to some extent. Go look for books on the work of Mapplethorpe (a fairly well renowned photographer). Much of what you see in tho could be considered porn but could also be considered art.
There was a big fuss in the UK since at one point the police decided this was an obscene work and raided libraries to confiscate it.
I trust libraries to make material that has some value available, regardless of some blanket regulation on how much flesh they can show.
Perhaps they need to have one all singing all dancing package for mac and windows that is geared towards newbies.
And then another one where you get bit of paper with server settings for the more advanced users.
What they really need are competant tech support people - i'm not saying that all isp support people are incompetant (some are in fact VERY competant) but a fair proportion are.
I'd like to recount my experience with at&t@home:
me> My connection is down, the modem doesn't seem to be able to establish ip connectivity after it's locked up and down streams
tech> Try rebooting
me> done that
tech> Power cycle the modem
me> done that
tech> Did you get the email about the changeover to attbi?
me> nope (presumably since I dont check my at&t address and they have another one on file anyway)
tech> ahhh, you need to check your email
me> but i'm not online
tech> but if you read this mail then it'll tell you how to get online
me> i dont think you understand what i'm saying...
tech> no you dont understand what i'm saying, the email will tell you how to get online.
Well this chip apparently works with any cellular network - which surely implies that it must be some sort of "modem". Assuming that they factor out analogue nets (which i thought died out in the early 90s until i reached the usa) then the only technology that will work will be creating an ISDN connection to an ISP - hardly revolutionary.
It's more likely some 2.5G or 3G packet based system but again it's not revolutionary. Nokia and Motorola have both demo'd phones that support these things and if they can fit them in a tiny handset then surely intel fitting them into laptop is hardly noteworthy.
However if they actually have a chip that in itself communicates with a base station without the need for an external antenna then they really have got something cool - but i doubt that.
ISPs need to ask themselves why are users using all this bandwidth and provide a disincentive for them to do so.
I proposed this to my UK isp (Blueyonder) and whilst the tech guys agreed they said it'd probably never happen. But how about this:
Enforce bandwidth caps at boundary router level.
It's a simple concept, give your users a few megabits of symetric bandwidth within your isps network, and give them 1024/128 outwith it.
That way the internet will take on a far more peer-to-peer form, internal-only gnutellanets will spring up. After all who's going to download mp3s from gnutella at 2kbyte/sec or ISOs from redhat at 30kbyte/sec when they can get them dozens of times faster from an internal network!
Surely you can apply the principal of locality and assume that the majority of the data that your users want is already SOMEWHERE on your network. Why pay for dozens of OC3's when all you need is a few routers?
Personally i'd jump to an ISP that had the foresight to do something like. I guess the main counterargument would be that "average users wont set up private gnutella networks and the like" - of course they wont! But 'average' users dont cost the ISP hundreds of dollars each every month.
Yeah I generally avoided that, but must have somehow missed a beat after sitting in there for too long.
It's also possible that it was a queued printout that never got printed. The shafted the print queuer in such a way that once you'd submitted a job you couldn't ever delete it (the previous version allowed you to delete anyones job) and therefore when the paper ran out - it just sat there til 9am the next day, when dozens of printouts would appear.
I pressured them to put a shredder in the lab and to install encryption tools on their systems so that we could avoid having plaintext flowing down snoopable wires - but they didn't seem to get it.
Recently I had to submit an assignment by email and naturally PGP signed it (no encryption though) and the operating systems lecturer that recieved it was thouroughly confused by the presence of a signature block and emailled me back to ask if i'd really meant to do that.
In my first year of university they had the bright idea of running some plagurism detection software against our classes submissions. I believe 127 people were accused of cheating by the CS department - including me.
I was sent a letter telling me that I had been accused of conspiring wiht one other person and consequently my mark would be halved.
Naturally I was outraged and got on the phone to the head of department. He explained that my submission was unacceptably similar to one other person and either someone copied it or we had collorated - I hadn't collaborated, copied or let my work be copied.
I arranged to meet with the course organiser and they showed me both submissions. Mine had originally been given 34/35 and the other had been handed in 2 weeks late and even then given 0/35. The other submission looked virtually identical to mine but had oddities like capital I's as loop control variables (suspiciously as if it had been typed into M$ Word). My guess is that he'd picked my code up from the recycle bin in the lab and typed it in.
However faced with this, they still argued that I could have allowed this person to copy my code (even hinting that I might have accepted payment for it) and if I had any further evidence to prove my innocence then I should draw it to their attention.
My father and I responded that it wasn't right that I should have to prove my innocence since it's a basic human right to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise. We suggested we would seek legal council, and they were quick to write back reinstating my original mark.
What frustrated me further was that the other party involved (who was never identified to me) was punished equally - by having his mark of 0 halved!
Cheat detection systems are fine as a mechanism to prompt staff to possible problems but they certainly shouldn't be used as the judge and jury.
Given that CS typically has large class sizes - mine was over 300 at one point - and CS assignments are often quite short and often closely related to textbook examples... it's infeasible to hope that no two students will produce very similar results.
The other thing that's NEVER been made clear to me is the distinction between permitted collaboration and plagurism. Every university document is fairly vague about what's acceptable and what's not. And as one of my other professors put it - "In the real world before you embark on any assignment it's worth asking, searching, begging and borrowing as much of it as possible"
They want a new protocol that will specifically include congestion control.
So they are going to try and market products with "we know it doesn't transfer mp3s as fast as our competitors but it's more community friendly"
Whilst congestion friendly protocols - like how real drops packets if you cant stream fast enough - are great for some purposes they just aren't going to cut it here.
Who's going to use an instant messenger product that sacrafices performance for the greater good.
Napster was the killer app for broadband users, it's just a shame that it also killed broadband networks - not that the users cared.
Home users are unlikely to - most of them stick with the windows that came preinstalled & M$'s oem pricing is sufficiently good that i cant see system manufacturers changing. Not to mention all those clauses that stop them shipping non-ms OS's. After all lindows is unlikely to run games or edutainment software well.
The business community are unlikely to - why would a sysadmin decide to put his neck on the line switching 5000 systems to lindows. When one critical application doesn't work as it's meant to, it all come crashing down around him. Most sysadmins will just stick to windows even if it does cost more.
The geek community are unlikely to. For the past five years i've kept a linux machine and a windows machine and will soon be readding a mac to that collection. Bluntly windows rocks for games and multimedia - whilst i'd love to do these on linux the support just isn't there. I'll keep my linux pure and gpl'd thank you very much.
The education community might. Although schools tend to avoid anything that they dont know since they dont tend to have a dedicated sys admin to set things up (and in the uk most schools pay sooo far over the odds for computers that the price difference wouldn't care).
Universities and Colleges might jump, since art students will be able to stick with word and it of course gives tech students unix as well. However most uni's at least have some linux workstations, or windows machines with exceed and big linux servers.
Quite honestly i dont see the market for it. Although if they go bust i really hope they open their code to wine.
Ultimately microsofts approach to this problem will be obvious:
Windows costs $W
Lindows costs $L
Office costs $O
Simply create a new bundle which includes Windows and Office at a price less than $O+$L.
I have a cable modem in the uk capped at 128kbit/s which in real terms means i can send data at about 15kbytes/s. It's probably just some confusion at their end.
After all 15kbytes/s would eliminate video conferencing - so what new features could they offer in tv ads?
Firstly they did mention reducing gate leakage current by a factor of 3 i believe which means the chip will produce a lot less heat.
As for embedding the core in the packaging - it's probably a great bonus. As has been pointed out this means that the top of your chip will be completely flush so you'll hopefully get better thermal transfer since you have a bigger surface area.
On a current intel chip the space between the packaging and the heatsink is currently acting as an insulator (since air does that best when it's not moving).
In addition to this, I would speculate that if the core is embedded into the packaging it might allow for small heat pipes to run directly into the core, allowing particularly hot areas of the chip to have additional passive cooling.
That said, given fabrication facilities i'd struggle to make even a single pnp transistor and whilst i could probably remember how to build simple mos (and hence cmos) gates - i'd struggle to replicate what intel was doing in the 70s... so dont take me as any sort of authority on this one.
I dont think this is the case at all. Most ordinary muslims that i've met are perfectly nice people and more than tolerant of other people's religions and beliefs.
Perhaps the reason the arab world dislikes the usa is something to do with $1.8BN Annual Military Aid to Israel. Especially when Israel turn round and use that money to attack palestinian settlements.
I appreciate that the whole israel - palestine dispute is far more complex than a/. comment could explain, but imagine this situation:
You are a arab who has to watch isreal destroy parts of your home town with american made and paid for missiles, naturally you'd feel some resentment towards israel and the usa
Or perhaps you can better relate to:
You are an american who has seen the horror of hijacked aircraft reigning down on one of your major cities, naturally you'd feel some resentment to the militant side of islam
Personally i find both situations horrific and unacceptable. Yet one is an act of terrorism and the other is an act of war - just depends which side of the coin you are on.
I'd be thrilled if bill did that. That way i'd actually be able to stop windows update from making background connections to it's mothership and telling me i need to have it upgrade my system.
That way i could just stick to the old school idea of downloading service packs when i've got the time and bandwidth to do it.
I've lived with a 512kbit cable modem in the uk for some time, and having a few months of ATT@Home i'm quite pissed that it's no longer working.
However i suggest you set up 'tc' on linux to shape the traffic on your linux system. I'm certainly no genius on this subject but if you have linux throttle incoming bandwidth at 1480kbit then you should be able to ensure that you constantly sit just below the limit for any given second.
My main use for tc is to shift large files from my us cable modem to my uk cable modem. I'm had it set to limit my outbound usage to my UK ip address to 112kbit, but set that traffic to be of very low priority - the net effect is that i can upload data all day long. The remaining 16kbit of outbound bandwidth is enough to leave room for all the other tcp control packets (keeps downloads fast) and whenever i upload anything else it takes priority over my bulk upload.
I think current cable services are more analogous to an all you can eat buffet. Whilst at&t give me 10mbps they assume that i wont eat it all, just like restaurants assume their is a reasonable limit to how much pizza one can consume.
I'd imagine that most restaurants would disapprove of two people sharing an all you can eat buffet.
Unfortunately we have no choice with cable and I'd be far more in favor of a decent pricing scheme:
Why not limit users to a few gigs and make it per gb after that?
Why not make it free in the dead of night, so i can cron my new distro downloads and incur the minimum impact on my cableco's network?
Why not make communication within the cableco's own network free and enfore the upstream cap at boundary router level. That way we could open up a gnutella network for our cable region and all the warez, pr0n and mp3 traffic would stay within their network - saving them plenty bandwidth.
Whilst i'm not enthralled at the idea of limited bandwidth, by providing a few concessions i'm sure they could make a lot of us bandwidth-hungry-/.-crowd jump to a metered plan. i know i would
I have a kenwood CD MP3 player in my car and it's excellent. I think i have the MP6090 (although it's snowing so i dont want to go out and check). The only downside is that it only supports an ISO filesystem so your directory names are limited to 31 characters, uppercase and no spaces. The filenames have the same restriction but the unit will display the id3 tag when it's actually playing a track.
It has never skipped on me, plays cds, cdrs, cdrw's and mp3 encoded cds too. It also has am/fm radio, clock, cd text, allows you to name radio stations (although i presume the european version supports rds). The interface is a little fiddly but once you are used to it - it's great.
Realistically i dont see that the quality will be THAT big a deal. My mother's main complaint with her digital camera is that the pictures are too big when she downloads them from it!??
If you care about quality then why would you be using digital anyway. I appreciate that there are some very high MP cameras, kodak's digital back should be 16MP if they've realeased it yet and some other company produce large format cameras that were touching 100MP (last i looked) for reprographics use.
My scanner will pull 8MP from a 35mm frame and that doesn't look close to maxing out the definition that the negative has. Yet how many home users ever blow photos up beyond 5x7". In fact the recent APS situation made it shockingly clear how happy the average guy on the street was to sacrafice quality in place of gimicks and convenience.
I suspect that the worst part about these is that the images will suffer from low light noise, poor colour balance and lens distortion. The MP count (imho) is a lesser factor.
Oh and if i'm out clubbing with my friends then 640x480 is a fine resolution, but if i'm capturing shots of wildlife or panoramic landscapes then I sometimes find my 2700dpi optical scanner limiting.
Once I get a bit of cash saved up i'm going to buy a small digital camera for casual photography, and a 5x4" large format system with a black cloth over my head for when quality is the overriding factor.
Slashdot Mirror
to some extent. Go look for books on the work of Mapplethorpe (a fairly well renowned photographer). Much of what you see in tho could be considered porn but could also be considered art.
There was a big fuss in the UK since at one point the police decided this was an obscene work and raided libraries to confiscate it.
I trust libraries to make material that has some value available, regardless of some blanket regulation on how much flesh they can show.
Perhaps they need to have one all singing all dancing package for mac and windows that is geared towards newbies.
...
And then another one where you get bit of paper with server settings for the more advanced users.
What they really need are competant tech support people - i'm not saying that all isp support people are incompetant (some are in fact VERY competant) but a fair proportion are.
I'd like to recount my experience with at&t@home:
me> My connection is down, the modem doesn't seem to be able to establish ip connectivity after it's locked up and down streams
tech> Try rebooting
me> done that
tech> Power cycle the modem
me> done that
tech> Did you get the email about the changeover to attbi?
me> nope (presumably since I dont check my at&t address and they have another one on file anyway)
tech> ahhh, you need to check your email
me> but i'm not online
tech> but if you read this mail then it'll tell you how to get online
me> i dont think you understand what i'm saying...
tech> no you dont understand what i'm saying, the email will tell you how to get online.
... this goes on for sometime
/. works by linking to other sites, and whilst paying $2/mo for /. isn't the worst thing in the world, i'd soon find i couldn't read half the stories.
Forget the ny times and it's free registration problems - we'd have to pay out for another subscription for every other link!
Well this chip apparently works with any cellular network - which surely implies that it must be some sort of "modem". Assuming that they factor out analogue nets (which i thought died out in the early 90s until i reached the usa) then the only technology that will work will be creating an ISDN connection to an ISP - hardly revolutionary.
It's more likely some 2.5G or 3G packet based system but again it's not revolutionary. Nokia and Motorola have both demo'd phones that support these things and if they can fit them in a tiny handset then surely intel fitting them into laptop is hardly noteworthy.
However if they actually have a chip that in itself communicates with a base station without the need for an external antenna then they really have got something cool - but i doubt that.
I proposed this to my UK isp (Blueyonder) and whilst the tech guys agreed they said it'd probably never happen. But how about this:
Enforce bandwidth caps at boundary router level.
It's a simple concept, give your users a few megabits of symetric bandwidth within your isps network, and give them 1024/128 outwith it.
That way the internet will take on a far more peer-to-peer form, internal-only gnutellanets will spring up. After all who's going to download mp3s from gnutella at 2kbyte/sec or ISOs from redhat at 30kbyte/sec when they can get them dozens of times faster from an internal network!
Surely you can apply the principal of locality and assume that the majority of the data that your users want is already SOMEWHERE on your network. Why pay for dozens of OC3's when all you need is a few routers?
Personally i'd jump to an ISP that had the foresight to do something like. I guess the main counterargument would be that "average users wont set up private gnutella networks and the like" - of course they wont! But 'average' users dont cost the ISP hundreds of dollars each every month.
Yeah I generally avoided that, but must have somehow missed a beat after sitting in there for too long.
It's also possible that it was a queued printout that never got printed. The shafted the print queuer in such a way that once you'd submitted a job you couldn't ever delete it (the previous version allowed you to delete anyones job) and therefore when the paper ran out - it just sat there til 9am the next day, when dozens of printouts would appear.
I pressured them to put a shredder in the lab and to install encryption tools on their systems so that we could avoid having plaintext flowing down snoopable wires - but they didn't seem to get it.
Recently I had to submit an assignment by email and naturally PGP signed it (no encryption though) and the operating systems lecturer that recieved it was thouroughly confused by the presence of a signature block and emailled me back to ask if i'd really meant to do that.
In my first year of university they had the bright idea of running some plagurism detection software against our classes submissions. I believe 127 people were accused of cheating by the CS department - including me.
... it's infeasible to hope that no two students will produce very similar results.
I was sent a letter telling me that I had been accused of conspiring wiht one other person and consequently my mark would be halved.
Naturally I was outraged and got on the phone to the head of department. He explained that my submission was unacceptably similar to one other person and either someone copied it or we had collorated - I hadn't collaborated, copied or let my work be copied.
I arranged to meet with the course organiser and they showed me both submissions. Mine had originally been given 34/35 and the other had been handed in 2 weeks late and even then given 0/35. The other submission looked virtually identical to mine but had oddities like capital I's as loop control variables (suspiciously as if it had been typed into M$ Word). My guess is that he'd picked my code up from the recycle bin in the lab and typed it in.
However faced with this, they still argued that I could have allowed this person to copy my code (even hinting that I might have accepted payment for it) and if I had any further evidence to prove my innocence then I should draw it to their attention.
My father and I responded that it wasn't right that I should have to prove my innocence since it's a basic human right to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise. We suggested we would seek legal council, and they were quick to write back reinstating my original mark.
What frustrated me further was that the other party involved (who was never identified to me) was punished equally - by having his mark of 0 halved!
Cheat detection systems are fine as a mechanism to prompt staff to possible problems but they certainly shouldn't be used as the judge and jury.
Given that CS typically has large class sizes - mine was over 300 at one point - and CS assignments are often quite short and often closely related to textbook examples
The other thing that's NEVER been made clear to me is the distinction between permitted collaboration and plagurism. Every university document is fairly vague about what's acceptable and what's not. And as one of my other professors put it - "In the real world before you embark on any assignment it's worth asking, searching, begging and borrowing as much of it as possible"
I'm sorry but it's just a big red box.
I can see why mac systems are stylish and perhaps 'sexy' but this is just big and red.
Although red is better than beige i guess.
They want a new protocol that will specifically include congestion control.
So they are going to try and market products with "we know it doesn't transfer mp3s as fast as our competitors but it's more community friendly"
Whilst congestion friendly protocols - like how real drops packets if you cant stream fast enough - are great for some purposes they just aren't going to cut it here.
Who's going to use an instant messenger product that sacrafices performance for the greater good.
Napster was the killer app for broadband users, it's just a shame that it also killed broadband networks - not that the users cared.
Perhaps 'Art Student' is a more british figure of speech.
Generally i was thinking of the hoards of english literature students that used to fill our labs typing up essays.
I appreciate that those who actually study art might well want graphics tools.
Home users are unlikely to - most of them stick with the windows that came preinstalled & M$'s oem pricing is sufficiently good that i cant see system manufacturers changing. Not to mention all those clauses that stop them shipping non-ms OS's. After all lindows is unlikely to run games or edutainment software well.
The business community are unlikely to - why would a sysadmin decide to put his neck on the line switching 5000 systems to lindows. When one critical application doesn't work as it's meant to, it all come crashing down around him. Most sysadmins will just stick to windows even if it does cost more.
The geek community are unlikely to. For the past five years i've kept a linux machine and a windows machine and will soon be readding a mac to that collection. Bluntly windows rocks for games and multimedia - whilst i'd love to do these on linux the support just isn't there. I'll keep my linux pure and gpl'd thank you very much.
The education community might. Although schools tend to avoid anything that they dont know since they dont tend to have a dedicated sys admin to set things up (and in the uk most schools pay sooo far over the odds for computers that the price difference wouldn't care).
Universities and Colleges might jump, since art students will be able to stick with word and it of course gives tech students unix as well. However most uni's at least have some linux workstations, or windows machines with exceed and big linux servers.
Quite honestly i dont see the market for it. Although if they go bust i really hope they open their code to wine.
Ultimately microsofts approach to this problem will be obvious:
Windows costs $W
Lindows costs $L
Office costs $O
Simply create a new bundle which includes Windows and Office at a price less than $O+$L.
Ooops sorry i meant 15kbit/s makes it impossible.
:)
Too easy to mess them up
I have a cable modem in the uk capped at 128kbit/s which in real terms means i can send data at about 15kbytes/s. It's probably just some confusion at their end.
After all 15kbytes/s would eliminate video conferencing - so what new features could they offer in tv ads?
Firstly they did mention reducing gate leakage current by a factor of 3 i believe which means the chip will produce a lot less heat.
As for embedding the core in the packaging - it's probably a great bonus. As has been pointed out this means that the top of your chip will be completely flush so you'll hopefully get better thermal transfer since you have a bigger surface area.
On a current intel chip the space between the packaging and the heatsink is currently acting as an insulator (since air does that best when it's not moving).
In addition to this, I would speculate that if the core is embedded into the packaging it might allow for small heat pipes to run directly into the core, allowing particularly hot areas of the chip to have additional passive cooling.
That said, given fabrication facilities i'd struggle to make even a single pnp transistor and whilst i could probably remember how to build simple mos (and hence cmos) gates - i'd struggle to replicate what intel was doing in the 70s... so dont take me as any sort of authority on this one.
How is this different from any password protected site which uses http basic authentication and email based registration.
Say you go to a site and create an account (the details of which are emailled to you)
That then means that the url:
http://username:password@website.com
has been created for you!
Bizreport isn't responding for me so i am just assuming that the description of the patent posted by other users is valid.
I dont think this is the case at all. Most ordinary muslims that i've met are perfectly nice people and more than tolerant of other people's religions and beliefs.
/. comment could explain, but imagine this situation:
Perhaps the reason the arab world dislikes the usa is something to do with $1.8BN Annual Military Aid to Israel. Especially when Israel turn round and use that money to attack palestinian settlements.
I appreciate that the whole israel - palestine dispute is far more complex than a
You are a arab who has to watch isreal destroy parts of your home town with american made and paid for missiles, naturally you'd feel some resentment towards israel and the usa
Or perhaps you can better relate to:
You are an american who has seen the horror of hijacked aircraft reigning down on one of your major cities, naturally you'd feel some resentment to the militant side of islam
Personally i find both situations horrific and unacceptable. Yet one is an act of terrorism and the other is an act of war - just depends which side of the coin you are on.
It'd be great if someone like the ny times printed this story... oh hang on nevermind.
Someone evidently feels the need to be right at the top of every list of downloads
aaquake indeed
I'd be thrilled if bill did that. That way i'd actually be able to stop windows update from making background connections to it's mothership and telling me i need to have it upgrade my system.
That way i could just stick to the old school idea of downloading service packs when i've got the time and bandwidth to do it.
Whilst i'm no guru on chip fab, this seems to be pretty close tot he way i understand how it works today.
You start with a silicon wafer, and then variously apply masks, metal layers and doping the silicon underneath.
You'll end up with a wafer that has a thin layer of SiO2 but with windows cut in it. Copper or Alu interconnects are applied onto that.
Of course we are only talking about a few layers here, not very 3d when you consider the area of the die versus the thickness of the active circuitry.
I've lived with a 512kbit cable modem in the uk for some time, and having a few months of ATT@Home i'm quite pissed that it's no longer working.
However i suggest you set up 'tc' on linux to shape the traffic on your linux system. I'm certainly no genius on this subject but if you have linux throttle incoming bandwidth at 1480kbit then you should be able to ensure that you constantly sit just below the limit for any given second.
My main use for tc is to shift large files from my us cable modem to my uk cable modem. I'm had it set to limit my outbound usage to my UK ip address to 112kbit, but set that traffic to be of very low priority - the net effect is that i can upload data all day long. The remaining 16kbit of outbound bandwidth is enough to leave room for all the other tcp control packets (keeps downloads fast) and whenever i upload anything else it takes priority over my bulk upload.
neat eh?
I think current cable services are more analogous to an all you can eat buffet. Whilst at&t give me 10mbps they assume that i wont eat it all, just like restaurants assume their is a reasonable limit to how much pizza one can consume.
I'd imagine that most restaurants would disapprove of two people sharing an all you can eat buffet.
Unfortunately we have no choice with cable and I'd be far more in favor of a decent pricing scheme:
Why not limit users to a few gigs and make it per gb after that?
Why not make it free in the dead of night, so i can cron my new distro downloads and incur the minimum impact on my cableco's network?
Why not make communication within the cableco's own network free and enfore the upstream cap at boundary router level. That way we could open up a gnutella network for our cable region and all the warez, pr0n and mp3 traffic would stay within their network - saving them plenty bandwidth.
Whilst i'm not enthralled at the idea of limited bandwidth, by providing a few concessions i'm sure they could make a lot of us bandwidth-hungry-/.-crowd jump to a metered plan. i know i would
I have a kenwood CD MP3 player in my car and it's excellent. I think i have the MP6090 (although it's snowing so i dont want to go out and check). The only downside is that it only supports an ISO filesystem so your directory names are limited to 31 characters, uppercase and no spaces. The filenames have the same restriction but the unit will display the id3 tag when it's actually playing a track.
It has never skipped on me, plays cds, cdrs, cdrw's and mp3 encoded cds too. It also has am/fm radio, clock, cd text, allows you to name radio stations (although i presume the european version supports rds). The interface is a little fiddly but once you are used to it - it's great.
Didn't the 8Mbit service have something like 2 or 4 phone lines... what the hell would i use them for!?
Since moving to the USA i've had a cellphone for 3 months and still haven't had anyone call me.
Realistically i dont see that the quality will be THAT big a deal. My mother's main complaint with her digital camera is that the pictures are too big when she downloads them from it!??
If you care about quality then why would you be using digital anyway. I appreciate that there are some very high MP cameras, kodak's digital back should be 16MP if they've realeased it yet and some other company produce large format cameras that were touching 100MP (last i looked) for reprographics use.
My scanner will pull 8MP from a 35mm frame and that doesn't look close to maxing out the definition that the negative has. Yet how many home users ever blow photos up beyond 5x7". In fact the recent APS situation made it shockingly clear how happy the average guy on the street was to sacrafice quality in place of gimicks and convenience.
I suspect that the worst part about these is that the images will suffer from low light noise, poor colour balance and lens distortion. The MP count (imho) is a lesser factor.
Oh and if i'm out clubbing with my friends then 640x480 is a fine resolution, but if i'm capturing shots of wildlife or panoramic landscapes then I sometimes find my 2700dpi optical scanner limiting.
Once I get a bit of cash saved up i'm going to buy a small digital camera for casual photography, and a 5x4" large format system with a black cloth over my head for when quality is the overriding factor.