Found this video on YouTube, and just had to share it with you. It’s the 2005 Stanford Commencement speech, and it’s amazingly inspirational. In it, Steve Jobs tells three stories from his life, and each one has an amazing lesson for us to learn. Whatever you may think of the man, you can’t argue with this speech. Watch it, you won’t regret it!
I made time tonight to do a few things that I’ve wanted to get done for some time:
While I’m on the subject of site updates, I also wanted to let you know that I put together a unified/single feed for all of my content. I used the My Networks feature of my FeedBurner account (gotta love them!) and put together a single feed that gathers my ComeAcross, Zooomr, YouTube, del.icio.us, and Twitter content and packages it in nice little, eatable nibblets — well, they’re XML nibblets anyway. Rick, thank you so much for telling me how to do this! And, just in case you were wondering, I didn’t include my three Dignoscentia feeds. Since this will be a commercialized feed, it just didn’t feel right to include content I didn’t want to commercialize at all.
And yes, you can still subscribe to individual feeds for all of this stuff. Just navigate to the various site sections using the menu at the top of this page, and choose whatever feed you want. Not sure yet if I’ll feature this single feed anywhere on the site (other than this post), because I don’t want to confuse people. Many still don’t know what feeds are (sad, but true), so I’ll just wait a little longer and give it some more thought. Want to know the fun part? The URL for this unified feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Raoul. Beautiful, isn’t it? 🙂
People are making a big to-do about Solid State Disks (SSDs) like this one. While I agree a 128GB size is impressive for SATA-connected flash memory, they shouldn’t be marketed as replacements for regular laptop hard drives. Yes, I think HD damage due to drops is a valid reason to try and use SSDs, but they’re still flash memory: they have an inherently limited number of uses before they die. Hard drives last longer, especially ones made nowadays. They can handle more read/write cycles. And, the biggest thing of all, they more capacity, especially with perpendicular bit storage.
You know where I think SSDs would work great? As secondary storage in addition to a regular hard drive. They could figure as a secondary drive on laptops or desktops, and be used for storage of all sorts of things that don’t need to be stored on the drive itself or that get fragmented quickly, like the page file, or the scratch disk in Photoshop. They could also be used to hold all of the temp files that the operating system generates. While you’re working on a file, say a Word document, the OS should store it automatically on the SSD, then transfer the saved document to the hard drive when you hit Save. Things like this could really help cut down on the HD fragmentation.
The SSDs could also be used to store vital OS files that are needed for boot-up (as was suggested a couple of years back, when flash storage was still too expensive and small). That way, computers could potentially start up instantly. The regular files would be stored on the HD, of course. But to say SSDs are hard drive replacements is a stretch. Their application as such, while suited for certain environments and laptops like the Panasonic Toughbooks, military equipment, or media players like the iPod, is ill-suited for regular laptops and computers, where storage needs are growing exponentially.
We should really focus our efforts on developing bigger, quieter hard drives for laptops and desktops, not on replacing them with expensive flash memory of unproven long-term reliability.
I love the idea of the HumanCar, a street-legal vehicle powered by the passengers and a hybrid-electric drive. It’s wonderful!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=369463415941480101
[via Autopia]
Over the past few months, whenever I get some free time, I stick in an old VHS tape into my trusty Samsung SV5000W VCR, and using my Plextor ConvertX PVR (PX-TV402U), I digitize it. I’m really mostly interested in my library of Disney movies (feature-length animation). I have tapes from as early as 1992, and those poor things are in dire need of resuscitation. The colors are fading fast, there’s static when I watch them, and even their plastic cases have started to show signs of wear and tear, even though the only thing they’ve been doing all this time is sitting in my bookcase.
I realize I could easily purchase the DVDs, and for some of the movies, I did just that. I have the special edition Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for example. But it’s kind of nice to save my old VHS tapes. I have very fond memories of my Disney movies. When I started to buy them, my parents and I had just come to the States from what used to be communist Romania. That meant no access to Disney cartoons unless someone had a badly dubbed bootleg copy of some movie. We got 10 minutes or less of cartoons on Sunday afternoons around 1 pm, and that was that. If we were lucky, we got a Tom and Jerry short. If we weren’t, we got some half-baked French or Romanian cartoon, mostly stick animation. Yuck!
When I came to the States in 1991, I was starved for good cartoons. Unfortunately, we were also starving. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but when you start from scratch, you don’t have a lot of spare cash. My parents had a hard time making ends meet in those first few years. So when I wanted to get my first Disney movie in 1992, that was a big deal. Twenty-five dollars is a lot of money to spend when you’re making minimum wage. As I started working in high school, I’d scrimp and save to have enough to buy my Disney movies. My my memories of these tapes are fond indeed. I’d wait months to be able to get one, and when I did get it, I enjoyed it very, very much — and I still do.
So here I am, dubbing my tapes to digital format. As I watch them again, bygone times come to mind. The nice experiences were all the nicer because they were in scarce supply. Digitizing my movies puts them and those times in cryogenic suspension, so to speak. They remain, in their current, fuzzy state, for as long as I keep them, always a memory of those first, few, rough years in the States.
Raoul Pop 