I could see us ending up with a two tier recordable media market
This effectively exists already. Recordable CD/DVD longevity is largely a function of dye stability. Over-generalizing, modern media support higher-speed writing because the dye is more stable. Ergo, greater long-term stability.
Unbranded media have other problems, in that frequently they're low-speed disks marked up as high-speed, so they get prematurely aged as they're written to.
Although I've got a couple of old CD-Rs that are unreadable, my MO stuff going back to 1989 still seems to be OK. So is my old PD stuff. Maybe phase-change is the way to go.
So what we need is to tax road users equitably. Those who drive farther, pay more. Heavier vehicles pay more because they do more damage. Fast drivers pay more because their accidents are likely to have a higher dollar value. Conversely, slow drivers pay less. Light vehicles pay less. Efficient vehicles pay less. We need to do this without adding a huge amount of infrastructure. A robust system that doesn't crash and doesn't accidentally bill the occasional victim a ludicrous amount would be nice. And then there are the privacy converns.
Gee. That's a tough one. Er, how about taxing the gas, anyone? mpg x distance seems to cover most of it. I've got to imagine someone's already thought of this taxing gas thing. A gas tax, or putting it another way, a tax on gas. But don't we already do that, he said, looking at the receipt for the last tank of gas he bought.
It's a BS-110/CS Digital tuner, which is appropriate to the local market. You're missing the point if you think the lack of DVB denotes an inferior product. DVB will be important, I'd guess, in November or so. After which you can expect a pile of DVB-compliant products, all of which will beat the pants off Nokia. It may help you to know that Nokia's concept of being competitive in the Japanese market is by abandoning its products and OEM'ing Sanyo, which is cute in a "well at least they're trying" fashion, but doesn't say much for their ability to partner with companies that have a clue.
It doesn't review as well as the Sharp, though the support for DVD-RAM is nice. Note, the Japanese-spec players tend to automatically delete stuff after 31 days to comply with Japanese copyright laws. But yes, any of these products make the Nokia distinctly an also-ran.
Software tends to get developed for new models as they are released. See Linux-based software for the 9000 series here. Most of the stuff is for Windows (see here, for example) and written in Europe. Also here. "MMedit" is a good word to Google on.
Verbatim and Imation claim 30 years for their linear tape open media ("Ultrium"). 100GB for around $55. For CD-R, CD & DVD life, ANSI Committee IT-9 is developing guidelines for estimation. Manufacturers claim from 70 years to more than 200 years. Imation claims 100 years for CD & CD-R stored below 30C.
However, others have noted that real-life disks can have a much shorter life.
Normally I'd reckon that off-brand disks come off the same production lines as name brands, but Maxell currently has a campaign to warn people that some white disks are digitally marked as Maxell, which can lead to a recorder treating a disk as a 4X when it's actually a 1X. So perhaps one should stick with branded products for archival purposes.
TDK claims to be using a more stable cyanine dye now, which should translate to increased storage life.
As a rule of thumb, disks recordable at higher speeds should have a longer storage life than those limited to 1X, since improvement in dye stability is directly responsible for the increased recording speeds.
they can actually get to making a really good product
They seem to have shown an inability to develop bought-in products in a timely manner, if at all. Their acquisition of Ventura is a case in point: an outstanding DTP solution, well-liked because of the ease with which huge documents could be laid out, turned rapidly into a bug-ridden monster. WordPerfect fared a little better, but still failed to keep up with the competition. The problem was, around 1998, that no-one really believed a Corel product would be stable enough to be usable.
Things may have changed more recently but, of course, it was too late since most of us had already jumped ship.
Please don't be so fast to suggest something like BitTorrent just because it's trendy
Agreed. It's an outstanding concept, but it's both bitstorm-oriented and relies on goodwill: it assumes many downloaders, who then make the decision to keep their download window open for an indeterminate time. It's an outstanding social protocol, but a poor forced dissemination protocol.
Instead of an exoskeleton that relies on foot contact sensors and similar, perhaps a simple rate-limiting system would be more appropriate: if the user is upright, then presumably that user wishes to remain upright so the system simply needs to contain unexpected forward and rearward moments. Assuming the user is mentally competent, then relatively few user-selectable buttons could control a whole range of motions, which in reality would simply be relaxing motion constraints. For example, an "I want to sit" button.
Places like Tsukuba tend not to have an inconvenient bunch of old people to hand.
...will make quite a sight at Japanese nursing homes.
Well this is exactly the problem. To slightly overstate the situation, there are no nursing homes in Japan. By which, I mean there are no transitional communities for the aged, no communities for the aged which retain a certain independence and dignity, nothing, nada, zilch. The traditional Japanese approach to the aged is that the oldest daughter in the family looks after the parents. Right now, the system is going titsup.com faster than you would believe because, firstly, all the daughters lived at home and delayed marrying as long as possible because their disposable income far exceeds what they can expect as a newlywed (there are entire cruise lines in Japan targeting women only), and secondly when they do marry, they move away from home and rarely return.
There's no sensible infrastructure for looking after the aged in Japan. There are an infinite number of token gestures, such as buttons at train stations so staff will rush to place a small ramp on the platform so a chairbound person can get on, all trains have a seat-free area for a wheelchair, but there is nothing that offers older people the ability to live at home for as long as possible and then transition to a managed facility.
To cope with this, industry is targeting older people partly because it is a growth market, and partly as a defensive survival tactic since the birthrate continues to decline. This can be seen in a range of products, such as hot water pots (ubiquitous in Japan) that phone home when the usage pattern changes, and small robotic pets that don't do a great deal but offer comfort and, again, have the ability to detect changes in usage patterns and transmit a warning.
I figure building exoskeletons for everyone that needs one in Japan is probably cheaper than building the infrastructure everyone thought they were paying for with their compulsory pension fees.
To witter on further and doom myself to be off-topic, consider this:
A lady in an aged facility has a problem with her stomach. The facility has a doctor on call, who has no skill in that area.
A family member decides a consultation is needed, so arranges for the lady to get scanned and have followup treatment, since stomach cancer is endemic in Japan.
The facility can't accept that, and insists the lady is removed from the facility 24 hours before any consultation not arranged by their own doctor and returned at least 24 hours after the consultation, to protect the dignity of the doctor.
Well, color me unimpressed, but if manufacturers in Japan make exoskeletons, emotion-surrogate robots, kitchen equipment that monitors daily patterns and anything else like that, it's fine by me, no matter how many westerners snigger.
Clearly few people replying know the pricing point of the beast you're considering. If you've got a mixed network it's a very configurable unit indeed. I've used one during a short demonstration and I rather liked it.
If you really need it as a heavy-duty scanner, the 50-80 page limit on the ADF may be a problem.
I think the remote management utilities are Windows & Mac only.
On the printing side, Panasonic seem to have been regarded as higher than average per-page costs. I don't know if Kyocera have anything similar in your market but you might want to check them out.
The only thing I'm not sure about is the network scanner side
I've scanned with one of these at a client's location, and in the sense it scanned really fast it was great. In the sense that it only scanned 10 pages or so before the memory was full, it had a problem. The interface I used scanned as a batch job rather than as a streamed job across the network. Things may have improved since then, but what it needed was a pile of extra memory, plus the ability for me to walk back to my computer, hit the scan key and have it stream the data back to the PC so the Xerox' memory would never fill up.
A long time ago I worked in an HV lab. Because HV networks get taller as you stack the components, this was made with the ceiling as the ground plane, so things got closer to you as they were built.
Because of this design, there was a problem with unused components around the room charging automagically. It really was a room I didn't care much for.
There was a box of old flourescent tubes by the door, a long list of do's and don'ts, and a final summary in really big writing. It said something like:
1. Do not enter without a tube. 2. If the tube glows, go somewhere else. 3. Don't touch anything until you've seen someone else touch it first.
No, in the MS world you're translating pairs of single-byte characters, as generated by the keyboard, to double-byte pairs in a hopefully intelligent manner.
Kingsoft is a major player in China, and also known elsewhere in the world for its Chinese dictionary solutions. See dictionaries here and Kingsoft here.
Microsoft's perpetual problem in Asian markets is its inability to develop a character conversion system that people actually want to use. In Japanese, this is called Henkan and is the shim that converts typing on a QWERTY keyboard to Japanese (and, in the Chinese market, Chinese {traditional or Big-5]). MS has totally failed to come up with an acceptable system after years of effort, yet the local companies such as Just Systems (ATOK, et al) have no problem coming up with sophisticated predictive conversion systems whilst Microsoft blunders around with what it THINKS these markets need. MS will struggle in China because it is a US company attempting to place a Chinese veneer over its operations. Other US companies do vastly better operating overseas. Similarly, overseas companies do much better operating in the US (every Japanese company you can think of, for example).
As a sensible publishing solution, MS is handicapped by having project leaders that hav no idea what good Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese typography look like. They want a minimum-cost conversion of a US-centric package, that's what they pay for and that's what they get.
This isn't an anti-MS diatribe, it's more of a frustrated comment on how MS operates in the world. I happen to know that their internal double-byte-enabled translation tools are outstanding, for example, yet they simply don't trust the quality their translators deliver them using this tool. It's like having an agressively arrogant version of Teletubbies as clients.
Mac doesn't have the money to do major product placement and why dont we see massive product placement from M$?
Er, yes they do. A better comparison would be with Sony. Also, check out why you get the Intel chimes on many hardware adverts: secondary product placement, in effect.
I routinely upgrade drives in my various notebooks, but I've discovered a drive in an external case can be much faster than swapping out the internal drive. To get maximum benefit out of the newer 7200rpm drives, one needs to use Mode 5, right? Do any current notebooks do that?
Hitachi have piles of info available on their drives here, and a discussion of 7200rpm drives here. The IBM legacy shines through.
Many people living near the mountains before the Kobe earthquake (Kobe is sandwiched between the sea and mountains 1.5km inland) reported that their houses filled with a blue glow shortly before the earthquake.
Slashdot Mirror
This effectively exists already. Recordable CD/DVD longevity is largely a function of dye stability. Over-generalizing, modern media support higher-speed writing because the dye is more stable. Ergo, greater long-term stability.
Unbranded media have other problems, in that frequently they're low-speed disks marked up as high-speed, so they get prematurely aged as they're written to.
Although I've got a couple of old CD-Rs that are unreadable, my MO stuff going back to 1989 still seems to be OK. So is my old PD stuff. Maybe phase-change is the way to go.
Gee. That's a tough one. Er, how about taxing the gas, anyone? mpg x distance seems to cover most of it. I've got to imagine someone's already thought of this taxing gas thing. A gas tax, or putting it another way, a tax on gas. But don't we already do that, he said, looking at the receipt for the last tank of gas he bought.
It's a BS-110/CS Digital tuner, which is appropriate to the local market. You're missing the point if you think the lack of DVB denotes an inferior product. DVB will be important, I'd guess, in November or so. After which you can expect a pile of DVB-compliant products, all of which will beat the pants off Nokia. It may help you to know that Nokia's concept of being competitive in the Japanese market is by abandoning its products and OEM'ing Sanyo, which is cute in a "well at least they're trying" fashion, but doesn't say much for their ability to partner with companies that have a clue.
It doesn't review as well as the Sharp, though the support for DVD-RAM is nice. Note, the Japanese-spec players tend to automatically delete stuff after 31 days to comply with Japanese copyright laws. But yes, any of these products make the Nokia distinctly an also-ran.
Software tends to get developed for new models as they are released. See Linux-based software for the 9000 series here. Most of the stuff is for Windows (see here, for example) and written in Europe. Also here. "MMedit" is a good word to Google on.
Flashing a Japanese model with US firmware works fine, but the number of channels is reduced to the US spec.
However, others have noted that real-life disks can have a much shorter life.
Normally I'd reckon that off-brand disks come off the same production lines as name brands, but Maxell currently has a campaign to warn people that some white disks are digitally marked as Maxell, which can lead to a recorder treating a disk as a 4X when it's actually a 1X. So perhaps one should stick with branded products for archival purposes.
TDK claims to be using a more stable cyanine dye now, which should translate to increased storage life.
As a rule of thumb, disks recordable at higher speeds should have a longer storage life than those limited to 1X, since improvement in dye stability is directly responsible for the increased recording speeds.
They seem to have shown an inability to develop bought-in products in a timely manner, if at all. Their acquisition of Ventura is a case in point: an outstanding DTP solution, well-liked because of the ease with which huge documents could be laid out, turned rapidly into a bug-ridden monster. WordPerfect fared a little better, but still failed to keep up with the competition. The problem was, around 1998, that no-one really believed a Corel product would be stable enough to be usable.
Things may have changed more recently but, of course, it was too late since most of us had already jumped ship.
Agreed. It's an outstanding concept, but it's both bitstorm-oriented and relies on goodwill: it assumes many downloaders, who then make the decision to keep their download window open for an indeterminate time. It's an outstanding social protocol, but a poor forced dissemination protocol.
Places like Tsukuba tend not to have an inconvenient bunch of old people to hand.
Well this is exactly the problem. To slightly overstate the situation, there are no nursing homes in Japan. By which, I mean there are no transitional communities for the aged, no communities for the aged which retain a certain independence and dignity, nothing, nada, zilch. The traditional Japanese approach to the aged is that the oldest daughter in the family looks after the parents. Right now, the system is going titsup.com faster than you would believe because, firstly, all the daughters lived at home and delayed marrying as long as possible because their disposable income far exceeds what they can expect as a newlywed (there are entire cruise lines in Japan targeting women only), and secondly when they do marry, they move away from home and rarely return.
There's no sensible infrastructure for looking after the aged in Japan. There are an infinite number of token gestures, such as buttons at train stations so staff will rush to place a small ramp on the platform so a chairbound person can get on, all trains have a seat-free area for a wheelchair, but there is nothing that offers older people the ability to live at home for as long as possible and then transition to a managed facility.
To cope with this, industry is targeting older people partly because it is a growth market, and partly as a defensive survival tactic since the birthrate continues to decline. This can be seen in a range of products, such as hot water pots (ubiquitous in Japan) that phone home when the usage pattern changes, and small robotic pets that don't do a great deal but offer comfort and, again, have the ability to detect changes in usage patterns and transmit a warning.
I figure building exoskeletons for everyone that needs one in Japan is probably cheaper than building the infrastructure everyone thought they were paying for with their compulsory pension fees.
To witter on further and doom myself to be off-topic, consider this:
A lady in an aged facility has a problem with her stomach. The facility has a doctor on call, who has no skill in that area.
A family member decides a consultation is needed, so arranges for the lady to get scanned and have followup treatment, since stomach cancer is endemic in Japan.
The facility can't accept that, and insists the lady is removed from the facility 24 hours before any consultation not arranged by their own doctor and returned at least 24 hours after the consultation, to protect the dignity of the doctor.
Well, color me unimpressed, but if manufacturers in Japan make exoskeletons, emotion-surrogate robots, kitchen equipment that monitors daily patterns and anything else like that, it's fine by me, no matter how many westerners snigger.
Exactly. I note the CPU in my notebook uses the metal backing sheet of the keyboard tray as its heatsink.
If you really need it as a heavy-duty scanner, the 50-80 page limit on the ADF may be a problem.
I think the remote management utilities are Windows & Mac only.
On the printing side, Panasonic seem to have been regarded as higher than average per-page costs. I don't know if Kyocera have anything similar in your market but you might want to check them out.
I've scanned with one of these at a client's location, and in the sense it scanned really fast it was great. In the sense that it only scanned 10 pages or so before the memory was full, it had a problem. The interface I used scanned as a batch job rather than as a streamed job across the network. Things may have improved since then, but what it needed was a pile of extra memory, plus the ability for me to walk back to my computer, hit the scan key and have it stream the data back to the PC so the Xerox' memory would never fill up.
Because of this design, there was a problem with unused components around the room charging automagically. It really was a room I didn't care much for.
There was a box of old flourescent tubes by the door, a long list of do's and don'ts, and a final summary in really big writing. It said something like:
1. Do not enter without a tube.
2. If the tube glows, go somewhere else.
3. Don't touch anything until you've seen someone else touch it first.
No, in the MS world you're translating pairs of single-byte characters, as generated by the keyboard, to double-byte pairs in a hopefully intelligent manner.
Microsoft's perpetual problem in Asian markets is its inability to develop a character conversion system that people actually want to use. In Japanese, this is called Henkan and is the shim that converts typing on a QWERTY keyboard to Japanese (and, in the Chinese market, Chinese {traditional or Big-5]). MS has totally failed to come up with an acceptable system after years of effort, yet the local companies such as Just Systems (ATOK, et al) have no problem coming up with sophisticated predictive conversion systems whilst Microsoft blunders around with what it THINKS these markets need. MS will struggle in China because it is a US company attempting to place a Chinese veneer over its operations. Other US companies do vastly better operating overseas. Similarly, overseas companies do much better operating in the US (every Japanese company you can think of, for example).
As a sensible publishing solution, MS is handicapped by having project leaders that hav no idea what good Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese typography look like. They want a minimum-cost conversion of a US-centric package, that's what they pay for and that's what they get.
This isn't an anti-MS diatribe, it's more of a frustrated comment on how MS operates in the world. I happen to know that their internal double-byte-enabled translation tools are outstanding, for example, yet they simply don't trust the quality their translators deliver them using this tool. It's like having an agressively arrogant version of Teletubbies as clients.
Er, yes they do. A better comparison would be with Sony. Also, check out why you get the Intel chimes on many hardware adverts: secondary product placement, in effect.
It's called product placement. We had people wear shoes we'd never heard of because the company coughed up $5k.
You're limited to 1.8" drives, which basically means Toshiba, topping out at 30GB with the MK3004GAH, a 4200rpm unit with slow access.
Floppy disk RAID system here for the cutting-edge Luddite.
I routinely upgrade drives in my various notebooks, but I've discovered a drive in an external case can be much faster than swapping out the internal drive. To get maximum benefit out of the newer 7200rpm drives, one needs to use Mode 5, right? Do any current notebooks do that?
Hitachi have piles of info available on their drives here, and a discussion of 7200rpm drives here. The IBM legacy shines through.
A nerd too far, I think. Japanese cows give nose prints. These are made available with the carcass, for example, to authenticate its origin.
Well heck, back to the safety of York Road, then.
Many people living near the mountains before the Kobe earthquake (Kobe is sandwiched between the sea and mountains 1.5km inland) reported that their houses filled with a blue glow shortly before the earthquake.