TG Daily has a review of DisplayLink, which lets you connect monitors via USB cable. This is pretty impressive technology, though there is a steep cost in terms of CPU power required. As far as video quality, only heavy-duty gaming apps suffered, while DVD playback and ordinary use had no problem at all.
Category: Geek service
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no WiMax for the nextgen EEE
Although Asustek Computer’s CEO said in January that the company planned to integrate WiMax technology into its next generation Eee PCs, recently it has decided to make WiMAX available only as an option to contract customers, according to industry sources.
I can understand this decision to drop WiMax from the upcoming Asus EEE, since WiMax adoption probably won’t be widespread until next year. If Asus wants its successor EEE model to really dominate the market the way the current generation have, they need to drop the excess baggage and keep the price near $500. WiMax can wait, though if they were to add Bluetooth in its stead, that would be pretty awesome.
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USB server
This is an idea that is long overdue – a USB device server:
IOGEAR today announced the release of its USB Net ShareStation, which enables network sharing of USB devices, including speakers and webcams.
The ShareStation (GUIP201) has a single USB 2.0 port, but can be connected to an AC powered four-port USB hub to support up to four devices. Devices supported include hard and flash drives, memory card readers, multifunction printers in addition to webcams and USB speakers.
This is a game-changer in terms of home network layout. Now, you can conceivably have a single network closet with your router, printer, external hard drives, etc and access them all freely iwth any laptop. There are various ways to do the same thing with other methods, such as printer sharing on a windows workgroup, a print server, a NAS, etc but this new device lets you do it all much mroe easily and with existing hardware.
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the perfect sunset
This is amazing – a photographer wanted the perfect photo of a sunset framed by a long pier. So, using math and information from websites like Google Maps and the US Naval Observatory, he calculated what day the Sun would appear at the ideal angle to catch the shot. And here’s the result:
Brilliant. This is the essence of Geek. See the original post for full details of the calculation.
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Vista Me
I have completed my reinstall of Windows XP SP3 from scratch, on my new hard drive, for my Thinkpad. The thing that took the longest was getting my apps in order, a process which made me realize just how few essential apps I use, and how dependent I am upon them for my workflow. I think it’s even more clear after this process than before just how damaging a move to the Mac universe would be. And frankly, I had forgotten how great XP can be. Everything just works the way i want it, the way I know it.
With regard to Windows 7, the successor to Vista, Bill Gates promises the emphasis will be on performance this time around:
We’re hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I’m very excited about the work being done there. The ability to be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone, so those scenarios connect up well to make it a great platform for the best gaming that can be done, to connect up to the thing being done out on the Internet, so that, for example, if you have two personal computers, that your files automatically are synchronized between them, and so you don’t have a lot of work to move that data back and forth.
In a nutshell, while Vista was all about security, Windows 7 will be about efficiency. It should be noted that a while back, Microsoft engineers demoed the core kernel of Windows 7, to run within 25 MB of disk space and 40 MB of RAM. Obviously that doesn’t include the GUI or the main OS features but its impressive to think that the essential core of Windows can be optimized that far down. And they aren’t done yet.
The truth is that for the modern computing environment, Windows XP trumps Vista by virtue of being leaner and more stable. I probably use my Asus EEE about 75% of the time, because it is so portable. The relatively slow speed (and lack of a big storage disk) are no hindrance because I sync my files to my main PC using FolderShare, and even the EEE has plenty of juice to run Office. However, it can’t run Vista, and given that the market for small PCs of the EEE variety is just starting to accelerate it’s no wonder that Microsoft is hinting about keeping XP around for a while longer. A lot of big businesses are also taking the long view, opting to skip Vista entirely and wait for W7.
We still don’t that much about Vista – Ars has a handy summary of just what we do know – but as far as my compute needs go, Vista is akin to Windows Me. I don’t need it, and I don’t want it, and I am going to wait for the “real” upgrade down the line.
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amazing earthset/earthrise videos
The Japanese spacecraft Kaguya, on a mission to the moon in what is described as the most significant moon exploration since Apollo, has delivered incredible HDTV-quality videos of the Earth rising and setting over the lunar horizon. These are unbelievable, like special effects in some movie, but they are real. The (english-language) homepage for the Kaguya mission is here. Kaguya is named for a princess in the Japanese folk tale, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.
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pre-rolling the dice
The new episode of Darths and Droids – Ãœberstition – has this truly inspired meta-commentary at the bottom, which purports to quantify the dice superstition that all RPG gamers suffer from to varying degree:
Pete, being the highly logical, calculating person he is, rejects all of that as superstitious nonsense. He instead applies the scientific approach. Over the years, he’s collected somewhere around a thousand twenty-sided dice. Every so often, he gathers them all together. He sits down at a table and carefully and individually rolls each of the thousand dice, once. Of course, roughly a twentieth of them will roll a one. He takes those fifty-odd dice and rolls them a second time. After about an hour of concentrated dice rolling, he’ll end up with around two or three dice that have rolled two ones in a row. He takes those primed dice and places them in special custom-made padded containers where they can’t roll around, and carries them to all the games he plays.
Then, when in the most dire circumstances, where a roll of one would be absolutely disastrous, he pulls out the prepared dice. He now has in his hand a die that has rolled two ones in a row. Pete knows the odds of a d20 rolling three ones in a row is a puny one in 8,000. He has effectively pre-rolled the ones out of the die, and can make his crucial roll with confidence.
This is the sort of geek brilliance that you’d normally find over at XKCD (though this forum thread comes close).
Being the geek that I am, and also because I just sent in a draft of a paper so the ball isn’t in my court and I can goof off a bit, I wonder if we cant look at Pete’s empirical superstition more critically. First, we can write a script in MATLAB to actually implement Pete’s strategy and see whether the empirical results match expectation. Second, we can analyze the problem theoretically.
I’ll play with MATLAB later – as far as the theory goes, though, Pete is out of luck. Each die roll is a purely independent event, so the probability of rolling a 1 is always 1 in 20. Pete argues that the special dice have already rolled 1’s twice, so there’s only a 1/20*1/20*1/20 = 1/8000 chance of getting a third 1. But that calculation explicitly makes the die rolls dependent. In essence, Pete is arguing that the previous rolls represent a-priori information that can be used to modify the probability of the next roll. Pete is a closet Bayesian in a Frequentist world.
But forget boring statistics jabber – look at the superstition on its own terms. Pete rolled 1,000 dice, not just one, and so if you roll each one three times you would have a total of 3000 rolls, out of which 3000/20 = 150 should be 1s. Note that Pete set aside 50 dice that rolled a 1 after the first round, so there are 100 1s still unused. Pete rolls only those 50 dice again, and gets about 3 that roll 1s, so now there are still 97 1s left! Of course you could argue that Pete has only made 1050 rolls thus far, in which case there are only 53 1s expected, but if you make that argument then you’ve admitted that each roll is independent and thus the next roll would still be a 1/20 chance of a 1 again. Plus, you made all those 97 1s angry by not carrying out the other 1950 rolls. Don’t anger the dice, Pete.
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surgery
As soon as I finish downloading Microsoft Office Ultimate (which I bought for $60 – you need a .edu email address to qualify), I am going to shut down my Thinkpad, remove the hard drive, and install the new hard drive I bought earlier. Then I will put the nlited DVD of Windows XP SP3 (using the original Windows license that came with the Thinkpad) in the drive and hopefully boot to the install screen. If all goes well, I’ll have a clean install on a clean hard drive. I’ve already backed up my data and also have an external USB case for the old hard drive handy.
Gulp. Here goes. I’ll be twittering updates if anyone is curious to follow the progress.
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Do velociraptors eat SSDs?
The WD Raptor has long ruled the roost in terms of raw hard drive performance. These are 10,000 RPM drives that are widely used in servers and high performance gaming rigs. They are expensive, and they maxed out at 150 GB if I recall correctly. However, WD is now releasing the next generation, the cleverly named Velociraptor series, and these things are probably the fastest hard drives on earth. But I think the name has a double meaning for WD, because the very existence of this drive is a clear sign that the days of rotating-platter hard drives are soon over. These raptors might be the pinnacle of their evolution, but their breed is going extinct.
That the Velociraptors are awesome drives is not in dispute. Part of their advantage is that these unabashedly desktop-PC-oriented drives actually use notebook-drive technology for better power consumption and speed:
The new VelociRaptor takes an untraditional approach for a desktop HDD with its 2.5″ drive design. The 2.5″ form factor allows the drive to be smaller, lighter, and more power efficient than its 3.5″ rivals.
But what good is a 2.5″ HDD in a desktop system which typically accommodates 3.5″ HDDs? Western Digital addressed that issue by affixing the VelociRaptor to an “IcePack” heatsink which allows the drive to fit into a standard 3.5″ drive bay.
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When it comes to performance, Western Digital promises a 30% increase in performance though is SATA 3Gb/sec interface, 1.4 million MTBF, and Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) to improve performance in vibration-heavy environments.Using a 2.5 inch drive surrounded by a stabilizing and cooling frame to round out the 3.5 inch enclosure is just brilliant. I think that the 3.5 inch format is itself a dinosaur of sorts – they do rule in raw capacity, but 2.5 inch drives are catching up, and their smaller platter size means they can spin faster and consume less energy.
The idea behind the velociraptors is to compete with solid-state hard drives (SSDs) on performance, while maintaining the cost advantage (at present) of traditional HD technology. And there’s no doubt that these monsters deliver. But as the Extremetech indepth review notes, it represents the pinnacle of hard drive technology. This is the peak of evolution, but SSDs are only just starting to evolve. The new generation of SSDs is on the horizon, and are already faster and cheaper than before, so the value and performance proposition of the VR is going to fall, inevitably.
Consider that SuperTalent is going to release a 120 GB SSD for only $699 shortly. The read speed is going to be rated at 120 MB/sec. As TGDaily notes,
When I bought my 32 GB SSD from Samsung in 2006 and put it inside Q30Plus notebook, SSD drive settled me back for almost $2K. But read speed of 120 MB/s was stuff dreams were made from. Performance of that drive, considered world’s best SSD – was in 35-50 MB/s read range (don’t ask about write). But even that was enough to beat default 1.8″ 4300 rpm drive. Now, imagine putting a 120 MB/s read, 40 MB/s write SSD in your notebook that is currently ran either with 5400rpm or even 7200 rpm HDD.
As the CEO of SuperTalent Joe James notes, SSDs are going to drop in price 50% every 9 months for the forseeable future (call this James’ Law). Couple that with continual improvement in performance as SSD makers gain more and more experience, and you can see the writing on the wall.
The traditional hard drive makers know it too, and products like the VR are only half their response. The other half is to try and buy time through delaying tactics – such as lawsuits:
Seagate Technology, the largest maker of computer hard drives, made a pre-emptive strike against an emerging competitor on Monday when it filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing STEC Inc. of patent infringement.
In the suit, Seagate contends that STEC’s solid-state drive products violate four Seagate patents covering how such drives interface with computers.
STEC, based in Santa Ana, Calif., makes solid-state drives for corporations and other large enterprises, a market that Seagate executives have said the company plans to enter this year.
STEC is a relatively minor player, so this lawsuit is Seagate’s way of testing the waters before going after the bigger fry like Micron and Samsung. It’s a desperation move, and it will fail, but it will give Seagate time to try to catch up.
In 5 years, every notebook will come with an SSD. Traditional hard drives are going to be relegated to cheap desktops, servers, and external drives for backups or NAS. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: The Velociraptor is dethroned from the performance peak.
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service industries
I have to agree with Author that fanservice is a term whose definition brooks no hijacking. The examples he gives of others abusing the term might better be phrased as “brainservice” and “engineerservice”, respectively. Pedantically, it’s [thing whose base needs is being serviced]-service. This is why I invented geekservice as a term; I think the song “it’s good to be a geek” is disturbingly accurate in it’s exploration of the primal forces that truly motivate our kind:
Belonging to multiple categories myself (geek, fan, intellectual, etc) I may be catered by various types of -services in different contexts. For the most part I tend to refrain from fanservice, though with my Ranma viewing entering season 5, I’ve pretty much caught up on my quota.