I loved freeboxen; it was great having a place to give away or trade systems, bits and pieces of hardware, etc. in a geek-to-geek fashion. I passed along some spare bits I had lying around that way. I've tried giving hardware away on craigslist but no takers thus far.
Heck, I'd be willing to host such a site; anyone know of a software package that would be good to use for such a function? It's been a few years so I don't quite recall how the posting/claiming of hardware worked, but it seems to me it was customized for the purpose.
Corel has a lot to prove this time. Testing the waters won't cut it; they ought to either decide that they're going to own the Office application market on Linux or just not bother. At least aim to own it in the corporate world. I mean it's four years since WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, and we have OpenOffice/StarOffice which runs on multiple platforms (OS X version unfortunately not quite up to snuff yet). It's really quite good, and offers some decent MS document handling.
I bought a copy of WPO2K for Linux, in large part to support their efforts in bringing a quality office suite to Linux. I was disappointed, to say the least; it loaded incredibly slowly, in a way that WP8 for Linux never did. It hung upon startup sometimes, even after installing the updated RPMs for a couple of packages. It was just hard to take it seriously, but I was hopeful they'd fix the issues and come out with a new version that was much better. Well, we all know what happened with that.
So anyway, I don't think I see a purpose in doing this. Opportunity lost; I'm not switching from OpenOffice, and I'm not at all convinced the corporate world is going to make a "Linux on the desktop" decision any differently for having an option of a Corel office suite over OpenOffice. Not that I wish for them to fail Corel has had a rough time over the last few years. I'm just not going to be paying for a proprietary package when something good (nay, excellent) is already available as OSS. Not because it's free, but because it works well.
I've been debating this with a couple of friends myself, and there's no super-clear answer we've come up with that meets all of the goals. Those are:
o Ease of use/deployment (think server farm)
o Tracking (what was built where and when it was installed)
o Performance
o Reliability
o Maintainability
o Longevity
That last one is what bugs me. I came to Linux via RedHat 5.3, and I've learned how to set up a firewall, a LDAP server (for addresses mainly), Samba, Apache, etc. over the last few years. I'm no guru, but I can install the software and make it work pretty well. I like packaging like RPM except when the RPM database gets hosed, which has happened to me at least twice. No idea why, and it "sucked more than anything has ever sucked before" (okay, not THAT bad, but you know). That speaks directly to the "reliability" aspect. There was a lot of helpful info about rebuilding a RPM db at rpm.org that I found especially helpful then.
But what I run into with an older system such as my personal (behind firewall) mail & web server that's running Mandrake 8.1 is that keeping up-to-date with security fixes and upgrades is that the Mandrake spec files are full of Mandrake-specific stuff that doesn't apply to newer versions. I can usually get updated tarballs and do my own builds, but eventually the spec files need more major overhauls or newer glibc is needed or something of the sort. I haven't found a good solution for keeping the system up-to-date, and I don't want to re-install newer versions every year or so. But that's what I do...
That's an attraction of using the source-code build strategy, but my buddy is really against this in a server farm environment because of deployment issues (not to mention requirements of specific versions of Linux for many of our apps). It seems more suited to individual users than to that sort of environment, anyway.
I installed Gentoo one time, and I liked how much less bloat it seemed to have. I am not aware how well its ports collections are maintained; if a system I install today can be gracefully updated with stable versions of updated packages over a 2 to 3 year period, I'd be interested in trying it again. I do want to install from a CD, tho (did that the first time) as I want a baseline build so I don't have to download and build quite so much.
There was an interesting program used to manage.tar installations on package-based systems at developerWorks called Stow which was also discussed on Slashdot awhile back. Like so many other things, I'm interested but haven't looked into it...
Also an article with tips for rebuilding from source code that was basic but still useful.
Anyway, kind of a ramble, but there is it just the same.
A buddy just told me over lunch that while he was driving past the Google facility in Mountain View, CA he saw they were having one heck of a party. He said it looked a lot like one of those "We're gonna IPO" parties.
Or maybe it was just a "Happy Monday" party. Yeah, that must be it.
Hell, go to the OO.o bug tracker and you can find entries from 2002 if you look for two minutes.
Exactly... you can't go and find what unresolved bugs there are for any Microsoft product, can you? No, that's proprietary information, my friend, and you and I are not worthy to view it -- whether we're MS customers or not. What a beautiful example of OSS in action, and a strong alternate point to their argument.
This makes a lot of sense; I bet the 110C isn't measured as I initially thought. I still can't read the darned article to get more information, but it just stands to reason that the junction temp isn't too whacked to allow the device to function (assuming my, er, assumptions about the hold time margins on Intel CPUs are valid).
While you're absolutely right -- I did not read the article -- it was because the server was unresponsive. My apologies for trying to actually share a little info from my tiny little world where I thought/hoped it applicable.
Too bad you didn't share any of the details from the article that you of course read; that might have allowed others to undo the criminal positive moderation already done to my post. Alas, another opportunity to make the moderation system function properly wasted.
While I don't work at a microprocessor company, I do work on the physical implementation of mixed-signal ASICs and I'm surprised these CPUs can work at -110C. As I recall even military limits only go down to -50C (at the maximum allowable voltage, usually no more than +10% of nominal) for design timing closure; beyond this (higher voltage and/or lower temperatures) the flip-flop to flip-flop paths may get fast enough to result in a "hold-time violation" . This is when the signal from one flip-flop reaches a downstream flip-flop so quickly that it is registered one clock-cycle early (basically, it is captured on the same clock edge as it was launched). This is most critical on timing paths with no combinational logic (occurs often in shift registers and cross-clock domain synchronizers) and is further complicated by clock distribution networks that take advantage of "useful skew" to borrow time from one timing path for use on another. I'd be surprised if even CPUs were designed with enough hold-time margin built-in to handle -110C.
The other variable is the fabrication process corner, so assuming the CPU isn't on the edge of being "fast" there could be some hold-time margin on a given chip to allow this kind of cooling to result in a working processor. Still, I'm kinda surprised it works at that temperature with any reliability.
But the 2.4GHz spot in the frequency spectrum in a typical household is so crudded up already. I mean, I already have these in use in that space:
o 802.11b network (2 APs, 4 clients)
o Cordless phone
o X10 video camera (for baby monitoring)
o Microwave oven
The X10 camera goes mostly unused nowadays due to interference from the APs. The telephone has some very annoying pops and clicks when the microwave is in use. I'd be hard-pressed to shell out many buckazoids for one of these until I was certain it worked better than my existing phone that's using that spectrum.
Assuming there's enough recovery for corrupted packets when interference is occurring (tried to read the article to get more info, but can't get to the site as usual), I can see where it might work better than my existing phone in the presence of such interference. But I won't be in a big hurry to go buy one just yet.
Low-end hosting often doesn't work that way; I know because I've been on the receiving end of no backups recently. Someone buys a dedicated server with a particular configuration from the data center, and sells reseller or shared hosting to a lot of other people. The data is very often only on the disk(s) on that system; backups are often not done depending upon how much the purchaser of the dedicated server wanted to pay.
Other people who provide hosting services do take advantage of the backup capability offered by the data center, but it is seldom more often than once per week. If the feds wanted fresh logfiles, the only way to get them would be to go to the machines themselves; if they want older ones, the data center would need to have a mechanism to quickly go the the correct backup file(s) and extract just the pertinent ones. That is not a process that most places have down to a science.
What I'm surprised at is that they thought it would be more efficient to do this themselves. You'd think they'd send in their forensic folks and work with the admins to get what they needed. A few hours is not enough time, but a couple of days you'd think might.
...not that this means you don't have to patch your box. But all major distros these days make that really painless. Or at least a lot less painful than Windows.
Just one bit that I'd say this is not quite on the mark in this closing statement: Windows makes it easy to patch a machine for the consumer, one box at a time; they make it easy for corporate customers with tools that can push updates onto boxes (although the required reboots are an issue unto themselves). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd venture a guess that the issue is that you don't have these tools because they cost money that isn't easy to justify for the number of Windows servers you have.
The major problem as I see is is exactly what another poster stated -- that vulnerabilities may exist for months before a patch becomes available from Microsoft, and we may not be informed of them in a timely manner. The sheer number of ways that a Windows machine may be vulnerable for variable periods of time seems to me to be orders of magnitude greater than any Open Source package or the Linux kernel itself.
The ease of patching vs. the costs of doing so is a very valid reason (among many, obviously) for choosing one operating system over another. But to me it's far more important to know when a vulnerability exists and when a patch will be available. Windows loses in this regard, hands down.
So I'm reminded of a joke that my wife's co-worker told her:
Q: How do you make a small fortune in the wine business? A: Start with a large fortune and start a winery
The woman had some credentials to get away with the joke; her family owns a medium-sized winery in either Napa or Sonoma, CA... been too long, can't quite remember. Or maybe the wine has killed those brain cells.;-)
This is indeed true, but it depends upon how you define 'pay'.
In the case of the government using open-source software, 'paying' to me means that the underlying code gets reviewed by govenrment employees or trusted subcontractors prior to being deployed, rather than paying cash for closed-source software. It is inconceivable to me that someone could argue that you have this option with closed-source software, or that you are more protected somehow because people getting a paycheck to write code would never do anything malicious. Even if you get to peek at the underlying closed-source code, how do you know that was the code used to compile the application? With open source you can guarantee it 100% by compiling it yourself. How does it get any better with closed-source? (rhetorical question of course...)
I'm also an OpenOffice.org user; editing an Excel spreadsheet on Solaris now, in fact. The importance of its cross-platform capabilities can't be overstated; it's simply da bomb. I use it on every platform I have except for Mac (that X11 version was just too horendous to look at).
With that said, it starts up incredibly slowly even on Windows, where it starts faster than anywhere else (for me, at least). Its memory footprint is pretty darned big, and even the toolkit being used to make the toolbars and such are noticably slow. While I'm sure there are many features that folks want to see added to OOo, I for one hope the startup speed and memory usage get some work.
Still, I'll check out KOffice 1.3 in the next distro that bundles it in. If it's significantly faster, I'll probably use it sometimes as long as I can get back into OOo when I'm done.
On the one-page summary they recommended using media with a gold reflective layer. My pre-coffee brain (which knows better when there's not too much blood in my caffeine stream) was thinking there was some high-end media that used real gold for the reflective layer. I don't think my $9.99/100 are gonna have any of that...
But I haven't seen any of the golden-colored layer media for a long time. Does anyone actually even make them now?
The whole Yin/Yang element is ever-present. Nuclear power, oil and coal have downsides we are more aware of, but I hadn't heard about this aspect of wind. As an engineer I know about the manufacturing downside of solar cells (which are in operation on the roof of my own house), and I had always assumed wind turbines to be better on the manufacturing side and inconsequential in operation. In retrospect that seems pretty naive...
I drive through the Altamont pass several times each year, and a LOT of those turbines are not operational -- especially those darius rotors that I find so cool. I wonder if the type of turbine has any effect upon the number of bird kills?
Anyway, it seems the safest thing to do is reduce our energy consumption. How much power would be saved if those damned wall wart transformers were able to be powered off, and my silly stereo amp would power down after xx minutes of no sound activity? Unfortunately, I doubt that will happen as long as the manufacturers don't consider it a feature the consumer is willing to pay for.
Ugh... not me. I would have bought one of these had they looked even remotely attractive. I ended up with the Home Media option on my Tivo instead, which is acceptable and was far less expensive (as an add-on charge, of course). I would have much preferred to support an open-source project such as this, but the price was too high for what it looked like (talking about the original SliMp3 here).
The new unit would fit fairly well in with my existing home audio system, however. Still, I'd prefer a unit like the Turtle Beach Audiotron from a "component look" standpoint.
Exactly right. There are numerous "baloney" elements to this "story":
1. CDs are pervasive. You can use them at home, in your car, in portable devices. They crossed the "good enough" threshold for the mainstream (America and other countries included).
2. Form factor. Please, don't try to tell me that a form factor much smaller than a memory stick is reasonable. The memory stick would be a nearly ideal form factor, IHMO. Consider trying to put a squarish card into a car audio player; you'd likely need an eject mechamism like for CompactFlash. The longer, narrower format of the memory stick would allow for easy insertion and removal of the media, and it's not *quite* so easy to lose as one of the smaller cards or this fingernail size they're talking about in the article.
3. People are getting upgrade annoyance. It's bad enough with computers, but with the installed base of CD/DVD players out there and the compatability of the CDs between the computer and home/car audio systems, the amount of equipment to upgrade is prohibitive. Hmmm, okay, this is closely related to #1, but the main point was people getting tired of obsoleting equipment.
Let's just see them try to stop selling CDs in five or even ten years. Assuming they don't like declining revenues and profits, they won't get rid of CDs -- DRM or no DRM.
What happened to the super capacitors? You know, caps with such a high energy density that they could be used to replace batteries in many applications. I'm sure I read about them last on Slashdot, but a quick search on the site turned up too many hits.
The ones out there now are already pretty cool because they can be charged quickly. If the energy density gets closer to high-capacity batteries like LiIon, it would be great to have them in portable devices so recharges would be speedy. Hate to have one short out all of a sudden, tho.
Slashdot Mirror
I loved freeboxen; it was great having a place to give away or trade systems, bits and pieces of hardware, etc. in a geek-to-geek fashion. I passed along some spare bits I had lying around that way. I've tried giving hardware away on craigslist but no takers thus far.
Heck, I'd be willing to host such a site; anyone know of a software package that would be good to use for such a function? It's been a few years so I don't quite recall how the posting/claiming of hardware worked, but it seems to me it was customized for the purpose.
- Leo
Corel has a lot to prove this time. Testing the waters won't cut it; they ought to either decide that they're going to own the Office application market on Linux or just not bother. At least aim to own it in the corporate world. I mean it's four years since WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, and we have OpenOffice/StarOffice which runs on multiple platforms (OS X version unfortunately not quite up to snuff yet). It's really quite good, and offers some decent MS document handling.
I bought a copy of WPO2K for Linux, in large part to support their efforts in bringing a quality office suite to Linux. I was disappointed, to say the least; it loaded incredibly slowly, in a way that WP8 for Linux never did. It hung upon startup sometimes, even after installing the updated RPMs for a couple of packages. It was just hard to take it seriously, but I was hopeful they'd fix the issues and come out with a new version that was much better. Well, we all know what happened with that.
So anyway, I don't think I see a purpose in doing this. Opportunity lost; I'm not switching from OpenOffice, and I'm not at all convinced the corporate world is going to make a "Linux on the desktop" decision any differently for having an option of a Corel office suite over OpenOffice. Not that I wish for them to fail Corel has had a rough time over the last few years. I'm just not going to be paying for a proprietary package when something good (nay, excellent) is already available as OSS. Not because it's free, but because it works well.
- Leo
Damn, I was gonna make the "dropped carrier" joke, you insensitive clod!
- Leo
I've been debating this with a couple of friends myself, and there's no super-clear answer we've come up with that meets all of the goals. Those are:
.tar installations on package-based systems at developerWorks called Stow which was also discussed on Slashdot awhile back. Like so many other things, I'm interested but haven't looked into it...
o Ease of use/deployment (think server farm)
o Tracking (what was built where and when it was installed)
o Performance
o Reliability
o Maintainability
o Longevity
That last one is what bugs me. I came to Linux via RedHat 5.3, and I've learned how to set up a firewall, a LDAP server (for addresses mainly), Samba, Apache, etc. over the last few years. I'm no guru, but I can install the software and make it work pretty well. I like packaging like RPM except when the RPM database gets hosed, which has happened to me at least twice. No idea why, and it "sucked more than anything has ever sucked before" (okay, not THAT bad, but you know). That speaks directly to the "reliability" aspect. There was a lot of helpful info about rebuilding a RPM db at rpm.org that I found especially helpful then.
But what I run into with an older system such as my personal (behind firewall) mail & web server that's running Mandrake 8.1 is that keeping up-to-date with security fixes and upgrades is that the Mandrake spec files are full of Mandrake-specific stuff that doesn't apply to newer versions. I can usually get updated tarballs and do my own builds, but eventually the spec files need more major overhauls or newer glibc is needed or something of the sort. I haven't found a good solution for keeping the system up-to-date, and I don't want to re-install newer versions every year or so. But that's what I do...
That's an attraction of using the source-code build strategy, but my buddy is really against this in a server farm environment because of deployment issues (not to mention requirements of specific versions of Linux for many of our apps). It seems more suited to individual users than to that sort of environment, anyway.
I installed Gentoo one time, and I liked how much less bloat it seemed to have. I am not aware how well its ports collections are maintained; if a system I install today can be gracefully updated with stable versions of updated packages over a 2 to 3 year period, I'd be interested in trying it again. I do want to install from a CD, tho (did that the first time) as I want a baseline build so I don't have to download and build quite so much.
There was an interesting program used to manage
Also an article with tips for rebuilding from source code that was basic but still useful.
Anyway, kind of a ramble, but there is it just the same.
- Leo
A buddy just told me over lunch that while he was driving past the Google facility in Mountain View, CA he saw they were having one heck of a party. He said it looked a lot like one of those "We're gonna IPO" parties.
Or maybe it was just a "Happy Monday" party. Yeah, that must be it.
- Leo
Hell, go to the OO.o bug tracker and you can find entries from 2002 if you look for two minutes.
Exactly... you can't go and find what unresolved bugs there are for any Microsoft product, can you? No, that's proprietary information, my friend, and you and I are not worthy to view it -- whether we're MS customers or not. What a beautiful example of OSS in action, and a strong alternate point to their argument.
- Leo
This makes a lot of sense; I bet the 110C isn't measured as I initially thought. I still can't read the darned article to get more information, but it just stands to reason that the junction temp isn't too whacked to allow the device to function (assuming my, er, assumptions about the hold time margins on Intel CPUs are valid).
- Leo
Okay, AC, I'll bite.
While you're absolutely right -- I did not read the article -- it was because the server was unresponsive. My apologies for trying to actually share a little info from my tiny little world where I thought/hoped it applicable.
Too bad you didn't share any of the details from the article that you of course read; that might have allowed others to undo the criminal positive moderation already done to my post. Alas, another opportunity to make the moderation system function properly wasted.
- Leo
While I don't work at a microprocessor company, I do work on the physical implementation of mixed-signal ASICs and I'm surprised these CPUs can work at -110C. As I recall even military limits only go down to -50C (at the maximum allowable voltage, usually no more than +10% of nominal) for design timing closure; beyond this (higher voltage and/or lower temperatures) the flip-flop to flip-flop paths may get fast enough to result in a "hold-time violation" . This is when the signal from one flip-flop reaches a downstream flip-flop so quickly that it is registered one clock-cycle early (basically, it is captured on the same clock edge as it was launched). This is most critical on timing paths with no combinational logic (occurs often in shift registers and cross-clock domain synchronizers) and is further complicated by clock distribution networks that take advantage of "useful skew" to borrow time from one timing path for use on another. I'd be surprised if even CPUs were designed with enough hold-time margin built-in to handle -110C.
The other variable is the fabrication process corner, so assuming the CPU isn't on the edge of being "fast" there could be some hold-time margin on a given chip to allow this kind of cooling to result in a working processor. Still, I'm kinda surprised it works at that temperature with any reliability.
- Leo
But the 2.4GHz spot in the frequency spectrum in a typical household is so crudded up already. I mean, I already have these in use in that space:
o 802.11b network (2 APs, 4 clients)
o Cordless phone
o X10 video camera (for baby monitoring)
o Microwave oven
The X10 camera goes mostly unused nowadays due to interference from the APs. The telephone has some very annoying pops and clicks when the microwave is in use. I'd be hard-pressed to shell out many buckazoids for one of these until I was certain it worked better than my existing phone that's using that spectrum.
Assuming there's enough recovery for corrupted packets when interference is occurring (tried to read the article to get more info, but can't get to the site as usual), I can see where it might work better than my existing phone in the presence of such interference. But I won't be in a big hurry to go buy one just yet.
- Leo
So your tagline wasn't meant to be just funny, I guess... ;-)
Low-end hosting often doesn't work that way; I know because I've been on the receiving end of no backups recently. Someone buys a dedicated server with a particular configuration from the data center, and sells reseller or shared hosting to a lot of other people. The data is very often only on the disk(s) on that system; backups are often not done depending upon how much the purchaser of the dedicated server wanted to pay.
Other people who provide hosting services do take advantage of the backup capability offered by the data center, but it is seldom more often than once per week. If the feds wanted fresh logfiles, the only way to get them would be to go to the machines themselves; if they want older ones, the data center would need to have a mechanism to quickly go the the correct backup file(s) and extract just the pertinent ones. That is not a process that most places have down to a science.
What I'm surprised at is that they thought it would be more efficient to do this themselves. You'd think they'd send in their forensic folks and work with the admins to get what they needed. A few hours is not enough time, but a couple of days you'd think might.
- Leo
Bingo! Right on the mark.
;-)
I had initially done as you suggested, but decided that "pretend to be one" was more accurate.
- Leo
Just one bit that I'd say this is not quite on the mark in this closing statement: Windows makes it easy to patch a machine for the consumer, one box at a time; they make it easy for corporate customers with tools that can push updates onto boxes (although the required reboots are an issue unto themselves). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd venture a guess that the issue is that you don't have these tools because they cost money that isn't easy to justify for the number of Windows servers you have.
The major problem as I see is is exactly what another poster stated -- that vulnerabilities may exist for months before a patch becomes available from Microsoft, and we may not be informed of them in a timely manner. The sheer number of ways that a Windows machine may be vulnerable for variable periods of time seems to me to be orders of magnitude greater than any Open Source package or the Linux kernel itself.
The ease of patching vs. the costs of doing so is a very valid reason (among many, obviously) for choosing one operating system over another. But to me it's far more important to know when a vulnerability exists and when a patch will be available. Windows loses in this regard, hands down.
Disclaimer: IANASBIPTBOOS
- Leo
So I'm reminded of a joke that my wife's co-worker told her:
;-)
Q: How do you make a small fortune in the wine business?
A: Start with a large fortune and start a winery
The woman had some credentials to get away with the joke; her family owns a medium-sized winery in either Napa or Sonoma, CA... been too long, can't quite remember. Or maybe the wine has killed those brain cells.
- Leo
This is indeed true, but it depends upon how you define 'pay'.
In the case of the government using open-source software, 'paying' to me means that the underlying code gets reviewed by govenrment employees or trusted subcontractors prior to being deployed, rather than paying cash for closed-source software. It is inconceivable to me that someone could argue that you have this option with closed-source software, or that you are more protected somehow because people getting a paycheck to write code would never do anything malicious. Even if you get to peek at the underlying closed-source code, how do you know that was the code used to compile the application? With open source you can guarantee it 100% by compiling it yourself. How does it get any better with closed-source? (rhetorical question of course...)
- Leo
I'm also an OpenOffice.org user; editing an Excel spreadsheet on Solaris now, in fact. The importance of its cross-platform capabilities can't be overstated; it's simply da bomb. I use it on every platform I have except for Mac (that X11 version was just too horendous to look at).
With that said, it starts up incredibly slowly even on Windows, where it starts faster than anywhere else (for me, at least). Its memory footprint is pretty darned big, and even the toolkit being used to make the toolbars and such are noticably slow. While I'm sure there are many features that folks want to see added to OOo, I for one hope the startup speed and memory usage get some work.
Still, I'll check out KOffice 1.3 in the next distro that bundles it in. If it's significantly faster, I'll probably use it sometimes as long as I can get back into OOo when I'm done.
- Leo
On the one-page summary they recommended using media with a gold reflective layer. My pre-coffee brain (which knows better when there's not too much blood in my caffeine stream) was thinking there was some high-end media that used real gold for the reflective layer. I don't think my $9.99/100 are gonna have any of that...
But I haven't seen any of the golden-colored layer media for a long time. Does anyone actually even make them now?
- Leo
The whole Yin/Yang element is ever-present. Nuclear power, oil and coal have downsides we are more aware of, but I hadn't heard about this aspect of wind. As an engineer I know about the manufacturing downside of solar cells (which are in operation on the roof of my own house), and I had always assumed wind turbines to be better on the manufacturing side and inconsequential in operation. In retrospect that seems pretty naive...
I drive through the Altamont pass several times each year, and a LOT of those turbines are not operational -- especially those darius rotors that I find so cool. I wonder if the type of turbine has any effect upon the number of bird kills?
Anyway, it seems the safest thing to do is reduce our energy consumption. How much power would be saved if those damned wall wart transformers were able to be powered off, and my silly stereo amp would power down after xx minutes of no sound activity? Unfortunately, I doubt that will happen as long as the manufacturers don't consider it a feature the consumer is willing to pay for.
- Leo
I prefered the original SliMP3's look
Ugh... not me. I would have bought one of these had they looked even remotely attractive. I ended up with the Home Media option on my Tivo instead, which is acceptable and was far less expensive (as an add-on charge, of course). I would have much preferred to support an open-source project such as this, but the price was too high for what it looked like (talking about the original SliMp3 here).
The new unit would fit fairly well in with my existing home audio system, however. Still, I'd prefer a unit like the Turtle Beach Audiotron from a "component look" standpoint.
- Leo
Exactly right. There are numerous "baloney" elements to this "story":
1. CDs are pervasive. You can use them at home, in your car, in portable devices. They crossed the "good enough" threshold for the mainstream (America and other countries included).
2. Form factor. Please, don't try to tell me that a form factor much smaller than a memory stick is reasonable. The memory stick would be a nearly ideal form factor, IHMO. Consider trying to put a squarish card into a car audio player; you'd likely need an eject mechamism like for CompactFlash. The longer, narrower format of the memory stick would allow for easy insertion and removal of the media, and it's not *quite* so easy to lose as one of the smaller cards or this fingernail size they're talking about in the article.
3. People are getting upgrade annoyance. It's bad enough with computers, but with the installed base of CD/DVD players out there and the compatability of the CDs between the computer and home/car audio systems, the amount of equipment to upgrade is prohibitive. Hmmm, okay, this is closely related to #1, but the main point was people getting tired of obsoleting equipment.
Let's just see them try to stop selling CDs in five or even ten years. Assuming they don't like declining revenues and profits, they won't get rid of CDs -- DRM or no DRM.
- Leo
What happened to the super capacitors? You know, caps with such a high energy density that they could be used to replace batteries in many applications. I'm sure I read about them last on Slashdot, but a quick search on the site turned up too many hits.
The ones out there now are already pretty cool because they can be charged quickly. If the energy density gets closer to high-capacity batteries like LiIon, it would be great to have them in portable devices so recharges would be speedy. Hate to have one short out all of a sudden, tho.
- Leo
Yeah yeah, it was a fast post. Like this one. Thought about it but decided to hit the "Submit" button.
Thanks for taking up my slack.
- Leo
Obligatory "I hate CVS" message. Can't wait for Subversion to come of age.
- Leo
It's not a proprietary format. You can use it to xfer data files as well.
The old software for the non-NX model didn't have Windows Explorer integration, but now it does.
Enjoy,
- Leo