Some of the limits on convergence are inherent - if you're going to have a screen and a keyboard, that gives you a certain minimum size, which may be awkward for a cellphone you hold up to your ear. (So use a headset to avoid holding it up to your ear, either wired or eventually Bluetoothed.) Screens may be avoidable by using heads-up displays, but that interferes with regular activities more than an earpiece does.
Some of the keyboard input may be replaceable with voice recognition; this is a natural match for a cellphone that's already doing digitized voice, and voice-recorders are an especially good match, since the phone is already doing good voice compression at less than 1KB/sec.
But some of the limitations are simply because technology isn't good enough. Pagers run for a month on a small battery, while good PDAs like Palm or Psion run a few weeks to a month on larger batteries, cellphones run a day to a week on rechargables, and Microsoft Palm PCs apparently run less than a day on their batteries. Nokia 6160 was the first cell phone I saw that claimed to run a week in standby mode - long enough I could trust it for a couple of days as a pager. Radio systems are also much different - pagers work almost everywhere, and the radio signalling is simple and dumb enough that they can work inside most buildings. But cell phones need much better radio reception, don't work well inside buildings, and coverage in many areas is much worse (depending on carrier), and CDPD has even more limited coverage. Some of these technology gaps may get fixed with basic engineering progress, like battery power - I don't know if converged devices will need to have multiple battery systems (e.g. a long-term battery for memory and pager, a larger shorter-life battery for phone calls, etc.)
When I got the headsets for my cellphone,
I could walk down the street looking like I was talking to myself. But I work in San Francisco - half the people walking down the street here are talking to themselves anyway, so the only difference is whether it's from cellphones or overuse of chemicals....
Out of curiousity, why does the slashdot.org summary page say "malignant carbon rod" and the article page say "inanimate carbon rod"? I was all set to post that the Reform Party candidate was highly likely to be the Malignant Carbon Rod himself, Pat Buchanan (unless by some chance the Transcendental Meditation Promotion Party candidate John Hagelin beats him, which Ross Perot almost deserves:-)
Ralph Nader is the Green Party candidate. The Green VP is Winona Laduke. Being decentralized folks, it's hard to tell if their main web site is Green-Party.org or Greens.org.
The Reform Party convention isn't till next week, so we don't know if their candidate will be notorious thug Pat Buchanan or Natural Law Party candidate John Hagelin, who's trying to get both nominations.
It makes a lot of difference - the Java security model is supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and I'm not aware of previous cracks of the model itself. Cracks of Netscape's implementation of the security model are a different issue - there have been problems before, and there may be others in the future, but they don't mean there's something fundamentally wrong with executable-in-a-sandbox scripting languages. Or is this something that wasn't a hole in Java 1.0 but has been broken between then and now?
Obviously non-sandboxed scripting languages like Javascript and ActiveX are a different kind of risk, and simply can't be trusted.
It'd be nice if the article header said what the Nautilus application was, for those readers not in the in crowd. I've heard of Eazel, who are trying to make Linux easier to use, though I haven't kept track of which thing Nautilus is. Once I waded through the slashdottedness of the site to look at the pictures, the couple I saw just looked like a file manager thing running in a browser. Slightly prettier than Netscape's default directory display, if you like that sort of GUI stuff, but if that's all it is, it's boring. What's does Nautilus DO?
Yes, it tweaked everyone, just like Dan Farmer naming his security tool SATAN got lots of publicity; naming either product "NetTool3" wouldn't have created any publicity, though its existence would still cause some publicity. But this let them be in your face about what they're doing, and about the fact that almost all ISPs they've asked have let them use it, except one that had technical difficulties, and that it's part of "da legitimate needs o' law enforcement". Janet Reno got to say "those crazy guys should have picked a better name" but still be in favor of rampant wiretapping.
As Sulli points out the law has changed. You can now export most crypto, including public-domain crypto without an export license or non-public-domain software with a one-time-review license. Even before that, they changed the law so crypto was no longer a munitions, primarily because we kept embarassing them with "munitions" T-shirts, "munitions" floppy disks, etc. They never did give Raph Levien the export permit for his T-shirts - nor did they return the shirts.:-)
Similarly, a major reason the law changed is be cause it was unconstitutional restriction on free speech, and we kept backing the government into a corner with lawsuits, lobbying, publicity, and free crypto programs - much thanks to Phil Zimmermann as well as all the academics from Diffie and Hellmann on who worked to get their crypto papers published in spite of NSA pressure on publishers.
DVDCSS is a different issue - there are some legitimate trade secret concerns (though the cat is out of the bag because of Norway's explicit exemptions for reverse engineering), rather than government-run censorship. But the DMCA Digital Millenium Copyright Act has some really terrible law that the Big Media folks got Congress to pass, and the provisions on copy protection are out of proportion and need to be overturned. They were designed to be abused by people like the RIAA and MPAA, and they're fulfilling their design goals:-)
It's fun having search engines with caching - they at least get the text, though the pictures may take a while to load unless your ISP also caches them. Here are some URLs:
I started getting major elbow pains when using the Sun optical mice. The low cost of them to Sun was made up for by the cost of extra tables, keyboard trays and whatever else I had to play around with to get a mostly pain-free environment, and eventually the Logitech Sun-compatible mouse helped a lot.
The contrast was especially annoying because I was also using the AT&T Bell Labs Blit workstation, which comes with the One True Mouse. It's red, it's almost-half-spherical, and the buttons are on the front (Not the front of the top, but the vertical front side.) It was made by some company in Switzerland. It felt perfect, let my hands be in a natural relaxed position, and didn't cause wrist strain while pushing the buttons. The original had a metal ball; it was followed by a cheaper version with a plastic ball that didn't work as well and needed cleaning more often, but it still was the right shape and felt right.
RIAA sued Napster saying "Make them stop and pay", and asked for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO), which is an order that says "The Judge agrees with the Plaintiff that you're probably going to lose this case, and you're having a major negative impact on the plaintif while you're operating, so stop now, and they'll post a bond to pay you back on the off chance you don't lose." Napster did an appeal to the higher court saying "No, we've got a decent chance of winning, here's why, overturn the TRO so we can keep running until the trial", and the appeals court appears to think there's enough chance that Napster won't lose that they'll let them keep operating. The reason is the difference of opinions the two courts have on
Napster's chance of losing the case
How much damage Napster is doing to RIAA
How much damage shutting down would do to Napster
How to balance damages and probabilities.
It may be that the appeals court also thinks Napster will lose, but that the damages are sufficiently unbalanced that they're overturning the TRO. And it makes a lot of difference whether the appeals court thinks Napster's odds are 49:51 or 1:99 or 75:25.
Evolution is a mail/calendar/addressbook Gnome app
on
Evolution 0.3 Released
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· Score: 2
"Evolution is the GNOME mailer, calendar, and addressbook application."
I find it really frustrating to have slashdot articles saying "FoobarWare Version 0.0.2 Is Now Available!" without saying what the FoobarWare project is. By the time something's been out on the street for a while, most people know what the name is (e.g. you don't need to explain what GNOME is), but for early development releases, the developers probably haven't done a big PR campaign and word-of-mouth hasn't spread much beyond the initial crowd of developers and their friends, so nobody knows if FooBarWare is a calendar program or a dessert topping synthesizer. So either you skip over the article, or read the first few comments (invariably about the need to fix the bug in the frobnifier routine), or you go slashdot the development site to find the one sentence summary that'd tell you whether you care about the two-paragraph description that gives you a good idea whether you want to read the detailed docs or download the code and start hacking on it.
No keyboard doesn't mean no text entry - it just means that the character input device isn't a mechanical keyboard, it's something else, typically stylus-based, which the operating system uses to hand characters to a device that wants them. It can either use a handwriting recognition program like Palm Graffiti or a hunt&peck stylus keyboard like Textware'sFITALY keyboard or a QWERTY stylus-pecking keyboard (which would be slower than fitaly, which is optimized for 1-finger use.) It does require some adaptation for applications that want Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift-Double-Bucky-F10, but there are ways to set stuff like that as well.
At the gym I go to, there are computers with touchscreens over some of the exercise bikes, and you can 1-finger type on them. It's a dog-slow way to enter anything, but fine for web browsing once you're past the first real URL, at least given the speed you read the web while biking.
He's rumored to be buried under the goal posts in the Meadowlands stadium in New Jersey. (He's also rumored to be buried just about anywhere else in New Jersey that has a large quantity of cement from the appropriate time frame, though he was also seen out on a date with Elvis, and having hot grits at a Cmdr's Taco stand with Natalie Portman.
When I was in college (late 70s), we had an NSA recruiting poster up in the computer lab. The graffiti added at the bottom said "You don't need to call us - if you're interested, we already know about you.":-)
Finally - something small enough to compete in coolness with the Minox B spy camera. Minox makes a variety of cameras, and the best place to find the classic Minox B is used on EBay, typically about $150-200US. They use 8x11mm film instead of 35mm, but they're extremely small, and come with a watch-chain that lets you measure the distance from those classified documents you're photographing. Here's a picture (on a Geocities page, which is likely to be less bothered by slashdotting than Minox's web site:-)
I've got a Toshiba Tecra 8100 portable with a Superdisk drive that fits in the removable-drive bay. I've currently got the CDROM in there instead, and this is the first thing I've seen that's a real motivation to use the Superdisk/floppy instead, since most new software installs from CD instead of floppy these days. I'll be able to run Linux without risking Partition Magic or other repartition-in-place tools.
(Why did I pick that machine? Bureaucrats from the Great Headquarters In New Jersey decided that people in the field needed 5.5-pound over-spec'd shoulder-breaking machines instead of 2.5-pound good-enough machines:-) They also decided we needed all 12GB of disk in one big Win98 partition to harass leftover MSDOS programs and people who want Linux partitions for tools in addition to Win98 for office apps...
The FBI can claim that their actions at various ISPs are part of ongoing investigations, so those ISPs that have seen the box may not be able to talk. But the design of the box is fair game for FOIA - whether they built it themselves or contracted it out. So the ACLU is doing a FOIA request to find out about the box, its design, what it can and can't do and what it does besides what it's authorized to do, etc.
Yeah. If you've got a court order telling you to connect the thing, you can fight it in court. But if they don't have a court order or warrant, and they're trying to bully you into cooperating without it, there's appropriate equipment around to plug it into.....
A friend of mine would like to find a usable speech-based program that runs on Linux. He's not concerned about it being a free package - he can't type due to wrist problems, and he wants to do his work on Linux, and not have to run a Microsoft operating system for that, but most of the speech packages like Dragon only run on Windows variants. Is there anything usable that's been ported to Linux, or can you run any of the packages in Windows over VMLinux and have them usefully connect back to Unix processes running on VMLinux?
Voice User Interfaces involve three main research areas:
How to do speech recognition at all
How natural languages express meaning using words and sentences
How to integrate sophisticated speech recognition into user interfaces that will be useful/meaningful/interesting for users.
Research tends to happen either at universities or at commercial research labs like Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, and IBM, where people can spend a long time looking at hard problems; while that can happen in an open academic-type environment or a closed intellectual-property-hoarding secret laBoratory, research is a much different environment from design or implementation, which are closer to what open-source development processes are good at, which are things that amateurs can do using their own resources or that professionals (including advanced college students) can do that piggybacks off their own work, like hacking operating systems or compilers. We're fortunate that enough of the development of speech recognition has been open so it's accessible for use - learning how people make phonemes with their mouths, words out of phonemes and sentences out of words is an immense job if you have to reinvent it.
Early user interfaces were simple - if your recognizer can only do 10-20 words, it doesn't take deep design research to design an interface - telephone companies do obvious things with 0-9/yes/no/help, and computer interfaces pick a dozen Mostly Harmless commands so that a misrecognized command or somebody walking down the hall talking doesn't trigger "rm -rf/", it just triggers ls or "play cd" or something. But now that voice recognition can handle vocabularies of hundreds or thousands of words, depending on your taste in accuracy and user-specific training, figuring out what good designs for interfacing with voice users that make sense in the environments you expect them to use is a large set of research problems. Open source is ok for doing implementations of specific proposals for what that interface should look like, and pretty good for tweaking existing designs to do more things, and really excellent for connecting the voice interface up to other things that are already written. But overall, it's a design problem, not a hacking problem.
As far as things I'd see that are useful that voice recognition interfaces can do, some are pretty obvious, like cellphone dialers and dictation tools - you'd like to tell your handsfree phone "call Alice" while you're driving, and have it look up Alice in a database, rather than typing or saying "+1-987-655-3210, er, umm that was 654-3210". (Some cellphone companies provide this - it's not based in your handset, but at the cellphone company's end, using a database lookup on your phone numebr to retrieve your voice settings and your list of names and phone numbers. If you're the canonical carpal-tunnel-abusing hacker, you'd like to dictate some of that business plan by voice using a voice editor that can stitch together words you've recycled from previous documents instead of having to mouse it in.
Beyond that there's a lot of open territory - it'd be nice to be able to walk down the street with a headset on or sit at a desk with a speakerphone or headset and tell your computers what you want them to do, who you want to communicate with, have them tell you stuff you want to know, etc. It's not a direct substitute for reading off a screen and pointing with a mouse; it'll change your workstyle just like adding GUIs and getting cellphones did.
Some of this sounds like time-zone issues, especially coming out with an article dated 4:04 when I think it's still 3:28pm:-) Shouldn't be happening much, but maybe the slashware isn't expecting some posters to be in non-standard timezones, or maybe their clock glitched.
What are you trying to _do_ with an 80GB drive? If you're going for maximum playback or recording rate for streaming material, that's one thing; going for fast seek times for an SQL database is another, and file systems are also different.
RPMs matter for video, in that they help a drive crank out data at a high rate, but that also depends on how much data is on a track (and controllers and such). An 80GB drive probably has lot more per track than the once-fuge-and-fast 10GB 7200RPM drives you need for video, so going 5400RPM instead of 7200 probably isn't a big difference, because it's probably still fast enough for real-time.
Most Unix and other file systems tend to be optimized to minimize seek time. This is because back when the theory developed, in the mid 80s, seek times were a lot slower than rotational latency, and you dealt with rotational latency by track caching, especially as memory got cheap enough to cache tracks in the disk drive's controller. Margo Seltzer did some work in the early 90s showing that this was no longer really the case - seek times were down under 10ms, and rotation speeds were mostly 3600rpm, with newer drives using 5400, which meant average rotational delay was 6-8ms. This means that it makes more sense to schedule disk accesses based on expected rotational latency as well as seek time between tracks, because they're now of similar magnitude. That was a few years ago, and seek times have gotten a bit faster, and RPMs have gotten higher, so if you're trying to do cutting-edge random-access file system performance, yeah, you want the high-RPM drive. But if you've got a spare 64MB of RAM for disk cache, you'll optimize most of that away. And if you're using the 80GB for high-performance SQL databases, you can't wait for moving parts anyway, so you've spent the extra thousand dollars for the extra GB of RAM.
If speed is a problem, use a system based on RC4-128 encryption instead of Blowfish. It's strong enough if used correctly (i.e. unlike MS PPTP's use), and blazingly fast. There are also some other AES candidate algorithms that are respectably fast.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the keyboard input may be replaceable with voice recognition; this is a natural match for a cellphone that's already doing digitized voice, and voice-recorders are an especially good match, since the phone is already doing good voice compression at less than 1KB/sec.
But some of the limitations are simply because technology isn't good enough. Pagers run for a month on a small battery, while good PDAs like Palm or Psion run a few weeks to a month on larger batteries, cellphones run a day to a week on rechargables, and Microsoft Palm PCs apparently run less than a day on their batteries. Nokia 6160 was the first cell phone I saw that claimed to run a week in standby mode - long enough I could trust it for a couple of days as a pager. Radio systems are also much different - pagers work almost everywhere, and the radio signalling is simple and dumb enough that they can work inside most buildings. But cell phones need much better radio reception, don't work well inside buildings, and coverage in many areas is much worse (depending on carrier), and CDPD has even more limited coverage. Some of these technology gaps may get fixed with basic engineering progress, like battery power - I don't know if converged devices will need to have multiple battery systems (e.g. a long-term battery for memory and pager, a larger shorter-life battery for phone calls, etc.)
When I got the headsets for my cellphone,
I could walk down the street looking like I was talking to myself. But I work in San Francisco - half the people walking down the street here are talking to themselves anyway, so the only difference is whether it's from cellphones or overuse of chemicals....
Out of curiousity, why does the slashdot.org summary page say "malignant carbon rod" and the article page say "inanimate carbon rod"? I was all set to post that the Reform Party candidate was highly likely to be the Malignant Carbon Rod himself, Pat Buchanan (unless by some chance the Transcendental Meditation Promotion Party candidate John Hagelin beats him, which Ross Perot almost deserves :-)
Ralph Nader is the Green Party candidate. The Green VP is Winona Laduke. Being decentralized folks, it's hard to tell if their main web site is Green-Party.org or Greens.org.
The Reform Party convention isn't till next week, so we don't know if their candidate will be notorious thug Pat Buchanan or Natural Law Party candidate John Hagelin, who's trying to get both nominations.
Has anybody checked which Netscape versions are susceptible? (or for that matter IE versions?)
Obviously non-sandboxed scripting languages like Javascript and ActiveX are a different kind of risk, and simply can't be trusted.
It'd be nice if the article header said what the Nautilus application was, for those readers not in the in crowd. I've heard of Eazel, who are trying to make Linux easier to use, though I haven't kept track of which thing Nautilus is. Once I waded through the slashdottedness of the site to look at the pictures, the couple I saw just looked like a file manager thing running in a browser. Slightly prettier than Netscape's default directory display, if you like that sort of GUI stuff, but if that's all it is, it's boring. What's does Nautilus DO?
Yes, it tweaked everyone, just like Dan Farmer naming his security tool SATAN got lots of publicity; naming either product "NetTool3" wouldn't have created any publicity, though its existence would still cause some publicity. But this let them be in your face about what they're doing, and about the fact that almost all ISPs they've asked have let them use it, except one that had technical difficulties, and that it's part of "da legitimate needs o' law enforcement". Janet Reno got to say "those crazy guys should have picked a better name" but still be in favor of rampant wiretapping.
Similarly, a major reason the law changed is be cause it was unconstitutional restriction on free speech, and we kept backing the government into a corner with lawsuits, lobbying, publicity, and free crypto programs - much thanks to Phil Zimmermann as well as all the academics from Diffie and Hellmann on who worked to get their crypto papers published in spite of NSA pressure on publishers.
DVDCSS is a different issue - there are some legitimate trade secret concerns (though the cat is out of the bag because of Norway's explicit exemptions for reverse engineering), rather than government-run censorship. But the DMCA Digital Millenium Copyright Act has some really terrible law that the Big Media folks got Congress to pass, and the provisions on copy protection are out of proportion and need to be overturned. They were designed to be abused by people like the RIAA and MPAA, and they're fulfilling their design goals :-)
The contrast was especially annoying because I was also using the AT&T Bell Labs Blit workstation, which comes with the One True Mouse. It's red, it's almost-half-spherical, and the buttons are on the front (Not the front of the top, but the vertical front side.) It was made by some company in Switzerland. It felt perfect, let my hands be in a natural relaxed position, and didn't cause wrist strain while pushing the buttons. The original had a metal ball; it was followed by a cheaper version with a plastic ball that didn't work as well and needed cleaning more often, but it still was the right shape and felt right.
It may be that the appeals court also thinks Napster will lose, but that the damages are sufficiently unbalanced that they're overturning the TRO. And it makes a lot of difference whether the appeals court thinks Napster's odds are 49:51 or 1:99 or 75:25.
Judge Patel, of course, was the excellent judge in the Dan Bernstein Crypto Export case.
"Evolution is the GNOME mailer, calendar, and addressbook application."
I find it really frustrating to have slashdot articles saying "FoobarWare Version 0.0.2 Is Now Available!" without saying what the FoobarWare project is. By the time something's been out on the street for a while, most people know what the name is (e.g. you don't need to explain what GNOME is), but for early development releases, the developers probably haven't done a big PR campaign and word-of-mouth hasn't spread much beyond the initial crowd of developers and their friends, so nobody knows if FooBarWare is a calendar program or a dessert topping synthesizer.
So either you skip over the article, or read the first few comments (invariably about the need to fix the bug in the frobnifier routine), or you go slashdot the development site to find the one sentence summary that'd tell you whether you care about the two-paragraph description that gives you a good idea whether you want to read the detailed docs or download the code and start hacking on it.
At the gym I go to, there are computers with touchscreens over some of the exercise bikes, and you can 1-finger type on them. It's a dog-slow way to enter anything, but fine for web browsing once you're past the first real URL, at least given the speed you read the web while biking.
He's rumored to be buried under the goal posts in the Meadowlands stadium in New Jersey. (He's also rumored to be buried just about anywhere else in New Jersey that has a large quantity of cement from the appropriate time frame, though he was also seen out on a date with Elvis, and having hot grits at a Cmdr's Taco stand with Natalie Portman.
When I was in college (late 70s), we had an NSA recruiting poster up in the computer lab. The graffiti added at the bottom said "You don't need to call us - if you're interested, we already know about you." :-)
Finally - something small enough to compete in coolness with the Minox B spy camera. Minox makes a variety of cameras, and the best place to find the classic Minox B is used on EBay, typically about $150-200US. They use 8x11mm film instead of 35mm, but they're extremely small, and come with a watch-chain that lets you measure the distance from those classified documents you're photographing. Here's a picture (on a Geocities page, which is likely to be less bothered by slashdotting than Minox's web site :-)
(Why did I pick that machine? Bureaucrats from the Great Headquarters In New Jersey decided that people in the field needed 5.5-pound over-spec'd shoulder-breaking machines instead of 2.5-pound good-enough machines :-) They also decided we needed all 12GB of disk in one big Win98 partition to harass leftover MSDOS programs and people who want Linux partitions for tools in addition to Win98 for office apps...
The FBI can claim that their actions at various ISPs are part of ongoing investigations, so those ISPs that have seen the box may not be able to talk. But the design of the box is fair game for FOIA - whether they built it themselves or contracted it out. So the ACLU is doing a FOIA request to find out about the box, its design, what it can and can't do and what it does besides what it's authorized to do, etc.
Yeah. If you've got a court order telling you to connect the thing, you can fight it in court. But if they don't have a court order or warrant, and they're trying to bully you into cooperating without it, there's appropriate equipment around to plug it into.....
A friend of mine would like to find a usable speech-based program that runs on Linux. He's not concerned about it being a free package - he can't type due to wrist problems, and he wants to do his work on Linux, and not have to run a Microsoft operating system for that, but most of the speech packages like Dragon only run on Windows variants. Is there anything usable that's been ported to Linux, or can you run any of the packages in Windows over VMLinux and have them usefully connect back to Unix processes running on VMLinux?
- How to do speech recognition at all
- How natural languages express meaning using words and sentences
- How to integrate sophisticated speech recognition into user interfaces that will be useful/meaningful/interesting for users.
Research tends to happen either at universities or at commercial research labs like Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, and IBM, where people can spend a long time looking at hard problems; while that can happen in an open academic-type environment or a closed intellectual-property-hoarding secret laBoratory, research is a much different environment from design or implementation, which are closer to what open-source development processes are good at, which are things that amateurs can do using their own resources or that professionals (including advanced college students) can do that piggybacks off their own work, like hacking operating systems or compilers. We're fortunate that enough of the development of speech recognition has been open so it's accessible for use - learning how people make phonemes with their mouths, words out of phonemes and sentences out of words is an immense job if you have to reinvent it.Early user interfaces were simple - if your recognizer can only do 10-20 words, it doesn't take deep design research to design an interface - telephone companies do obvious things with 0-9/yes/no/help, and computer interfaces pick a dozen Mostly Harmless commands so that a misrecognized command or somebody walking down the hall talking doesn't trigger "rm -rf /", it just triggers ls or "play cd" or something. But now that voice recognition can handle vocabularies of hundreds or thousands of words, depending on your taste in accuracy and user-specific training, figuring out what good designs for interfacing with voice users that make sense in the environments you expect them to use is a large set of research problems. Open source is ok for doing implementations of specific proposals for what that interface should look like, and pretty good for tweaking existing designs to do more things, and really excellent for connecting the voice interface up to other things that are already written. But overall, it's a design problem, not a hacking problem.
As far as things I'd see that are useful that voice recognition interfaces can do, some are pretty obvious, like cellphone dialers and dictation tools - you'd like to tell your handsfree phone "call Alice" while you're driving, and have it look up Alice in a database, rather than typing or saying "+1-987-655-3210, er, umm that was 654-3210". (Some cellphone companies provide this - it's not based in your handset, but at the cellphone company's end, using a database lookup on your phone numebr to retrieve your voice settings and your list of names and phone numbers. If you're the canonical carpal-tunnel-abusing hacker, you'd like to dictate some of that business plan by voice using a voice editor that can stitch together words you've recycled from previous documents instead of having to mouse it in.
Beyond that there's a lot of open territory - it'd be nice to be able to walk down the street with a headset on or sit at a desk with a speakerphone or headset and tell your computers what you want them to do, who you want to communicate with, have them tell you stuff you want to know, etc. It's not a direct substitute for reading off a screen and pointing with a mouse; it'll change your workstyle just like adding GUIs and getting cellphones did.
Some of this sounds like time-zone issues, especially coming out with an article dated 4:04 when I think it's still 3:28pm :-)
Shouldn't be happening much, but maybe the slashware isn't expecting some posters to be in non-standard timezones, or maybe their clock glitched.
RPMs matter for video, in that they help a drive crank out data at a high rate, but that also depends on how much data is on a track (and controllers and such). An 80GB drive probably has lot more per track than the once-fuge-and-fast 10GB 7200RPM drives you need for video, so going 5400RPM instead of 7200 probably isn't a big difference, because it's probably still fast enough for real-time.
Most Unix and other file systems tend to be optimized to minimize seek time. This is because back when the theory developed, in the mid 80s, seek times were a lot slower than rotational latency, and you dealt with rotational latency by track caching, especially as memory got cheap enough to cache tracks in the disk drive's controller. Margo Seltzer did some work in the early 90s showing that this was no longer really the case - seek times were down under 10ms, and rotation speeds were mostly 3600rpm, with newer drives using 5400, which meant average rotational delay was 6-8ms. This means that it makes more sense to schedule disk accesses based on expected rotational latency as well as seek time between tracks, because they're now of similar magnitude. That was a few years ago, and seek times have gotten a bit faster, and RPMs have gotten higher, so if you're trying to do cutting-edge random-access file system performance, yeah, you want the high-RPM drive. But if you've got a spare 64MB of RAM for disk cache, you'll optimize most of that away. And if you're using the 80GB for high-performance SQL databases, you can't wait for moving parts anyway, so you've spent the extra thousand dollars for the extra GB of RAM.
If speed is a problem, use a system based on RC4-128 encryption instead of Blowfish. It's strong enough if used correctly (i.e. unlike MS PPTP's use), and blazingly fast. There are also some other AES candidate algorithms that are respectably fast.