Filed under: Fun, Photo, Hardware
Get every National Geographic since 1888 on a 160GB hard drive
From the massively-nerdy-but-really-quite-cool news department, I bring you the coolest thing I've seen since unwrapping my presents on Christmas Day. 120 years of amazing discoveries, eye-opening editorial and mind-expanding stories form The Complete National Geographic. Maps, stories and every single damn photo, all lovingly reproduced in 'stunning high resolution'... and distributed on a hard drive!What you see here is the beginning of the end for the librarian. It's also great news for trees and climate change! (Unless someone can turn around and tell me that a hard disk drive is actually more harmful to the environment than 120 years worth of printed magazines).
For a third of the price you could also get the entire collection on six DVDs... but that's not quite as cool, is it? They also mention that 100 of the 160GB is freely available for your own use -- or future content updates, because the National Geographic shows no sign of slowing down yet!
[a nod, conspiratorial wink and thanks to Yanksy for the tip!]
Chromatic is one of the best time-wasters I've recently come across. It's all about the gameplay -- no Flash graphics here. You play a "circle" (it doesn't really have a name in the game). You move around with the arrow keys, and you change colors with Z, X, and C.
You can either be red, blue, or yellow, and you can switch at any time during the game. Each color has different capabilities -- yellow can double-jump, while red has a longer dash (which is like a forward sprint, activated by double-pressing DOWN).
Each ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dan said 11:39AM on 12-29-2009
What's stopping someone from copying the hard drive's contents and torrenting this? LOL
I'd hope Nat Geo put some encryption on the files to prevent this.
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Sebastian Anthony said 11:42AM on 12-29-2009
Hm... possibly!
I assume there's some menu system to navigate, which might be encrypted... I guess we'll find out sooner rather than later :)
Synergy6 said 11:58AM on 12-29-2009
It was torrented weeks ago. Comes to 51GB of data.
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Fred Thompson said 2:27PM on 12-29-2009
"Climate change" is constant. Laws of thermodynamics are not changed through personal whim. Trees are a crop which are farmed.
Tech news, please, not superstition.
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Sebastian Anthony said 4:03PM on 12-29-2009
Stop being so superstitious!
octoberasian said 4:49PM on 12-29-2009
I'm getting this! Thank you for sharing this Sebastian. This saves me a trip to the library and finding crappy parking, and end up finding missing pages in National Geographic magazines there.
Hells yea!
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Sebastian Anthony said 5:32PM on 12-29-2009
You're more than welcome!
Maybe the next expansion of it... in... 2020... will have some of my photos in it :)
AA said 5:28PM on 12-29-2009
They did a similar collectuion upto about 2000 in 2001 but on cd's
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Sebastian Anthony said 5:32PM on 12-29-2009
Must've been quite a few CDs...
Though not so bad if you're doing it chronologically I guess.
Neoprimal said 6:13PM on 12-29-2009
I don't get it. Why didn't they just put it on an 80GB hard drive?
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Sebastian Anthony said 6:21PM on 12-29-2009
You probably can't buy 80GB drives any more...
Cheapest drive is not always the smallest -- it's whatever's most abundant :)
Cam said 5:43PM on 1-02-2010
Once you buy it, you can update it once more NatGeo's are released.
johndoe said 3:53AM on 12-30-2009
https://isohunt.com/download/145018393/National+Geographic.torrent
Directory: The.Complete.National.Geographic.Every.Issue.Since.1888.COMPLETE.8.DISC.SET.WINMAC-GKN
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SimonJ said 11:38AM on 12-30-2009
Technically the magazines would be better for climate change as growing the trees for the paper means lots of conversion of CO2 and sequestering of the carbon whereas powering the hard drive is probably going to mean some CO2 production through the energy consumed.
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Sebastian Anthony said 11:51AM on 12-30-2009
I think it takes not-inconsiderable energy to convert trees into paper...!
e40 said 12:16PM on 12-30-2009
I hope there is no DRM. The New Yorker DVD's are laden with it, requiring .Net on Windows. It's so encumbered that I never use it (it was a gift, or I would have returned it). What a shame.
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David Moisan said 9:12AM on 1-03-2010
I have the DVD version. I love it. Only problem I've seen is that it runs on Adobe AIR, which is not the most reliable runtime. Known install bug on Windows 7. Slow.
Otherwise awesome; I wish more magazine collections were available like this (yes I know about Google Books.)
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