I made this movie using State software from the XtraNormal site. I tried to make the movie online, but I had to pay for some unknown number of points to be allowed to publish the movie, but thankfully I was able to download the State software for free and make the movie on my desktop and then manually publish it to youtube. The choices of characters and scenes are very limited using State.

Enjoy and consider how dependent you are on your wireless devices.

Gulf Coast Cleanup Ideas and all associated materials by Darrell Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The oil coming ashore on the gulf coast is making a terrible mess. In order to save the wetlands, the wildlife and the seafood industries of the area it is clear that the oil will need to be cleaned up, but this is not going to be the same problem as we faced in Alaska. Men in haz-mat suits with brushes and steam hoses are not going to be able to tackle the problem. So how might this problem be solved?
I recently saw a program on HD Theater channel which described the De Beers diamond mining dredge called Peace in Africa. This ship mined diamonds from the ocean at the rate of about 240,000 carats per year. See: http://www.theartofdredging.com/peaceinafrica.htm and http://www.debeersgroup.com/en/Exploration-and-mining/Mining-operations/South-African-Sea-Areas/
Here is a picture, copyright De Beers, of Peace in Africa.

If we, as a civilization are willing to go to this time and trouble for diamonds, surely we can go beyond these lengths to restore the ecology, the wildlife and livelihoods of the folks of the gulf coast after this tragic accident. This paper looks at some of the problems involved in building cleaning dredges to solve the problem of cleaning up the Gulf Coast.

Caveats

While I am not a process design engineer, I am making a proposal for some of the problems that will be encountered along with some candidate approaches. The intent of this document is to encourage debate of the process required to clean up the Gulf coast after the Deep Horizon oil spill.

Describing the Problem

There are a number of challenges to be solved to clean up the oil from shallow water, wetlands and beaches:

1. The water is shallow. Any processing dredge must be able to operate over mud as well as shallow water and narrow passages. It is possible to consider that the ship will make its own channel to travel, but it must be able to operate with very shallow draft.
2. Large volumes of water, mud and sand, with many types of vegetation must be processed and clean sand and water must be returned to the environment. This means that heavy metals, dispersant and other toxins as well as oil must be removed from the sand, water, and scrubbed from any smoke that is the result of burning processes.
3. It is going to take more energy to incinerate the millions [billions] of tons of coastline than will be provided by the oil  that is present, so fuel must be provided, and this is most effectively be unprocessed crude oil from nearby wells delivered by shallow water tankers or by pipelines that are towed behind the dredge.
4. Wetlands are excellent filters so only the margins are expected to be affected by the oil.
5. Since only the margins are affected, the length of coast line affected in wetlands is very much larger compared with the straight coastline between two points.
6. Wetlands must be protected once they are cleaned, probably by a well designed set of shallow water sand bars that trap further oil coming ashore.
7. Once the oil threat is gone, these sand bars must be removed or redesigned to allow the wetlands to flush normally with the tides. These bars can form part of a barrier bar system to mitigate and control future hurricane damage and should be designed with that in mind.
8. During some times of its operation, such as low tides and when operating in narrow channels, there will not be enough water locally at the dredge for proper processing, so a continuous pipeline will be required to the dredge from deeper water to provide additional water for processing. If this water contains oil, that is no problem since the dredge will clean all of its effluent completely of oil and toxins, such as dispersant, before discharging it into the estuary.
9. There are three components in the material dredged from the estuary: mud sand and possibly gravel which is heavier than water, organic debris which is lighter than water, and water with entrained or emulsified oil. The heavier and lighter components can be burned together, but for this to work effectively, most of the water/oil mixture must be separated. If the water/oil is not removed, then the other debris will cook a long time before it reaches a high enough temperature to burn the oil / toxins out.
10. A likely approach to removing the oil from the water would be to using a large continuous belt of a thick mesh filter which is made of a substance which will trap oil / toxins. The belt will move continuously from entrapping oil / toxins to a furnace where it will be heated to a very high temperature to burn off the oil / toxins and back to the entrapment zone of the dredge.
11. All smoke from the incinerators is scrubbed to move any particulates and any toxic gasses. A modified version of scrubbers for coal fired electric power plants seems promising for this technology.
12. All processing areas of the dredge are provided with double or triple redundancy so that any failure or maintenance would reduce capacity, but not stop the processing.

Schematic Design of the Dredge

Example Renders of a Dredge

Overview

This example shows a platform 100m x 50m with two dredge booms. The processing plant may require a platform twice that size. For comparison, the diamond dredge mentioned above is over 200m long.
I have not tried to design any way to move the dredge through the marsh. It seems clear that either towing with anchors or walking with legs will be required.

Crawler Detail

The recovery head is suspended from the booms which move back and forth and can direct the head via cables from above. Each head contains a cutter head to process sand, mud and vegetation including small trees as well as powerful rotary pump to recover the debris with sufficient water to avoid loss of the contaminated debris.

Processing Detail

The processing plant is likely to be more complex than a diamond dredge, which cost about $110m to convert from a cargo ship completed in 2007. But with BP company profits exceeding $20BPounds in 2007, it seems clear that money is not a problem. Many of these dredge platforms are going to be required to clean up the marshes in a reasonable amount of time.

Crawler Dredge Head

The dredge heads do not ride in the marsh but are suspended above it to avoid stirring the mud and making the oil harder to recover. The platform floats over land that is already cleaned. The boom head is steered by cables from the boom above it.
The dredge heads resemble vacuum cleaner heads with grinders that cut up vegetation including grass and trees, as well as mud and sand and then using a large blower to pump the contaminated debris and water for processing.

Distribution Plenum

The distribution plenum allows parts of the dredge to be taken offline for repair or maintenance.

Liquid / Debris Separator

It is essential to separate water/ oil from the sand / vegetation for incineration. A rotary separator probably will work for this. Essentially spin dry the debris out of the liquid. Any vapors are sent on with the debris for incineration.

Liquid / Oil Separation / Incineration

The water and oil must be separated so that clean water can be returned to the marsh. Removing salt is not done, but toxic metals should be separated with the oil. This might be done by a large blanket of absorbent material which will survive the high temperatures required to incinerate the oil. Oil is trapped in the blanket and then burned off the blanket while the water does not stick to the blanket and is discharged. Further cleaning may be required of the water but the blanket should be designed to remove the oil to a very large extent.
The smoke is sent to the stack scrubbers.

Debris Incineration

The debris, including all sand, mud, shells and vegetation are incinerated to remove all oil and other toxic materials.  It may not be necessary to remove the ash since this may not be very harmful to the environment. The smoke from this incineration is sent to the stack scrubbers.

Stack Scrubbers

Before releasing any smoke from the platform, it is scrubbed using a suitable method to remove any toxic gases and metal oxides. This technology is similar to that used in coal fired power plants.

Energy and Water Supplies

The oil recovered will not be enough to supply the energy requirements of the platform. An oil pipeline  dragged behind the platform to a mother ship offshore will provide the energy and pump clean sea water from offshore to aid in the processing. Additional water will be required at low tide for the dredging. As the rig operates, it adds a large amount of water to the marsh which washes back out to sea taking the silt stirred up by the operation to mitigate the drowning of uncontaminated marsh with silt.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I hope this paper spurs debate and design. No matter what happens from now on, at least one such clean-up dredge will be required to clean up the Gulf Coast marshes. The sooner we start design, testing and construction, the sooner we will have the mess cleaned up. It seems clear that a multi-disciplinary team of ecologists, process engineers and heavy equipment construction contractors are required to complete such a large project.
Darrell Duffy
Coos Bay, OR
6 June 2010

Document as PDF Gulf_Coast_Cleanup_01

3dsMax 2009 Model of Dredge Oil_Dredge_Crawler_06

Is that cool or what??

I didn’t have any tags assigned, but it’s willing to cloud my topics, er Categories. So no worries.

Enjoy,

Windy

History Reminder

As we consider the plight of the planet, it is good to look back and remind ourselves what the earth used to look like and how it got this way.

Precambrian Era

In the beginning, say 2-3 billion – with a B – years ago, the earth was covered with a reducing atmosphere. No free oxygen was present. Only carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. Oxygen is very toxic and very reactive and so it reacted with the hydrogen and methane and sulfur and iron, and it was all bound up in the products of the reactions – Water, Carbon Dioxide, Sulfur Dioxide, and Rust.

When life first evolved, it comprised various species of bacteria that fed on this atmosphere and probably the likes of the deep ocean vents, both in the ocean and in shallow pools on the surface. In places there was a meager living to be had from finding “Resources” in the form of un-reacted chemicals and further reducing those chemicals to the ones mentioned above. This state of affairs in the history of life went on for untold millennia with no real change, no higher life forms, no plants and no real fossils except for the mats of bacteria that were left, mineralized, in shallow waters that we find as the only fossils from this period.

Precambrian Era Timeline

But then there was a technological break-through in evolution. Some cells invented photosynthesis. They figured out how to use the light of the sun and carbon dioxide to make food at first, and later structural materials in the form of cellulose to build their bodies. This was a major break-through since the power of the sun, and the availability of carbon dioxide was apparently limitless. And the explosion of these algae and later the other plants, still in the oceans and shallow waters transformed the earth. Well that’s not the way they saw it. From their point of view there was a toxic crisis. Photosynthesis produces oxygen, and at first this was simply reacted in the atmosphere with the residual hydrogen and methane and all was well, but eventually more oxygen was produced than could be reacted away and it began to build up. Early plants were not adapted to deal with this toxic by-product and no doubt many species of algae died as the toxic oxygen built up in the atmosphere. But eventually, these algae evolved to protect themselves from the toxic oxygen and the levels continued to rise.

As the oxygen concentration rose, some strains of life evolved to depend on it as an energy source. It turns out that if there is enough free oxygen, it can be combined with other things in the environment, like the structural materials in the plentiful plants to provide an energy source, and so the first herbivores evolved. And once there were herbivores the carnivores could evolve.

Carboniferous Period

Along our journey we can recall the Carboniferous Period, from 360 to 290 MYBP [Million years before present] when the O2 and CO2 concentration was much higher than it is today. Now we have 21% O2 and 300ppm CO2. In the Carboniferous there was 32% O2 and 800ppm CO2. Talk about Global Warming! Actually the global temperature average was about the same as we have today. And certainly this was pre-industrial. The higher levels of oxygen allowed large insects, Meganeura, similar to a dragonfly, with wingspans as large as 75cm – about 2.5 feet.

Meganeurid

The take-away messages from this history are that

1. One specie’s pollution is another specie’s requirement, and
2. Life has evolved from a basis in exploitation to a sustainable ecology.
3. Life wasn’t always based on sustainability. For the first more than one billion years of it’s existence, life was exploitive, just as man is now.

In order for sustainability to evolve, life had to use up the easily exploited resources – the primordial Petro-chemical deposits of methane, ammonia and hydrogen – and evolve the means to depend on the cycle of photosynthesis employing the sun and CO2.

For a time, man has taken the easy way of exploiting the available resources, but like the plants before us, we need to learn to live sustainably.

Sustainability

Life has evolved to recycle everything completely. We have only to look at any verdant ecology on the planet – Coral Reefs, Rain Forests, Temperate Forests, Temperate Ocean ecosystems – and we see complete recycling in a complex web of life. We have studied these eco-systems for years and while we don’t understand all the details in each one of them, we do understand the large picture in all of them.

We have now made our own ecology too, an exploitive one, much like that of the early bacteria. This is not to compare us with bacteria, but only to remind us, as we know, that such exploitive ecosystems are fleeting in the history of life. The resources run out and the toxic bi-products build up, and if we continue on this path, not only we, but all the life around us must evolve to live with that toxicity. I’m not talking about the CO2 and Methane that may build up in the atmosphere. The bulk of the species on earth will not be adversely affected by a rise in CO2 to 380 or 500ppm. Life has been there before. Many plants will see this is as a food boon and there may be a verdant time after we have poisoned ourselves off the planet. When there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, photosynthesis is more efficient. In the grand scheme of things, the mass-extinction caused by the human condition will not even rank among the top 10 such events, tragic though it will be. But I’m sure that we don’t want to be among the extinct.

Let’s look at some of the resources that we use, and even now attempt to re-use and re-cycle [R&R]. Let us recall that Reduce does not figure into ecology. Life is greedy and uses all the resources available to it. However, everything is re-used and re-cycled. Some of the materials that human ecology uses are: Metals, Paper, Plastics, and Glass. You can add more to the list I’m sure. But our pathetic attempts to recycle these only recovers a small portion of our use of these materials and most recycle programs are a joke compared to what happens in any ecology that we have studied. R&R is very complex to get right. It has taken millions of years for these ecologies to evolve the complete recycling programs that they use. How quickly do we think we can duplicate this complexity for all the materials that we use?

These kinds of R&R can never put our civilization on a long term recycling path. It’s a land-fill reduction policy at best.

We can only hope to succeed with a long term R&R program if we hook into nature rather than imitating it. We must adopt mostly biological materials for our civilization rather than metal and glass materials to have any chance at true R&R. That way the complex evolved organisms of nature help us rather than our having to invent all the process ourselves.

If life on this planet had evolved incorporating metals and glass into the ecology, then the R&R for those materials would already be in place in nature, but they are not. Metals and stone and glass [Silicon Dioxides] were left out of nature’s processes. This probably tells us something about the chemistry surrounding those materials. It requires too much energy or there are no suitable chemical processes for those materials to be incorporated into a sustainable ecology. We should take this hint from nature, who has had billions of years of experience in this area, and adopt materials where the chemistry supports reasonable R&R processes. Unless you are a snail or a diatom, stone and silicates are not a part of your ecology.

The Message of Avatar the Movie

And now we come to a message I found in the movie Avatar. I’m not sure if James Cameron had this message in mind when he wrote the story, or whether it is an emergent message that he did not see or intend.

Pandora is an example of a sustainable civilization. In order to see this, you have to stop looking at the Na’vi as primitive people. Think of them rather as a highly evolved race of folks with a global internet – you’ve seen the movie, right. I’m not going to review or repeat the movie here. If you have not seen the movie, then go see it and come back to this.

Let’s look at what the Na’vi have:

1. Places to live. Large buildings where large numbers of people can live in close proximity. Ok they happen to look like trees. Really big trees.
2. Abundant food and water nearby. You can pick from Rainforest, Prarie or Oceanside tribes. Like we do now.
3. Vehicles of several types for transportation both on the ground and in the air. Presumably in the ocean too, although we didn’t actually see examples of this in the movie – or at least I didn’t see it.
4. A planet wide communication mechanism. Previous stories might have called this Gaia. Although the don’t seem to be using it as effectively as they might. They flew to the neighboring tribes rather than going to the nearest tree and doing a phone call. By the way, as I read the movie, no ancestors were lost when one of the life trees was destroyed. That was the tragic destruction of a local terminal, nothing more. The planet wide network backs up multiple copies of everything: a Carbonite subscription is built into the system.
5. Everything they have is self-replicating and self-repairing. Except their bows and arrows.

Let’s see what they don’t have:

1. Pollution of any kind. All of their needs are met with natural substances that are completely recycled by the surrounding ecology, whether that be rain forest or prairie.
2. Population problems. They have adapted their numbers to a sustainable level.
3. Political misunderstandings – in the absence of the Sky People at least. If you can’t understand your neighboring tribe because your local spoken language has evolved, just hook into the life tree with your neighbor and understanding will be enhanced by the Babelfish program that is present in the life-tree network.

DireHorse

Let’s look at other properties of what they have:

1. Their vehicles are smarter than ours. They can hook into their horses and birds to tell them where to go, but the horses and birds already come with many modern features that we are hopelessly trying to add to ours: Collision avoidance, unattended operation, automated driving in crowded traffic. When you start with an animal that flocks or herds and knows how to stand up and avoid running into another or a tree, then it’s much easier to build a vehicle that does these things. If you start with a piece of metal and a computer, perhaps it can be done, but it’s much harder.
2. It may be harder to learn to fly, or drive, than it is for us. But once you do, it is potentially much safer. And who can say that our teenagers should not go through a rite-of-passage than makes them appreciate the privilege of driving rather than viewing the car as a toy. Perhaps the Na’vi have a lower teenage vehicular death rate than we do. And if you do spend a late night out partying, it is useful if your car knows the way home by itself.
3. Who needs wide-screen-HD-tv when you can hook into the stories of the ancestors? And who is to say that story-tellers among the Na’vi cannot hook into their local life-tree and imagine their stories to be told, or recount their experiences, to be recorded for all after them to enjoy in full 3D with a complete sensory experience.

The Na’vi and the World of Pandora is not a primitive aboriginal past, but rather a picture of a possible and rich sustainable civilization that we can aspire to. Our present course of building a metal, glass and silicon ecology and then recreating sustainability is going to be much harder than adapting biology to our needs to accomplish the same ends.

Now all we need to do is to get this temporary Global Warming thing under control as we see what the real long term goal is for our civilization.

Unanswered Questions

There are many unanswered questions in the Avatar story. Rich material for sequels to be sure. Here are some of the questions that I have:

1. How did Pandora arise? Did it naturally evolve? or was it created by the previous un-sustainable, metal-glass-ecology civilization as they grew out of that primitive technology.
   Are the floating mountains the remnants of the previous toxic metal-glass ecology? Long derelict remnants of buildings in a floating city?
2. Are the Na’vi still in control of their own evolution in ways that we cannot understand? Can they create or modify the life forms around them, perhaps using the life tree as an intermediary? A larger Direhorse, an ocean crossing whale vehicle, a bird that can transport the aged or very young.
3. Do the Na’vi know and understand their origins. Apparently they do by listening to the life tree. They probably have a better connection with their past than we do, since all we have are history books and fossils.

Floating Mountains

- windy

Images Copyright by Twentieth Century Fox and others.
Text – Copyright (c) 2009, Darrell Duffy

Thanks,

Darrell

TWIT 225 Schmidt Happens

Maybe it’s not privacy, but monetizing. It’s about “monetizing me”. Obviously Facebook, Twitter, google, netflix and the other sites are making money by selling our info. But they aren’t paying us for it. I might be disposed to make a lot more information available and public on those sites if I were being paid by Facebook and the others to do that. The more information that I share and make public the higher the rate / month that they send to my PayPal account.

And the more movies I watch/rate on Netflix, and the more searches I do, with an Opt-In for google and bing, and the more background info I give google and bing.

Why should google make billions – with a B – from their advertisers based on knowing about me, which is why the advertisers give them the big bucks after all, and I don’t get a cent? I should get a reduced rate from Netflix the more movies I rent/ watch instantly, and rate. I should get a reduced shipping rate the more I buy from Amazon and still more off if I rate items and provide feedback about sellers. And provide Amazon with more “private” information about me.

I turn off Third-Party-Cookies because it allows harvest of information about me for which I’m not being paid. How about $5 or $10 / month from ClickWhatsIt – I forget the name of the prominent third-party cookie baker – if I enable third party cookies? That’s about Opt-In and Monetizing Me.

I provide a lot of private information here on this blog about me, but that can’t be monetized by those sites because it’s not connected with transactions or page views on those sites. So they can’t monetize this blog. But when I do something on those sites, then they figure out a way to sell the “pages hits” combined with the private info about me – maybe anonymized maybe not – to other folks. That’s about Monetizing those sites – to some extent. Either directly or indirectly.

But what about my value in the equations. Shouldn’t I be paid to some extent for my information?

It’s about Monetizing Me.

Sandy Dunewinds of Elona

Finally in 2012 an Open Source MMO appeared. As late as 2009 the entire field was littered with the corpses of failed and abandoned projects. With a few exceptions, like Panda3D , very few Open Source MMO platforms have made any lasting impression.

However, now the long wait is over. Dream World has appeared. Dream World combines the good ideas from a number of proprietary projects that have gone before, but has opened up the world to players and non-programmers.

Free or Pay to Play

The first decade of the 21st century saw an explosion of Free to Play MMOs. Of course the leader, WoW showed that millions of users were looking for the MMO experience, but many weren’t ready to shell out the $15 per month to play the game. Guild Wars, and possibly other games, had a free to play model once you had purchased the game. This model has proved profitable and we have seen two sequels to Guild Wars.

By late in 2010, the single player or single campaign game was largely extinct, except in the hand-held market. Dragon Age: Origins was one of the last of the single player genre and soon spawned a true F2P MMO. Even in the hand-held market the hand-held computer, which used to be called the smart-phone, has spawned many online games as well.

The primary motivation for the ubiquity of MMOs is based on economics of the game company as well as the interest of the players. The game companies have discovered that they will make more money over time if they build a loyal player base and the way to do this is to build a long-lived game, as WoW and its ancestors have proven. The game designers are kept gainfully employed with constant upgrades to the game as the players grind on through the levels, engage in epic battles, dress up in boutique armor and weapons and buy and sell loot. The income from the micro-transactions for buffs, mounts, vehicles and costume armor provide plenty of income to sustain the servers, and the designers.

Finally Dream World

Late in 2009, a dedicated group of software designers began putting the parts of Dream World together from the corpses of other OpenSource games and new code. By late 2010 the game showed promise as a platform, and during the next year the releases came fast and furiously as the platform gained momentum. The Open Source nature of the product and the promise of being able to move characters between worlds caused the most interest as the platform took its final form.

Some of Dream World’s features include:

• A world builder based on the general ideas of Unreal Ed, the editor for the Unreal game engine, but with a more intuitive interface.
• The ability to import map as well as model geometry built in popular tools like 3dsMax, Maya and Blender to build new maps, characters, NPCs [non-player characters] and monsters.
• The ability to define new character classes, complete with character models, cosmetic customizations, experience level path, behavior animations, skill trees, skill animations, armors, and weapons.
• The ability to define new buffs and candy, which apply within a class or across classes.
• The ability to define new monsters to kill, including all their attributes of resistance, health, experience, attack type and damage. Also monsters are defined with loot dropping, mobbing, re-spawn times and wandering behaviors. Boss monsters are easy to define.
• Any character [account] can contribute any map, character, item, or monster content to the game. This contribution is done in the context of the game and may be subject to review of the management or a peer group of characters before being released to the entire population.
• New content is downloaded and cached on the local machine as it is accessed, this technique was pioneered by Guild Wars. A large game wide client update is not required to continue to play in old content areas. New content is downloaded incrementally as it is accessed. Deferred update occurs when a new character or new character content appears so that a novel character may appear as a gray blob for a while until it’s content is loaded.
• Characters can play in PvE, PvP and PK [Player Kill] modes and can avoid all types of play. Most worlds enact automatic behaviors which punish repeated harassing of other characters including “jail time” and large fines of in-world currency.
• Skills and tasks can be defined to enhance game play or to allow non-violent characters, skill trees or whole worlds to be created.
• Worlds can optionally define real-world currency exchange. Gateways to PayPal and other online payment services allow the game currency to interact with real-world currencies as Second Life has pioneered. Each world sets it’s own exchange rate as either a fixed number or based on a currency exchange.
• Characters can find, craft or import game objects from the outside world into the game world and then sell them to other characters to make money. The sale of loot or crafted items is limited by in-game creation or farming, but sale of imported items are not limited. This allows the game economy to interact with the real-world in all the ways that Second Life has pioneered.
• Public Key encryption techniques can be used to “sign” created items, so copyright can be enforced for items sold by characters in the game. Copies of items do not pass the authentication test for their creators. Items can be forged but on close examination, their creation date will be shown to be later than the original, so the forger can be identified.
• The items for sale by the game designers are indistinguishable from the items for sale by other players. These sales are the micro-transactions that can provide income for the server farm and salaries for game designers. A small sales tax can provide additional income for the game designers.
• Web portals for sale of game items provides a more convenient method of finding those in-game items than wandering all over the in-game world to check out the many store fronts.
• Some characters “own” game land for store fronts or houses, but most game players are wandering mercenaries who are too busy leveling their characters, and engaging in epic battles to spend time gambling or engaging in sex play. While castle building and sex play are possible, they are a minor part of the game rather than a large part of the game as in Second Life.
• Streaming of in-world music, video and in-game voice communication is provided by a variety of means. The open source nature of the software allow a variety of best of breed methods to be used for this communication. We no longer are killed by monsters while we type in a chat window.
• The game behavior is controlled by the game server rather than the client, so that while the game is open source, a well controlled server is not easily subject to hacking. So while game players may modify their clients, this does not  allow taking advantage of other players in the game. The open source nature of the software means that bugs that cause crashes or allow hacking are quickly fixed.
• While many of the progenitors of Dream World are medieval RPG games, the platform has spawned worlds of every flavor: WWII battle fields, Planetary Warfare, Anime style RPGs, Corporate and Educational meeting and educational venues.
• Since characters can move among worlds with ease, medieval RPG characters often appear in educational contexts where students are showing off the characters they have worked so hard to build.

With many different worlds running the Dream World software, it is now possible to migrate your character between worlds and servers. When a new world appears, you can now visit or join that world with your high level character from another world so that you need not start off at the lowest level of existence in the new world. Those who find the new world exciting can decide to play the copy of their character in the new world as well as the old world, or to move back into a previous world while merging their enhanced attributes, skills and loot. As characters, we are no longer trapped in one version of cyber-space, but are free to move between cyber-worlds. At long last, our cyber-selves exist outside of any particular cyber-world.

- Windy

The following gallery shows photos from a Dream World based on Guild Wars.

Luna Online

There are several YouTube video reviews: Here and Here.

You’ll find all the features you’ll expect in an MMORPG.  So if you like the look, and have a computer with a modest graphics card, this may be the game for you to try.

The game team is quite serious about punishing those who grief other players, but it seems that one of the most annoying issues is a player stealing a kill from another player. It’s called KS or Kill Stealing. It seems odd that the game does not simply fix this issue in the same way that 2Moons [Dekaron] has solved it. In Dekaron, once you start killing a monster, then you get the experience even if another player kills the monster, unless some time passes or you die and are unable to finish the kill. This effectively prevents KS issues

Well, if you are looking for an MMO that is Terminally Cute, then Luna Online may be for you. Enjoy.

Windy.

Rappelz shows a very nice face on the website. But the graphics are dated, circa last millennium, and the game play is slow and the animations are simplistic. I recall better game play, graphics and animations from Rune which is 10 years old this month. If you want to play an MMO on an old computer with a 1024px monitor then Rappelz may be for you. It does seem to have all the expected MMO features, and has very modest graphics requirements. I’ve included lots of screen shots so you can see how it looks.

Bright Portrait

The window size cannot be changed, it is fixed at 1024×768. So on a 1920×1200 screen on my laptop, I can’t play it in window mode because I can’t see the text. So I have to run it full screen. I can’t find fault with the game play since I never got that far along. Beyond the dated graphics, the primary issue for me is that there is no keys for movement. The WASDF keys you expect to move around are not present. You can only move by clicking the mouse on the terrain ahead of you.

Conclusions

Rappelz is very dated in graphics. Looks like a 10 year old game, which it may be.

• It is free to play and free to buy, so as an introduction for a MMO for an older computer it may be ok.
• Guild Wars may work fine on your computer, and is only about $25 per kit. And the graphics, game play and animations of Guild Wars are much better.
• If you have a modern powerful computer and a large screen, don’t waste your time. Go with Guild Wars or 2Moons.

I’m going to go install Rune on my system just to give it a try after all these years.

- windy

Dragon Age: Origins is a new game from BioWare, the makers of Baldur’s Gate back in the last millennium [1998]. Way back in that ancient history, a stand alone RPG made a lot of sense, but in these days of X Box Online, Sony Online and dozens of Free To Play MMOs like Perfect World, Dekaron [2Moons], Ether Saga, etc. it seems odd to bring out a game with no online play.

There are many reviews out there. Here is one from SlashDot.

The other odd thing about DAO is that the entire description of the game has all the keywords and phrases that you would expect from a game that was online. They talk about parties and loot and leveling and approval and so forth. Here’s a quote:

The Approval system is a fun way to learn about each of your companions. There’s a surprising amount of story to be told for each of them. Surprising, at least, until you realize how much story there is in the rest of the game.

The reviewer does talk about having finished the game. I played Guild Wars for months and was nowhere near “finishing” the game. And during the experience, I recall that I and other folks came back to do quests long after they had completed them. The attraction, in part at least, appeared to be that the high level players had fun helping lower level players to finish the quest and progress in the game.

None of this will be possible in this historic throwback game that is not online.

So it appears that DAO will be a few hours of play and then it will pass into history.

Baldur’s Gate and its sequels have long passed into history, but I occasionally log into my Guild Wars account and the community is still active and vibrant.  I look forward to Guild Wars 2 which has a surprisingly similar logo to that of DAO. But GW2 will be an MMO and from everything that I read will improve two of the limiting issues with Guild Wars: The low leveling cap and the difficulty with solo play, when you can’t find your friends online.

Dragon Age Origins

Guild Wars 2

As you can tell from the other Guild Wars posts on this site, I found much to enjoy in Guild Wars in particular and MMOs in general. DAO looks interesting, but without online play, I have no interest in even trying it.

- windy

But I wouldn’t say it was Perfect by any means. Compared with Guild Wars and 2Moons [Dekaron], it has some minor drawbacks. I’m not going to do a full review here, you can find more complete reviews on the web. I’ll just do an overview of some of the features that I found most notable.

Here are some of my observations in the order that I encountered them:

• Installation is gigantic and apparently monolithic. By that I mean that apparently all the content is downloaded at the beginning. The download is done by the first installer and comprises two files totalling 2.5GB. Once the installation is complete and you start the game, it updates itself for another 20 minutes. Sigh… Guild Wars is much smarter. It downloads content incrementally as you visit new areas. 2Moons is a monolithic install, but it’s quite a bit smaller.
• The options for character customizations are way over the top. So far I have only seen the options for humans, but there are about a dozen tweaks to positions and sizes just for the face. The number reminds me of Poser, rather than a game. In my opinion, Guild Wars dozen different faces and a half dozen different hair styles and skin shades was plenty, but if you want to be an ugly portly knight or mage, this is your game.  I do appreciate the ability to have the choice of gender for each character class. 2Moons allows no customzation at all for each class, not even gender.
• The graphics are indeed good, as many of the reviews point out, but I wouldn’t say that they are stunning. They are quite a notch below Guild Wars. The environments are more interesting than 2Moons, but the character animations of PW are quite a bit cruder than either Guild Wars or 2Moons.
• The battle animations are slow and simple in PW. Both Guild Wars and 2Moons have more responsive and much more interesting battle animations. While the performance of PW seemed just fine, the slow pace of battle can become tiresome after a while. As I progress in strength, and it only takes 3 rather than 15 seconds to make a kill, this is a lot less of a problem.
• The environments are huge and sparse in PW. Environments in 2Moons are simpler and less spacious, and the environments of Guild Wars and huge, but in GW one never feels that one is running along forever and ever without encountering interesting things. Monsters in PW are too far apart to make for efficient leveling. There is lots of running involved. Perhaps flight solves that. I remember seeing something about flight being a skill that you learn at level 10.
• Quests are more interesting in PW than in 2Moons. The quests in 2Moons are pretty much a joke with kill a bunch of monsters being the primary idea. Of course Guild Wars quests are the thing that drives the whole story line. I haven’t seen much of a story line in PW, perhaps I missed it, but the early quests are more interesting and lead you through a tutorial of the game.
• Some of the comments I found on the web indicate that PW is a grind to level up. The levels actually seem close together compared with GW or 2Moons, but it is harder to level up since the damage dealt with weapons is small compared with the strength of monsters at your level. So it take many seconds to kill a monster at your level even though that monster is doing no damage to you. This mismatch makes leveling take longer even though you don’t have to kill very many monsters compared with 2Moons.
• The game lacks a comprhensive wiki. GW has a very complete wiki and MMOSite has a fairly complete wiki for 2Moons. As far as I can find the PW wiki is woe-some and a simple task like obtaining your first pet at level 3 is insurmountable without help from the local population.

Perfect World is an interesting diversion, but I doubt if I spend much time there. Like EtherSaga, it has its points, but 2Moons continues to hold my interest. I look forward to Guild Wars 2, AION and Tera all of which should be opening up during the next year.

Update: Right before I reached level 6 I found some shiny new hammers. At level 6 I was able to boost my strength to take advantage of them and kills are down to 3 seconds from 15 seconds. I also found a new halberk and learned the tailoring skill so now I’m a blacksmith and a tailor. As a tailor I made a new helmet, although you can’t tell since helmets never show in PW.

- windy

Microsoft has entered the business of AntiVirus software by simplifying and repackaging their Corporate Security suite for home users. The new program is called Microsoft Security Essentials. When this is released, it will be free for use by non-commercial users and will run on Windows XP, Vista and Version 7.

Currently the Beta is closed, but the program will be available later this year. Based on all the reviews I’ve seen – Security Now for example – this is a light weight, but very robust anti-virus.

When this comes out I will be installing it with an eye toward eliminating my use of Free AVG.

More news when it appears,

- windy

Podcasts

I’m using Twonky Media’s media server to serve up mp3 podcasts, music and photos to my PS3. This works great, and Twonky version 5 is a great media server for a reasonable price. I used this a while ago and I got some errors on my PS3, but the latest version is great: Fewer errors and an easier install and setup.

However, Fast Forward in an MP3 is pretty messed up. As you can see from the following video, when you hold down fast foward, it skips and jumps and it keep stuttering and stopping so you can’t forward very fast. So, if for example, you play the first 40 minutes of of a 1:45 [one hour and 45 minute] podcast, then trying to get back to the place you were is a real pain. This feature probably works fine for a 4 minute song, but it’s not useful for a very long podcast.

Not sure if this is a problem with the PS3, or with the Twonky or the DLNA protocol.

I’ll try to contact the PS3 and Twonky support folks.

Video On Demand from Netflix

I’ve just discovered Play On which allows you to play videos from Netflix, YouTube and other places on your TV by using a PS3 or other DLNA Media Client. I’ve set up Play On on the same system where I installed Twonky and connected it to my NetFlix account. So now I can watch Instant movies from Netflix directly on my large screen TV and using my hi-fi system. My Media Server is a Win XP system running on a Compaq SR2020NX Athlon 64 3500+, 2.2GHz with 2GB memory. This is a $500 system that’s about 3 years old.

PlayOn is very easy to set up, although I had a glitch with the Media Player V11 that PlayOn required. The WMP11 installer kept reporting an error, but it turned out that it did install correctly. Once you install PlayOn, you configure it with your Netflix account, and then use a web browser to load up your Instant Queue in Netflix. To start with I loaded up a few movies, and TV series including Sanctuary, Ghost in the Shell, and a couple of other things. When you check the videos in the PS3 menu, you find the PlayOn server and the list of videos that are in the Netflix Instant list.

I’ve watched a couple of movies and the quality is very good with no noticeable sound or video artifacts. The video quality is not as good as a DVD, but it is at least as good as a SD quality Dishnet satellite broadcast. The PS3 display function reports about 4 mbps. The PlayOn software requires about 180MB of memory in two processes and takes about 50% of the CPU when the video is on pause. I’m guessing that the video is being downloaded and re-coded for the PS3.

BTW, the fast forward situation is much better with video than with music. Using PlayOn and the PS3 with Netflix, fast forward gives 10, 30, 120x fast forward and it works just fine to go back to a point deep into a movie. The PlayOn server did get stuck about 45 minutes into a movie, but turning off the PS3 and then reopening the movie fixed it up. The PS3 was reporting network errors. Not sure why. The server was working fine and the network was not having any problems that I could detect.

I’m catching up on Sanctuary and watched “In the Electric Mist” with Tommy Lee Jones this evening. When I added Sancuary, it added a folder with all the episodes.

I’m not clear on why the PS3 doesn’t support Netflix and other video sources directly, but since it doesn’t at least an inexpensive software addon, which runs on any modern computer, will allow a true video on-demand experience. PlayOn costs about $40. Since Netflix doesn’t charge for “Watching Instantly” beyond my normal subscription, I’ve got a fixed cost subscription to video on demand.

- Windy

Ether Saga online is a cute cartoony Free to Play MMO that follows the recent model of “Free to Download and Play”, but “Pay” for upgrades and costumes. This game is a full 3D game with modest system requirements. My Alienware m15x was not working as hard with this game on full tilt as it does with 2Moons.

After about 6 hours with the game, there is much to love and a few things that aren’t so nice.

Generally. The game is beautiful and friendly looking. The graphics are wonderful and the animations are well done. But beware, this is not a browser game. The download is 1.7GB and after that there is a large update; so it takes a little while to download and install. I had no problem installing it on Vista x86.

I’ll leave a description of the game, races, and classes to their website. I’ll confine myself to my observations and comparisons with other games I’ve played in this genre. This is by no means a complete review of the game, but a set of first impressions after playing the game for about 6 hours. I expect to be drawn into a game during that much time and if not then it’s time to move on to more interesting fare. I am willing to give a game that much time and don’t expect it to be a hit in the first 10-20 minutes.

There are a large number of levels. So one expects a “Grinder” but also there seems to be a developed Quest system. So Ether Saga probably doesn’t have the downsides of Guild Wars capped leveling system where the maximum level is 20, but seems to have a better quest system than 2Moons. Quests are listed in a special dialog and it’s easy to see quests there that are appropriate for your level. Although I was not able to find a quest for my character because it didn’t give me good directions to the place where the NPC was that had the quest.  The Ether Saga quest panel did indicate what rewards were given for the quest so you could pick quests intelligently. Guild Wars has a very nice quest system with good rewards. 2Moons as I have said elsewhere here has a lousy quest system with trivial rewards.

Starting a Character. I chose a Dragoon – melee fighter – as my character, and there are quite a few options, including gender, when you create your character. All the characters, apparently, come with a Pet OOTB. Mine was a cute little fox. Oddly, the character did not come with any weapon, but I found that I could kill things fairly effectively with my fists. After a few levels and what I thought were quite a few coins, I went to find a Lance. Apparently, based on the very incomplete wiki, each character only has one weapon type. It was not obvious where to find weapon. The blacksmith was no help. Finally I stopped by a “Merchant” and she had what I needed. A little while later I got the same thing as a drop, but the merchant also had some upgraded armor for my character, who by that time was level 5. Minor annoyance: the length of character names is limited to 10 so I had to use WindFlayer rather than WindyFlayer. How lame is that?

Leveling is a Grind, even at low levels. The leveling effort quickly becomes a grind. There something like 150 levels total, but by level 9 the grind was particularly tedious. The game animations are quite slow and at first that seems charming, but even at level 9 you only have one killing skill, so whacking away at all those cute little critters can take a very long time. By comparison, I started a brand new character in 2Moons, also a melee character, and in about 6 hours brought it up to level 24. This was admittedly with some help from his brother who had cash to spare for upgrades, but regardless, 2Moons is much more efficient and quicker to kill things in succession. In Ether Saga, if I went after low level prey, then I had to kill a lot to make any progress, and if I went after stronger prey, I had to use the Healing Skill after every 2 or 3 kills to build myself back up to avoid dying. The good news was that this did not require purchase of pots, which is lucky since I have accumulated very little loot and cash as I leveled.

Drops are few and far between. The drops are far too infrequent to build up any sizable loot, and I barely kept by pet fed. Compared with 2Moons and Guild Wars, it is very difficult to build up a store of booty. My pet was sitting at about 75% energy most of the time since the food drops were not frequent enough.

Traveling About. The world is large and there are teleports and Auto Route lets you click on a the map or select an NPC and forget it, for the most part. Auto Route occasionally gets stuck, but that’s no big deal. There is a minor problem with the map that you cannot zoom in and then pan around to see the world in detail. Zooming in or out is always based on your position. The world is beautiful and site seeing is a pleasure. As you level up to about level 20, it looks like you just move clockwise around the town.

There are mobs of prey, but I never saw any that attack unprovoked. But I have only reached level 9 so far.

Skills are Rich. There is a complex skill design based on 4 parameters rather than the more typical 2. And another good thing is that you don’t have to hunt a skill trainer or merchant to get new skills. Just purchase your skills with Spirit points from a dialog. I found that I had plenty of Spirit points, but not very much currency as I leveled up, which is a problem, as you will see. The Dragoon comes with a fighting skill and a healing skill. The healing skill builds up your health quickly whenever you want, as long as you aren’t actually fighting at the time. There are also health and energy pots, but with so little currency, I wasn’t looking for those. I never got a pot as a drop in the first 9 levels.

Your Pet. All the character classes come with a pet OOTB, and you must feed it. It does damage as you attack, and really helps you level, but for some reason it actually levels faster than you do. You need to feed it all the food stuffs that you get in drops to keep it healthy, but don’t worry, you don’t need to eat yourself. If you die you resurrect back in town and away you go, but if your pet dies, you are in deep trouble. Apparently there are Scrolls and a Hunter who can resurrect your pet, but the Hunter costs big time. The currency is Gold, Silver, Bronze. At the end of 9 levels I had about 4 silver and a few bronze. It costs 50, yes that ’s Fifty, Silver to resurrect your pet. I’ll probably be level 20 or more before I see that much cash. [Update: I was able to resurrect the pet by buying a "Resurrection Scroll" for 5 Silver. Quite a bit less than 50 Silver for the service. There is a difference since the Scroll does not resurrect the pet with full energy.]

Bottom Line. I’ll probably spend a few more hours, but the slowness of leveling, sparsity of drops and currency, and the slow pace make this game an eye-candy adventure, but not a place where I’ll be spending more time.

Screen Shots. Here are a few screen shots from my adventures.

enjoy, – windy

I’m planning a short vacation. So the obvious thing to do is to use Google Maps to plan the trip. After putting in some way points, I got to a ferry, and Google croaked… I’ve got some screen shots that show the problems and I’ve got some suggestions about features that are missing.

The vacation we have planned takes us from Coos Bay, OR to Anacortes, WA. From there we take a ferry to Sidney, Victoria Island and then by ferry to Vancouver, BC. Well the first problem occurred when I added a destination to Sidney.

Here the Ferry Terminal shows correctly and the directions are valid. I added a destination of Anacortes, WA and then dragged the marker down the street to the ferry building. That was fine and as you can see from the above picture the Ferry Terminal Rd is a valid destination.

Then I added Sidney, but spelled it wrong, but no worries mate, Google helped correct that. But the ferry stopped the trip dead in the water, so to speak. How about we add an option for “As the Crow Flys” or some such routing in the middle of a trip, until we get ferries added to Google routing, that is.

But after adding the ferry, and having that fail, I got a messed up trip destination list with duplicated entries.

So apparently Google has forgotten the location of the entry that it added to the list. Sigh… That was pretty lame don’t you think? And then it apparently just coughed up a hairball that caused a real mess.

The Bottom Line

Google Maps has some issues:

1. Sometimes GM forgets the location of entries that it adds to a route when you drag a flag. That clearly should never happen.
2. There is no way to do “As the crow flys” for legs of a trip where other routes are not possible. This would be useful in many instances. Say I don’t want to travel, but just measure distances on a map. As the crow flys would allow me to measure distances along a route between way points.
3. Each leg of a trip should drop back to ATCF, if routing can’t be done by other ways, with an appropriate message of course, to allow me to continue with the entire trip in a single route. In this case I have to break up my trip simply because I’m going to take some ferries.
4. Google should support ferry trips – not schedules, but just routing and distances – to help plan trips that include ferries.

Now I’m going to look in Google Maps and figure out how to pass this to them.

- windy

Goldwave doesn’t cost much the first time, but it hasn’t really moved much over the past many years and the major updates cost.

Adobe Audition is very functional, but very expensive. and updates are costly as well.

My friend is converting some of her cassette tapes to CDs and MP3s and I’ve taught her to use  Goldwave. But with Goldwave you have to pre-create your audio file to record to. How long should you create your file? With Audacity you can just start recording. While the interface is different from Goldwave, she should have little problems in doing the transition to Audacity. I’ll see how she likes it.

Audacity also looks like it has some cool features for amateur musicians:

1. Lay down multiple tracks.
2. Label the parts of the tracks.
3. Slide the tracks in time to align with each other.
4. Set mono tracks to left or right channel.

If I knew more about the requirements of a home studio I would be more helpful in looking at these features. More later as we try it out.

- windy

Wakoopa is a free software service that keeps track of what software you have been using. I heard about it on the Windows Weekly podcast from back in January. I’m just now catching up on missed episodes.

To use Wakoopa, just sign up for a free account and install the little program on your system[s]. The little applet [ 3MB ] uploads the info to the website so you can review and share the statistics.

There’s even a way to publish the data to your blog or social networking site.

Here are recent programs that I’ve used:

I’m not sure how useful this will be, but Leo and Paul like it.

BTW, there are ways to eliminate programs from the list, either for privacy reasons, which is where you find the feature, or because “Presentation Settings” is not a very interesting to keep track of.

Wakoopa keeps track of both programs you run and websites you visit, at least some websites that are built in.

- windy

There are several devices on the market to allow backing up photos on a trip. Here is a partial list of devices. After reviewing the devices and checking prices, I found Digital Foci was selling a refurbished an 80GB unit for about $50 off. As you can see from the following pictures, the device is pretty hefty. It’s not a contender for an IPOD replacement, although it does almost all the functions of an IPOD. But it has CF and SD card slots built in and it has backup and compare [verify] functions built in. It backs up 233x CF cards at 4.88 MB/sec.

This device has all the functions of a modern multi-media kitchen sink. It also has a 12 hour battery life when playing MP3s. It remains to be seen how long it will last when backing up photos cards.

Features I liked

• The photo display and review features are very nice. The rotate and zoom features are well designed and even for large, 12MP, JPG images, the display time is very short. It takes 2 – 5 sec to display 16MB 12MP RAW images however. The photo album display features are best utilized if you reduce the images to 1.5MP or so [1280x1024 for example].
• Photo card backup is great. Inserting a card brings a popup to the screen asking how you would like to do the backup. Beware of the glitch though where the card is found but the hard drive is not found. Make sure you see the hard drive in the menu before inserting the card in the device. The work around is simple once you know the secret.
• The computer connection works quite well. The transfer is also very fast. I did have some intermittent connection problems with the USB cable, but seating the cable more firmly in the device fixed that.
• I have been using this device for hours and hours to listen to podcasts. The Photo Elite has a little speaker, which isn’t much good for music but is just fine for podcasts. No constraining earbuds to wear and you can carry it around with you while you work around the house. The only problem is that it doesn’t remember your place in the podcast when you shut the system down. But you can pause it for many minutes without noticeable drain on the battery.

What the device is not.

• This device is not a replacement for my Sansa MP3 player. The Sansa has longer battery life and is shirt pocket size. This device is large and cumbersome for an MP3 player.
• It’s not a game console, although it has a game built in called MATRIX which is suspiciously like Tetris. But the screen is larger than a PSP and there are card slots, so while your PSP or DS may have most of this device’s media features, the game consoles don’t provide the convenient photo backup feature and I’m not sure that any of them have 80 or 160GB of on-board storage.
• The Photo Elite has no WiFi capability. But you won’t miss that drain on your battery.

I’ll bet this device:

1. has a laptop drive hiding inside.
2. is based on some form of embedded Linux – good for them.
3. contains software written by software engineers living in California. The interface is well designed and performance is snappy.
4. will have future follow-on devices with more storage and more functions. These guys are on a roll.

Good luck to Digital Foci. This device gets my vote for coolest thing to solve my photo card backup problem at a very reasonable price. And listening to dozens of hours of podcasts is a real bonus. You go, Leo…

- windy

We the people of this country are no longer in control of the debate on Health Care reform that is occurring in Washington. This debate has been co-opted by the special interests of the Health Care Insurance Agencies and the American People are not being heard.

We the people elected you to guide the debate on Health Care as well as the other issues vital to the future of this country. We need you to get engaged on this question and take back the debate so that all parties are heard.

We, those of us listening to quiet voices, have heard all the arguments in voices such as:

• Sicko – http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/index.html
• Bill Moyers Journal: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05222009/profile2.html http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05222009/profile.html
• Frontline: Sick Around the World http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/
• Frontline: Sick Around America http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundamerica/

I am again embarrassed and ashamed that leaders such as Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.) have restricted the debates in so clearly a self-serving and narrow way. We know that he and many other members of congress are beholden to large contributions from the special interests that are and have since the time of Jimmy Carter held back progress in this area.

It is time for you, Mr. President, to help lead us out of this nonsense into the light of day that all the other countries of the developed world, and many of the developing world have already seen.

It seems obvious from listening to all the voices, including the more quiet ones, that the largest problem that needs to be addressed is profits acquired by health care insurance companies. This leads to most of the problems that we have now including:

• The large number of uninsured. Since companies make higher profits by denying coverage, raising premiums and employing hundreds of workers to deny claims.
• Higher infant mortality in the US than most of the other developed nations.
• Higher overhead in the delivery of health care – about 24% of every health care dollar spent compared to most other nations where it is more like 7%.
• The large influence that the health care insurance companies have to protect their own interests.

It seems clear that the way out of this dilemma is for you to let the American People know that you personally support:

1. Opening the debate in Sen. Baucus committee to all the voices including doctors and nurses voicing their concerns about Single Payer approaches.
2. Talk publicly about how a new system must include taking the profit out of Health Care Insurance, either by requiring that all insurance for basic coverage be conducted by companies whose sole business is basic health insurance on a non-for-profit basis, or by adopting a single payer system. Separate insurance companies are free to exist to provide extra insurance as long as they are separate companies. I am sure we can all see how companies providing both non-profit basic insurance and for-profit supplemental insurance would be in conflict. This would surely lead to abuses. The lack of profit is a common theme in systems around the world.
3. Talk about efficiencies that a single payer system would afford, such as a single standard of care and lowered overhead in the delivery of Health Care. This is not a matter of siding with one constituency of the debate, but of siding with what is best for the American People.

We are looking to you to lead and guide in these troubled times. This whole argument of Health Care Reform is being co-opted by the special interests. Since your administration has not sought to lead by drafting the legislation for congress to consider, it seems clear that you cannot sit by and watch while it is being rail-roaded in the wrong direction by the Special Interests.

We must be heard, and you are our leader.

Thanks for listening,

Darrell Duffy
Coos Bay, Oregon.

Am I the only one that sees that 12cm disks should be dead?

I know that we have just, finally after much gnashing of teeth and political finagling, decided on a new standard for the next generation, but there are too many disadvantages to these 12cm optically read disks or discs if you prefer.

Let me enumerate some of the problems:

1. They are slow to write.
2. They are too big.
3. They are round.
4. They are slow to access.
5. They can be easily scratched.
6. They will not scale to larger sizes easily without yet another change in optical frequency.
7. They are costly to create.
8. They are problematic to re-write or make eraseable. My experience is that CD-RWs eventually fail to write after a few hundred or less write operations.

There is a better media. Flash or ROM. Serially accessed mass storage if you like.

There is a better format: The smart credit card format.

The advantages for the Media are at least:

1. You can decide whether you want read-only or read-write at the time of manufacture.
2. The media size and speed will scale with Moore’s Law rather than at the speed of standards committees.
3. The cost of the media over time will scale with Moore’s law, so that the cost to produce the media will go down quickly over time. The cost of 12cm disks goes up over time as it is more complex to build the more complex media types, and only goes down slowly after that because it is based on a physical manufacturing process rather than an electronic one.
4. We are free to use all the old formats as well as new ones to encode media for the format. A Blu-Ray disk image is just as easily processed while reading it from a ROM or FLASH as it is from an optical disk; in fact, several complex stages of encoding are skipped in the case of reading the data from memory media. File systems – FAT32 or ISO – with MP3, WMV, MPG or any other media.

The advantages for the Credit Card size format are at least:

1. It is a standard size.
2. There is a standard pin out. The use of the pins is likely to be different, but I’m sure we can come up with a serial protocol for the pins to read and write memory without too much trouble, if there is not one already.
3. It is already designed to be robust over 1000’s of insertion, removal cycles.
4. It is already used for static as well as dynamic uses: Security cards for Satellite Receivers, as well as credit cards.
5. It is large enough to hold a picture of the content and small enough to reduce waste in landfills.
6. It is designed to be robust against bending, scratching and other abuse. After all, a credit card in and out of your wallet 1000’s of times is bound to encounter bending and scratching.
7. It is rectangular rather than round. So it racks and stacks with ease.

What this does to Players

And players shrink too. The player becomes a slot in the side of your new AV receiver, rather than a box by itself. AV receivers need to be large enough for the many connections, and for the front panel displays. But adding the video function with a credit card slot reader adds neither to the connections on the back or the front panel space required. The receiver will soon display it’s interface on the TV anyway, so it’s size will soon be limited only by the connections to other components. And this video format removes one of the media components, and reduces the receiver connections rather than maintaining them.

The Epiphany

I had this idea when I purchased a new USB thumb drive with 4GB capacity. And of course this is not the largest one available. The size of a standard single layer DVD, and no bigger – inside at least – than a postage stamp. And with a USB storage interface, this chip is more complex than it need be I’m sure.

Right now, the cost of writable Blu-Ray media is high enough that it makes little sense to purchase a Blu-Ray writer. If DVD dual-layer experience is a guide, by the time the media falls to US$2, which is about the level at which I will be willing to invest in a Blu-Ray burner and purchase media in 50’s, I would guess the cost of 32GB flash memory could be US$2 as well if shipped in the same quantity. And ROM – or write once memory for media purchase – will be even cheaper. While 32GB is not exactly the size of the maximum size of a Blu-Ray disk, but it is pretty close.

Blu-Ray players already read all previous 12cm optical formats. During the transition it makes sense that they contain a slot and an optical drive. And over time, slot-only interfaces will appear for computers and for home theater systems.

There are no compelling advantages for the 12cm format in the long term. In five years it could be the “Compatibility” format for ages past, ordered as an optional addition to your new computer system. Won’t laptops be a lot nicer without the space and complexity of the optical drive?

- windy