20G+ iPod (Apple hasn't a prayer of holding my entire music collection, but let's at least get a decent sized chunk of it, shall we?)
Bluetooth (or WiFi, whatever) connectivity.
Induction charger.
Some way to intelligently decide what should go on the iPod. The Synapse thing would be good here, methinks.
I'd like to come home, toss my wallet and keys and toys on a mat by the door, and have everything there automatically charge, sync, and get ready for the morning. Without any intervention on my part.
If Apple made an iPod / PDA comparable to the tiny Sony Clies with the gorgeous displays and included a wireless charger/sync combo, they'd have my business in a second. I would pay a $50 premium for that without blinking, and maybe $100. Convenience rather than power is Apple's game, and I'm eager to see them capitalize on their strengths in non-PC sectors.
LRU eviction is somewhat costly, but highly effective. Pseudo-LRU can be much cheaper and nearly as effective. The replacement policy is not hard - it is a well-researched problem in cache design.
What I find telling is that such a system has to be implemented at all. It seems clear to me that the operating system's filesystem, in conjunction with the VM, should implement this automatically. In Linux, this is true - large portions of the filesystem get cached if you have gobs of RAM lying around. Why certain more commonly-used OSes do the exact opposite is beyond me.
From my perspective, the right way to handle this is obvious. RAM is there to be used. Just as we have multiprogramming to make more efficient use of CPU and disk resources, we should be making the best possible use of available RAM. Letting it sit idle on the odd chance the user will suddenly need hundreds of meg of RAM out of nowhere is rediculous. From the perspective of the CPU, RAM is dog slow, but from the perspective of the disk, it's blazing fast. ANYTHING that can be done to shift the burden from magnetic storage to RAM should be done. Magnetic storage excels in one area and one area only: cheap permanent storage of vast amounts of data. RAM should be used to cache oft-used data. Why is this not painfully obvious to anyone designing an operating system?
Smart Display indeed. More like a half-broken dumb terminal.
It lasts maybe 3 hours despite its bulk, shuts itself off at inappropriate times, includes nonfunctional hardware, locks out the local desktop when in use, and has insulting audio (unless you use headphones) but since it won't let you watch DVDs that's probably alright. And without its host computer it's worthless. A cheap laptop running VNC would be more useful, both near and far from its home.
If it were half the weight, half the price, and worked I'd buy one. But since it's not, that's three strikes against and I'll be playing with my lovely IBM X31 instead.
Like ones that come in text boxes that you can edit.
Such as the agreement with ATI I cheerfully clicked my agreement to. When I was done with it, it said "In appreciation for downloading this driver suite, ATI inc. will send me one (1) riding pony in good health and standing in the equine community."
They've since changed the format, but I still don't have my pony.
You *can* be sure whether it's random or not. "999" is not random. It may very well be randomly-generated, but that's not the same thing at all.
Of course, it's not that simple either:
If I have a RNG that spits a long string of the same number. Is the string random? Well, not really. So I take the string, and make sure it has the same number of each digit in it. But 1111222233334444 isn't random either, so now I make sure the same number of each pair occurs, so we've got as many 12s as we have 21s. 1234321234321234 still isn't random, so we check 3-digit sets. And at the end, I'm left with a string that is random, right? Well, it has known properties, namely that it has the same number of each digit (+-1), the same number of each pair, etc. So that's not random. But what about the original string of 8s? That's clearly not random. So what to do?
If government is prohibited by law from gathering this sort of intelligence for itself, using information gathered by others seems a flimsy defense against the law. If an FBI agent, paid by the government, snoops around it's illegal. But if a grocery store, paid by the government, gives you the info it is legal? I don't buy it.
Every credit card application I get in the mail has a little check box and requires my signature: "I authorize ----- to check my credit record and verify the information provided on this application....." So if companies can't check my credit rating w/o my approval, how is the government going to get it, as the article suggests?
This is a weak end-run around existing legal protections. While I would like to think that when the next airplane explodes in a huge ball of flame the citizenry will say "Wait! You told us we gave up our freedoms for protection. If you can't do that, we at least want to be able to fly unmolested!" But I fear all we'll hear is a government cry of "See? We've saved you from everything up to this, but we need more information to stop these attacks in the future." and the people will say "Ok, if you say so."
The Republicans are distracting everyone from their machinations by beating up on Iraq. The Democrats are meekly going along with it in some misguided attempt to "show support for our troops" when any idiot could tell you the best way to support the troops is to send them back home where there aren't people shooting at them, and spend that war money sending their kids to better schools.
"The New York Post suggests that Google's focus on R&D doesn't really mesh with the financial accountability of a publicly traded company."
Phrased differently: "The NYP suggests that doing research to make a better product isn't financially sound for a publicly traded company."
Or: "Companies investing in their future are seen as worthless by investors."
Myopic MBAs with their heads in the sand kissing someone's ass are why Bell Labs got gutted. They are why US colleges stamp out more and more lawyers and fewer and fewer engineers. They are why not-CDs exist, why ReplayTV is out of business, and why it's illegal in Michigan to provide internet access to a school lab through a cable modem with 1 IP.
Would you ever hear the following in a boardroom meeting? "Let's phase out our coal-fired plants and replace them with solar." "But sir, that would cost $100 billion!" "Who the fuck cares? We'll spend that in the next 10 years buying coal anyway - might as well buy solar panels instead."
And won't you ever hear that? Back to the chickenshit MBAs. There's an enormous fusion reactor in our backyard that hits us with over 6.5 billion watts of energy per square mile and the MBAs would rather spend endless effort securing regulatory approval for another coal-fired plant or nuclear reactor than spend their money buying up plots of the cheapest land they can find in the middle of sunny Nevada.
I've strayed a bit, so I'll sum up my point here. The same thinking that suggests Google abandon improving their product so they'll make more money is why we still burn things to make steam to run generators, why we have no base on the moon and barely have one in orbit, and why we're willing to spend $200 billion (yup, you heard that right) to bomb the shit out of some poor country unfortunate enough to be situated on top of a sea of hydrocarbon ooze.
There's a big difference between "support everything forever" and "support products until the promised EOL". The former is unreasonable; the latter quite possibly legally enforceable. Anyone who gets nailed through this flaw prior to their EOL (whether it's June 30 of this year or Jan 1 '05) should consult with a lawyer.
Hard to say. While the Windows market is quite a bit larger, I'll bet the mac market is quite a bit more likely to pay for software, so they probably even out.
I always thought of Ambrosia as dead (the only games I had heard of from them were really old) but then stumbled across their website and saw that they're still around and doing cool stuff. I've played EV on my old Powerbook but it's slow - it runs a lot better on a Duron/600 with Executor (www.ardi.com), and I've logged more hours playing that way than under macOS. Regrettably, EVO doesn't play nicely with either Executor and is too slow to play on the Powerbook, so I haven't gotten very far with it.
There seem to be PPC emulators which will run a legit copy of macOS using actual Apple ROMs (rather than Executor which emulates the OS directly), but I haven't had much luck with them, even though it seems to me to be a better way to tackle emulation since the hardware changes less than the software. In any event, if anyone has gotten Mac emulation running that way and has good things to say about it, could you point me to a good howto?
If that's [25W] the maximum draw, the average is not likely to be less than 10...
The P-M's "thermal envelope" is 25W for the 1.6G version - if its average power consumption is 1W, how do you figure the Athlon's will be 10 times that much? I know AMD hasn't put as much engineering effort into their mobile chip as went into the P-M, but a 10:1 difference seems more than a bit off.
Re: LCD power consumption.
I'm just waiting for OLEDs to start being mass produced in sizes large enough for laptops. If the P-M can really deliver 8 hours runtime under normal usage, adding an OLED should push us up to 8 hours runtime while watching a DVD or using the wireless network - really using the machine. That would be superb.
You've already got the "somebody saying something pro-Microsoft that seems reasonable" karma, so I hope you don't mind me disagreeing with you.
In a country full of schools and colleges using MS Word, you have the gall to claim that anyone not doing so is restricting choice?! Anyone bothered by their decision can GO ELSEWHERE, or use MS products themselves. Nobody is mandating non-Microsoft products; they're just trying to get the college not to pay for them. Microsoft is free to donate them, and students are free to use their own.
The donor isn't seeking to force anyone to buy his products. He's seeking to force them *not* to buy certain products. Sort of like people protesting fur.
Your average computer user has a hard enough time telling the difference between Word, IE, and Windows, let alone between Staroffice and Word. Your argument that learning anything other than Word and Excel is harming someone is pure bullshit. There are more differences between WordXP and earlier versions than there are between WordXP and OO, so the idea that you're training someone wrong doesn't hold water. Most people don't do more than type and underline, which is pretty much the same you'll have to admit, between any two word processors.
You're wrong on your last point too - Microsoft doesn't pay OEMs to use their product. They license the product in such a way that if the OEM wants to sell *any* MS software, it has to sell *only* MS software.
I bought a 15000RPM hard drive 18 months ago and it was the fastest disk made for almost a year.
I just bought a laptop. It isn't even here yet. It's already obsolete. *cry*
I got a ultra-low-voltage P3/933 because battery life is paramount. Now they're making laptops ~2x as fast with half again as much battery life. Huzzah for technology.
Your basic premise there is flawed. Browsers are *not* mature.
By your implied definition, a mature piece of software does not exhibit major innovations. Yet browsers are being dramatically rewritten all the time. HTML keeps changing and improving. CSS was until recently unsupported. CSS2 is not (fully) supported by *any* browsers, and it's 4 years old. Then you've got DOM, DHTML, XML, VRML, XHTML, and all the rest. Any browser that fails to innovate will die. Notice nobody uses NS4 or IE4 anymore.
Well, let's see. If you run one way and then run back, you're cancelling out your effect. Except, if you run one way and then puke, when you run back you're exerting less force. So that's good so far.
If you run one way and have a heart attack, you're still fine as long as they don't bury you back where you started.
Getting bored and going home is bad though unless you start by going the wrong way, and then pick up a big juicy burger before oozing back.
So really, I think there's enormous potential in the/. crowd. Typically little kinetic, but good potential...
Consider a 3-platter design, typical for high-capacity IDE drives. Six read heads float above 6 platter surfaces at all times. Guess how many of those read at once? Yup. One. If manufacturers were worried about transfer rates, they could read from all 6 heads at once. Know what though? Processing that much info at once is hard. Expensive. So they don't do it. Yes, the higher linear track density (not areal density) increases bandwidth if the same rotational speed is maintained, but this speed is limited by the electronics to read the data, which are improving more or less in sync with the mechanical assemblies.
In a theoretical sense decreasing platter diameter decreases STR and decreases performance, but as a practical matter STR has little to do with performance in most applications, and those that require high STR are best served by RAID arrays anyway. Thus there is little practical need for higher-STR drives, which nicely explains why they don't exist. If you're interested in hard numbers, check out Storage Review - they have a long series of discussions and benchmarks revealing the importance or lack thereof of STR on common applications.
Why? What conceivable use is there for a single drive that can kick out 300MB/sec?
Haven't we learned this already a dozen times now? Bandwidth is EASY. If you want a high-bandwidth link between NY and LA, charter a few trucks and fill them with DDS4 tapes. If you want a high-bandwidth disk subsystem, fill it with a dew dozen drives. If you want more memory bandwidth, add another channel or three.
Latency, not bandwidth, is the problem in nearly all applications. You want a drive that can sustain 3GB/sec. Well, I'll give you a hypothetical drive that can transfer data instantaneously. With a 5ms access time, it can still only transfer 100KB/sec if it reads 512byte sectors randomly. A drive with half the latency but only 10MB/sec transfer rate could come within 95% of doubling the first drive's performance under those conditions.
Until you approach petabits/second, bandwidth is not a technical problem, it is a financial problem. I have to go, so thus endeth the lesson.
Jesus, man! What planet are you on? Any time I want data to last on a floppy for more than 10 feet, I make 2 copies. And I have on more than one occasion needed a third. I consider myself fortunate if I can get a floppy to last from one end of a 20-minute car ride to the other in a nice floppy box in my breast pocket. Years?!? You can get floppies to last years? Go buy yourself a lottery ticket. Now!
In point of fact, nothing is on my ass, as I just stepped out of the shower.
But I see your point:)
Re:I dont see why Tabbing is such a big issue.
on
Hyatt Discusses Tabs
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· Score: 1
Clearly you don't regularly have 10-20 webpages open at a time.
Tabbed browsing saves screen space. This is especially important for window managers that have little icons a'la Windows Taskbar for each open window.
Tabbed browsing allows conceptual organization. I have one window for Ebay-related things, another is my "home" window with Slashdot and boingboing and a dozen others, and I have other windows as browsing warrants.
There are other virtues too, but if I don't go soon I'll add "making me late for class" to the list. Besides, if you look at my comments I've babbled just about enough about my beloved tabs already today. Bye now.
Slashdot Mirror
With your share of the $20 million you helped smuggle out of Nigeria for that nice elderly chap, you can probably afford a cellphone.
Music to my ears. Hm. Ok, here goes:
20G+ iPod (Apple hasn't a prayer of holding my entire music collection, but let's at least get a decent sized chunk of it, shall we?)
Bluetooth (or WiFi, whatever) connectivity.
Induction charger.
Some way to intelligently decide what should go on the iPod. The Synapse thing would be good here, methinks.
I'd like to come home, toss my wallet and keys and toys on a mat by the door, and have everything there automatically charge, sync, and get ready for the morning. Without any intervention on my part.
If Apple made an iPod / PDA comparable to the tiny Sony Clies with the gorgeous displays and included a wireless charger/sync combo, they'd have my business in a second. I would pay a $50 premium for that without blinking, and maybe $100. Convenience rather than power is Apple's game, and I'm eager to see them capitalize on their strengths in non-PC sectors.
LRU eviction is somewhat costly, but highly effective. Pseudo-LRU can be much cheaper and nearly as effective. The replacement policy is not hard - it is a well-researched problem in cache design.
What I find telling is that such a system has to be implemented at all. It seems clear to me that the operating system's filesystem, in conjunction with the VM, should implement this automatically. In Linux, this is true - large portions of the filesystem get cached if you have gobs of RAM lying around. Why certain more commonly-used OSes do the exact opposite is beyond me.
From my perspective, the right way to handle this is obvious. RAM is there to be used. Just as we have multiprogramming to make more efficient use of CPU and disk resources, we should be making the best possible use of available RAM. Letting it sit idle on the odd chance the user will suddenly need hundreds of meg of RAM out of nowhere is rediculous. From the perspective of the CPU, RAM is dog slow, but from the perspective of the disk, it's blazing fast. ANYTHING that can be done to shift the burden from magnetic storage to RAM should be done. Magnetic storage excels in one area and one area only: cheap permanent storage of vast amounts of data. RAM should be used to cache oft-used data. Why is this not painfully obvious to anyone designing an operating system?
"RAM costs more than disk". There. Now you don't need to read the story, which is probably /.ed by now anyway.
Smart Display indeed. More like a half-broken dumb terminal.
It lasts maybe 3 hours despite its bulk, shuts itself off at inappropriate times, includes nonfunctional hardware, locks out the local desktop when in use, and has insulting audio (unless you use headphones) but since it won't let you watch DVDs that's probably alright. And without its host computer it's worthless. A cheap laptop running VNC would be more useful, both near and far from its home.
If it were half the weight, half the price, and worked I'd buy one. But since it's not, that's three strikes against and I'll be playing with my lovely IBM X31 instead.
If they were real engineers, there'd be teleporters on either side of the board:)
Great job guys! Looks awesome.
Yes.
May I suggest at least taking a peak at Google before asking silly questions?
In fact, some I'm downright thrilled with.
Like ones that come in text boxes that you can edit.
Such as the agreement with ATI I cheerfully clicked my agreement to. When I was done with it, it said "In appreciation for downloading this driver suite, ATI inc. will send me one (1) riding pony in good health and standing in the equine community."
They've since changed the format, but I still don't have my pony.
You *can* be sure whether it's random or not. "999" is not random. It may very well be randomly-generated, but that's not the same thing at all.
Of course, it's not that simple either:
If I have a RNG that spits a long string of the same number. Is the string random? Well, not really. So I take the string, and make sure it has the same number of each digit in it. But 1111222233334444 isn't random either, so now I make sure the same number of each pair occurs, so we've got as many 12s as we have 21s. 1234321234321234 still isn't random, so we check 3-digit sets. And at the end, I'm left with a string that is random, right? Well, it has known properties, namely that it has the same number of each digit (+-1), the same number of each pair, etc. So that's not random. But what about the original string of 8s? That's clearly not random. So what to do?
This seems to be of dubious legality.
If government is prohibited by law from gathering this sort of intelligence for itself, using information gathered by others seems a flimsy defense against the law. If an FBI agent, paid by the government, snoops around it's illegal. But if a grocery store, paid by the government, gives you the info it is legal? I don't buy it.
Every credit card application I get in the mail has a little check box and requires my signature: "I authorize ----- to check my credit record and verify the information provided on this application....." So if companies can't check my credit rating w/o my approval, how is the government going to get it, as the article suggests?
This is a weak end-run around existing legal protections. While I would like to think that when the next airplane explodes in a huge ball of flame the citizenry will say "Wait! You told us we gave up our freedoms for protection. If you can't do that, we at least want to be able to fly unmolested!" But I fear all we'll hear is a government cry of "See? We've saved you from everything up to this, but we need more information to stop these attacks in the future." and the people will say "Ok, if you say so."
The Republicans are distracting everyone from their machinations by beating up on Iraq. The Democrats are meekly going along with it in some misguided attempt to "show support for our troops" when any idiot could tell you the best way to support the troops is to send them back home where there aren't people shooting at them, and spend that war money sending their kids to better schools.
"The New York Post suggests that Google's focus on R&D doesn't really mesh with the financial accountability of a publicly traded company."
Phrased differently: "The NYP suggests that doing research to make a better product isn't financially sound for a publicly traded company."
Or: "Companies investing in their future are seen as worthless by investors."
Myopic MBAs with their heads in the sand kissing someone's ass are why Bell Labs got gutted. They are why US colleges stamp out more and more lawyers and fewer and fewer engineers. They are why not-CDs exist, why ReplayTV is out of business, and why it's illegal in Michigan to provide internet access to a school lab through a cable modem with 1 IP.
Would you ever hear the following in a boardroom meeting?
"Let's phase out our coal-fired plants and replace them with solar."
"But sir, that would cost $100 billion!"
"Who the fuck cares? We'll spend that in the next 10 years buying coal anyway - might as well buy solar panels instead."
And won't you ever hear that? Back to the chickenshit MBAs. There's an enormous fusion reactor in our backyard that hits us with over 6.5 billion watts of energy per square mile and the MBAs would rather spend endless effort securing regulatory approval for another coal-fired plant or nuclear reactor than spend their money buying up plots of the cheapest land they can find in the middle of sunny Nevada.
I've strayed a bit, so I'll sum up my point here. The same thinking that suggests Google abandon improving their product so they'll make more money is why we still burn things to make steam to run generators, why we have no base on the moon and barely have one in orbit, and why we're willing to spend $200 billion (yup, you heard that right) to bomb the shit out of some poor country unfortunate enough to be situated on top of a sea of hydrocarbon ooze.
*takes breath* *steps off soapbox*
And here I thought there were no replies to the WinXP story because nobody cares. *sigh* I can always hope, right?
I'm having a harder time imagining a 5-meter-long Bug than I am a 5-meter-long meteor.
There's a big difference between "support everything forever" and "support products until the promised EOL". The former is unreasonable; the latter quite possibly legally enforceable. Anyone who gets nailed through this flaw prior to their EOL (whether it's June 30 of this year or Jan 1 '05) should consult with a lawyer.
Hard to say. While the Windows market is quite a bit larger, I'll bet the mac market is quite a bit more likely to pay for software, so they probably even out.
I always thought of Ambrosia as dead (the only games I had heard of from them were really old) but then stumbled across their website and saw that they're still around and doing cool stuff. I've played EV on my old Powerbook but it's slow - it runs a lot better on a Duron/600 with Executor (www.ardi.com), and I've logged more hours playing that way than under macOS. Regrettably, EVO doesn't play nicely with either Executor and is too slow to play on the Powerbook, so I haven't gotten very far with it.
There seem to be PPC emulators which will run a legit copy of macOS using actual Apple ROMs (rather than Executor which emulates the OS directly), but I haven't had much luck with them, even though it seems to me to be a better way to tackle emulation since the hardware changes less than the software. In any event, if anyone has gotten Mac emulation running that way and has good things to say about it, could you point me to a good howto?
If that's [25W] the maximum draw, the average is not likely to be less than 10...
The P-M's "thermal envelope" is 25W for the 1.6G version - if its average power consumption is 1W, how do you figure the Athlon's will be 10 times that much? I know AMD hasn't put as much engineering effort into their mobile chip as went into the P-M, but a 10:1 difference seems more than a bit off.
Re: LCD power consumption.
I'm just waiting for OLEDs to start being mass produced in sizes large enough for laptops. If the P-M can really deliver 8 hours runtime under normal usage, adding an OLED should push us up to 8 hours runtime while watching a DVD or using the wireless network - really using the machine. That would be superb.
You've already got the "somebody saying something pro-Microsoft that seems reasonable" karma, so I hope you don't mind me disagreeing with you.
In a country full of schools and colleges using MS Word, you have the gall to claim that anyone not doing so is restricting choice?! Anyone bothered by their decision can GO ELSEWHERE, or use MS products themselves. Nobody is mandating non-Microsoft products; they're just trying to get the college not to pay for them. Microsoft is free to donate them, and students are free to use their own.
The donor isn't seeking to force anyone to buy his products. He's seeking to force them *not* to buy certain products. Sort of like people protesting fur.
Your average computer user has a hard enough time telling the difference between Word, IE, and Windows, let alone between Staroffice and Word. Your argument that learning anything other than Word and Excel is harming someone is pure bullshit. There are more differences between WordXP and earlier versions than there are between WordXP and OO, so the idea that you're training someone wrong doesn't hold water. Most people don't do more than type and underline, which is pretty much the same you'll have to admit, between any two word processors.
You're wrong on your last point too - Microsoft doesn't pay OEMs to use their product. They license the product in such a way that if the OEM wants to sell *any* MS software, it has to sell *only* MS software.
I bought a 15000RPM hard drive 18 months ago and it was the fastest disk made for almost a year.
I just bought a laptop. It isn't even here yet. It's already obsolete. *cry*
I got a ultra-low-voltage P3/933 because battery life is paramount. Now they're making laptops ~2x as fast with half again as much battery life. Huzzah for technology.
Your basic premise there is flawed. Browsers are *not* mature.
By your implied definition, a mature piece of software does not exhibit major innovations. Yet browsers are being dramatically rewritten all the time. HTML keeps changing and improving. CSS was until recently unsupported. CSS2 is not (fully) supported by *any* browsers, and it's 4 years old. Then you've got DOM, DHTML, XML, VRML, XHTML, and all the rest. Any browser that fails to innovate will die. Notice nobody uses NS4 or IE4 anymore.
Well, let's see. If you run one way and then run back, you're cancelling out your effect. Except, if you run one way and then puke, when you run back you're exerting less force. So that's good so far.
/. crowd. Typically little kinetic, but good potential...
If you run one way and have a heart attack, you're still fine as long as they don't bury you back where you started.
Getting bored and going home is bad though unless you start by going the wrong way, and then pick up a big juicy burger before oozing back.
So really, I think there's enormous potential in the
Close, but no cigar.
Consider a 3-platter design, typical for high-capacity IDE drives. Six read heads float above 6 platter surfaces at all times. Guess how many of those read at once? Yup. One. If manufacturers were worried about transfer rates, they could read from all 6 heads at once. Know what though? Processing that much info at once is hard. Expensive. So they don't do it. Yes, the higher linear track density (not areal density) increases bandwidth if the same rotational speed is maintained, but this speed is limited by the electronics to read the data, which are improving more or less in sync with the mechanical assemblies.
In a theoretical sense decreasing platter diameter decreases STR and decreases performance, but as a practical matter STR has little to do with performance in most applications, and those that require high STR are best served by RAID arrays anyway. Thus there is little practical need for higher-STR drives, which nicely explains why they don't exist. If you're interested in hard numbers, check out Storage Review - they have a long series of discussions and benchmarks revealing the importance or lack thereof of STR on common applications.
Why? What conceivable use is there for a single drive that can kick out 300MB/sec?
Haven't we learned this already a dozen times now? Bandwidth is EASY. If you want a high-bandwidth link between NY and LA, charter a few trucks and fill them with DDS4 tapes. If you want a high-bandwidth disk subsystem, fill it with a dew dozen drives. If you want more memory bandwidth, add another channel or three.
Latency, not bandwidth, is the problem in nearly all applications. You want a drive that can sustain 3GB/sec. Well, I'll give you a hypothetical drive that can transfer data instantaneously. With a 5ms access time, it can still only transfer 100KB/sec if it reads 512byte sectors randomly. A drive with half the latency but only 10MB/sec transfer rate could come within 95% of doubling the first drive's performance under those conditions.
Until you approach petabits/second, bandwidth is not a technical problem, it is a financial problem. I have to go, so thus endeth the lesson.
> most claim floppy disks have two year lifespans
Jesus, man! What planet are you on? Any time I want data to last on a floppy for more than 10 feet, I make 2 copies. And I have on more than one occasion needed a third. I consider myself fortunate if I can get a floppy to last from one end of a 20-minute car ride to the other in a nice floppy box in my breast pocket. Years?!? You can get floppies to last years? Go buy yourself a lottery ticket. Now!
In point of fact, nothing is on my ass, as I just stepped out of the shower.
But I see your point:)
Clearly you don't regularly have 10-20 webpages open at a time.
Tabbed browsing saves screen space. This is especially important for window managers that have little icons a'la Windows Taskbar for each open window.
Tabbed browsing allows conceptual organization. I have one window for Ebay-related things, another is my "home" window with Slashdot and boingboing and a dozen others, and I have other windows as browsing warrants.
There are other virtues too, but if I don't go soon I'll add "making me late for class" to the list. Besides, if you look at my comments I've babbled just about enough about my beloved tabs already today. Bye now.