Haibane.info

Category: Geek service

  • Dell coupon codes

    As a Dell affiliate, I get periodic emails about new offers and discounts. If you’re in the market for a new laptop or desktop, this is a good time of year to take the plunge.

    Dell XPS deals

    Dell Inspiron coupon codes

    However, Dell’s new Latitude XT tablet PC seems like a pretty poor value. It’s priced over $1000 more than a comparable Lenovo ThinkPad X61, though it is thinner and has a cool capacitive touch screen.

  • wireless monitors

    This will make it a lot easier to plop your laptop on your desk at home and start working: wireless display adapters:

    According to DisplayLink, there will be no performance penalty for using a wireless monitor, and displays will function at resolutions of up to 1680×1050 at 16.7 million colors. The actual wireless USB chip is produced by Alereon—that’s where the partnership comes in—but both companies seem confident that they can deliver a high-quality visual experience without noticeable tear or artifacts. DisplayLink’s products aren’t suitable for gaming or other functions that depend on split-second reaction times, but the company claims that DVD playback is flawless, even over its new wireless USB 2 technology.

    By all accounts, DisplayLink’s current wired USB 2 technology works quite well at resolutions of up to 1600×1200, and a wireless solution could definitely increase the concept’s attractiveness, particularly in system deployments where space is at a premium. DisplayLink hasn’t stated how, exactly, monitors will interface with its wireless system. Ideally, the company could offer a small transmitter/receiver unit that plugs into a monitor’s DVI cable, with a similar device hooked into the back of the computer.

    I think it’s safe to state flatly that if the technology can’t be used with any monitor, it’s a non-starter. But imagine if they build this thing the right way; you could have a hydra box with multiple monitors plugged in, and then connect the hydra wirelessly. The next step would be to use Bluetooth so its seamless.

  • HD-DVD is not region-free

    in teh great battle of nextgen DVD formats, one piece of information seems to be conventional wisdom: that HD-DVD, unlike Blu-ray, will not have region-coding. At AICN, Massawyrm cites being region-free as one of his main motivations for choosing HD-DVD, for example. But it’s been known for over a year that despite initial reports that HD-DVD would not restrict by region, it has since succumbed to the pressure and will likely have “some form” of region coding eventually. As Ars Technica noted 18 months ago, there’s a chance that this will affect the early adopters (including anyone who buys an HD-DVD this holiday season, it should be noted):

    If RPC is ultimately approved and incorporated into the HD DVD format, it is unclear how the players that have already been sold will handle it. The most logical solution would be to allow the current handful of HD DVD players already on the market to play any HD DVD. Unfortunately, history tell us that logic is not one of the entertainment industry’s strong suits, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that region-coded HD DVDs will cause problems for some early adopters.

    Note that Blu-ray’s region coding scheme compresses the number of regions down from seven to three – and that includes lumping Japan and the United States into one region, which will definitely turn the economics of the anime industry upside down.

    I still personally lean towards HD-DVD for the simple reason of cost. The Toshiba HD-A3 is selling at the $200 price point on Amazon, which is just a fantastic deal (esp if you have or are planning to buy an HD-TV). And there’s $100 players at Walmart, too (though not the name brand). I don’t think the worst case scenario is likely to come to pass because to be honest I don’t see either BD or HD-DVD going away anytime soon – both have years to go before they are a sizable fraction of traditional DVD sales. And there’s always standard DVD formats or the Internet download for the occasional movie I must watch but isn’t available on my format of choice. All of these physical media formats are going to be obsolete eventually anyway.

    UPDATE: Anime R1 DVD sales peaked in 2003 and have been declining ever since. I speculate without evidence that 2003 was when fansubbing really started as an industry in its own right – and was a response almost entirely due to region coding alone. It’s also telling that the major players in the industry don’t even mention region coding as they discuss the state of the US market.

  • the year of the SSD

    Solid-state disks (SSDs) are already trickling out from various manufacturers, and you can even order them as an option on some laptop systems (notably, the Asus EEE comes standard with one!). The advantages over traditional hard drives are obvious: speed and power consumption, though of course the former is somewhat limited by the system bottlenecks. Capacity remains the major hurdle, though – state of the art is presently 128 GB (which admittedly is 50% larger than the hard drive on the laptop I am writing on now). And of course cost – which probably scales as the fourth power of capacity (call that Fledge’s Law).

  • a coincidence, yeah sure

    Via my feedreader, an article preview at Ars Technica:

    Top US government research labs infiltrated by hackers
    from Ars Technica by segphault@arstechnica.com (Ryan Paul)

    Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, two of the leading military research facilities in the United States, were recently infiltrated by hackers.

    Read More…

    clicking the link for more, however, brings you to a blank page. I’m sure it’s just a technical difficulty. ahem.

    in related news, we rented Live Free and Die Hard last week. It was a fun movie, and the hacker kid was a great sidekick. But what’s with replacing “yippee-ki-yay mother-[obscenity]er” with “Whoo!”!? It’s not like the rest of the movie was kid-friendly for language. And the villain was just bleh. Oooh, scary, I’ll delete your 401k! Is that a threat? The shadow of Hans Gruber looms large.

    so, anyway, <rumor>Ars Technica has been hacked!</rumor> Hopefully now I will be linked by Valleywag.

  • CompUSA closing

    Looks like CompUSA is closing its doors for good. The good news is that they will be having massive sales to get rid of inventory during the holiday season, so if you can find one near you, run, don’t walk, and stock up.

  • Python

    Python by XKCD

    I used to be a Perl hacker. I confess I’ve forgotten a lot of the zen since, and nowadays I’m more a PHP guy (or MATLAB). But I’ve been hearing a lot about Python (ever since the infamous Parrot April Fool’s joke). The XKCD comic excerpted below got me thinking though that maybe I should get familiar with it in a more formal sense. Anyone out there use Python regularly? How does it compare, as a scripting language, to Perl? How does it compare, as a web application language, to PHP?

  • social linkages online

    Earlier, I mused about whether the inherent limit on human interaction group size would apply to online social networks or not. That limit is called “Dunbar’s Number” and is estimated to be ~150, based on observations of social networks among primates and then extrapolating to humans taking increased brainpower into consideration. An intriguing piece in the WSJ asks whether online social networks are still bound by Dunbar’s number or whether technological innovation might permit us to exceed it:

    But there is reason to believe that the social-networking sites will enable their users to burst past Dunbar’s number for friends, just as humans have developed and harnessed technology to surpass their physical limits on speed, strength and the ability to process information.
    Robin Dunbar, an Oxford anthropologist whose 1993 research gave rise to the magical count of 150, doesn’t use social-networking sites himself. But he says they could “in principle” allow users to push past the limit. “It’s perfectly possible that the technology will increase your memory capacity,” he says.

    The question is whether those who keep ties to hundreds of people do so to the detriment of their closest relationships — defined by Prof. Dunbar as those formed with people you turn to when in severe distress.

    The problem here is the definition of the word “relationship”. Dunbar’s definition of “closest” is just one of many possible ones, and the various definitions might well overlap. But does that mean that business relationships are excluded from Dunbar’s limit? If so, then you might expect to see many more contacts on LinkedIn, which caters to a business networking model, than on Facebook which is primarily stalker heaven. LinkedIn is approaching critical mass in terms of network effect; RWW found over 80% of their business contacts already using it, for example.

    There are surely other models one could employ to map relationships: blogrolls, chat client lists, twitter fans/friends, etc. I think any one of these – or a weighted combination of all of them – would be good data sets to see whether Dunbar’s number truly holds online or not.

  • EEE 2.0

    Ars has a gigantic review of the EEE. It is as comprehensive as you can imaging, delving into everything from design build to hacking the OS.

    In other news, Asus has revealed the specs on the next generation EEE: double the flash storage to 8 GB, and a larger 10″ LCD screen. Assuming they bump the resolution to 1024×768 or thereabouts on that larger screen, it would pretty much answer Ars’ main complaint.

    The only other thing to complain about with the EEE is the cramped keyboard; but we have seen a solution for that before…

  • Dell XPS coupon code

    Save $200 on all Dell XPS notebook purchases over $1499 – coupon code: TQHN5R8KB90DFM.

    Save $200 on all Dell XPS desktop purchases over $1499 – coupon code: TQHN5R8KB90DFM
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