One other difference worth mentioning: The Treo is available ONLY as a GSM CancerPhone, while the Samsung and it's Kyocera cousin work with the much more biologically friendly CDMA.
(CDMA is also much better for mobile data connections because of its soft handoff capability, which allows the phone to "talk" to multiple cells simultaneously to produce a smooth transition rahter than the abrupt switchover used by other systems.)
You don't explain your complaint with it, but I've had one for a few months and it's quite simply the best and most functional piece of electronic gear I've ever owned. It's small, rugged, integrates phone and Palm functions quite well,is completely compatible with all the Palm software I use, some of which dates back to the original 1000 (only one program, ToDo+, needed a new version, free for registered users), and the batteries last darn near forever. If you took away all my electronics and computers one by one, the Kyocera 6035 would be the last thing left, and you'd have to fight me for it.
By the way, there are other choices: Samsung has a new Palm phone out with a larger screen - the smaller screen is my only (minor) complaint about the Kyocera.
I agree with others that say they don't want and won't pay for the ridiculous Japanese 3G foo-foo of movies and animated icons on a tiny screen. A faster data connection and a real web browser would be nice, but I can't think of much else I'd want. I'm not even considering the Linux-based handhelds for a while - It's nice to be able to get all kinds of things to run on them, but unfortunately, none of them are capable of doing the basics nearly so well as the Palm, so I'll stick with what works...
Count the number of doors that need to have a user manual on them, even if it just says "Pull." Watch how many people struggle for a couple of seconds or even run into them because the design is not obvious. Somebody bought those doors and didn't buy others.
This is one of my pet peeves. Almost 100% of the time, push/pull confusion is caused because the door violates the unwritten rule of door and handle design that we've all incorporated subconsciously based on our experiences with doors: Doors with horizontal handles should be pushed, while doors with vertical handles should be pulled.
Chances are, next time you're fooled by a door, it will be violating this simple rule that you may not have even been consious of. It's unconscionable for those conscious of design to be unconscious of it, though...;-)
Heck, there's "living fossil" code under every rock in most large corporations, especially those technically oriented.
I've seen some seriously old code running in the aerospace and oilfiled exploration areas - in some cases, the old algorithms really can't be improved that much, in others, the code has been kept alive through heroic methods simply because the source (or anyone that understood it) was lost to the company decades ago. You'd be amazed at how many PDP-11s or 16s are still in service as factory process controllers - they were the standard in Manufacturing and refineries just a few years ago - if Compaq hadn't pulled support, thier users wouldn't even be migrating off the things - they're dead simple and just flat bulletproof.
This can even happen in relatively new large companies: The heart of Dell's build-to-order production system is a pile of extremely crufty Tandem code that is only partially understood by no more than maybe a half-dozen old-timers, most of whom aren't programmers. It's a good thing that the Non-Stop architecture hasn't changed too much in years - they've been relying on Moore's law to make the old code scale enough to accommodate their growth. (Dell may finally be moving off the Tandem by now - Compaq's acquisition of Tandem really tweaked Dell - they couldn't stand being so reliant on *Compaq* for the core technology their whole business is based upon, although they also rely on Sun for all the data warehousing that drives their marketing and sales machine. I know because I considered a job running the "secret" Sun data center at Dell, the one with no windows, that customers never see...)
NASA has tons of ancient code, much of which runs pretty much as it was ages ago - This is partly because NASA's planning horizon is so far out that they have to freeze the hardware years before it goes into production. For example, the primary computing infrastructure for the ISS was frozen about 1995 as being based on the '486 and 640x480 VGA displays. (I was at Sun at the time, and had a heck of a time finding 6x4 S-Bus display adapters for a project at JSC - NASA considered some exceptions to the Intel rule, but not many...) Around the same time, I had a meeting with another group of JSC ISS engineers to find a suitable computer for another part of the station. They were terribly concerned about weight, heat, physical size, and resilience to vibration, but get this, they *insisted* on VME-bus architecture, which had alreaady been obsolete for more than a decade and would be about the worst choice possible to meet their needs, not to mention banishing any hope of acceptable performance. And some people wonder how NASA can waste so much money...
Of course, Unix itself falls into the category of ancient software still in production use for those that run BSD or other *real* Unix, not that wimpy GNU stuff with those perverted "--" options and the like...;-)
I know for a fact that some companies I've worked for (and shall remain nameless) have decades-old code that they've used various binary conversion tools on because the source was lost long ago, and it would cost too much to rebuild the program from scratch. Sometimes even having the source doesn't do you much good when the Fortran source has made rugged transitions across several version s of Fortran before being unceremoniously dumped into a Fortran-to-C translator (to "run in the modern world", like Fortran doesn't...) The C source that now comprises the "current" source of these apps is so ugly no one will *ever* maintain it, so it will likely limp on for decades more.
As a last observation, good computer architectures tend to allow code to stay in use for a very long time: current IBM mainframes still run code from the 360 days just fine, VAX and PDP code has lasted darn near forever, and it's quite apparent that Sun's unique commitment to binary compatibility will carry some old apps well into the future with thier customers as well... (Most people don't know it, but this is one of the cooler things about Sun - they are adamant about binary compatibility: the same exact Solaris code that ran on your original SPARCstation 1 will run unmodified (but a whole lot faster) on the latest UltraSPARC behemoth. Both the hardware and the OS have been carefully designed to make architecture transitions totally seamless, one big reason Sun's kicked butt against HP, SGI, IBM and DEC/Compaq, all of which thought it was OK to force their customers to throw away all their old stuff for the new. Of course, nobody else has Bill Joy to plan these things through 5 years before they're needed, either. The amazing thing about Bill's architectures is that Sun has provided binary compatibilty without paying any penalty for legacy support. That's just plain cool.
Oh, just for fun, I spent a bit of time digging up a reference from Locke that I remembered, but couldn't lay my hands on - I think after reading it you'll find that perhaps you don't agree with Locke quite so much as you thought:
"Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of toleration." -John Locke,
Essay on Toleration, 1685
We are under no obligation to tolerate the intolerable. Even Locke knew that...
You may not like it, but the freedoms that the United States brought to the world are inseparable from Christianity. Even George Washington recognized this, and thought it important enough to include as a warning in his famous (although rarely read in schools anymore, since it offends leftist sensibilities) Farewell Address:
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness - these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." -George Washington,
Farewell Address, 1796
Finally, if you really believe the tripe your professors evidently pushed (that the Founding Fathers were deists, unitarians, atheists, or worse) you're just showing your gullibility. Even a casual perusal of the original sources makes it quite clear to even the thickest reader that these men were deeply committed to the Christian God of the Bible, and that such belief shaped and molded thier every thought and action. If you don't believe me, start reading them for yourselves - not modern summaries of what they wrote, but their actual words. You'll find a group of very committed Christians, and their own words will make that quite apparent.
The principles of free speech come not from the Bible, but instead from the European Enlightenment - John Locke, et la. Note they are largely upheld in India and Japan, two other non-Christian nations.
I beg to differ. The prevailing attitude in Europe that made the enlightenment possible was itself directly caused by the Reformation. It was this event (the Reformation) that has shaped modern civilization perhaps more than any other in the past thousand years: As a result of the Reformation it was permissable to investigate all things in God's creation, as there was a new confidence (which has been well borne-out, by the way) that all truth validates Truth.
India and Japan are decidedly mushy in thier support of free speech and other ideals of freedom. They have adopted them (although not entirely wholeheartedly) in an effort to become more Western and modern, but it is quite obvious that neither would have ever developed these ideas on thier own - in fact, they are two very old, mostly brutally ruled, cultures that never showed any significant inclination toward free ideals before they were colonized by the British. I think that kind of makes my point, not yours...
Oops, the phone rang and I forgot the final thought: Jonathan Edwards is especially timely here, because has been regarded by a great many historians as the most brilliant thinker in the history of North America. He had been president of Princeton for less than a year when he died at age 55 in 1757 as the result of a smallpox vaccination...
The Islamic fundies (not particularly worse than Christian fundies or ultranationalist Israelis, just more prominent)...
Oh really? And when was the last time you heard a Christian "fundie" advocating holy war, engaging in state-sponsored terrorism, and displaying the shocking lack of regard for human life exhibited by Al Queda?
Your post is just an attempt to smear and inflame Christians and Jews. Keep in mind that the ONLY countries in the history of the world to permit free speech are those based on Christian priciples.
Remember those Pilgrims we'll be thinking about this week? They were radical fundamentalist Christians who had the courage and guts to sail halfway around the world to a strange and dangerous land. They carved out a place where they could could worship and rule themselves as free men, and in doing so, changed the world tremendously for the better. We could do worse than to learn from those Puritans.
(Those of you truly open-minded enough to consider the posiibility of "true truth" (as Francis Schaeffer put it) might consider reading some Jonathan Edwards this week, in the spirit of the season...)
MHO, there is only one solution to this, and a lot of pro-Corporate people are not going to like, or understand, it. We have to take care of what we have - people, fauna, flora, habitats, EVERYTHING - as well as, or better than, ourselves.
One can only assume by your rant that you believe we should enforce a uniform standard of living for ll people everywhere. The Soviet Union tried that, and it's a great means of ensuring that everyone (but the truly elite - we really hardly have such a thing in this country relative to the Poilitburo or royalty of old) winds up equally ppor and miserable.
We have nations for a reason, and we haven't outgrown them, nor are we likely to in this millenium.
The people of those countries CAN and SHOULD change their own national governments to ensure that they act responsibly and in the best interest of the people of that nation. The US BY FAR the most generous benefactor nation in the entire history of the world. The superiority of our economic system generates a bountiful surplus that has allowed us to do so. While the US should encourage the formation of republics wherever it can, it is NOT our job or duty to try to sort out the internal politics of every corrupt regime on the planet.
In fact, the experiences of this century have clearly shown the futility of attempting to "install" free governments in countries where the people are not sufficiently motivated to fight in their own self-interest.
Obviously, you've fallen for the flawed logic of your leftist college professors. Following your course of action would result in the destruction of any means by which the US might be able to provide aid. We should encourage freedom, but the people of foreign nations must have some skin in the game. Welfare works even less well for nations than it does for individuals, sapping their desire and any initiative to get up and work for thier own benefit.
Our goal (the only truly compassionate one) should be to help these countries generate their own wealth, rather than being dependent on ours. (The US has a long and successful history of doing this, even for our enemies...)
Sounds like you need one of the new Palm/Phone Combos. I bought a Kyocera 6035 SmartPhone a couple of months ago, and I can't say enough good things about it. It's got it's faults, sure, but they're livable, and the ability to a) have ALL your numbers at hand, and b) have them seamlessly integrated with the phone is worth every bit of the purchase price, especially now that there are starting to be decentl deals on this phone (I paid only $150 for mine at Office Max, less than the cost of a new Palm alone...)
Samsung has a new one that looks like it could be good, too, and then there's the Visor stuff, if you don't mind a GSM cancerphone. (I'll stick to CDMA, thanks, especially since the latest research shows there is *definitely* a link between cellphone RF and brain cancer/effects....)
The CIA cats working on this category must have been catatonic, or maybe just got caught catnapping:
The kitty carcass catapulted by the cab catercorner across the catwalk caterwauled, then went cataleptic and catatonic. It's hard to categorize such cathodically catheterized cattails as anything but cataclysmically catastrophic. The catcalls clearly catalyzed the cattiest CIA agents to consider acoustic catfish to catch confidential conversations near cataracts. Catfights in cathouses are another matter: maybe covert catsup bottles? Gee that was cathartic - I think I'll have some catnip...
Ah, I see, you live by the "tough man" approach to programming. The fact is, people keep shooting themselves in the foot with this.
Some truths just stubbornly remain the same: Unix and its derivatives are great because they are power tools - but always remember, "Power tools can kill!" (If they couldn't, they wouldn't be power tools, anymore, now would they? For a great insight to this important aspect of the Unix philosophy, do a net search for Neal Stephenson's "In the beginning, there was the command line", and his quite apt comparison of Unix to the amazingly powerful Milwaukee HoleHawg, which is, as the saying of aviation goes, "terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity, or neglect."
Actual business logic took, perhaps, 2-4 months of coding work, the rest of that time was completely and totally focused on getting the "plumbing" to work. If standards were really solidified and not moving targets, we could have been out on the market a year ago...
That's why so many people like J2EE. It's far from perfect, but it does work. As I've said before, the open source community would go much farther if it simply embraced Java/J2EE than if it goes off tilting at the CORBA windmill with some silly Gnomized.NET clone...
In reality, Sun has proven to be a fairly responsible and even-handed steward of Java. The Gnazi's insistence on total "freedom" (read "GPL is the only acceptable license") is the single greatest threat to the success of open source software. Embrace Java or lose to Microsoft. It's really that simple. (There's not time to do Java over again, and the community has no proven ability to generate such complex code, anyway. Lots of the same pieces over and over, but no integrated, interoperable, and more importantly, interworkable systems.)
Actually, I don't want to use Gnumeric at all. I want a spreadsheet that works.;-) Gumeric is pretty, but it's a toy.
Sadly, I've yet to find a real alternative to Excel. That's not terribly surprising when you remember that the only reason Microsoft developed Windows in the first place was to run Excel (which started life as a Mac-only product) on the PC so as to have something to compete against Lotus 1-2-3. Anyone who is even a moderate "power-user" of Excel (even avoiding VB & macros, which is a very goood idea) finds all the alternatives (Gnumeric, Kspread, StarOffice, etc.) to be pretty featureless and flakey by comparison.
I'll chime in here just because I've seen *so* many computer-types foul this up. (No slam, just fact.)
The bottom line is this: Everything depends on how well you collect that initial data. This is TRUTH: No amount of signal conditioning, DSPs, FFTs, DCTs, quantum neural framulators, or anything else can make up for crappy sensing elements.
This is true whether you're talking about image sensors, temperature sensors, EM sensors, mechanical sensors (force, pressure, torque, etc.), or anything else. Remember that silly saying you learned in your first computer class: Garbage In, Garbage Out - It's still true, whether you like it or not!
Sadly, I can't tell you how many times I've seen really bright people ignore this simple fact of life (wasting countless millions of dollars in the process), confident that the rules don't apply to them, and that their computer can somehow create something from nothing. (My experience tells me thse people are more likely to be in academia or very large companies where "scientists" are more highly regarded than mere "engineers".)
BTW: I know a thing or two about this because my father's company (and no I did *not* do the web site) specializes in building high-quality mechanical sensors that provide laboratory precision in hellish environments. (Literally hellish: like downhole in oil wells.) Some customers are willing to pay for really good data, realizing that there's no alternative if you really need to know what's going on.
Get the sensing elements right, and the rest of your job will be much easier (and cheaper, too...)
Disclosure: I am VP/GM of Conservor, whose product & service offerings are discussed in this post.
At Conservor, we offer a new set of IP-based Storage Area Network services that offer the speed, capacity, and features of traditional Fibre Channel based SANs, but at an order of magnitude less cost. This approach uses Gigabit Ethernet to make disk and/or tape resources appear as locally attached devices at very nearly wire speed.
We have been told by our partners that our IP SAN experience is considerably broader and deeper than even the largest consultants such as EDS, Accenture, and IBM Global Services. We are also experts at storing and managing VERY large datasets - we work routinely with the oilfield service and exploration companies to do exactly this sort of thing with very large 3D seismic datasets. It's not clear from your post, but you may well need some type of content management system, as well, to ensure propoer indexing and speedy retrieval of such a volume of data, and we can do that, too.
Your write speed and capacity requiremeents, while larger than normal, are not a problem, and can be accommodated without having to resort to exotic
technologies. Of course, there aren't enough details to propose even a rough solution from what you've posted, but it sounds like a tape solution. Still, if your retention time is not too long, we might even be able to do it with disk (we can provide high-speed Fibre-Channel storage arrays as little as 2 cents/MB: MUCH LESS than the competition, and capable of RAID 3, which you may want to use if video streaming for playback is much of an issue - we're working with next-gen cable headend guys on this stuff, too.)
As for the tape components, I need much more info to be able to even speculate on your needs. Anything from mid-range high-performance LTO libraries to full-scale mainframe-type 3590 silos may be needed, depending on a number of variables.
All our solutions are also available as complete service offerings, preventing you from having to acquire, own, or maintain any hardware, software, or management staff. In addition, since our fee is entirely for the service, it is a tax-deductible operating expense, which most companies find quite attractive. (We can also make everything look like capital for those companies (Real Estate, etc.) that want to capitalize everything in an effort to boost EBITDA.)
Storage is changing - there's no reason to do things the old way anymore, when there are better and cheaper solutions at hand. Some of the big guys in storage are going to learn this the hard way...
If Staroffice doesn't work 100% with the existing Word and Excel files a company uses every day, no one is going to use it because no one wants to pay their employees to regenerate all that work.
And unfortunately, the new StarOffice Beta failed to properly open every single one of the first half-dozen files I threw at it, so I tossed it.
I don't even have time to file bugs on it if they're going to lie about it being "beta" in an attempt to get the community to finish their code for them. It's (sadly) of the very poor quality I've come to expect from GNU software, especially from a compatibility point of view, and I think, a step *down* from the previous StarOffice, which at least opened *one* of those files correctly...
Then you've not really pushed it very hard, I'd say. Red Hat 7 crashed on me just recently in some of our lab testing (my first experience with RH7, which appears to be as close to a steaming pile as I've seen in a while - it definitely was not ready to ship when they shoveled it out the door, and it stacks up very poorly compared to the Caldera and Mandrake distros I had been using.) Look, I'm a Linux promoter (I've been using it since 0.96, and my company's new IP storage server is based on it), but Linux is NOT (out of the box) the be-all and end-all of stability that many people on/. pretend it is. Both BSD and Solaris can be considerably more stable when you beat on them hard (that means a serious server environment, not a script-kiddie desktop.)
Linux is a decent server platform, no one disputes that. It's on the desktop though, that the excellent selection of Windows apps drives people to insist that their desktop platform be capable of running those apps. As a for-instance, there is NO substitute in the Linux/Unix world for Visio (although Kivio shows promise, but will take a Mozilla-like time to get there), Adobe Illustrator, or a serious MCAD/CAM package.
The sad reality is that it's far easier to emulate unix in Windows than to emulate Windows in unix, so that's the appropriate, although less satisfying approach to those of us that would like to exorcise Windows. As a result, I'm not posting this from a Linux/BSD/Solaris box that can run Windows programs, but from a Win32 box that, with U/Win (or Cygwin, if you don't care if it works correctly) can run everything I need.
Windows emulation is effectively impossible, as was discovered by Sun when they did their excellent (at the time) Wabi product. Such an approach dooms you to staying two years behind the new API breakages (esp. of hidden APIs) that come with each successive version of Windows.
Linux quite simply does not have that advantage; and as much as we would like it to, the Open Source/Free software development system just isn't as effective as the closed source/marketed software approach.
This is a very insightful comment, and the reason that MS continues to enlarge and solidify its control on the world's desktops. They will eventually get their act together on servers, too, but may have generated too much ill-will amongst their customers to succeed there over the long haul. This is especially tru since even the "Linux faithful" here on/. won't *buy* Linux distros, and scream bloody murder about the distros not providing free ISO images so they can continue to leech off the hard work these companies put into development.
This is the ugly underbelly of the GPL, and one reason why we can either get smart and switch to a more realistic Open Source model (ala BSD), or admit defeat, recognizing that the FSF itself will ensure Microsoft's eventual victory...
You're obviously pretty ignorant of the history behind the Crusades, which were a RESPONSE to the bloody and ruthless occupation of the Holy Land by the Muslims. I will not try to defend the actions of the Catholic church at that time - it was clearly on a downward slide that culminated in the corruption and decay that created the Reformation as a (proper) response.
Still, it is absolutly true that either Christianity can be true, or Islam can be true, but not both. Of the two, only Christianity provides demonstrable truth and is logically and internally consistent. (Those that deny the Truth of Christianity are rejecting the most well-documented and attested events in all of ancient history.) Islam falls under its own weight, as it is terribly self-contradictory in numerous important ways.
We should not slaughter the Muslims, but we should convert them. Anything less will not solve the fundamental problem, as Islam is inherently incompatible with free civilization. Remember that only the Christian world has produced free, safe, and civilized societies...
There is no publically available and conclusive evidence that Osama Bin Laden is responsible for Sept 11.
Clearly, you haven't been reading the papers: Tony Blair recently released some pretty damning evidence, evidence that was strong enough to convince Pakistan's ruler that binLaden was guilty "beyond any reasonable doubt." (In fact, after being brifed on this info by Sec'y Powell, he said that it should be made public. Blair released it the next day.
Bin Laden is guilty as hell, and there is NO doubt of that. Regardless, the US is under NO obligation whatsoever to subject clear any efforts to bring bin Laden to justice with the Taliban. We can and should go after him directly. WIth international cooperation, if possible, without it , if not. It's time for terrorism to go the way of piracy on the high seas, and there's no other way to do that than to destroy the terrorists continually over a period of decades, until they die out. Unfortunately, the innate violence and hatred of the Islamic faith may make this a long and difficult battle. (Don't be deceived by the current reporting: we have 1400 years of history to prove that Islam is anything but "a religion of peace".)
It's the modulation that makes the difference. In a nutshell, these are as different as daylight and dark in the RF realm: GSM is a TDMA system, so you have a specific time slot during which the radio is constantly banging out full-power square waves at a tremendous rate. Research shows that these very sharp, high-power RF spikes are likely the most dangerous form. CDMA, on the other hand, is by definition a spread spectrum technique where the RF signal is much lower power, spread over as much bandwidth as possible, and looks (by design) like slightly higher background noise - note the absence of the spikes.
The waveform difference (between GSM and analog, but the CDMA waveform looks much more like analog) has been postulated as a factor in adverse RF effects of cellphones since at least the Adelaide study. Recent research has confirmed that this may indeed be a factor, but I have yet to see a good sturdy that is aimed at really isolating modulation method as a factor in RF damage. There is really no longer any doubt amongst RF/bio researchers that damage is occuring, though - here are two recent quotes from prominent and respected researchers in the field: "One can no longer go around saying there is no link (between cellphone use and health effects.)" -Dr. Alan Preece, head of Biophysics at Bristol Oncology Center. "Without question there is a biological threat," agreed James Lin, Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering at the U.S. University of Illinois. "The question is how hazardous mobile phone use is." (Source, Reuters report from last month, available on Yahoo!. (Is it proper to ignore the embedded punctuation in Yahoo!'s name? If not, it should be, just to spite them for doing such a thing...)
BTW: There's not necessarily a difference in frequency: GSM operates at 1900 MHz, CDMA may operate at *either* 800 or 1900 MHz, depending on the carrier. (Generally, Cingular/GTE uses 800 MHz CDMA overlays on part of thier analog channels, Sprint PCS and most of Verizon use the 1900 MHz PCS band. Most of the CDMA in the US today is already at 1900 MHz. TDMA in this country is pretty much exclusively in the 1900 MHz band, since it can't reasonably coexist with other methods.)
Well, we're always going to be putting our music onto other things than our primary terabyte hard drives, so space will always be an issue. I want to put my music on my laptop, on a CD (or
DVD) for my car MP3 player, on my PDA, on my cell, on my digital watch, on my fingernail... we still need compression for 15 years.
This logic relies on the erroneous assumption that all content must be available at all times on all devices, no matter how small. Keeping WAVs on disk as the primary master and generating MP3's etc. on demand for portable players, etc. is borderline do-able today, depending on your threshold of acceptable economics.
GSM may be the world standard, but the latest research reconfirms that GSM is likely far more dangerous than CDMA - the new studies show there's pretty much no doubt now that non-heating RF has deleterious biological effects. (The Slashdot editors don't seem to want to post articles on this subject, regardless of the validity or importance of such articles to the/. population.)
Too bad Handspring built this thing around a GSM CancerPhone, since it looks like decent execution otherwise. Looks like I'll be staying with the Kyocera 6035 SmartPhone for a while...
As such, I think Ogg will only become more relevant as bandwidth and storage space inevitably expand.
I'm interested in your take on this issue: The increasing affordability of both bandwidth and storage capacity is the reason I question whether either Ogg or MP3 are relevant in the future: Realistically, we're now within sight of the time when it's reasonable to simply keep and use the raw CDA/WAV streams themselves, eliminating the entire ugly problem of bad encoders and worse decoders.
BTW, this is one thing I like about the Turtle Beach Audiotron component: it's fully capable of dealing directly with WAVs if that's what you choose to keep. I'm increasingly leaning that way, since ripping/encoding everything periodically is NOT my idea of fun, and this approach avoids the need to ever re-rip, while still allowing the easy on-the-fly creation of MP3's or the like for portable players as "disposable" files.
So, the $64,000 question I'd like to pose to/. is: Are MP3, Ogg, and their ilk even relevant in another 18(?) months or so, or will we all just be riding a new WAV by then?
3. The ONLY source of hydrogen suitable for the production of such large quantities is natural gas, one of the best and cleanest fuels known anyway. If we're going to deal with the problems of gaseous fuels, why not use LNG directly and save the HUGE additional costs of converting to and dealing with hydrogen?
I disagree. Any fuel source powering a generator, plus an open body of water, can be used to generate hydrogen. While I don't know the economics or thermodynamics associated with burning LNG to produce electricity to produce hydrogen, I can't answer to that point.
Sorry, clearly you missed my point: NG is the only cost-effective source of H2 because every molucule of methane (CH3) has three hydrogen atoms already. You don't burn the (L)NG to produce hydrogen, because that would be grossly inefficient, so you simply crack the CH3 into carbon and hydrogen. As I said, this is currently the ONLY cost-effective means of producing industrially significant quantities of H2. Electrolysis has been proven time and again to NOT be viable for this job. Not to say it can't happen, but it requires several large technology breakthroughs.
Overall, it's still FAR more effective to simply burn the natrual gas directly than jump through the hoops (and attendant inefficiencies) of extracting the hydrogen. For the foreseeable future, hydrogen is technically attractive, but economically stupid. That's not likely to change soon.
Slashdot Mirror
One other difference worth mentioning: The Treo is available ONLY as a GSM CancerPhone, while the Samsung and it's Kyocera cousin work with the much more biologically friendly CDMA.
(CDMA is also much better for mobile data connections because of its soft handoff capability, which allows the phone to "talk" to multiple cells simultaneously to produce a smooth transition rahter than the abrupt switchover used by other systems.)
I had the Kyocera, and it was terrible.
You don't explain your complaint with it, but I've had one for a few months and it's quite simply the best and most functional piece of electronic gear I've ever owned. It's small, rugged, integrates phone and Palm functions quite well,is completely compatible with all the Palm software I use, some of which dates back to the original 1000 (only one program, ToDo+, needed a new version, free for registered users), and the batteries last darn near forever. If you took away all my electronics and computers one by one, the Kyocera 6035 would be the last thing left, and you'd have to fight me for it.
By the way, there are other choices: Samsung has a new Palm phone out with a larger screen - the smaller screen is my only (minor) complaint about the Kyocera.
I agree with others that say they don't want and won't pay for the ridiculous Japanese 3G foo-foo of movies and animated icons on a tiny screen. A faster data connection and a real web browser would be nice, but I can't think of much else I'd want. I'm not even considering the Linux-based handhelds for a while - It's nice to be able to get all kinds of things to run on them, but unfortunately, none of them are capable of doing the basics nearly so well as the Palm, so I'll stick with what works...
Count the number of doors that need to have a user manual on them, even if it just says "Pull." Watch how many people struggle for a couple of seconds or even run into them because the design is not obvious. Somebody bought those doors and didn't buy others.
;-)
This is one of my pet peeves. Almost 100% of the time, push/pull confusion is caused because the door violates the unwritten rule of door and handle design that we've all incorporated subconsciously based on our experiences with doors: Doors with horizontal handles should be pushed, while doors with vertical handles should be pulled.
Chances are, next time you're fooled by a door, it will be violating this simple rule that you may not have even been consious of. It's unconscionable for those conscious of design to be unconscious of it, though...
Heck, there's "living fossil" code under every rock in most large corporations, especially those technically oriented.
;-)
I've seen some seriously old code running in the aerospace and oilfiled exploration areas - in some cases, the old algorithms really can't be improved that much, in others, the code has been kept alive through heroic methods simply because the source (or anyone that understood it) was lost to the company decades ago. You'd be amazed at how many PDP-11s or 16s are still in service as factory process controllers - they were the standard in Manufacturing and refineries just a few years ago - if Compaq hadn't pulled support, thier users wouldn't even be migrating off the things - they're dead simple and just flat bulletproof.
This can even happen in relatively new large companies: The heart of Dell's build-to-order production system is a pile of extremely crufty Tandem code that is only partially understood by no more than maybe a half-dozen old-timers, most of whom aren't programmers. It's a good thing that the Non-Stop architecture hasn't changed too much in years - they've been relying on Moore's law to make the old code scale enough to accommodate their growth. (Dell may finally be moving off the Tandem by now - Compaq's acquisition of Tandem really tweaked Dell - they couldn't stand being so reliant on *Compaq* for the core technology their whole business is based upon, although they also rely on Sun for all the data warehousing that drives their marketing and sales machine. I know because I considered a job running the "secret" Sun data center at Dell, the one with no windows, that customers never see...)
NASA has tons of ancient code, much of which runs pretty much as it was ages ago - This is partly because NASA's planning horizon is so far out that they have to freeze the hardware years before it goes into production. For example, the primary computing infrastructure for the ISS was frozen about 1995 as being based on the '486 and 640x480 VGA displays. (I was at Sun at the time, and had a heck of a time finding 6x4 S-Bus display adapters for a project at JSC - NASA considered some exceptions to the Intel rule, but not many...) Around the same time, I had a meeting with another group of JSC ISS engineers to find a suitable computer for another part of the station. They were terribly concerned about weight, heat, physical size, and resilience to vibration, but get this, they *insisted* on VME-bus architecture, which had alreaady been obsolete for more than a decade and would be about the worst choice possible to meet their needs, not to mention banishing any hope of acceptable performance. And some people wonder how NASA can waste so much money...
Of course, Unix itself falls into the category of ancient software still in production use for those that run BSD or other *real* Unix, not that wimpy GNU stuff with those perverted "--" options and the like...
I know for a fact that some companies I've worked for (and shall remain nameless) have decades-old code that they've used various binary conversion tools on because the source was lost long ago, and it would cost too much to rebuild the program from scratch. Sometimes even having the source doesn't do you much good when the Fortran source has made rugged transitions across several version s of Fortran before being unceremoniously dumped into a Fortran-to-C translator (to "run in the modern world", like Fortran doesn't...) The C source that now comprises the "current" source of these apps is so ugly no one will *ever* maintain it, so it will likely limp on for decades more.
As a last observation, good computer architectures tend to allow code to stay in use for a very long time: current IBM mainframes still run code from the 360 days just fine, VAX and PDP code has lasted darn near forever, and it's quite apparent that Sun's unique commitment to binary compatibility will carry some old apps well into the future with thier customers as well... (Most people don't know it, but this is one of the cooler things about Sun - they are adamant about binary compatibility: the same exact Solaris code that ran on your original SPARCstation 1 will run unmodified (but a whole lot faster) on the latest UltraSPARC behemoth. Both the hardware and the OS have been carefully designed to make architecture transitions totally seamless, one big reason Sun's kicked butt against HP, SGI, IBM and DEC/Compaq, all of which thought it was OK to force their customers to throw away all their old stuff for the new. Of course, nobody else has Bill Joy to plan these things through 5 years before they're needed, either. The amazing thing about Bill's architectures is that Sun has provided binary compatibilty without paying any penalty for legacy support. That's just plain cool.
We are under no obligation to tolerate the intolerable. Even Locke knew that...
You may not like it, but the freedoms that the United States brought to the world are inseparable from Christianity. Even George Washington recognized this, and thought it important enough to include as a warning in his famous (although rarely read in schools anymore, since it offends leftist sensibilities) Farewell Address:
Finally, if you really believe the tripe your professors evidently pushed (that the Founding Fathers were deists, unitarians, atheists, or worse) you're just showing your gullibility. Even a casual perusal of the original sources makes it quite clear to even the thickest reader that these men were deeply committed to the Christian God of the Bible, and that such belief shaped and molded thier every thought and action. If you don't believe me, start reading them for yourselves - not modern summaries of what they wrote, but their actual words. You'll find a group of very committed Christians, and their own words will make that quite apparent.
The principles of free speech come not from the Bible, but instead from the European Enlightenment - John Locke, et la. Note they are largely upheld in India and Japan, two other non-Christian nations.
I beg to differ. The prevailing attitude in Europe that made the enlightenment possible was itself directly caused by the Reformation. It was this event (the Reformation) that has shaped modern civilization perhaps more than any other in the past thousand years: As a result of the Reformation it was permissable to investigate all things in God's creation, as there was a new confidence (which has been well borne-out, by the way) that all truth validates Truth.
India and Japan are decidedly mushy in thier support of free speech and other ideals of freedom. They have adopted them (although not entirely wholeheartedly) in an effort to become more Western and modern, but it is quite obvious that neither would have ever developed these ideas on thier own - in fact, they are two very old, mostly brutally ruled, cultures that never showed any significant inclination toward free ideals before they were colonized by the British. I think that kind of makes my point, not yours...
Oops, the phone rang and I forgot the final thought: Jonathan Edwards is especially timely here, because has been regarded by a great many historians as the most brilliant thinker in the history of North America. He had been president of Princeton for less than a year when he died at age 55 in 1757 as the result of a smallpox vaccination...
The Islamic fundies (not particularly worse than Christian fundies or ultranationalist Israelis, just more prominent)...
Oh really? And when was the last time you heard a Christian "fundie" advocating holy war, engaging in state-sponsored terrorism, and displaying the shocking lack of regard for human life exhibited by Al Queda?
Your post is just an attempt to smear and inflame Christians and Jews. Keep in mind that the ONLY countries in the history of the world to permit free speech are those based on Christian priciples.
Remember those Pilgrims we'll be thinking about this week? They were radical fundamentalist Christians who had the courage and guts to sail halfway around the world to a strange and dangerous land. They carved out a place where they could could worship and rule themselves as free men, and in doing so, changed the world tremendously for the better. We could do worse than to learn from those Puritans.
(Those of you truly open-minded enough to consider the posiibility of "true truth" (as Francis Schaeffer put it) might consider reading some Jonathan Edwards this week, in the spirit of the season...)
MHO, there is only one solution to this, and a lot of pro-Corporate people are not going to like, or understand, it. We have to take care of what we have - people, fauna, flora, habitats, EVERYTHING - as well as, or better than, ourselves.
One can only assume by your rant that you believe we should enforce a uniform standard of living for ll people everywhere. The Soviet Union tried that, and it's a great means of ensuring that everyone (but the truly elite - we really hardly have such a thing in this country relative to the Poilitburo or royalty of old) winds up equally ppor and miserable.
We have nations for a reason, and we haven't outgrown them, nor are we likely to in this millenium.
The people of those countries CAN and SHOULD change their own national governments to ensure that they act responsibly and in the best interest of the people of that nation. The US BY FAR the most generous benefactor nation in the entire history of the world. The superiority of our economic system generates a bountiful surplus that has allowed us to do so. While the US should encourage the formation of republics wherever it can, it is NOT our job or duty to try to sort out the internal politics of every corrupt regime on the planet.
In fact, the experiences of this century have clearly shown the futility of attempting to "install" free governments in countries where the people are not sufficiently motivated to fight in their own self-interest.
Obviously, you've fallen for the flawed logic of your leftist college professors. Following your course of action would result in the destruction of any means by which the US might be able to provide aid. We should encourage freedom, but the people of foreign nations must have some skin in the game. Welfare works even less well for nations than it does for individuals, sapping their desire and any initiative to get up and work for thier own benefit.
Our goal (the only truly compassionate one) should be to help these countries generate their own wealth, rather than being dependent on ours. (The US has a long and successful history of doing this, even for our enemies...)
Sounds like you need one of the new Palm/Phone Combos. I bought a Kyocera 6035 SmartPhone a couple of months ago, and I can't say enough good things about it. It's got it's faults, sure, but they're livable, and the ability to a) have ALL your numbers at hand, and b) have them seamlessly integrated with the phone is worth every bit of the purchase price, especially now that there are starting to be decentl deals on this phone (I paid only $150 for mine at Office Max, less than the cost of a new Palm alone...)
Samsung has a new one that looks like it could be good, too, and then there's the Visor stuff, if you don't mind a GSM cancerphone. (I'll stick to CDMA, thanks, especially since the latest research shows there is *definitely* a link between cellphone RF and brain cancer/effects....)
The CIA cats working on this category must have been catatonic, or maybe just got caught catnapping:
The kitty carcass catapulted by the cab catercorner across the catwalk caterwauled, then went cataleptic and catatonic. It's hard to categorize such cathodically catheterized cattails as anything but cataclysmically catastrophic. The catcalls clearly catalyzed the cattiest CIA agents to consider acoustic catfish to catch confidential conversations near cataracts. Catfights in cathouses are another matter: maybe covert catsup bottles? Gee that was cathartic - I think I'll have some catnip...
Ah, I see, you live by the "tough man" approach to programming. The fact is, people keep shooting themselves in the foot with this.
Some truths just stubbornly remain the same: Unix and its derivatives are great because they are power tools - but always remember, "Power tools can kill!" (If they couldn't, they wouldn't be power tools, anymore, now would they? For a great insight to this important aspect of the Unix philosophy, do a net search for Neal Stephenson's "In the beginning, there was the command line", and his quite apt comparison of Unix to the amazingly powerful Milwaukee HoleHawg, which is, as the saying of aviation goes, "terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity, or neglect."
Actual business logic took, perhaps, 2-4 months of coding work, the rest of that time was completely and totally focused on getting the "plumbing" to work. If standards were really solidified and not moving targets, we could have been out on the market a year ago...
.NET clone...
That's why so many people like J2EE. It's far from perfect, but it does work. As I've said before, the open source community would go much farther if it simply embraced Java/J2EE than if it goes off tilting at the CORBA windmill with some silly Gnomized
In reality, Sun has proven to be a fairly responsible and even-handed steward of Java. The Gnazi's insistence on total "freedom" (read "GPL is the only acceptable license") is the single greatest threat to the success of open source software. Embrace Java or lose to Microsoft. It's really that simple. (There's not time to do Java over again, and the community has no proven ability to generate such complex code, anyway. Lots of the same pieces over and over, but no integrated, interoperable, and more importantly, interworkable systems.)
Actually, I don't want to use Gnumeric at all. I want a spreadsheet that works. ;-) Gumeric is pretty, but it's a toy.
Sadly, I've yet to find a real alternative to Excel. That's not terribly surprising when you remember that the only reason Microsoft developed Windows in the first place was to run Excel (which started life as a Mac-only product) on the PC so as to have something to compete against Lotus 1-2-3. Anyone who is even a moderate "power-user" of Excel (even avoiding VB & macros, which is a very goood idea) finds all the alternatives (Gnumeric, Kspread, StarOffice, etc.) to be pretty featureless and flakey by comparison.
I'll chime in here just because I've seen *so* many computer-types foul this up. (No slam, just fact.)
The bottom line is this: Everything depends on how well you collect that initial data. This is TRUTH: No amount of signal conditioning, DSPs, FFTs, DCTs, quantum neural framulators, or anything else can make up for crappy sensing elements.
This is true whether you're talking about image sensors, temperature sensors, EM sensors, mechanical sensors (force, pressure, torque, etc.), or anything else. Remember that silly saying you learned in your first computer class: Garbage In, Garbage Out - It's still true, whether you like it or not!
Sadly, I can't tell you how many times I've seen really bright people ignore this simple fact of life (wasting countless millions of dollars in the process), confident that the rules don't apply to them, and that their computer can somehow create something from nothing. (My experience tells me thse people are more likely to be in academia or very large companies where "scientists" are more highly regarded than mere "engineers".)
BTW: I know a thing or two about this because my father's company (and no I did *not* do the web site) specializes in building high-quality mechanical sensors that provide laboratory precision in hellish environments. (Literally hellish: like downhole in oil wells.) Some customers are willing to pay for really good data, realizing that there's no alternative if you really need to know what's going on.
Get the sensing elements right, and the rest of your job will be much easier (and cheaper, too...)
Disclosure: I am VP/GM of Conservor, whose product & service offerings are discussed in this post.
At Conservor, we offer a new set of IP-based Storage Area Network services that offer the speed, capacity, and features of traditional Fibre Channel based SANs, but at an order of magnitude less cost. This approach uses Gigabit Ethernet to make disk and/or tape resources appear as locally attached devices at very nearly wire speed.
We have been told by our partners that our IP SAN experience is considerably broader and deeper than even the largest consultants such as EDS, Accenture, and IBM Global Services. We are also experts at storing and managing VERY large datasets - we work routinely with the oilfield service and exploration companies to do exactly this sort of thing with very large 3D seismic datasets. It's not clear from your post, but you may well need some type of content management system, as well, to ensure propoer indexing and speedy retrieval of such a volume of data, and we can do that, too.
Your write speed and capacity requiremeents, while larger than normal, are not a problem, and can be accommodated without having to resort to exotic
technologies. Of course, there aren't enough details to propose even a rough solution from what you've posted, but it sounds like a tape solution. Still, if your retention time is not too long, we might even be able to do it with disk (we can provide high-speed Fibre-Channel storage arrays as little as 2 cents/MB: MUCH LESS than the competition, and capable of RAID 3, which you may want to use if video streaming for playback is much of an issue - we're working with next-gen cable headend guys on this stuff, too.)
As for the tape components, I need much more info to be able to even speculate on your needs. Anything from mid-range high-performance LTO libraries to full-scale mainframe-type 3590 silos may be needed, depending on a number of variables.
All our solutions are also available as complete service offerings, preventing you from having to acquire, own, or maintain any hardware, software, or management staff. In addition, since our fee is entirely for the service, it is a tax-deductible operating expense, which most companies find quite attractive. (We can also make everything look like capital for those companies (Real Estate, etc.) that want to capitalize everything in an effort to boost EBITDA.)
Storage is changing - there's no reason to do things the old way anymore, when there are better and cheaper solutions at hand. Some of the big guys in storage are going to learn this the hard way...
If Staroffice doesn't work 100% with the existing Word and Excel files a company uses every day, no one is going to use it because no one wants to pay their employees to regenerate all that work.
And unfortunately, the new StarOffice Beta failed to properly open every single one of the first half-dozen files I threw at it, so I tossed it.
I don't even have time to file bugs on it if they're going to lie about it being "beta" in an attempt to get the community to finish their code for them. It's (sadly) of the very poor quality I've come to expect from GNU software, especially from a compatibility point of view, and I think, a step *down* from the previous StarOffice, which at least opened *one* of those files correctly...
I've NEVER crashed a linux workstation...never.
/. pretend it is. Both BSD and Solaris can be considerably more stable when you beat on them hard (that means a serious server environment, not a script-kiddie desktop.)
/. won't *buy* Linux distros, and scream bloody murder about the distros not providing free ISO images so they can continue to leech off the hard work these companies put into development.
Then you've not really pushed it very hard, I'd say. Red Hat 7 crashed on me just recently in some of our lab testing (my first experience with RH7, which appears to be as close to a steaming pile as I've seen in a while - it definitely was not ready to ship when they shoveled it out the door, and it stacks up very poorly compared to the Caldera and Mandrake distros I had been using.) Look, I'm a Linux promoter (I've been using it since 0.96, and my company's new IP storage server is based on it), but Linux is NOT (out of the box) the be-all and end-all of stability that many people on
Linux is a decent server platform, no one disputes that. It's on the desktop though, that the excellent selection of Windows apps drives people to insist that their desktop platform be capable of running those apps. As a for-instance, there is NO substitute in the Linux/Unix world for Visio (although Kivio shows promise, but will take a Mozilla-like time to get there), Adobe Illustrator, or a serious MCAD/CAM package.
The sad reality is that it's far easier to emulate unix in Windows than to emulate Windows in unix, so that's the appropriate, although less satisfying approach to those of us that would like to exorcise Windows. As a result, I'm not posting this from a Linux/BSD/Solaris box that can run Windows programs, but from a Win32 box that, with U/Win (or Cygwin, if you don't care if it works correctly) can run everything I need.
Windows emulation is effectively impossible, as was discovered by Sun when they did their excellent (at the time) Wabi product. Such an approach dooms you to staying two years behind the new API breakages (esp. of hidden APIs) that come with each successive version of Windows.
Linux quite simply does not have that advantage; and as much as we would like it to, the Open Source/Free software development system just isn't as effective as the closed source/marketed software approach.
This is a very insightful comment, and the reason that MS continues to enlarge and solidify its control on the world's desktops. They will eventually get their act together on servers, too, but may have generated too much ill-will amongst their customers to succeed there over the long haul. This is especially tru since even the "Linux faithful" here on
This is the ugly underbelly of the GPL, and one reason why we can either get smart and switch to a more realistic Open Source model (ala BSD), or admit defeat, recognizing that the FSF itself will ensure Microsoft's eventual victory...
You're obviously pretty ignorant of the history behind the Crusades, which were a RESPONSE to the bloody and ruthless occupation of the Holy Land by the Muslims. I will not try to defend the actions of the Catholic church at that time - it was clearly on a downward slide that culminated in the corruption and decay that created the Reformation as a (proper) response.
Still, it is absolutly true that either Christianity can be true, or Islam can be true, but not both. Of the two, only Christianity provides demonstrable truth and is logically and internally consistent. (Those that deny the Truth of Christianity are rejecting the most well-documented and attested events in all of ancient history.) Islam falls under its own weight, as it is terribly self-contradictory in numerous important ways.
We should not slaughter the Muslims, but we should convert them. Anything less will not solve the fundamental problem, as Islam is inherently incompatible with free civilization. Remember that only the Christian world has produced free, safe, and civilized societies...
There is no publically available and conclusive evidence that Osama Bin Laden is responsible for Sept 11.
Clearly, you haven't been reading the papers: Tony Blair recently released some pretty damning evidence, evidence that was strong enough to convince Pakistan's ruler that binLaden was guilty "beyond any reasonable doubt." (In fact, after being brifed on this info by Sec'y Powell, he said that it should be made public. Blair released it the next day.
Bin Laden is guilty as hell, and there is NO doubt of that. Regardless, the US is under NO obligation whatsoever to subject clear any efforts to bring bin Laden to justice with the Taliban. We can and should go after him directly. WIth international cooperation, if possible, without it , if not. It's time for terrorism to go the way of piracy on the high seas, and there's no other way to do that than to destroy the terrorists continually over a period of decades, until they die out. Unfortunately, the innate violence and hatred of the Islamic faith may make this a long and difficult battle. (Don't be deceived by the current reporting: we have 1400 years of history to prove that Islam is anything but "a religion of peace".)
It's the modulation that makes the difference. In a nutshell, these are as different as daylight and dark in the RF realm: GSM is a TDMA system, so you have a specific time slot during which the radio is constantly banging out full-power square waves at a tremendous rate. Research shows that these very sharp, high-power RF spikes are likely the most dangerous form. CDMA, on the other hand, is by definition a spread spectrum technique where the RF signal is much lower power, spread over as much bandwidth as possible, and looks (by design) like slightly higher background noise - note the absence of the spikes.
The waveform difference (between GSM and analog, but the CDMA waveform looks much more like analog) has been postulated as a factor in adverse RF effects of cellphones since at least the Adelaide study. Recent research has confirmed that this may indeed be a factor, but I have yet to see a good sturdy that is aimed at really isolating modulation method as a factor in RF damage. There is really no longer any doubt amongst RF/bio researchers that damage is occuring, though - here are two recent quotes from prominent and respected researchers in the field: "One can no longer go around saying there is no link (between cellphone use and health effects.)" -Dr. Alan Preece, head of Biophysics at Bristol Oncology Center. "Without question there is a biological threat," agreed James Lin, Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering at the U.S. University of Illinois. "The question is how hazardous mobile phone use is." (Source, Reuters report from last month, available on Yahoo!. (Is it proper to ignore the embedded punctuation in Yahoo!'s name? If not, it should be, just to spite them for doing such a thing...)
BTW: There's not necessarily a difference in frequency: GSM operates at 1900 MHz, CDMA may operate at *either* 800 or 1900 MHz, depending on the carrier. (Generally, Cingular/GTE uses 800 MHz CDMA overlays on part of thier analog channels, Sprint PCS and most of Verizon use the 1900 MHz PCS band. Most of the CDMA in the US today is already at 1900 MHz. TDMA in this country is pretty much exclusively in the 1900 MHz band, since it can't reasonably coexist with other methods.)
Well, we're always going to be putting our music onto other things than our primary terabyte hard drives, so space will always be an issue. I want to put my music on my laptop, on a CD (or
DVD) for my car MP3 player, on my PDA, on my cell, on my digital watch, on my fingernail... we still need compression for 15 years.
This logic relies on the erroneous assumption that all content must be available at all times on all devices, no matter how small. Keeping WAVs on disk as the primary master and generating MP3's etc. on demand for portable players, etc. is borderline do-able today, depending on your threshold of acceptable economics.
GSM may be the world standard, but the latest research reconfirms that GSM is likely far more dangerous than CDMA - the new studies show there's pretty much no doubt now that non-heating RF has deleterious biological effects. (The Slashdot editors don't seem to want to post articles on this subject, regardless of the validity or importance of such articles to the /. population.)
Too bad Handspring built this thing around a GSM CancerPhone, since it looks like decent execution otherwise. Looks like I'll be staying with the Kyocera 6035 SmartPhone for a while...
As such, I think Ogg will only become more relevant as bandwidth and storage space inevitably expand.
/. is: Are MP3, Ogg, and their ilk even relevant in another 18(?) months or so, or will we all just be riding a new WAV by then?
I'm interested in your take on this issue: The increasing affordability of both bandwidth and storage capacity is the reason I question whether either Ogg or MP3 are relevant in the future: Realistically, we're now within sight of the time when it's reasonable to simply keep and use the raw CDA/WAV streams themselves, eliminating the entire ugly problem of bad encoders and worse decoders.
BTW, this is one thing I like about the Turtle Beach Audiotron component: it's fully capable of dealing directly with WAVs if that's what you choose to keep. I'm increasingly leaning that way, since ripping/encoding everything periodically is NOT my idea of fun, and this approach avoids the need to ever re-rip, while still allowing the easy on-the-fly creation of MP3's or the like for portable players as "disposable" files.
So, the $64,000 question I'd like to pose to
3. The ONLY source of hydrogen suitable for the production of such large quantities is natural gas, one of the best and cleanest fuels known anyway. If we're going to deal with the problems of gaseous fuels, why not use LNG directly and save the HUGE additional costs of converting to and dealing with hydrogen?
I disagree. Any fuel source powering a generator, plus an open body of water, can be used to generate hydrogen. While I don't know the economics or thermodynamics associated with burning LNG to produce electricity to produce hydrogen, I can't answer to that point.
Sorry, clearly you missed my point: NG is the only cost-effective source of H2 because every molucule of methane (CH3) has three hydrogen atoms already. You don't burn the (L)NG to produce hydrogen, because that would be grossly inefficient, so you simply crack the CH3 into carbon and hydrogen. As I said, this is currently the ONLY cost-effective means of producing industrially significant quantities of H2. Electrolysis has been proven time and again to NOT be viable for this job. Not to say it can't happen, but it requires several large technology breakthroughs.
Overall, it's still FAR more effective to simply burn the natrual gas directly than jump through the hoops (and attendant inefficiencies) of extracting the hydrogen. For the foreseeable future, hydrogen is technically attractive, but economically stupid. That's not likely to change soon.