It's entitled "MAC OS INTEL X86 DEVELOPER EDITION", and looks like it's at least different from the fake "GNAA version" that had been floating around. The torrent delivers a single file called "macosxintel.exe".
I have no idea whether it's real. Anyone have a clue? If you do download it, BE CAREFUL... it's an executable, and if it's from some unsavory character, might do unspeakable things to your pc.
I had this same issue, and I settled on the Terk Leap Frog system. It's a 2.4ghz audio/video broadcast system. I hooked my stereo receiver (audio and video) up to the transmitter, and put receivers in my bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen.
Downsides:
The sound quality's not great: there are a few hisses and pops. Think somewhere between FM radio and a good cordless phone. It goes haywire every time my phone rings.
Upsides: It's nice and cheap--$99 for the first transmitter and receiver and $50 for each additional receiver. It works with ALL my A/V sources--TiVo (which talks to my MP3 server), DVD, even Xbox. Whatever's on the TV in my living room is what's throughout the house. It's easy to add more nodes--just buy another receiver. As a bonus, it does video, too--the television in my bedroom is slaved so I can watch TiVo from there. It even transmits remote control IR for you so you can use a remote to control the main unit from any room where there's a receiver.
Not a perfect solution, but it does what I need it to (play music through the house), is nice and flexible, and didn't require tearing up any walls. Wired solutions are great if you want to put the effort and money into quality, but all I really cared about was having a house full of music--and this works quite nicely.
If you want to put pressure on the government, what you need is a good attorney. The FBI and local law enforcement might be liable civilly for failing to respond to your complaint. You probably wouldn't win, but the spur of such a lawsuit would probably be enough to get a little action on your part.
If you really care about it, I'd talk to a civil litigator or IP attorney with experience in dealing with federal law enforcement. It won't be cheap, of course (good lawyers never are), but the Powers That Be will be a lot more helpful to someone with a J.D. behind his name.
Short of that, I think you're better off protecting your network and moving on. Good luck!
The new iPod is a great (if evolutionary) development, and a 60Gb Zen has me drooling, but the player I've really been lusting after is the fate-unknown Pearl from now-defunct SonicBlue.
It's smaller than the iPod, and includes an Ethernet-enabled docking station. All the early reports were good.
Alas, SonicBlue went bankrupt and sold its Rio assets to Denon, a major high-end home audio manufacturer. It's starting to look like the Pearl might never actually ship.
Between the two (Apple and Creative), for my money, I'd take an iPod. It has a dock, supports FireWire AND USB2, is quite a bit smaller and lighter, is Mac-friendly (if you're into that sort of thing) and is truly a brilliant piece of interface work. Also: when Apple ships the Windows version of its online music store later this year, you can be sure that iPod-for-Windows will be nicely supported.
The new Zen is bigger, but I listen to a LOT of music, and I've ripped every CD I've ever owned, plus years of Naptering and eMusic subscription, and my collection's only a little larger than 20Gb. It'll be a LONG time before I hit even the 40Gb barrier of the iPod--I can't imagine that I'd ever fill up a 60 gig drive. If you plan to use the player to shuffle around a lot of big files (graphics professionals?) in addition to using it as an audio player, then I might recommend the Zen, but 60 Gb is a LOT for just music.
It doesn't sync with contacts managers, but you can adjust almost anything you can set on the Sidekick (address book, calendar, settings, etc.) from the T-Mobile website.
Jabber is great. No question. It's exactly what I'd design if I wanted to make an open-source instant message transport protocol. It's multiplatform, it's multiservice... it's good stuff.
But on a device small enough to fit into your pocket, you want a minimum of technical complexity -- as few "Settings" options as possible. A huge percentage of IM users use AIM, and all you need to worry about is a username and password. You can even modify your Buddy List from a desktop if you want to. Clean, simple, effective -- it provides exactly what the vast majority of potential users want at a minumum of cost and fuss.
Yeah... that kind of sucks. I wouldn't get too angry, though... that kind of craziness accompanies just about every product launch. If you walked into a store next week, they'd probably have their act together.
I actually got my hands on one last week in Atlanta -- the T-Mobile reps were very courteous and even tried (and failed) to activate it for me before the launch. In the end, they let me out of the store with the Sidekick, but it won't be "turned on" until this afternoon.
Plug for those in Atlanta -- the T-Mobile store in Peachtree Center is good people. Ask for Monique.:)
I have to say, though... I'm quite impressed with the feature set they managed to include for the money.
The trick to making a $200 device is to include good, cool, cheap features that get the job done, and leave out expensive, nice, but not strictly necessary features.
Yes, the phone's hard to dial (although you CAN dial without opening it, it just requires a lot of scrolling-and-clicking with the wheel). But probably 95% of my calls are made from the address book ANYWAY (for which the Sidekick has a very nice interface), so I'm not worried about it.
And the features they left IN are excellent. The interface on the phone is quite good, the keyboard is easy to type on (i reached acceptable AIM speed after only a day of use), the web browser, aim, and email clients are very well designed, the ringtones are great, and the 24-bit-color scroll wheel is just plain cool. (not incredibly useful, but cool nontheless).
What's more, the device FEELS solid. It's well weighted, the keys have a good responsive click, and the screen rotates cleanly. If you're at all intersted, I'd lay hands on one before you count it out completely. It's a really nice device.
From early reports, the POP3 checks every 15 minutes or so, while the @tmobile.com address pretty much beeps your phone as soon as the email arrives. I'm just going to set my accounts to forward to @tmobile.com and be done with it.
It's VERY reasonably priced ($200 + $40/month) for the feature set, comes with UNLIMITED data including AIM, email, and the Web, and has what's purported to be a fantastic HTML parser for small screens. Plus, if the SDK ever actually ships, it should be pretty easy to write your own apps for it. Plus, it's a decent phone... plus, the industrial design with the fliparound screen is fantastic.
By linking to its review, the editors of Slashdot are implicitly endorsing NewsForge as a source of valuable information, quality reviews, etc., etc., etc. They might not get paid "per click", but OSDN certainly does have a stake in driving up NewsForge's traffic (that is, after all, the business they're in).
Is this a big deal? Of course not. There's no conspiracy afoot here, but keeping the business side of things separate from the editorial side is a cardinal rule of journalism. As a rule, you disclose ANY possible conflict of interests, no matter how small. It keeps editors from having to make tough (and sometimes dangerous) decisions.
As long as we're on the issue, I'm curious about how Slashdot's readers and editors would respond to a few questions:
This review started with a third party (Anonymouse). What if Slashdot's editors themselves had started the story? What if Slashdot had posted a link to a third-party review of NewsForge itself? What if Slashdot's editors wrote and posted a review of NewsForge? Would a disclosure statement be enough in that case?
It's called full disclosure, and it's a bedrock principle of responsible journalism. A reporter or news outlet is responsible to acknowledge any financial interest in the subjects on which they report.
Read a few issues of any AOL Time/Warner magazine (Time, Entertainment Weekly) and you'll find one. They have their fingers in EVERYTHING.:)
"... being anonymous is as good as taking a dummp on president bush's plans to revitalize the sucking economy, while visiting his bro in florida talking about the election while having their servents serve them tea and cakes..."
In addition to being Christmastime, it's apparently Long Weird Analogy Week.
Who knew?
Re:Mac-only ..... nobody seems to get it.
on
The Guts Of An iPod
·
· Score: 1
A couple of the replies seemed to miss my point about Apple's strategy:
First of all, the iPod is a little more than an MP3 player... it's a REALLY GOOD MP3 player. It's got a great interface, lightning-fast transfer, gorgeous industrial design, huge capacity, and it fits in a shirt pocket. Nothing else out there can do that. The Archos Jukebox comes close, but it's a lot bulkier and slower.
Second, the iPod itself isn't supposed to be a compelling reason to buy a Mac. It's just the first in a series of home electronics that talk to a "digital hub"... a MacOS computer. The more of these devices Apple ships, the more "you can only do this with a Mac" press it'll get.
As for the "it's ridiculous to sell a $400 device as a strategy for selling an $800 PC" argument... well, Apple needs to build market share any way it can. Sure, the low-end iMacs are low-profit machines, but higher-end equipment certainly isn't, and research shows that once a user buys his first Mac, he keeps buying Apple's hardware. If Apple wants to grow, it has to drive its 5% market share up an order of magnitude... even if it means selling low-profit or even loss-leader equipment now.
Mac-only ..... nobody seems to get it.
on
The Guts Of An iPod
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I have to laugh every time i hear someone in Slashdot forums or the media talk about how Apple's killing themselves by making the iPod Mac-only. True, they ARE limiting their market to less than 5% of computer owners, but there's one thing no one seems to get:
Apple didn't create the iPod to sell iPods. They created it to sell Macs.
Interface used to be a compelling reason to pick a Mac over a Wintel box--the Mac OS was just THAT much better. Say what you want about Windows... for the average user, that's just not true any more. The Windows 98/ME/2000/XP experience ain't so bad. So Apple needs a new compelling reason to make users buy their products.
In short, they need to offer things that you can ONLY do on a Mac. They've already done a few of these things... Mac OS X's UNIX roots offer some unique features, and tight integration with iTools is great. Apple's future strategy is to make a Mac a "digital hub"... to sell lots of little electronic gadgets for home users with a Mac at their center. Apple's key technologies (early 802.11 adoption, FireWire) are uniquely suited to tying together digital devices.
In short, every columnist and reviewer who criticizes Apple for making iPod Mac-only is just doing their work for them. That kind of criticism is EXACTLY what Apple needs right now... it just amounts to more people shouting out "here's something you can only do on a Mac."
This is an intriguing idea, but one with some major flaws.
In response to ALL the port forwarding posts... port forwarding is useful, but it's not a "silver bullet." Each port may be assigned to exactly ONE machine inside the network. If you're running more then one web server (or more than one machine with Napster), you either have to do without or deal with sending your users to alternate ports. AVES doesn't suffer from this problem.
The problem, as I see it, is a shortage of Waypoints. Let's assume that every AVES NAT machine is also a waypoint (as suggested in the paper). If there are N users in an AVES cluster, then there would be N unique IP addresses to distribute. What we need, though, is an IP address for every machine INSIDE the AVES NAT network. We can safely assume that every user will have at least two machines behind his network (if they had only one, then port forwarding or DMZ would do just fine). At peak usage, then, we'd need at least 2 * N IP addresses. Many networks would have still MORE internal IPs... my office has forty-some.
Some of these problems could be solved by timing out the AVES DNS requests quickly (shuffling IPs around more quickly), but then you'd begin to run into caching problems. If my PC caches an AVES domain name after it's been released and repointed, I could end up pointing at a completely wrong server.
AVES is an ingenious attempt to "communize" IP addresses... to share a pool of unique IPs among all users. The IP pool just isn't big enough, though--every user has one to contribute, and is almost certain to require more than one.
FTP doesn't work that way, I'm afraid... the HOST HEADER NAME function is unique to the HTTP standard. And some browsers (old ones) don't transmit HHNs at all, so those wouldn't be able to use virtual servers. Multihomed servers are a Good Thing... if not ALWAYS necessary.
And I can think of lots reasons for machines that aren't "servers" per se to have "real" IP addresses. AOL IM and Napster both have limited functionality behind a firewall. Certain games don't work very well behind one. "Active" FTP doesn't work at all.
Well... we all have USB 1.1 ports on our computers. Nobody (that I know of, anyway) ships PCs with built-in USB 2 support yet.
USB 2 will require completely new controllers, drivers, and devices... for all intents and purposes, it's a completely new hardware technology (albeit one which is backwards compatible w/ USB 1.1)
Oops. Picked the wrong formatting option. This should be a little more readable...
Very strange...
I've been researching the Neo for three days, and I finally broke down and ordered one from SSI today. I check Slashdot a while later... and there it is!
One thing I did learn--the Neo's pretty persnickety about the hard drive you put in it. Maxtor and Western Digital drives (apparently) draw too much power to spin up. SSI recommends Seagate, Quantum, and IBM drives. I just ordered the Neo with the drive built in. It was actually a decent price on the drive ($150 for a 30 gigger) and I figured they'd know what would be most reliable.
If anyone's thinking of buying one, the best resources I've found are:
The Unofficial Neo Web Site
http://www.barncow.com/neo/
Has instructions, links to the new firmware, and a very active messageboard. A great site--well maintained and very informative.
Very strange...
I've been researching the Neo for three days, and I finally broke down and ordered one from SSI today. I check Slashdot a while later... and there it is!
One thing I did learn--the Neo's pretty persnickety about the hard drive you put in it. Maxtor and Western Digital drives (apparently) draw too much power to spin up. SSI recommends Seagate, Quantum, and IBM drives. I just ordered the Neo with the drive built in. It was actually a decent price on the drive ($150 for a 30 gigger) and I figured they'd know what would be most reliable.
If anyone's thinking of buying one, the best resources I've found are:
http://www.barncow.com/neo/
The Unofficial Neo Web Site
Has instructions, links to the new firmware, and a very active messageboard. A great site--well maintained and very informative.
http://bboard1.mp3.com/hardware/liststory/?topic_i d=38&month=200008
The Neo "User Reviews" at MP3.com
A pretty good forum with real-world performance reports.
Slashdot Mirror
A new torrent of the Tiger Developer beta just popped up:
i ls&id=328287&query=intel%20mac
.
... it's an executable, and if it's from some unsavory character, might do unspeakable things to your pc.
http://torrentspy.com/search.asp?mode=torrentdeta
It's entitled "MAC OS INTEL X86 DEVELOPER EDITION", and looks like it's at least different from the fake "GNAA version" that had been floating around. The torrent delivers a single file called "macosxintel.exe"
I have no idea whether it's real. Anyone have a clue? If you do download it, BE CAREFUL
I had this same issue, and I settled on the Terk Leap Frog system. It's a 2.4ghz audio/video broadcast system. I hooked my stereo receiver (audio and video) up to the transmitter, and put receivers in my bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen.
Downsides:
The sound quality's not great: there are a few hisses and pops. Think somewhere between FM radio and a good cordless phone.
It goes haywire every time my phone rings.
Upsides:
It's nice and cheap--$99 for the first transmitter and receiver and $50 for each additional receiver.
It works with ALL my A/V sources--TiVo (which talks to my MP3 server), DVD, even Xbox. Whatever's on the TV in my living room is what's throughout the house.
It's easy to add more nodes--just buy another receiver.
As a bonus, it does video, too--the television in my bedroom is slaved so I can watch TiVo from there.
It even transmits remote control IR for you so you can use a remote to control the main unit from any room where there's a receiver.
Not a perfect solution, but it does what I need it to (play music through the house), is nice and flexible, and didn't require tearing up any walls. Wired solutions are great if you want to put the effort and money into quality, but all I really cared about was having a house full of music--and this works quite nicely.
AK
If you want to put pressure on the government, what you need is a good attorney. The FBI and local law enforcement might be liable civilly for failing to respond to your complaint. You probably wouldn't win, but the spur of such a lawsuit would probably be enough to get a little action on your part.
If you really care about it, I'd talk to a civil litigator or IP attorney with experience in dealing with federal law enforcement. It won't be cheap, of course (good lawyers never are), but the Powers That Be will be a lot more helpful to someone with a J.D. behind his name.
Short of that, I think you're better off protecting your network and moving on. Good luck!
The new iPod is a great (if evolutionary) development, and a 60Gb Zen has me drooling, but the player I've really been lusting after is the fate-unknown Pearl from now-defunct SonicBlue. It's smaller than the iPod, and includes an Ethernet-enabled docking station. All the early reports were good.
Alas, SonicBlue went bankrupt and sold its Rio assets to Denon, a major high-end home audio manufacturer. It's starting to look like the Pearl might never actually ship.
Between the two (Apple and Creative), for my money, I'd take an iPod. It has a dock, supports FireWire AND USB2, is quite a bit smaller and lighter, is Mac-friendly (if you're into that sort of thing) and is truly a brilliant piece of interface work. Also: when Apple ships the Windows version of its online music store later this year, you can be sure that iPod-for-Windows will be nicely supported.
The new Zen is bigger, but I listen to a LOT of music, and I've ripped every CD I've ever owned, plus years of Naptering and eMusic subscription, and my collection's only a little larger than 20Gb. It'll be a LONG time before I hit even the 40Gb barrier of the iPod--I can't imagine that I'd ever fill up a 60 gig drive. If you plan to use the player to shuffle around a lot of big files (graphics professionals?) in addition to using it as an audio player, then I might recommend the Zen, but 60 Gb is a LOT for just music.
iPod has a great flash memory buffer (32Mb? check the specs) ... you can shake the hell out of it and it still plays.
I've heard great things from people using it as a workout player.
It doesn't sync with contacts managers, but you can adjust almost anything you can set on the Sidekick (address book, calendar, settings, etc.) from the T-Mobile website.
AK
Bluetooth was mentioned on the Danger Info a week or two back.
Oh, piffle.
... it's good stuff.
Jabber is great. No question. It's exactly what I'd design if I wanted to make an open-source instant message transport protocol. It's multiplatform, it's multiservice
But on a device small enough to fit into your pocket, you want a minimum of technical complexity -- as few "Settings" options as possible. A huge percentage of IM users use AIM, and all you need to worry about is a username and password. You can even modify your Buddy List from a desktop if you want to. Clean, simple, effective -- it provides exactly what the vast majority of potential users want at a minumum of cost and fuss.
Yeah ... that kind of sucks. I wouldn't get too angry, though ... that kind of craziness accompanies just about every product launch. If you walked into a store next week, they'd probably have their act together.
:)
I actually got my hands on one last week in Atlanta -- the T-Mobile reps were very courteous and even tried (and failed) to activate it for me before the launch. In the end, they let me out of the store with the Sidekick, but it won't be "turned on" until this afternoon.
Plug for those in Atlanta -- the T-Mobile store in Peachtree Center is good people. Ask for Monique.
True, true.
... I'm quite impressed with the feature set they managed to include for the money.
I have to say, though
The trick to making a $200 device is to include good, cool, cheap features that get the job done, and leave out expensive, nice, but not strictly necessary features.
Yes, the phone's hard to dial (although you CAN dial without opening it, it just requires a lot of scrolling-and-clicking with the wheel). But probably 95% of my calls are made from the address book ANYWAY (for which the Sidekick has a very nice interface), so I'm not worried about it.
And the features they left IN are excellent. The interface on the phone is quite good, the keyboard is easy to type on (i reached acceptable AIM speed after only a day of use), the web browser, aim, and email clients are very well designed, the ringtones are great, and the 24-bit-color scroll wheel is just plain cool. (not incredibly useful, but cool nontheless).
What's more, the device FEELS solid. It's well weighted, the keys have a good responsive click, and the screen rotates cleanly. If you're at all intersted, I'd lay hands on one before you count it out completely. It's a really nice device.
It does not do IMAP, I'm afraid -- just POP3.
;)
From early reports, the POP3 checks every 15 minutes or so, while the @tmobile.com address pretty much beeps your phone as soon as the email arrives. I'm just going to set my accounts to forward to @tmobile.com and be done with it.
Maybe in the next version....
Waddayamean, why?
... that's why.
... plus, the industrial design with the fliparound screen is fantastic.
/. is FOR?
It's really cool
It's VERY reasonably priced ($200 + $40/month) for the feature set, comes with UNLIMITED data including AIM, email, and the Web, and has what's purported to be a fantastic HTML parser for small screens. Plus, if the SDK ever actually ships, it should be pretty easy to write your own apps for it. Plus, it's a decent phone
Isn't that exactly what
That's not a goat mirror!
This is a goat mirror!
-foob
By linking to its review, the editors of Slashdot are implicitly endorsing NewsForge as a source of valuable information, quality reviews, etc., etc., etc. They might not get paid "per click", but OSDN certainly does have a stake in driving up NewsForge's traffic (that is, after all, the business they're in).
Is this a big deal? Of course not. There's no conspiracy afoot here, but keeping the business side of things separate from the editorial side is a cardinal rule of journalism. As a rule, you disclose ANY possible conflict of interests, no matter how small. It keeps editors from having to make tough (and sometimes dangerous) decisions.
As long as we're on the issue, I'm curious about how Slashdot's readers and editors would respond to a few questions:
This review started with a third party (Anonymouse). What if Slashdot's editors themselves had started the story? What if Slashdot had posted a link to a third-party review of NewsForge itself? What if Slashdot's editors wrote and posted a review of NewsForge? Would a disclosure statement be enough in that case?
Wow, this is off-topic. =)
It's called full disclosure, and it's a bedrock principle of responsible journalism. A reporter or news outlet is responsible to acknowledge any financial interest in the subjects on which they report.
:)
Read a few issues of any AOL Time/Warner magazine (Time, Entertainment Weekly) and you'll find one. They have their fingers in EVERYTHING.
"... being anonymous is as good as taking a dummp on president bush's plans to revitalize the sucking economy, while visiting his bro in florida talking about the election while having their servents serve them tea and cakes ..."
In addition to being Christmastime, it's apparently Long Weird Analogy Week.
Who knew?
A couple of the replies seemed to miss my point about Apple's strategy:
... it's a REALLY GOOD MP3 player. It's got a great interface, lightning-fast transfer, gorgeous industrial design, huge capacity, and it fits in a shirt pocket. Nothing else out there can do that. The Archos Jukebox comes close, but it's a lot bulkier and slower.
... a MacOS computer. The more of these devices Apple ships, the more "you can only do this with a Mac" press it'll get.
... well, Apple needs to build market share any way it can. Sure, the low-end iMacs are low-profit machines, but higher-end equipment certainly isn't, and research shows that once a user buys his first Mac, he keeps buying Apple's hardware. If Apple wants to grow, it has to drive its 5% market share up an order of magnitude ... even if it means selling low-profit or even loss-leader equipment now.
First of all, the iPod is a little more than an MP3 player
Second, the iPod itself isn't supposed to be a compelling reason to buy a Mac. It's just the first in a series of home electronics that talk to a "digital hub"
As for the "it's ridiculous to sell a $400 device as a strategy for selling an $800 PC" argument
I have to laugh every time i hear someone in Slashdot forums or the media talk about how Apple's killing themselves by making the iPod Mac-only. True, they ARE limiting their market to less than 5% of computer owners, but there's one thing no one seems to get:
... for the average user, that's just not true any more. The Windows 98/ME/2000/XP experience ain't so bad. So Apple needs a new compelling reason to make users buy their products.
... Mac OS X's UNIX roots offer some unique features, and tight integration with iTools is great. Apple's future strategy is to make a Mac a "digital hub" ... to sell lots of little electronic gadgets for home users with a Mac at their center. Apple's key technologies (early 802.11 adoption, FireWire) are uniquely suited to tying together digital devices.
... it just amounts to more people shouting out "here's something you can only do on a Mac."
Apple didn't create the iPod to sell iPods. They created it to sell Macs.
Interface used to be a compelling reason to pick a Mac over a Wintel box--the Mac OS was just THAT much better. Say what you want about Windows
In short, they need to offer things that you can ONLY do on a Mac. They've already done a few of these things
In short, every columnist and reviewer who criticizes Apple for making iPod Mac-only is just doing their work for them. That kind of criticism is EXACTLY what Apple needs right now
Plus, the iPod is all shiny. I like shiny.
This is an intriguing idea, but one with some major flaws.
... port forwarding is useful, but it's not a "silver bullet." Each port may be assigned to exactly ONE machine inside the network. If you're running more then one web server (or more than one machine with Napster), you either have to do without or deal with sending your users to alternate ports. AVES doesn't suffer from this problem.
... my office has forty-some.
... to share a pool of unique IPs among all users. The IP pool just isn't big enough, though--every user has one to contribute, and is almost certain to require more than one.
In response to ALL the port forwarding posts
The problem, as I see it, is a shortage of Waypoints. Let's assume that every AVES NAT machine is also a waypoint (as suggested in the paper). If there are N users in an AVES cluster, then there would be N unique IP addresses to distribute. What we need, though, is an IP address for every machine INSIDE the AVES NAT network. We can safely assume that every user will have at least two machines behind his network (if they had only one, then port forwarding or DMZ would do just fine). At peak usage, then, we'd need at least 2 * N IP addresses. Many networks would have still MORE internal IPs
Some of these problems could be solved by timing out the AVES DNS requests quickly (shuffling IPs around more quickly), but then you'd begin to run into caching problems. If my PC caches an AVES domain name after it's been released and repointed, I could end up pointing at a completely wrong server.
AVES is an ingenious attempt to "communize" IP addresses
FTP doesn't work that way, I'm afraid ... the HOST HEADER NAME function is unique to the HTTP standard. And some browsers (old ones) don't transmit HHNs at all, so those wouldn't be able to use virtual servers. Multihomed servers are a Good Thing ... if not ALWAYS necessary.
And I can think of lots reasons for machines that aren't "servers" per se to have "real" IP addresses. AOL IM and Napster both have limited functionality behind a firewall. Certain games don't work very well behind one. "Active" FTP doesn't work at all.
AK
Well ... we all have USB 1.1 ports on our computers. Nobody (that I know of, anyway) ships PCs with built-in USB 2 support yet.
... for all intents and purposes, it's a completely new hardware technology (albeit one which is backwards compatible w/ USB 1.1)
USB 2 will require completely new controllers, drivers, and devices
AK
Very strange...
I've been researching the Neo for three days, and I finally broke down and ordered one from SSI today. I check Slashdot a while later ... and there it is!
One thing I did learn--the Neo's pretty persnickety about the hard drive you put in it. Maxtor and Western Digital drives (apparently) draw too much power to spin up. SSI recommends Seagate, Quantum, and IBM drives. I just ordered the Neo with the drive built in. It was actually a decent price on the drive ($150 for a 30 gigger) and I figured they'd know what would be most reliable.
If anyone's thinking of buying one, the best resources I've found are:
The Unofficial Neo Web Site
http://www.barncow.com/neo/
Has instructions, links to the new firmware, and a very active messageboard. A great site--well maintained and very informative.
The Neo "User Reviews" at MP3.comi d=38&month=200008
http://bboard1.mp3.com/hardware/liststory/?topic_
A pretty good forum with real-world performance reports.
Very strange... I've been researching the Neo for three days, and I finally broke down and ordered one from SSI today. I check Slashdot a while later ... and there it is!
One thing I did learn--the Neo's pretty persnickety about the hard drive you put in it. Maxtor and Western Digital drives (apparently) draw too much power to spin up. SSI recommends Seagate, Quantum, and IBM drives. I just ordered the Neo with the drive built in. It was actually a decent price on the drive ($150 for a 30 gigger) and I figured they'd know what would be most reliable.
If anyone's thinking of buying one, the best resources I've found are:
http://www.barncow.com/neo/
The Unofficial Neo Web Site
Has instructions, links to the new firmware, and a very active messageboard. A great site--well maintained and very informative.
http://bboard1.mp3.com/hardware/liststory/?topic_i d=38&month=200008
The Neo "User Reviews" at MP3.com
A pretty good forum with real-world performance reports.