Shouldn't the Digital Economy Bill have sorted this out?

Given that we as a species have only been widely using the internet for about ten years, it’s quite understandable that we’re still finding our feet. It’s ambitious in the least to expect to fully understand how to run, legislate and control such an endlessly changing thing which is so unlike anything we’ve been in charge of before. It’s because of this that the pursuit of making and enforcing laws on internet use is still a very confusing, sometimes fruitless and often contradictory one.

In the following video, Evan Grant demonstrates the science and art of cymatics, a process for making soundwaves visible. Useful for analyzing complex sounds (like dolphin calls), it also makes complex and beautiful designs.

On paper, Linux doesn't seem susceptible to any of the performance pitfalls associated with transitioning from 512-byte to 4096-byte sector hard drives, but is that really the case? According to Timothy Miller, founder of the Open Graphics Project, Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP.

Miller came to his conclusion after picking up a pair of new Western Digital Caviar Green drives and putting the paper assumption to the test.

"The problem most likely to hit you with one of these drives is very slow write performance," Miller wrote on his blog. "This is caused by improper logical-to-physical sector alignment. OS's like Linux use 4K blocks (or multiples of 4K) to store data, which matches well with the physical sector. However, nothing restricts you from creating a partition that starts on an odd-numbered 512-byte logical sector. This misalignment causes a performance hit since the drive has to read and rewrite the 4K sectors with whatever 512-byte slices changed."

Miller's findings fly in the face of WD's claims, who says that both Mac OS X and Linux would be "unaffected." During Miller's testing, he found that 1000 random aligned 4K writes consistently took between 7 and 8 seconds, while the same number of unaligned 4K writes took between 22 and 24 seconds, or three times longer.

"We've known about this issue for LONG time, and now it's here, and we haven't fully prepared," Miller added.

Get the full scoop here.

iPhone-killer this is not, but it's a big step in the right direction

Motorola’s Droid is full of firsts: It’s the first smartphone on Verizon powered by Google’s Android OS, it’s also the first Motorola smartphone to use Android, and it’s the first phone in the United States that ships with version 2.0 of the Android OS. Unfortunately for Motorola, all of the good news about the phone is centered on the OS, while any ill tidings regard the hardware.

There’s a lot to like about the latest version of the Android OS. The ability to leave frequently used applications running in the background is a welcome change for long-time iPhone users. Whether it’s a Twitter client, instant-messaging app, or simply your email, this is the Android OS’s main competitive advantage over Apple’s product. Of course, you shouldn’t discount the value of a powerful API that allows app developers to tightly integrate their offerings with the phone. For example, Android’s default Facebook app automatically adds information from your Facebook friends’ profiles to your Contacts list—including phone number, current email address, and even their profile picture. This type of integration makes services like Google Voice even more useful than they are on their own—if you install Google Voice on an Android phone, you can choose whether to use VoIP or cellular minutes on every call, pick which phone number your caller sees, and even manage calling groups on the phone. In that regard, Android really is a revolution.

What's sleek, shiny, and has the worst keyboard we've ever had the misfortune to use? That would be the Droid by Motorola.

However, Motorola’s implementation of the hardware has some problems. The core phone functionality is sound: Battery life is acceptable (1.5 days under normal usage), the voice quality is excellent, and we love the haptic touch buttons on the phone’s front. Most of all, the 3.7-inch, 854x480-pixel capacitive screen is lovely—and welcome to anyone accustomed to the iPhone’s relatively low-res 320x480 screen. The omission of multitouch functionality, however, is a big letdown. No multitouch makes the onscreen keyboard much more difficult to use than it should be. We also find that the default Home screen application doesn’t make particularly good use of all those extra pixels—it includes room for just 12 app shortcuts (the iPhone fits 20).

Furthermore, the Droid’s hardware keyboard should be a huge advantage over both the iPhone’s onscreen keyboard and the tiny keyboards on the face of other smartphones. Unfortunately, the keys are too small and flat for most people to use without staring intently at the phone, and they’re lined up in a square grid instead of the more traditional offset layout used for most QWERTY keyboards. We don’t understand why Motorola devoted fully 15 percent of the space on the keyboard tray to an eight-way D-pad that you’ll rarely use when that space could have been used to make the hardware keyboard good. While the Android OS’s onscreen keyboard is decent, if Motorola is going to increase the size and weight of the phone to include a hardware keyboard, we want one that’s usable.

Android still needs a few additions to qualify for best-in-class—a better way to manage and automatically close open applications is desperately needed, for instance—but as far as we’re concerned, it’s the most exciting mobile OS today. That said, we highly recommend waiting for better hardware before making the leap to Android.