I would put my Karma up against any iPod, any day. The only thing the iPod had over the Karma was looks.... The iPud wins on better marketing and sexier wrapping paper.
The thing is, most of the iPod detractors don't seem to figure in the user interface. I've tried all the different devices at Best Buy and any other retailer that has them out to play with. I pretty much concluded that most, if not all of the competitors are quite a bit more clumsy in the UI department than they need to be. I realize that there is a matter of personal preferences here but the operation and button layout often didn't seem to be as intuitive as it should be.
The above statements don't apply to shuffle though. My sister has one, and the slider switch is poorly thought out, and I do occasionally want to know what the song name is, etc.
Here's the crucial difference: the BBC think "they've already paid for it, how can we give them better access to what they have paid for?", and other corporations think "they've already paid for it, how can we make them pay for it again?".
In the case of the BBC, it is a government program more than anything else. For others, then it is the corporation that originally funded the program and as such, I think they do have certain exclusive rights to make what money they can from it. Of course, I don't believe they hare a right to guaranteed business or guaranteed profit, just the exclusive copyrights to make money from the work they own and funded. Unlike others, I don't see the abuses in this arena as a sufficient reason to completely throw away the copyright idea.
Compare and contrast with, say, the RIAA, who flatly deny that you buy music, rather "a license to listen", and run the upgrade treadmill - buy on vinyl, buy on cassette, buy on CD, buy on DVD-A, buy online - but tie it up in DRM so you'll still have to pay for a copy for the office and your car too.
I really don't see it that way. Though I don't liked DRM'd music, but DRM isn't a means to prevent an individual from using their music whereever they go, it is to reduce the redistribution to others that didn't pay for it. For example, Apple lets the same DRMed music be played on up to five computers. They also let the DRMed music be playable on an indeterminate number of their portable audio player products.
Don't get me wrong, Apple's "policy" of having people buy a new ipod when the battery dies is rediculous.
But they don't have that policy. Maybe one can say they did, but they don't anymore, at least they haven't for a little over two years. IIRC, battery replacement through Apple only costs $80.
It isn't that hard to get inside an iPod. No, there aren't any external screws but it shouldn't be a problem for a geek worth the geek label.
I don't have a problem with a built-in battery, so long as it can be replaced. Even if the owner isn't confident about their abilities, there are a few services to do the task.
The problem I have with AA and similar batteries is that they don't discourage the use of one-use batteries, which is wasteful and destructive. At least there are plenty Lithium battery recycling programs, and the same battery can be re-charged hundreds of times.
That being said- locks only keep honest men out... In the military locks are known as "delaying devices"
I think the "delaying devices" is exactly the key to their usefulness though. Every bit of difficulty in cirvumventing a device is useful in making it less worth a criminal's time to bypass it.
Sometimes I get the sense from the Slashdot crowd that something isn't worth doing because perfection is impossible, perfect security being a prime example. I would like to ask, does that mean we quit using security measures? Do the people that say that leave their cars, homes and possessions unlocked? It would seem that is the logical conclusion of such an argument. If a person truly believed it the argument., then locking things is something a person doesn't do.
In some ways, you are right, MD players are very nifty. I have owned two portable MD players and they've taken several drops to concrete and still worked. Eventually the battery door hinge broke on one, though the device still works.
Being able to store MP3s on them is a very recent development, before they required ATRAC files, which was an asinine requirement.
But still, being able to shuffle through more than a small fraction of a music collection is more important to me.
I might look into one of the larger capacity MD devices for my next portable device. 1GB per disc is nice to have.
It doesn't work that way. For one, flash is competing against microdrive in that case, which is tougher to make mechanical drives that small, being 1" drives and all.
For another, I don't think the heads can cut through the platter, the heads would break first.
Lastly, flash isn't anywhere near able to compete against laptop drives, much less desktop drives. For $100, I think one can get a 60GB laptop drive, which is faster in bandwidth than a high performance $60 1GB flash SD or CF chip. The 1GB chip I just bought was a high performance one rated at 9MB/s, laptop drives are easily faster. Desktop drives are even cheaper and higher performance, beyond 60MB/s and less than 50 cents per gig.
Definitely. I'd rather see a company like Samsung who is able to keep its business divisions separate rather than try to hobble one division in a vain attempt to help another. Samsung is big in consumer electronics, but they shouldn't hobble their semiconductor business just because they think a particular buyer is going to compete against them, because those competitors generally have alternative sources, so if Samsung's chips are in a competitor's device, it is still a win for Samsung.
For instance, Sony made the wrong choice in flash and drive players to force users to transcode mp3 to ATRAC just to protect its music interests, and as such, they placed very poorly in the market for those devices everywhere in the world except Japan.
Re:I don't get it? ; onboard ; memory ; solid stat
on
Intel and Laptop RAID?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Personally, I'd like to see more money put into developing SOLID STATE hard drives that use less power, produce less heat, and have no moving parts- such as a flash drive, only bigger
If you are willing to pay $50 per gigabyte of solid state mass storage, go right on ahead. I'll continue to pay 1% of that per gigabyte of mechanical storage until a truly competitive alternative emerges.
Keep in mind that the costs of fabbing 1GB of flash memory is going to be on the same order of magnitude as the cost of fabbing 1GB of RAM. This is because of the relative transistor and feature size complexities involved, so it is unrealistic to expect silicon-based solid state mass storage to be inexpensive unless there is a significant breakthrough that affects flash fabbing and not RAM fabbing, or some other, completely different tech becomes available.
I guess I have it pretty good where I am. There is only one national chain (Cinemark), one or two very small local chains and a bunch of independents. Other than the price of food, I don't really have a complaint.
I see too many posts on other forums where people have jobs in which they should be qualified enough to either know how to do what they are doing, or know how to find that information without having to ask about it in a public forum.
I'd say it is like someone that claims to be a UNIX developer asking about the basics of how to use 'tar'. It just doesn't look like a swift idea, and the person holding that job shouldn't be asking basic questions that show they don't deserve said job.
In a recent example, a person whose job is to administrate a four processor Opteron computer running Linux had asked vague questions on how to get multiprocessing working. To top it off, this question was asked on a audio/video forum.
Also, Slashdotters don't necessarily have the specific knowledge on how to do this and what is needed, and those that do probably aren't allowed to say.
I've seen another slashdotter claim some months ago that he's doing this sort of thing for attention, that some of the things he fights were stupid fights. One story had something about Spitzer claiming that public restroom janitors weren't getting paid enough as employees, when really, they never were hired, they just keep the bathrooms clean for the lucrative tips. Maybe I got the story wrong, it's been several months and I never did read up on it.
There've already been a lot of reports that OS X on x86 is faster than on PPC
Keep in mind that the reports I saw also said that Windows XP was faster on the devel boxes than standard x86 computers, even though the guts of the devel box is mostly a standard x86 computer.
I am curious how the final x86 version will compare. Some say that the x86 version doesn't load a lot of extensions because they aren't available, others say that x86 is just faster.
I'm not sure if I can accept the second claim at face-value, esp. if a system like the Big Mac cluster kept pace with Xeon and Opteron clusters dollar-for-dollar on hardware costs.
I could have sworn that a lot of Intel's compilers were already included with Apple's Development system.
err, nope. I guess I can say that this was already known in *June*:
Intel plans to provide industry leading development tools support for Apple later this year, including the Intel C/C++ Compiler for Apple, Intel Fortran Compiler for Apple, Intel Math Kernel Libraries for Apple and Intel Integrated Performance Primitives for Apple.
More probably, the story submitter is just a standard illiterate slashbot who doesn't know that "guise" implies an ulterior motive.
Or maybe the sumbitter knows that guise implies an ulterior motive, and believes there is an ulterior motive for implementing this system. If the incidents in London tell us anything, it is that it won't stop bombings, and it won't be used to aid investigations against police misconduct. The BBC has said that there is no footage of the case where police murdered the suspicious-yet-innocent immigrant.
It's also extremely unfriendly to people with visual impairments, and hence illegal in some jurisdictions.
The illegal argument really doesn't fly. If you think it does, please tell me how it could be prosecuted. So long as the actual server(s) and the company itself isn't/aren't in that jurisdiction, there is nothing that can be done from a legal standpoint except to write a polite letter explaining the issue and show them a better way.
A lot of flight control systems were PPC for this reason, but last I heard, there was a strong resistance to Linux, I think in part due to perception, and the rest due to the cost of validating / certifying it as a flight control operating system.
I don't know if the perception is warranted or not, I know it's a pretty tough set of shoes to sell. The Aerospace industry is very conservative, not wanting their products to crash and burn (literally of course), so it takes a decade or so to make changes.
But strangely enough when they shot one of the 'identified' terrorists it turned out that he wasn't one after all. Even stranger is the fact that apparently all cameras where off during this little incident...
Cute. Very cute. All the cameras were "off". If true, that makes me suspicious if they were either deliberately turned off to avoid having to deal with pesky evidence, or the data simply erased.
A. You don't realize that cameras are normally intended to collect data about perpetrators after the fact.
And how is this information is worth paying $212M for hardware to see what the dead criminal looked like? Has the identity of the London bombers helped find "terror cells"? I think it was HSA officials that said that the most dangerious ones are the lone wolves anyway, so it would be a dead end for that investigation.
That's a lot of money for fuzzy video that likely wouldn't stand up in court, assuming the bomber(s) had survived.
In the end, it is looking like a lot of money that will be spent that won't do anything to prevent a catastrophe.
While it is a tad more complex than this, I hope another option is that players will read both standards like DVD writers do now. I mean, the difference between plus and dash weren't that huge, with benefits tilting slightly toward plus. This time, I think the benefits tilt a bit more strongly toward Blu-Ray, though as a recording format, it seems the HD-DVD group is fine with hobbling capacity to save a few cents per disc in replication costs.
Anyway, on the similarity, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD both use the same laser wavelength, and I think with a little jiggering, the same optical heads could read both. The both more or less use the same set of audio standards, both support three different video codecs, and both use the same basic encryption standards. I'm not sure about HD-DVD, but Blu-Ray supports overlaying video streams onto the main video, which could be nifty.
I think there is still a point though, marketing plays a larger role in helping get and attain market share than geeks care to admit.
AMD and AMD fans shouldn't be complaining about market awareness when AMD barely has an ad budget. Sure, I see an occasional full-page magazine ad but I don't remember any TV ads. Really, they should at least drop a couple mil for a spot during the Superbowl, at least to show the PHBs that AMD does exist.
Slashdot Mirror
I would put my Karma up against any iPod, any day. The only thing the iPod had over the Karma was looks. ... The iPud wins on better marketing and sexier wrapping paper.
The thing is, most of the iPod detractors don't seem to figure in the user interface. I've tried all the different devices at Best Buy and any other retailer that has them out to play with. I pretty much concluded that most, if not all of the competitors are quite a bit more clumsy in the UI department than they need to be. I realize that there is a matter of personal preferences here but the operation and button layout often didn't seem to be as intuitive as it should be.
The above statements don't apply to shuffle though. My sister has one, and the slider switch is poorly thought out, and I do occasionally want to know what the song name is, etc.
Here's the crucial difference: the BBC think "they've already paid for it, how can we give them better access to what they have paid for?", and other corporations think "they've already paid for it, how can we make them pay for it again?".
In the case of the BBC, it is a government program more than anything else. For others, then it is the corporation that originally funded the program and as such, I think they do have certain exclusive rights to make what money they can from it. Of course, I don't believe they hare a right to guaranteed business or guaranteed profit, just the exclusive copyrights to make money from the work they own and funded. Unlike others, I don't see the abuses in this arena as a sufficient reason to completely throw away the copyright idea.
Compare and contrast with, say, the RIAA, who flatly deny that you buy music, rather "a license to listen", and run the upgrade treadmill - buy on vinyl, buy on cassette, buy on CD, buy on DVD-A, buy online - but tie it up in DRM so you'll still have to pay for a copy for the office and your car too.
I really don't see it that way. Though I don't liked DRM'd music, but DRM isn't a means to prevent an individual from using their music whereever they go, it is to reduce the redistribution to others that didn't pay for it. For example, Apple lets the same DRMed music be played on up to five computers. They also let the DRMed music be playable on an indeterminate number of their portable audio player products.
Don't get me wrong, Apple's "policy" of having people buy a new ipod when the battery dies is rediculous.
But they don't have that policy. Maybe one can say they did, but they don't anymore, at least they haven't for a little over two years. IIRC, battery replacement through Apple only costs $80.
It isn't that hard to get inside an iPod. No, there aren't any external screws but it shouldn't be a problem for a geek worth the geek label.
I don't have a problem with a built-in battery, so long as it can be replaced. Even if the owner isn't confident about their abilities, there are a few services to do the task.
The problem I have with AA and similar batteries is that they don't discourage the use of one-use batteries, which is wasteful and destructive. At least there are plenty Lithium battery recycling programs, and the same battery can be re-charged hundreds of times.
She just says "swap and share large files"
I'm pretty sure that the majority of traffic really is large media files, as in, the media being audio, video or even disc media images.
That being said- locks only keep honest men out... In the military locks are known as "delaying devices"
I think the "delaying devices" is exactly the key to their usefulness though. Every bit of difficulty in cirvumventing a device is useful in making it less worth a criminal's time to bypass it.
Sometimes I get the sense from the Slashdot crowd that something isn't worth doing because perfection is impossible, perfect security being a prime example. I would like to ask, does that mean we quit using security measures? Do the people that say that leave their cars, homes and possessions unlocked? It would seem that is the logical conclusion of such an argument. If a person truly believed it the argument., then locking things is something a person doesn't do.
In some ways, you are right, MD players are very nifty. I have owned two portable MD players and they've taken several drops to concrete and still worked. Eventually the battery door hinge broke on one, though the device still works.
Being able to store MP3s on them is a very recent development, before they required ATRAC files, which was an asinine requirement.
But still, being able to shuffle through more than a small fraction of a music collection is more important to me.
I might look into one of the larger capacity MD devices for my next portable device. 1GB per disc is nice to have.
It doesn't work that way. For one, flash is competing against microdrive in that case, which is tougher to make mechanical drives that small, being 1" drives and all.
For another, I don't think the heads can cut through the platter, the heads would break first.
Lastly, flash isn't anywhere near able to compete against laptop drives, much less desktop drives. For $100, I think one can get a 60GB laptop drive, which is faster in bandwidth than a high performance $60 1GB flash SD or CF chip. The 1GB chip I just bought was a high performance one rated at 9MB/s, laptop drives are easily faster. Desktop drives are even cheaper and higher performance, beyond 60MB/s and less than 50 cents per gig.
Different business units.
Definitely. I'd rather see a company like Samsung who is able to keep its business divisions separate rather than try to hobble one division in a vain attempt to help another. Samsung is big in consumer electronics, but they shouldn't hobble their semiconductor business just because they think a particular buyer is going to compete against them, because those competitors generally have alternative sources, so if Samsung's chips are in a competitor's device, it is still a win for Samsung.
For instance, Sony made the wrong choice in flash and drive players to force users to transcode mp3 to ATRAC just to protect its music interests, and as such, they placed very poorly in the market for those devices everywhere in the world except Japan.
Personally, I'd like to see more money put into developing SOLID STATE hard drives that use less power, produce less heat, and have no moving parts- such as a flash drive, only bigger
If you are willing to pay $50 per gigabyte of solid state mass storage, go right on ahead. I'll continue to pay 1% of that per gigabyte of mechanical storage until a truly competitive alternative emerges.
Keep in mind that the costs of fabbing 1GB of flash memory is going to be on the same order of magnitude as the cost of fabbing 1GB of RAM. This is because of the relative transistor and feature size complexities involved, so it is unrealistic to expect silicon-based solid state mass storage to be inexpensive unless there is a significant breakthrough that affects flash fabbing and not RAM fabbing, or some other, completely different tech becomes available.
I guess I have it pretty good where I am. There is only one national chain (Cinemark), one or two very small local chains and a bunch of independents. Other than the price of food, I don't really have a complaint.
From a comment from a person on another forum, it looks to be misinformation from that "news" source.
Said person managed to sign up without having to text message them from a mobile phone.
and a roll of duck tape.
Where do I find this? At a hunter's supply store?
I wouldn't say it that way.
I see too many posts on other forums where people have jobs in which they should be qualified enough to either know how to do what they are doing, or know how to find that information without having to ask about it in a public forum.
I'd say it is like someone that claims to be a UNIX developer asking about the basics of how to use 'tar'. It just doesn't look like a swift idea, and the person holding that job shouldn't be asking basic questions that show they don't deserve said job.
In a recent example, a person whose job is to administrate a four processor Opteron computer running Linux had asked vague questions on how to get multiprocessing working. To top it off, this question was asked on a audio/video forum.
Also, Slashdotters don't necessarily have the specific knowledge on how to do this and what is needed, and those that do probably aren't allowed to say.
Build it yourself. I wouldn't rely on any manufacter.
It still has to be made of parts, and generally those parts are made by manufacturers...
I've seen another slashdotter claim some months ago that he's doing this sort of thing for attention, that some of the things he fights were stupid fights. One story had something about Spitzer claiming that public restroom janitors weren't getting paid enough as employees, when really, they never were hired, they just keep the bathrooms clean for the lucrative tips. Maybe I got the story wrong, it's been several months and I never did read up on it.
There've already been a lot of reports that OS X on x86 is faster than on PPC
Keep in mind that the reports I saw also said that Windows XP was faster on the devel boxes than standard x86 computers, even though the guts of the devel box is mostly a standard x86 computer.
I am curious how the final x86 version will compare. Some say that the x86 version doesn't load a lot of extensions because they aren't available, others say that x86 is just faster.
I'm not sure if I can accept the second claim at face-value, esp. if a system like the Big Mac cluster kept pace with Xeon and Opteron clusters dollar-for-dollar on hardware costs.
I could have sworn that a lot of Intel's compilers were already included with Apple's Development system.
h tml
err, nope. I guess I can say that this was already known in *June*:
Intel plans to provide industry leading development tools support for Apple later this year, including the Intel C/C++ Compiler for Apple, Intel Fortran Compiler for Apple, Intel Math Kernel Libraries for Apple and Intel Integrated Performance Primitives for Apple.
Source: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.
More probably, the story submitter is just a standard illiterate slashbot who doesn't know that "guise" implies an ulterior motive.
Or maybe the sumbitter knows that guise implies an ulterior motive, and believes there is an ulterior motive for implementing this system. If the incidents in London tell us anything, it is that it won't stop bombings, and it won't be used to aid investigations against police misconduct. The BBC has said that there is no footage of the case where police murdered the suspicious-yet-innocent immigrant.
It's also extremely unfriendly to people with visual impairments, and hence illegal in some jurisdictions.
The illegal argument really doesn't fly. If you think it does, please tell me how it could be prosecuted. So long as the actual server(s) and the company itself isn't/aren't in that jurisdiction, there is nothing that can be done from a legal standpoint except to write a polite letter explaining the issue and show them a better way.
A lot of flight control systems were PPC for this reason, but last I heard, there was a strong resistance to Linux, I think in part due to perception, and the rest due to the cost of validating / certifying it as a flight control operating system.
I don't know if the perception is warranted or not, I know it's a pretty tough set of shoes to sell. The Aerospace industry is very conservative, not wanting their products to crash and burn (literally of course), so it takes a decade or so to make changes.
But strangely enough when they shot one of the 'identified' terrorists it turned out that he wasn't one after all. Even stranger is the fact that apparently all cameras where off during this little incident...
Cute. Very cute. All the cameras were "off". If true, that makes me suspicious if they were either deliberately turned off to avoid having to deal with pesky evidence, or the data simply erased.
A. You don't realize that cameras are normally intended to collect data about perpetrators after the fact.
And how is this information is worth paying $212M for hardware to see what the dead criminal looked like? Has the identity of the London bombers helped find "terror cells"? I think it was HSA officials that said that the most dangerious ones are the lone wolves anyway, so it would be a dead end for that investigation.
That's a lot of money for fuzzy video that likely wouldn't stand up in court, assuming the bomber(s) had survived.
In the end, it is looking like a lot of money that will be spent that won't do anything to prevent a catastrophe.
While it is a tad more complex than this, I hope another option is that players will read both standards like DVD writers do now. I mean, the difference between plus and dash weren't that huge, with benefits tilting slightly toward plus. This time, I think the benefits tilt a bit more strongly toward Blu-Ray, though as a recording format, it seems the HD-DVD group is fine with hobbling capacity to save a few cents per disc in replication costs.
Anyway, on the similarity, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD both use the same laser wavelength, and I think with a little jiggering, the same optical heads could read both. The both more or less use the same set of audio standards, both support three different video codecs, and both use the same basic encryption standards. I'm not sure about HD-DVD, but Blu-Ray supports overlaying video streams onto the main video, which could be nifty.
I think there is still a point though, marketing plays a larger role in helping get and attain market share than geeks care to admit.
AMD and AMD fans shouldn't be complaining about market awareness when AMD barely has an ad budget. Sure, I see an occasional full-page magazine ad but I don't remember any TV ads. Really, they should at least drop a couple mil for a spot during the Superbowl, at least to show the PHBs that AMD does exist.