Well, the resolution alone doesn't tell you much without also knowing the shape of the pixels and the ratio of horizontal to vertical. I could conceivably make a 1024x768 monitor which was 16x9 widescreen, either by making pixels which were wider than they were tall or by spacing them farther apart horizontally than vertically.
When you see "XGA," what you're seeing is the maximum resolution as well as the aspect ratio and the pixel size all rolled into one. So it's a different statistic than just the resolution. This is an important distinction...I have an older digital camera which takes shots at 1280x1024, but not at 4x3 (it's a little wider than it is long, its normal res displays properly but its resampling sucks), and I have to resample the shots or they look stunted!
What I think is appalling is the assumption that because a person does not personally need a thing, that it is unneccessary and worthy of contempt. Come on, you guys -- you don't REALLY think that the whole of the economy is built around your personal needs, do you?
I mean, as a man, I personally have no use for tampons, but I can understand where some people might find them rather helpful.
Incidentally, an 8 megapixel display would be very useful for those of us who like digital photography. Right now, I have a choice of seeing my shots at actual resolution, or being able to see the whole shot. A monitor like this would make it much easier, and much faster, to detect things like distracting moire effects, JPEG noise and spot blemishes.
Sounds like your company sucks balls. Here, the developers get new top of the line machines every two years, at which point their old machines trickle down to the QA team, whose machines trickle down to the frontline support staff.
Or maybe you just don't understand what the "needs" are. As a sysadmin, you don't really have to do any heavy duty processing on your machine, nor is your work going to get completed any faster if you do so. Now, at our company the sales staff get new machines at the same time as the developers, because we want them to put the best face forward at conferences and such. Also, sometimes we, uh, don't optimize a product before they show it off, and they're running both the client and server software on the same machine. If your VPs do a lot of selling, they may get new laptops every few months to show how cutting edge you are. Call it a waste if you must, but their laptops are trickling down fairly quickly to the general populous, and they're serving a somewhat legitimate use before hand.
If they spent millions (or a lot anyway), how come that now they're willing to let that investment go to waste by leaving the patent dormant and the concept unimplemented? It would make no sense.
Makes no sense? Maybe it doesn't. But let me put it to you this way: this year, the company I am working for proposes to make $400,000 off of software that I've written. This implies that I could go off on my own and write said software and the money would just fall into my lap. But the real story is that the product needs tailoring, it needs support, and it needs somebody to sell it. None of these are my strong suit. I'm just a software guy.
Many of the researchers out there couldn't sell heat to an Inuit, let alone a decent product to people who need it. Still, they don't want the inflexibility of working for somebody else. So they go it alone, they come up with the ideas, and sell ACCESS to these ideas to the type of people that can't come up with ideas that are any good, but who can package, maintain and sell them.
Your opinion that all people who want to license ideas are "patent squatters" is noted. But I would prefer a world where ideas are worth something and products are merely examples to one where products are everything and ideas are treated as half-cents-ical.
Patents *DO* require a working example, with a very few exceptions. Unfortunately, patent clerks rarely have time to do much more than non destructive analysis of things...they sort of have to go on the words and drawings of the patenter for things like new propulsion systems, data structures, that kind of thing.
But if you're patenting something like a user interface -- I can think of a few, such as the Fitaly keyboard -- they're going to need to see it. A patent is NOT on an idea. It's an actual product or process.
I'm surprised by the ruggedness of most Apple designs. Not to say that I haven't had the occasional problem (the sagging CD drives of pre-slot loading 'books, the hinges on the titanium iBook, the prone to cracking when dropped four feet onto the concrete from a fast moving bicycle Pismo) -- but for the most part, I've dropped, smacked, slid, and scratched most of my Apple gear to hell and it keeps coming back for more. I had a blue and white CRT fall five feet and honest-to-god BOUNCE, and the thing still worked great. My poor ipod has been abused to death, multiple droppings (many at the gym) and it's as good as the day I bought it. Part of that is thanks to the iSkin case. But most of it is the sturdy, solid design that covers the screen and sinks most of the controls into the body.
I think you're confused as to what patents *DO*, or else you'd realize that you don't patent code, not can you patent work somebody else has done. A patent is basically a very exact description of a real, working product, process or interface that does something specific and new. Generally, you can get around a patent by changing a few of the essential variables -- so even when a patent's abstract says "A system for processing information," if the description applies to a specific system for a specific process on a specific kind of information, you can generally get around it by using a different order of operations in the system or by changing the output information.
In fact, changing minor details of a system is sometimes enough for you to be able to patent your own design. Take a look at the hundreds of different patents for the revolver mechanism on a gun, or ways of making a shock absorber, you'll see what I'm talking about.
Yes, overly broad patents are sometimes issued, but rarely stand up in court even though they've been issued -- so while patenting water or walking or something may sound clever, it's actually of little practical use. The best patents are those that refer to specific things -- such as the LZW patent. A very specific algorithm with a very specific use that did not prevent dozens of other methods of dictionary compression to pop up.
There is definetly a large need to stop the excessive Patents
I disagree. When you do things in an original way, the best means of maintaining economic viability in the software industry these days is to ensure that somebody can't clone your work and offer it for less, or in the case of OSS, for free. The best way to do that is to patent it. Theft of intellectual property (e.g. product design) should not be accepted as business as usual. Unfortunately, it is quite common in the industry as well as in the Open Source community (and it's often touted as a main feature of an application..."X is a Y workalike," etc. Software patents are really the only defense AGAINST the cloning of your program.
I spent three months working on the interface for my last program and my boss is so worried that somebody will just clone it and sell a look-alike for cheaper that he doesn't want to put screenshots on the web! In our industry, price is a BIG concern and we're already selling things as cheaply as we can without cutting big corners, like our R&D budget. Being able to have the peace of mind that, for twenty years, nobody else in this industry could do what the core of our product does in the way it does it without our permission, would be a great boon to the maintenance of our MASSIVE R&D budget.
This is ridiculous. Many, many incredibly useful new processes and products have been created by research houses whose entire livelihood is based on discovering new ways of doing things and then licensing them to others in the industry. This practice allows companies that might not otherwise be able to have the latest manufacturing technique to benefit without having to dump millions into research.
Not every inventor wants to be a marketer, too. Some want to sell their ideas and start work on the next thing. These inventors would be severely penalized under your scheme -- because their products would be worth less. Even twenty years is not that long to wait for some technologies...and if a business is faced with paying for a product or simply waiting three years for a patent to expire (knowing full well the inventor won't have the ability to market his own products), they're gonna wait.
But is that mostly debt financed, tax financed, or does it matter?
The way I understand standard bookkeeping is that you have two columns: money in, and money out. You never make the distinction that "dollar X was paid for service Y," because from a bookkeeping point of view it doesn't make any sense. I mean, do you take all of the money from Delaware and say that's for school programs but money from South Dakota is for defense spending? Or do you break it down evenly by percentage per person? If so, do you count debt as a person, or as a blanket sum? These are hard questions, and as you suggest, they don't matter. Spending is what it is. Taxes are what they are. It's obvious the government doesn't care, because whatever imbalance you have come out of bonds, which incidentally are generally paid for by American citizens' savings accounts.
Furthermore, by itemizing the bill (which would be several hundred pages long), they are making the inference that you can line item veto services you don't want. Which is again absurd. Everybody agrees we need a welfare assistance program but nobody wants their cash going to freeloaders. Allowing people to vote with their dollars would mean having to advertise and hard sell each social program, of which there are thousands.
I assume this is what you're suggesting, because why else would you want so much detail? Accounting is at its best when it is simple addition, without a lot of percentages involved. Do you notice how SIMPLE Schedule A is compared to your own personal accounting system? They don't care about where YOUR tax money is coming from nor do they care what your expenses were beyond some very simple type association. In other words, they don't ask you to itemize every penny of the money coming in -- saying that you spend so much on electricity, so much on natural gas, so much on pencils, so much on skilled labor -- and, in return, they're giving you a very simple breakdown of where your money is going.
And hey. If you want to know what every cent of your money is going, you can find this out. They publish it every year in a document called "the budget." It's even available on the internet. I'm willing to bet a similar document is available from your municipal, county and state governments as well as your school district.
True. But without it, we're left with even more corrupt institutions. Such as corporations, crime families, religious organizations, and defacto dictators.
I'll take a nice pork-laden government any day of the week.
No, you're the one who's mistaken. Social Security Numbers are not contiguous nor are the assigned round robin. The newest baby doesn't neccesarily receive last_number+1 and some SSNs just aren't assigned...therefore, to find 192-32-2304 not simply a matter of accessing SSN[192322304] as you are suggesting. That number and its associated data would be located somewhere else in the array, at an indeterminate position...and to find it, you'd need a marginally efficient search algorithm. Hope you kept that array sorted!
And come to think of it, the best way to handle SSNs would be with a tree based map.
To date, I have never seen a better power to weight ratio along with excellent potential economy than with a supercharged, intercooled, fuel injected 3.6l V6. My buddy routinely commutes in his heavily modified Impala, to the tune of a bit under 30 mpg. Dyno tells him he gets 400 hp at the wheels.
When he's commuting, that super is pushing hardly any pressure and the injectors are closed tighter than stock. At full bore, he's pushing 17 PSI+ and economy shrinks to around 4 mpg. But the nice thing about his ride is that he gets to crusing speed in about 4 seconds, meaning you don't need to stick at the 4 mpg mark for very long:).
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, IS IT REALLY THAT HARD TO USE AN APOSTOPHE?
You are == you're. It's a goddamn contraction. You should have learned that in first grade. You can make up for it by never making this mistake again.
Oh, and to get on topic: if your car gets less than 30 miles per gallon, it is a pathetic stone age piece of shit that you should have crushed as soon as possible in the interest of national security. It does not matter that you enjoy driving your SUV. I enjoy punching polluting fucks in the teeth, but I am not allowed to do that so i don't see why we shouldn't both suffer.
Oh, poor guy. Having to pay taxes on the goods you buy to support the roads you use, the police who protect you, the judges and district attorneys who fight for your rights against much more corruptable institutions than even government.
Taxes don't all go to the same place. Federal income taxes pay for federal programs. State income taxes and sales taxes pay for state programs. Property taxes pay for municipal governments and schools. Each of these layers of government helps you out in some way. Many of them (most probably at the local level) run very efficiently, lest they make some huge mistake encouraging you to vote them out. Personally, I don't find anything "quite terrifying" about government being able to pay for itself. I'm more terrified when it can't.
Don't like taxes? Move. But good luck finding some place to move to. Globally speaking, US citizens pay a relatively low amount of income tax, and our sales tax is much lower than, oh say, Europe or Canada. Here's a little info: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/001201.html, and you can google for more.
Actually, I've never seen a PDA that had a fast enough interface to do that. My old Toshiba unit had the slooooowest internal ram, and the USB cable just performed Serial-over-USB for a grand total of 115kbit. Using the wireless ethernet was slightly better, I could maybe get 256kbit off of that...but it was still a pain to get music into it.
I didn't know what fast was until I plugged the iPod into my firewire card and was able to transfer my whole collection in less than ten minutes. It used to take me that long to store 60 meg!
The PDAs in the iPod's range have drastically lower disk space and drastically slower sync interfaces. They are not as sturdy as the iPod. Their interfaces are not usable with one hand and the buttons are more fragile.
Finally, as cool as it may sound to do word processing and watch video on a handheld, in practice you will never do these things. I sold my Toshiba palmtop for way less than it was worth to buy my 30 gig 3G iPod the day it came back. I have never regretted this decision in the least.
Or press the right combination of keys to perform a hard reset.
(This actually isn't a joke. My iPod doesn't lock up since 2.1, but before that, pressing Menu-Play for six seconds to reboot after a lockup was a common occurance. Oh, and pressing and holding left and right bypasses the iPod software and goes straight to Firewire mode...useful for when your software config shits the bed and you want to get your MP3s off of it before restoring the software)
If the book has a section on MusicMatch (which, when you consider how much better EphPod and iTunes are at managing the iPod on Windows, nobody seriously uses anymore), it probably won't have anything useful in it.
If you want to know more about your iPod, hop on over to ipodlounge.com, or one of the dozens of other in-depth ipod fan sites out there dedicated to hacking this clever little device.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the resolution alone doesn't tell you much without also knowing the shape of the pixels and the ratio of horizontal to vertical. I could conceivably make a 1024x768 monitor which was 16x9 widescreen, either by making pixels which were wider than they were tall or by spacing them farther apart horizontally than vertically.
When you see "XGA," what you're seeing is the maximum resolution as well as the aspect ratio and the pixel size all rolled into one. So it's a different statistic than just the resolution. This is an important distinction...I have an older digital camera which takes shots at 1280x1024, but not at 4x3 (it's a little wider than it is long, its normal res displays properly but its resampling sucks), and I have to resample the shots or they look stunted!
What I think is appalling is the assumption that because a person does not personally need a thing, that it is unneccessary and worthy of contempt. Come on, you guys -- you don't REALLY think that the whole of the economy is built around your personal needs, do you?
I mean, as a man, I personally have no use for tampons, but I can understand where some people might find them rather helpful.
Incidentally, an 8 megapixel display would be very useful for those of us who like digital photography. Right now, I have a choice of seeing my shots at actual resolution, or being able to see the whole shot. A monitor like this would make it much easier, and much faster, to detect things like distracting moire effects, JPEG noise and spot blemishes.
Sounds like your company sucks balls. Here, the developers get new top of the line machines every two years, at which point their old machines trickle down to the QA team, whose machines trickle down to the frontline support staff.
Or maybe you just don't understand what the "needs" are. As a sysadmin, you don't really have to do any heavy duty processing on your machine, nor is your work going to get completed any faster if you do so. Now, at our company the sales staff get new machines at the same time as the developers, because we want them to put the best face forward at conferences and such. Also, sometimes we, uh, don't optimize a product before they show it off, and they're running both the client and server software on the same machine. If your VPs do a lot of selling, they may get new laptops every few months to show how cutting edge you are. Call it a waste if you must, but their laptops are trickling down fairly quickly to the general populous, and they're serving a somewhat legitimate use before hand.
If they spent millions (or a lot anyway), how come that now they're willing to let that investment go to waste by leaving the patent dormant and the concept unimplemented? It would make no sense.
Makes no sense? Maybe it doesn't. But let me put it to you this way: this year, the company I am working for proposes to make $400,000 off of software that I've written. This implies that I could go off on my own and write said software and the money would just fall into my lap. But the real story is that the product needs tailoring, it needs support, and it needs somebody to sell it. None of these are my strong suit. I'm just a software guy.
Many of the researchers out there couldn't sell heat to an Inuit, let alone a decent product to people who need it. Still, they don't want the inflexibility of working for somebody else. So they go it alone, they come up with the ideas, and sell ACCESS to these ideas to the type of people that can't come up with ideas that are any good, but who can package, maintain and sell them.
Your opinion that all people who want to license ideas are "patent squatters" is noted. But I would prefer a world where ideas are worth something and products are merely examples to one where products are everything and ideas are treated as half-cents-ical.
Patents *DO* require a working example, with a very few exceptions. Unfortunately, patent clerks rarely have time to do much more than non destructive analysis of things...they sort of have to go on the words and drawings of the patenter for things like new propulsion systems, data structures, that kind of thing.
But if you're patenting something like a user interface -- I can think of a few, such as the Fitaly keyboard -- they're going to need to see it. A patent is NOT on an idea. It's an actual product or process.
I'm surprised by the ruggedness of most Apple designs. Not to say that I haven't had the occasional problem (the sagging CD drives of pre-slot loading 'books, the hinges on the titanium iBook, the prone to cracking when dropped four feet onto the concrete from a fast moving bicycle Pismo) -- but for the most part, I've dropped, smacked, slid, and scratched most of my Apple gear to hell and it keeps coming back for more. I had a blue and white CRT fall five feet and honest-to-god BOUNCE, and the thing still worked great. My poor ipod has been abused to death, multiple droppings (many at the gym) and it's as good as the day I bought it. Part of that is thanks to the iSkin case. But most of it is the sturdy, solid design that covers the screen and sinks most of the controls into the body.
I think you're confused as to what patents *DO*, or else you'd realize that you don't patent code, not can you patent work somebody else has done. A patent is basically a very exact description of a real, working product, process or interface that does something specific and new. Generally, you can get around a patent by changing a few of the essential variables -- so even when a patent's abstract says "A system for processing information," if the description applies to a specific system for a specific process on a specific kind of information, you can generally get around it by using a different order of operations in the system or by changing the output information.
In fact, changing minor details of a system is sometimes enough for you to be able to patent your own design. Take a look at the hundreds of different patents for the revolver mechanism on a gun, or ways of making a shock absorber, you'll see what I'm talking about.
Yes, overly broad patents are sometimes issued, but rarely stand up in court even though they've been issued -- so while patenting water or walking or something may sound clever, it's actually of little practical use. The best patents are those that refer to specific things -- such as the LZW patent. A very specific algorithm with a very specific use that did not prevent dozens of other methods of dictionary compression to pop up.
There is definetly a large need to stop the excessive Patents
I disagree. When you do things in an original way, the best means of maintaining economic viability in the software industry these days is to ensure that somebody can't clone your work and offer it for less, or in the case of OSS, for free. The best way to do that is to patent it. Theft of intellectual property (e.g. product design) should not be accepted as business as usual. Unfortunately, it is quite common in the industry as well as in the Open Source community (and it's often touted as a main feature of an application..."X is a Y workalike," etc. Software patents are really the only defense AGAINST the cloning of your program.
I spent three months working on the interface for my last program and my boss is so worried that somebody will just clone it and sell a look-alike for cheaper that he doesn't want to put screenshots on the web! In our industry, price is a BIG concern and we're already selling things as cheaply as we can without cutting big corners, like our R&D budget. Being able to have the peace of mind that, for twenty years, nobody else in this industry could do what the core of our product does in the way it does it without our permission, would be a great boon to the maintenance of our MASSIVE R&D budget.
This is ridiculous. Many, many incredibly useful new processes and products have been created by research houses whose entire livelihood is based on discovering new ways of doing things and then licensing them to others in the industry. This practice allows companies that might not otherwise be able to have the latest manufacturing technique to benefit without having to dump millions into research.
Not every inventor wants to be a marketer, too. Some want to sell their ideas and start work on the next thing. These inventors would be severely penalized under your scheme -- because their products would be worth less. Even twenty years is not that long to wait for some technologies...and if a business is faced with paying for a product or simply waiting three years for a patent to expire (knowing full well the inventor won't have the ability to market his own products), they're gonna wait.
But is that mostly debt financed, tax financed, or does it matter?
The way I understand standard bookkeeping is that you have two columns: money in, and money out. You never make the distinction that "dollar X was paid for service Y," because from a bookkeeping point of view it doesn't make any sense. I mean, do you take all of the money from Delaware and say that's for school programs but money from South Dakota is for defense spending? Or do you break it down evenly by percentage per person? If so, do you count debt as a person, or as a blanket sum? These are hard questions, and as you suggest, they don't matter. Spending is what it is. Taxes are what they are. It's obvious the government doesn't care, because whatever imbalance you have come out of bonds, which incidentally are generally paid for by American citizens' savings accounts.
Furthermore, by itemizing the bill (which would be several hundred pages long), they are making the inference that you can line item veto services you don't want. Which is again absurd. Everybody agrees we need a welfare assistance program but nobody wants their cash going to freeloaders. Allowing people to vote with their dollars would mean having to advertise and hard sell each social program, of which there are thousands.
I assume this is what you're suggesting, because why else would you want so much detail? Accounting is at its best when it is simple addition, without a lot of percentages involved. Do you notice how SIMPLE Schedule A is compared to your own personal accounting system? They don't care about where YOUR tax money is coming from nor do they care what your expenses were beyond some very simple type association. In other words, they don't ask you to itemize every penny of the money coming in -- saying that you spend so much on electricity, so much on natural gas, so much on pencils, so much on skilled labor -- and, in return, they're giving you a very simple breakdown of where your money is going.
And hey. If you want to know what every cent of your money is going, you can find this out. They publish it every year in a document called "the budget." It's even available on the internet. I'm willing to bet a similar document is available from your municipal, county and state governments as well as your school district.
Most government is horseshit.
True. But without it, we're left with even more corrupt institutions. Such as corporations, crime families, religious organizations, and defacto dictators.
I'll take a nice pork-laden government any day of the week.
No, you're the one who's mistaken. Social Security Numbers are not contiguous nor are the assigned round robin. The newest baby doesn't neccesarily receive last_number+1 and some SSNs just aren't assigned...therefore, to find 192-32-2304 not simply a matter of accessing SSN[192322304] as you are suggesting. That number and its associated data would be located somewhere else in the array, at an indeterminate position...and to find it, you'd need a marginally efficient search algorithm. Hope you kept that array sorted!
And come to think of it, the best way to handle SSNs would be with a tree based map.
To date, I have never seen a better power to weight ratio along with excellent potential economy than with a supercharged, intercooled, fuel injected 3.6l V6. My buddy routinely commutes in his heavily modified Impala, to the tune of a bit under 30 mpg. Dyno tells him he gets 400 hp at the wheels.
:).
When he's commuting, that super is pushing hardly any pressure and the injectors are closed tighter than stock. At full bore, he's pushing 17 PSI+ and economy shrinks to around 4 mpg. But the nice thing about his ride is that he gets to crusing speed in about 4 seconds, meaning you don't need to stick at the 4 mpg mark for very long
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, IS IT REALLY THAT HARD TO USE AN APOSTOPHE?
You are == you're. It's a goddamn contraction. You should have learned that in first grade. You can make up for it by never making this mistake again.
Oh, and to get on topic: if your car gets less than 30 miles per gallon, it is a pathetic stone age piece of shit that you should have crushed as soon as possible in the interest of national security. It does not matter that you enjoy driving your SUV. I enjoy punching polluting fucks in the teeth, but I am not allowed to do that so i don't see why we shouldn't both suffer.
Got me son.
Me thinks moderators slipped their finger. Luckily, I meta-mod everything as unfair anyway, so eventually this guy won't be a problem.
ipodlinux is a retarded fucking idea.
I want my ipod to play music, and play it well.
When I want to put data into it, I will sell it.
Furthermore, with an Array, the cost to find 192-32-2304 is...well, however many numbers come before it.
With a hash, it's more like log N.
I bet if the government would itemize how peoples' taxes are being used
The government does exactly this. It's in the 1040, towards the front. Do you even PAY your taxes?
Oh, poor guy. Having to pay taxes on the goods you buy to support the roads you use, the police who protect you, the judges and district attorneys who fight for your rights against much more corruptable institutions than even government.
Taxes don't all go to the same place. Federal income taxes pay for federal programs. State income taxes and sales taxes pay for state programs. Property taxes pay for municipal governments and schools. Each of these layers of government helps you out in some way. Many of them (most probably at the local level) run very efficiently, lest they make some huge mistake encouraging you to vote them out. Personally, I don't find anything "quite terrifying" about government being able to pay for itself. I'm more terrified when it can't.
Don't like taxes? Move. But good luck finding some place to move to. Globally speaking, US citizens pay a relatively low amount of income tax, and our sales tax is much lower than, oh say, Europe or Canada. Here's a little info: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/001201.html, and you can google for more.
thanks to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle
We can't know what the data is because somebody wanted to know how fast they were entering it?
Actually, he wrote "Social Security Number Hash," which is exactly the data structure *I* would use to organize them.
Here's a very detailed set of benchmarks for you.
Time to copy 100 megs of MP3s to my 24x CF card over a firewire multireader: 4:32.
Time to copy those same 100 megs to the iPod: 48s.
Actually, I've never seen a PDA that had a fast enough interface to do that. My old Toshiba unit had the slooooowest internal ram, and the USB cable just performed Serial-over-USB for a grand total of 115kbit. Using the wireless ethernet was slightly better, I could maybe get 256kbit off of that...but it was still a pain to get music into it.
I didn't know what fast was until I plugged the iPod into my firewire card and was able to transfer my whole collection in less than ten minutes. It used to take me that long to store 60 meg!
In a word: Yes.
The PDAs in the iPod's range have drastically lower disk space and drastically slower sync interfaces. They are not as sturdy as the iPod. Their interfaces are not usable with one hand and the buttons are more fragile.
Finally, as cool as it may sound to do word processing and watch video on a handheld, in practice you will never do these things. I sold my Toshiba palmtop for way less than it was worth to buy my 30 gig 3G iPod the day it came back. I have never regretted this decision in the least.
Or press the right combination of keys to perform a hard reset.
(This actually isn't a joke. My iPod doesn't lock up since 2.1, but before that, pressing Menu-Play for six seconds to reboot after a lockup was a common occurance. Oh, and pressing and holding left and right bypasses the iPod software and goes straight to Firewire mode...useful for when your software config shits the bed and you want to get your MP3s off of it before restoring the software)
If the book has a section on MusicMatch (which, when you consider how much better EphPod and iTunes are at managing the iPod on Windows, nobody seriously uses anymore), it probably won't have anything useful in it.
If you want to know more about your iPod, hop on over to ipodlounge.com, or one of the dozens of other in-depth ipod fan sites out there dedicated to hacking this clever little device.