Re:Obligatory product bashing
on
TiVo to Go Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Yes, but how do you justify paying $13/month for just a program guide which is free on tv.yahoo.com or your cable provider's site?"
I justify the TiVo monthly service expense for the convenience. It's fairly easy to understand if you start from the premise that you and I place different values on nearly everything - Starbucks coffee, restaurant meals, cars, mortgages, computers, etc. But mostly for me it's about valuing time and convenience. Although I am technically capable of doing so, I have no desire to assemble, configure, and maintain a homebrew PVR system. My wife and seven year old son can operate the TiVo. That has value to me as well. And a free programming guide from Yahoo, or printed weekly in the newspaper, does not compare to the simplicity of a few clicks to keep the TiVo full of fresh episodes of the Magic Treehouse and SpongeBob.
"Or keeping a landline for TiVo to use when you probably already have broadband and a cell phone?"
I plugged a USB 802.11b adapter into the TiVo and it utilizes my wireless network. That enables TiVo to stream photos and music from iPhoto and iTunes which the aforementioned wife enjoys. Her happiness = my happiness. And not messing up the most basic home entertainment needs trumps my geek impulses.
"If MythTV is too complicated to setup, just get the cheapest Windows PC and use whatever PVR program comes with the TV tuner. Might want to throw in a wireless keyboard+trackpad."
What's exciting to you is frightening to me. I'd rather pay the $13 a month. But I am glad that options exist so we can all benefit.
(The term "hacker" first referred to people who liked to design and create machines, and only later began to be applied to people who broke into them.)
Bah, hackers are pure evil. It's right there in the Mainstream Media Technology Usage Guide. Although admittedly some of the rules are brazenly flaunted lately, like the requirement to preface all references to Apple with "embattled computer maker." But still, one would expect better from the NY Times.
"You have got to be kidding me. This board is known to have more fierce Mac fanboys then even Linux sometimes. I mean, look at the mods, is even one negative Mac post modded up?.... Go through the Mac posts again...watch legitimate opinions about Macs be modded down..while people say something as worthless as "I heard my friend got great performance on WoW with an eMac" get modded +5 insightful (real example from this thread even)."
You, Sir, are correct. I am a huge Mac fan and I am going to forfeit my option to moderate in this thread by publicly agreeing with you. Slashdot has become so pro-Mac that the backlash is inevitable. I don't care for the OS holy wars from either perspective and do appreciate that Macs and OS X get some of the recognition that they deserve. But I love my Mac because it's my Mac. I could not care less about what any of you use for your personal computers. They're yours so enjoy them.
That said, I imagine that PC Mag was just trying to spread the love with equal opportunity bashing. I guess one could say the eMac is "slow, underpowered, and pathetic," but it's a disingenuous argument to compare a Mac to a low-end PC just on specs. The eMac is not sold that way and is made to address a specific market. I also do not understand why "the lack of a DVD burner makes offloading files impossible." Impossible? I'm not the brightest guy around but I have been offloading files from my iMac for years and have never used my DVD burner. Maybe its mere presence is some sort of technology enabler.
I gave up on photo printers when every retailer in my area began offering prints from Kodak and Fuji kiosks for US$0.29. Sam's Club does them for 18 cents. I just can't see getting anywhere near that cost per print from an at-home solution. These self-serve machines accept several common memory card formats and even allow some basic editing of the image before printing. I bought a multi-format USB card reader so I can pull the pictures I want to print, including post-modification, from iPhoto and load them on a CF card. Not I can silence my wife's complaining that the pictures go into the black hole of my computer and she doesn't get normal prints. This is way cheaper than buying film and paying for whole roll processing when you factor how many prints you actually wanted. I figured we were paying up to a dollar or more for the prints we kept using her film camera.
I have a pretty good Epson photo printer and have made some nice booklets with it. But if I didn't print for a few weeks the ink would start to dry on the print heads and cause streaking that I couldn't eliminate with multiple cleanings. So I had to factor in the cost of replacing the black and/or color cartridges at $25 each when I wanted to print batches of pictures. Now I just run to CVS or Target and get nice glossy prints of the pictures I want for 29 cents each. The inconvenience of having to drive (a half mile to one or two miles to the other) is worth it for the cost savings and better quality. At least to me it is.
"FM, eh, who cares? I haven't found a halfway decent FM station other than NPR in probably five years. Commercial radio in the US is atrocious."
Oh, the truth you speaketh. I recently found myself in the car having forgot my iPod in the house and having nothing to listen to but the radio. I took a deep breath and flipped it on to the only thing I listen to anymore, NPR. *Gasp* Pledge week. I flipped through all of the other nine presets - seven commercials, one horrible alt-rock song, and Christmas music! I was in radio Hell. I flipped through them all again, faster this time as if something better would emerge. Damn you, commercial radio, I exclaimed. I began to sweat in panic. What would I do? I can't go on under these conditions I thought. I turned the radio off and stared out the window focused on nothing but my fellow drivers. No sounds to soothe me but the hum of the tires. I completed my errand at the corner drug store and made it home safe, but those were the worst two miles I've ever driven.
"I doubt they looked up all the code. They probably only made statistics to compare the amount of bugs based on what has been reported and archives."
Exactly. The article is nearly useless. According to the CNet article covering the same issue: "Proprietary software, in general, has 1 to 7 flaws per thousand lines of code, according to an April report from the National Cybersecurity Partnership's Working Group on the Software Lifecycle, which cited an analysis of development methods by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University."
The Wired article says, "... 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code, according to Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Sustainable Computing Consortium."
Hmmm, both cite Carnegie Mellon University as the source. So which is it, one to seven, or 20 to 30? That's a big difference. It's either 5,700 to 40,000 flaws or 114,000 to 171,000.
The bottom line is that the Linux source code can be viewed and has 985 visible bugs of various identifiable types. The Windows source code cannot be viewed and may have anywhere between 5,700 and 171,000 flaws based on some questionable extrapolation using two widely divergent methods.
"I guess it's nice getting _exactly_ the song you want, but still, I just don't get the appeal of iTunes."
OK. The appeal of iTunes is "getting _exactly_ the song you want."
I can browse, click "Buy Song," download, and sync to my iPod before you can grab the car keys and get in the car. I'll be listening to the songs I wanted at US$0.99 each long before you will drive to the store and buy them at somewhere around $16 for an average of three songs you want per CD. At that average you just paid $100 for 99 good songs through eBay. If you like more songs than that then congratulations, you came out ahead on a per song basis. But I seriously doubt that you would have selected all of those songs and paid for then individually. Even at $0.33 each.
I imagine that at some time we will approach the level of technological sophistication where we no longer call some competitive event a sport. That is to say, at some point the human element will contribute a trivial amount to the overall performance. I am not saying that F1 racing is at or near that point - I have tremendous respect for the athletes that drive those cars under extreme conditions. But imagine a technologically advanced version of something like dogsledding, where the human is along for the ride. Do we continue to call it a sport? Or does it become some other type of contest?
"I agree, if high resolution, by itself, is so important, consumers would be staring out their windows in droves. You certainly cannot get better resolution than reality. People are not staring out of their windows because there is no content to see."
Now there's a statement you might only see on Slashdot!
"It's usually quite easy to remember which album is which from the first bit of music at the start. 1GB of random MP3s - that's another story altogether. "
That's a good observation. It makes me wonder though if people are filling these devices mostly with ripped albums or with single tracks acquired through other means. My iPod Mini has no full albums although I have ripped my entire CD collection into iTunes. All of my playlists are assortments for different moods or occasions and rarely contain more than a couple tracks by any artist. I have so few albums that I like in their entirety anymore. In fact, I remove the album tag from most of my music so that I can quickly find any of those albums I like by searching. A lot of the songs I get from the iTunes Music Store are from compilations so what's the point of having "Greatest Hits" or "20th Century Masters" as the album track?
You could replace "album" in your observation with "playlist" and it would be the same effect. In fact such a limited capacity device may best be suited for random play of either the entire contents or of a specific playlist. I think it would be a stale experience to utilize it like a portable CD player with a handful of albums.
"... use it to refer to missing some of the audio..."
As opposed to a pause followed by resumption of playback from the exact same spot in the song? Which is what I thought you were talking about. But missing some of the audio?? I don't see how that's possible. Playback is digital and is unaffected by external physical forces. Shaking, jostling, or dropping an iPod should not be able to cause it to change the playback position within a song. Just like slapping the side of your computer will not cause a playing MPEG video to jump. If it does what you say then that seems odd to me. Although I've never jogged with my Mini.
It cracks me up every time I see people mention "skipping" in the context of digital music-playing devices. Records skipped. Remember them? They were made of vinyl and had a needle that tracked fine grooves to play the music. Vibration could cause the needle to jump across grooves and thus skip a portion of the music. Scratches could do the same thing.
Digital music is decoded from a storage device and converted to sound. While there may be errors in the encoded music data, or encountered during the decoding process, there is no analogue to the concept of skipping. There can be disruption of the hard drive which can lead to a temporary disruption of the data stream. iPods have a 32 MB buffer from which the music is actually played to prevent such a disruption (and to prolong battery life), but other devices may not. Older CD players used to have that problem where jostling them caused a pause while the laser had to re-track. I imagine that HD-based players would experience a catastrophic head crash as likely as they would pause to recover.
But such a temporary pause from vibration is probably what you meant. I didn't mean to be a pedant. I just find the term "skip" to be a quaint reference. Like "dialing" a phone.
Also the iPod Mini has an optional arm-band for use while jogging. So it's designed for that environment.
You're addressing the ebook reader, and make some good points. But it may be more important to look at it from the other side of the equation - the content. Right now there are some problems with ebooks (the content, not the readers) that are easy to fix. First, they are priced ridiculously. Yes, I know about all the free content and the niche ebook retailers selling cheap ebooks. But that's not going to sustain any market. For mass appeal there needs to be the latest novels from the biggest names. The last time I looked into ebooks (admittedly a while ago so keep me honest) the new releases of bestsellers were priced higher than the paper hardcover. Ridiculous. Secondly, there is no compelling reason for a book reader to consider switching to an ebook system. Forget the geeky arguments about searching or any other technology-enabled function. Normal book consumers don't give a damn about any of that. What I think ebooks should do is adopt the model of DVDs and offer extras along with the content. Since there is no space restriction the ebook could offer tons more stuff. How about throwing in author interviews, previews of other works, maps, drawings, pictures, etc.? The audiobook could also be bundled with the ebook. Then ebooks could be sold for the same price and offer more.
I think that it's a mistake to concentrate on ebook readers first when no one is buying the ebooks yet. Sell the content first and let the market drive the technology.
"The problem with blogs is that they don't go through any level of background checks and often don't provide reasonable sources."
But the beauty of blogs, at least those reasonably credible and well-read, is that they provide for for decentralized authentication. As blogger Ken Layne attested, "We can fact check your ass." In other words, the forces that kept the Trent Lott and Dan Rather stories alive when the mainstream news media were ready to let them rest were the aggregate voices of many bloggers and the sum of the facts they could collect. While any individual blogger does not have the information-gathering or verification resources of a large newspaper or network news division they do have each other. And an often voracious attachment to a story. They fact-check each other, obsessively link to multiple points of view on any given topic, disagree politely, attack cruelly, and eventually form reasoned arguments. Sometimes. Think of how a Slashdot story about a particular topic can bring an expert out of the woodwork with valuable experience to expound upon that very topic. (Yeah, yeah, hold your jokes. You know there's often that needle in the haystack if you can slog through the lame jokes and off-topic rants.)
If the problem of separating the wheat from the chaff is solved, and we don't develop an unhealthy attachment to sensationalism and partisan bickering, blogs can indeed become the watchdogs of the traditional media.
"How did they sustain a transfer like that? Unless my math is wrong, that's 11GBps... what has that kind of read/write speed?"
Good point, but that's the aggregate throughput of the data pipe and not necessarily generated or used by any two single end-point devices. They may test it this way as a proof of concept, but it's more likely that 1000 computers in a lab on one coast would send that total data through such a link to a lab on the other coast.
"When PS2 was launched, incredible specs were also touted; on delivery it ended up cheaper but not more powerful than a high-spec PC with a good video card one year later. I am afraid we might end up with another mediocre product at a reasonable price point."
Frankly I like the idea of delivering power comparable to a high-end PC in a less expensive console. Those that want the most possible power will pay the price for the PC anyway so they can keep it updated. The console buyer wants simplicity and low price. As a reformed geek myself I never want to touch the guts of a computer again. My two favorite electronic devices are my iMac and iPod. When I buy another game console I will be much more concerned with the quality of the games and the ease of use than the raw specs. I'd certainly like to see what all this power could deliver, but I'd rather it be US$199 than "incredible."
I, for one, am glad that we do not let what's useful determine what we actually try to accomplish. Perhaps if we could harness all the wasted energy that goes into stuff like this we could solve that power production problem recently discussed here.
"... our online ordering system running IIS and Windows 2000 was comprimised and has left us waiting for a green light with our payment processor that has resulted in approximately 1 million in losses. I don't care how much of a budget Windows has if being a "known quantity" makes you a target."
Good point. An alternative to a rewards for the positive benefits for deploying Linux on the desktop is punishment for sticking with something that is not working or causing problems. Security concerns with Windows are certainly an example of the latter. I still feel the path of least resistance is to throw more money at the entrenched product in an effort to fix it, but that's not a viable long-term strategy. Exposure in the corporate server arena and "pioneers" such as you will set the stage for Linux to gain wide-spread desktop deployment. But then again, you are talking about what sounds to me like a specific application-focused environment. The typical corporate cubical land is full of desk-bound workers who need a wide variety of standard office applications and some homegrown custom apps written in VB. The cost-savings vs. the desktop OS and office suite has to be compared with retraining costs and development of new customer apps. And all that has to be evaluated with productivity loss from, and overall cost to contain security breaches and attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yes, but how do you justify paying $13/month for just a program guide which is free on tv.yahoo.com or your cable provider's site?"
I justify the TiVo monthly service expense for the convenience. It's fairly easy to understand if you start from the premise that you and I place different values on nearly everything - Starbucks coffee, restaurant meals, cars, mortgages, computers, etc. But mostly for me it's about valuing time and convenience. Although I am technically capable of doing so, I have no desire to assemble, configure, and maintain a homebrew PVR system. My wife and seven year old son can operate the TiVo. That has value to me as well. And a free programming guide from Yahoo, or printed weekly in the newspaper, does not compare to the simplicity of a few clicks to keep the TiVo full of fresh episodes of the Magic Treehouse and SpongeBob.
"Or keeping a landline for TiVo to use when you probably already have broadband and a cell phone?"
I plugged a USB 802.11b adapter into the TiVo and it utilizes my wireless network. That enables TiVo to stream photos and music from iPhoto and iTunes which the aforementioned wife enjoys. Her happiness = my happiness. And not messing up the most basic home entertainment needs trumps my geek impulses.
"If MythTV is too complicated to setup, just get the cheapest Windows PC and use whatever PVR program comes with the TV tuner. Might want to throw in a wireless keyboard+trackpad."
What's exciting to you is frightening to me. I'd rather pay the $13 a month. But I am glad that options exist so we can all benefit.
What is this garbage?
(The term "hacker" first referred to people who liked to design and create machines, and only later began to be applied to people who broke into them.)
Bah, hackers are pure evil. It's right there in the Mainstream Media Technology Usage Guide. Although admittedly some of the rules are brazenly flaunted lately, like the requirement to preface all references to Apple with "embattled computer maker." But still, one would expect better from the NY Times.
"You have got to be kidding me. This board is known to have more fierce Mac fanboys then even Linux sometimes. I mean, look at the mods, is even one negative Mac post modded up? .... Go through the Mac posts again...watch legitimate opinions about Macs be modded down..while people say something as worthless as "I heard my friend got great performance on WoW with an eMac" get modded +5 insightful (real example from this thread even)."
You, Sir, are correct. I am a huge Mac fan and I am going to forfeit my option to moderate in this thread by publicly agreeing with you. Slashdot has become so pro-Mac that the backlash is inevitable. I don't care for the OS holy wars from either perspective and do appreciate that Macs and OS X get some of the recognition that they deserve. But I love my Mac because it's my Mac. I could not care less about what any of you use for your personal computers. They're yours so enjoy them.
That said, I imagine that PC Mag was just trying to spread the love with equal opportunity bashing. I guess one could say the eMac is "slow, underpowered, and pathetic," but it's a disingenuous argument to compare a Mac to a low-end PC just on specs. The eMac is not sold that way and is made to address a specific market. I also do not understand why "the lack of a DVD burner makes offloading files impossible." Impossible? I'm not the brightest guy around but I have been offloading files from my iMac for years and have never used my DVD burner. Maybe its mere presence is some sort of technology enabler.
iHatethisnamingspeculation
I gave up on photo printers when every retailer in my area began offering prints from Kodak and Fuji kiosks for US$0.29. Sam's Club does them for 18 cents. I just can't see getting anywhere near that cost per print from an at-home solution. These self-serve machines accept several common memory card formats and even allow some basic editing of the image before printing. I bought a multi-format USB card reader so I can pull the pictures I want to print, including post-modification, from iPhoto and load them on a CF card. Not I can silence my wife's complaining that the pictures go into the black hole of my computer and she doesn't get normal prints. This is way cheaper than buying film and paying for whole roll processing when you factor how many prints you actually wanted. I figured we were paying up to a dollar or more for the prints we kept using her film camera.
I have a pretty good Epson photo printer and have made some nice booklets with it. But if I didn't print for a few weeks the ink would start to dry on the print heads and cause streaking that I couldn't eliminate with multiple cleanings. So I had to factor in the cost of replacing the black and/or color cartridges at $25 each when I wanted to print batches of pictures. Now I just run to CVS or Target and get nice glossy prints of the pictures I want for 29 cents each. The inconvenience of having to drive (a half mile to one or two miles to the other) is worth it for the cost savings and better quality. At least to me it is.
"your comment makes no sense"
You must be new here.
Dude, you freakin' nailed it! Slammin' review. It was so sick the way you jammed on that show. Seriously Man, your recap was off the hizzle. Dude.
"Me too!!!"
You must be banned from AOL.
"FM, eh, who cares? I haven't found a halfway decent FM station other than NPR in probably five years. Commercial radio in the US is atrocious."
Oh, the truth you speaketh. I recently found myself in the car having forgot my iPod in the house and having nothing to listen to but the radio. I took a deep breath and flipped it on to the only thing I listen to anymore, NPR. *Gasp* Pledge week. I flipped through all of the other nine presets - seven commercials, one horrible alt-rock song, and Christmas music! I was in radio Hell. I flipped through them all again, faster this time as if something better would emerge. Damn you, commercial radio, I exclaimed. I began to sweat in panic. What would I do? I can't go on under these conditions I thought. I turned the radio off and stared out the window focused on nothing but my fellow drivers. No sounds to soothe me but the hum of the tires. I completed my errand at the corner drug store and made it home safe, but those were the worst two miles I've ever driven.
"I doubt they looked up all the code. They probably only made statistics to compare the amount of bugs based on what has been reported and archives."
Exactly. The article is nearly useless. According to the CNet article covering the same issue:
"Proprietary software, in general, has 1 to 7 flaws per thousand lines of code, according to an April report from the National Cybersecurity Partnership's Working Group on the Software Lifecycle, which cited an analysis of development methods by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University."
The Wired article says,
"... 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code, according to Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Sustainable Computing Consortium."
Hmmm, both cite Carnegie Mellon University as the source. So which is it, one to seven, or 20 to 30? That's a big difference. It's either 5,700 to 40,000 flaws or 114,000 to 171,000.
The bottom line is that the Linux source code can be viewed and has 985 visible bugs of various identifiable types. The Windows source code cannot be viewed and may have anywhere between 5,700 and 171,000 flaws based on some questionable extrapolation using two widely divergent methods.
"I guess it's nice getting _exactly_ the song you want, but still, I just don't get the appeal of iTunes."
OK. The appeal of iTunes is "getting _exactly_ the song you want."
I can browse, click "Buy Song," download, and sync to my iPod before you can grab the car keys and get in the car. I'll be listening to the songs I wanted at US$0.99 each long before you will drive to the store and buy them at somewhere around $16 for an average of three songs you want per CD. At that average you just paid $100 for 99 good songs through eBay. If you like more songs than that then congratulations, you came out ahead on a per song basis. But I seriously doubt that you would have selected all of those songs and paid for then individually. Even at $0.33 each.
I imagine that at some time we will approach the level of technological sophistication where we no longer call some competitive event a sport. That is to say, at some point the human element will contribute a trivial amount to the overall performance. I am not saying that F1 racing is at or near that point - I have tremendous respect for the athletes that drive those cars under extreme conditions. But imagine a technologically advanced version of something like dogsledding, where the human is along for the ride. Do we continue to call it a sport? Or does it become some other type of contest?
I thought only old Koreans used Legos.
I give you 15 minutes until this generates rumors of an impending tablet Mac.
"I agree, if high resolution, by itself, is so important, consumers would be staring out their windows in droves. You certainly cannot get better resolution than reality. People are not staring out of their windows because there is no content to see."
Now there's a statement you might only see on Slashdot!
"It's usually quite easy to remember which album is which from the first bit of music at the start. 1GB of random MP3s - that's another story altogether. "
That's a good observation. It makes me wonder though if people are filling these devices mostly with ripped albums or with single tracks acquired through other means. My iPod Mini has no full albums although I have ripped my entire CD collection into iTunes. All of my playlists are assortments for different moods or occasions and rarely contain more than a couple tracks by any artist. I have so few albums that I like in their entirety anymore. In fact, I remove the album tag from most of my music so that I can quickly find any of those albums I like by searching. A lot of the songs I get from the iTunes Music Store are from compilations so what's the point of having "Greatest Hits" or "20th Century Masters" as the album track?
You could replace "album" in your observation with "playlist" and it would be the same effect. In fact such a limited capacity device may best be suited for random play of either the entire contents or of a specific playlist. I think it would be a stale experience to utilize it like a portable CD player with a handful of albums.
"... use it to refer to missing some of the audio ..."
As opposed to a pause followed by resumption of playback from the exact same spot in the song? Which is what I thought you were talking about. But missing some of the audio?? I don't see how that's possible. Playback is digital and is unaffected by external physical forces. Shaking, jostling, or dropping an iPod should not be able to cause it to change the playback position within a song. Just like slapping the side of your computer will not cause a playing MPEG video to jump. If it does what you say then that seems odd to me. Although I've never jogged with my Mini.
"I run with my iPod mini all the time. No skips."
It cracks me up every time I see people mention "skipping" in the context of digital music-playing devices. Records skipped. Remember them? They were made of vinyl and had a needle that tracked fine grooves to play the music. Vibration could cause the needle to jump across grooves and thus skip a portion of the music. Scratches could do the same thing.
Digital music is decoded from a storage device and converted to sound. While there may be errors in the encoded music data, or encountered during the decoding process, there is no analogue to the concept of skipping. There can be disruption of the hard drive which can lead to a temporary disruption of the data stream. iPods have a 32 MB buffer from which the music is actually played to prevent such a disruption (and to prolong battery life), but other devices may not. Older CD players used to have that problem where jostling them caused a pause while the laser had to re-track. I imagine that HD-based players would experience a catastrophic head crash as likely as they would pause to recover.
But such a temporary pause from vibration is probably what you meant. I didn't mean to be a pedant. I just find the term "skip" to be a quaint reference. Like "dialing" a phone.
Also the iPod Mini has an optional arm-band for use while jogging. So it's designed for that environment.
"EBook tech really needs 4 things ...."
You're addressing the ebook reader, and make some good points. But it may be more important to look at it from the other side of the equation - the content. Right now there are some problems with ebooks (the content, not the readers) that are easy to fix. First, they are priced ridiculously. Yes, I know about all the free content and the niche ebook retailers selling cheap ebooks. But that's not going to sustain any market. For mass appeal there needs to be the latest novels from the biggest names. The last time I looked into ebooks (admittedly a while ago so keep me honest) the new releases of bestsellers were priced higher than the paper hardcover. Ridiculous. Secondly, there is no compelling reason for a book reader to consider switching to an ebook system. Forget the geeky arguments about searching or any other technology-enabled function. Normal book consumers don't give a damn about any of that. What I think ebooks should do is adopt the model of DVDs and offer extras along with the content. Since there is no space restriction the ebook could offer tons more stuff. How about throwing in author interviews, previews of other works, maps, drawings, pictures, etc.? The audiobook could also be bundled with the ebook. Then ebooks could be sold for the same price and offer more.
I think that it's a mistake to concentrate on ebook readers first when no one is buying the ebooks yet. Sell the content first and let the market drive the technology.
"The problem with blogs is that they don't go through any level of background checks and often don't provide reasonable sources."
But the beauty of blogs, at least those reasonably credible and well-read, is that they provide for for decentralized authentication. As blogger Ken Layne attested, "We can fact check your ass." In other words, the forces that kept the Trent Lott and Dan Rather stories alive when the mainstream news media were ready to let them rest were the aggregate voices of many bloggers and the sum of the facts they could collect. While any individual blogger does not have the information-gathering or verification resources of a large newspaper or network news division they do have each other. And an often voracious attachment to a story. They fact-check each other, obsessively link to multiple points of view on any given topic, disagree politely, attack cruelly, and eventually form reasoned arguments. Sometimes. Think of how a Slashdot story about a particular topic can bring an expert out of the woodwork with valuable experience to expound upon that very topic. (Yeah, yeah, hold your jokes. You know there's often that needle in the haystack if you can slog through the lame jokes and off-topic rants.)
If the problem of separating the wheat from the chaff is solved, and we don't develop an unhealthy attachment to sensationalism and partisan bickering, blogs can indeed become the watchdogs of the traditional media.
Amazing! That's the same combination I have on my luggage.
"How did they sustain a transfer like that? Unless my math is wrong, that's 11GBps ... what has that kind of read/write speed?"
Good point, but that's the aggregate throughput of the data pipe and not necessarily generated or used by any two single end-point devices. They may test it this way as a proof of concept, but it's more likely that 1000 computers in a lab on one coast would send that total data through such a link to a lab on the other coast.
"When PS2 was launched, incredible specs were also touted; on delivery it ended up cheaper but not more powerful than a high-spec PC with a good video card one year later. I am afraid we might end up with another mediocre product at a reasonable price point."
Frankly I like the idea of delivering power comparable to a high-end PC in a less expensive console. Those that want the most possible power will pay the price for the PC anyway so they can keep it updated. The console buyer wants simplicity and low price. As a reformed geek myself I never want to touch the guts of a computer again. My two favorite electronic devices are my iMac and iPod. When I buy another game console I will be much more concerned with the quality of the games and the ease of use than the raw specs. I'd certainly like to see what all this power could deliver, but I'd rather it be US$199 than "incredible."
I, for one, am glad that we do not let what's useful determine what we actually try to accomplish. Perhaps if we could harness all the wasted energy that goes into stuff like this we could solve that power production problem recently discussed here.
Good point. An alternative to a rewards for the positive benefits for deploying Linux on the desktop is punishment for sticking with something that is not working or causing problems. Security concerns with Windows are certainly an example of the latter. I still feel the path of least resistance is to throw more money at the entrenched product in an effort to fix it, but that's not a viable long-term strategy. Exposure in the corporate server arena and "pioneers" such as you will set the stage for Linux to gain wide-spread desktop deployment. But then again, you are talking about what sounds to me like a specific application-focused environment. The typical corporate cubical land is full of desk-bound workers who need a wide variety of standard office applications and some homegrown custom apps written in VB. The cost-savings vs. the desktop OS and office suite has to be compared with retraining costs and development of new customer apps. And all that has to be evaluated with productivity loss from, and overall cost to contain security breaches and attacks.