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Seems like a cheap 4GB USB memory stick :) USB Sticks

check cnet reviews for EVERYTHING and stop posting stupid questions like this on slashdot.

http://reviews.cnet.com/Scanners/2001-3136_7-0.htm l?tag=dir.scan

this means you too, editors.

really? http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6450_7-6247126.html most people have found that the audio quality for the ipod is good, but not as good as many other. esp on the 3rd and 4th gen. maybe you are refering to the shuffle, which has better sound than most players. i'll give you the benefit of doubt.

Mod parent up. Here's an article about the Ricoh RDC-i700, dated 3/18/2002:

http://www.macworld.com/news/2002/03/18/ricoh/inde x.php

And a review from CNet, dated 6/28/2001:

http://reviews.cnet.com/Ricoh_RDC_i700/4505-6501_7 -6346147-2.html?tag=glance

Nokia already made the one-button phone. No, really.

http://reviews.cnet.com/Nokia_7280/4535-6454_7-312 56627.html?tag=top

Maybe you might want to ask Orkut, these exclusionists(who inspired Google towards their current policy), this guy, and maybe CNET. Also, it wouldnt be too far off of them to be evil by making it policy to consider the Midwest as talentless "flyover country".

Maybe they ought to get out there in the sun and take a look at rest of the nation that didnt have blessed connections but has plenty of talent.

My iRiver H320 (http://reviews.cnet.com/iRiver_H320_20GB/4505-649 0_7-31120667.html) hasn't failed me yet.

Celeron D processors with EM64T are now available starting at around $76. Dell is selling Celeron D EM64T desktops starting at around $612.

Though not a car obviously, there's also the ENV1 bike ( http://www.envbike.com/ )reported here before, using hydrogen fuel cells, emitting water and electricity. there are still environmental issues over the hydrogen production in the first place but it still seems much better than oil. I hadn't untill just the other day heard about the GM EN1 also (though I beleive this was just electric)? "Even today's superclean hybrid cars are still polluters--their electric batteries are recharged by small gas engines. But up until 2003, you could lease a true zero-emission electric car from General Motors: the EV1. It was a science-fiction car of the first order, and it looked it--all swoopy lines and space-egg aerodynamics. None were made available for sale. When the leases on the EV1s expired, GM recalled the cars, over the ardent objections of many of the lessees, who protested, begged, and lobbied GM to let them buy their vehicles. GM would not relent, and, citing concerns over liability and parts availability, even took to crushing some of these high-tech marvels to keep them off the road." source: cnet's top 10 things we miss http://www.cnet.com/4520-11136_1-6259955-1.html?ta g=txt

cnet has a guide as well

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-7604_7-1016838-1.html ?tag=dir.prntbg

Yeah, CNET is having a top 10 celebration for its 10th aniversary... can we just point everyone to it rather than having to make each one a new article!?

http://www.cnet.com/4520-11136_1-6250162-1.html?ta g=bottom

1. Manned Space Exploration

Well, I agree that reestablishing travel to the moon and beyond is important, the International Space Station is an important stepping stone that deserves focus. The reason I think so is that I truly believe it's going to take a multinational effort to get to Mars and back.

2. Kozmo.com

Make up your mind, CNET, technology you miss, or giant flop. I suppose it could be both, but even if Kozmo had stayed in business, it could never compete with my neighborhood grocery store.

3. Napster

Any opinion I might express about this would likely start a flame war, so I'll leave this one alone.

4. Concorde

You can't really miss what even yourselves admit was out of reach to almost everyone. I don't seem to miss it at all. How do you miss something you never really had?

5. GM's EV1

Zero Emission Vehicle. ROFLMAO. Zero-emission as long as you don't count the power plant that burned (coal|oil|gas|atomic nuclei) and polluted somone else's back yard. Sure, I suppose the power could have been photoelectric or wind produced, but if you believe no harm to the earth was done in the process of manufacturing those systems, you're clueless. (Hint: Strip mining for metals, processing ore, smelting, doping chemicals for solar, etc). Not that I have a problem with any of the above, but let's be realistic here. There's no such thing as a "Zero Emission Vehicle".

6. The Original Palm Pilot

I don't know. My Zire 31 does everything the original did, plus color and MP3s. I've been eying the Tungsten E2 as an upgrade. Only third party apps have ever crashed it, and that's only twice after over a year of use. The Palm-supplied apps have been rock solid. A lot like the original Palm Pilot.

7. Good Keyboards

Agreed.

8. Wires

You miss wires? Uh, you made the choice to go wireless. If you truly miss wires, just switch back, right? It's not like your old phone company disappeared, and you can't buy ethernet cables. Oh wait... the convenience outweighs the disadvantages of wireless you point to. I guess you don't really miss wires after all.

9. LPs

My wife is an archaeologist. She's told me about digging these up.

10. The Newton

The Newton was good for a laugh, but it was also a good lesson for future manufacturers of PDAs. Without Apple's failure, would we really have seen Palm's success?

How sad... wasn't Kozmo.com in the Top 10 Dot Com Flops article, too? Yes. What's sad is that you see all of these bike messengers in NYC still touting their Kozmo.com messenger bags. And wasn't this in like 30 previous posts, too?

1. Manned space exploration
2. Kozmo.com
3. the original Napster
4. The Concorde
5. GM's EV1 (interesting)
6. The original Palm Pilot
7. Good keyboards
8. Wires
9. LPs
10. The Newton

"I hope that they will soon develop a power efficient chip for laptops."

http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/hardware/notebooks/0, 39001748,39242904-2,00.htm

BAPCo MobileMark2002 battery life (in minutes)
P-M 2.0GHz: 203
Turion64 2.0GHz: 197

(Disclosure: this joke is already half-made in the article.)

Pictures of Repliee. The android behind her doesn't appear too lifelike, though.

It appears that the Osaka lab has been /.ed. Might be interesting once everything settles down.

Here is an exhaustive list of radiation exposures.

And it consumes a lot less power. PM's on the mobile side are just better chips

I've not seen a noise cancellation box as you describe, but then maybe too many engineers have read the Arthur C Clarke short story :)

http://www.whitehouse.com/ former porn site

and

http://www.cnet.com/

[ ] Unix
[ ] Mainframe
[ ] Windows

beard #2

[ ] Unix
[ ] Mainframe
[ ] Windows

beard #3

[ ] Unix
[ ] Mainframe
[ ] Windows

this Hmm..I guess branding is a bitch.

Saying "your fingers can handle a lot more latency than 250 Mbps" is nonsensical- 250Mbps is a measure of bandwidth, not latency. I couldn't find any statistics on a latency difference between USB and Firewire interfaces, and any latency either has is going to be something in milliseconds that will never be apparent to humans no matter what the application. External drives that have dual Firewire/USB interfaces don't even bother to quote different latency specs for the different interfaces, it's so close to identical.

As I said, Firewire had greater bandwidth, so if you needed to move a lot of data in real time, then that was an advantage. Firewire became the standard for video instead of USB because USB 1.1 didn't have enough bandwidth to handle a DV stream, and it probably helped stop USB2 from taking over later that Firewire was designed specifically to handle a DV video stream and has great protocols for doing so. USB2 could probably do as good of a job- the latency's effectively the same as Firewire, and the bandwidth is competitive. You can find many pages online testing, measuring, and debating the merits of Firewire and USB2 for various real-time uses, like MIDI. Note, this article on MIDI latency doesn't even mention the latency of USB and Firewire, only the read/write speeds- the bandwidth, because the latency of the interfaces is irrelevant. USB2 actually wins the realtime data transfer test in their comparison because it achieves faster write speed. If you look around, there are a lot of other real-world tests online showing USB2 and Firewire to have similar bandwidth, and the latency of the interfaces isn't even an issue.

Again, your division of tasks with non-realtime using USB and realtime using Firewire is a coincidence of the two things you pointed out. Plenty of realtime applications are done through USB, and plenty of tasks that aren't time sensitive are done through Firewire. I could as easily switch your sentence around to say "Which is why non-real time tasks like tape backup drives use Firewire, while real-time webcam video uses USB." You can get webcams, printers, hard drives, and all sorts of things with either interface or both. Firewire rules video transfer for the reasons I've mentioned, and USB rules keyboards and mice because USB chips were much, much cheaper than Firewire chips a few years ago. Neither ever had anything to do with latency, and neither has anything to do with current bandwidth differences between Firewire and USB2.

http://reviews.cnet.com/Sling_Media_Slingbox/4505- 6739_7-31423815-2.html?tag=top

it digitizes the programming from your cable or satellite box and streams it--in real time--to a remote PC. The receiving computer needs to be a Windows XP PC with access to a broadband Internet connection and be running Sling's SlingPlayer viewing software. you can stream your PVR, DVD and any channels you get, not just a select few.

I agree that OGG is excellent. In fact, I can often hear weird tinny-sounding artifacts and clicks in MP3 even at 160, while OGG sounds clean. Moreover, the sound of OGG is more, how should I say this, luscious than MP3, even when I compare OGG 80 mbps to MP3 128.

By the way, you should try that compile someone did that allowed Vorbis to encode to -2 quality at 500 BITS per second. It sounded quite amazing, considering the size...

This is what I have found in my own tests. Using Audiograbber (open-source cd ripper that supports ogg, LAME mp3 and more), I ripped several tracks into mp3 and ogg at different bitrates. I found, to my amazement, that I couldn't tell the difference between ogg at 80mbps (!) and CD most of the time. Now all of my music on my iRiver iHP-120 (around $200 for 20gb player on ebay) is in ogg, at about half the space that mp3's would take, and at better quality.

Also see this comparison of OGG, MP3 (LAME 3.91), WMA8, and MP3Pro at 64mbps and 128mbps, which I didn't believe until I reproduced the results with my own encoder.

The ability to reduce the number of cables is absolutely outstanding. A console that can be attached to the Internet without having to run a wire from the router or wireless hub to the box is a godsend. The ping times might suffer a little, though, I bet.

Get a wireless bridge and you can have your godsend today. It's a miracle!

See http://www.synaptics.com/technology/cps.cfm or http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6450_7-5512416-1.html for more info.

I was once looking for a video tape for my friends in Ukraine (different video standard from US). I found it through Yahoo! Shopping Australia...

That said, I also visit CNet and EPinions for product reviews and -- right before buying from a particular vendor -- search Google for

vendor sucks

Use a HP Ipaq 4350 http://reviews.cnet.com/HP_iPaq_H4350/4505-3127_7- 30571424.html It has your integrated keyboard, battery life is way above normal, integrated wifi, integrated bluetooth, uses USB. Seems to be your solution, just be carefull as i accidently broke my HP IPaq 4150 screen a few months back, plan to get it fixed soon.

Correct. It does not.

In fact, there's a serious lack of a decent alternative to iTunes for OS X: ie an regular good ol' winamp-like MP3 player,

"Audion 3: The ultimate Macintosh MP3 player / encoder". Probably the best of the bunch, and it was recently discontinued for OS X. Why? Various reasons, but mainly because an arguably superior product is now available for free. (Oh, us poor, poor consumers.)

and a lack of a decent alternative to Quicktime (VLC doesn't count, im talking things like Zoom Player).

Let me guess: VLC doesn't count because it's existence contradicts your argument. VLC is a fine program, with much broader format support, and terrific support for subtitles. Between that and Mplayer, I don't need to use Quicktime at all, nor do I need an [expletive] "pro" key to go full-screen.

On the Windows front, there's a whole wackload of alternatives for Windows Media Player that goes on and on and on.

Yeah, a bigger user base will do that for ya. Thanks, Captain Observo.

In that respect, there's no decent photo viewer other than iPhoto (Picasa is there for PC),

Come on, perform at least a cursory search before opening your mouth. Shoebox is an excellent program.

no decent consumer video editor other than iMovie (plenty for PC)

Depending on how you cut the difference between 'pro' and 'consumer', the numbers change. How about Hyperengine AV, and Avid Free DV? But more to the point:

and so on and so forth. No one has competed with Apple on this front. Why? Because it's their by default? Why isn't Apple getting sued?

Because, in case you're forgotten, the "sue your platform" tactic was already tried by Netscape, and THEY LOST. Even the much more sinister bundling and OEM contracts cases amounted to almost nothing in the end.

Suffice to say Microsoft is doing absolutely nothing to stop others from installing other browsers/media players or whatever people want.

I don't know about absolutely nothing, but at least they are now forbidden to enter into exclusive bundling contracts with OEMs with obvious intent to crush a competitor. That policy has changed, to eliminate the middleman. That policy now reads, "Just buy the competitor."

So Real Player has every opportunity to gather attention, and in fact their player used to be quite popular. Then it started to be spyware ridden, over-bloated interface and horribly slow player, and they lost it.

A perfect example of a media delivery middleman doing exactly the wrong thing: Making it harder for people to get what they're after, instead of easier. (That's why the Quicktime interface consists of: A row of navigation buttons, and a volume control. No hippy-dippy "skins" to apply, no grating 'bonus content' area, and the 'favorites' in a simple, detached, closable window that most people never see.)

If you're still wondering why Apple isn't being sued while Microsoft was, take note that you're comparing Apples to oranges. If you don't want iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iChat, Mail, Safari, and Terminal on your machine, you can just drag them to the trash, and empty it. And third-party apps continue to work just fine. If you don't want Internet Explorer, WMP, or Outlook Express as part of Windows, you're facing a very different uphill battle. For a while, your 'best' solution was to download an

Wow, remind me to use the preview button... Try this

A keyboard with LCDs on each key seems like it would be needlessly expensive. You can get full LCD-touch screens where you can make a keyboard, but even this has a very niche appeal: it doesn't give the same feedback of a regular keyboard and, of course, the LCD is prone to getting dirty & misregistering strokes (especially in a multiuser environment).

It might be cool to hack one of those virtual keyboards. You know, the ones that project the keys via a laser. This would be cheaper & more maintainable than LCDs, but still no feed-back.

For personal use & for the money, I'd just get an old IBM Model-M & put the keycaps in whatever order I wanted.

I scored a little better, but I'm using the Google Accelerator with my dial-up.

Okay, here's an hour and a half of research into my bandwidth (on a Saturday morning):

• Verizon PC 5220 card, no booster antenna: 158 kbps
  • 7 trials
  • high 677, low 39
  • standard deviation 216 kbps
• Verizon PC 5220 card, with booster antenna: 485 kbps
  • 7 trials
  • high 772, low 51
  • standard deviation 292 kbps
• Covad DSL: 472 kpbs
  • 7 trials
  • high 607, low 381
  • standard deviation 74 kbps

The Verizon PC 5220 card is in a PowerBook. The Covad DSL is plugged into a Power Mac. The laptop performance was measured lying in bed, next to my sleeping wife.

Coverage is pretty good for me. My wife drove us from north Alexandria to Fair Oaks Mall out in Fairfax, I was surfing the web all the way.

Yeah, the slow upload won't let you run a server, but lots of companies provide webhosting, some for little money. Works for me.

Notes:

1. I researched and bought the EVDO plan at http://www.evdoinfo.com/.
2. Bandwidth was measured using "CNET.com - Internet Services - BandWidthMeter Results" ( http://reviews.cnet.com/Bandwidth_meter/7004-7254_ 7-0.html, 2005-06-25T07:40/P1H).
3. Calculation of standard deviation was done at http://invsee.asu.edu/srinivas/stdev.html.

(end notes)

Here is a test image that I believe was designed for printer/monitor color calibration (I dredged it up from the data recovered from a hard drive failure a while back). It is 2297x3600x24 at a resolution of 360 pixels per inch for a final image size of 6.381x10 inches. Included on the image are several Kodak color charts, along with a variety of household objects and several faces of varying skin colors.

Here is another test photo of the same style as the first one. According to the CNET Labs printer page, this is "the industry-accepted PhotoDisc Target document." Not sure about that (especially with the website logo in the corner of the image), but whatever. It works nonetheless.

Following with the previous recommendation of finding a vibrant nature photo, I located a rather beautiful photograph (free registration required for download) of the Grand Canyon with a large variety of colors at 1200x1600x24.

I have been thinking about this on and off for a while now (still stuck in lowly inkjet-land). Thanks for finally motivating me to do some research. Hope this aids you in your obsessive-compulsive quest to achieve satisfaction from knowing every little defect in your printer.

I'm surprised no one has posted screenshots yet but cnet has a couple of very nice looking ones. http://reviews.cnet.com/Nvidia_GeForce_7800_GTX_25 6MB/4505-8902_7-31422201-2.html?tag=top

There's no way I'm going to buy this card (maybe in 3 years) but it sure does make games look good.

You aren't the only one with problems running msoffice X on the Mac.

I was also beset by nasty crashes until I installed the MS "security"?? patch for msoffice X. Even now it still crashes sometimes (see my other post to this parent). This is on a G4 Powerbook with (now) 512MB RAM, so I don't think it is too underpowered.

Secondly, although it isn't really a bug, I hate the way that I can slide windows under the menubars so that I can no longer click the top of the window to move it. To fix this problem I have had to change my menubars to mac-like floating boxes to the side of my workspace. Well I suppose I am using a Mac ! ;P

http://www.shentech.com/agdvx100a.html
http://reviews.cnet.com

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that this has been sitting on my desk for four years now.

The releasedate of this mouse was October 18, 2004 according to Cnet.

Hey look! It's that new Gameboy Color!

http://reviews.cnet.com/Logitech_V500_Cordless_Not ebook_Mouse/4505-3148_7-31144953.html

We've been seeing Indian IT salary rises of about 10% per year for many years now. Most recently:

http://www.asia.cnet.com/news/perspectives/0,39037 107,39225948,00.htm

"Average Indian salaries in the [IT] field rose 12 percent last year, and they are expected to rise by about 15 percent across the industry again this year."

You value battery life, but you bought a "mobile" Pentium 4 laptop instead of a Pentium M or Celeron M laptop at the end of 2004? It's not like the power-saving features of Centrino haven't been publicized and hyped since March 2003.

Initially, Pentium M/Celeron M notebooks carried a notable price difference over Pentium 4/Celeron notebooks. But by the end of 2004, Pentium M technology had made its way all the way down to sub-$1000 notebooks (Celeron M). By that time, only "desktop replacements" (and older discontinued models) were using Pentium 4 CPUs. For the same price as that Toshiba Pentium 4-based notebook, I think you would have been much better off (with much longer battery life) with a Pentium M-based, or even Celeron M-based, notebook.

My first inclination is that console gaming has been so limited in it's basic inability to allow for online gaming (e.g. MMORPG's).

But this factor is really becoming a non-issue since the consoles are starting to become Internet-enabled, for this very reason.

see http://reviews.cnet.com/Nintendo_Revolution/4505-6 464_7-31355104-2.html?tag=top

It will really be interesting to see what happens in the future.

I'm personally hoping that the demand for PC gaming goes way down, alone for the fact that if demand goes down, so will the price!

As one astute /.'r wrote above, no CEO in his/her right mind will walk away from such a huge (albeit shrinking) market.

I whole-heartedly agree.

intel has a little chip in the works for nintendo, it just so hoppens to be a powerpc chip called the broadway http://reviews.cnet.com/Nintendo_Revolution/4507-1 0109_7-31355104.html?tag=txt or at least that is what cnet says, i am not going to make an AMD taking over x86 comment here, intel just wants to expand, apple wants faster cheaper chips, why not... those powerbook G5 don't look like they are going to happen must I LD R0, #b10 LD R1. #b10 ADD R0, R1, R0 ST R0, IntelCanMakePPC

um, because your TV is what, 480x440 (another source), and your monitor is what, 1600x1200 or higher?

someone remind me why they need the equivalent of two GeForce 6800 Ultra cards to run 480x440 resolution?

Unless you're planning on spending big $$$$$ for a real 1080i HDTV then it's pretty stupid to compare a PC running at 1600x1200 to a TV at 480x440.

Also let's not forget the PS3 won't be released for another year, so by then those video cards will be half the price. Then you gotta wait for games to be released, while the PC video cards will run on everything out there.

There's plenty of LCD's at UXGA resolution - they're just expensive. Here's a list

My CRT just died on me and I needed to replace it quickly. It's damned hard to find CRTs here in Japan these days unless you go to a specialty shop. I'm happy with the 19" LCD that I got though I wound up with 1200x1024 because I just wasn't willing to pay the price differential.

No, I'm not dead wrong on color accuracy. Go to Tom's Harware and look at the test results of the latest LCDs they reviewed yourself.

(a) There are still people who read Tom's Hardware?

(b) Okay, I did. Now, where is the comparison to CRTs? I see two LCDs being compared against each other -- apparently they are similar. What should I be deriving from this about CRT's versus LCDs?

I have new twin 20" LCDs at work and a new 19" CRT at home (none of which are high-end products), and I can easily say that:

* The CRT can produce much more intense colors.

* The CRT can produce deeper blacks and brighter whites.

* The CRT has faster response time (even CRTs don't update instantly, but it's hard to see trails caused by a light object on a dark area on it, and not hard on the LCD).

Now, both monitors are much better than their predecessors from a few years ago. The CRT is as flat as the LCD, doesn't show any brightness variation over the surface, and has faster response time than my previous, six-year-old CRT. The LCD doesn't show color banding, has no dead pixels, and the trails are no longer bad enough to be distracting. But if I have to choose just one, I'd take the CRT, for the above reasons, and because:

* CRTs can do multiple resolutions without looking horrendous.

* CRTs cost less.

* CRTs have better refresh rates (not just response times).

* The main advantage of desktop LCDs from my standpoint is the space savings -- and at work, all that means is that there's a big, empty, unused gap behind my monitors instead of a gap containing the rear end of a monitor.

Oh, and CRT's DO fade. It's the nature of phospher technology. Contrast and brightness setting can effect the longevity of your CRT but it's design necessitates fading. There's a huge difference between a 5yr old monitor and a brand new one. Put them side by side and look for yourself. I have.

Sure, but all that means is that you turn up the brightness once a year to compensate for the very slow decrease in brightness. You aren't going to be running the thing at 100% brightness at the beginning, so you have many years of brightness decrease in the thing. I had my previous monitor for six years, and never had brightness or contrast above 75%, even at the end.

However, the vast majority of CRTs out there are crap that costs less than half that amount and you know it.

Let's be fair. You're complaining about him discussing a premium $450 CRT, while you were advocating the technical benefits of LCDs using a rather more expensive premium LCD to do so. How about the obvious counterargument -- that the majority of LCDs out there are not comparable to the LCD that you are using as an example?

Compare the Oblivion PC screenshots to the Oblivion console screenshots. I don't care how good the graphics chipset is. If the result is being displayed on flickering, grainy, interlaced, 1960s display technology it can never be immersive or photorealistic. For current and even nextgen consoles it doesn't matter what goes in because it's always Garbage Out.

Or maybe you will be interested in purchasing a Samsung HL-R6768W for $7000 when it is released this summer. Personally I'd rather invest in Dual X850s and 16x antialiasing on an autostereoscopic LCD screen and a dual 1280x1024 HMD with headtracker. I could have all of it for a fraction of the cost of a 1080p HDTV.

Now my only question is, can I run Windows Update through this browser? So if someone else who decided to get it, let me know.
Yes, yes it does.