DanKohn.com

Going Gas by Fred Kaplan in Slate explains that it’s not quite time yet to buy:

Has there ever been a more alluring gizmo than the plasma TV? The first time you see one, you really do gasp. The screen is so big and wide, the image is so bright, the set is so amazingly flat, just a few inches deep — you could hang it on the wall.

Besides, real aficinados currently prefer DLP and LCD projectors for equal brightness, better resolution, and no motion artifacts.

It’s been a nightmare trying to get a) high definition source material and b) a hi-def projection system capable of showing it off for Pixonics. I’m proud of the system we’ve hobbled together out of a Pentium 4 with a dual-DVI video card hooked up to 2 HP DLP projectors. The box can display a 32 Mbps MPEG2 stream across 2048×768, with complete pixel for pixel accuracy (i.e., no stretching). And, we assembled it for less than $10 K, as opposed to $100+ K for comparable demo systems.

All kudos to Rob Harley, sed stud, for fixing my sed regex, and then (because true wizards answer the underlying question, not just the one asked), showing that sed wasn’t even necessary. So, Rob got me from this:

| lynx -dump -force_html -stdin \
| sed -e 's/^\ \ \ \ \ /bigindent/' \
| sed -e 's/\ \+/\ /g' \
| sed -e 's/^\ /\ \ \ /g' \
| sed -e 's/^bigindent/\ \ \ \ \ /' \
| mutt $MAILLIST -s "${SUBJ_}"

To this:

| lynx -dump -force_html -stdin \
| sed -e 's/\([^ ]\) \+/\1 /g'
| mutt $MAILLIST -s "${SUBJ_}"

And finally to this:

| lynx -dump -force_html -stdin -justify=0 \
| mutt $MAILLIST -s "${SUBJ_}"

Thanks, Rob.

Fortune has a fluffy piece on Gates and the next big OS upgrade, called Longhorn:

Why can’t I tap into all my stuff at home or at work from any device that’s mine, and have it just be available because it knows I’m me?

They should just take a look at Sproqit.

View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

This is a spectacular demo.

My atrociously ugly sed regex of the evening:

| lynx -dump -force_html -stdin \
| sed -e 's/^\ \ \ \ \ /bigindent/' \
| sed -e 's/\ \+/\ /g' \
| sed -e 's/^\ /\ \ \ /g' \
| sed -e 's/^bigindent/\ \ \ \ \ /'

I’ve already asked for help on simplifying the beast (and I also explain why I’m using it in the first place).

The Economist describes a new technique to “stamp minute features on to melted silicon, just as a seal is stamped on to softened wax”. This is more fodder to dispose of the contention that Moore’s Law will soon be coming to an end.

The cynical view of Westerner’s obsession with Ebola and death by asteroid is that it gives us relatively innocuous ghouls to worry about while completely curable diseases like measles and malaria kill tens of millions every year. The counter-argument is that no event threatens the survival of our species the way an asteroid strike does, so it’s worth some extra effort to prepare. Timothy Ferris wrote the definitive “Death from Above” in the New Yorker in 1997, which has been excerpted and reviewed.

The New York Times carries an AP story today that an asteroid the size of a football field had a near miss last week. You’ve got to love NASA representatives calmly discussing asteroids that could “destroy civilization as we know it” versus the miss last week that would only be the magnitude of a large nuclear weapon. Of the nuclear-bomb size asteroids, another scientist helpfully adds: “Civilization has to get used to them on some level.”

Is there a pattern here?

MSN’s earlier efforts to expand its D.S.L. service nationwide have been star crossed. It first contracted with Northpoint Communications to provide its nationwide backbone network. When Northpoint filed for bankruptcy protection, Microsoft hired Enron, which met the same fate. Now Qwest is providing Microsoft’s backbone.

Maybe we should short QWST?

I know as a vc, CEO of a DSL equipment company, and a political centrist, I should support a government policy to expand the use of broadband. But I can’t; I just don’t see the justification for an industrial policy. If we (the industry) get our act together (meaning making broadband ubiquitous, low cost, and easy to use) the dogs will eat the dog food. If not, not. Oddly enough, I fully support the apparent Bush broadband policy of speak loudly and do nothing.

The FTC filed a complaint against Rambus, whose product RDRAM still beats DDR-RAM handily. Here’s an older piece from another PC hobbyist site.