I guess HTC has it right. Press the X to minimize, press and hold to close the app. It only takes me two taps to see the running program list and switch back and forth between them. Sure, every once in a while I accidentally leave something major running, but it's a small price to pay for being able to switch between apps instead of having to shut one down to get data from another.
WinMobile has its shortcomings, but multitasking is not really one of them.
I mean, their livers are probably shot, but I have to believe that there are other organs worth harvesting from the board of directors and the legal firm representing them.
Reminds me of the old Franklin planner seminar video, wherein the instructor has all his five children (including two teens) get up at 5am so they can do their daily planning together. A question from the audience asks how in the world he gets his teens up at 5am, to which he calmly replies that he puts them to bed at 8pm. More incredulous, the audience member asks him how he gets his teens to go to bed at 8pm. With a smile he replies, "I get them up at 5."
It is interesting that, while they claim that the licensing would START at 3%, it would climb to 8% as the mechanism was more widely adopted (interesting logic - once you're stuck, we'll screw you vs. as you make more you get a volume discount). Also, although he claims it takes $150 to install the device, his saws which incorporate it appear to cost 2-3X what comparables cost.
Sounds like it might be a line spike issue. It sucks mightily to have a $5 CFL go toes up after a couple months. I'd be apoplectic if that happened to a $50 LED. What's worse is that, unless you find exactly the same brand and style, you might get a different color temperature on a replacement lamp. Not a big deal if you have a single, one lamp fixture in your room, but annoying if you've got an array of ceiling cans (like my playroom, with 9). Verying color temps in all fluor. lights is a pet peeve of mine.
I think 100W is around 1500-1600lumens. 60W is closer to 720-760lumens. The lower the wattage, the lower the filament temp and the less visible light generated. Small lamps are ~10L/W, larger ones are north of 16L/W. I go with a 3:1 ratio for CFL:Incand. conversion. It's not completely accurate, but I'd rather have a little more light than a little less. It will always be less than daylight (for which our eyes are tuned), and as long as your fixtures don't create glare you shouldn't have a problem.
Up to the limit of comfort, more light = smaller pupils = greater depth of field at your retina = less eyestrain to correct for lens imperfections.
Do you imagine they install themselves? Sure, I can pick up a rough-in box for a 7' can for $15 and a cheap trim for another $7. If I want an airtight RI, it'll be closer to double that. If I want something other than generic 7" (say, a 4" with a nice baffle) it will be shade more. But that's just for the hardware. If you ask your builder to put cans in your remodel, or an electrician to install cans in your house, you'll find the effective - installed - cost is about $150. Not too surprising, actually, since installed product in residential construction is typically 3-4x what material costs are. I happen to know, as I'm in the industry.
Slow start up is annoying. Knowing which one starts at 15% and ramps up over 3 minutes vs the mythical one every CFL champion here on/. owns (you know, the one that starts at 90% brightness and gets to full output in 10 seconds) is a pretty big difference.
Anyway, I'll try to remember that website when I'm in WalMart needing to buy a new lamp because the ballast in one of my 2 year old CFLs just went toes up and I need a light NOW, not in a week when they can ship it to me.
Good business sense requires that an investment pay back at a 15-20% per year. For nearly every businessperson I know that is the case. Put into year terms, that means you'd have to pay back in 4-6 years. If you're paying a fortune for electricity, then it might make sense.
Being/., I'll take it to the geek side, though...
I live in a moderately temperate climate (Virginia, USA). Interestingly, in the winter, when we have more dark hours than light, I gain a heating bonus from incandescent lighting. You might say that it's only a 1.0 COP (vs. 2.0-3.0 for the main heating system, to use heat pump terms), but in fact it means I'm actively heating the room I occupy rather than the whole house, allowing me to set the main house thermostat lower. Since I live in an older home (1960), several rooms are inaccessible to the main forced air system and operate on resistance heat - in those cases the lighting costs me zero regardless of type (all the wattage becomes heat, which offsets the heat demand by 100%).
In the summer, of course, there is a stretch of about 2-3 months where we are actively cooling the home during peak solar load. Coincidentally, though, there is almost zero need for artificial lighting during this time, as there are sufficient windows in nearly all of the rooms of the house.
Finally, your savings presumes you remain in your home for the life of the lamp, and that no failures occur. A bad incandescent at $0.25 is no big deal, a bad LED at $50 is a bit more concerning - and with a life of 20 years, what is the chance of finding your receipt and getting a refund/replacement if it dies in year 4? Any wall mounted fixtures would, I presume retain their lamps when you sell, and "lamp type" doesn't really figure into home sales price in any meaningful way. Finally, any lamp which is used less than 1.6 hours a day is likely to outlive you. That would be every closet, attic, bathroom, etc. Be careful which you replace, you may just be throwing money away.
Always buy on lumens. I purchase one-up from the size I would use as an incandescent. A 60-75W inc. gets replaced with a 22-23W CFL. A poster elsewhere linked to a 7W LED lamp which claimed to be equivalent to a 35-40W incandescent, but it only put out 155lumens, whereas a PAR20 incandescent 35W lamp is usually around 350lumens, and a 40 watt R19 will put out about 500lumens.
I have a 15 x 20 room that has 9 ceiling cans with 22W CFLs, and the lighting is perfect. I still have 6 sconces with 60W incandescents for when I want dimmable (either for watching movies or mood) in the room, but that's part of the price of CFLs - if you want dimmable, you put in an extra source.
Actually, you're incorrect. I just bought a set of new CFLs about two months ago and they take between 2 and 3 minutes to be fully on. The initial light is less than 25% of full on. This was a problem with two sets I bought - one a store brand ($1 a lamp) and one was a name brand (~$2-3 a lamp). I have others which are very good - Philips Decorator series, I believe - which take about 30-45 seconds to full brightness, and about 50% illumination at startup. Of course, I can't turn on my stereo with the IR remote control for the first minute because the RFI from the lamps (9 in all) completely drowns out the IR system, but that's a side issue.
The problem is that there are no requirements for publishing the data on the package - CRI, Color Temp, Initial Illumination, Time to Full Output. None of that data is available, and it makes purchasing a random event. The EMI/RFI shielding is another issue entirely.
That's nice. Only one of those fits in a standard socket. That one is an a19 form factor, not an R/PAR form factor popular in recessed lighting (R20/PAR20 CFLs don't exist either). And to top it all off, it puts out less than 1/3 the light of a standard 50W lamp (155 lumens per the Philips website, a 50W PAR20 produces 550lumens). Dimmable must also mean "already too dim to care about."
So I get to use only 7W of electricity, pay 10x the cost of a halogen lamp (100x the cost of a standard lamp) and I have to install 3.5x fixtures to get the same lighting level, and in return I get to save 60% on my lighting bill. Lets see, I pay 8.5c.kW. I need 3.5*7W of these to equal the output of a 50W halogen, so that's 25.5W/hour savings , or $0.000021 per hour savings for a $175 in lamps. It will only take me 81,000 hours to pay back the cost of the lamps, presuming the fixtures are free (a recessed can runs about $100-$150, installed, for new construction). Note that I haven't accounted for cost of money, nor increases in power - I presume both to be between 7 and 15 percent, and will likely cancel one another out.
Funny, I've found the two WinMo phones I've had the last 3.5 years (both HTC - Hermes and Raphael/TouchPro on AT&T). I always install a cooked ROM to free up the space that AT&T reserves for their in-house apps, and I've never had lock-up problems.
What's lacking, oddly enough, are some of the "embedded" apps which either don't exist or haven't been updated, like browsers and clients (facebook/twitter/etc). Other than that it's pretty damned solid. The real downside is that the GUI is stylus-oriented, and MS never updated the GUI to be finger friendly. It's my main beef. I have never owned an iPhone, mainly because it doesn't have a stand alone GPS app and I'm frequently in areas without cell service. That's not (always) an AT&T limitation - I travel the mountains of Appalachia, and there are broad expanses of zero coverage regardless of carrier. Every time I think I might switch, I'm reminded of the apps I can't live without (tethering, GPS, Pocket Informant), and I decide to wait a little longer. At least on WinMo there are several front ends (I use SPB) which make the phone more finger friendly.
Actually, since it's in China, they probably only have grams of it. Mg, Tg, Pg, perhaps, but grams nonetheless. Though I suppose they could be talking about metric tonnes, which would also be true.
I do generally agree that it would be nice if they could get the estimate to within three orders of magnitude in the headline.
I was a professional (and a PE) before I hit grad school full on. The students who came straight from undergrad took the classes like undergrads. I agree with your assessment, and I took the fee to heart. I'm paying the professor to help me learn a subject. First, I expect to get a full lecture, and the lecture to be useful. Second, I expect to get help when I'm stuck. I also felt it was part of the contract that I try my hardest to learn the subject.
I got a great deal out of my MS degree. I used it to switch careers, but I learned more about some of my undergrad work in grad school than I ever imagined.
I'm going to Karma hell for this, but let me fix a few things for you:
creators: you have a choice too...ridiculous stifling agreement...or you can self-distribute
Creators, you can take that pile of advance cash sitting there on the table. Yes, those are stacks of $100 bills, and of course we can get you a duffel bag to put them in. Then again, you could always walk out with your "principles" and forego the chance to share your art with untold millions of future adoring fans. You don't have the capitol to market or get airplay, so you'll simply wallow in obscurity for entire career, requiring you to get a day job to make rent each month.
you are your own entrepreneur, with your own creative output. no more is your fate decided by some asshole in a suit in an office
Most musicians can't tell the right and left sides of a ledger apart, and really have no desire to do so. That's why they're called artists, and not entrepreneurs, business people, or venture capitalists. Every hour a competent business person spends managing your career is 4-10 frustrating hours an artist would spend away from creating. Hell, I'm an engineer and I'm pretty good at finance and accounting, but my finance person does the same job in less than half the time it used to take me. I couldn't even guess the hours it would take to write a creative musical work from scratch (and I know a little music, too).
creators: make money the honest way
Careful there, bub. Art is a luxury or an entertainment. Ever notice how lots of people do music for fun, but almost nobody does accounting as a hobby? To be good enough to get paid as a creative artist you've got to make a lot of people happy. It is insanely hard, and the opportunity to jump into the mainstream (including an income that lets you lose your day job) is a hard one to turn down. Bootstrapping in a mature, multinational industry - even in the internet age - is very, very hard.
I don't like the system, but asking an up-an-coming artist to try and buck it is asking quite a lot.
It's easy to see how there is overlapping technology being developed in parallel. The question is how the IP system will sort out "simultaneous" discoveries.
(the short answer probably involves lawyers and the ability to bankroll seemingly perpetual litigation)
...of Windows 1.02 (or was it 1.12) on 720k, 3.5" floppy. And no, I never used it - DOS was king and there were better file management programs at the time (which is all Win was at that point, iirc).
You should get a winmobile phone. With the exception of Opera 10 (which fucks the system if you switch to lansdcape), and an old stand-alone GPS program, it's rare that I need to soft-boot. The last time it happened was more than a month ago. It's never (to my knowledge) prevented the phone from working like a phone. (FWIW, it's an HTC Raphael, aka AT&T Fuze)
The problem with storing things is that they tend to degrade over time, and you never know when they'll fail.
Without being ridiculous, four sets in two locations is the best bet. Two sets are on line, and a regular parity check should be made between the two, with full data verification on a longer scale basis. One backup set gets made of each online set (an external drive which is sync'd once a week/month is likely good enough) and stored unpowered. This prevents local disaster from destroying your data, electrical damage from destroying your data, and (hopefully) bit rot from corrupting your data (two online sets provide a cross check, offline sets allow polling if the parity is off).
Mechanisms usually last longer when they are in service than when they are left unattended, though it takes power and - more importantly - a human to keep tabs on the system. You should also have a 5-8 year migration plan so that the data is updated to current interface standards on a regular schedule. The biggest fear, short of actual data loss, is that your storage medium will be unreadable at the indeterminate point in the future when it becomes necessary to retrieve the data.
This is, no doubt, more money than you've budgeted for the storage. Whatever you do, don't use RAID5. Two failures = zero data. Better to use a RAID4 (JBOD with Parity). If you lose 2 drives, you lose data, but at least you only use 1 drive of data for each additional drive failure.
You laugh, but a couple of decades ago we were testing reflections of laser pulses off of a 60-ish cm sphere covered with corner cubes. The question was how many photons we were getting from each "ring" of cubes so that we could better predict the exact center of the sphere when it was in orbit. See http://images.google.com/images?q=lageos I think we knew the orbit to better than 5cm at the time. Anyway, we (well they - I was just a co-op student) used a 250fs pulse to try and get distinct returns from each cube and map the response. Who knows what they're doing now.
The horizontal/vertical scrolling action is an extension of the media center interface (and supposedly Zune, though I've never seen one) and it's not a bad way to go if they feel they need some eye candy (and that seems to be the only way to lure the masses). The one dimensional version of OS nav was recently a topic here on/. as the "next big thing" in finger-manipulated computer work spaces. The fact that they can't fit February on the screen is pretty stupid, but the overall interface makes sense when seen in the extended (22 minute) show and tell from a couple of weeks ago.
I actually _am_ holding my breath (figuratively) for 7 as I prefer several win-only programs (pocket informant and stand-alone GPS software comes to mind) and tethering is high on my list of phone requirements, too. Att he rate its going, the iPhone will never tether, and I doubt that stand alone GPS will ever be an option on either Android or the iPhone. Since the BB is even harder locked down than the iPhone, that leaves only one real player. I hate the stylus-centric mode of win 6 and lower apps, so I'm hoping that 7 will make the jump to finger usefulness that W6 can never have with all its legacy stylus apps.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess HTC has it right. Press the X to minimize, press and hold to close the app. It only takes me two taps to see the running program list and switch back and forth between them. Sure, every once in a while I accidentally leave something major running, but it's a small price to pay for being able to switch between apps instead of having to shut one down to get data from another.
WinMobile has its shortcomings, but multitasking is not really one of them.
I mean, their livers are probably shot, but I have to believe that there are other organs worth harvesting from the board of directors and the legal firm representing them.
Reminds me of the old Franklin planner seminar video, wherein the instructor has all his five children (including two teens) get up at 5am so they can do their daily planning together. A question from the audience asks how in the world he gets his teens up at 5am, to which he calmly replies that he puts them to bed at 8pm. More incredulous, the audience member asks him how he gets his teens to go to bed at 8pm. With a smile he replies, "I get them up at 5."
It is interesting that, while they claim that the licensing would START at 3%, it would climb to 8% as the mechanism was more widely adopted (interesting logic - once you're stuck, we'll screw you vs. as you make more you get a volume discount). Also, although he claims it takes $150 to install the device, his saws which incorporate it appear to cost 2-3X what comparables cost.
...but I have no doubt this will be appealed.
Sounds like it might be a line spike issue. It sucks mightily to have a $5 CFL go toes up after a couple months. I'd be apoplectic if that happened to a $50 LED. What's worse is that, unless you find exactly the same brand and style, you might get a different color temperature on a replacement lamp. Not a big deal if you have a single, one lamp fixture in your room, but annoying if you've got an array of ceiling cans (like my playroom, with 9). Verying color temps in all fluor. lights is a pet peeve of mine.
I think 100W is around 1500-1600lumens. 60W is closer to 720-760lumens. The lower the wattage, the lower the filament temp and the less visible light generated. Small lamps are ~10L/W, larger ones are north of 16L/W. I go with a 3:1 ratio for CFL:Incand. conversion. It's not completely accurate, but I'd rather have a little more light than a little less. It will always be less than daylight (for which our eyes are tuned), and as long as your fixtures don't create glare you shouldn't have a problem.
Up to the limit of comfort, more light = smaller pupils = greater depth of field at your retina = less eyestrain to correct for lens imperfections.
Do you imagine they install themselves? Sure, I can pick up a rough-in box for a 7' can for $15 and a cheap trim for another $7. If I want an airtight RI, it'll be closer to double that. If I want something other than generic 7" (say, a 4" with a nice baffle) it will be shade more. But that's just for the hardware. If you ask your builder to put cans in your remodel, or an electrician to install cans in your house, you'll find the effective - installed - cost is about $150. Not too surprising, actually, since installed product in residential construction is typically 3-4x what material costs are. I happen to know, as I'm in the industry.
Slow start up is annoying. Knowing which one starts at 15% and ramps up over 3 minutes vs the mythical one every CFL champion here on /. owns (you know, the one that starts at 90% brightness and gets to full output in 10 seconds) is a pretty big difference.
Anyway, I'll try to remember that website when I'm in WalMart needing to buy a new lamp because the ballast in one of my 2 year old CFLs just went toes up and I need a light NOW, not in a week when they can ship it to me.
Good business sense requires that an investment pay back at a 15-20% per year. For nearly every businessperson I know that is the case. Put into year terms, that means you'd have to pay back in 4-6 years. If you're paying a fortune for electricity, then it might make sense.
Being /., I'll take it to the geek side, though...
I live in a moderately temperate climate (Virginia, USA). Interestingly, in the winter, when we have more dark hours than light, I gain a heating bonus from incandescent lighting. You might say that it's only a 1.0 COP (vs. 2.0-3.0 for the main heating system, to use heat pump terms), but in fact it means I'm actively heating the room I occupy rather than the whole house, allowing me to set the main house thermostat lower. Since I live in an older home (1960), several rooms are inaccessible to the main forced air system and operate on resistance heat - in those cases the lighting costs me zero regardless of type (all the wattage becomes heat, which offsets the heat demand by 100%).
In the summer, of course, there is a stretch of about 2-3 months where we are actively cooling the home during peak solar load. Coincidentally, though, there is almost zero need for artificial lighting during this time, as there are sufficient windows in nearly all of the rooms of the house.
Finally, your savings presumes you remain in your home for the life of the lamp, and that no failures occur. A bad incandescent at $0.25 is no big deal, a bad LED at $50 is a bit more concerning - and with a life of 20 years, what is the chance of finding your receipt and getting a refund/replacement if it dies in year 4? Any wall mounted fixtures would, I presume retain their lamps when you sell, and "lamp type" doesn't really figure into home sales price in any meaningful way. Finally, any lamp which is used less than 1.6 hours a day is likely to outlive you. That would be every closet, attic, bathroom, etc. Be careful which you replace, you may just be throwing money away.
Always buy on lumens. I purchase one-up from the size I would use as an incandescent. A 60-75W inc. gets replaced with a 22-23W CFL. A poster elsewhere linked to a 7W LED lamp which claimed to be equivalent to a 35-40W incandescent, but it only put out 155lumens, whereas a PAR20 incandescent 35W lamp is usually around 350lumens, and a 40 watt R19 will put out about 500lumens.
I have a 15 x 20 room that has 9 ceiling cans with 22W CFLs, and the lighting is perfect. I still have 6 sconces with 60W incandescents for when I want dimmable (either for watching movies or mood) in the room, but that's part of the price of CFLs - if you want dimmable, you put in an extra source.
Actually, you're incorrect. I just bought a set of new CFLs about two months ago and they take between 2 and 3 minutes to be fully on. The initial light is less than 25% of full on. This was a problem with two sets I bought - one a store brand ($1 a lamp) and one was a name brand (~$2-3 a lamp). I have others which are very good - Philips Decorator series, I believe - which take about 30-45 seconds to full brightness, and about 50% illumination at startup. Of course, I can't turn on my stereo with the IR remote control for the first minute because the RFI from the lamps (9 in all) completely drowns out the IR system, but that's a side issue.
The problem is that there are no requirements for publishing the data on the package - CRI, Color Temp, Initial Illumination, Time to Full Output. None of that data is available, and it makes purchasing a random event. The EMI/RFI shielding is another issue entirely.
You've found 98+ CRI 3500K CFLs? Please point me to the manufacturer - most of the ones in the store I find are sub85 CRI.
That's nice. Only one of those fits in a standard socket. That one is an a19 form factor, not an R/PAR form factor popular in recessed lighting (R20/PAR20 CFLs don't exist either). And to top it all off, it puts out less than 1/3 the light of a standard 50W lamp (155 lumens per the Philips website, a 50W PAR20 produces 550lumens). Dimmable must also mean "already too dim to care about."
So I get to use only 7W of electricity, pay 10x the cost of a halogen lamp (100x the cost of a standard lamp) and I have to install 3.5x fixtures to get the same lighting level, and in return I get to save 60% on my lighting bill. Lets see, I pay 8.5c.kW. I need 3.5*7W of these to equal the output of a 50W halogen, so that's 25.5W/hour savings , or $0.000021 per hour savings for a $175 in lamps. It will only take me 81,000 hours to pay back the cost of the lamps, presuming the fixtures are free (a recessed can runs about $100-$150, installed, for new construction). Note that I haven't accounted for cost of money, nor increases in power - I presume both to be between 7 and 15 percent, and will likely cancel one another out.
Funny, I've found the two WinMo phones I've had the last 3.5 years (both HTC - Hermes and Raphael/TouchPro on AT&T). I always install a cooked ROM to free up the space that AT&T reserves for their in-house apps, and I've never had lock-up problems.
What's lacking, oddly enough, are some of the "embedded" apps which either don't exist or haven't been updated, like browsers and clients (facebook/twitter/etc). Other than that it's pretty damned solid. The real downside is that the GUI is stylus-oriented, and MS never updated the GUI to be finger friendly. It's my main beef. I have never owned an iPhone, mainly because it doesn't have a stand alone GPS app and I'm frequently in areas without cell service. That's not (always) an AT&T limitation - I travel the mountains of Appalachia, and there are broad expanses of zero coverage regardless of carrier. Every time I think I might switch, I'm reminded of the apps I can't live without (tethering, GPS, Pocket Informant), and I decide to wait a little longer. At least on WinMo there are several front ends (I use SPB) which make the phone more finger friendly.
Actually, since it's in China, they probably only have grams of it. Mg, Tg, Pg, perhaps, but grams nonetheless. Though I suppose they could be talking about metric tonnes, which would also be true.
I do generally agree that it would be nice if they could get the estimate to within three orders of magnitude in the headline.
I was a professional (and a PE) before I hit grad school full on. The students who came straight from undergrad took the classes like undergrads. I agree with your assessment, and I took the fee to heart. I'm paying the professor to help me learn a subject. First, I expect to get a full lecture, and the lecture to be useful. Second, I expect to get help when I'm stuck. I also felt it was part of the contract that I try my hardest to learn the subject.
I got a great deal out of my MS degree. I used it to switch careers, but I learned more about some of my undergrad work in grad school than I ever imagined.
I'm going to Karma hell for this, but let me fix a few things for you:
creators: you have a choice too...ridiculous stifling agreement...or you can self-distribute
Creators, you can take that pile of advance cash sitting there on the table. Yes, those are stacks of $100 bills, and of course we can get you a duffel bag to put them in. Then again, you could always walk out with your "principles" and forego the chance to share your art with untold millions of future adoring fans. You don't have the capitol to market or get airplay, so you'll simply wallow in obscurity for entire career, requiring you to get a day job to make rent each month.
you are your own entrepreneur, with your own creative output. no more is your fate decided by some asshole in a suit in an office
Most musicians can't tell the right and left sides of a ledger apart, and really have no desire to do so. That's why they're called artists, and not entrepreneurs, business people, or venture capitalists. Every hour a competent business person spends managing your career is 4-10 frustrating hours an artist would spend away from creating. Hell, I'm an engineer and I'm pretty good at finance and accounting, but my finance person does the same job in less than half the time it used to take me. I couldn't even guess the hours it would take to write a creative musical work from scratch (and I know a little music, too).
creators: make money the honest way
Careful there, bub. Art is a luxury or an entertainment. Ever notice how lots of people do music for fun, but almost nobody does accounting as a hobby? To be good enough to get paid as a creative artist you've got to make a lot of people happy. It is insanely hard, and the opportunity to jump into the mainstream (including an income that lets you lose your day job) is a hard one to turn down. Bootstrapping in a mature, multinational industry - even in the internet age - is very, very hard.
I don't like the system, but asking an up-an-coming artist to try and buck it is asking quite a lot.
It's easy to see how there is overlapping technology being developed in parallel. The question is how the IP system will sort out "simultaneous" discoveries.
(the short answer probably involves lawyers and the ability to bankroll seemingly perpetual litigation)
NT was a solid OS. Then they let the hardware vendors back into ring 0 so that games would run faster.
...of Windows 1.02 (or was it 1.12) on 720k, 3.5" floppy. And no, I never used it - DOS was king and there were better file management programs at the time (which is all Win was at that point, iirc).
You should get a winmobile phone. With the exception of Opera 10 (which fucks the system if you switch to lansdcape), and an old stand-alone GPS program, it's rare that I need to soft-boot. The last time it happened was more than a month ago. It's never (to my knowledge) prevented the phone from working like a phone. (FWIW, it's an HTC Raphael, aka AT&T Fuze)
Does OSX not recognize and attempt to run the information on a newly inserted device based on the device content?
The problem with storing things is that they tend to degrade over time, and you never know when they'll fail.
Without being ridiculous, four sets in two locations is the best bet. Two sets are on line, and a regular parity check should be made between the two, with full data verification on a longer scale basis. One backup set gets made of each online set (an external drive which is sync'd once a week/month is likely good enough) and stored unpowered. This prevents local disaster from destroying your data, electrical damage from destroying your data, and (hopefully) bit rot from corrupting your data (two online sets provide a cross check, offline sets allow polling if the parity is off).
Mechanisms usually last longer when they are in service than when they are left unattended, though it takes power and - more importantly - a human to keep tabs on the system. You should also have a 5-8 year migration plan so that the data is updated to current interface standards on a regular schedule. The biggest fear, short of actual data loss, is that your storage medium will be unreadable at the indeterminate point in the future when it becomes necessary to retrieve the data.
This is, no doubt, more money than you've budgeted for the storage. Whatever you do, don't use RAID5. Two failures = zero data. Better to use a RAID4 (JBOD with Parity). If you lose 2 drives, you lose data, but at least you only use 1 drive of data for each additional drive failure.
You laugh, but a couple of decades ago we were testing reflections of laser pulses off of a 60-ish cm sphere covered with corner cubes. The question was how many photons we were getting from each "ring" of cubes so that we could better predict the exact center of the sphere when it was in orbit. See http://images.google.com/images?q=lageos I think we knew the orbit to better than 5cm at the time. Anyway, we (well they - I was just a co-op student) used a 250fs pulse to try and get distinct returns from each cube and map the response. Who knows what they're doing now.
The horizontal/vertical scrolling action is an extension of the media center interface (and supposedly Zune, though I've never seen one) and it's not a bad way to go if they feel they need some eye candy (and that seems to be the only way to lure the masses). The one dimensional version of OS nav was recently a topic here on /. as the "next big thing" in finger-manipulated computer work spaces. The fact that they can't fit February on the screen is pretty stupid, but the overall interface makes sense when seen in the extended (22 minute) show and tell from a couple of weeks ago.
I actually _am_ holding my breath (figuratively) for 7 as I prefer several win-only programs (pocket informant and stand-alone GPS software comes to mind) and tethering is high on my list of phone requirements, too. Att he rate its going, the iPhone will never tether, and I doubt that stand alone GPS will ever be an option on either Android or the iPhone. Since the BB is even harder locked down than the iPhone, that leaves only one real player. I hate the stylus-centric mode of win 6 and lower apps, so I'm hoping that 7 will make the jump to finger usefulness that W6 can never have with all its legacy stylus apps.