Did Microsoft invent the iPod? No. Did Apple? No. The idea that either company invented the mp3 is ludicrous -- both were years behind numerous companies.
Unless Microsoft somehow patented the idea of a well designed stylish mp3 player their patent is so laughably easy to dismiss with prior art it stands as just another example of how lazy, inept & stupidty-riddled the US Patent Office is.
First, the article is wrong about Battlgrounds. Blizzard has recently stated that they WILL be in the next patch, not the patch after next. My guess is that means ~3 weeks; figure a week or two before we see the test servers back up sporting Battlgrounds, and a week or so after that for the patch to go live.
Second, while stability is still an issue where large scale PVP is ocurring, overall stability has been pretty good in my experience. I'm on Arthas -- one of the most populated servers -- and it's been at least a month I think since I wasn't able to log on immediately. I had a server reboot in the middle of an instance run about a week ago, but that's been it in the last few weeks.
Frankly, I think the ungodly lag in places like Tarren Mills will slowly decrease as people piece together how little honour they get from large scale, one-sided town-raiding. It's far more efficient to form small posses and find a decently populated area to 'farm'. It's tricky though, since killing anyone a second time is worth next to nothing. Once people realize that too I think we'll see people sweeping the globe rather than haunting a particular quest area (unless it's a throughfare that promises a steady stream of new victims).
I haven't seen a serve queue in even longer, though I hear queues were cropping up on the new servers they just opened yesterday. Apparently that's typical on new servers for a day or so though.
I see space colonization as a must. A good enterprise (especially the Great Human Enterprise) should always have a usable back-up at an offsite location.
w00t! They must be talking about Medivh's Tower in Deadwind Pass! A lot of us old beta hands have been waiting to get in there. Given Medivh's prominence in the history of Azeroth, it promises to be an absolute bounty of Warcraftian lore!
Plus, Deadwind pass is just spooky. I mean, it just reeks with atmosphere =) How can the big instance in that not be cool?
Problems with the game right now... There have been times of extreme lag. Ofcourse the fanboi's will say that it is a stress test so thats why there was lag. But in my honest opinion that lag is going to exist when the game comes live. There very rarely is a miracle build and I doubt blizzard have one either.
It should be noted that this was lag within the game server itself, and not between the server and the clients. It's not that there were too many people hogging the internet bandwidth, but rather that the servers couldn't keep up. That's a fairly easy thing to fix if you've got your system designed right because you just throw my servers at it. Not be a fanboi, but clearly part of the stress/open beta phase was to get a feel for how many of each type of server need to be dedicated to alleviate as much of the lag as possigle.
In this case, the lag seemed to be with the item database. Anyone who didn't interact with their items, loot corpses, or use shops blazed along with no troubles. Of course, those are obviously fundamental components but it's not like they lagged all the time, there would just be, admittedly bad, bursts of item interaction lag. So that seemed to be a problem with their item database.
They rebooted the servers a few times and made some fixes and my experiences after that were zero item lag, but I didn't play enough to get a feel. I did notice the lag complaints dialed down a fair bit after that, and they were LOUD before that =)
The classes do not seem to be completely balanced but all of the classes are fun to play. I have played every single class and I enjoyed them all, For example a druid has a bunch of spells, but also has the ability to tank by changing into bear form which is great!
I agree on the class balance. I love the game, been in the closed beta for a few months (Troll Mage to level 60!) and the main thing I'm disappointed about is that the closed beta ended when it did. Not because I wanted to keep playing for free as a priviledged user (though that is a nice thing) but because they've repeatedly said there are a bunch of upper level abilities that they plan to add and I'd love to try and help balance that. I guess I'm a touch put out that they're releasing it this early, I thought for sure it'd be a January release. But I guess they're feeling the combined pressure of EQ2 & Christmas. =(
It's probably EQ2 more than Christmas I think though. People tend to commit to these things; I think they were afraid that even though WoW beats EQ2 hands down in almost every way (caveat: that's 2nd hand, I've never tried EQ2 myself so this may not be true) if people are waiting for WoW they might pick up EQ2, buy a 6 month subscription, and then never come back. I suspect if EQ was hitting shelves 3Q '05 we'd not be seeing WoW hit retail next week. =(
While I agree with the argument that he lowest common denominator often has too much sway, he immediately chose two things I disagree with to make his point.
1. Permanent Death
I disagree that it is a given that this is a naturally good thing. I do agree that there are some players who prefer to play this way, and while I'm not one of them, I can understand how that could be a thrilling experience. I, on the other hand, am looking to enjoy myself and experience the content. He claims that by adding permanent death content would be more replayable because we'd see it through the eyes of man characters instead of uber-character. Like I said, I think there's a case to be made for a permanent death option, but please, this is not it. It's precisely because I don't want to repeat the same damn content over and over that I don't want permanent death to be a fact of life. He overlooks the simplest answer of all: have both options available, a la Diablo II's Hardcore Mode. Mark these players out as special somehow too, so we can marvel at their Hardcore-ness if need be. I don't mind. But don't prevent me from seeing the cooler upper-level spells and areas because you think non-permanent death removes your eliteness.
2. Instances
I'm not sure what he was smoking on this one. Instances are fine. I've been playing WoW for three months and I've rarely ever gone into an instance with the same people even twice. I meet random people and head in. Instances prevent a far, far worse concern that he completely ignores, namely the camping of quest-integral mobs and items. Because yeah, it's FUN to hang around at the end of a dungeon for 8 hours for that rare boss spawn. Just ask old-time EQ players.
Even his arguments against make little sense: that it will fence players off from each other. Moronic. Again, in WoW, there is maybe one, sometimes two such instances in a zone. Instances probably make up, what, 4% of the game's area? You spend maybe 5% of your total playing time in one? And this fences you off? Or, we could let everyone camp mobs, and a fun dungeon experience could be ruined by group of asshats spamming "You are teh sux0r" and corpse camping you. Yeah, that's fun.
His four points about newbies may be true. I can see some truth in his argument. But he still can't use that to prove which features are inherently good or bad. That's ridiculous. Of course, since I'm disagreeing with him, I'm almost certainly a 'newb'. Well, he can think what he wants, just like I will think what I want.
Let's assume for a moment that the run back to your corpse in WoW is the same amount of time you'd need to grind mobs in CoH to get back the experience you lost (this will almost never be the case, in favour of WoW from what I've experienced, but let's do it for sake of argument).
In WoW, you mindlessly run back to your corpse to resurrect. The time is lost, but nothing else is.
In CoH, you HAVE lost something, and you have to work to get it back. Depending on where you grind, you'll have to work shorter or longer to get that experience back, but you HAVE lost it. Also, you could die again while regaining the lost experience and that will put you farther back!
So there is a difference. Personally I prefer the WoW way, I just wish they could come up with a system so that resurrection via player spell wasn't so undesirable except deep in dungeons:(
There is an/ignore command. And yeah, there are currently a fair number of Dialob rejects but also a goodly number of good people. Look for that ration to tilt wildly towards the former in the Open Beta:)
All you guys who end up downloading the Open Beta client are in for a treat. I've played a troll mage (EnSabahNur) through to 57 and had a great time. Still work to be done on it, but a blast nonetheless.
Actually, AIDS is a far bigger problem than you give it credit for namely because it FEEDS the problems you think of bigger.
My father is the chairman of the Canadian branch larger organization that deals with children worldwide. As part of that mandate they have come to view AIDS as perhaps THE greatest problem that they have to deal with.
Basically, AIDS creates widows and orphans. And widows & orphans cause more poverty & more starvation. Not just because THEY are starving or poor, but because it robs their country of productive people and potentially productive people. You really see this in the schools. In countries like Tanzania & Zambia, they're losing teachers to AIDS faster than they can train them! Obviously this translates into less educated people, and that ultimately translates into fewer teachers (among many other things). And the cycle continues.
My father's been to many countries over there to see the problem first hand. In some places, it IS getting better. But very, very, slowly. Other places it's just getter worse every day.
I had the opportunity to go over in May 2004 and I spent 10 days in Zambia & Tanzania (the latter is making better headway). I can say that the problem is as bad as my father & his organization think, and it's far worse than most people in the West have any clue about. It's easy to talk about numbers, but it's a lot harder to put a value on the social and personal costs...and those are enormous.
Worst though, it was goddamn frustrating. My overreaching emotion throughout the trip was anger. Because by and large the people in those countries were getting better! All those old clichés about how poor and hungry the African countries may have been true, but they were starting to get out from under that; you could see it. But then AIDS kicked them right in the teeth and it's like watching someone who'd started to crawl out of quicksand start to slide back. It's disheartening.
AIDS has probably set the continent back 15 years. And that'll probably get worse. In Zambia, I think there are 10 MILLION orphans. 10 million!!! That's a goddamn 1/3 of the population of Canada!
And, of course, even if scientists manage to isolate a gene that prevents the infection, and bottle it, and distribute it, Africa will be the last place on earth that gets it. Because they're in debt already and have little money anyways. Hell, it costs US$3 for a pill that reduces the chances that a baby born from a mother with HIV will also have HIV to less than 10%...and most of the people there can't afford it. Or worse, can but don't know about it because the people there who have them can't afford to educate the people about it. And so it spreads:(
I forget exactly which ones. I base my assertion on a Tom's Hardware article on LCDs I read about a year ago. I believe there was a manufacturer that had a one-pixel (!) policy, but I can't be certain. I was reading a whole bunch while researching a possible LCD purchase of my own. In the end I decided to wait until the replacement policies of the manufacturers were better, since this would imply that they technology had matured to the point where pixel failure was uncommon.
Hell,it's better than the first iMac. Not sure if it's better than the last one, but I don't really care.
Curious: does anyone know what the pixel burnout policy is on those things? Most LCD manufacturers have some threshold whereby if X # of pixels burnout, they replace the monitor. Since LCDs are still -- somewhat -- a new technology, and far from perfected, there will be pixels burning out on some percentage of those screens. For a LCD manufactors, that means a % of monitors that have to be replaced. For Apple, that will mean a % of computers (expensive computers) that have to be replaced.
I'm guessing the threshold will be worse than the current standard (typically 2-4 pixels) based on this, but I'm not sure. Anyone find that in the fine print somewhere?
...have to be low. I mean, let's go over the steps that such an alleged terrorist would have to go thorugh to get this crucial system bug into the kernel:
craft a bug that would be capable of rending someone-in-the-know root access
craft the code that creates the bug in such a way that it would be accepted by Linus. This would require:
a plausible reason for the patch; ie. a feature addition or bug
the crafted 'secret bug' would have to be imbeded in such code that purports to add the alleged feature or fix the supposed bug
Linus (or whoever) would have to miss the bug; so it would have to be fairly subtle
hope that no one detects the bug, be it by the hardware manufacturer, or anyone using the OS before the military hardware goes live in the field (or wherever)
???
Profit! (Terrorize?)
That's a pretty good obscure set of circumstances. Does it mean it can't happen? No. But contrast this with proprietary methodology wherein a coder has (usually) unrestricted access to the code base. Hmmm. Sounds more plausible there!
Of course, the key thing to note here is that anyone who has to dredge the dread forumla that terrorism + open source == Disaster!!! is probably desperate to save his flagging business.
If you've ever played this game, they you must know what I'm talking about. Great voices. Ben was so gruff I almost laughed everytime he said something.
Given that one of the first posts talked about how good the Kyle Katurn voice was in Dark Forces (he's right), and how it made Luke sound lame, it's ironic that several of the voices were done by Hamil in FT!
Exactly. The only difference is that with one these nice tasty DAPs, it's like listening to radio station that only plays music you like. All the fun of the radio without the inccessant chatter and unwanted songs. Who would have though that would be popular indeed!
This is just silly. The only DAPs similar to these 'mini-iPods' are the Rio Nitrus @ US$219.99 SRP and the RCA Lyra RD2760 @ US$249.99 SRP.
So what we are to believe is that Apple is going to put out a 'mini-iPod' that has 3 times the capacity for less than half the price? Make sense: after all, Apple is known for putting out products that are all of sleek, stylish, well-made and cheap.
Wait, no, they aren't; we forgot the Apple Tax(tm)!
I can believe that possibly Apple is reading a 'mini-iPod', but if it's less than US$300 I'll be damned surprised.
I think the developers have, in fact, mentioned this. Their problem is, of course, that they can't say to their users that they must use LAME 3.90.3:( I know that their RMM software does not actually do mp3 decoding unless you upgrade for $10 to the RMM Pro version (I'm sure this has to do with the mp3 patent since they give the non-Pro RMM away for free). I'm not sure what decoder they use in RMMP.
foobar2000 and the encoder delay/padding variables have been mentioned though. I know they're trying to support this as best as possible. The developers on the forums are quite knowledgable and very responsive. The dropping of silent frames may or may not be a user option or a stopgap (no pun indended) measure while they look at other approaches.
I've got one of these two -- had it a week now and have nothing but good things to say.
Does the Karma support dynamic playlist building? That is, can you program a playlist on the device while it is playing music?
Oh yes. It's quite powerful in that regard. The Rio DJ is goddamned fabulous.
Does the Karma support gapless playback? I've heard about the crossfade feature, but I'm much more interested in gapless transitions between tracks.
This works for mp3s that were encoded -nogap only at the moment. Some of the Rio developers hang out and post at the Riovolution forums and they've said the forthcoming 1.2.x firmware (due out any day now) should make gapless a reality for ogg (which was supposed to, but had a bug) and even non-nogap mp3s (the Karma will now drop silent frames starting and trailing mp3s).
Does it display non-western charsets in the song titles? Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. Even accented ISO-8859-1 European characters would be a good start.
I believe the latest PC client software (Rio Music Manager) was just updated to support this. I think the next firmware will provide it on the Karma.
Also note, that while firmware upgrades are USB & Windows only, I believe the java RMML (Rio Music Manager Lite) developer has said that eventually it should be possible to udpate firmware via ethernet and his java client.
Re:What about the dangers?
on
Hackers On Atkins
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I can back this up. I've lost 65 pounds on Atkins (down to 215) and I have to say that, if anything, I'm eating MORE fruits & vegtables than I was before. YMMV though.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless Microsoft somehow patented the idea of a well designed stylish mp3 player their patent is so laughably easy to dismiss with prior art it stands as just another example of how lazy, inept & stupidty-riddled the US Patent Office is.
This is all propaganda because they want to keep everyday people from getting their own set of super powers.
...cue the Dennis the Menace references.
First, the article is wrong about Battlgrounds. Blizzard has recently stated that they WILL be in the next patch, not the patch after next. My guess is that means ~3 weeks; figure a week or two before we see the test servers back up sporting Battlgrounds, and a week or so after that for the patch to go live.
Second, while stability is still an issue where large scale PVP is ocurring, overall stability has been pretty good in my experience. I'm on Arthas -- one of the most populated servers -- and it's been at least a month I think since I wasn't able to log on immediately. I had a server reboot in the middle of an instance run about a week ago, but that's been it in the last few weeks.
Frankly, I think the ungodly lag in places like Tarren Mills will slowly decrease as people piece together how little honour they get from large scale, one-sided town-raiding. It's far more efficient to form small posses and find a decently populated area to 'farm'. It's tricky though, since killing anyone a second time is worth next to nothing. Once people realize that too I think we'll see people sweeping the globe rather than haunting a particular quest area (unless it's a throughfare that promises a steady stream of new victims).
I haven't seen a serve queue in even longer, though I hear queues were cropping up on the new servers they just opened yesterday. Apparently that's typical on new servers for a day or so though.
Anyways, YMMV, but that's how I've had it lately.
I see space colonization as a must. A good enterprise (especially the Great Human Enterprise) should always have a usable back-up at an offsite location.
If your user is getting "Assert failed" messages, you shipped them a debug version by accident! Bigger problems ahead! =)
w00t! They must be talking about Medivh's Tower in Deadwind Pass! A lot of us old beta hands have been waiting to get in there. Given Medivh's prominence in the history of Azeroth, it promises to be an absolute bounty of Warcraftian lore!
Plus, Deadwind pass is just spooky. I mean, it just reeks with atmosphere =) How can the big instance in that not be cool?
If it was a fake post by a hacked account, it wouldn't still be up 5 days later.
It should be noted that this was lag within the game server itself, and not between the server and the clients. It's not that there were too many people hogging the internet bandwidth, but rather that the servers couldn't keep up. That's a fairly easy thing to fix if you've got your system designed right because you just throw my servers at it. Not be a fanboi, but clearly part of the stress/open beta phase was to get a feel for how many of each type of server need to be dedicated to alleviate as much of the lag as possigle.
In this case, the lag seemed to be with the item database. Anyone who didn't interact with their items, loot corpses, or use shops blazed along with no troubles. Of course, those are obviously fundamental components but it's not like they lagged all the time, there would just be, admittedly bad, bursts of item interaction lag. So that seemed to be a problem with their item database.
They rebooted the servers a few times and made some fixes and my experiences after that were zero item lag, but I didn't play enough to get a feel. I did notice the lag complaints dialed down a fair bit after that, and they were LOUD before that =)
The classes do not seem to be completely balanced but all of the classes are fun to play. I have played every single class and I enjoyed them all, For example a druid has a bunch of spells, but also has the ability to tank by changing into bear form which is great!
I agree on the class balance. I love the game, been in the closed beta for a few months (Troll Mage to level 60!) and the main thing I'm disappointed about is that the closed beta ended when it did. Not because I wanted to keep playing for free as a priviledged user (though that is a nice thing) but because they've repeatedly said there are a bunch of upper level abilities that they plan to add and I'd love to try and help balance that. I guess I'm a touch put out that they're releasing it this early, I thought for sure it'd be a January release. But I guess they're feeling the combined pressure of EQ2 & Christmas. =(
It's probably EQ2 more than Christmas I think though. People tend to commit to these things; I think they were afraid that even though WoW beats EQ2 hands down in almost every way (caveat: that's 2nd hand, I've never tried EQ2 myself so this may not be true) if people are waiting for WoW they might pick up EQ2, buy a 6 month subscription, and then never come back. I suspect if EQ was hitting shelves 3Q '05 we'd not be seeing WoW hit retail next week. =(
1. Permanent Death
I disagree that it is a given that this is a naturally good thing. I do agree that there are some players who prefer to play this way, and while I'm not one of them, I can understand how that could be a thrilling experience. I, on the other hand, am looking to enjoy myself and experience the content. He claims that by adding permanent death content would be more replayable because we'd see it through the eyes of man characters instead of uber-character. Like I said, I think there's a case to be made for a permanent death option, but please, this is not it. It's precisely because I don't want to repeat the same damn content over and over that I don't want permanent death to be a fact of life. He overlooks the simplest answer of all: have both options available, a la Diablo II's Hardcore Mode. Mark these players out as special somehow too, so we can marvel at their Hardcore-ness if need be. I don't mind. But don't prevent me from seeing the cooler upper-level spells and areas because you think non-permanent death removes your eliteness.
2. Instances
I'm not sure what he was smoking on this one. Instances are fine. I've been playing WoW for three months and I've rarely ever gone into an instance with the same people even twice. I meet random people and head in. Instances prevent a far, far worse concern that he completely ignores, namely the camping of quest-integral mobs and items. Because yeah, it's FUN to hang around at the end of a dungeon for 8 hours for that rare boss spawn. Just ask old-time EQ players.
Even his arguments against make little sense: that it will fence players off from each other. Moronic. Again, in WoW, there is maybe one, sometimes two such instances in a zone. Instances probably make up, what, 4% of the game's area? You spend maybe 5% of your total playing time in one? And this fences you off? Or, we could let everyone camp mobs, and a fun dungeon experience could be ruined by group of asshats spamming "You are teh sux0r" and corpse camping you. Yeah, that's fun. His four points about newbies may be true. I can see some truth in his argument. But he still can't use that to prove which features are inherently good or bad. That's ridiculous. Of course, since I'm disagreeing with him, I'm almost certainly a 'newb'. Well, he can think what he wants, just like I will think what I want.
Let's assume for a moment that the run back to your corpse in WoW is the same amount of time you'd need to grind mobs in CoH to get back the experience you lost (this will almost never be the case, in favour of WoW from what I've experienced, but let's do it for sake of argument).
:(
In WoW, you mindlessly run back to your corpse to resurrect. The time is lost, but nothing else is.
In CoH, you HAVE lost something, and you have to work to get it back. Depending on where you grind, you'll have to work shorter or longer to get that experience back, but you HAVE lost it. Also, you could die again while regaining the lost experience and that will put you farther back!
So there is a difference. Personally I prefer the WoW way, I just wish they could come up with a system so that resurrection via player spell wasn't so undesirable except deep in dungeons
There is an /ignore command. And yeah, there are currently a fair number of Dialob rejects but also a goodly number of good people. Look for that ration to tilt wildly towards the former in the Open Beta :)
All you guys who end up downloading the Open Beta client are in for a treat. I've played a troll mage (EnSabahNur) through to 57 and had a great time. Still work to be done on it, but a blast nonetheless.
Actually, AIDS is a far bigger problem than you give it credit for namely because it FEEDS the problems you think of bigger.
:(
My father is the chairman of the Canadian branch larger organization that deals with children worldwide. As part of that mandate they have come to view AIDS as perhaps THE greatest problem that they have to deal with.
Basically, AIDS creates widows and orphans. And widows & orphans cause more poverty & more starvation. Not just because THEY are starving or poor, but because it robs their country of productive people and potentially productive people. You really see this in the schools. In countries like Tanzania & Zambia, they're losing teachers to AIDS faster than they can train them! Obviously this translates into less educated people, and that ultimately translates into fewer teachers (among many other things). And the cycle continues.
My father's been to many countries over there to see the problem first hand. In some places, it IS getting better. But very, very, slowly. Other places it's just getter worse every day.
I had the opportunity to go over in May 2004 and I spent 10 days in Zambia & Tanzania (the latter is making better headway). I can say that the problem is as bad as my father & his organization think, and it's far worse than most people in the West have any clue about. It's easy to talk about numbers, but it's a lot harder to put a value on the social and personal costs...and those are enormous.
Worst though, it was goddamn frustrating. My overreaching emotion throughout the trip was anger. Because by and large the people in those countries were getting better! All those old clichés about how poor and hungry the African countries may have been true, but they were starting to get out from under that; you could see it. But then AIDS kicked them right in the teeth and it's like watching someone who'd started to crawl out of quicksand start to slide back. It's disheartening.
AIDS has probably set the continent back 15 years. And that'll probably get worse. In Zambia, I think there are 10 MILLION orphans. 10 million!!! That's a goddamn 1/3 of the population of Canada!
And, of course, even if scientists manage to isolate a gene that prevents the infection, and bottle it, and distribute it, Africa will be the last place on earth that gets it. Because they're in debt already and have little money anyways. Hell, it costs US$3 for a pill that reduces the chances that a baby born from a mother with HIV will also have HIV to less than 10%...and most of the people there can't afford it. Or worse, can but don't know about it because the people there who have them can't afford to educate the people about it. And so it spreads
I forget exactly which ones. I base my assertion on a Tom's Hardware article on LCDs I read about a year ago. I believe there was a manufacturer that had a one-pixel (!) policy, but I can't be certain. I was reading a whole bunch while researching a possible LCD purchase of my own. In the end I decided to wait until the replacement policies of the manufacturers were better, since this would imply that they technology had matured to the point where pixel failure was uncommon.
Ah! Found the article.
Jeepers! Upon reading the article (it had been a while) it looks like Apple's pretty damn bad!
So that may answer my question, unless Apple's changed their tune and has a policy posted somewhere?
Hell,it's better than the first iMac. Not sure if it's better than the last one, but I don't really care.
Curious: does anyone know what the pixel burnout policy is on those things? Most LCD manufacturers have some threshold whereby if X # of pixels burnout, they replace the monitor. Since LCDs are still -- somewhat -- a new technology, and far from perfected, there will be pixels burning out on some percentage of those screens. For a LCD manufactors, that means a % of monitors that have to be replaced. For Apple, that will mean a % of computers (expensive computers) that have to be replaced.
I'm guessing the threshold will be worse than the current standard (typically 2-4 pixels) based on this, but I'm not sure. Anyone find that in the fine print somewhere?
That's a pretty good obscure set of circumstances. Does it mean it can't happen? No. But contrast this with proprietary methodology wherein a coder has (usually) unrestricted access to the code base. Hmmm. Sounds more plausible there!
Of course, the key thing to note here is that anyone who has to dredge the dread forumla that terrorism + open source == Disaster!!! is probably desperate to save his flagging business.
If you've ever played this game, they you must know what I'm talking about. Great voices. Ben was so gruff I almost laughed everytime he said something.
Given that one of the first posts talked about how good the Kyle Katurn voice was in Dark Forces (he's right), and how it made Luke sound lame, it's ironic that several of the voices were done by Hamil in FT!
Exactly. The only difference is that with one these nice tasty DAPs, it's like listening to radio station that only plays music you like. All the fun of the radio without the inccessant chatter and unwanted songs. Who would have though that would be popular indeed!
URL: http://www.dhmo.org/
Last Updated: March 16, 2004
Note: content veracity not implied
Copyright (C) by Tom Way
*L* I guess they missed that...
This is just silly. The only DAPs similar to these 'mini-iPods' are the Rio Nitrus @ US$219.99 SRP and the RCA Lyra RD2760 @ US$249.99 SRP.
So what we are to believe is that Apple is going to put out a 'mini-iPod' that has 3 times the capacity for less than half the price? Make sense: after all, Apple is known for putting out products that are all of sleek, stylish, well-made and cheap.
Wait, no, they aren't; we forgot the Apple Tax(tm)!
I can believe that possibly Apple is reading a 'mini-iPod', but if it's less than US$300 I'll be damned surprised.
Note: "actually do mp3 decoding" should be "actually do mp3 ENcoding".
I think the developers have, in fact, mentioned this. Their problem is, of course, that they can't say to their users that they must use LAME 3.90.3 :( I know that their RMM software does not actually do mp3 decoding unless you upgrade for $10 to the RMM Pro version (I'm sure this has to do with the mp3 patent since they give the non-Pro RMM away for free). I'm not sure what decoder they use in RMMP.
foobar2000 and the encoder delay/padding variables have been mentioned though. I know they're trying to support this as best as possible. The developers on the forums are quite knowledgable and very responsive. The dropping of silent frames may or may not be a user option or a stopgap (no pun indended) measure while they look at other approaches.
I've got one of these two -- had it a week now and have nothing but good things to say.
Does the Karma support dynamic playlist building? That is, can you program a playlist on the device while it is playing music?
Oh yes. It's quite powerful in that regard. The Rio DJ is goddamned fabulous.
Does the Karma support gapless playback? I've heard about the crossfade feature, but I'm much more interested in gapless transitions between tracks.
This works for mp3s that were encoded -nogap only at the moment. Some of the Rio developers hang out and post at the Riovolution forums and they've said the forthcoming 1.2.x firmware (due out any day now) should make gapless a reality for ogg (which was supposed to, but had a bug) and even non-nogap mp3s (the Karma will now drop silent frames starting and trailing mp3s).
Does it display non-western charsets in the song titles? Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. Even accented ISO-8859-1 European characters would be a good start.
I believe the latest PC client software (Rio Music Manager) was just updated to support this. I think the next firmware will provide it on the Karma.
Also note, that while firmware upgrades are USB & Windows only, I believe the java RMML (Rio Music Manager Lite) developer has said that eventually it should be possible to udpate firmware via ethernet and his java client.
I can back this up. I've lost 65 pounds on Atkins (down to 215) and I have to say that, if anything, I'm eating MORE fruits & vegtables than I was before. YMMV though.