>And finally, I still have this question: What about playback? Is there any difference between playback engines? I've got a RIO 300 w/64 Mb and I use it all the time.
I haven't done any real serious testing between playback devices, but I also have a Rio 300 -- and I think it sounds terrible. My 300 makes every MP3 sound like AM radio, even when I plug in good headphones. There is no comparison between the Rio 300 and WinAmp, IMHO.
Other players I haven't listened closely to. But my Rio is worthless.
Maybe for the 1337 hax0rs on the overclocking web sites it's about status. But for myself and my friends, all of whom overclock, it is about getting more for your money!
Let's see... a celeron 300A OC'd to 450MHz cost me EXACTLY THE SAME as a 300A running at stock speed. Any cheapo fan did the trick. I was running a 450MHz system long before "mere mortals" could afford it. I was AHEAD of the curve for once in my life. For less $.
My current rig is a celeron 566 running at 850MHz. It cost me about $130 for the CPU/fan/slotket adapter. No special cooling was required. I used a fan/heat sink that cost $10. Where's the crushing additional cost?
And I know all about how the Celerons aren't as fast as a real PIII and yadda yadda yadda. Big deal. I am still getting more for my money. A lot more. More frames per second. Faster respose on the desktop. What's not to like?
If I had more money, I would buy a better processor. And I would overclock it too, as others have said.
You say that overclockers are obsessed with some penis thing, that it's all for show, that it's a waste of money. On the contrary -- I say that if you are NOT overclocking when you can, you are a chump.
I used to know this guy back when I was in high school. We were both members of an Explorer Post at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. I had no idea I had him to thank for Apache. Small world.
What if this article detailed a technology that could make people smarter?
At what point is improving ourselves dangerous or unethical?
It's interesting to me that vision enhancement is largely seen as harmless... but how would strength enhancement, or intellect enhancement be seen?
(I am not fishing for a fight, just curious what people think. FWIW I say bring on all the enhancements science can provide. I wear glasses -- I'll take the rest too, thank you.)
We're not talking about superpowers here. It's just vision enhancement. Save your fears for a technology that matters, like anti-aging treatments. Could easily happen within a generation or 2.
>The way the planet works, all resources cycle. A simplistic example is water.
If the cycle time is sufficiently long (ie fossil fuels) then practically speaking there is no cycle. And what about radioactives? Uranium doesn't recycle, neither does tritium. They decay irreversibly. If you want to synthesize them you use up more energy than you can get back.
>When you travel into space, you actually remove resources from the shorter term cycles of the earth by carrying them outside our atmosphere.
Big deal. A few tons of materials won't make a difference globally. And you use Earthly materials to bootstrap your way into exploiting resources that you find in space.
Were the materials used by the pilgrim's wooden ships missed by England? No. The investment paid off. For a while, anyway.;)
>But the illusion of solving the problems of the human species through space travel is just that, an illusion.
There are resources in space, and there is room to use them in. What's so hard to accept about that?
>My other question is - why are we so intent on outsurviving the Earth's willingness to let us live here? Why not just appreciate what we are given, and make the most of it?
Do you just make the most of what you are given here? Have you ever asked for a raise? Ever looked for a better job, or a better place to live? Have you looked for companionship?
It's the most natural thing in the world to try and better your situation -- as an individual, as a nation, as a species.
You may be content to lay back and take whatever the universe dishes out -- but don't be surprised if humanity at large wants to put up a fight.
Sorry, but this is perfectly potty. Have you ever heard the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?"
Put down your hammer. Open source is not the solution to everything.
Weapons plans are not "competitive assets" in the same sense as the secret Windows APIs are.
Microsoft's abuses get us overpriced, crappy software that's forced on us.
Abusing US nuke technology results in more nukes being made and aimed at us. I hate MS as much as the next guy, but please don't tell me the two are comparable.
If someone steals our plans for suitcase nukes or whatever, it will affect the balance of power in the world. I would rather have the US be at the top than China, Russia, etc. Wouldn't you? We aren't perfect but we have a better track record in a lot of important ways.
I'm going to say a couple things now that will be extremely unpopular with some folks here.
1. It's OK for governments to keep secrets, even secrets about exotic weapons.
2. It's OK to charge people for software.
Like it or not, we'll be living with both of these for the forseeable future. Deal with it.
Let's hear it for Microsoft's Virus Building Script!
Why can't they issue a serurity patch for Windows that adds a control panel setting for VBS? Be default, the system should DISALLOW the execution of *.VBS files. Turn it on of you are an author and you know what you are doing.
I just did a quick search of my C drive... there are 6 VBS files, all in a samples directory. This does not look like a technology that needs to be enabled by default. If the file type association for VBS was clobbered, or if VBS files were neutered in some other way, would this have any negative impact on Windows? Someone must know.
Here's an idea: someone should modify the ILOVEYOU virus so that it does the following:
- Reads address books and replicates iteself as usual
- On the "victim" machine, it DISABLES the future execution of Visual Basic Scripts. The virus that disables future viruses!
Damascus & pattern-welded steels are very neat looking. I have a Spyderco folding knife that was made with a Zowada Steel damascus blade. Pretty spiffy. Of course it's pretty beaten up because I USE the knife, and I didn't keep it in a box.
I have wanted a meteoric metal blade for a long time, but not in damascus or pattern-welded style. That just makes it doubly expensive. Give me a meteoritic metal blade and an Earthly Damascus blade as well, and I'll be quite happy.
Sure, music is wonderful, yadda yadda yadda but it is still, in the end, the product of someone's labor. Like software. And while I think it would be keen if music makers all wanted to give it away for the betterment of all, they still have a right to charge for it. If you don't want to pony up, you find a substitute product.
You can't force creative people to give their stuff away. That's just wrong. If you built a house, do I have the right to crash it? Or are you a bad person for not letting bums sleep in your living room? Of course not.
OK, a quick primer on ham radio for the uninitiated.
The "ham" in ham radio is a strange abbreviation of "amateur." The amateur radio service is chartered by the FCC in America, and other government bodies in other nations.
The government has allocated parts of the radio spectrum for hams to use. It's not restricted to high or low frequencies -- there are ham bands up and down the dial, from a few MHz to the GHz range, and everything in between.
In return for getting radio spectrum, hams have a moral responsibility to further the radio arts and provide emergency communications in time of need. That's the spirit of the deal. In practice, a ham doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to. Just obey the rules -- no swearing, no commercial use, no broadcast entertainment, ID yourself often -- and you are fine.
Most hams do often use their radios ("rigs") for the public good though -- calling in car accidents, stranded motorists, that kind of thing. I do that all the time. Used my HT (Handheld Transciever) once to call in aid for an injured mountain biker I found. Where I was there would have been no cell coverage, either.
You do have to take a Federal test to get your ham ticket, and there are harder tests required o get more privileges. But even the entry-level license lets a geek have a LOT of fun. If you have half a brain you can cram for the test in a weekend. If you have any electronics experience, you might be able to cram for it in a day.
When you pass your test you get a call sign. This is how you ID yourself on the air. Your call sign is analogous to a commercial broadcaster's call sign like KROQ or KNBC. The first call you get is long, like mine: KF6IYW. As you advance in the ham tests, your call gets shorter (provided there are vacant calls to move you up to). A ham with a call like NO6B is a stud.
Ham radio is cool because you have a lot of options and there are neat toys to buy. You can talk across town on a pocket-sized radio, or blacken the sky with a monstrous antenna over your home with which you talk to the other side of the planet. You can build a transmitter and try to get Morse code to the other side of the country with a few watts of power. It's about problem solving and electronics as much as communication for a lot of people.
Me, I like the pocket-sized stuff. Does it replace a cell phone? No, but it makes a damn good supplement -- and it doubles as a police scanner, FM radio, and TV audio receiver. You can't stay in touch with a mess of people at once, with no per-minute fees with a cell phone.
Last common question people have is "how far can that thing talk?" A small handheld radio -- cellphone sized -- can let you talk to someone 100 miles away, or more, if there are convenient repeaters. I commonly use an HT to talk to friends all over the LA area, sometimes farther. A powerful rig that operates on lower frequencies can talk to anywhere on earth, if conditions are good. Some nuts even put this stuff in their cars. That's too much for me.:)
There, all you ever wanted to know about ham radio...
This is the big question, IMHO. I will jump through a hoop or 2 if needed to set up my MP3 CDRs properly for the deck... but I draw the line at extensive prep time. It better be forgiving WRT file names, directory structure, etc. I want to dump my best music onto a few CDs, and leave them in the car. At $1 apiece for CDRs, I could duplicate my entire library and if it got stolen... I wouldn't care!
I would hope the dir structure works something like this:
DIRECTORIES at the root level are named by the user for the category of songs within them. There should be a hardware button to skip categories ahead & back. This way I could name a dir "industrial dance classics" or "classic polka" and refer to that group of songs on the display.
When you are "in" a category, you could set it to random play or sequential play, repeat, etc. You could also tell it to do global randomization.
SUBDIRECTORIES should perhaps be ignored. It might be nice to have a sub-category, but think about the front-panel interface you'd need to navigate it. Too much, I think.
ID3 TAGS should be used, when present, to display the song name. If there are no ID3 tags, the dispaly can show the category name, "track number," and filename.
Support for some kind of disc playlist would be nice too. I don't use playlists on the desktop so I am not sure how it should work mobile...
Enough rambling. Time to go look for change under the couch so I can get one of these, or equivalent...
I certainly see a point to this product -- a lot of people want it! What's wrong with CD media? A lot of people have been holding out for it as solid-state media is too expensive.
This will probably sell really well. I'm planning on getting this, or an equivalent, as soon as they are available.
Why the skepticism about the future of MP3? I don't understand.
Then again, it's not too late for M$ to cram another standard down our throats... they'ds trying already, the Rios, etc. are compatible with the M$ compressed audio format... Which may sound great, but I have a problem with it in principle.
First off: Boy, do I want a GeForce 2 to replace my TNT1! OK, now for the off-topic content...
"Pro-gun" goes not equal "pro-violence." That's an insulting bit of intellectualy laziness.
The FACTS of life are somewhat UNPLEASANT. The FACT is that some day, I may need to use violence to protect myself or my family. A gun is the best tool for that. Do I look FORWARD to that? No. Do I prepare for it? Yes. Isn't it wise to set yourself up to WIN a confrontation that could othewise result in your death?
(If you think that there is never a call for violence, that there is always a peaceful solution, then you don't want to argue about guns, you want to argue about violence and the right to self defense, an altogether different topic which guns are only a facet of.)
And the above poster has it right when he says that guns are an important part of protecting our freedom. I'm not saying we need an armed revolt now -- but can anyone guarantee that we won't in 100 years? 500?
Ultimate authority flows from the barrel of a gun. If the people don't have some "authority" of their own someday they'll lose big to an invasive government.
Yes, that's exactly it. You can "cheat" the speed of light in some ways -- waving a laser across a "wall" is a good example -- but no matter how hard you try you can't use the trick to communicate. Frustrating, isn't it?
Side note:
One of the tricks to being a good scientist is developing an *intuition* for how things work. Take enough classes, do enough problem sets, and this intuition starts to develop.
If your intuition tells you that something must be too good to be true, it's probably right. Break the problem apart and you will find that you are violating conservation of energy or something else fundamental in one of your assumptions.:)
I have the Olympus 450Z and I can attest that it is a great camera. I was lucky enough to get it when Value America was having that wacky $150-off promotion, so it ended up being about $390 all told...
It has good exposure controls -- not pro level, but a cut above cheap digicams. This was important to me. I think it should be important to you too, because if all the metering is automatic there will be some shots you *can't* get. For example, a shot of someone in the shadows where the background is bright. You need to switch to spot metering for that, not average.
It has a good lens and a 3x optical zoom. There is some barrel distortion, but most cameras in this price range suffer from that.
I got a 32MB SmartMedia card for mine. (it comes with an 8mb card.) In 640x480 mode I can store almost 500 photos. IMHO this mode stinks, the compression artifacts are obvious.
In "HQ" mode, you get about 140 1280x1024 photos. Good quality shots here, no glaring artifacts.
SHQ mode is even less compression, also at 1280x1024. About 70 shots here. This is what I use all the time.
There is also an uncompressed mode, but SHQ is good enough that I don't use it.
There is 1 use for 640x480 -- burst mode. You can shoot about 2 frames per second. Good for capturing some stuff and making it into animated gifs. (oh hell, I said gif. Now I am screwed...)
There is a panorama shot mode, which works very well. Pretty cool.
On the subject of adapters: I recently bought a SmartMedia to PCMCIA adapter. It's the BEST. No more of that lame, SLOW serial connection. Taking an hour to dump a full load of photos was getting annoying!
I got my SM to PCMCIA adapter at www.18004memory.com. They aren't the brightest crew over there, at first they sent me a CF to PCMCIA card and I had to RMA it. But I stuck with it because the SM adapter was $40 from them, which is the best price I have found in a year of looking. (was too cheap to buy one for $80-90)
I work for a big.com, and in the course of my product management duties I have picked up some knowledge about how ad rates on the net are set up.
(Vocabulary you need to know: CPM. CPM stands for "cost per thousand," and it is how ads are sold. Show an ad to 1000 people, and you earn the ad's CPM, less a fee for ad serving, which is somewhere around $0.30-$0.50, from AdSmart anyway.)
Anyway, here's why all this tracking hoo-hah is inevitable...
Un-targeted banner ads -- the "bottom feeders," I have heard them called -- command a measly $1-3 CPM. Many sites that do not have their users categorized display these "run of site" untargeted banners. They make a few bucks per CPM. Nice, but it's not the big money.
Targeted ads are much more lucrative. If your users are divided into highly "vertical" segments, like car people, pet people, etc. you can make $10-$15 CPMs.
Right there is the motivation for all of this. Targeted ads make the big bucks.
But, look on the bright side... in the coming no-privacy ISP world, there's an opportunity for a number of right-thinking geek-run ISPs to really grow and serve our needs...
... until the government fixes that by banning on-line anonynimity. Which is their ultimate goal -- don't doubt that for a minute. The President stated that very clearly recently. I wish I had the link handy. Right now we should also be thinking of ways to defeat enforced-by-law identity tracking, as it is inevitable.
Here's something for Pinkerton to ponder... by screening the information that is submitted, aren't they opening themselves up to liability?
One of these days, someone will rat on a classmate via the WAVE site -- the warning will be disregarded as insufficiently substantiated -- and then the subject will go on a shooting spree.
Pinkerton will find itself in court pretty fast when that happens.
The solution to that is to:
A) Not pass any information and shut the service down
B) Pass all the information along, without evaluating it, as a policy to insulate the company from liability.
> The federal government can't just mandate laws > to the states...thanks to Amendment 10
That is a GROSS oversimplification. The Feds pass laws all the time that affect all of us directly. If you don't think that's the case, you need to wake up!
Here's one example -- Federal income tax. There are a few thousand others.
The 10th is as tattered as the 2nd and 4th Amendments. The Feds are always passing laws on things that they weren't given express permission to.
It's a bad scene. Too bad all the other countries suck more.
Slashdot Mirror
>And finally, I still have this question: What about playback? Is there any difference between playback engines? I've got a RIO 300 w/64 Mb and I use it all the time.
I haven't done any real serious testing between playback devices, but I also have a Rio 300 -- and I think it sounds terrible. My 300 makes every MP3 sound like AM radio, even when I plug in good headphones. There is no comparison between the Rio 300 and WinAmp, IMHO.
Other players I haven't listened closely to. But my Rio is worthless.
Maybe for the 1337 hax0rs on the overclocking web sites it's about status. But for myself and my friends, all of whom overclock, it is about getting more for your money!
Let's see... a celeron 300A OC'd to 450MHz cost me EXACTLY THE SAME as a 300A running at stock speed. Any cheapo fan did the trick. I was running a 450MHz system long before "mere mortals" could afford it. I was AHEAD of the curve for once in my life. For less $.
My current rig is a celeron 566 running at 850MHz. It cost me about $130 for the CPU/fan/slotket adapter. No special cooling was required. I used a fan/heat sink that cost $10. Where's the crushing additional cost?
And I know all about how the Celerons aren't as fast as a real PIII and yadda yadda yadda. Big deal. I am still getting more for my money. A lot more. More frames per second. Faster respose on the desktop. What's not to like?
If I had more money, I would buy a better processor. And I would overclock it too, as others have said.
You say that overclockers are obsessed with some penis thing, that it's all for show, that it's a waste of money. On the contrary -- I say that if you are NOT overclocking when you can, you are a chump.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
I used to know this guy back when I was in high school. We were both members of an Explorer Post at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. I had no idea I had him to thank for Apache. Small world.
Thanks, Brian. Good luck in the future.
What if this article detailed a technology that could make people smarter?
At what point is improving ourselves dangerous or unethical?
It's interesting to me that vision enhancement is largely seen as harmless... but how would strength enhancement, or intellect enhancement be seen?
(I am not fishing for a fight, just curious what people think. FWIW I say bring on all the enhancements science can provide. I wear glasses -- I'll take the rest too, thank you.)
We're not talking about superpowers here. It's just vision enhancement. Save your fears for a technology that matters, like anti-aging treatments. Could easily happen within a generation or 2.
>The way the planet works, all resources cycle. A simplistic example is water.
;)
If the cycle time is sufficiently long (ie fossil fuels) then practically speaking there is no cycle. And what about radioactives? Uranium doesn't recycle, neither does tritium. They decay irreversibly. If you want to synthesize them you use up more energy than you can get back.
>When you travel into space, you actually remove resources from the shorter term cycles of the earth by carrying them outside our atmosphere.
Big deal. A few tons of materials won't make a difference globally. And you use Earthly materials to bootstrap your way into exploiting resources that you find in space.
Were the materials used by the pilgrim's wooden ships missed by England? No. The investment paid off. For a while, anyway.
>But the illusion of solving the problems of the human species through space travel is just that, an illusion.
There are resources in space, and there is room to use them in. What's so hard to accept about that?
>My other question is - why are we so intent on outsurviving the Earth's willingness to let us live here? Why not just appreciate what we are given, and make the most of it?
Do you just make the most of what you are given here? Have you ever asked for a raise? Ever looked for a better job, or a better place to live? Have you looked for companionship?
It's the most natural thing in the world to try and better your situation -- as an individual, as a nation, as a species.
You may be content to lay back and take whatever the universe dishes out -- but don't be surprised if humanity at large wants to put up a fight.
Sorry, but this is perfectly potty. Have you ever heard the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?"
Put down your hammer. Open source is not the solution to everything.
Weapons plans are not "competitive assets" in the same sense as the secret Windows APIs are.
Microsoft's abuses get us overpriced, crappy software that's forced on us.
Abusing US nuke technology results in more nukes being made and aimed at us. I hate MS as much as the next guy, but please don't tell me the two are comparable.
If someone steals our plans for suitcase nukes or whatever, it will affect the balance of power in the world. I would rather have the US be at the top than China, Russia, etc. Wouldn't you? We aren't perfect but we have a better track record in a lot of important ways.
I'm going to say a couple things now that will be extremely unpopular with some folks here.
1. It's OK for governments to keep secrets, even secrets about exotic weapons.
2. It's OK to charge people for software.
Like it or not, we'll be living with both of these for the forseeable future. Deal with it.
Let's hear it for Microsoft's Virus Building Script!
Why can't they issue a serurity patch for Windows that adds a control panel setting for VBS? Be default, the system should DISALLOW the execution of *.VBS files. Turn it on of you are an author and you know what you are doing.
I just did a quick search of my C drive... there are 6 VBS files, all in a samples directory. This does not look like a technology that needs to be enabled by default. If the file type association for VBS was clobbered, or if VBS files were neutered in some other way, would this have any negative impact on Windows? Someone must know.
Here's an idea: someone should modify the ILOVEYOU virus so that it does the following:
- Reads address books and replicates iteself as usual
- On the "victim" machine, it DISABLES the future execution of Visual Basic Scripts. The virus that disables future viruses!
Damascus & pattern-welded steels are very neat looking. I have a Spyderco folding knife that was made with a Zowada Steel damascus blade. Pretty spiffy. Of course it's pretty beaten up because I USE the knife, and I didn't keep it in a box.
I have wanted a meteoric metal blade for a long time, but not in damascus or pattern-welded style. That just makes it doubly expensive. Give me a meteoritic metal blade and an Earthly Damascus blade as well, and I'll be quite happy.
You may not want or need anonymity, but rest assured there are others who do. And thankfully there is ample legal precendent to protect them.
Don't try to dismiss this issue so casually. It's bigger than you.
I'm just not going to be interested unless it comes with 500 FREE HOURS. [ducking]
Sure, music is wonderful, yadda yadda yadda but it is still, in the end, the product of someone's labor. Like software. And while I think it would be keen if music makers all wanted to give it away for the betterment of all, they still have a right to charge for it. If you don't want to pony up, you find a substitute product.
You can't force creative people to give their stuff away. That's just wrong. If you built a house, do I have the right to crash it? Or are you a bad person for not letting bums sleep in your living room? Of course not.
OK, a quick primer on ham radio for the uninitiated.
:)
The "ham" in ham radio is a strange abbreviation of "amateur." The amateur radio service is chartered by the FCC in America, and other government bodies in other nations.
The government has allocated parts of the radio spectrum for hams to use. It's not restricted to high or low frequencies -- there are ham bands up and down the dial, from a few MHz to the GHz range, and everything in between.
In return for getting radio spectrum, hams have a moral responsibility to further the radio arts and provide emergency communications in time of need. That's the spirit of the deal. In practice, a ham doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to. Just obey the rules -- no swearing, no commercial use, no broadcast entertainment, ID yourself often -- and you are fine.
Most hams do often use their radios ("rigs") for the public good though -- calling in car accidents, stranded motorists, that kind of thing. I do that all the time. Used my HT (Handheld Transciever) once to call in aid for an injured mountain biker I found. Where I was there would have been no cell coverage, either.
You do have to take a Federal test to get your ham ticket, and there are harder tests required o get more privileges. But even the entry-level license lets a geek have a LOT of fun. If you have half a brain you can cram for the test in a weekend. If you have any electronics experience, you might be able to cram for it in a day.
When you pass your test you get a call sign. This is how you ID yourself on the air. Your call sign is analogous to a commercial broadcaster's call sign like KROQ or KNBC. The first call you get is long, like mine: KF6IYW. As you advance in the ham tests, your call gets shorter (provided there are vacant calls to move you up to). A ham with a call like NO6B is a stud.
Ham radio is cool because you have a lot of options and there are neat toys to buy. You can talk across town on a pocket-sized radio, or blacken the sky with a monstrous antenna over your home with which you talk to the other side of the planet. You can build a transmitter and try to get Morse code to the other side of the country with a few watts of power. It's about problem solving and electronics as much as communication for a lot of people.
Me, I like the pocket-sized stuff. Does it replace a cell phone? No, but it makes a damn good supplement -- and it doubles as a police scanner, FM radio, and TV audio receiver. You can't stay in touch with a mess of people at once, with no per-minute fees with a cell phone.
Last common question people have is "how far can that thing talk?" A small handheld radio -- cellphone sized -- can let you talk to someone 100 miles away, or more, if there are convenient repeaters. I commonly use an HT to talk to friends all over the LA area, sometimes farther. A powerful rig that operates on lower frequencies can talk to anywhere on earth, if conditions are good. Some nuts even put this stuff in their cars. That's too much for me.
There, all you ever wanted to know about ham radio...
This is the big question, IMHO. I will jump through a hoop or 2 if needed to set up my MP3 CDRs properly for the deck... but I draw the line at extensive prep time. It better be forgiving WRT file names, directory structure, etc. I want to dump my best music onto a few CDs, and leave them in the car. At $1 apiece for CDRs, I could duplicate my entire library and if it got stolen... I wouldn't care!
I would hope the dir structure works something like this:
DIRECTORIES at the root level are named by the user for the category of songs within them. There should be a hardware button to skip categories ahead & back. This way I could name a dir "industrial dance classics" or "classic polka" and refer to that group of songs on the display.
When you are "in" a category, you could set it to random play or sequential play, repeat, etc. You could also tell it to do global randomization.
SUBDIRECTORIES should perhaps be ignored. It might be nice to have a sub-category, but think about the front-panel interface you'd need to navigate it. Too much, I think.
ID3 TAGS should be used, when present, to display the song name. If there are no ID3 tags, the dispaly can show the category name, "track number," and filename.
Support for some kind of disc playlist would be nice too. I don't use playlists on the desktop so I am not sure how it should work mobile...
Enough rambling. Time to go look for change under the couch so I can get one of these, or equivalent...
I certainly see a point to this product -- a lot of people want it! What's wrong with CD media? A lot of people have been holding out for it as solid-state media is too expensive.
This will probably sell really well. I'm planning on getting this, or an equivalent, as soon as they are available.
Why the skepticism about the future of MP3? I don't understand.
Then again, it's not too late for M$ to cram another standard down our throats... they'ds trying already, the Rios, etc. are compatible with the M$ compressed audio format... Which may sound great, but I have a problem with it in principle.
First off: Boy, do I want a GeForce 2 to replace my TNT1! OK, now for the off-topic content...
"Pro-gun" goes not equal "pro-violence." That's an insulting bit of intellectualy laziness.
The FACTS of life are somewhat UNPLEASANT. The FACT is that some day, I may need to use violence to protect myself or my family. A gun is the best tool for that. Do I look FORWARD to that? No. Do I prepare for it? Yes. Isn't it wise to set yourself up to WIN a confrontation that could othewise result in your death?
(If you think that there is never a call for violence, that there is always a peaceful solution, then you don't want to argue about guns, you want to argue about violence and the right to self defense, an altogether different topic which guns are only a facet of.)
And the above poster has it right when he says that guns are an important part of protecting our freedom. I'm not saying we need an armed revolt now -- but can anyone guarantee that we won't in 100 years? 500?
Ultimate authority flows from the barrel of a gun. If the people don't have some "authority" of their own someday they'll lose big to an invasive government.
But do you have Deities and Demigods? The first print run, with the deities from the Elric fantasy series in it?
Yes, that's exactly it. You can "cheat" the speed of light in some ways -- waving a laser across a "wall" is a good example -- but no matter how hard you try you can't use the trick to communicate. Frustrating, isn't it?
Side note:
One of the tricks to being a good scientist is developing an *intuition* for how things work. Take enough classes, do enough problem sets, and this intuition starts to develop.
If your intuition tells you that something must be too good to be true, it's probably right. Break the problem apart and you will find that you are violating conservation of energy or something else fundamental in one of your assumptions.
I have the Olympus 450Z and I can attest that it is a great camera. I was lucky enough to get it when Value America was having that wacky $150-off promotion, so it ended up being about $390 all told...
It has good exposure controls -- not pro level, but a cut above cheap digicams. This was important to me. I think it should be important to you too, because if all the metering is automatic there will be some shots you *can't* get. For example, a shot of someone in the shadows where the background is bright. You need to switch to spot metering for that, not average.
It has a good lens and a 3x optical zoom. There is some barrel distortion, but most cameras in this price range suffer from that.
I got a 32MB SmartMedia card for mine. (it comes with an 8mb card.) In 640x480 mode I can store almost 500 photos. IMHO this mode stinks, the compression artifacts are obvious.
In "HQ" mode, you get about 140 1280x1024 photos. Good quality shots here, no glaring artifacts.
SHQ mode is even less compression, also at 1280x1024. About 70 shots here. This is what I use all the time.
There is also an uncompressed mode, but SHQ is good enough that I don't use it.
There is 1 use for 640x480 -- burst mode. You can shoot about 2 frames per second. Good for capturing some stuff and making it into animated gifs. (oh hell, I said gif. Now I am screwed...)
There is a panorama shot mode, which works very well. Pretty cool.
On the subject of adapters: I recently bought a SmartMedia to PCMCIA adapter. It's the BEST. No more of that lame, SLOW serial connection. Taking an hour to dump a full load of photos was getting annoying!
I got my SM to PCMCIA adapter at www.18004memory.com. They aren't the brightest crew over there, at first they sent me a CF to PCMCIA card and I had to RMA it. But I stuck with it because the SM adapter was $40 from them, which is the best price I have found in a year of looking. (was too cheap to buy one for $80-90)
I work for a big .com, and in the course of my product management duties I have picked up some knowledge about how ad rates on the net are set up.
(Vocabulary you need to know: CPM. CPM stands for "cost per thousand," and it is how ads are sold. Show an ad to 1000 people, and you earn the ad's CPM, less a fee for ad serving, which is somewhere around $0.30-$0.50, from AdSmart anyway.)
Anyway, here's why all this tracking hoo-hah is inevitable...
Un-targeted banner ads -- the "bottom feeders," I have heard them called -- command a measly $1-3 CPM. Many sites that do not have their users categorized display these "run of site" untargeted banners. They make a few bucks per CPM. Nice, but it's not the big money.
Targeted ads are much more lucrative. If your users are divided into highly "vertical" segments, like car people, pet people, etc. you can make $10-$15 CPMs.
Right there is the motivation for all of this. Targeted ads make the big bucks.
But, look on the bright side... in the coming no-privacy ISP world, there's an opportunity for a number of right-thinking geek-run ISPs to really grow and serve our needs...
... until the government fixes that by banning on-line anonynimity. Which is their ultimate goal -- don't doubt that for a minute. The President stated that very clearly recently. I wish I had the link handy. Right now we should also be thinking of ways to defeat enforced-by-law identity tracking, as it is inevitable.
Here's something for Pinkerton to ponder... by screening the information that is submitted, aren't they opening themselves up to liability?
One of these days, someone will rat on a classmate via the WAVE site -- the warning will be disregarded as insufficiently substantiated -- and then the subject will go on a shooting spree.
Pinkerton will find itself in court pretty fast when that happens.
The solution to that is to:
A) Not pass any information and shut the service down
B) Pass all the information along, without evaluating it, as a policy to insulate the company from liability.
Interesting times ahead.
> The federal government can't just mandate laws
> to the states...thanks to Amendment 10
That is a GROSS oversimplification. The Feds pass laws all the time that affect all of us directly. If you don't think that's the case, you need to wake up!
Here's one example -- Federal income tax. There are a few thousand others.
The 10th is as tattered as the 2nd and 4th Amendments. The Feds are always passing laws on things that they weren't given express permission to.
It's a bad scene. Too bad all the other countries suck more.