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A decent MP3 player, 128MB with FM/AM tuner, tends to run between $100-130 USD: iRock 830

So basically, this Gateway offering is no more impressive then your run-of-the-mill 128MB MP3 player. All it adds is voice recording and the ability to use it for portable storage (which is handy, but at only 128-256MB doesn't impress me enough to buy it). However, you could buy a 20GB portable USB HDD and any other 128MB MP3 player for about $250 USD all together, which is only $80 more then their 256MB model.

Verdict:
A. For $170 you can get a 256MB MP3 player with a voice recorder.
B. For $250 you can get a 128MB MP3 player and a 20GB external drive.
C. You could just buy a 20GB MP3 player for $240 USD: Archos Jukebox Recorder 20

A decent MP3 player, 128MB with FM/AM tuner, tends to run between $100-130 USD: iRock 830

So basically, this Gateway offering is no more impressive then your run-of-the-mill 128MB MP3 player. All it adds is voice recording and the ability to use it for portable storage (which is handy, but at only 128-256MB doesn't impress me enough to buy it). However, you could buy a 20GB portable USB HDD and any other 128MB MP3 player for about $250 USD all together, which is only $80 more then their 256MB model.

Verdict:
A. For $170 you can get a 256MB MP3 player with a voice recorder.
B. For $250 you can get a 128MB MP3 player and a 20GB external drive.
C. You could just buy a 20GB MP3 player for $240 USD: Archos Jukebox Recorder 20

A decent MP3 player, 128MB with FM/AM tuner, tends to run between $100-130 USD: iRock 830

So basically, this Gateway offering is no more impressive then your run-of-the-mill 128MB MP3 player. All it adds is voice recording and the ability to use it for portable storage (which is handy, but at only 128-256MB doesn't impress me enough to buy it). However, you could buy a 20GB portable USB HDD and any other 128MB MP3 player for about $250 USD all together, which is only $80 more then their 256MB model.

Verdict:
A. For $170 you can get a 256MB MP3 player with a voice recorder.
B. For $250 you can get a 128MB MP3 player and a 20GB external drive.
C. You could just buy a 20GB MP3 player for $240 USD: Archos Jukebox Recorder 20

NetMeeting or GnomeMeeting using an $80 QuickCam.

$81.86 at buy.com

I think he was referring to the TV ads they have on their home page...

http://ak.buy.com/buy_assets/v6/buymusic/commercia ls/superfreak300k.wmv

The thing I like (and hoping works) is the built-in FM transmitter - no need to lug cable around, just fire up the stereo!

I always said I'd buy the first large capacity portable that did Vorbis. And here it is.

The thing I like (and hoping works) is the built-in FM transmitter - no need to lug cable around, just fire up the stereo!

I always said I'd buy the first large capacity portable that did Vorbis. And here it is.

and I need to it work in zero-G (but not in a vacuum)

First off, this states that you explicitly need it not to work, i.e. "fail" in a vacuum. I doubt this is your intent. If you need something to fail in a vacuum, one idea may be to have a membrane holding back some sort of acid at air pressure, but which bursts and destroys your media at a sufficiently low pressure. If you merely don't care about failing in a vacuum, then leave that out of all future problem statements.

Secondly, to all the posters before me, it appears as though everyone assumes this person is going into space. While Cujo is from John Hopkins' Applied Physics Lab (looking at the e-mail address) which is apparently sending a craft to Mercury, it is possible that Cujo is working on a different project which is terrestrial. Perhaps a roller coaster type environment or sky diving type airplane bourne freefall. I'm not sure why you need 150GB of storage on a craft that will forever have a 9600 baud connection home (if even that fast)-- so I suspect that the poster has less lofty goals. But maybe 150GB is necessary because of the volume of data to record and the craft will return.

To combine RAID type reliability and resistance to vibration and probably some attention to power dissipation, solid state is a good possibility, especially if you have few write cycles. You can apparently get 512 MB of compact flash for $128 but someone might give you a discount if you buy 300 of them. If not, that brings you to less than $40k, which still leaves you with ~$12k to pay a student to integrate them into a smart FPGA based controller.

For pre-existing solid state solutions, google for SSD or solid state drives.

What 'artificial scarcity' are you talking about? There is nothing 'scarce' about music. You can go to any number of internet sites and buy CDs. Try buy.com.

The free market is in action. It's just that people would rather pay $0.00 for music rather than anything more than $0.00.

Stateful, multi-layer inspection firewalls
[...]
High level of cost, security and complexity

I try not to buy from Amazon.com, since they apply for many stupid patents. Also, I noticed that Amazon.com says the list price is $35 dollars, but they sell it to you for a 30 percent discount - so you only pay $24.50. However, if you look inside the cover of the book the actual list price is $25. So really, Amazon.com is lying to you about a 30 percent discount and is really only giving you a 2 percent discount. Also, note that you miss free shipping by 50 cents.

Yes, I am an Amazon hater. (Amazon Sucks!)

You can find it at buy.com instead. I'm not a buy.com lover, just an Amazon.com hater.

Here is the Powerline 802.11b adapter.

Here is the powerline ethernet adapter.

I for one think this is a really neat idea. I think this is the use for powerline ethernet I have seen yet. Buy one Etheret adapter to hook your NAT box into the powerline, and a couple of the access points, keep one in the middle of the house, and plug the other one in outside when you want to work in the yard? Great Idea.

Here is the Powerline 802.11b adapter.

Here is the powerline ethernet adapter.

I for one think this is a really neat idea. I think this is the use for powerline ethernet I have seen yet. Buy one Etheret adapter to hook your NAT box into the powerline, and a couple of the access points, keep one in the middle of the house, and plug the other one in outside when you want to work in the yard? Great Idea.

I asked:
"What defines a blog, anyway? "

Tablizer replied:
"How about: If it turns a profit, it is no longer a blog."

Well, there goes CNN.com, Alternet.org, Fair.org, ACLU.org, Kuro5hin, IMDB, the MIT Tech Review and everything on the BBC website.

On the other hand we'll now get authoratative hits from Amazon, Buy.com and Microsoft.

Woot!

But I think something like this might work. I know it's not firewire (one of your requirements) but if you're looking for redundancy, just buy two and have them mirror each other. They're certainly cheap enough.

Compare that to one of O'Reilly's best books, Building Internet Firewalls, with a cover of $49.95 and 890 pages -- less than 6 cents per page. buy.com has it for $31.47, dropping the ratio to less than 4 cents per page!

O'Reilly books seem to be the most expensive around, yet I think their ability to charge so much has been eroded by good books from other publishers.

Helevius

Compare that to one of O'Reilly's best books, Building Internet Firewalls, with a cover of $49.95 and 890 pages -- less than 6 cents per page. buy.com has it for $31.47, dropping the ratio to less than 4 cents per page!

O'Reilly books seem to be the most expensive around, yet I think their ability to charge so much has been eroded by good books from other publishers.

Helevius

I can't wait to have these start appearing in all sorts of Palm devices. The processors and screens of these guys have long caught up to the PC's of min 90's, but the sotrage capacities have been hovering around late 80's levels with the micro-drives being too large to fit in.

Yowza, you haven't been paying attention to the Palm market lately.

I'm listening to music on my Palm Tungsten T right now, from a 256MB SD card -- these are the static RAM cards the size of a postage stamp (although thicker). Right now, you can get these SDs for about $70, so this is pretty affordable. You can actually get 512MB SD cards, although they'll set you back closer to $300. I remember 40MB hard drives being pretty decent storage for a PC in the early 90s, so the static storage for Palmtops have certainly surpassed the early 90's PC.

Curiously, the cost curve for static RAM seems to be an inverse bell. The lowest cost point seems to be the just-less-than-the-maximum storage capacity, for SD around $0.27/MB. The maximum is over $0.50/MB, and anything below the second-to-best is between $0.40 and $0.50. I'm not sure why, but this strikes me as odd.

You can set up a Music module (basically, a menu choice) and set it to let you browse folders. You can tell it that JPGs are covers, and it will pull the first JPG it finds in each folder and use it as the image - so there are your covers. You can tell it that MP3 and OGG are your media types for this module, and it will display those and let you queue them/play them. If you want more information (for your movies, for example) you can use the included .my file editor - .my files are metadata files about your videos/music/etc. The program will generate .my files for you, though, so unless you want to add a lot of metadata you don't have to.

There is no interface to, say, IMDB, out-of-the-box. People unrelated to this program are writing their own cover downloaders, one I remember is called Gotcha Covered which I found on the AVS Forum but I think it is mentioned in the myHTPC forums as well - it will help you download covers for CDs and DVDs, although for just one or two covers I go to walmart or buy.com on my own. Walmart has good covers for CDs - 500x500, and a good selection. Just drop a JPG in your album folder and that's it, essentially.

I have been using the software for a month or a month and a half. But, the program has come miles since then, and it is not very old at all. Electronic Program Guide is the newest big addition and a fully skinnable interface is coming soon (XML based; you can set up icons rather than buttons, for example, and trigger programming based on button presses.)

So, there is setup involved. Go check out the forums for some help if you need it - I don't remember how good the wizard is, since I had mine set up before the wizard was introduced. The price is right and Pablo is amazing with the amount of work he's done for it - it's come farther than any other HTPC/menu program I've seen in a matter of months. If anything, you should keep your eye on it while you use Showshifter. It is coming along quickly.

Regarding the Bob Marley / Pulp Fiction screen shot... Couldn't tell ya. Probably an accident. :)

This ended up long. I don't have a lot of time to proof it for coherency :) ...get your feet wet with the program and I'm sure you can feel your way around. The forums on myHTPC.net would be a good place if you have trouble; plenty of people there, including myself when I have time.

sheephead

Here or take your pick at Froogle.

there's no way that I'm buying something that ties up the tv everytime somebody wants to make a phonecall. you'd think that for $269 they'd put some sort of display on the thing.

How many people really need color? The ones that I know that do need a nice color printer, not some rickety HP revenue generator.

The Samsung personal laser printers sell for under $200. The cheapest inkjet at Best Buy is $99 and on top of it all black & white laser blows away inkjet any day of the week in regards to performance and quality. Toner which lasts a year must be mindblowing to those who know nothing else but buying ink every three weeks.

We've certainly reached the point where the PC is now a needed appliance and the printer market has been living high on the hog for too long. We're all techies here, use your status as the "neighborhood computer guy/gal" to start letting people know about the benefits of laser, especially when they call complaning about their "free" inkjets.

Perhaps the above comment is a little harsh, afterall inkjet technology definitely has its benefits, but for everyday printing its just the wrong tool for the job.

Amazon has said before that these things happen, and they won't honor orders for honest price mistakes.

But other (sites) honor orders for "honest" price mistakes and even advertise it on their front page!

(I'll let you determine how honest it truely is.)

-- CodeZion

Another $600 word processor from Microsoft.

Hmm, you may want to switch from wherever you purchase software. The full version is only $300 at Buy.om. And if you have a previous version it is only $69.83 for the upgrade version.

Another $600 word processor from Microsoft.

Hmm, you may want to switch from wherever you purchase software. The full version is only $300 at Buy.om. And if you have a previous version it is only $69.83 for the upgrade version.

Another $600 word processor from Microsoft.

Hmm, you may want to switch from wherever you purchase software. The full version is only $300 at Buy.om. And if you have a previous version it is only $69.83 for the upgrade version.

While you have some very good points, one must keep in mind the still staggering rate of performance increases in lightweight and embedded processors.

Witness the proliferation ofcheap PDAs.

The other day, I was looking into obtaining some hardware that I wanted to use in my own embedded experiments but I could not find anything that was cheap enough (read: to be profitable if I ever decided to bring my low-volume application to market). The PDA brings an interesting twist to that.

Is there any PDA that lends itself to being hacked apart and used in something other than its intended use? The other day, I was at Lowes and I saw that their alarm system had the screen about the size of a PDA. A closer look revealed that it was running PalmOS.

Bueller?

I was looking through Buy.com's clearance items last week and came across this. Now there's a deal. 134MB for only $440. And that's at a whopping 86% off! Of course, 134 MB is a bit small... so instead you can buy a 3.2G version. For $28,000. Each. I suspect quantity discounts are available.

Solid state disk is a long ways off if you want anything even vaguely affordable - there simply isn't enough market demand to make prices reasonable.

The ADS Cadet ISA card can be picked up for really cheap and it has Linux support. Only problem is scaring up ISA slots.

I can't believe B&N would sell this for $47... I guess they are relying on lazyness. A few mouse clicks will generally yield better results.

It is obvious that Microsoft has been the fantastic driving force behind software innovation over the past two decades. Their uncanny ability to feel out new markets and met the needs of their customers with cost effective, friendly licensed, quality software has forced all other developers to increase the quality of their products.

The main problem with Free Software today is that GNU considers itself to be the central authority of the Free Software Movement. Sure, people who don't appreciate the utopian nature of the GNU license can go with BSD or GPU style, but neither of those is really satisfactory in giving back to the community.

For example, using BSD style licensing, anyone can take your source and close it to sell a proprietary product. And the GPL, with it's virus-like tendencies, really prevents people from using your source in a corporate enviroment.

So the problem is, GNU needs an elected board to cover the changes in licensing to better reflect the thoughts of the Free Software Community rather than bowing to the whims of Richard Stallman.

DAMN RIGHT! I was actually thinking about a nice monitor and a nice penguin for Christmas.... for me. I might have to spring for some think geek bumper stickers for everyone else. College budgets don't allow for much you know, especially when you are getting yourself a monitor.

As for the DMCA applying to this... If it applies to prices, then it is WAAAAAYYYYY to broad in its powers. If that's the case, I will now copyright the letter "e".

All for $250 (counting a $50 rebate (link to a pdf)).

At first, I started syncing over USB, man was that slow! For $30, you can pick up a firewire card, pop it in, and wham! stuff transfers super-fast.

I love it. Sure, it's a little bigger than an iPod, but that doesn't bother me. The interface is pretty darn good, you can create playlists on the device, I've got tons of battery life, the sound quality is great, and I saved a bunch of money. What's not to love?

Well, there is one thing that sucks about it. The Creative software that comes with it. Ditch it and get the Notmad Explorer software from Red Chair. It's a lot more streamlined, and syncs ID3 tags correctly with the device. It's cheap and totally useful. Todd

All for $250 (counting a $50 rebate (link to a pdf)).

At first, I started syncing over USB, man was that slow! For $30, you can pick up a firewire card, pop it in, and wham! stuff transfers super-fast.

I love it. Sure, it's a little bigger than an iPod, but that doesn't bother me. The interface is pretty darn good, you can create playlists on the device, I've got tons of battery life, the sound quality is great, and I saved a bunch of money. What's not to love?

Well, there is one thing that sucks about it. The Creative software that comes with it. Ditch it and get the Notmad Explorer software from Red Chair. It's a lot more streamlined, and syncs ID3 tags correctly with the device. It's cheap and totally useful. Todd

It was $334 when I bought it at Buy.com two months ago ($347.99 now) & I've fallen in love. Seriously, I thought they were kidding when I read the specs for the new Palms. Compare it to the Zaurus specs and decide for yourself...

I heard a song the other day by someone named Norah Jones which I very much liked. I decided to stop by Best Buy and buy it. The CD cost me $11.99.

Then I was looking at the list of upcoming releases, and thought I'd stop back next week and buy the new Tori Amos album. It too is only $11.99.

Then I thought of a couple of other albums I didn't yet have I wanted. For instance "Heart Shaped World" by Chris Isaak, I checked and it is $9.99. Also "Warning:" by Green Day, I checked and it is $15.99.(Wow that's the first one I've seen close to your price range)

Then I thought... You know, I really need to broaden my horizons and stop listening to off beat music and pick up some top-40. So I looked up the latest album from Eminem. I found it for $12.99. Then I decided to find Pink, her album is $13.99.

I've been buying music since 1987 when I purchased my first CD player. Back then the first CD I bought was the Top Gun Soundtrack, and I paid $16.99 for it. Now if you go look at the historical value of the dollar, you'd find that $16.99 in 1987 is worth $26.48 today. But I'm not paying $26 for my music, I'm paying an average $12-14 for it, or about half the price. You should also note that in 1987 I could buy a Cassette for about $6-7, today they are $10.

Basically it seems like you have two problems.

First, you don't understand what the value of money really means. In 1987 I was working as a student and receiving $4/hour. Want to take a guess as to how much students receive now for working on campus?(Try $8-10/hour) It's called inflation, go look it up.

Second, if you are paying $16-20 for your CDs, then you are a really really stupid consumer and PT Barnum was correct. There are many places to buy music cheaper than that.

And as far as DVDs go... You know what, just quit yer whining and go back to playing Nintendo. (BTW, want to take a guess as to what I paid for Atari 2600 video cartridges?)

Why go with the Terapin VCD recorder when you can get a DVD recorder from Panasonic for about twice the price?

The time-slip and the ability to record using variable bit rate on a much bigger media, seems to be pretty cool. VCD is ok, but it's not where things are going. I'd rather plunk down an extra couple hundred to get a DVD recorder.

guac-foo

InkLink, $85 at buy.com, appears to be a pen that does this without special paper. (IBM also made a product with a tethered pen and clipboard, but I don't know if it exists anymore.)

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10320222 &loc=101

What geek doesn't like the math, science, logic, and illogic in Alice?

...and the next time you slam someone for suggesting running linux on a mac, think before opening your mouth. The previous poster is probably making some generalized statement like; if you're on slashdot, you probably/should have at least one machine running linux and that the scanner he mentioned will run on linux. He made no mention of OS X. I happen to have 3 macs, all of them have at least one partition running debian for linux network development from my academic days, aside from another mac os. So if he likes that scanner, he might be able to use it with linux on his mac.

My suggestion to the scanner issue is get one of those $80 ultra slim USB flatbed scanners. My best friend has one for his Pismo mac laptop that fits perfectly in his bag with his laptop and I belive is bus powered though I think it'd be difficult running a scanner bulb with less than 300mA. I think its a cannon like this one but older and not USB2.0. They used to make a high end for $120 and a low end at $90 but I'm sure older models are super cheap these days.
lastly, I have indeed used my 2.1 mega pixel digital elph to take macro pictures of pages and OCR them later. It works fine.

Here's the CanoScan LiDE 30 USB at Buy.com.
These are by far the best solution for portable scanning. You get a full size bed, excellent quality, decent speed (though not blazing), very quiet operation entirely off USB without any other power source, and yet they're only about the thickness of a laptop. My wife uses hers a lot for her research, it fits very nicely in the side pocket of the laptop bag. Add a reasonably recent version of PaperPort Deluxe, which is one of the most hassle-free scanning and scan management packages around, and you've got everything to create and maintain gobs of scans.

Finally saying that Mac OS X does not have the steep licencing that Windows does is just plain wrong, it still costs $129 for a client and $499/$999 for a server.

Whereas Microsoft Windows XP is $274.95, and Windows 2000 Server (5-client license) is $1,303.95.

Finally saying that Mac OS X does not have the steep licencing that Windows does is just plain wrong, it still costs $129 for a client and $499/$999 for a server.

Whereas Microsoft Windows XP is $274.95, and Windows 2000 Server (5-client license) is $1,303.95.

Your also missing one of the other not-mentioned strong points of the Microsoft Exchange/Outlook combination. The system supports Offline access. The US is by no means 'connected' when it comes to people in the field. Not only do they support offline access, but they also support things like Custom forms (Look at the Active&Bidding field) and Custom Views that take advantage of the data provided in the "Custom Forms". A rather ahead-of-it's-time technology considering there is nothing else that can do this - and do it in an offline manner. So, not only do you get the shared calendaring, you also get easy to create custom forms (which are basically HTML forms w/o the HTML), public folders which can have custom attributes and properties for them (very easy to create, just like a dbms table), custom views on the public folders to group by and/or filter by builtin or custom fields or folder properties, AND all of it works offline. (And it has a system for dealing with conflicts when there are conflicts between offline changes and changes made to data by online users). Suffice to say, there is way more to exchange than calendaring, and MAPI. Oh yeah, almost forgot...you can also create a Public Folder for posting 'Contact' forms and use it as a huge public contact management system, which can be used for sending outgoing mail (and it will recognize the name based on the contacts in the public folder). You can also set filters on document properties for the offline settings in outlook. That means that if I've got 6000 documents in a public folder, all of which have a field called "Job Number"...I can tell Outlook to only syncronize for certain Job Numbers. Thus, the user doesn't have to syncronize all 6000 documents for offline access. It's quit a solution for $240/user (5 user) or $192/user (25 user). See this buy.com search. Exchange is not expensive for what it does. And of course, what MSFT usually doesn't tell you is that an Exchange Client Access License also covers Microsoft Outlook...eg, for every Exchange CAL you've got, you've also got an Outlook 2000 or 2002 license.

I admit though, if Exchange/Outlook didn't have the offline abilities it has, I wouldn't use it. I'd develop a suitable browser-based application using jsp, php, mysql, oracle and linux boxes (which i've done before). BUT, I can't interact with dynamic data through a browser while offline, so for now, I'm stuck with the only thing that can do it. Of course, I'm working on a solution that let's me do this through IMAP, but so is everybody else and I've also got a company to run, so the chances of it getting finished are slim and none. I wouldn't mind paying for an open source solution that does all the above. Maybe I should hire some programmers to code such a thing (I've thought of it many times)...but that's a whole other slashdot post in itself ("Building the Exchange Killer")...which hasn't been posted yet.

The screen is almost the size of a 3x5 note card, and has 600 x 800 resolution.
That is big enough for web browsing, or email, or chat, or writing documents, and some people pay over $400 for a portable dvd player with the very same screen, and same battery life.

It has usb ports, put any game controller on it that you want to.
If you don't want to "lug around" a big keyboard, don't worry I'm sure someone will make a usb nifty little fold up keyboard like the ones for Palms.
You don't need a mouse, it has a touch screen.
Of course bigger screens and interface devices are better for prolonged use and I've got 2 words for you: docking station. Many people use a docking station with their laptops already.
Your palm is synced to your desktop for todo list/calendar stuff, but one of these wouldn't need to SYNC, it could BE the main computer.
This isn't a toy like the PocketPC things, it is a full computer. I don't travel, so this isn't for me, but you can bet that many people who do travel would love to have one device that would replace both their PDA and their laptop, even if they have to carry several batteries and a kit to plug it into the cigarette lighter in their car.

A PDA is still better at being a PDA than this thing is, and 2 hours is a serious problem, no doubt about it. But calling this an iPod with a pretty screen is close minded.

The screen is almost the size of a 3x5 note card, and has 600 x 800 resolution.
That is big enough for web browsing, or email, or chat, or writing documents, and some people pay over $400 for a portable dvd player with the very same screen, and same battery life.

It has usb ports, put any game controller on it that you want to.
If you don't want to "lug around" a big keyboard, don't worry I'm sure someone will make a usb nifty little fold up keyboard like the ones for Palms.
You don't need a mouse, it has a touch screen.
Of course bigger screens and interface devices are better for prolonged use and I've got 2 words for you: docking station. Many people use a docking station with their laptops already.
Your palm is synced to your desktop for todo list/calendar stuff, but one of these wouldn't need to SYNC, it could BE the main computer.
This isn't a toy like the PocketPC things, it is a full computer. I don't travel, so this isn't for me, but you can bet that many people who do travel would love to have one device that would replace both their PDA and their laptop, even if they have to carry several batteries and a kit to plug it into the cigarette lighter in their car.

A PDA is still better at being a PDA than this thing is, and 2 hours is a serious problem, no doubt about it. But calling this an iPod with a pretty screen is close minded.

If you only have 2 PCs, I like my Linksys KVM - less than $60 at buy.com including cables, and I can have it buried behind my desk (double-tapping CTRL switches inputs). Only bummer is that it only has PS2 inputs, but I have no problem running my Logitech cordless kb and Intellimouse optical through USB>PS2 adapters. Linksys KVM Kit

So Apple is exaggerating, their system is only 47% faster... at burning a hole in your wallet.