As someone who suffers from vestibular dysfunction (i.e, I experience daily what these research subjects went through, and my bad spells are more intense), I think I can offer some insight on this:
Sounds like you know a lot more about this stuff than most of the other/.-ers put together. Still, don't let your own circumstances limit your imagination when it comes to considering possibilities.
- Computers that help people avoid falling down if they, for whatever reason, have lousy balance or slow reaction. Perhaps it could help older folks for whom falling down can be a serious risk.
Doubtful. You'd have to be able to perfectly compensate for the damage in order to cancel it out. It's like applying an inverse signal to cancel it out, but you have no way of reading what the original (faulty) signal is, or what the correct signal should be.
I was thinking less of compensating for a damaged vestibular system and more of improving one that mostly works. Imagine a helmet that contains some accelerometers, a little computer, maybe a camera, and a couple of vestibular stimulators. The computer could notice a situation where the user is at risk of falling, perhaps because he or she is already off balance, or perhaps because of upcoming terrain, and activates one stimulator or the other in order to move the user to a more stable configuration.
I'm sure that's pretty pie-in-the-sky, but it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility. I'm presupposing that there are people for whom reaction time to balance information from a mostly-working vestibular system is a problem. But that would seem to be exactly the problem that drunk people face, so I'd guess that there might also be people who have similar problems even without alcohol.
An implant that replaced the vestibular organs would be the only way. Where else could you put the artifical motion sensors?
Eyeglasses? Helmet? Baseball cap? Star Wars-type levitating robot which follows you around watching you?
One can imagine some cool applications for this sort of thing...
- Computers that help people avoid falling down if they, for whatever reason, have lousy balance or slow reaction. Perhaps it could help older folks for whom falling down can be a serious risk.
- When the officer says "Walk on this line with one foot in front of the other," I'll say "Yes sir, anything you say, just let me put on my special balance-assist eyeglasses."
- A game like Dance Dance Revolution might use this to help teach you to get jiggy. And games, or better, IMAX movies, could use it to provide an increased sense of motion.
- Maybe it could help reduce motion sickness? Sort of like noise-cancellation technology, but for your sense of balance.
It's a perfectly accurate, legitimate point. The fact that the moderators have essentially said "Aww, screw that" just goes to show that the RIAA/MPAA crowd aren't entirely wrong: the/. crowd has little respect for other people's copyrights.
Chip's problem now is that 100% of his admissable evidence is in the hands of a known immoral and hostile agent.
Perhaps, but if he can get some traction with, say, the attourney general in Montana or elsewhere then HMS may suddenly find its own hardware siezed. HMS, if it's as guilty as Chip says it is, cannot go from very dirty to crystal clean overnight. They can't cover up everything they've been doing.
I suppose the open source community might even lend him a hand. Why not set up a few machines that look like open proxies, get them listed wherever these things are listed, and wait for HMS to come to us? Log all traffic from HMS and find out whether or not they're still ignoring ROBOTS.TXT. That sort of thing would be fairly inexpensive and would provide exactly the kind of evidence that Chip needs to back up his allegations. It could also be used by every website that HMS illegally harvests as the basis for a law suit.
I don't disagree with you, but America apparently does. Both Jobs and Gates are listed in Discovery Channel's list of 100 greatest Americans.
Being a "visionary" means not only having a vision, but making that vision a reality. I like Jobs' vision better than Gates', but you really have to put them both in the 'visionary' category.
When you get down to it, all personal writing requires some degree of self-importance. Anyone who posts here on/., myself included, presumes that his or her opinion is interesting enough that others will want to read it. The only difference between us and Dave Barry, for example, is that Dave is actually correct in that presumption. Most bloggers fall in the realm of the/. poster, but a few succeed in being interesting, informative, relevant, and/or entertaining.
BusinessWeek ran an article on blogging called "Blogs Will Change Your Business" in the May 2 issue. The article is written in the form of a blog, and the main idea is that no business can afford to ignore blogs. My opinion when I read it was that the article was a little heavy on hype, but for a businessman who knows nothing about blogs it's probably a good introduction. In any case, the article also announced that BusinessWeek was starting its own blog, called Blogspotting, to continue to follow blogs as they relate to business.
Call me naive, but isn't the main mission of a university press to disseminate information as widely as possible? They exist mainly because Penguin and Random House and the like don't see a huge earnings potential in publishing narrowly focussed academic material. Google can be a huge help to academic publishers by helping potential customers locate their material. At the same time, Google will help customers to be more discriminating in their purchases. Academic publishers will need to streamline their operations. They should really hop on the print-on-demand bandwagon so that they print only what they sell.
Having recently returned from a trip to London, I can tell you that they're pretty close to an iPod-based economy already. Seemed like every third person I passed on the street had a MP3 player, and I only noticed one MP3 player in an entire week that wasn't an iPod.
There's a difference between having a pro-SCO, anti-Linux opinion and simply spouting SCO's FUD. O'Gara or anyone else is welcome, IMO, to say: "I think SCO actually has a legitimate complaint against IBM, and here's why..." That's quite different from the poorly researched, poorly reasoned crap that O'Gara has been writing for the last year or two. Her articles so closely match the tall tales that McBride and Stowell have been telling that one can only conclude that she's a big part of the SCO PR team.
Bill Gates can't find enough IT workers, so he wants to change visa regs to get more in. IBM has too many IT workers, wants to fire them.
Uh, no.
1) IBM is laying off people in Europe, where AFAIK, Bill Gates would be very happy to simply avoid paying enormous fines.
2) Bill Gates and much of the rest of the IT sector in the US want to change the quotas on certain types of visas to allow more foreign workers. They want this not because they can't find enough skilled workers in the US, but because they can't find enough skilled workers in the US who are willing to work at the wage that Bill & friends want to pay. Adding more H1B visas and (particularly) moving to offshore development firms are ways to exert downward pressure on salaries.
Odd, yes, and inappropriate. Seems to equate 13,000 people with car keys. IBM decided to terminate 13,000 people. I expect it probably had some sort of reason for that... IBM has layed off or terminated large batches of employees before, and I'm sure it's not something that the company takes lightly. Nevertheless, it's the (ex-)employees who are losing something.
The thing is, the only people who are really interested in seeing the sixth movie (or third, depending on how you count) in the Star Wars saga are those that have seen the other five movies. Mostly, it's the people who were kids when "Star Wars" came out. We're all about 35 now. If we go with our kids, it'll be because we can't find a babysitter and so decide to drag our kids along with us rather than the other way around.
And what about those who have been wrongly convicted?
Martin Tankleff, for example, is currently serving a life term for allegedly killing his parents, but the evidence against him (a confession written by the investigating detective) was pretty weak. And the evidence that someone else committed the murders is strong and seems to get stronger with each passing month. The martytankleff.org site would seem an important and perfectly reasonable way for Tankleff and his supporters to get their message out.
It's clear that our system of justice is flawed. I have no idea how many innocent people are currently in prison, but enough people on death row have been exonerated by new evidence that a number of states currently have placed moratoriums on executions. Given that, and the fact that we can't just ditch our system until someone thinks up a better one, we certainly shouldn't prohibit inmates from contributing to the web sites which could ultimately result in helping them restore their freedom.
As so many others have pointed out, Xcode won't cost you a cent beyond whatever you decide to spend on a Mac (which could be anywhere from $500 to $3000, depending on you). And there are lots of free resources for learning about Mac programming, and lots of books.
If you want to get a taste of the cutting edge of Mac development, however, go to developer.apple.com and buy yourself a ticket to Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, a.k.a. WWDC. Depending on where you live, you may also need a plane ticket and a plane ticket and a hotel room or a pal in San Francisco that you can crash with. Anyway, at WWDC you'll meet a few thousand Mac developers and attend sessions given mostly by Apple engineers on.
Attending WWDC is definitely not something you _need_ to do, particularly if you're just starting out. But it's a lot of fun, and you might just see stuff there that will make you decide to sell your PC.
If you decide to do it, do it soon. You can get a WWDC ticket now for $1295, but prices go up to $1595 on April 22.
Tax evasion is when you pay less in taxes by lying, cheating, etc. Some obvious examples that probably happen all the time are claiming more dependants than you actually have, failing to report income, or saying that income came from somewhere other than where it really did.
Tax avoidance is when you reduce the taxes you owe by arranging your life so that the money you receive comes from sources that are taxed at the lowest rate possible. You say to the government: "You wanna play by those rules? Okay, I can play by those rules." Capital gains are taxed at a lower overall rate than salary, for example, so one way to pay legitimately pay less in taxes is to reduce your salary as much as possible.
This is, as others have pointed out, a pretty common thing for CEO's to do. In addition to the tax benefit, it's a way to say to your investors: "I'm so confident that our stock will go up that I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. I'm not the usual CEO that pays himself a huge salary. Instead, you'll know that I'm looking out for the shareholders because I'm one of the biggest ones, and I depend on the stock for money."
For every proprietary format that Apple has, Microsoft has ten. If Apple is forced to open up it's DRM, why then shouldn't Microsoft have to open up the file formats for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.? And let's not forget the Windows Media file formats.
If Congress wants to talk about outlawing all proprietary formats, then fine, let's have that debate. If it wants to pick on one particular company that's simply selling copies of music in a format that works on the systems it sells, it should think again because it's standing on a very slippery slope.
I can't help but wonder why Microsoft would want to beat Google. I mean yeah, sure, it's pretty obvious that Microsoft can't stand to see any other technology company gain a dominant position. But aside from corporate ego and obstinance, what's really in it for Microsoft?
Money? I'm sure there's plenty of money to be made in the Internet search field. But Microsoft is already making money faster than it can count it. Microsoft hardly needs to add another profit center to its portfolio.
Control? I'm sure this is part of it. Microsoft can push around almost any tech company it wants to, either because it controls the platform that all those companies rely on, or because it can threaten to move into their markets. Not so with Google, which doesn't depend directly on Windows, and is established more than enough that Microsoft isn't going to knock them off any time soon. Google is a big, powerful company over which Microsoft has little leverage. That's a fairly new position for Microsoft.
But really, it's not like the Google search engine constitutes an OS-like platform that threatens Microsoft's bread and butter. Sure, maybe people will use some Google-based service to do distributed computing or something. But nobody's going to stop buying Windows and Office because they like using Google. Apple and Linux seem like much more significant threats to Microsoft's well being than Google.
For that matter, Microsoft seems like a much more significant threat to Microsoft's well being than Google. Microsoft's products are, frankly, pretty crappy, and people aren't going to put up with that forever. It seems to me that Microsoft would be much, much better off devoting the time and energy it spends on Internet searching to rethinking its existing products. Maybe break Word up into two or three products which are each a lot easier to use and which play well together. As it is, Word just gets in its own way when I try to use it. More importantly, it gets in _my_ way. And how about letting me choose between performance and eye candy in Windows XP, so that I don't have to buy a newer, faster PC every ten months?
So what is it that I'm missing? Why does Microsoft feel compelled to play king-of-the-mountain in every single tech market instead of shoring up its own existing businesses? Again, what's in it for Microsoft?
Flying a plane is like operating a lawnmower or driving a car. You're operating a machine with well-defined controls within well-defined parameters. You generally know the correct procedure for each phase of the process, and your job is to stick to that procedure as closely as possible. Check lists work well here because the procedures rarely change.
Writing software or building a space probe is more like designing an airplane than flying one. I doubt that there's ever been a case where an aircraft was designed from the ground up without some significant mistakes, defects, or other problems. Indeed, airplanes do crash from time to time, and while pilot error may occasionally be the problem, it seems that mechanical failure or design problems are often the cause of an accident.
In short, if we were sending thousands of identical space probes around the solar system on a daily basis the way we fly thousands of 737's around the USA every day, problems like the one with the Huygens probe probably wouldn't happen very often.
There are certainly methodologies for monitoring development-type processes such as writing software or designing airplanes. And you can bet that NASA and its contractors use every single one of them. I'm dead certain that this problem will be examined from every angle, and it will eventually be traced back to some problem or group of problems in the development and testing process, which will ultimately be changed to prevent this sort of thing in the future.
Creative is going to take market share away from Apple? That's pretty funny, because it sounds like Apple has decided to take a bunch of market share away from Creative (and everyone else) with the iPod Shuffle. Small, sleek, simple, and sensible, the Shuffle is the one flash-based player that's interesting to me; Apple will likely get my money.
If the iPod Shuffle is a hit, Apple will be taking at least a decent chunk of the flash-based market. Creative, then, will need not only to take a bite out of the iPod's and iPod mini's market share, but take a big enough bite to make up for its losses in the flash-based market.
It wouldn't be such a bad thing if there were dozens of versions of Wikipedia out there. At the very least, it might cause people to question what they read on the net more than they do now, and to question all the ways they get news and information. There's a lot of crap out there that masquerades as journalism or factual content, and the world will be a better place when folks question sources more than they do now.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you know a lot more about this stuff than most of the other
I was thinking less of compensating for a damaged vestibular system and more of improving one that mostly works. Imagine a helmet that contains some accelerometers, a little computer, maybe a camera, and a couple of vestibular stimulators. The computer could notice a situation where the user is at risk of falling, perhaps because he or she is already off balance, or perhaps because of upcoming terrain, and activates one stimulator or the other in order to move the user to a more stable configuration.
I'm sure that's pretty pie-in-the-sky, but it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility. I'm presupposing that there are people for whom reaction time to balance information from a mostly-working vestibular system is a problem. But that would seem to be exactly the problem that drunk people face, so I'd guess that there might also be people who have similar problems even without alcohol.
Eyeglasses? Helmet? Baseball cap? Star Wars-type levitating robot which follows you around watching you?
One can imagine some cool applications for this sort of thing...
- Computers that help people avoid falling down if they, for whatever reason, have lousy balance or slow reaction. Perhaps it could help older folks for whom falling down can be a serious risk.
- When the officer says "Walk on this line with one foot in front of the other," I'll say "Yes sir, anything you say, just let me put on my special balance-assist eyeglasses."
- A game like Dance Dance Revolution might use this to help teach you to get jiggy. And games, or better, IMAX movies, could use it to provide an increased sense of motion.
- Maybe it could help reduce motion sickness? Sort of like noise-cancellation technology, but for your sense of balance.
Why is the parent modded "Score:0, Flamebait"?
/. crowd has little respect for other people's copyrights.
It's a perfectly accurate, legitimate point. The fact that the moderators have essentially said "Aww, screw that" just goes to show that the RIAA/MPAA crowd aren't entirely wrong: the
Chip's problem now is that 100% of his admissable evidence is in the hands of a known immoral and hostile agent.
Perhaps, but if he can get some traction with, say, the attourney general in Montana or elsewhere then HMS may suddenly find its own hardware siezed. HMS, if it's as guilty as Chip says it is, cannot go from very dirty to crystal clean overnight. They can't cover up everything they've been doing.
I suppose the open source community might even lend him a hand. Why not set up a few machines that look like open proxies, get them listed wherever these things are listed, and wait for HMS to come to us? Log all traffic from HMS and find out whether or not they're still ignoring ROBOTS.TXT. That sort of thing would be fairly inexpensive and would provide exactly the kind of evidence that Chip needs to back up his allegations. It could also be used by every website that HMS illegally harvests as the basis for a law suit.
I don't disagree with you, but America apparently does. Both Jobs and Gates are listed in Discovery Channel's list of 100 greatest Americans.
Being a "visionary" means not only having a vision, but making that vision a reality. I like Jobs' vision better than Gates', but you really have to put them both in the 'visionary' category.
When you get down to it, all personal writing requires some degree of self-importance. Anyone who posts here on /., myself included, presumes that his or her opinion is interesting enough that others will want to read it. The only difference between us and Dave Barry, for example, is that Dave is actually correct in that presumption. Most bloggers fall in the realm of the /. poster, but a few succeed in being interesting, informative, relevant, and/or entertaining.
BusinessWeek ran an article on blogging called "Blogs Will Change Your Business" in the May 2 issue. The article is written in the form of a blog, and the main idea is that no business can afford to ignore blogs. My opinion when I read it was that the article was a little heavy on hype, but for a businessman who knows nothing about blogs it's probably a good introduction. In any case, the article also announced that BusinessWeek was starting its own blog, called Blogspotting, to continue to follow blogs as they relate to business.
Call me naive, but isn't the main mission of a university press to disseminate information as widely as possible? They exist mainly because Penguin and Random House and the like don't see a huge earnings potential in publishing narrowly focussed academic material. Google can be a huge help to academic publishers by helping potential customers locate their material. At the same time, Google will help customers to be more discriminating in their purchases. Academic publishers will need to streamline their operations. They should really hop on the print-on-demand bandwagon so that they print only what they sell.
Having recently returned from a trip to London, I can tell you that they're pretty close to an iPod-based economy already. Seemed like every third person I passed on the street had a MP3 player, and I only noticed one MP3 player in an entire week that wasn't an iPod.
The Internet is dynamic. Get over it.
If you want to see what the net used to look like, use the http://linuxworld.com/">Wayback Machine.
There's a difference between having a pro-SCO, anti-Linux opinion and simply spouting SCO's FUD. O'Gara or anyone else is welcome, IMO, to say: "I think SCO actually has a legitimate complaint against IBM, and here's why..." That's quite different from the poorly researched, poorly reasoned crap that O'Gara has been writing for the last year or two. Her articles so closely match the tall tales that McBride and Stowell have been telling that one can only conclude that she's a big part of the SCO PR team.
Bill Gates can't find enough IT workers, so he wants to change visa regs to get more in. IBM has too many IT workers, wants to fire them.
Uh, no.
1) IBM is laying off people in Europe, where AFAIK, Bill Gates would be very happy to simply avoid paying enormous fines.
2) Bill Gates and much of the rest of the IT sector in the US want to change the quotas on certain types of visas to allow more foreign workers. They want this not because they can't find enough skilled workers in the US, but because they can't find enough skilled workers in the US who are willing to work at the wage that Bill & friends want to pay. Adding more H1B visas and (particularly) moving to offshore development firms are ways to exert downward pressure on salaries.
Odd, yes, and inappropriate. Seems to equate 13,000 people with car keys. IBM decided to terminate 13,000 people. I expect it probably had some sort of reason for that... IBM has layed off or terminated large batches of employees before, and I'm sure it's not something that the company takes lightly. Nevertheless, it's the (ex-)employees who are losing something.
The thing is, the only people who are really interested in seeing the sixth movie (or third, depending on how you count) in the Star Wars saga are those that have seen the other five movies. Mostly, it's the people who were kids when "Star Wars" came out. We're all about 35 now. If we go with our kids, it'll be because we can't find a babysitter and so decide to drag our kids along with us rather than the other way around.
And what about those who have been wrongly convicted?
Martin Tankleff, for example, is currently serving a life term for allegedly killing his parents, but the evidence against him (a confession written by the investigating detective) was pretty weak. And the evidence that someone else committed the murders is strong and seems to get stronger with each passing month. The martytankleff.org site would seem an important and perfectly reasonable way for Tankleff and his supporters to get their message out.
It's clear that our system of justice is flawed. I have no idea how many innocent people are currently in prison, but enough people on death row have been exonerated by new evidence that a number of states currently have placed moratoriums on executions. Given that, and the fact that we can't just ditch our system until someone thinks up a better one, we certainly shouldn't prohibit inmates from contributing to the web sites which could ultimately result in helping them restore their freedom.
As so many others have pointed out, Xcode won't cost you a cent beyond whatever you decide to spend on a Mac (which could be anywhere from $500 to $3000, depending on you). And there are lots of free resources for learning about Mac programming, and lots of books.
.
If you want to get a taste of the cutting edge of Mac development, however, go to developer.apple.com and buy yourself a ticket to Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, a.k.a. WWDC. Depending on where you live, you may also need a plane ticket and a plane ticket and a hotel room or a pal in San Francisco that you can crash with. Anyway, at WWDC you'll meet a few thousand Mac developers and attend sessions given mostly by Apple engineers on
Attending WWDC is definitely not something you _need_ to do, particularly if you're just starting out. But it's a lot of fun, and you might just see stuff there that will make you decide to sell your PC.
If you decide to do it, do it soon. You can get a WWDC ticket now for $1295, but prices go up to $1595 on April 22.
Tax evasion is when you pay less in taxes by lying, cheating, etc. Some obvious examples that probably happen all the time are claiming more dependants than you actually have, failing to report income, or saying that income came from somewhere other than where it really did.
Tax avoidance is when you reduce the taxes you owe by arranging your life so that the money you receive comes from sources that are taxed at the lowest rate possible. You say to the government: "You wanna play by those rules? Okay, I can play by those rules." Capital gains are taxed at a lower overall rate than salary, for example, so one way to pay legitimately pay less in taxes is to reduce your salary as much as possible.
This is, as others have pointed out, a pretty common thing for CEO's to do. In addition to the tax benefit, it's a way to say to your investors: "I'm so confident that our stock will go up that I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. I'm not the usual CEO that pays himself a huge salary. Instead, you'll know that I'm looking out for the shareholders because I'm one of the biggest ones, and I depend on the stock for money."
That reminds me of a song by Jamie Notarthomas in which the chorus goes:
Every time you pay your taxes, you only hurt yourself...
He's been playing all over New York state for at least 15 years, and he does a great show. Catch him if you ever get a chance.
For every proprietary format that Apple has, Microsoft has ten. If Apple is forced to open up it's DRM, why then shouldn't Microsoft have to open up the file formats for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.? And let's not forget the Windows Media file formats.
If Congress wants to talk about outlawing all proprietary formats, then fine, let's have that debate. If it wants to pick on one particular company that's simply selling copies of music in a format that works on the systems it sells, it should think again because it's standing on a very slippery slope.
Minus infinity + Minus infinity + Minus infinity = Minus Infinity.
Why use hyperbole when facts will do just as nicely? If you want to make your point and maintain some credibility, put it this way:
0 + 0 + 0 = 0
I can't help but wonder why Microsoft would want to beat Google. I mean yeah, sure, it's pretty obvious that Microsoft can't stand to see any other technology company gain a dominant position. But aside from corporate ego and obstinance, what's really in it for Microsoft?
Money? I'm sure there's plenty of money to be made in the Internet search field. But Microsoft is already making money faster than it can count it. Microsoft hardly needs to add another profit center to its portfolio.
Control? I'm sure this is part of it. Microsoft can push around almost any tech company it wants to, either because it controls the platform that all those companies rely on, or because it can threaten to move into their markets. Not so with Google, which doesn't depend directly on Windows, and is established more than enough that Microsoft isn't going to knock them off any time soon. Google is a big, powerful company over which Microsoft has little leverage. That's a fairly new position for Microsoft.
But really, it's not like the Google search engine constitutes an OS-like platform that threatens Microsoft's bread and butter. Sure, maybe people will use some Google-based service to do distributed computing or something. But nobody's going to stop buying Windows and Office because they like using Google. Apple and Linux seem like much more significant threats to Microsoft's well being than Google.
For that matter, Microsoft seems like a much more significant threat to Microsoft's well being than Google. Microsoft's products are, frankly, pretty crappy, and people aren't going to put up with that forever. It seems to me that Microsoft would be much, much better off devoting the time and energy it spends on Internet searching to rethinking its existing products. Maybe break Word up into two or three products which are each a lot easier to use and which play well together. As it is, Word just gets in its own way when I try to use it. More importantly, it gets in _my_ way. And how about letting me choose between performance and eye candy in Windows XP, so that I don't have to buy a newer, faster PC every ten months?
So what is it that I'm missing? Why does Microsoft feel compelled to play king-of-the-mountain in every single tech market instead of shoring up its own existing businesses? Again, what's in it for Microsoft?
Amazing that Apple and Pixar both beat Coca-Cola! I'm a big fan of both, but it's hard to imagine that Coke doesn't have a larger following worldwide.
Flying a plane is like operating a lawnmower or driving a car. You're operating a machine with well-defined controls within well-defined parameters. You generally know the correct procedure for each phase of the process, and your job is to stick to that procedure as closely as possible. Check lists work well here because the procedures rarely change.
Writing software or building a space probe is more like designing an airplane than flying one. I doubt that there's ever been a case where an aircraft was designed from the ground up without some significant mistakes, defects, or other problems. Indeed, airplanes do crash from time to time, and while pilot error may occasionally be the problem, it seems that mechanical failure or design problems are often the cause of an accident.
In short, if we were sending thousands of identical space probes around the solar system on a daily basis the way we fly thousands of 737's around the USA every day, problems like the one with the Huygens probe probably wouldn't happen very often.
There are certainly methodologies for monitoring development-type processes such as writing software or designing airplanes. And you can bet that NASA and its contractors use every single one of them. I'm dead certain that this problem will be examined from every angle, and it will eventually be traced back to some problem or group of problems in the development and testing process, which will ultimately be changed to prevent this sort of thing in the future.
Creative is going to take market share away from Apple? That's pretty funny, because it sounds like Apple has decided to take a bunch of market share away from Creative (and everyone else) with the iPod Shuffle. Small, sleek, simple, and sensible, the Shuffle is the one flash-based player that's interesting to me; Apple will likely get my money.
If the iPod Shuffle is a hit, Apple will be taking at least a decent chunk of the flash-based market. Creative, then, will need not only to take a bite out of the iPod's and iPod mini's market share, but take a big enough bite to make up for its losses in the flash-based market.
It'll be an interesting battle.
It wouldn't be such a bad thing if there were dozens of versions of Wikipedia out there. At the very least, it might cause people to question what they read on the net more than they do now, and to question all the ways they get news and information. There's a lot of crap out there that masquerades as journalism or factual content, and the world will be a better place when folks question sources more than they do now.