You know, it would be interesting if Slashdot let you do something like that--either use your mod points in the traditional manner, or use all five (maybe just 3) to mod down an actual article.
When I was younger, we made it at home from real milk, sugar and a bit of flavoring agent in a hand-turned ice-cream maker...
FYI, electric ice cream makers are typically $40-100. I just googled for 'ice cream maker' and the first match was a Cuisinart for $50. All the taste, none of the work!;-)
Getting people to change their mind about religion or politics.
Fact: most people, as is the topic of this thread, Do Not Care. Are there problems with closed source software? Sure. Are there benefits? Believe it or not, yes. Are there good things about OSS? Of course. Are there problems too? You bet! So even if you "solve" one problem by moving to an OSS package, you're likely to be creating another at the same time. And since you're the one pushing it, you'll likely become the 'de facto' support person at best, and the person whose fault it is that things don't work at worst.
Not that I don't love OSS. But pushing it just because is just as bad as, if not worse than, arguing about religion or politics.
I think this guy has a lot of good points. (Just skip halfway down past the ranty bits.:-) )
The Nintendo DS...
It's cheap. ($129... and I'm sure if you order 150 million Nintendo will cut you a deal.)
It's power-efficient. (Easily lasts 14 hours on a single charge, even with the screen bright enough to be seen in direct sunlight.. there's even a hand-crank charger!)
It's a computer. (All advantages to be gained by giving a young child a laptop are also gained by giving a child a DS. Just by using a DS they'll become confident and "fluent" in the use of technology, and future "real" computer use will come much much easier. Worked for me!)
It's got wi-fi. (In fact, it even does ad-hoc networking, and allows downloading content from one host DS to all the others.. just the teacher could have the lesson plan on their DS and wirelessly beam it to all the students at the start of each class!)
It's rugged. (Nintendo's been making toys for actual children for over 100 years and Game Boys have survived actual wars.)
It's powerful enough. (If it can handle Mario Kart tournaments, it can handle Multipli Kation tables.)
It's small and has a touch screen. (Like the iPhone. Just like laptops have replaced the desktop, in the future ever smaller portable electronics will replace the laptop. Why teach on antiquated technology?)
It's forward-compatible. (Nintendo's portable systems have very long life cycles. Any software you write for the DS will very likely still be runable on the hardware they're selling in a decade.)
Children love it. (You want a teaching tool that's "fun to use?" You want a teaching tool that's "collaborative" You've hit "the jackpot.")
It's a world-wide standard. (Over 53 MILLION have been sold already. The platform has thousands of developers. The future leaders of the developed world are growing up playing Nintendo DS.. why give the future leaders of the developing world anything less?)
It's already used for education. (Millions use their DS to learn a language, develop logic skills, practice cooking, learn math, read books, research, and browse the web every day!)
Thanks for the laugh. Slowly zooming out to see where the roads were, I zoomed out further and noticed this giant white splotch in NW Utah. What's that? Is that whole area just perpetually snowy?
So it sounds like they were in the MINORITY when they put protected-AAC support in. Of the many reasons why this suit-of-the-day is probably groundless, I think this is a good one: are they required to worry about anticompetitive practices when they aren't yet a monopoly? Once they become one, are the required to change? I would think not--if the market didn't like the restrictive product they introduced, it wouldn't have become dominant in the first place.
This isn't like MS giving away IE for free AFTER Windows was firmly established as the dominant desktop OS. This is like if MS had given away IE since the Windows 1.0 days. Did any of the MS antitrust suits include complaints that they bundled Notepad? More people probably play Solitaire and the other bundled games than use Notepad--were there ever any antitrust suites re: the games?
Thanks for the link to the weblog. I love stumbling onto new stuff. I know this wasn't the point you meant to make, but this post makes a whole lot of sense.
One Nintendo DS Per Child! ... The Nintendo DS is literally perfect for [the OLPC project's] needs:
It's cheap. ($129... and I'm sure if you order 150 million Nintendo will cut you a deal.)
It's power-efficient. (Easily lasts 14 hours on a single charge, even with the screen bright enough to be seen in direct sunlight.. there's even a hand-crank charger!)
It's a computer. (All advantages to be gained by giving a young child a laptop are also gained by giving a child a DS. Just by using a DS they'll become confident and "fluent" in the use of technology, and future "real" computer use will come much much easier. Worked for me!)
It's got wi-fi. (In fact, it even does ad-hoc networking, and allows downloading content from one host DS to all the others.. just the teacher could have the lesson plan on their DS and wirelessly beam it to all the students at the start of each class!)
It's rugged. (Nintendo's been making toys for actual children for over 100 years and Game Boys have survived actual wars.)
It's powerful enough. (If it can handle Mario Kart tournaments, it can handle Multipli Kation tables.)
It's small and has a touch screen. (Like the iPhone. Just like laptops have replaced the desktop, in the future ever smaller portable electronics will replace the laptop. Why teach on antiquated technology?)
It's forward-compatible. (Nintendo's portable systems have very long life cycles. Any software you write for the DS will very likely still be runable on the hardware they're selling in a decade.)
Children love it. (You want a teaching tool that's "fun to use?" You want a teaching tool that's "collaborative" You've hit "the jackpot.")
It's a world-wide standard. (Over 53 MILLION have been sold already. The platform has thousands of developers. The future leaders of the developed world are growing up playing Nintendo DS.. why give the future leaders of the developing world anything less?)
Remember: you can't win. There was a/. story on this a few months or a year ago (too lazy to search; don't remember any unique keywords) and the summary was along the lines of "If you look nervous, you could be a terrorist and should be inspected. If you look too calm, then you could be a skillful terrorist, consciously quashing your nervousness, and should be inspected." You can't win.
+1 for Joel. +10, actually, if I'm allowed. I really recommend reading the above linked (online, free) book. And if you've got the time, you should pretty much read everything he's ever written. Even his stories about buying office furniture or shipping packages has little hints and clues, not about GUIs per se, but about all the little things that make any experience good or bad. And there's lots of good other stuff too, like dealing with people, creative approaches to problem solving, etc.
Even when he's wrong, the stories are still good. He has a series called 'Working on CityDesk' that has lots of little bits of good info. Despite the fact that his company's web-editing app CityDesk tanked ("nobody wants to compose in a big TEXTAREA on an HTML page") and they now focus on selling the bug-tracking software that they originally developed for in-house use, there is still a lot of good info. I love this bit about XML and databases. (About 2/3 the way down.)
And one other important thing to remember is to NOT go all by one source. Find some others. (Joel frequently mentions others in the industry.) As we saw above, Joel was as wrong as could be, and Norman, despite having lots and lots of good info, is a little too detached from reality most of the time. Forget Designing Web Usability, go read Design of Everyday Things instead.
One: software doesn't exist in a vacuum. Software development must respond to market realities. The reason people work on developing Linux and BSD is because they are usable, today, with a world of current open- and closed-source software. I'd rather have something good, that works, now, than wait forever for some magical thing and have nothing in the meantime. In other words, I'd rather have a nice, refined, working car now, than walk for 20 years while I wait for the helicar to be usable.
Open-source doesn't magically always lead to succes, but neither does closed-source: OS/2 and BeOS are two commercial, 100% closed-source operating systems that were very ahead of their time... and died. Why? Well, largely (and this is especially the case with BeOS) because they couldn't INTEROPERATE with all the other things that were already out there that most people used. And why couldn't they interoperate? Everyone, all together now...
Two: open source developers would love nothing more than to create the next great thing, and they are more than talented enough to do it. Why aren't they? Oh, right: they've got to spend their time reinventing the wheel, reverse-engineering all those wonderful CLOSED standards--Office file formats, SMB, video codecs, etc. Imagine how far ADVANCED we'd be if we didn't have to spend man-decades reverse engineering crappy-but-dominant things. If asshole companies would have worked with open standards in the first place, we wouldn't be in this fucking mess. Outside of a computer science class, it's a waste of time to solve the same problems over and over and over again.
One of my favorite quotes of all time:
"The aim is to 'commoditize the protocol'. By giving the stack away, maybe we can stop everyone obsessing over how to format the bits on the wire, and get them writing applications instead."
Craig Southeren, co-founder of OpenH323 Fucking-a right. Why are there so many IM protocols? (Formatted text over a network--are you fucking kidding me?!?!?*) And why, relevant to Open H323, don't we all have videophones yet? Same reason.
From TFA: "Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world--like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe's Flash--the results of proprietary development?"
There are MANY reasons, but a lack of creativity on the part of OSS developers is NOT one. It is a fact that secrets DO have some value. If you know something good, and you aren't willing to tell someone for free, they'll probably be willing to pay.
PageRank and Flash are his shining examples of "sophisticated" and successful code?!? Ha! Let's see: PageRank is a weighted ranking algorithm Ooh. It exists (and is closed) because people are assholes and are constantly trying to game the system. If fucking asshole spammers and porn sites didn't fill up their pages with bogus META tags back in the mid-to-late '90s, PageRank wouldn't be the necessity it is. If they didn't continue to do everything possible to defeat honest ranking, its methods wouldn't have to be secret. And Flash? Are you fucking KIDDING me? It's a vector graphics format that handles animation, can play sound in sync, and has gained the ability to play embedded movie files. Those are all DECADES-old technolgies! And Adobe bundled them all together into one plugin... ooh, that fucking REEKS of innovation.
This guy was on a panel with Lee Smolin (a physicist) and Neal Stephenson talking about "the relationship between time and math" so I'm sure he's smarter than I am in many ways, but I can't help but feel that this article of his is way, way, way wrong.
* yeah, I know there's more to it than just text... but not fucking much. Not enough to justify the existence of AIM and MSN and Yahoo! and all the rest.
Good point. That may very well be the reason. But there's GOT to be a market for drives with 2x the capacity of anyone else's! And hard drives typically don't follow a straight bigger-equals-better-value curve--there's usually a sweet spot in the middle (like where 320s/500s/maybe 750s are today) and then an upswing at the high end (where 1 TB is today.) Just like with LCD panels--medium is a better value than small, but large is a worse value than medium. So people wouldn't mind if a 2 TB drive cost more than 2x a 1 TB drive.
Why do you hate to say it? Ever since spyware started becoming a royal PITA to combat--quoth another responder, "With AVG, ZoneAlarm, Spybot, and Firefox..."--I've done nothing BUT recommend Macs. Things like ZoneAlarm are impossible to explain to non-techies, as is the difference between spyware-generated popups, popup ads you see while web browsing, popups from nagware apps (I'm lookin' at you, QuickTime), and 'real' system popups. Even limited to just real system popups, most users don't know what's important and what isn't; what they should read and what they shouldn't, and whether they should click yes, no, cancel, or close to any of the many messages they see. MS's lame response to security issues is basically "We'll just warn the user that everything might be potentially hazardous. Now if anything goes wrong, it's the user's fault for not knowing."
You can argue all day about which system is inherently more secure, or that Macs have more unpatched OS-level theoretical UNIX-style vulnerabilities, and if it's the fault of the OS, bundled apps, 3rd-party apps, malicious web devs, or stupid users, whatever... at the end of it all, there remains one simple un-ignorable fact that says it all: there has not been one self-replicating in-the-wild virus for Mac OS X. Ever. Period. Owning a Mac == NO SECURITY HEADACHES. A computer should not be an ongoing effort to secure and use.
If you even try to explain things to users, - they may make mistakes - they may not remember - they may not follow instructions perfectly - they may not understand all the instructions - they may ignore warnings if a site promises porn - they may be kids and can't understand/don't care
My son is, at the moment, not allowed to use a computer. Despite this, he snuck on my wife's W2K box and royally borked it* in just an hour or so of unsupervised surfing. I've been meaning to move her to a Mac for a while, just never had a compelling reason to do so. Now I do. I just bought a (used) Mac Pro and will give her my Mini.
I'm not your typical fanboi. I've worked with Mac and PCs since the mid-1990s and I preferred Win95/98/2K over Mac OS 7/8/9. But OS X became usable (10.2) right around the time XP came out (which I've always disliked) and also around this same time, Macs (like the original white iBook) became more reasonably priced. I've completely switched and I don't recommend Windows to anyone, ever, unless they have a have a very real need for it.
For a user who is either a) very knowledgeable, b) extremely cautious (and somewhat knowledgeable), or c) has VERY LIMITED needs (i.e., only ever visits a handful of sites; doesn't have friends emailing crazy crap; somehow doesn't get a lot of malicious spams)--Windows is easy to keep safe. For absolutely everyone else on the planet, keeping a Windows box secure is a battle that starts on Day 1 and never ends.
* 'royally borked' = neither IE nor Firefox will even launch; if you boot it and do nothing, it'll generate out-of-memory errors. Here's what happened: I woke it from screensaver one day and saw an out-of-memory error that I've never seen before. I rebooted and neither browser would launch. I have since shut it down and it has not been booted since. Before that, it had been running just fine for... five years? Six?
Why no love for the 5.25" form factor? That extra inch-and-three-quarters gives you a lot of extra real estate to play with. ((5.25/2)^2) / ((3.5/2)^2) = 2.25, if I'm doing this correctly, so even minus room for the spindle, etc., you're still talking about 5-100% more area.) Why is no one making a modern version of the Quantum Bigfoot* that came in my sister's 400 MHz Compaq Presario 5150? I would love to see a modern 5.25" HD with... - 3600 or 4200 RPM rotational speed - low noise - low heat - low power consumption The reduced speed (wear and tear on parts) and heat should also lead to greater reliability. If a 3.5" drive can be 1 TB today, a 5.25" drive should be 1.5-2TB. A drive like this would be perfect for a home media server or HTPC, where performance is not critical (SD DVD is only 4 GB/hour; even BluRay is only 25 GB/hour--and I'm pretty happy with ripped DVDs at ~1500 kbps--less than 1 GB per hour) but low heat, low noise, and low power consumption are all desirable traits. (There's more rotating mass, but at lower speed there should be much less energy/momentum/intertia/whatever overall.) And as long as CDs and DVDs are still ~5"--and that seems to be the case (DVD, HD-DVD, BluRay, SACD)--we'll already be using properly-sized cases.
* granted, that old thing was slow as hell. Swapping out the stock 8 GB Quantum Bigfoot for a 30 GB Maxtor dropped boot times from 3 minutes to 40 seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
As a subscriber you are probably not aware that /. has started inserting banner ads after some posts.
/etc/hosts file I, too, was not aware that /.has started inserting banner ads after some posts. :-)
As someone with a custom
You know, it would be interesting if Slashdot let you do something like that--either use your mod points in the traditional manner, or use all five (maybe just 3) to mod down an actual article.
If Scrabulous is forced offline, what the hell am I going to do all day when I'm at work?
Possible solution.
... you'd need seating for four, and bubble domes so they can see everything... I think I can do this for $82,000.
I was born in late 1972. My first memory of video games is my dad holding me up so I could see Space Invaders running its demo.
When I was younger, we made it at home from real milk, sugar and a bit of flavoring agent in a hand-turned ice-cream maker...
;-)
FYI, electric ice cream makers are typically $40-100. I just googled for 'ice cream maker' and the first match was a Cuisinart for $50. All the taste, none of the work!
Getting people to change their mind about religion or politics.
Fact: most people, as is the topic of this thread, Do Not Care. Are there problems with closed source software? Sure. Are there benefits? Believe it or not, yes. Are there good things about OSS? Of course. Are there problems too? You bet! So even if you "solve" one problem by moving to an OSS package, you're likely to be creating another at the same time. And since you're the one pushing it, you'll likely become the 'de facto' support person at best, and the person whose fault it is that things don't work at worst.
Not that I don't love OSS. But pushing it just because is just as bad as, if not worse than, arguing about religion or politics.
The Nintendo DS...
Funny. I've been using that hosts file for years.... on my 800 MHz G3 iBook. :-) No problems there!
Thanks. Being a car guy, I've heard of them, I just never knew they were *that* big.
Thanks for the laugh. Slowly zooming out to see where the roads were, I zoomed out further and noticed this giant white splotch in NW Utah. What's that? Is that whole area just perpetually snowy?
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&t=h&q=United+States&ie=UTF8&om=1&ll=39.044786,-111.192627&spn=7.497841,10.964355&z=7
Apple introduced the iTMS in April 2003
Over a year later, they had 8-50% of the market, depending on exactly which numbers you look at.
So it sounds like they were in the MINORITY when they put protected-AAC support in. Of the many reasons why this suit-of-the-day is probably groundless, I think this is a good one: are they required to worry about anticompetitive practices when they aren't yet a monopoly? Once they become one, are the required to change? I would think not--if the market didn't like the restrictive product they introduced, it wouldn't have become dominant in the first place.
This isn't like MS giving away IE for free AFTER Windows was firmly established as the dominant desktop OS. This is like if MS had given away IE since the Windows 1.0 days. Did any of the MS antitrust suits include complaints that they bundled Notepad? More people probably play Solitaire and the other bundled games than use Notepad--were there ever any antitrust suites re: the games?
Not always.
:-) The white ones, though, were kick-ass and a great value.)
(Note that the first link skips you past the clamshell ones.
To Lenovo I say: welcome to 2001!
Or when I want to download an eval copy of an MS product to play with in a VM.
:-)
PS: Better work in Safari/OS X.
My first thought was 'tm.rf'--in Soviet Russia, The Manual, um, Reads... wait...
Yeah, these guys aren't exactly rocket scientists. Oh, wait...
The editors, are busy.
Remember: you can't win. There was a /. story on this a few months or a year ago (too lazy to search; don't remember any unique keywords) and the summary was along the lines of "If you look nervous, you could be a terrorist and should be inspected. If you look too calm, then you could be a skillful terrorist, consciously quashing your nervousness, and should be inspected." You can't win.
+1 for Joel. +10, actually, if I'm allowed. I really recommend reading the above linked (online, free) book. And if you've got the time, you should pretty much read everything he's ever written. Even his stories about buying office furniture or shipping packages has little hints and clues, not about GUIs per se, but about all the little things that make any experience good or bad. And there's lots of good other stuff too, like dealing with people, creative approaches to problem solving, etc.
Even when he's wrong, the stories are still good. He has a series called 'Working on CityDesk' that has lots of little bits of good info. Despite the fact that his company's web-editing app CityDesk tanked ("nobody wants to compose in a big TEXTAREA on an HTML page") and they now focus on selling the bug-tracking software that they originally developed for in-house use, there is still a lot of good info. I love this bit about XML and databases. (About 2/3 the way down.)
And one other important thing to remember is to NOT go all by one source. Find some others. (Joel frequently mentions others in the industry.) As we saw above, Joel was as wrong as could be, and Norman, despite having lots and lots of good info, is a little too detached from reality most of the time. Forget Designing Web Usability, go read Design of Everyday Things instead.
Open-source doesn't magically always lead to succes, but neither does closed-source: OS/2 and BeOS are two commercial, 100% closed-source operating systems that were very ahead of their time... and died. Why? Well, largely (and this is especially the case with BeOS) because they couldn't INTEROPERATE with all the other things that were already out there that most people used. And why couldn't they interoperate? Everyone, all together now...
Two: open source developers would love nothing more than to create the next great thing, and they are more than talented enough to do it. Why aren't they? Oh, right: they've got to spend their time reinventing the wheel, reverse-engineering all those wonderful CLOSED standards--Office file formats, SMB, video codecs, etc. Imagine how far ADVANCED we'd be if we didn't have to spend man-decades reverse engineering crappy-but-dominant things. If asshole companies would have worked with open standards in the first place, we wouldn't be in this fucking mess. Outside of a computer science class, it's a waste of time to solve the same problems over and over and over again.
One of my favorite quotes of all time: Craig Southeren, co-founder of OpenH323 Fucking-a right. Why are there so many IM protocols? (Formatted text over a network--are you fucking kidding me?!?!?*) And why, relevant to Open H323, don't we all have videophones yet? Same reason.
From TFA: "Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world--like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe's Flash--the results of proprietary development?"
There are MANY reasons, but a lack of creativity on the part of OSS developers is NOT one. It is a fact that secrets DO have some value. If you know something good, and you aren't willing to tell someone for free, they'll probably be willing to pay.
PageRank and Flash are his shining examples of "sophisticated" and successful code?!? Ha! Let's see: PageRank is a weighted ranking algorithm Ooh. It exists (and is closed) because people are assholes and are constantly trying to game the system. If fucking asshole spammers and porn sites didn't fill up their pages with bogus META tags back in the mid-to-late '90s, PageRank wouldn't be the necessity it is. If they didn't continue to do everything possible to defeat honest ranking, its methods wouldn't have to be secret. And Flash? Are you fucking KIDDING me? It's a vector graphics format that handles animation, can play sound in sync, and has gained the ability to play embedded movie files. Those are all DECADES-old technolgies! And Adobe bundled them all together into one plugin... ooh, that fucking REEKS of innovation.
This guy was on a panel with Lee Smolin (a physicist) and Neal Stephenson talking about "the relationship between time and math" so I'm sure he's smarter than I am in many ways, but I can't help but feel that this article of his is way, way, way wrong.
* yeah, I know there's more to it than just text... but not fucking much. Not enough to justify the existence of AIM and MSN and Yahoo! and all the rest.
Don't you see? This is capitalism in action! Domain names are $7.95... domain names people want start at $79.50.
Good point. That may very well be the reason. But there's GOT to be a market for drives with 2x the capacity of anyone else's! And hard drives typically don't follow a straight bigger-equals-better-value curve--there's usually a sweet spot in the middle (like where 320s/500s/maybe 750s are today) and then an upswing at the high end (where 1 TB is today.) Just like with LCD panels--medium is a better value than small, but large is a worse value than medium. So people wouldn't mind if a 2 TB drive cost more than 2x a 1 TB drive.
Why do you hate to say it? Ever since spyware started becoming a royal PITA to combat--quoth another responder, "With AVG, ZoneAlarm, Spybot, and Firefox..."--I've done nothing BUT recommend Macs. Things like ZoneAlarm are impossible to explain to non-techies, as is the difference between spyware-generated popups, popup ads you see while web browsing, popups from nagware apps (I'm lookin' at you, QuickTime), and 'real' system popups. Even limited to just real system popups, most users don't know what's important and what isn't; what they should read and what they shouldn't, and whether they should click yes, no, cancel, or close to any of the many messages they see. MS's lame response to security issues is basically "We'll just warn the user that everything might be potentially hazardous. Now if anything goes wrong, it's the user's fault for not knowing."
You can argue all day about which system is inherently more secure, or that Macs have more unpatched OS-level theoretical UNIX-style vulnerabilities, and if it's the fault of the OS, bundled apps, 3rd-party apps, malicious web devs, or stupid users, whatever... at the end of it all, there remains one simple un-ignorable fact that says it all: there has not been one self-replicating in-the-wild virus for Mac OS X. Ever. Period. Owning a Mac == NO SECURITY HEADACHES. A computer should not be an ongoing effort to secure and use.
If you even try to explain things to users,
- they may make mistakes
- they may not remember
- they may not follow instructions perfectly
- they may not understand all the instructions
- they may ignore warnings if a site promises porn
- they may be kids and can't understand/don't care
My son is, at the moment, not allowed to use a computer. Despite this, he snuck on my wife's W2K box and royally borked it* in just an hour or so of unsupervised surfing. I've been meaning to move her to a Mac for a while, just never had a compelling reason to do so. Now I do. I just bought a (used) Mac Pro and will give her my Mini.
I'm not your typical fanboi. I've worked with Mac and PCs since the mid-1990s and I preferred Win95/98/2K over Mac OS 7/8/9. But OS X became usable (10.2) right around the time XP came out (which I've always disliked) and also around this same time, Macs (like the original white iBook) became more reasonably priced. I've completely switched and I don't recommend Windows to anyone, ever, unless they have a have a very real need for it.
For a user who is either a) very knowledgeable, b) extremely cautious (and somewhat knowledgeable), or c) has VERY LIMITED needs (i.e., only ever visits a handful of sites; doesn't have friends emailing crazy crap; somehow doesn't get a lot of malicious spams)--Windows is easy to keep safe. For absolutely everyone else on the planet, keeping a Windows box secure is a battle that starts on Day 1 and never ends.
* 'royally borked' = neither IE nor Firefox will even launch; if you boot it and do nothing, it'll generate out-of-memory errors. Here's what happened: I woke it from screensaver one day and saw an out-of-memory error that I've never seen before. I rebooted and neither browser would launch. I have since shut it down and it has not been booted since. Before that, it had been running just fine for... five years? Six?
Why no love for the 5.25" form factor? That extra inch-and-three-quarters gives you a lot of extra real estate to play with. ((5.25/2)^2) / ((3.5/2)^2) = 2.25, if I'm doing this correctly, so even minus room for the spindle, etc., you're still talking about 5-100% more area.) Why is no one making a modern version of the Quantum Bigfoot* that came in my sister's 400 MHz Compaq Presario 5150? I would love to see a modern 5.25" HD with...
- 3600 or 4200 RPM rotational speed
- low noise
- low heat
- low power consumption
The reduced speed (wear and tear on parts) and heat should also lead to greater reliability. If a 3.5" drive can be 1 TB today, a 5.25" drive should be 1.5-2TB. A drive like this would be perfect for a home media server or HTPC, where performance is not critical (SD DVD is only 4 GB/hour; even BluRay is only 25 GB/hour--and I'm pretty happy with ripped DVDs at ~1500 kbps--less than 1 GB per hour) but low heat, low noise, and low power consumption are all desirable traits. (There's more rotating mass, but at lower speed there should be much less energy/momentum/intertia/whatever overall.) And as long as CDs and DVDs are still ~5"--and that seems to be the case (DVD, HD-DVD, BluRay, SACD)--we'll already be using properly-sized cases.
* granted, that old thing was slow as hell. Swapping out the stock 8 GB Quantum Bigfoot for a 30 GB Maxtor dropped boot times from 3 minutes to 40 seconds.