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Treó 10: Another Portable Mass Storage Device
mblase writes: ""The Treó 10 is a lightweight, pocket-sized, digital music jukebox with the capacity to store over 3,000 songs - that's 150 hours of music." It's got twice the hard-drive space of Apple's iPod, but also half the RAM, half the battery life, and uses a much slower USB connection instead of FireWire. However, it's PC-compatible using MusicMatch Jukebox right out of the box, and costs only $250 instead of $400 for the iPod. CNet's article compares the two further."
This post doesn't really warrant being on the front page of slashdot really; there's already portable MP3 players with hard drives. It's no surprise that more would come out. Just because it looks slightly like the ipod doesn't mean it's any more special than another mp3 player. It's good that more of these are getting to market, but I see nothing revolutionary here, or news worthy for that matter.
How long will it be before handpring and these morons start dukeing it out over the 'so cool' term Treo? They are booth personal electronic devices, looks like trademark overlap to me
but IANAL.
Does this thing use USB, or USB 2.0? From what I understand, there's a HUGE speed difference.
You will be overwhelmed by "gadget craze" and forget that carrying an IDE drive around is cheaper. Poverty to follow.
...in bed.
So is there any legal overlap between the Treo that is a handheld PDA/phone (which could potentially end up with an mp3 attachment) and the Treo that is a handheld mp3 player? Ohhh, wait, I see. The former has an accent over the 'e' whereas the latter's is on the 'o'. As observed by JC's
Help fight continental drift.
Archos, http://www.archos.com, has been in the game for awhile now. They have a handy 20-gig Jukebox Studio 20 MP3 Player & Hard Drive, http://www.archos.com/us/products/product_500205.h tml, that dare I say rocks. Still uses USB, but it nice to not only carry your MP3 collection around, but also have a handy transport for all your big files.
I have the Jukebox 6000 now, but I am hoping that St. Nick will remember my letter and hook me up with a Studio.
/sig "Shop smart! Shop S-Mart!"
I ordered an iPod the day Apple announced it. So far since its arrival, I've taken it halfway across country patched into my car stereo, I've taken it hiking in the Jemez Mountains, I've tuned out all the banal MallMusik to get my Christmas shopping done without killing anyone, and I patch it into the ministereo in my bedroom so I can be lulled gently to sleep by whatever the randomizer kicks out.
Oh, and I've got all my important OS X data backed up onto it.
I'm completely sold on the iPod. This thing for me is to music what my TiVo is to TV: you'd have to kill me to get it outta my meaty paws.
Now, for the Treo. USB? 10GB? Are they high? Syncing a portable to (in my case) a slightly less portable shouldn't ever be something that takes an overnighter plus to accomplish. That alone would kill the Treo for me.
I'm guessing from the fact that special "music management" software is provided that there's some kind of DRM scheme involved. I like Apple's approach: every iPod comes in a plastic sleeve with "Don't steal music" on it. My machine. My ethical conundrum. They stayed out of it, as they should have.
Still, it'll be nice to get some feedback from folks who've actually used one -- I'm especially curious about the DRM speculation.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
in the just completed (rather dull) Fall COMDEX, i spoke to a number of people who had iPod's, they all loved them, BUT, about half of them were using them as portable storage, in addition to their MP3 duties....
/.r's come up with????
most popular use was transferring movies to your iPod for viewing through your (apple, obviously) notebook.....
at 10GB and 250$, this also becomes a good alternative for the Wintel crowd as a "Personal Storage Device"...
you could put a movie file, some MP3/WMA's, TeleTubbie Pr0n, etc on this, your backups of key programs, data, etc...
for the money this is a LOT cheaper (if slower -- til USB 2) then the 1394 external drives people (including me) have been buying and much more portable....
what other uses can
......
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Another problem is that the bitrate can be dramatically different among the songs in someone's collection, ranging from 128kbps for some songs to a maximum 320kbps for others; yet these announcements completely ignore this! Are they afraid to tell us exactly how many MB or GB the device actually has? Or do they just seek to try and do simple math for us based on some predetermined 'common' bitrate?
I want real measurements, not arbitrary ones. I don't buy cars that get "three full drives per every tank of gas", and I don't buy music players that hold "xxx minutes of music".
-Angron
makes sense to me. Products that are worse and cost more don't survive.
Battery life matter much to me, so I use my Minidisc (40 hrs aa per charge). Those these units definetly have there plusses.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/gadgets/57a3.shtmlT he Terapin Mine Handheld
Uses ETHERNET and USB, runs linux and has 10 gigs of storage plus audio out and MP3 playing abilities. Now, why would you want a stinkin' ipod?
Photos.
Sony has a laptop they call the "Vaio." It uses currently available technology in order to create a laptop. Its better than other ones, but more expensive.
Nike makes shoes. They're better than others, but more expensive.
McDonalds makes hamburgers. They taste good, but the ones from Steak & Shake taste better. However, they are more expensive.
In a thriving industry with hundreds of products which have only a few distinguishing features, why is it worth mentioning one more?
Perhaps this breaks some ground that I'm not aware of. If anyone has any insight, enlighten me.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Neither the article nor the product web site have info on it, so I'll ask here: does the Treo have SDMI on it?
If so, its instantly worthless.
...I bought an iPod and got to admit that after passing the feeling of spending too much for not much more, I love the iPod.
The not much more ends up making all the difference. Having a firewire drive I can carry with me and hot plug to my home machine and transfer music when I need it the most and the fastest I can before leaving home is just phenomenal.
Having twice as much of memory gives me 20 mins of skip free music. A must for this symphonies. The size and design are just too good. Hummm, I love the click of the wheel of the jog shuttle. The interface is also simple and so convenient and so easy to use.
Finally, the battery is a big winner: reloading the unit while connected to firewire, I never ran out of battery like I did all the time on a walkman or even a Rio.
And little people know about the fact that there is a flash eeprom that stores the firmware OS of the machine and Apple plans to release a fix for early bugs, better experience. The other units, er, you just have to buy the new model sorry.
I'll get the software that let's it connect to Windoz. Linux support is probably right at the corner when enough people will buy that device.
Two thumbs up and I am lucky enough to have it before Christmas.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
wow! bigger AND slower!
but it runs under windows, so let's all party!
*sigh*
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I'm betting that whatever method it uses to transfer files from the computer isn't nearly as slick as the iPod's iTunes syncing.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Most people don't have firewire yet. Most PC-users, that is (and thus most people...). So there probably are a lot more customers for an USB-device than for a FireWire-device.
0x or or snor perron?!
with the capacity to store over 3,000 songs - that's 150 hours of music
First, thank you for the story. But I'm going to plead to audio-device story submitters now: For god's sake, when posting the story to Slashdot, please talk to your fellow geeks in geek-speak, not copy-and-pasted condescending marketing terms. I can get that from CNET or MSN or my local news anchor. 3,000 songs? 150 hours? Based on what bitrate? How big is this compared to a PC hard drive? Will this store my existing collection that takes N gigs? Obviously, we can find the real specs if we hit the company's website, but do us a favor and give us the geeky bits when submitting the story.
FWIW, this Treo has a 10 gig drive, so I guess the 3,000 song figure is based on approx 3.3 megs per song. (Kind of low, really.) The 150 hour figure is apparently based on something between 128 and 160 kbps.
Okay, end of rant. Cool device.
Who the fuck needs to be able to boot from a god damn MP3 player?!
This is a completely ridiculous feature...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There have been other Treos in the past as well. Treo, with a long vowel mark over the "e," as Handspring uses it, was trademarked at one time for use as a pesticide, although that mark is no longer active. And, in the 1960s, Treo was trademarked as the name for "soap impregnated in paper tissues for general household cleaning purposes."
errr, thanks C|Net. that's what i go to your site to learn about. expired trademarks in the fields of pesticides and women's shoes.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
See first hand this woman's opinion of the Good Morning, America TV program. I think most /. readers will find her reasons difficult to dismiss.
Why bother.
There's a bit more to it then just har hard drive, you know. For one thing these come with a 2.5'' inch drive rather then a 3.5'' drive. A standard size HD is a bit large for me to carry around.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
rsync is your friend when it comes to this matter.
10GB=8.589935e+10 bits (assuming they're using 1024MB/GB not 100 to inflate the numbers). USB=12mbps=1.258291e+07bits/sec. Assuming this device completely saturates the USB port (it won't), that will take (8.59e+10)/(1.26e+07)=6826.668 seconds=1.89 hours. That seems like a long time to me. the iPod downloads its 5 gigs (yes, only 5, not 10) in ten minutes or so. Yeah, it's $150 more, but that's a big time difference
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
I'm not that bright, however. I'm still suffering with LAME and NotLame notcompiles and I don't know how to write to my CD player with Linux. Because of that, I don't consider any of these things "PC" compatible. They are M$ compatible, the best example of overpriced hype that won't be here ten years from now.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
First I'll tell you guys the positives as I see them. The cost is a major factor. Like many people I can't drop more than maybe $50 at the drop of a hat, so the lower the price the better. The fact that for the lower price, you get 2x the storage is great also. The Treo is 2.5 cents per meg, while the iPod is 8 cents. That plus the fact that it works with Windows out of the box will probably give it very good sales. This is also good because USB is quite ubiqutous, unlike FireWire. The last good point that I'd like to touch on is the fact that it only has enough memory for 8 minutes of continuous playback. I have to say that I can't think of any way to use a MP3 player that would be so abusive that it would not be able to read a few megs off of a hard drive every few minutes. Are people planning on settings their MP3 players on those paint mixer things at hardware stores that shake paint cans like mad? Also, it's a serious bonus not to have to buy a Mac or some piece of software to be able to use my new MP3 player; of course if you already have a Mac, that's not a problem.
Now the cons, once again as I see them. Firs the iPod is tiny and has a great UI. The jog dial works extreemly well, and with the exception that it took me a few seconds to figure out how to force it to turn off (hold pause, didn't take long ;), the controlls are perfect and obvious. I think that while USB is good, they should have included USB 2.0 for a number of reasons:
- USB 2.0 is backwards compatible, so as more computers get USB 2, more people will get faster transfer rates. Let's face it, transfering 10 gigs at USB 1.x speeds would be mind-numbingly slow
- FireWire is just too rare (in the wintel arena anyway) to be able to ship and expect good sales without bundeling a FireWire card with the product, IMHO
- USB 2.0 is supposed to be faster than FireWire (or at least the current implementation of FireWire as seen on a Mac I could go out and buy today, correct?), so if USB 2 was availible you could transfer files to the Treo faster than the iPod
The computer interface isn't the only problem that I see. First of all the Treo looks physically bigger than an iPod. I understand that it would have to be a tad bigger to hold twice as much storage, but it looks quite a bit wider, which is my complaint. The interface doesn't look nearly as good as the iPod. I don't think that the buttons could beat that slick jog dial. Now if they were to include (at least as an option) a little LCD/remote on a headphone cable like many CD players have these days, something that I think should have been offered on the iPod, that could make up for it easy. The battery life is another problem. If all your songs were encoded at 128kbps, then the Treo should only be able to play about 3.5% of it's capacity without having to recharge. While the iPod holds less, it will let you play 12% of it's capacity without having to recharge. This seems quite significant to me. The last major issue that I can say without haveing used a Treo is that it just doesn't look as cool as the iPod. If there is anything that the iMac taught us (other than how much the industry loves playing "Me too!" with ideas that become annoying fast and last TOO long), it's that sex sells. Let's face it, the average joe prefers something that looks stylish (the iMac) to something that looks like a box (average no-name PC of years ago).Well, those are my thoughts. I'd love to do a better in-depth comparison, so you guys feel free to send me any MP3 player (or anything else ;) that you want. My e-mail address is above! All in all I must say that for me, there is no contest that I would have to go with the iPod.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
No "Buy one now at ThinkGeek" link? You guys are slipping.
sulli
RTFJ.
About a month after the one year warranty period, my Vaio's plastic case cracked in one corner. Not too big a deal as everything is still working, just annoying to look at. Another couple months later and a small subset of the keys on the keyboard stop responding. Okay, got on Sony's factory support and ordered a new plastic plate and keyboard (at a cost of $250 total or so).
Works great for another couple months, then one of the hinges for the display snaps clean off. Bleh! At this point, I wish I had just bought a new Thinkpad when my keyboard broke instead of sinking more money into repairing my stinkin Vaio.
You left off the part about the lack of the Apple logo which always seems to increase the price of hardware.
and uses a much slower USB connection instead of FireWire.
USB 1.x can pump 1.2 megabytes per second (12 megabits, divided by 10 bits per byte counting comms overhead). That's the same as an 8x CD-ROM, or 50x realtime for a 192 kbps MP3. That's only five or six seconds per song. How is this slow for incrementally changing what's on your device when you get a new CD? Can't you spare one minute to copy the new album that you picked up at Best Buy to the device?
USB 2.x, on the other hand, is about as fast as a FireWire brand IEEE-1394 connection.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The nomad 20 GB is $349, less the twice the price for more than TWICE the storage....The only thing is it takes 2 bloody hours to fill up my 6GB nomad via USB so this thing is gonna be a nightmare...Apple has it right with FireWire...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Is this the new unit of storage measurement? Will we soon see 50 megasong drives from Seagate? What if songs start getting longer again?
Read the blurb, that's all the comparison is. What a waste of bytes; the submitter summed up in 3 lines what it took the whole page on CNet.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Sadly, the overhead of USB is quite dramatic, bulk packets are 64 bytes max size. Blasting the board with bulk transfers from an Athlon 650, I could get between 860kb and 1.0MB/s into it - depending on the data. Due to bit-stuffing every six bits (this guarantees that the receiver can synthesize the clock from the data stream), the data rate is not constant. In real life it is probably closer to 1MB/s, though.
Interestingly, similar experiments on a Mac showed dramatically worse performance, around 600kB/s. Our resident Mac guru says this is due to very poor implemention in the OS.
Off-topic note to engineers: The part's DMA is broken and the manufacturer doesn't seem to want to rev the die.
Geez people. 10 gig Treo??? 6 gig IPod???? Please people. Are you kidding me???? Get the freakin Archos 20 gig for only $330 at www.thinkgeek.com right now! Don't complain that it's only USB either. Yes USB is quite a bit slower than Firewire but please, it's not like your gonna suddenly decide to copy 10 gigs of music to your Archos all the sudden. I can't believe some people would actually sacrifice 300% more space just so the transfer speeds are faster.....IPod = dumb. 6 gigs is chunk change. And it's more expensive??!?? ha! My archos ownz the Ipod. Who cares how fast I can copy my 10 songs to my mp3 players. As long as it's not forever :)
Jakobud
Huh? I have computer in my trunk with a 40 GB hard drive. Right now it's at around 75% capacity, and has ~4000 songs (in the days of napster, I was the uber-leech... though I must say I've bought atleast 50 CDs from stuff I've downloaded... but that's another story).
Personally, I wish the PR droids would stop assuming everyone in the world used 128 kb/s encoding for their music. I prefer to use 192 kb/s when encoding, and usually don't download anything but. Really, 128 kb/s sounds like absolute shit over any decent sound system. I suppose if you're just listening with "ear buds" or some crappy $10 headphones, it doesn't make a difference. The 10 GB "embedded" drive in this device says 3000? Assuming that is at 128 kb/s (could be less), that's 2000 -- not 3000. When you have a decent album collection, 2000 is not much of anything.
In retrospect... nah, there's no way that "3000" figure could even be 128 kb/s for a 10 GB drive... it must be something lower like 96 kb/s (which means only 1500 songs at 192 kb/s). Still better than carrying around a CD player, but if you're using this in your car, just roll your own damn mp3 player. It impresses the chicks.
--
#nohup cat
If I were to have continued to purchase music, with the money I have these days, I'd be well over 10,000 songs. And I'm damn picky in terms of what I like. If 3,000 songs seems like a lot, you have very, very select tastes in music, or not much money.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The point is, I have some 60GB of MP3s on my machines...and increasing as I slowwwwly get my CDs ripped. No, I don't completely replace all the music on the iPod every time I sync it -- but I could, and it would take less time than a single trip through my .newsrc. USB types don't have that luxury.
Something I found amusing about Apple's promotional material for the iPod was the way they gushed that it would hold 100 CDs -- your Entire! Collection! Chyeah...I'm at a shade under 700 and counting. And I don't think I'm _that_ unusual with music.
As for whether we're the exceptions, I don't think we are. The people who only own a few CDs aren't going to buy a gizmo like this: they're going to take the wallet o' CDs and their DiscMan(tm)(c)(r)(pat pend) when they go out.
Now, you can call kvetching about USB a "whine" if you like, but if you could transfer data at 400 Mb/s with one connector and 12Mb/s with another -- why on earth would you tolerate the dog-slow version?
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Check it out.
Notice the corelation? Silly design move. If they had more ram (so cheap right now too) it wouldn't have to access the HDD as often. Thus, the battery would last longer. Oh well...
SSL Certificate
While I don't have the extra cash to go out and pick up an iPod I've got to play with a couple of them. They are pretty fucking cool. The screen isn't some POS ordered out of a RadioShack catalog, the battery life is long because they don't use standard batteries, and they are really compact. They're geared toward Mac users and people pissed off that they only work with iTunes don't seem to grasp that most shit is ONLY Windows compatible and most of the time Mac users are SOL when it comes to new toys. As for a new iPod-ish device coming out with more space yet less actual capability that doesn't mean much. Storage space on portables isn't such a big deal since there's no way you could listen to the thousands of songs you can carry on the battery supply you've got available. However you might want to make your portable your main MP3 storage device in which case you're actually limited by space but also connection speed. USB is not going to cut it for this sort of task. Having 10GB would be a plus but the fact it would take you forever to fill up the drive is a definite minus. Now if this thing had the same capabilities as an iPod with a groovy screen for half as much money I'd be impressed. You get what you pay for though. Ask Nomad owners who bought their deck six months ago and are STILL waiting for their MP3 collection to upload to it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
- OMG, 10 Mbps is even less than the 12 Mbps of (theoretical) USB peak bandwidth!
- OMG, 10 Mbps is 1/40:th of the (again, theoretical) FireWire/IEEE1394/i.Link peak bandwidth of 400 Mbps!!
Taken together, these two facts might make you think that ThinkGeek's device, while possibly cool, does not beat the iPod when it comes to bandwidth, and in fact doesn't even beat the Treo. Clear? With that said, I must say the TV output is kind of a cool feature.main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
I think that we can safely say that when they do collide they will stitch up some deal which results in the consumer being screwed over.
BTW, does anyone know if you can buy a portable OGG player yet? Perhaps someone could come up with a firmware patch for one of these things which would add that feature.
So that gives them a year or two to come up with a FireWire version of the device and until then their sales won't suffer because they're trying to sell something which the vast majority just cannot use without buying new hardware. By the way...with 10 gigs of space I don't really care about the speed since I can fit all of my favourites on it anyway.
0x or or snor perron?!
Is a jukebox that has ethernet, and uses something like smb, or tftp to put stuff on/delete from it. I'd like the artist/album/song data to simply come from the filenames (ie, directory structure). Nothing else. Just a KISS mp3 player that is easy to put stuff on, remove stuff from, and organize.
Beg Pardon??? Sure USB is more ubiquitous and that is a very good reason to choose to make a product based on it. But you should have stopped while you were ahead.
That "expensive" license was only there for the first six months after Apple introduced Macs' with FireWire. After that, they dropped the price, check it out do a google search.
Apple makes kick ass hardware, but also makes some stupid moves, but that wasn't one of them.
---
"Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that."
Especially useful for those at college who hate how some Mac labs may be locked down with software. Again, just plug in and boot your own setup.
Every locked down mac I've ever seen didn't allow external booting. For good reason.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
While it's interesting to think about how long it takes to fill 10 gig via USB (short answer: overnight) that really isn't a big deal to me. Fine, I transfer your music one evening & I have it from then on on the Treo. There are two bigger 'time' questions though, IMO.
.02 worth.
1) How long does it take to start playing from the moment I boot the machine (for reference, Creative Nomad Jukebox's take up to 50 seconds for an initial boot, check out News.Creative.Com - Products.Nomad and the comments there by Nomad owners & you'll see this is a common issue)?
2) How long does it take for the Treo to shuffle from one track to another one? In other words, are there noticable delays between non-sequential tracks as the hard drive searches for the next song? This would also come into play if I searched for a song - how long will it take to find it?
Anyway, I can live with a long process of transfering my music to the machine as it will only have to be done once (with periodic smaller updates as I get new music), but the other issues would affect me every time I try to play music...and would just be annoying.
Just my
-Mark
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
> I still can't understand why anyone would invest 15 hours in loading a USB device....
I have invested at least this much time, I guess, because I have about 20GB of songs on my upgraded 30 GB Archos. The thing is that I only invested maybe five minutes at a time, over a period of about 4 months. The reason I hacked it up to 30GB was so that it would be a download-once operation - I don't need to constantly shuffle what is on the toy because it has *everything*. My entire CD collection, plus what I have managed to pirate off of friends.
And to confuse things, Firewire 2 should be shipping on some machines in Q1 02. If this is the case, it might "leapfrog" Firewire and become the default install of the two.
Someone check my figures here:
USB 1.5MB/s
Firewire 50MB/s
USB2 60MB/s
Firewire2 100MB/s
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
Interesting.
I noticed that Apple was using a standard file rate of 192 kb/s for their marketing figures. Looks like they expect people to use the highest quality, while other companies marketing dept.s expect people to use the crappiest quality.
I bet this bites Apple on the ass.
Rather like when the used to measure all of their monitors by the *viewable/useable* space, NOT the size of the glass. Every other company used the (misleading) size of the glass, and that left them trying to explain that their 13.3" was the same as a 14 or 15" monitor.
To me it is more honest to measure the storage size in terms of "real world" quality or monitors in terms of the actual viewable space you get.
But the marketing droids take over, streching the truth as much as they can, which means every one has to also in order to compete.
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
I have a bit over 500 myself. Don't think that is too unusual.
Plus I have 700+ albums from back in the day before these new-fangled CD things. But I was in radio back then. (And basically one of the guys from _High Fidelity_ but I have reformed since.)
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
Got a spare slot? Firewire cards can be found for about 30$US.
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
Not a hack. As long as your machine will boot of off 1394, then it works.
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
No, it's different. What sucks about USB is that it does everything that IEEE 1394 does, but a little worse.
And the cost per unit of USB hardware is much cheaper than that of 1394 hardware. The asymptotic law of hardware cost states that if you reduce the cost of one component or set of components that contributes say 3/4 of the cost of a device, you can't reduce the total cost lower than 1/4 of the original cost. USB and USB 2 are both licensed on a royalty-free relevant-patent-swap basis; 1394 requires payment of a 25c per device royalty. After three layers of markup (manufacturer, distributor, and dealer), this royalty can become significant.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes, I know about the 1.8 inch drives in the smaller storage widgets, including the iPod. I mention in my review that the whole iPod actually costs about the same as the higher retail prices for a drive like the one it contains :-).
My 5200/75LC was the suckiest piece of suck ever created.
They're not always all that bad. Check out the HOWTO I wrote on making one useful.
--saint
No, it's easy to disable external booting. You can set a password in Open Firmware to prevent booting from any external device, or anything but a specified device without a password. It's customizable and your choice. Any Mac with Open Firmware can do this. There are a couple of shareware gadgets to set passwords via a GUI, if you're squeamish about using the OF command line. The only way to reset the machine without the password is to reset OF by removing RAM and OF will reset when it detects the changed configuration. So all you have to do is install the password and keep the CPU cabinets locked, and you're secure.