Haibane.info

Category: Geek service

  • power corrupts…

    and Google corrupts absolutely. With that maxim in mind, this little Google hack might be of interest:

    -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "Linkin Park"

    Of course, you can replace “Linkin Park” with whatever other artist or work you may be interested in. This searches open web folder indexes for files that people have uploaded and left publicly accessible. Other enterprising folks have even built an entire application around this, called G2P (Google to Person).

    Please use your newfound powers for good, and not for evil.

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  • desktop replacement, indeed

    As in, this new 12-lb, 20″ monster from HP IS a desk unto itself:

    HP HDXThe unit will be powered by a Core 2-based processors while graphics duties will be handled by a GeForce Go 8000 Series GPU. Given the size of the notebook, there is ample room for four integrated speakers along with an HP Bass Reflex subwoofer. The notebook is also large enough to accommodate a full-size keyboard and an integrated media remote control.

    The Pavilion HDX will also feature an ATSC/NTSC tuner onboard and HDMI out. There is still no word on what optical drive will be used by the Pavilion HDX, but expect to see either a Blu-ray or HD DVD unit onboard.

    Of course, it’s a Santa Rosa, but calling it a “laptop” is sort of absurd.

  • polyglot programming

    via a comment thread at Good Math, Bad Math comes this polyglot program that compiles in 8 different programming languages:

    1. COBOL (ANSI)
    2. Pascal (ISO)
    3. Fortran (ANSI, f77)
    4. C (ANSI-ish)
    5. PostScript
    6. Linux/Unix shell script (bash, sh, csh)
    7. x86 machine language (MS-DOS, Win32, Linux)
    8. Perl (version 5)

    Hideous and elegant simultaneously. All it does is write, “Hello, polyglot.” to stdout. The trick is clever use of comment strings.

    Why yes, it is indeed 4am and the baby has been keeping us awake forever.

  • Intel BK 2Q08!

    AMD needs some cash, so it’s taking out a $2b loan:

    The first quarter was a rough one for the chipmaker. AMD followed up its 2006 revenue and market share gains by posting a $600 million loss for the quarter. More alarmingly, it had only $1.2 billion in cash on hand, an amount that is just twice the company’s minimal acceptable level.

    An ongoing price war with Intel is hurting AMD in the short term, and its first quarter results demonstrate how deeply the price cuts affected its bottom line. Unfortunately for AMD and its investors, it looks like things won’t change much in the short term. Two weeks ago, the company announced more price cuts in an attempt to fend off the Core 2 Duo.

    The Ars article notes that AMD is hardly out of the game. They have some impressive products in the pipeline, including quad-core cpus (“Barcelona”) and new GPU technology derived from its purchase of ATI. And it’s absolutely better for the consumer to have AMD be a healthy competitor to Intel than a weak foe; the astounding innovations of the Core Duo platform (derived from Intel’s Israel-based design team) are arguably solely the result of competitive pressure. I for one hope that AMD’s gamble pays off and they can hold it together long enough to deliver solid computing options for both the average consumer and enthusiast.

    Couldn’t resist a little dig at Sharikou with the post title, though. June 2007 is when Intel will supposedly be “obsolete” – so let’s see.

    UPDATE: Ouch. Worth keeping in mind that market share is intrinsically volatile, whereas prices tend to go in one direction: down.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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.

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