I've been thinking that as well. Standard electrical outlets could have the current AC plug socket (for whatever country you are in) and a WORLDWIDE standard DC 12V (? or 5V?) socket.
This is entirely possible - mandate it now, all new house builds will start including it, all new electrical refittings will include it, products will start coming with the standard cable to accept DC straight up, with an AC/DC convertor for non-standard properties. Companies will come out with AC-4DC bricks which will allow non-standard properties to at least run multiple DC devices off of one wart.
Then we could replace all the AC-DC wallwarts with DC-DC wallwarts:p
Fucking useless OS isn't it? Quite sad considering I know a couple of people that work at Symbian, but I think the fault is with UIQ.
If it didn't crash it'd be okay. But it does crash. I tried to make a phone call today, wondered why I wasn't getting a ring, looked at the screen to see the "Motorola 3G" logo pop up as it rebooted. Just for making a phone call!
Windows Mobile (which I've also used) is around 3 years ahead of the Symbian + UIQ combination. At least the handwriting recognition works, and isn't per-letter based. Maybe UIQ3 has sorted this out. I WANT TO WRITE ON THE SCREEN NATURALLY, NOT IN A FUCKING POXY SQUARE.
View-Text Size doesn't scale the layout or images. It is only useful for when a designer thinks that 7pt text is 'cool'. Admittedly scaling images with CSS is a hassle, but at least the layout is easily changed or resized.
View -> Page Style doesn't persist your choice.
Javascript and a Cookie does, and it does it in under 20 lines of code.
Yes, the stylesheets available on that site aren't great, but hey, why not contribute your own that is built for a higher resolution screen? I'm sure they would be grateful.
The site looks good on a 1024x768 laptop display. I can see that it would suck for the typical Windows weenie full-screen everything user however.
My local superstore, a Tesco, got the worst ratings for photo processing quality. Cheap, yes.
Nearly as bad were all mail-order photo processing companies.
The places that scored well are in town, which is 8 miles away. Like the typical retardedness that is the UK these places are only open when you are at work - oddly enough I don't want to spend a couple of hours at a weekend collecting photos when I could be drinking beer at home.
I suppose my best bet is the expensive iPhoto album option! Does anyone have any feedback as to the quality of this?
I'm glad that your local situation is such that it is cheap for you to drop off your photos for processing. However that isn't the case for everyone, so bear that in mind.
I fail to see what is so unique about "Wireless Email"... Email has existed for umpteen years, and wireless networks for a decade or so.
As soon as the wireless network became digital and the devices accessing them powerful enough to do more, it is a logical progression that you would be able to access your digital media (emails, photos, etc) via that device, possibly via a gateway service.
However maybe there was something unique in their patent. Shame they NEVER MADE A DEVICE which used the patent. Patents should exist to protect the inventor whilst he/she/it sells their product utilising said patent. It should be for people to have ideas, patent, and wait for someone else to implement.
I think that patent lawsuits should be stopped on the first day after the judge asks "Did this patent ever result in the creation of a device that you wish to protect from the alleged infringers?".
If you are living in an area where it is a half-hour drive there and back to find a decent place to develop your pictures, then you are most likely living in an area where you are lucky to get 33.6k out of your modem (well, in the USA anyway).
Here in the UK the quality of photo processing places varies widely according to a report I saw.
Oh, and how much are A4 photos at your local photo place? Are they cheaper than the cost of a sheet of A4 photo paper and the required ink?
I don't have a photo printer, but if I did and I wanted to print a picture for posterity once a week (i.e., one picture in 25 say - we used to have to get them ALL developed remember) then I'd use the photo printer over driving into town (16 miles return journey, that's half a gallon of petrol, which is around £2.50 in the UK!), parking (or getting the bus - £2.50 again), the hassle of someone else handling your pictures, and so on.
This article is correct - printing your own photos is more expensive than getting a print house to do them - when you take the situation in ISOLATION. The home-printing option saves you on:
1) Time (very valuable for anyone with a job) and Convenience (same hour photos at home) 2) Fuel Cost 3) Exorbitant costs for non-standard sizes at a photo shop
I rate my personal time at more than the difference in printing even 25 photos. By not driving I do a little bit towards easing congestion and helping the environment. Never mind car parking fees in town.
None of them (to my knowledge)! I'm just saying that languages these days are, to varying extents, not stopping the creation of bugs up front. Specification, Verification and Exhaustive Implementation Testing aren't integral. Some have optional features that aid certain aspects (e.g., JUnit with Java) and a decent software house will have their own systems as well, but AFAIK there is no language that integrates all aspects of software engineering into its create-build-test-deploy process.
Are they required for your average desktop application? Certainly Not. _Requiring_ that all software have this (by way of legislating overbearing liability regulations) would increase costs by what? 10x? 100x? How many software programmers are good enough to formally specify and verify all aspects of a design and implementation? The job market will be good for those of us with the skill and ability...
What we have now is reasonable. If you need near-bug-free software than you can opt to pay 100x more for it, and then get a contact with liability assigned to the creators - and probably then to merely get same-hour attention applied to flaws, rather than for costs. Maybe if some software is totally flawed the law should get it completely removed and refunded as a dud. Totally flawed is not 'I couldn't get it to work', it is 'Thousands of users reported data loss'.
Another point - you know how much you paid the last time you called the plumber, electrician, gasman out to fix something? It was quite high wasn't it, made you think of quitting software engineering and going into plumbing because you worked it out that they must be on £50k ($100k) a year.
20% of that is probably spent up front on personal liability insurance. And that is for a task that can be done correctly 100% of the time if you know what you are doing.
Given software's poor record so far, we'd be looking at personal liability insurance for contractors, or entire companies, being a much larger amount of the cost.
When software engineering contractors start having to ask for wages starting at £200k ($400k) a year, where half of that amount is simply to cover liability insurance, we will end up getting software at 1/10th of the rate that we do now, and only 1/100th of it overall.
Insurance companies will start hiring code auditors, to audit your company's code to assess risk. Unlikely that any company would want to hire someone with under 10 years experience in that case, in case of a poor audit. Any enforced regulation would kill the industry.
So if we ever have to pay £2000 for a web browser, this idiot Bill Thompson will have been the originating cause.
For now, given the languages software is commonly written in these days.
What the liability should be is for Time To Fix.
A software developer shouldn't be liable for a bug, but they should be liable for unreasonable time to fixes for the bugs. How long is unreasonable? That depends on the severity of the bug as it relates to security and advertised functionality. I'd say that a week was long enough to post a fix in most cases for a replicable bugm certainly no more than a fortnight.
This type of liability might be a problem for spaghetti-code houses that knock out crap without a care. I don't mind if these places get a kick up the backside.
The issue is rushed software development, utilising software programmers rather than software engineers. Liability rules would mean a move towards proper software engineering - the implementation might still be by mere programmers of course. It'll probably take twenty years or so to get to this state I suppose.
I'd say that Earth was clearly dominant over the moon. I don't know if the centre of rotation is between the bodies or within Earth itself - the latter would clearly define dominance.
Damn, that was badly worded. 4 hours sleep and most of a day of work since don't do wonders for the brain:S
I was counting Ceres as a planet, as the other respondent suggested.
Of course, Ceres is pretty small at around 950km in diameter. Even Mercury is 4870km in diameter and Pluto is 2270km or so in diameter. It is spherical under its own gravity however... In terms of mass however it is pretty insignificant compared to even our moon. However it has the main characteristics of a planet so no reason why it can't be included I guess.
I agree it will happen, maybe next week, maybe next year.
I'm speculating here:
iPod AV Screen Resolution:: 320x208 (same as A1000, P910, etc):: or 480x304 (under half DVD resolution, 16:9)
H.264 can encode DVD quality media in 1mbit/s. I saw somewhere it could do it in 800kbps even. However the screen is half that. You could have video content encoded at 500kbps or under (i'm ignoring showing it on a TV here, and given the speculation about Airport Express including video out in its next incarnation you might want to divide/multiply by 2 where necessary).
500kbps... 225MB per hour encoded. Under a minute to sync the daily news report, weather forecast and sports report (as podcasts) for viewing on the way to/from work.
And music videos? At 4 minutes each you can have 5000 music videos in your pocket on a 80GB device. Or 2000 DVD quality music videos and a f*ck load of normal music, photos, etc besides.
So, stop calling them planets... just call them objects. Earth is a satellite of the sun. The moon is a satellite of Earth.
If they are objects (which they are), then we can subclass them and give them more solid definitions...
public class CelestialBody {...}
public class Star extends CelestialBody {...}
public class Satellite implements Orbits {...}
public class Planet extends Satellite
public class RockyPlanet extends Planet {...}
public class GasPlanet extends Planet {...}
public class IcePlanet extents Planet {...}
public class Moon extends Satellite {...}... and so on...
(of course now we'd use generics and shit)
The real issue with the terminology is that scientific terminology is being influenced by short-lived cultural terminology. This is clearly a rather retarded idea in the long run. Many people here agree on a terminology for a planet that might mean there are over 20 planets in the solar system, or 9 non-ice planets (+Ceres, -Pluto). Most things we learn in life aren't correct, so there isn't any harm in letting popular culture take the 30 years or so to catch up with the truth, but we'd better not fuck around with the truth now because of popular culture.
Loads of us have grown up expecting Planet X at any point, and now we have X, XI, XII,... scientists suddenly decide don't want them! WTF. Correct the mistake that was Pluto, or create an 'Icy Planet' category and have loads more planets, and decide what to do about Ceres.
Cruithne isn't really a moon, is it merely an object that has exactly the same rotational period around the Sun as the Earth, caused by some kind of interaction with Earth. It doesn't orbit Earth, it is not a satellite of Earth, so it isn't a moon of Earth.
Why Pluto ? Only because from an historical and cultural point of view, it's a planet.
Are we going to be scientific about this, or are we stopping the planetary count because most people can't count in the double digits?
So what if it is in a belt? Does the fact that it is in a belt (with bodies in the belt being many millions of miles apart) somehow stop a massive body being a planet?
Either: Pluto is a planet, alongside Xena (and Quaaarorora and Sedna, if they meet other planetary requirement) (and Ceres), or none of them are. Scientifically. Popular culture can still call it a planet, and in 50 years time with new school books popular culture will finally catch up.
Because someone will reply "if it is not part of an orbiting belt of material" to try and cut out Ceres and this new planet, to keep the status quo.
Never mind the fact that the asteroid belt is in fact very sparsely populated, and merely a bunch of bodies in space in a reasonably common orbit, possibly created from the destruction of a single larger body or two.
I'm happy with our solar system having 5 rocky planets, 4 gas planets and 2+ remote ice planets.
That's what I don't like about the London Underground Maps... yeah, they're readable, and if you know you need to go to X when you are at Y they are great for that purpose. However they're bloody useless if you are at non-station location A looking for X, even if you have a GPS device on you and a map of london on it. An underground + railway map, done geographically correctly, that is compatible with most GPS software would be great. Have the overlying road map done in 33% transparent grey or something, and you can have all the layers of transport available in your pocket.
The article is Ars' copyright, and you reduplicated it without their permission. By writing good articles they get linked to, and then make money from advertising and selling the articles, etc, which they can then invest in creating even more good articles.
This isn't reposting someone's personal website or a not-for-profit website that will go down when Slashdotted, and in fact might save them some hosting money.
And you are insulting them because of YOUR action.
If Ars' were really assholes they'd subpoena Slashdot to get your details and then sue you for copyright infringement. Instead you got a polite response saying that your actions weren't necessary. Given your response to that, I hope they drag you through the courts, but sadly it isn't likely to happen.
Microsoft went with HD-DVD because Bluray uses BD-J (i.e., Java) for interactive, programmable, etc, content.
BluRay drives have been around for a long time. They exist now.
What isn't finalised is the DRM and various things relating to that. It won't take too long to get these things finalised.
The 2 years to 50GB stuff is pure FUD as far as we, the consumers, are concerned. Have either of us held a HD-DVD or a BD-ROM in out hands? No. They're both up in the air. We should just sit back and wait for one or the other to release something. It isn't as if BluRay single-layer (23, 25 or 27GB) is that much lower than HD-DVD dual layer (30GB) anyway.
I know one BluRay manufacturer said they'd be making 50GB stuff this December.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been thinking that as well. Standard electrical outlets could have the current AC plug socket (for whatever country you are in) and a WORLDWIDE standard DC 12V (? or 5V?) socket.
:p
This is entirely possible - mandate it now, all new house builds will start including it, all new electrical refittings will include it, products will start coming with the standard cable to accept DC straight up, with an AC/DC convertor for non-standard properties. Companies will come out with AC-4DC bricks which will allow non-standard properties to at least run multiple DC devices off of one wart.
Then we could replace all the AC-DC wallwarts with DC-DC wallwarts
Great ... no more working scoreboards.
I hope they use Vista to control the annoying advertising boards with scrolling animated adverts though. I'll be happy to see them go blank.
I have a Motorola A1000 - a UIQ v2 based phone.
Fucking useless OS isn't it? Quite sad considering I know a couple of people that work at Symbian, but I think the fault is with UIQ.
If it didn't crash it'd be okay. But it does crash. I tried to make a phone call today, wondered why I wasn't getting a ring, looked at the screen to see the "Motorola 3G" logo pop up as it rebooted. Just for making a phone call!
Windows Mobile (which I've also used) is around 3 years ahead of the Symbian + UIQ combination. At least the handwriting recognition works, and isn't per-letter based. Maybe UIQ3 has sorted this out. I WANT TO WRITE ON THE SCREEN NATURALLY, NOT IN A FUCKING POXY SQUARE.
View-Text Size doesn't scale the layout or images. It is only useful for when a designer thinks that 7pt text is 'cool'. Admittedly scaling images with CSS is a hassle, but at least the layout is easily changed or resized.
View -> Page Style doesn't persist your choice.
Javascript and a Cookie does, and it does it in under 20 lines of code.
Yes, the stylesheets available on that site aren't great, but hey, why not contribute your own that is built for a higher resolution screen? I'm sure they would be grateful.
The site looks good on a 1024x768 laptop display. I can see that it would suck for the typical Windows weenie full-screen everything user however.
My local superstore, a Tesco, got the worst ratings for photo processing quality. Cheap, yes.
Nearly as bad were all mail-order photo processing companies.
The places that scored well are in town, which is 8 miles away. Like the typical retardedness that is the UK these places are only open when you are at work - oddly enough I don't want to spend a couple of hours at a weekend collecting photos when I could be drinking beer at home.
I suppose my best bet is the expensive iPhoto album option! Does anyone have any feedback as to the quality of this?
I'm glad that your local situation is such that it is cheap for you to drop off your photos for processing. However that isn't the case for everyone, so bear that in mind.
I fail to see what is so unique about "Wireless Email" ... Email has existed for umpteen years, and wireless networks for a decade or so.
As soon as the wireless network became digital and the devices accessing them powerful enough to do more, it is a logical progression that you would be able to access your digital media (emails, photos, etc) via that device, possibly via a gateway service.
However maybe there was something unique in their patent. Shame they NEVER MADE A DEVICE which used the patent. Patents should exist to protect the inventor whilst he/she/it sells their product utilising said patent. It should be for people to have ideas, patent, and wait for someone else to implement.
I think that patent lawsuits should be stopped on the first day after the judge asks "Did this patent ever result in the creation of a device that you wish to protect from the alleged infringers?".
Ideas are cheap. Doing them is where the work is.
If you are living in an area where it is a half-hour drive there and back to find a decent place to develop your pictures, then you are most likely living in an area where you are lucky to get 33.6k out of your modem (well, in the USA anyway).
Here in the UK the quality of photo processing places varies widely according to a report I saw.
Oh, and how much are A4 photos at your local photo place? Are they cheaper than the cost of a sheet of A4 photo paper and the required ink?
I don't have a photo printer, but if I did and I wanted to print a picture for posterity once a week (i.e., one picture in 25 say - we used to have to get them ALL developed remember) then I'd use the photo printer over driving into town (16 miles return journey, that's half a gallon of petrol, which is around £2.50 in the UK!), parking (or getting the bus - £2.50 again), the hassle of someone else handling your pictures, and so on.
This article is correct - printing your own photos is more expensive than getting a print house to do them - when you take the situation in ISOLATION. The home-printing option saves you on:
1) Time (very valuable for anyone with a job) and Convenience (same hour photos at home)
2) Fuel Cost
3) Exorbitant costs for non-standard sizes at a photo shop
I rate my personal time at more than the difference in printing even 25 photos. By not driving I do a little bit towards easing congestion and helping the environment. Never mind car parking fees in town.
None of them (to my knowledge)! I'm just saying that languages these days are, to varying extents, not stopping the creation of bugs up front. Specification, Verification and Exhaustive Implementation Testing aren't integral. Some have optional features that aid certain aspects (e.g., JUnit with Java) and a decent software house will have their own systems as well, but AFAIK there is no language that integrates all aspects of software engineering into its create-build-test-deploy process.
...
Are they required for your average desktop application? Certainly Not. _Requiring_ that all software have this (by way of legislating overbearing liability regulations) would increase costs by what? 10x? 100x? How many software programmers are good enough to formally specify and verify all aspects of a design and implementation? The job market will be good for those of us with the skill and ability
What we have now is reasonable. If you need near-bug-free software than you can opt to pay 100x more for it, and then get a contact with liability assigned to the creators - and probably then to merely get same-hour attention applied to flaws, rather than for costs. Maybe if some software is totally flawed the law should get it completely removed and refunded as a dud. Totally flawed is not 'I couldn't get it to work', it is 'Thousands of users reported data loss'.
Another point - you know how much you paid the last time you called the plumber, electrician, gasman out to fix something? It was quite high wasn't it, made you think of quitting software engineering and going into plumbing because you worked it out that they must be on £50k ($100k) a year.
20% of that is probably spent up front on personal liability insurance. And that is for a task that can be done correctly 100% of the time if you know what you are doing.
Given software's poor record so far, we'd be looking at personal liability insurance for contractors, or entire companies, being a much larger amount of the cost.
When software engineering contractors start having to ask for wages starting at £200k ($400k) a year, where half of that amount is simply to cover liability insurance, we will end up getting software at 1/10th of the rate that we do now, and only 1/100th of it overall.
Insurance companies will start hiring code auditors, to audit your company's code to assess risk. Unlikely that any company would want to hire someone with under 10 years experience in that case, in case of a poor audit. Any enforced regulation would kill the industry.
So if we ever have to pay £2000 for a web browser, this idiot Bill Thompson will have been the originating cause.
For now, given the languages software is commonly written in these days.
What the liability should be is for Time To Fix.
A software developer shouldn't be liable for a bug, but they should be liable for unreasonable time to fixes for the bugs. How long is unreasonable? That depends on the severity of the bug as it relates to security and advertised functionality. I'd say that a week was long enough to post a fix in most cases for a replicable bugm certainly no more than a fortnight.
This type of liability might be a problem for spaghetti-code houses that knock out crap without a care. I don't mind if these places get a kick up the backside.
The issue is rushed software development, utilising software programmers rather than software engineers. Liability rules would mean a move towards proper software engineering - the implementation might still be by mere programmers of course. It'll probably take twenty years or so to get to this state I suppose.
How else will you persist a stylesheet selection over multiple pages*?
Without the cookie or javascript you will just get the default stylesheet each time and you will have to change it on every page you go to.
* Yes, you can store it at the server end, with a lot of hassle. I don't think this is an ideal solution.
Use the 'Large' stylesheet you old blind coot. :)
(agreed about the naming convention however, but sadly I think around 90% of web developers haven't worked this out yet)
The FreeBSD website was in dire need of an overhaul.
Looks like the new site keeps the best of the old site, but in a better form.
It'd be nice if the 'Large' stylesheet also made the columns wider however.
I'd say that Earth was clearly dominant over the moon. I don't know if the centre of rotation is between the bodies or within Earth itself - the latter would clearly define dominance.
:S
Damn, that was badly worded. 4 hours sleep and most of a day of work since don't do wonders for the brain
I was counting Ceres as a planet, as the other respondent suggested.
Of course, Ceres is pretty small at around 950km in diameter. Even Mercury is 4870km in diameter and Pluto is 2270km or so in diameter. It is spherical under its own gravity however... In terms of mass however it is pretty insignificant compared to even our moon. However it has the main characteristics of a planet so no reason why it can't be included I guess.
I agree it will happen, maybe next week, maybe next year.
:: 320x208 (same as A1000, P910, etc) :: or 480x304 (under half DVD resolution, 16:9)
... 225MB per hour encoded. Under a minute to sync the daily news report, weather forecast and sports report (as podcasts) for viewing on the way to/from work.
I'm speculating here:
iPod AV Screen Resolution
H.264 can encode DVD quality media in 1mbit/s. I saw somewhere it could do it in 800kbps even. However the screen is half that. You could have video content encoded at 500kbps or under (i'm ignoring showing it on a TV here, and given the speculation about Airport Express including video out in its next incarnation you might want to divide/multiply by 2 where necessary).
500kbps
And music videos? At 4 minutes each you can have 5000 music videos in your pocket on a 80GB device. Or 2000 DVD quality music videos and a f*ck load of normal music, photos, etc besides.
So, stop calling them planets... just call them objects. Earth is a satellite of the sun. The moon is a satellite of Earth.
... and so on ...
... scientists suddenly decide don't want them! WTF. Correct the mistake that was Pluto, or create an 'Icy Planet' category and have loads more planets, and decide what to do about Ceres.
If they are objects (which they are), then we can subclass them and give them more solid definitions...
public class CelestialBody {...}
public class Star extends CelestialBody {...}
public class Satellite implements Orbits {...}
public class Planet extends Satellite
public class RockyPlanet extends Planet {...}
public class GasPlanet extends Planet {...}
public class IcePlanet extents Planet {...}
public class Moon extends Satellite {...}
(of course now we'd use generics and shit)
The real issue with the terminology is that scientific terminology is being influenced by short-lived cultural terminology. This is clearly a rather retarded idea in the long run. Many people here agree on a terminology for a planet that might mean there are over 20 planets in the solar system, or 9 non-ice planets (+Ceres, -Pluto). Most things we learn in life aren't correct, so there isn't any harm in letting popular culture take the 30 years or so to catch up with the truth, but we'd better not fuck around with the truth now because of popular culture.
Loads of us have grown up expecting Planet X at any point, and now we have X, XI, XII,
Cruithne isn't really a moon, is it merely an object that has exactly the same rotational period around the Sun as the Earth, caused by some kind of interaction with Earth. It doesn't orbit Earth, it is not a satellite of Earth, so it isn't a moon of Earth.
Are we going to be scientific about this, or are we stopping the planetary count because most people can't count in the double digits?
So what if it is in a belt? Does the fact that it is in a belt (with bodies in the belt being many millions of miles apart) somehow stop a massive body being a planet?
Either: Pluto is a planet, alongside Xena (and Quaaarorora and Sedna, if they meet other planetary requirement) (and Ceres), or none of them are. Scientifically. Popular culture can still call it a planet, and in 50 years time with new school books popular culture will finally catch up.
Don't try to bring sense into this debate.
Because someone will reply "if it is not part of an orbiting belt of material" to try and cut out Ceres and this new planet, to keep the status quo.
Never mind the fact that the asteroid belt is in fact very sparsely populated, and merely a bunch of bodies in space in a reasonably common orbit, possibly created from the destruction of a single larger body or two.
I'm happy with our solar system having 5 rocky planets, 4 gas planets and 2+ remote ice planets.
I found a London Underground In Reality tube map ...
http://www.nyclondon.com/blog/images/tube_geo.jpg
I think I'll stick with the distorted one... even if the person had used a font that was legible.
That's what I don't like about the London Underground Maps ... yeah, they're readable, and if you know you need to go to X when you are at Y they are great for that purpose. However they're bloody useless if you are at non-station location A looking for X, even if you have a GPS device on you and a map of london on it. An underground + railway map, done geographically correctly, that is compatible with most GPS software would be great. Have the overlying road map done in 33% transparent grey or something, and you can have all the layers of transport available in your pocket.
Will they give him permission if he asks them?
Maybe he should just draw his own.
Grow up little boy.
The article is Ars' copyright, and you reduplicated it without their permission. By writing good articles they get linked to, and then make money from advertising and selling the articles, etc, which they can then invest in creating even more good articles.
This isn't reposting someone's personal website or a not-for-profit website that will go down when Slashdotted, and in fact might save them some hosting money.
And you are insulting them because of YOUR action.
If Ars' were really assholes they'd subpoena Slashdot to get your details and then sue you for copyright infringement. Instead you got a polite response saying that your actions weren't necessary. Given your response to that, I hope they drag you through the courts, but sadly it isn't likely to happen.
Microsoft went with HD-DVD because Bluray uses BD-J (i.e., Java) for interactive, programmable, etc, content.
BluRay drives have been around for a long time. They exist now.
What isn't finalised is the DRM and various things relating to that. It won't take too long to get these things finalised.
The 2 years to 50GB stuff is pure FUD as far as we, the consumers, are concerned. Have either of us held a HD-DVD or a BD-ROM in out hands? No. They're both up in the air. We should just sit back and wait for one or the other to release something. It isn't as if BluRay single-layer (23, 25 or 27GB) is that much lower than HD-DVD dual layer (30GB) anyway.
I know one BluRay manufacturer said they'd be making 50GB stuff this December.
Let's just wait and see what happens!