Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • Terabyte is here

    As promised at CES 2007, Hitachi has formally unveiled the first 1.0 Terabyte hard drive. Watch for Seagate to follow in a few weeks with their own 1 TB model.

    UPDATE: Anandtech has done a lot more benchmarking, including a pointless RAID 0 diversion, and concludes:

    Our experiences over the past few weeks with the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 have been terrific. The overall performance of this drive is excellent and close enough to the WD1500ADFD Raptor drive that we consider it a worthy adversary in most situations. The Raptors are still the drives to own for most benchmarking purposes or those simply wanting the best overall performance in a SATA drive regardless of price or capacity, but the reduced capacity and higher noise levels are certainly a drawback.

    We consider the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 the best 7200rpm drive we have tested to date. This is quite the accomplishment considering this is Hitachi’s first 3.5″ form factor drive that utilizes perpendicular recording technology. We found the write performance and sustained transfer rates to be excellent and class leading in several of our test results. The drive also offers a very balanced blend of performance across a wide variety of business and home applications. The 7K1000 even has the best overall thermal and acoustic characteristics of the high performance 7200rpm drives in our tests. For these reasons, we award the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 our Gold Editors’ Choice award and highly recommend the purchase of this drive if you are currently looking for a high-capacity drive with performance to match.

    Welcome to the golden age of file storage. It only gets better from here. Bonus nail in the coffin of RAID 0, to boot.

  • Serenity now

    Man, I kind of wanted to be Wash. But this is pretty good too:


    You are Malcolm Reynolds (Captain)

    Honest and a defender of the innocent. You sometimes make mistakes in judgment but you are generally good and would protect your crew from harm.

    Click here to take the “Which Serenity character are you?” quiz…

  • branch large support

    I recently came across the following phrase in Kanji: 枝大支

    The Fish translates this as “branch large support” but that’s just the literal translation; I am sure this is some kind of reference to something else but am unable to find out what. I wonder if anyone might know what the phrase really means. I am reminded of my favorite Chinese restaurant, which has the symbols 大四川 emblazoned across it, which a Chinese friend tells me means, “big four rivers” (a reference to Szechuan province cuisine). Oddly, according to the Fish, 川 is Japanese kanji and not traditional Chinese. I confess that I have ni idea what I am talking about. At any rate,I suspect that the kanji above also have some meaning beyond the literal, and any help in figuring this out would be much appreciated.

  • Anamnesis

    In the course of some friendly trash-talk during a hypercompetitive game of Go, my esteemed opponent Arwen taught me a new word: anamnesis. From context and the similarity to amnesia, I understood the context, but it also rang a bell somewhere in the depths of my mind, piquing my curiosity enough that I turned to Google. In a modern medical context, it means reclaimed memory and experiences, but it turns out that the term was in fact coined by Plato (who just recently made an appearance here on Haibane.info, my three regular readers may recall). From Wikipedia:

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  • Kurt Vonnegut, 84

    Rest in peace. I can’t think of a better tribute to Vonnegut than this writeup at AICN. Though the news comes too late for tomorrow’s Writer’s Almanac, I expect Garrison Keillor to rise to the occasion on Friday’s broadcast as well.

    Vonnegut is of course rightly lauded for Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), which took him 25 years to write, as a means of excising the demons he bore by witnessing the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden. That book, along with Catch-22, probably did more to influence my politics and view of war than any other piece of literature or political treatise. But the piece I remember most was actually his 1961 short story, Harrison Bergeron, which remains the most razor-sharp indictment of the false cult of equality that anyone has ever wielded. I praise it as a political liberal, mind you. As a witness to the madness of war and culture, he had no equal in speaking truth to self-deception.

    So long, Pilgrim. Knock ’em dead on Trafalmadore. So it goes… so it goes.

  • Twitter

    I joined up with Twitter several months ago, and have essentially never used it. I see that I am not alone in considering its stated rationale kind of pointless. Do any of my friends actually care what I am up to moment-by-moment? If anything I already have a (less fine-grained) system for that, in my google chat status message, which I populate with all sorts of things as my mood strikes me. And I know I have a lot more (vetted) friends on Google than I will ever recruit on Twitter.

    (as an aside, a javascript badge to display your Google Chat status on your web site would be mondo cool.)

    I am however impressed by Twitter’s technical backend; essentially a device-agnostic messaging system, that lets you essentially blog via IM, cell phone text, or web interface (provided each “post” is only 140 characters long). This suggests that Twitter could be thought less of a social tool and more of a general one that can be easily re-purposed, for example as performance art. I’ve decided to hijack Twitter myself, to use it akin to the old UNIX fortune command, only mine will be populated by great song lyric lines.

    If you look on the sidebar, you’ll see a new section called Lyrical; that’s powered by javascript (which I had to hack the code a bit from their example). I wanted something unobtrusive and easily integrated. Now, whenever I get the urge to preserve a great lyric, I can just IM it or cell text it to my Twitter account and it will automatically update on my blog sidebar. This is really kind of impressive if you think about it. At any rate, it’s a cool toy and until I find something even more interesting to use it for, I shall enjoy the freedom of music, one line at a time.

    UPDATE: Removed it from my sidebar. Took way too long for the javascript to update, it was slowing down the whole page load. I might add it as an RSS feed module instead.

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  • Drink to long health

    This just in: caffeine may help prevent Parkinson’s disease:

    A new case study published […] in the Archives of Neurology has examined the prevalence of PD, smoking, caffeine, and NSAID usage in 356 patients and 317 of their family members. The study, conducted by a team at Duke University Medical Center, found that although there was no link between PD and NSAID usage, both smoking and caffeine intake were inversely related to PD.

    I hven’t bothered to grab the original study off PubMed yet but an Ars Technica reader did post the results from the paper, so I’ve copied them into extended entry if you’re interested.

    of course, caffeine might well have long term health effects that make Parkinson’s seem tame; certainly that is the case with smoking. But as a justification for my third cup already this morning, this news works for me.

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  • beta-test a GPS

    If you’re a hard-core commuter, or just a geek with a love of driving, then this might interest you:

    Dash Navigation is giving out 2000 GPS units for a free six-month test drive. Geeks and “heavy commuters” can go to the Dash.net website to sign up for a free Dash Express navigation unit. The company recently completed a preliminary test in Silicon Valley and thinks the Internet-connected unit is ready for the big time.

    The Dash Express is unlike other GPS units because it constantly accesses the Internet and also other Dash Express units for updated traffic and location information. You can think of it as peer-to-peer navigation.

    This is a great concept. I’ve long thought that there needs to be a way to bring realtime traffic into the car; Houston Transtar is a great example of a informative display that is just begging to be integrated onto the dash. This could be the killer GPS app.

  • laser HDTV

    My inlaws recently bought a plasma HDTV – a nice 50″ Samsung model. The purchase was the impetus for me to learn a little about the various flavors of HDTV out there; plasma, LCD, etc. In a nutshell, I learned that DLP had the best picture and color, and is thinner than old-style CRT but still cannot be hung on a wall. Plasma is the cheapest, can be hung on a wall, and has great image contrast, but may suffer from image burn in and must be replaced in total if the screen breaks, it cannot be repaired. Finally, LCD has great image quality, is thin enough to wall-mount, and has no burn-in issues, but is vastly more expensive.

    Now comes along a fourth technology, laser TV:

    Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Novalux Inc. is one of the main developers of the upcoming laser TV technology, and promises that its products will deliver appreciable benefits over plasma, LCD and CRT televisions. When compared to plasma and LCD, laser TV technology boasts half the production cost, double the color range, and three-quarters less power consumption.
    […]
    One area where laser TV may give up to the flat panel technologies plasma and LCD is in profile. The thin profile of flat panels allows users to hang their televisions on a wall, like a picture or painting. Rear projection televisions, by nature, are thicker than flat panels, but thanks to recent developments in the DLP market and the weight savings of laser technology, clever manufacturers may be able to put laser TVs on the wall too.

    “The one that Sony had on the show floor was one that they built themselves using our lasers, and it was a thin cabinet TV – maybe 8 to 10-inches – thin enough to mount on the wall,” Niven added.

    It remains to be seen whether the manufacturers succeed in making laser TVs thin enough to wall-mount, but even so, 10-inches thick is pretty impressive. The power consumption angle is also particularly interesting as a selling point. These TVs should start to appear in 2008.

  • the barista hates you

    Slashfood’s coffee-blogging is right up my alley. A good friend recently introduced me to the delights of Red Bull, but when I tried to buy some at a local Kroger I got major sticker shock. So for now my routine is brewed coffee at home or the office, with the occasional treat of Starbucks when good company presents itself.

    Still, I labor under no illusions that the barista corps have any love lost for me or my triple venti blended nonfat dolce (with no whipped cream, thank you) pretensions. Check out this righteous rant at Romenesko’s Starbucks Gossip blog – one of my favorite excerpts:

    Quit bitching about the names of everything. Yes, there is a “tall” size. No, it’s not the smallest size – that would be the “short.” Somewhere along the line, it got dropped from the menu, but can still be ordered. It doesn’t make much sense to me either, but I didn’t come up with the nomenclature for this s%$t. Order by the names on the menu, because I’ve had people ask for a “medium coffee” and get inexplicably pissed off when I give them a grande. Which is a medium coffee.
    […]
    If you order a Frappuccino, I will hate you even more.

    What would happen if I tried to order a half-double decaffeinated half cap (with a twist of lemon)?