Blu-ray may sound cooler to technically-minded folks like you and I, but I think that consumers at large (your Average Joe at Best Buy) might feel that the HD-DVD name is something they are more comfortable with as it implies that it's a technology that they already know (DVD) with "bonus-added HD goodness", and most people are getting familiar with what HD means in terms of TV. I think the Blu-ray name may come off sounding vague and silly unless the Blu-ray people can add some serious marketing mojo. Perhaps the Blue Man Group can help them out with that...
HD-DVD will win out over Blu-Ray because people are not going to buy something with a stupid sounding name when a comparable technology with a better/cooler name exists.
From my reading of the (whole) article, it seems that NEC has already developed a *laptop* that runs for 5 hours on a fuel cell and hopes to extend it to 40 hours by 2005. Hitachi is the one with the PDA that currently runs for 5 hours on a (presumably smaller) fuel cell.
This has probably been thought of before, but would it be possible to use a checksum scheme to identify a particular file, so that files of the same name but differing quality can be distinguished? I'm thinking about the same type of MD5-type checksum that's currently used to verify software archive integrity.
Scenario:
1. One of the P2P/Gnutella clients could add a feature where the MD5 (or similar) checksum of each shared file is calculated at startup and distributed along with the file information.
2. Any third-party site could provide quality-rating/endorsement of a particular file by listing the name and checksums of files that had manually been checked for quality. This could even be linked into the P2P client.
Slashdot Mirror
Blu-ray may sound cooler to technically-minded folks like you and I, but I think that consumers at large (your Average Joe at Best Buy) might feel that the HD-DVD name is something they are more comfortable with as it implies that it's a technology that they already know (DVD) with "bonus-added HD goodness", and most people are getting familiar with what HD means in terms of TV. I think the Blu-ray name may come off sounding vague and silly unless the Blu-ray people can add some serious marketing mojo. Perhaps the Blue Man Group can help them out with that...
HD-DVD will win out over Blu-Ray because people are not going to buy something with a stupid sounding name when a comparable technology with a better/cooler name exists.
From my reading of the (whole) article, it seems that NEC has already developed a *laptop* that runs for 5 hours on a fuel cell and hopes to extend it to 40 hours by 2005. Hitachi is the one with the PDA that currently runs for 5 hours on a (presumably smaller) fuel cell.
This has probably been thought of before, but would it be possible to use a checksum scheme to identify a particular file, so that files of the same name but differing quality can be distinguished? I'm thinking about the same type of MD5-type checksum that's currently used to verify software archive integrity.
Scenario:
1. One of the P2P/Gnutella clients could add a feature where the MD5 (or similar) checksum of each shared file is calculated at startup and distributed along with the file information.
2. Any third-party site could provide quality-rating/endorsement of a particular file by listing the name and checksums of files that had manually been checked for quality. This could even be linked into the P2P client.
Is there already this type of checksum available?