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HP Officially Announces 40g MP3 Stereo Component
jspectre writes "HP announced their new
de100c "digital entertainment center." Containing a 40g drive and a built in CDRW drive it will store "up to 750 CDs of music" or 9000 tracks. You can make your own playlists and burn them out to CDR/CDRW's. All of this for $999.99. No mention of any digital management controls on the device." I totally need a review model! I saw this thing at the last LinuxWorld and it looked good, but only really playing with it for a few weeks will let me know if it's better then the audiotron that I've been using in my home system.
I know that this is picky, but your sig is redundant. Please use 15% or 15 percent but not 15% percent. It just irks me. Did you do that on purpose? wait a minute...you're in on the conspiracy aren't you!?
Jeez that's crazy to someone in Taiwan right now. /. editors focus a bit too much on Japan and don't really understand the economics of the place their toys come from. Nichia is cool, but the dude is at Santa Barabara now. Drop the Japan consumer fetish thing because it's so not happening. Really. Prices have to come down. Cheerleading about this is rude.
Doesn't anybody read Anandtech or Tom's hardware? The guts of the Xbox were done by Nvidia and Nvidia and Via are both pointed at a low price point --damn the US or Europe. They want PCs in growth markets and that's only going to happen outside the US and at much lower price points than what people, apparently the Taco among them, in rich countries can afford to say --oh gee, what a bargain at $999! How eighties.
It has jack shit to do with people in LA, SF, NewYork Chigago or Northern Europe getting a good bargain or whatever lateral debate you care to dwell on that has to do with me me me the American consumer. Low hardware prices are about growth markets because a growing market is paradise for the companies on top of it. Places like China, India and South America can't take the current entry points for PCs and related digital entertainment devices, yet their populations are vast and the chances of coming up with a few hundred bucks for the works are considerable if they can get a nice cheap box that really has everything.
So, let's define everything from the rich comsumer's perspective too. A modular solution could work for both markets if it had the following.
1. Gigabit ethernet so they're stackable to increase sales in rich countries while dropping unit prices to the floor to make them accessible in growth markets.
2. In-house distros to make Stacking them easy on the software side and useful for 3D gaming. Some say it's all in the video card, but is that really the full story? These beasts would already be using the latest from NVidia. Complex textures and animations can always use more clock cycles.
3. And the rest of that shit they ought to have, multi-Gig CPUs in boxes a quarter that price, RAM is so damn cheap here. I just bought a 256Meg SDRAM for nine bucks! The 512 sticks are forty bucks. Where the hell is Taco seeing this as a deal? A 20GigHD is a fucking hustle if anything.
Obviously the
Having enjoyed a nice rant, I must confess I never played with one. Perhaps they are cool. And some cool people get off on burning money so whatever. But I suspect hardware is selling like shit because the markets aren't impressed with what gets touted as a deal these days. Where's the 160Gig HDs?
I'm saying sell 8-Way rack mounts at Costco for like $2999. All it would take is an in-house distro with Mosix doing something, anything with all the CPUs at the same time so you could use it in the marketing. Somebody would have to pay to get it done right so it would be workable for mass consumption. I know, I know, we're not there yet. But damn, it's got to be happenin' soon. I always assumed VALinux was going to do something like this, but it never happened. Seems easy though, stick one of these worthless 20Gig IDEs in each of those cases and bang! You advertise it as $160Gig system. Let's say you make the hard drives on like four nodes into jukeboxes and the rest is just for fun and games and let's not forget word processing!
Okay, in that case, I'm all for spending the cash. It's where the market should go. Overpriced special purposed toys are just a diversion from the larger entertaiment potentials that will only come with excessive power lying around waiting to be put to use. At the same time, it will provide a solution to the poorer countries. Everybody wins except all the cultures that get squashed out by western influences, but those make great documentaries afterwards.
Gandhi is overrated. Something tells me that passive resistance would not have worked well for the Jews with Hitler...
Just because he got lucky with India doesn't mean it's a viable philosophy in all (or even very many) cases.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.