"Communicate with [...] outside parties" == talk to the people who call you on your lovely new Skype kit, perchance? (after all, the whole point is to communicate with third parties, isn't it? or did you just want to talk to the folks at Skyper all day?)
"Distributed by third parties". Third parties, eh? Like tucows and c|net? Those third parties? Or maybe they mean "third parties" like those promiscuous P2P folks that allow the system to work in the first place. This sounds Really Dangerous. Really.
"Skyper will not be liable for damage". I mean. No shit. The GPL has similar verbiage, and so does every other bit of boilerplate in the world.
How you manage to read promises of spyware into those paragraphs, I'll never know.
Re:I remember those 9Gig drives when new
on
Google's Early Hardware
·
· Score: 2, Informative
$4000? In 1997?
You're on crack.
Though I hasten to admit that I didn't buy any 9 gig SCSI drives in 1997, per se, I did buy two 9-gigabyte IBM 9ES ultrawides in 1998 for something less than $500 each (Non-anecdotal evidence here).
(Oh, and yes. They're still working justfine, thanks.)
It always seemed pretty trivial to do with Norton Disk Doctor. And that has always pretty trivial buy, and increasingly trivial to steal.
I mean. FAT isn't exactly new, or undocumented. It has operated that way since the beginning of time, give or take. Programs exist which trivially fix most trivial problems, like fixing a fucked up FAT table using the second copy.
How are any of the problems you've mentioned any different with VHS tape than they are for "digital" mediums like DAT/DDS, AIT, Exabyte 8mm, or whatever?
I submit that all tape degrades. If it degrades "a little," it'll still be recoverable/watchable. If it degrades more than that, you lose bits that you cannot get back.
They all use error correction to help with this problem.
Where I work, there's a magical grey box on the wall in the area where all of the telco stuff demarcs.
It's a device from Pairgain, and looks to be NEMA rated and such. It is line-powered at something obscene like 300 volts. I recall that it says something about xDSL on one of its brightly-colored warning labels.
One pair goes into this box from the utility pole; three (loop start POTS) pairs emerge.
It works great. I've got a very little idea what the back-end consists of. AFAIK, the whole kit was supplied free by Ameritech/SBC, as the neighborhood is completely out of spare copper.
VoADSL? Check. Breakthrough? Not by a longshot.
I'll consider it a breakthrough when the POTS loop can be eliminated, and our small-office VOIP-based phone system can talk IP to the local PSTN. Replacing the Pairgain demarc box with a DSL router configuring the switch for h.323 would get there (in a perfect world), but it's just not gonna happen.
The primary difficulty in building non-cookie-cutter subdivisions is not that it's expensive to -build- different types of houses, but that it's expensive to -design- them.
(Excepting, of course, factory-build modular and mobile homes. Assembly lines are a whole different world from building houses on-site.)
Somehow, I doubt this robotic extruder of concrete will eliminate the design phase.
Also: Don't put your desk against a wall, but situate it so that you're facing out into the room.
This is typical in an executive setting, but seems to be incredibly unpopular in the home office crowd (or with anyone raised in a cube).
It reduces the cost (muscular, time) of changing focal length, so it's easier to do. And since you're more likely to -actually look around you- when it's easier to do so, it means that you might actually do it enough to make a difference.
Being able to glance just off one side of a monitor, into the room, and then out of an open doorway is a really easy way to let your eyes "stretch" and relax.
My eyes (which are horrible - I can't read inch-high letters more than a foot or two away unaided) have more-or-less stabilized since I made it easy to look around at my surroundings, and adopted the habit of actually doing so.
Re:Jammers and Dampers
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Is it really that expensive or difficult?
In my kitchen, I've got a 1.3 kilowatt transmitter. It operates at ~2.4GHz (which isn't very far removed from modern cellular frequencies). There is a screen on the front of the thing that seems to do a good job of keeping the RF from escaping (my nose hasn't gone necrotic from years of watching microwaves cook food) - and I can -see- through it! I can't possibly imagine that the screen contributed substantially to the cost of my microwave.
Therefore, effective shielding is not only readily achievable, but is also relatively inexpensive and already in common use.
Luckily, your short-sighted prose on the operation of stealth aircraft leaves little doubt that you're a dim-witted moron, and just spreading FUD. (RF fud, but FUD nonetheless.)
Educated decisions merely reduce the viability of their forecasts (read: "hopes"). It fucks up the marketers' dark ages equation, where increased advertising ("awareness") equals an increase in revenue.
I'm not going to -not- rent/buy something just because I read a bad review on a kiosk, I'll just get something with better reviews instead. I did, after all, venture out to the place in search of entertainment. I'm not leaving without some.
Which is to say that there's plenty of money to be made; it just won't be where they expect it. Pity, that.
Years ago, before any of this interweb business happened ('91? '92?), there was a video rental store here that had an IMDB-like system. It was CD-ROM based, had a color touchscreen, and was wrapped in a kiosk for casual customer perusal. It was right next to the SNES demo rig, and I seem to recall it working fairly well.
The difference is thus: You want your motherboard grounded. It's good for reducing EMI/RFI emissions. It's good for maintaining consistancy among all those cute little transmission lines ("traces" isn't quite adequate terminology when dealing with the RF signalling in a modern PC) that connect everything together.
The engineer who designed the motherboard wanted a ground point at the screw hole, so he designed it that way. Hence, the cute little ring of solder-dots circling it (soft material to promote extra surface area for improved electrical contact), which would be bare green fiberglass if that weren't the intent. I've seen it both ways.
But go ahead and think it's incorrect.
Me, I want my electronics' RF ground to be as close to the source as possible. It is -such- a shorter path to ground to just use the fucking screws and stop trying to think yourself out of doing what is obviously better:
Motherboard grounded with screws: Motherboard -> tray
Connections to nearest to nearest shield: 1.
Impedance: Near 0.
Motherboard grounded with ATX power connector: a maze of perhaps a foot or two of copper ground plane, a foot or two of copper ATX power cable, a few inches of copper traces in the PSU, a steel power supply chassis, a steel computer chassis, and a steel computer mainboard tray.
Connections to nearest shielding shield: ~5.
Impedance: ??? (but certainly great enough that my cheap-ass Radio Shack DMM would be able to measure it)
Added cost: Several paper washer of negative benefit.
And this doesn't apply to just PCs, either. Go open up your DVD player. I'll wait.
See that PCB over in the corner with a one or more largish square chips on it, with a bunch of connectors poking out through the back panel? See the screws holding it down? Remove one of them. I'll wait.
See the chassis ground connection? Good. It's not accidental, and I didn't plant it there.
Reassemble, and remember that DDR3200 and 8x AGP and other things unequivicably RF != 12VDC automotive electronics.
"Plastic rivets" happen because it's -cheaper- to manufacture and assemble that way, not because it's better.
My boss has a wireless account with Verizon, and a self-contained PCMCIA device to access it. All-you-can-eat bandwidth from wherever you happen to be in the US that you can see a tower from for ~$70/mo.
It seems reliable, and fast enough that I didn't get pissed off doing typical web browsing.
For double-extra-special bonus points, add an external antenna.
Or, just go ahead and do the Wi-Fi thing. Might be cheaper, and is sure to be faster and less available.
Build an antenna, or buy an antenna, or whatever.
If I were feeling cheap, I'd start with a cell phone antenna and then cut it to length for the correct frequency. If I were feeling spendy, I'd buy a high-gain omni from Tessco and invest a lot of time mounting and cabling it.
Then just plug the kit into your Proxim/Orinoco/Lucent card, drive to town, and waste half a day looking for a legitimate hotspot.
That must be why there are -so- -fucking- -many- 1974 Chevy 3/4-ton pickups left on the road. I can hardly even venture out without tripping over the things.
Any vehicle will last nearly indefinately if driven gingerly, only in New Mexico, cleaned frequently and promptly fixed when broken.
Those few of them which have experienced that level of care for the past 30 years will, of course, continue to work perfectly today. The rest are already soupcans.
The peice-of-shit car that I've got in my collection is a 1995 Chevy Beretta with ~140k miles. Modern by most measures (certainly those that begin in 1974), it's got direct fuel injection, electronic ignition, ABS, and more sensors and behind-the-scenes gadgetry than you can shake a stick at.
I hit the 7k revlimiter on just about every shift, and generally beat the hell out of it whenever I drive it.
Problems? I broke one of the rear wheels off once (80mph, sideways, ditch, field), and cooked an alternator. Those were my fault. It's had its plugs changed (once), and a new battery (years ago), as well as brakes and tires and other consumables (as needed). It did eat a $25 waterpump for no good reason one day, though.
Other than that, it's maintenance-free. Fluids are topped-off as needed, but never changed.
Nowadays, it spends most of its time sitting in the driveway, often for months without even a glance. Yet, it still starts immediately and is ready to go whenever I do drive it. I don't hesitate to take it on long trips, and in fact prefer it over my other car due to its still-superb gas mileage (35mpg highway, measured).
And after 9 Ohio winters and about as many washes, it's still rust-free. What is this "fender rot" thing that you speak of?
[I don't expect or want the Beretta to live forever. But it would if I wanted it to, and keeping it properly would be a far easier task than taking care of a 1974 anything.]
When I switch my local phone carrier from SBC to, say, MCI, I get to keep the same number. Same when I move my cell phone from Alltel to Verizon. It's bloody simple.
But it's not quite-so-easy with the current simplicity of DNS and SMTP to keep email addresses across providers.
So why bother with using your ISP's email, at all?
POP3 is free. Hotpop is an example of this that I've been using for years without complaint. (Google will, doubtlessly, find others.) I've got Roadrunner at home right now, due to price/performance issues, but if it ever gets cancelled, I'll have no problem moving to something different.
On the other side of the coin, we pay for an Ameritech/SBC/Prodigy/Yahoo DSL account at work that never gets used, so that the salesguys can keep using the same ameritech.net addresses they were using before we moved everything in-house. Lately there's not even been a modem attached, since the antiquated Speedstream modem/router box mysteriously died some months ago.
It's on its own dedicated pair, in a neighborhood with zero available pairs. SBC has informed us that they'd *really* like their copper back, but they're not going to.
Since this is a technical forum, let's try to stay technically correct.
A TiVo does not use seperate read and write heads. Echostar's contraption does not use seperate read and write heads. ReplayTV does not use seperate read and write heads.
They're just plain-jane consumer-grade IDE hard drives. One big swingin' head assembly for all. It can't be in two places at once.
How to pause TV? Write a few/hundred/thousand sectors in one spot, move the head over, read a few/hundred/thousand sectors, move the head back, write a few/hundred/thousand sectors. Use RAM buffering to smooth over the requisite gaps.
Did anyone besides me even bother to write to Taft on the matter? I only got a snail-mail form-letter response, but at least some staffer put a checkmark on some tally board in Columbus that wouldn't have been there if I hadn't said a word. It took less than five minutes of my time.
There's all this hot air on Slashdot about this sort of thing, every day, but nobody seems to ever bother complaining to the only people who can make a bloody difference.
And then, we all act surprised when a nefarious bill becomes law and engage in some sort of twisted group hug, loudly complaining amongst ourselves that the sky has, in fact, fallen.
The LaserJet Series II is a ghastly slow behemoth. It has no vector drawing capabilities.
This makes printing anything other than plain (ASCII) text a process best measured in minutes-per-page, as everything else gets sent to the machine as a huge bitmapped graphic. No vectors=no scalable text=(agony+pain).
If you're printing in Wordperfect 4.2 under DOS, you'll find that it's quite fast. With any modern system, it's horrible. Especially with Ghostscript.
Don't bother with one unless it's free, or you're using it for parts.
From the LaserJet III (which has the same bulletproof mechanics as a II) on up, things are way better. It's actually got a brain, and vectors do flow forth with great speed. New parts are very cheap. It will last forever with minimal care and feeding.
Isn't it about time we move beyond using the term "baud" as a description of speed?
Baud rate is a measure of the number of signal changes per second. Alas, POTS phone lines are generally spec'd to only 3 KHz. Therefore, they're incapable of anything more than 3,000 signal changes per second, or 3,000 baud.
To get anything faster than that, you use a modem to get more bits per signal change. But even then, it's still going to be running at less than 3,000 baud.
"Baud" is a passable measure of speed for a serial binary stream (think RS-232), but is still superflous in practical application.
Let's stick to terms that are more useful and not just plain wrong, shall we? "Bits per second" being applicable here, or perhaps "kilobits per second." Abbreviate them as "bps," or "kbps." Progressively faster pipes should be labeled in terms of "megabits per second," "gigabits per second," or even "fucktons per fortnight" at the more extreme (and latent) end of things.
And by the way, you can't make up an new argument by simply referencing other arguments.
You must be new here.
I'm not primarily interested in (USB) charging systems, or that the device is the smallest and lightest possible when looking for a portable device. It's nice if it has these features, but the most important part is that I can use it (does the job), and use it while travelling, and use it as long as possible!
The only application I can think of where recharging is not an option while one sleeps, is while backpacking. I'd hasten to say that "batteries for the MP3 player" would fall a bit short of being on the list of things to carry on my back for a few weeks, but maybe my priorities are wacked.
That said, if size really isn't as important as replacable batteries, just buy a battery holder of reasonable shape and capacity, and plug it into a modern Archos. Might be good to remove the existing Lithium battery to save power loss as heat if it should try to charge it, too. And since the wide, flat battery compartment consumes very little space, you've still got a fairly small portable.
Fasten it together with duct-tape, velcro, epoxy, needle and thread, or whatever suits your fancy. I'd probably craft something out of stainless. YMMV. whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Um.
"Communicate with [...] outside parties" == talk to the people who call you on your lovely new Skype kit, perchance? (after all, the whole point is to communicate with third parties, isn't it? or did you just want to talk to the folks at Skyper all day?)
"Distributed by third parties". Third parties, eh? Like tucows and c|net? Those third parties? Or maybe they mean "third parties" like those promiscuous P2P folks that allow the system to work in the first place. This sounds Really Dangerous. Really.
"Skyper will not be liable for damage". I mean. No shit. The GPL has similar verbiage, and so does every other bit of boilerplate in the world.
How you manage to read promises of spyware into those paragraphs, I'll never know.
$4000? In 1997?
You're on crack.
Though I hasten to admit that I didn't buy any 9 gig SCSI drives in 1997, per se, I did buy two 9-gigabyte IBM 9ES ultrawides in 1998 for something less than $500 each (Non-anecdotal evidence here).
(Oh, and yes. They're still working justfine, thanks.)
*shrug*
I don't have one of these things, so I'll just have to take your word for it and let you prove yourself wrong.
Thanks, champ!
Really?
It always seemed pretty trivial to do with Norton Disk Doctor. And that has always pretty trivial buy, and increasingly trivial to steal.
I mean. FAT isn't exactly new, or undocumented. It has operated that way since the beginning of time, give or take. Programs exist which trivially fix most trivial problems, like fixing a fucked up FAT table using the second copy.
I think you've got it all wrong.
How are any of the problems you've mentioned any different with VHS tape than they are for "digital" mediums like DAT/DDS, AIT, Exabyte 8mm, or whatever?
I submit that all tape degrades. If it degrades "a little," it'll still be recoverable/watchable. If it degrades more than that, you lose bits that you cannot get back.
They all use error correction to help with this problem.
What's so wrong about analog video?
Where I work, there's a magical grey box on the wall in the area where all of the telco stuff demarcs.
It's a device from Pairgain, and looks to be NEMA rated and such. It is line-powered at something obscene like 300 volts. I recall that it says something about xDSL on one of its brightly-colored warning labels.
One pair goes into this box from the utility pole; three (loop start POTS) pairs emerge.
It works great. I've got a very little idea what the back-end consists of. AFAIK, the whole kit was supplied free by Ameritech/SBC, as the neighborhood is completely out of spare copper.
VoADSL? Check. Breakthrough? Not by a longshot.
I'll consider it a breakthrough when the POTS loop can be eliminated, and our small-office VOIP-based phone system can talk IP to the local PSTN. Replacing the Pairgain demarc box with a DSL router configuring the switch for h.323 would get there (in a perfect world), but it's just not gonna happen.
The primary difficulty in building non-cookie-cutter subdivisions is not that it's expensive to -build- different types of houses, but that it's expensive to -design- them.
(Excepting, of course, factory-build modular and mobile homes. Assembly lines are a whole different world from building houses on-site.)
Somehow, I doubt this robotic extruder of concrete will eliminate the design phase.
Also: Don't put your desk against a wall, but situate it so that you're facing out into the room.
This is typical in an executive setting, but seems to be incredibly unpopular in the home office crowd (or with anyone raised in a cube).
It reduces the cost (muscular, time) of changing focal length, so it's easier to do. And since you're more likely to -actually look around you- when it's easier to do so, it means that you might actually do it enough to make a difference.
Being able to glance just off one side of a monitor, into the room, and then out of an open doorway is a really easy way to let your eyes "stretch" and relax.
My eyes (which are horrible - I can't read inch-high letters more than a foot or two away unaided) have more-or-less stabilized since I made it easy to look around at my surroundings, and adopted the habit of actually doing so.
Is it really that expensive or difficult?
In my kitchen, I've got a 1.3 kilowatt transmitter. It operates at ~2.4GHz (which isn't very far removed from modern cellular frequencies). There is a screen on the front of the thing that seems to do a good job of keeping the RF from escaping (my nose hasn't gone necrotic from years of watching microwaves cook food) - and I can -see- through it! I can't possibly imagine that the screen contributed substantially to the cost of my microwave.
Therefore, effective shielding is not only readily achievable, but is also relatively inexpensive and already in common use.
Luckily, your short-sighted prose on the operation of stealth aircraft leaves little doubt that you're a dim-witted moron, and just spreading FUD. (RF fud, but FUD nonetheless.)
I hope you haven't fooled too many people.
Naah.
Educated decisions merely reduce the viability of their forecasts (read: "hopes"). It fucks up the marketers' dark ages equation, where increased advertising ("awareness") equals an increase in revenue.
I'm not going to -not- rent/buy something just because I read a bad review on a kiosk, I'll just get something with better reviews instead. I did, after all, venture out to the place in search of entertainment. I'm not leaving without some.
Which is to say that there's plenty of money to be made; it just won't be where they expect it. Pity, that.
Years ago, before any of this interweb business happened ('91? '92?), there was a video rental store here that had an IMDB-like system. It was CD-ROM based, had a color touchscreen, and was wrapped in a kiosk for casual customer perusal. It was right next to the SNES demo rig, and I seem to recall it working fairly well.
It's not there anymore.
The engineer who designed the motherboard wanted a ground point at the screw hole, so he designed it that way. Hence, the cute little ring of solder-dots circling it (soft material to promote extra surface area for improved electrical contact), which would be bare green fiberglass if that weren't the intent. I've seen it both ways.
But go ahead and think it's incorrect.
Me, I want my electronics' RF ground to be as close to the source as possible. It is -such- a shorter path to ground to just use the fucking screws and stop trying to think yourself out of doing what is obviously better:
And this doesn't apply to just PCs, either. Go open up your DVD player. I'll wait.
See that PCB over in the corner with a one or more largish square chips on it, with a bunch of connectors poking out through the back panel? See the screws holding it down? Remove one of them. I'll wait.
See the chassis ground connection? Good. It's not accidental, and I didn't plant it there.
Reassemble, and remember that DDR3200 and 8x AGP and other things unequivicably RF != 12VDC automotive electronics.
"Plastic rivets" happen because it's -cheaper- to manufacture and assemble that way, not because it's better.
My boss has a wireless account with Verizon, and a self-contained PCMCIA device to access it. All-you-can-eat bandwidth from wherever you happen to be in the US that you can see a tower from for ~$70/mo.
It seems reliable, and fast enough that I didn't get pissed off doing typical web browsing.
For double-extra-special bonus points, add an external antenna.
Or, just go ahead and do the Wi-Fi thing. Might be cheaper, and is sure to be faster and less available.
Build an antenna, or buy an antenna, or whatever.
If I were feeling cheap, I'd start with a cell phone antenna and then cut it to length for the correct frequency. If I were feeling spendy, I'd buy a high-gain omni from Tessco and invest a lot of time mounting and cabling it.
Then just plug the kit into your Proxim/Orinoco/Lucent card, drive to town, and waste half a day looking for a legitimate hotspot.
That must be why there are -so- -fucking- -many- 1974 Chevy 3/4-ton pickups left on the road. I can hardly even venture out without tripping over the things.
Any vehicle will last nearly indefinately if driven gingerly, only in New Mexico, cleaned frequently and promptly fixed when broken.
Those few of them which have experienced that level of care for the past 30 years will, of course, continue to work perfectly today. The rest are already soupcans.
The peice-of-shit car that I've got in my collection is a 1995 Chevy Beretta with ~140k miles. Modern by most measures (certainly those that begin in 1974), it's got direct fuel injection, electronic ignition, ABS, and more sensors and behind-the-scenes gadgetry than you can shake a stick at.
I hit the 7k revlimiter on just about every shift, and generally beat the hell out of it whenever I drive it.
Problems? I broke one of the rear wheels off once (80mph, sideways, ditch, field), and cooked an alternator. Those were my fault. It's had its plugs changed (once), and a new battery (years ago), as well as brakes and tires and other consumables (as needed). It did eat a $25 waterpump for no good reason one day, though.
Other than that, it's maintenance-free. Fluids are topped-off as needed, but never changed.
Nowadays, it spends most of its time sitting in the driveway, often for months without even a glance. Yet, it still starts immediately and is ready to go whenever I do drive it. I don't hesitate to take it on long trips, and in fact prefer it over my other car due to its still-superb gas mileage (35mpg highway, measured).
And after 9 Ohio winters and about as many washes, it's still rust-free. What is this "fender rot" thing that you speak of?
[I don't expect or want the Beretta to live forever. But it would if I wanted it to, and keeping it properly would be a far easier task than taking care of a 1974 anything.]
This is just a gimmick to sell stuff.
Pray tell: What product can I buy today that is not just a gimmick to sell stuff?
When I switch my local phone carrier from SBC to, say, MCI, I get to keep the same number. Same when I move my cell phone from Alltel to Verizon. It's bloody simple.
But it's not quite-so-easy with the current simplicity of DNS and SMTP to keep email addresses across providers.
So why bother with using your ISP's email, at all?
POP3 is free. Hotpop is an example of this that I've been using for years without complaint. (Google will, doubtlessly, find others.) I've got Roadrunner at home right now, due to price/performance issues, but if it ever gets cancelled, I'll have no problem moving to something different.
On the other side of the coin, we pay for an Ameritech/SBC/Prodigy/Yahoo DSL account at work that never gets used, so that the salesguys can keep using the same ameritech.net addresses they were using before we moved everything in-house. Lately there's not even been a modem attached, since the antiquated Speedstream modem/router box mysteriously died some months ago.
It's on its own dedicated pair, in a neighborhood with zero available pairs. SBC has informed us that they'd *really* like their copper back, but they're not going to.
Since this is a technical forum, let's try to stay technically correct.
A TiVo does not use seperate read and write heads. Echostar's contraption does not use seperate read and write heads. ReplayTV does not use seperate read and write heads.
They're just plain-jane consumer-grade IDE hard drives. One big swingin' head assembly for all. It can't be in two places at once.
How to pause TV? Write a few/hundred/thousand sectors in one spot, move the head over, read a few/hundred/thousand sectors, move the head back, write a few/hundred/thousand sectors. Use RAM buffering to smooth over the requisite gaps.
Your X-Box-selling friend was making 66% more money daily, but was expending more than 3 times as much work, shelf space, and time to do so.
It is a good example of diminishing returns, not of some "incremental decrease in price exponentially increasing sales/profit."
Remember kids, overhead costs money.
Did anyone besides me even bother to write to Taft on the matter? I only got a snail-mail form-letter response, but at least some staffer put a checkmark on some tally board in Columbus that wouldn't have been there if I hadn't said a word. It took less than five minutes of my time.
There's all this hot air on Slashdot about this sort of thing, every day, but nobody seems to ever bother complaining to the only people who can make a bloody difference.
And then, we all act surprised when a nefarious bill becomes law and engage in some sort of twisted group hug, loudly complaining amongst ourselves that the sky has, in fact, fallen.
Amazing.
Really?
How do you fit more than 3,000 things into a thing that only holds 3,000 things?
Just curious...
The LaserJet Series II is a ghastly slow behemoth. It has no vector drawing capabilities.
This makes printing anything other than plain (ASCII) text a process best measured in minutes-per-page, as everything else gets sent to the machine as a huge bitmapped graphic. No vectors=no scalable text=(agony+pain).
If you're printing in Wordperfect 4.2 under DOS, you'll find that it's quite fast. With any modern system, it's horrible. Especially with Ghostscript.
Don't bother with one unless it's free, or you're using it for parts.
From the LaserJet III (which has the same bulletproof mechanics as a II) on up, things are way better. It's actually got a brain, and vectors do flow forth with great speed. New parts are very cheap. It will last forever with minimal care and feeding.
Some links that actually work:
The cases.
The coolers.
The company.
Don't thank me; thank Google.
Isn't it about time we move beyond using the term "baud" as a description of speed?
Baud rate is a measure of the number of signal changes per second. Alas, POTS phone lines are generally spec'd to only 3 KHz. Therefore, they're incapable of anything more than 3,000 signal changes per second, or 3,000 baud.
To get anything faster than that, you use a modem to get more bits per signal change. But even then, it's still going to be running at less than 3,000 baud.
"Baud" is a passable measure of speed for a serial binary stream (think RS-232), but is still superflous in practical application.
Let's stick to terms that are more useful and not just plain wrong, shall we? "Bits per second" being applicable here, or perhaps "kilobits per second." Abbreviate them as "bps," or "kbps." Progressively faster pipes should be labeled in terms of "megabits per second," "gigabits per second," or even "fucktons per fortnight" at the more extreme (and latent) end of things.
Thank you.
And by the way, you can't make up an new argument by simply referencing other arguments.
You must be new here.
I'm not primarily interested in (USB) charging systems, or that the device is the smallest and lightest possible when looking for a portable device. It's nice if it has these features, but the most important part is that I can use it (does the job), and use it while travelling, and use it as long as possible!
The only application I can think of where recharging is not an option while one sleeps, is while backpacking. I'd hasten to say that "batteries for the MP3 player" would fall a bit short of being on the list of things to carry on my back for a few weeks, but maybe my priorities are wacked.
That said, if size really isn't as important as replacable batteries, just buy a battery holder of reasonable shape and capacity, and plug it into a modern Archos. Might be good to remove the existing Lithium battery to save power loss as heat if it should try to charge it, too. And since the wide, flat battery compartment consumes very little space, you've still got a fairly small portable.
Fasten it together with duct-tape, velcro, epoxy, needle and thread, or whatever suits your fancy. I'd probably craft something out of stainless. YMMV. whatever.