I'm not really able to understand the technical details of both codecs, but what I did find out is that youtube webm videos look better than their flash (h264?) counterparts even if they have nearly the same filesize. http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/985/youtubevergleich.png was a picture I made back when that blog entry was a few days old, and as you can see the webm-Video on the top in Opera looks much smoother than the normal flash based one in firefox (both have about the same filesize). It's not really possible to get the exact same frame in both videos, of course, but please trust me when I tell you that I didn't pick the best or worst pictures for either webm or the flash based video, I could see that the frames of each video are of similar quality as the one I chose in the picture when I tried to stop both videos at the exact same frame.

I also wondered why HD material and a high video bitrate(~14mbit) was used by the x264-developer to test baseline h264, VP8 and h264. Isn't it possible that 640x480 videos get compressed better in VP8 than with h264 baseline if the bitrate has to be lower? And isn't the used video (the one the pictures you linked to come from, watched it when that article came out so I don't remember it perfectly) rather 'slow motion', making it possible that VP8 is better suited for videos with fast scene changes (game trailers, mobile phone videos, ...)?

I'm not trying to spread FUD, as I said in the beginning I don't know much about this whole codec stuff. But personally I just don't see how we can really compare the subjective quality of these two (or three) codecs when both articles only show a few sample videos (only one with only one scene, or just the frames) or present them in a suboptimal way (lossy comparison pictures) :-)

Personally I'd prefer the ultrasound if there are no apparent side effects: I don't want to add or remove any hormones from my or my girlfriends body because I don't trust people to find out all effects of hormone treatments at the moment. On the other hand the ultrasound treatment sounds like it can be applied only to the area where we want the effect, and if anything else happens in that region after treatment (stuff falls off, more hormones being released, changes in cell structure, ...), it's probably much easier to notice than general changes in behaviour after doing hormones for a year.

That said, we are currently still using hormones for contraception. There is just no other method we like and trust, and even after years of using hormones we didn't notice any serious problems.

Widespread use of linux should be a good thing for you as a linux user, too. Just think about hardware support and some programs where it isn't too bad if they are proprietary ('mainstream' games, for example). Don't you want new hardware and new games to work on linux, too? What about special software from big vendors that is not available on linux right now? Widespread use of an OS could be the most important factor when a company decides on which platforms they want to release a software for.

I truly understood the text in that way yesterday: Millions(1) of small devices(2) that transmit stuff wirelessly to anywhere in the world(3).

"It will soon be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world so simply that any individual can carry and own his own apparatus" was the line in the text I mostly read that out of, but I see now that I may have interpreted that incorrectly, as 'all over the world' might just mean that people use these devices everywhere, not that they are able to transmit far distances (Even though he talks about that later on again).

So basically I thought the claims he made are to be combined when he talks about these future devices, but I see now that it makes sense even when not combining them. Thanks for making me think a bit more, but I dislike your argumentation style quite a bit.

I'm not sure, but as the first bigger radio broadcast with voice was done in 1906, and the article is from 1909, it's hard to say if his claims were special back then.

Personally I expected his claims to be of a scientific nature, so when he claims that it's possible to do radio transmission from New York to London with a watch-sized-machine, I'd expect he wanted to say that he thinks it's possible to only need a bit of power and a small device to get radio waves from New York to London and back, and not that you have to build a retransmitter every 50 miles to make it work :)

Nowhere does he say that we will use a complex network of machines to send and receive messages. He thought that you could easily transmit stuff directly to other devices even if they are hundreds of miles away and even if there are millions of them being used at the same time. This isn't true, just like the other things in the article are not possible with our current understanding of physics. I'm not very knowledgable about science, but I even doubt that this is at all possible in the way he described it.

Have you ever used a notebook with a good ssd? (Intel Postville 80GB, for example) I have seen one in action (don't own one right now, but will soon), and I can tell you that browsing the web with firefox and 'using' that system is such a dream compared to using a normal notebook with a harddrive that you can't really imagine going back to your old system. Just think about how often you really (re)start a program or click that 'Open File' button in a program, just to wait 1 - 4 seconds until you can continue working. Of course I'm not entirely sure if it really speeds up browser usage, but starting firefox / opera with a few tabs saved is much faster, and IIRC the caching mechanism of firefox with all the slow background filesystem syncing stops you from using your browser for a while, too, so maybe that is the reason why browser usage feels faster, too. You might be able to do all this with a ramdisk and enough RAM, btw (I've heard of people putting their firefox cache in one, for example), but I never tried preloading all 'common' applications when booting my OS because I find it too complex or slow when booting (There is some linux software that does it for you by learning what programs you like to use, though, and Windows Vista can do it too IIRC) -- Now, what parts would you be throwing those 200 - 400 Euros at when not choosing a faster storage device for a laptop? When assuming the 1500 Euro price range because we were talking about a dual harddrive notebook, I'd rather have the "2,0 GHz Intel Centrino dual core something" instead of a 2,5GHz one if that means I can get one SSD + harddrive / two SSDs while staying in my budget. And considering the performance gain, I'd consider doing this in the 800 - 1000 Euro range, too, even when not considering the better data safety if you drop your notebook or the possiblity of slightly less energy consumption (I'm not too sure on that one, though).

I can name one: An Intel Postville 80GB SSD for ~180 Euro. Nothing else will give you that much speed when you work with your PC, although with games you 'only' get it to load stuff a bit faster, not better framerates. Other than that, I agree. Get something in the price range you are willing to pay, maybe add a decent graphics card in a low budget pc as an example, and you should be good to go. Everything you pay more in $$$ now will not make a difference in 1-2 years, and if you need something better in 2 years you can usually upgrade to a far better machine with the money you didn't spend right now (if the low-end/midrange stuff does what you want) But seriously, get an SSD.