Very few people in any field are competent and even those that are can make mistakes or have gaps in their knowledge.
A few years ago my wife was suffering from recurring miscarriages, so we got a consult with a reproductive endocrinologist. His insightful conclusion? That she was ovulating. Yeah, great detective work there. Anovulatory women aren't a particularly high risk group for miscarriages.
When we finally did retain a successful pregnancy, it was off to the perinatologist. Twin pregnancy on top of all the other risk factors, suspected monoamniotic as well. The highly recommended, highly respected doctor quoted morbidity rates that were about twenty years out of date and outlined a care plan that included none of the intensive monitoring recommended by contemporary studies. When we offered several articles from credible medical journals, she dismissed it with "I don't have time to read something you found on the internet."
Thankfully we found a doctor who didn't dismiss her patients so easily (and actually did research of her own to make sure she was abreast of new information when faced with less common conditions.)
I hope that "incompatible" only refers to source in both cases. It looks like the biggest headache for updating Perl 5 code to Perl 6 is going to be the fact that "@foo[0]" will be the first element of the array @foo which we'd write as "$foo[0]" in Perl 5.
I'd say adopting the perl5 concat operator as the perl6 dereference operator will be at least as much a headache.:)
There is a finalized spec, but it's silly to say that Blu-ray also doesn't have a finalized spec. For watching movies, it's finalized enough. They are adding newer stupid features. Totally ok.
Really? It's silly to say there isn't a finalized spec? Care to explain why there isn't a signle 2.0 player on the market yet, then?
As for whether it's "finalized enough" is a matter of opinion. If I'm going to pay a premium price for discs I want to be able to access all the features, period. Maybe you don't personally see value in downloadable content or in-movie experience features (video commentary, live storyboards, pre-effects footage, etc) but I do.
Cheaper for sure, but so what? Eventually blu-ray will be MUCH cheaper (I'm willing to bet money on it).
Sure, any volume electronics get cheaper over time. I prefer sooner rather than later. And this isn't just about players - mastering, design and production costs are also significantly lower, thereby allowing cheaper software as well.
And the audio codec are mandatory because HD-DVD is inferior. Period. They cannot fit uncompressed audio and must use compression, so of course there's a mandatory codec. You say space is wasted on uncompressed as though it's impossible to hear the difference. It's not, studies have proven it, I can tell, and why not have absolutely perfect audio? Audio is blu-ray's best feature.
You're a moron. Lossless codecs like TrueHD and DTS Master Audio produce an identical bitstream. Uncompressed audio buys you nothing but wasted space and bandwidth.
Not sure what your point for combo discs means. I don't need combo discs for blu-ray devices because obviously blu-ray will be in every $50 drive in five years. You can't get a combo disc for most movies, since most studios aren't on HD-DVD. Just a lame point.
That's fabulous in five years. Right now I enjoy being able to play my disks in my HD DVD player, my three DVD players, my three DVD drives, my portable DVD player and the car DVD player I'm picking up for the kids. Even if I spent the thousands it would cost to replace everything now, there are no portable Blu-ray drives (and little value to having one... 7" and 9" screens aren't going to be HD resolution any time soon).
I can see sticking with DVD. It's certainly good enough for enjoying films. you can't beat the slection. But you insist you're sticking with HD-DVD, and I don't really know how that's possible. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that Toshiba is liquidating, the studios are leaving, and there's not going to be a bundh of players or movies to stick to. It's like my asserting I will stick to Betamax until VHS is far more compelling. WTF deos that even mean? That I won't be watching any movies? Stick away, pal.
It means just what I said, I'll stick with HD DVD combo discs and DVD for the foreseeable future. They play in all my current devices, they'll play in all my future devices as well (even BD, since they play DVD5 and DVD9 just fine).
As for whether Toshiba is liquidating, I don't buy it. I think they're making a legitimate effort to continue establishing the format. You obviously disagree. I don't care.
The market is choosing blu-ray 9:1 over hd-dvd without even counting PS3s, so I think you're going to change your mind.
The fact that you quote figures from a single week of sales after the research firm that provided them publicly stated not to take them serious illustrates nicely why I don't put much stock in your judgement.
The HD-DVD's failure in DRM is a big reason why they lost. If you are so opposed to DRM, then you need to give up on optical movies. Perhaps that's a shame, I don't know, but it's the truth.
I would say it's more Sony literallly owning several movie studios and spending billions subsidizing the Playstation 3 to submarine the format into as many households as possible. The lack of extensible DRM was a secondary i
Your last point is just untrue. An 8Gb SD card costs a minimum of $50 at the moment, compared to a dual layer DVD-R which is generally much lower than a dollar
Actually, 8GB SD cards are commonly available for $30-35 these days.
In terms of backup, though, it's not SD cards that optical media has to contend with. Hard drives are cheaper per megabyte than either HD formats currently and even if that changes optical still sucks as a backup medium. Write speed on current burners is 9MB/s (hour and a half to write a BD50) compared to 30MB/s on a typical USB hard drive. And of course capacity is far below hard drives, even on notebook.
Where flash comes into play is casual file transfer. A flash drive may be a bit more expensive, but as often as not you don't need the full capacity of a disc. It doesn't take an 8GB drive to hold a few drivers or pictures of your kids. And again we have a faster, more convienent, more compact medium.
I've personally been using the same ten pack of CD-RWs for the last five years. They only get dusted off when I have a machine that doesn't support booting from USB.
Whether you burn a one-off disc on your Mac Pro or send a title out for commercial replication, you can have confidence that your DVDs will play back on a wide range of set-top players and computers. Burn your own discs in a wide variety of formats, including double-layer DVDs. For commercial replication, choose one of the traditional red laser formats or double the capacity on your HD DVD disc by using a blue laser format.
Cheaper. Finalized spec. No region encoding. No extensible DRM. High definition audio codecs mandatory (good thing for BD they have extra space to waste on uncompressed audio). Combo discs for backwards compatability with DVD players. I'll stick with HD DVD or DVD until BD is far more compelling.
(I agree regarding back-ups though. Flash memory is cheap and convienent for casual file transfer. External and network drives are cheap and convienent backups. Just don't see the optical formats as particular compelling for anything but video, and considering the typical length of home videos most people would be just as well served master their content in HDRED or AVCREC on regular DVDs.)
They update hourly for the top tier. I've pulled up the rankings probably about a half dozen times over the past week and the rankings have been relatively similar. Were you looking at the same category? The overall "DVD player & recorder" category is the one I've dinged because Amazon seems to have neglected to include the A30 in the plain "DVD player" category (it's listed as outselling the A35 in every category they share, so it's clear it should be on the list).
The only released data for last week is software sales, not hardware. In other words, not relevant to this particular topic.
And no, the BD offers haven't stopped. Best Buy is still giving a free Sharp player with Aquos HDTVs or a $500 rebate when you buy a $499.99 Panasonic player with Panasonic HDTVs. Sony is also still offering a $400 rebate on their Bravia line that's good toward any Sony Blu-ray player. The offers that have been running apply primarily to the more expensive sets but sales in that segment peak before the Superbowl.
Personally, I don't buy the whole "firesale" take. I think it's a legitimate attempt to establish the format long term. Futile? Possible. Subsidized? Probably to some degree, though certainly nowhere near as much as the Playstation 3 has been. (And to inject a bit of snark, if selling players at $150 is a firesale what do you call giving them away?)
No, they announced they're discontinuing a particular model of dual format player (the BDP-UP5000). The new model they demoed at CES (the BDP-UP5500) is still coming to market. Word is that the Broadcom reference design the earlier model was based on was fairly craptastic, with tons of disc compatability issues and poor support for high definition audio.
Also three in the top twenty-five. Bit of a difference between holding #2, #3 and #10 and holding #6, #16 and #22.
Regardless, I wasn't looking to get into a format pissing match. I was responding to the assertion in the title of the article, namely whether HD DVD player sales have "[ground] to a halt". Sales at Amazon refute that regardless of what's happening with Blu-ray.
Silverthorne is a new architecture, not a Core 2 processor. Rumour has it that it's a strictly in-order, two-issue device. Ironically that would put it much closer in implementation to the C7 chip that Isaiah supercedes.
The folks at NPD have already said not to make too much of these numbers. Not only do they reflect a single week of data immediately following the Warner announcement and prior to Toshiba cutting prices in half, there were also free Blu-ray player promotions from Panasonic, Sharp and Sony. Easy to "sell" a lot of units when the price tag is $0.
Keep in mind that a large site does not necessarily imply every component they use is scalable or reliable on it's own. Plenty of sites practice brute force scalability, throwing hardware at the problem until it performs adequately. Others mask inefficencies with careful design. Pages can be pre-rendered. Sorting and filtering can be implemented at the application level. Queries can be constructed to maximize cachability. Avoid use of functions, round time-based WHERE clauses; e.g. instead of "SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE start > DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 5 MINUTE)" calculate the time string in code so you're sending "SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE start > '2008-01-23 13:15:00'". That way you're only processing a query once every five minutes instead of every connection; subsequent requests are just pulled out of the query cache.
Reliability can likewise be achieved with unreliable components. You might buy an ultra reliable server, for example. Dual power supplies, mirrored storage, error-correcting memory, hot swap CPUs. On the other hand you could buy a pair of commodity servers without all the internal redundancy and throw them behind a load balancer. Now you're protected from a software crash as well as hardware faults. Another component is monitoring. Have an application that wedges regularly? Put together a watchdog script to automatically restart it.
Of course there are always limitations. Some things may not scale horizontally. Others are so central that you do everything you can to enhance performance or minimize downtime. It's all a matter of balancing cost versus consequence. Free service like Wikipedia goes down? Not a big deal, customer comes back later. Paid service goes down? Big deal. Advertising revenue could be lost, customers might defect, volume to customer service call centers go up. Online store goes down? Big deal. Erodes customer confidence, drives sales to competitors. Orders get lost or possible double-charged? Huge deal. Direct revenue hit, angry customers (almost certainly lost permenantly), possible trouble with a credit processor, possible loss of compliance certifications.
This is where maybe it makes sense to go with a ridiculously expensive server with a ton of redundancy (including seperate power feeds if you know what's good for you:) running software with a solid track record of handling transactional processing reliabily.
And for those for whom it's all about size, the Apple's graduated to a different league than this Thinkpad. They're about the same footprint, but the Air tapers from.16" to.76", where the Thinkpad tapers from.73" to.92". The Air's thickest part is almost as thin as the Thinkpad's thinnest part. Assuming they're both 9" deep and that the cross-sectional area of these laptops were right trapezoids, which they're not quite, the Macbook's cross sectional area is 4.14 square inches, and the Thinkpad's is 7.43. It's a big difference.
Shrinking the least important dimension doesn't impress me, especially when it's at the expense of a lot of functionality (compared to the x300 you lose gigabit ethernet, modem, mini-PCIe, two USB ports, user replaceable battery, lock port, etc) and still end up weighing more (which is a far far more important consideration than thickness).
Since the standard disk in the MacBook comes straight from the iPod, at 1.8" and 4200rpm, it's not likely to be a great performer in the high speed transfer department anyways, so why bother with Gigabit Ethernet.
I wouldn't bet on that. They don't go into details on the model or specs of the drive on the website, but I think it's far more likely they're using the brand new MK8025GAL, which is aimed at PC applications rather than consumer devices. Higher density platters than their CE rated devices and 8MB cache instead of 2MB.
Speed demon? Doubtful, but also keep in mind that PMR drives reach far greater transfer rates at a given rotational speed relative to traditional longitudinal drives. Certainly feasible you could exceed the real world transfer rates of the network, even if you do happen to have a pre-N, which is hardly a given.
From a network connectivity perspective I personally wouldn't be hampered by the lack of a wired jack, since I rarely use them anyways. The lack of a convienent slot for an EV-DO, though, is a killer. Ideally I would want mini-PCI(E), cardbus or expresscard would be acceptable. Hell, even a second USB port so I wouldn't have to unplug my network connection to plug in a thumb drive (unless I carry around a USB hub as well and frankly that's just dumb:)
I think the point that flew over your head is that thinness doesn't translate into any tangible benefit. Weight has obvious benefits. Same with footprint, battery life, durability, et cetera. Thin made sense for phones, since those are carried in pockets, but unless you actually plan on carrying your laptop around in an interoffice envelope what does thin buy you in a laptop?
(Not that it will stop sales from being brisk. Style for it's own sake is a saleable asset and Apple knows it.)
We apparently roll in very different circle. My corner of the geek world seems to have a pretty heavy overlap with the poly and kink communities. Plenty of sex, particularly at the various gatherings (conventions, SCA events, IRC parties and so forth). Lots or relationships, lots of marriages, sometimes both.
That's the main reason I don't see Perl6 being particularly relevant. Perl may be ugly but it's everywhere. You'd be hard pressed to find a system administrator who never wrote in it. You'd be hard pressed to come up with a file format or API without at least one CPAN module for it.
With the changes to Perl6 being so drastic, that advantage evaporates and it becomes Yet Another Language. Already have several of those I like far more than Perl.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Very few people in any field are competent and even those that are can make mistakes or have gaps in their knowledge.
A few years ago my wife was suffering from recurring miscarriages, so we got a consult with a reproductive endocrinologist. His insightful conclusion? That she was ovulating. Yeah, great detective work there. Anovulatory women aren't a particularly high risk group for miscarriages.
When we finally did retain a successful pregnancy, it was off to the perinatologist. Twin pregnancy on top of all the other risk factors, suspected monoamniotic as well. The highly recommended, highly respected doctor quoted morbidity rates that were about twenty years out of date and outlined a care plan that included none of the intensive monitoring recommended by contemporary studies. When we offered several articles from credible medical journals, she dismissed it with "I don't have time to read something you found on the internet."
Thankfully we found a doctor who didn't dismiss her patients so easily (and actually did research of her own to make sure she was abreast of new information when faced with less common conditions.)
I hope that "incompatible" only refers to source in both cases. It looks like the biggest headache for updating Perl 5 code to Perl 6 is going to be the fact that "@foo[0]" will be the first element of the array @foo which we'd write as "$foo[0]" in Perl 5.
:)
I'd say adopting the perl5 concat operator as the perl6 dereference operator will be at least as much a headache.
There is a finalized spec, but it's silly to say that Blu-ray also doesn't have a finalized spec. For watching movies, it's finalized enough. They are adding newer stupid features. Totally ok.
... 7" and 9" screens aren't going to be HD resolution any time soon).
Really? It's silly to say there isn't a finalized spec? Care to explain why there isn't a signle 2.0 player on the market yet, then?
As for whether it's "finalized enough" is a matter of opinion. If I'm going to pay a premium price for discs I want to be able to access all the features, period. Maybe you don't personally see value in downloadable content or in-movie experience features (video commentary, live storyboards, pre-effects footage, etc) but I do.
Cheaper for sure, but so what? Eventually blu-ray will be MUCH cheaper (I'm willing to bet money on it).
Sure, any volume electronics get cheaper over time. I prefer sooner rather than later. And this isn't just about players - mastering, design and production costs are also significantly lower, thereby allowing cheaper software as well.
And the audio codec are mandatory because HD-DVD is inferior. Period. They cannot fit uncompressed audio and must use compression, so of course there's a mandatory codec. You say space is wasted on uncompressed as though it's impossible to hear the difference. It's not, studies have proven it, I can tell, and why not have absolutely perfect audio? Audio is blu-ray's best feature.
You're a moron. Lossless codecs like TrueHD and DTS Master Audio produce an identical bitstream. Uncompressed audio buys you nothing but wasted space and bandwidth.
Not sure what your point for combo discs means. I don't need combo discs for blu-ray devices because obviously blu-ray will be in every $50 drive in five years. You can't get a combo disc for most movies, since most studios aren't on HD-DVD. Just a lame point.
That's fabulous in five years. Right now I enjoy being able to play my disks in my HD DVD player, my three DVD players, my three DVD drives, my portable DVD player and the car DVD player I'm picking up for the kids. Even if I spent the thousands it would cost to replace everything now, there are no portable Blu-ray drives (and little value to having one
I can see sticking with DVD. It's certainly good enough for enjoying films. you can't beat the slection. But you insist you're sticking with HD-DVD, and I don't really know how that's possible. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that Toshiba is liquidating, the studios are leaving, and there's not going to be a bundh of players or movies to stick to. It's like my asserting I will stick to Betamax until VHS is far more compelling. WTF deos that even mean? That I won't be watching any movies? Stick away, pal.
It means just what I said, I'll stick with HD DVD combo discs and DVD for the foreseeable future. They play in all my current devices, they'll play in all my future devices as well (even BD, since they play DVD5 and DVD9 just fine).
As for whether Toshiba is liquidating, I don't buy it. I think they're making a legitimate effort to continue establishing the format. You obviously disagree. I don't care.
The market is choosing blu-ray 9:1 over hd-dvd without even counting PS3s, so I think you're going to change your mind.
The fact that you quote figures from a single week of sales after the research firm that provided them publicly stated not to take them serious illustrates nicely why I don't put much stock in your judgement.
The HD-DVD's failure in DRM is a big reason why they lost. If you are so opposed to DRM, then you need to give up on optical movies. Perhaps that's a shame, I don't know, but it's the truth.
I would say it's more Sony literallly owning several movie studios and spending billions subsidizing the Playstation 3 to submarine the format into as many households as possible. The lack of extensible DRM was a secondary i
Your last point is just untrue. An 8Gb SD card costs a minimum of $50 at the moment, compared to a dual layer DVD-R which is generally much lower than a dollar
Actually, 8GB SD cards are commonly available for $30-35 these days.
In terms of backup, though, it's not SD cards that optical media has to contend with. Hard drives are cheaper per megabyte than either HD formats currently and even if that changes optical still sucks as a backup medium. Write speed on current burners is 9MB/s (hour and a half to write a BD50) compared to 30MB/s on a typical USB hard drive. And of course capacity is far below hard drives, even on notebook.
Where flash comes into play is casual file transfer. A flash drive may be a bit more expensive, but as often as not you don't need the full capacity of a disc. It doesn't take an 8GB drive to hold a few drivers or pictures of your kids. And again we have a faster, more convienent, more compact medium.
I've personally been using the same ten pack of CD-RWs for the last five years. They only get dusted off when I have a machine that doesn't support booting from USB.
OS X, the de facto standard on Movie production doesn't have any kind of HD-DVD support.
O RLY?:
Versatile DVD Mastering
Whether you burn a one-off disc on your Mac Pro or send a title out for commercial replication, you can have confidence that your DVDs will play back on a wide range of set-top players and computers. Burn your own discs in a wide variety of formats, including double-layer DVDs. For commercial replication, choose one of the traditional red laser formats or double the capacity on your HD DVD disc by using a blue laser format.
Cheaper. Finalized spec. No region encoding. No extensible DRM. High definition audio codecs mandatory (good thing for BD they have extra space to waste on uncompressed audio). Combo discs for backwards compatability with DVD players. I'll stick with HD DVD or DVD until BD is far more compelling.
(I agree regarding back-ups though. Flash memory is cheap and convienent for casual file transfer. External and network drives are cheap and convienent backups. Just don't see the optical formats as particular compelling for anything but video, and considering the typical length of home videos most people would be just as well served master their content in HDRED or AVCREC on regular DVDs.)
They update hourly for the top tier. I've pulled up the rankings probably about a half dozen times over the past week and the rankings have been relatively similar. Were you looking at the same category? The overall "DVD player & recorder" category is the one I've dinged because Amazon seems to have neglected to include the A30 in the plain "DVD player" category (it's listed as outselling the A35 in every category they share, so it's clear it should be on the list).
The only released data for last week is software sales, not hardware. In other words, not relevant to this particular topic.
And no, the BD offers haven't stopped. Best Buy is still giving a free Sharp player with Aquos HDTVs or a $500 rebate when you buy a $499.99 Panasonic player with Panasonic HDTVs. Sony is also still offering a $400 rebate on their Bravia line that's good toward any Sony Blu-ray player. The offers that have been running apply primarily to the more expensive sets but sales in that segment peak before the Superbowl.
Personally, I don't buy the whole "firesale" take. I think it's a legitimate attempt to establish the format long term. Futile? Possible. Subsidized? Probably to some degree, though certainly nowhere near as much as the Playstation 3 has been. (And to inject a bit of snark, if selling players at $150 is a firesale what do you call giving them away?)
No, they announced they're discontinuing a particular model of dual format player (the BDP-UP5000). The new model they demoed at CES (the BDP-UP5500) is still coming to market. Word is that the Broadcom reference design the earlier model was based on was fairly craptastic, with tons of disc compatability issues and poor support for high definition audio.
Is in the top ten, with eight of the remaining top slots taken by the market leader and one taken by the other top three vendor.
What was your point again?
Also three in the top twenty-five. Bit of a difference between holding #2, #3 and #10 and holding #6, #16 and #22.
Regardless, I wasn't looking to get into a format pissing match. I was responding to the assertion in the title of the article, namely whether HD DVD player sales have "[ground] to a halt". Sales at Amazon refute that regardless of what's happening with Blu-ray.
Silverthorne is a new architecture, not a Core 2 processor. Rumour has it that it's a strictly in-order, two-issue device. Ironically that would put it much closer in implementation to the C7 chip that Isaiah supercedes.
You think half the people are going to throw out the movies that come in the box? Along with the five free mail-in discs?
The MSRP on the three models from Toshiba are $149.99, $199.99 and $299.99. Sales at Amazon seem brisk enough.
Oh, it's also worth noting that all three current Toshiba players (A3, A30, A35) have been in the top ten at Amazon since the price cut.
The folks at NPD have already said not to make too much of these numbers. Not only do they reflect a single week of data immediately following the Warner announcement and prior to Toshiba cutting prices in half, there were also free Blu-ray player promotions from Panasonic, Sharp and Sony. Easy to "sell" a lot of units when the price tag is $0.
Keep in mind that a large site does not necessarily imply every component they use is scalable or reliable on it's own. Plenty of sites practice brute force scalability, throwing hardware at the problem until it performs adequately. Others mask inefficencies with careful design. Pages can be pre-rendered. Sorting and filtering can be implemented at the application level. Queries can be constructed to maximize cachability. Avoid use of functions, round time-based WHERE clauses; e.g. instead of "SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE start > DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 5 MINUTE)" calculate the time string in code so you're sending "SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE start > '2008-01-23 13:15:00'". That way you're only processing a query once every five minutes instead of every connection; subsequent requests are just pulled out of the query cache.
:) running software with a solid track record of handling transactional processing reliabily.
Reliability can likewise be achieved with unreliable components. You might buy an ultra reliable server, for example. Dual power supplies, mirrored storage, error-correcting memory, hot swap CPUs. On the other hand you could buy a pair of commodity servers without all the internal redundancy and throw them behind a load balancer. Now you're protected from a software crash as well as hardware faults. Another component is monitoring. Have an application that wedges regularly? Put together a watchdog script to automatically restart it.
Of course there are always limitations. Some things may not scale horizontally. Others are so central that you do everything you can to enhance performance or minimize downtime. It's all a matter of balancing cost versus consequence. Free service like Wikipedia goes down? Not a big deal, customer comes back later. Paid service goes down? Big deal. Advertising revenue could be lost, customers might defect, volume to customer service call centers go up. Online store goes down? Big deal. Erodes customer confidence, drives sales to competitors. Orders get lost or possible double-charged? Huge deal. Direct revenue hit, angry customers (almost certainly lost permenantly), possible trouble with a credit processor, possible loss of compliance certifications.
This is where maybe it makes sense to go with a ridiculously expensive server with a ton of redundancy (including seperate power feeds if you know what's good for you
A piece of software is a product. Bug fixes, updates, etc are services. A seperate proprietary application falls into the former category.
And for those for whom it's all about size, the Apple's graduated to a different league than this Thinkpad. They're about the same footprint, but the Air tapers from .16" to .76", where the Thinkpad tapers from .73" to .92". The Air's thickest part is almost as thin as the Thinkpad's thinnest part. Assuming they're both 9" deep and that the cross-sectional area of these laptops were right trapezoids, which they're not quite, the Macbook's cross sectional area is 4.14 square inches, and the Thinkpad's is 7.43. It's a big difference.
Shrinking the least important dimension doesn't impress me, especially when it's at the expense of a lot of functionality (compared to the x300 you lose gigabit ethernet, modem, mini-PCIe, two USB ports, user replaceable battery, lock port, etc) and still end up weighing more (which is a far far more important consideration than thickness).
Since the standard disk in the MacBook comes straight from the iPod, at 1.8" and 4200rpm, it's not likely to be a great performer in the high speed transfer department anyways, so why bother with Gigabit Ethernet.
:)
I wouldn't bet on that. They don't go into details on the model or specs of the drive on the website, but I think it's far more likely they're using the brand new MK8025GAL, which is aimed at PC applications rather than consumer devices. Higher density platters than their CE rated devices and 8MB cache instead of 2MB.
Speed demon? Doubtful, but also keep in mind that PMR drives reach far greater transfer rates at a given rotational speed relative to traditional longitudinal drives. Certainly feasible you could exceed the real world transfer rates of the network, even if you do happen to have a pre-N, which is hardly a given.
From a network connectivity perspective I personally wouldn't be hampered by the lack of a wired jack, since I rarely use them anyways. The lack of a convienent slot for an EV-DO, though, is a killer. Ideally I would want mini-PCI(E), cardbus or expresscard would be acceptable. Hell, even a second USB port so I wouldn't have to unplug my network connection to plug in a thumb drive (unless I carry around a USB hub as well and frankly that's just dumb
I think the point that flew over your head is that thinness doesn't translate into any tangible benefit. Weight has obvious benefits. Same with footprint, battery life, durability, et cetera. Thin made sense for phones, since those are carried in pockets, but unless you actually plan on carrying your laptop around in an interoffice envelope what does thin buy you in a laptop?
(Not that it will stop sales from being brisk. Style for it's own sake is a saleable asset and Apple knows it.)
We apparently roll in very different circle. My corner of the geek world seems to have a pretty heavy overlap with the poly and kink communities. Plenty of sex, particularly at the various gatherings (conventions, SCA events, IRC parties and so forth). Lots or relationships, lots of marriages, sometimes both.
See also:
/home/me/Desktop/women -type f | xargs grep 'white female'
/home/me/Desktop/women -type f -exec grep 'white female' {} \;
# find
or
# find
That's the main reason I don't see Perl6 being particularly relevant. Perl may be ugly but it's everywhere. You'd be hard pressed to find a system administrator who never wrote in it. You'd be hard pressed to come up with a file format or API without at least one CPAN module for it.
:)
With the changes to Perl6 being so drastic, that advantage evaporates and it becomes Yet Another Language. Already have several of those I like far more than Perl.