I too am looking forward to the sling catcher. Apparently they're promising it'll be out Q208.

Thats why I built my own. ;-) It was a hideous hunk of ugly but I used an off the shelf motion sensor to detect if someone was nearby to turn it on. Subsequently it would sleep if it didn't detect motion for 30 min. I never got around to building a kitty safe mode though so I just aimed the sensor high.

I've been saying this for a while now and I completely agree. When you start getting websites like Facebook valued at $15B (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071024/152027.shtml)
and Digg valued at $200M of dollars when their annual revenue barely breaks even at 3 million (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060803/1812214.shtml) you know we're heading or are already in for trouble.

Took the words right out of my mouth.

Just what you want to do is add insulation to a piece of hardware that already tends to run hot.

Perfect for conference room tables, they should build an ethernet switch into one of these. I'd bet they'd sell like hotcakes.

Oh looks like they do, they're just crazy overpriced.

http://cableorganizer.com/powerdata-centers/power-sphere.htm

Is it just me or does this device seem like convergence headed in the wrong direction?

I think that TomTom already does it right (for the most part) with the way they handle 2 way communication with their devices. They simply tether your cell phone, that way you get data / hands free / voice calling / etc. I don't like that they charge you a fee to use the TomTom plus features and I probably wouldn't pay it no matter how small it was.

I just don't get why you'd spend $600 on a dash in order to have a built in cell modem. Which I can only assume will cost a decent amount per month in addition to the cost of the device. When you can simply tether a cell phone.

I do really like dash's idea on anonymous real time traffic. Though I believe once again TomTom has something like this already and could easily build it out assuming dash doesn't have any patents on it.

Awesome! I just hope they're less than $500, because I want to order 200 of them. Actually, make it 220, then I won't have to do Christmas shopping next year, because this is obviously going to be on the top of everyone's list.

...


I wrote about how we're (as a commercial society) coming up with new useless ideas for products in a post a while ago. This item confirms my thesis.

There are a lot of good sites, here are a couple right off the top of my head.
http://www.cuddletech.com/veritas/raidtheory/x31.html
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=1491
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/expert/KnowledgebaseAnswer/0,289625,sid5_gci1240568,00.html

But if you don't want to deal with backups yourself there are a couple of really decent and fairly inexpensive options.
Carbonite, Mozy, and soon google?

Erows is right, (2 GB) / (1 (Gb / sec)) = 16 seconds, and that's assuming zero overhead and traffic in the link.

Gotta love google calc: http://www.google.com/search?q=2GB+%2F+1Gb%2Fsec

As far as speed, personally 1GB in 4 seconds is much less important to me than large amounts of cheap redundant storage. Thus the reason I'm considering building a simple software raid 5 linux file server. On a related note, a few raid 0 (or 0+1) Cheetah 15k's should get about 80% of the above speed and are likely much less expensive.

The ts-209 looks a little sexier. I'm planning on building a NAS fairly soon. I want something simple and expandable. It doesn't need to scream. I was thinking just a cheepo box with software raid 5 and maybe LVM. The Drobo looked really interesting. But in the end I'm not sure if I can justify the cost when Linux seems to work perfectly fine for the most part and it has the added benefit of being able to run apps on it.