Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • 1.5 TB for the desk, SSD for the road

    it’s even got it’s own gravitational field:

    The new Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB HDD is 50 percent larger than the 1TB desktop drives available today, while the 500GB Momentus drives (available in 5400rpm and 7200rpm flavors) are 56 percent larger than the current high-capacity 320GB 2.5″ laptop drives.
    …
    The main difference between the new 1.5TB drive and the 1TB ST31000340AS already available is their platter density. Both disks are four-platter designs, but the 1TB drive uses four 250GB platters, while the new 1.5TB is apparently using four 375GB platters.
    …
    We could see modest increases through the end of the year, but 2TB before 2009 is a toss-up. 500GB platters are probably still a ways away, and while a 5x400GB platter configuration would do the trick, the first generation 1TB five platter drives tended to run hotter and noisier than the units that the followed.

    I am fully aware that in five years someone will link to this post and guffaw at what a rube we all were for being impressed by this. I think Ars is being conservative here – someone is sure to roll out a 2TB drive (on 5 platters) before the end of the year. If not Seagate, then Hitachi.

    While the desktop drive is noteworthy for its sheer size, the laptop drive doesn’t impress me at all, however. The future of laptop drives is SSD and SSD alone (I say this without irony, even though I just bought a 250 GB drive for my own laptop a few months ago). The far more important news on that front is that Samsung is opening the flood gates of volume production:

    Seoul, Korea – July 9, 2008: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, announced today that it has begun mass producing 1.8- and 2.5-inch multi-level cell (MLC)-based solid state drives (SSD) with a 128 Gigabyte (GB) storage capacity. Mass production of the Samsung MLC-based 64GB SSD also began this month.
    …
    Power consumption for the Samsung SSD is exceptionally low in standby mode at approximately 0.2 watts and in active mode at 0.5 watts. The Samsung MLC-based SSD has a write speed of 70MB/s and a read speed of 90MB/s.

    Somehow I don’t think SSDs will ever supplant 3.5″ on the desktop, though I do think that eventually 2.5″ will become desktop standard. So the progress by Seagate on pushing the envelope on the notebook drive capacity is still relevant.

  • the paper-user

    Is it just wrong that the first thing I thought of when I saw this was Read or Die?

    Gandhi

    Since Gandhi was a lawyer, you might argue that Gandhi did literally have to read, or die, for freedom.

  • epic fail? 12 Kingdoms vs Escaflowne

    Pete rags a bit on 12 Kingdoms (not entirely undeservedly). He notes that the system of rule (divine powers enforcing a strict and literal connection to the rulers of each kingdom) is a giant straight-jacket, but that’s entirely the point and in fact the only logical outcome of taking the Chinese theology literally. When you blur the lines between heaven and earth, then heaven’s decrees become part of daily life – and by their very nature, divine will means law. None of that pussyfooting around with interpretations, ijtihad, or whatnot.

    In a nutshell, 12 Kingdoms is an attempt to create a “perfect” system of governance, wherein the rulers of a kingdom are held directly accountable not to the masses, but to the higher powers from which they derive their authority. He that giveth also taketh away.

    As far as being too-epic-y, I think that 12 Kingdoms is less guilty of trying too hard than Escaflowne (which after my initial disenchantment with, I am now 3 discs in and thoroughly enjoying). The epic layers of 12K get added slowly, as Youko’s horizons slowly expand with her travels. In Escaflowne, Hitomi is dropped right into the thick of things and the first disc is like a firehose of information about Gaea. Hitomi hooks up with the movers and shakers of the new world right away and is at the literal center of action, whereas Youko ascends gradually, from pawn to player. In a lot of ways I am more free to enjoy Escaflowne because having seen the atrocious movie, I know much of the backstory already, and so am not floundering trying to get my bearings (a problem that never went away with Serial Experiments Lain. Now there’s a series that might benefit from a movie treatment…).

  • used anime bleg

    If anyone out there has the following series that they are no longer watching or using, I am interested in buying your copy:

    – Kino’s Journeys
    – Bottle Fairy
    – Someday’s Dreamers (esp volume 2)
    – any Miyazaki
    – anything else you think might be suitable for young girls.

    Kino is for me, everything else is for Mini Otaku and Baby Otaku. Please let me know!

  • bit.ly and folksonomy

    I noticed a few links on Twitter using bit.ly for url shortening rather than the old standby tinyurl and was intrigued. RWW raved about the service as well, mainly because it makes an attempt to categorize links using semantic algorithms. I took a look and have to admit that one other feature of bit.ly stands out – the ability to define your own link code. In one sense this is kind of a bad thing, because it is Yet Another Namespace that everyone with a brand or trademark would do well to rush to grab (assuming the service does take off, which I am still a bit skeptical about). For example, bit.ly/blog and bit.ly/islam are now taken, pointing to various blogs of mine as an experiment (I note with satisfaction that the Obama campaign already is on top of this and has grabbed bit.ly/obama).

    At RWW, Marshall says that bit.ly’s semantic classification of links makes it the tool of the future:

    Bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters! Calais is something we’ve written about extensively here. Bit.ly will use Calais to determine the general category and specific subjects of all the pages its users create shortcuts to. That information will be freely available to the developer community using XML and JSON APIs as well.

    I can’t share in Marshall’s enthusiasm however because I don’t see the semantic categorization as innately useful. I’ve blogged before about why folksonomies are the key to web 3.0, and all bit.ly is doing is generating a taxonomy for its links, not levarging the power of folksonomy. In a sense, by letting users define their own link code, bit.ly is sitting on top of an intrinsic mechanism for folksonomy already, by simply treating the codes that users assign to their links as folksonomic tags. I hope that they recognize the value of those custom codes, and not get too enamoured of and distracted by the magic word “semantic”.

    Whether bit.ly gains traction is of course not going to be driven by fringe features such as geotagging and semantics (ie, metadata), but rather by how easy it is to integrate teh service into other tools that users actually, well, use. TinyURL rode the Twitter wave to prominence, since it is the default url-shortener service (automatically invoked when you tweet, with no user intervention required). Similar services like is.gd, which have a much simpler API and are theoretically more robust in their namespaces, still haven’t broken into the market much yet, even though they also have teh requisite bookmarklets and firefox extensions already. If bit.ly wants to make inroads it needs to become the default URL service for a hot web app like Friendfeed, or even contract with twitter itself to become a user-specified alternative to tinyurl. I think that it would make sense to try for partnership with friendfeed, actually, because then the link history can be integrated into the user’s profile and browsed like any other service. If bit.ly doesn’t support RSS feeds of its user’s linkages, they should.)

    Overall, there are plenty of services out there but the thing to remember is that none shoudl be thought of as genuinely archival. A shortened URL should be a tool of convenience, but don’t expect that link to work forever. In one sense its better for there to be many such services rather than one to rule them all, which is why I am glad to see another competitor to TinyURL emerge. The rest is just icing on the cake (and hopefully a spur towards further innovation).

  • Enter the GPS

    This is our second week in Madison and already one difference between here and Marshfield is readiy apparent: this place takes more than 5 minutes to drive across. It’s been particularly difficult for my wife who has to drive to several different clinics across town for her resident duties, so we finally decided to buy a GPS unit in lieu of having her call me throughout the day for quick Google Maps consultations. We picked up a Garmin Nuvi 260 at WalMart (mainly because they had a no-restock-fee return policy) to evaluate and I have to admit it’s been pretty useful thus far. For her, it’s handy because it helps her get to where she needs to go, when she doesn’t know how to get there. For me, it’s let me attempt an unfamiliar route to a place I do know how to get to already. I confess to having been skeptical at first, but I can see the value-add even though I largely pride myself on my independent sense of direction. To be honest, the GPS hasn’t actually given me any new information in terms of a better route anywhere, but it was still nice to have just in case.

    Garmin nüvi 360    I am planning to return the Nuvi 260 to WalMart though – for the price, we can get a much better deal on a Nuvi 360 at Amazon, which adds mp3 playback and bluetooth for hands-free dialing. I think that this will be very useful later on in the year when we take various trips such as to Indianapolis for a conference, or elsewhere. My main concern was that I don’t become dependent on it and let my own navigating skills atrophy, but now that we’ve played with the 260 a bit I can see that this won’t happen. It’s an information multiplier, not a crutch.

  • for great justice

    Steve Gillmor celebrates Independence Day by heralding the arrival of the Enterprise iPhone (or ePhone) by Apple. I guess I was wrong, the Singularity and Transhumanism really are here after all.

  • welcome to Verona, WI

    moving sucks. but we are almost done unpacking. In a week we will have figured out the rhythm of where the stuff is and adapted our routines, but this is gonna be a strange week.

  • plugin wanted: Author Tags

    Had another idea for a useful plugin – what is needed is a plugin that creates a tag cloud/tag list on a per author basis. This would be especially useful for group blogging sites (like Talk Islam). The plugin would ideally allow a simple function call with arguments:

    – user name (login)
    – number of tags (defaults to 5)
    – list or cloud format (defaults to list)
    – list delimiter (defaults to ” | “)

    On a bio page or About page, this would be very cool because it would let you see at a glance what topics each author blogs about most.

  • to tide us over until 2009

    I’ve got a lot to say about the Galactica mid-seson finale, but that requires time which a day prior to moving house) i don’t have at present. In teh absence of original content I will however point to some very good speculative (and highly spoilery) blogs that purport to analyze the Final Supper image and divine the identity of the Final Cylon:

    Space Westerns applies a highly geometric analysis to the Last Supper photo.

    BSG Last Supper is an entire blog devoted to analyzing the picture.

    Cellounge is a blog ostensibly devoted to Japanese cars, however they have a lengthy analysis of the Last Supper using Leonardo Da Vinci’s original as a guide.

    I’m pleased to see my earlier speculation is not invalidated by any of these analyses.