If it has such a high energy content, what about building a powerplant surrounded by fields of this grass, and just burn it and use a steam turbine to generate electricity? Then use this technique to take care of the smoke emissions. If you compare the electrical transmission losses with the amount of energy lost by fermenting it and making alcohol and then transporting that, I wonder which is more efficient?
Well LaTeX seems too arcane to most people. Maybe it's just a matter of paring down all the non-essential features, but I think there is more to it than that. The wiki idea started by saying hey, people already have certain habits, for plain-text email, Usenet, etc., to express *boldface*, _italics_, paragraph breaks, hrules etc. so let's just parse those forms, and then there will be no learning curve - at least for people who already have those habits. The degenerate case is that plain text, with no adornment other than double-carriage-returns between paragraphs, is wiki syntax. Of course then you add a few more features and there is a little bit of a learning curve, but not too bad. TeX on the other hand makes you feel constrained rather than free, with a lot of rules to learn and follow. At least, it's always trial and error for me.
I try to maintain my resume in LaTeX but haven't been really happy with the existing converters to generate HTML. So my impression is that it's really too paper-oriented, and I'm not sure what you would need to do to make the transformation to HTML as direct, efficient and suitable as possible.
Knuth I'm sure would say, web pages are so ugly - lousy default fonts, no kerning, no right-justification, and you can't even control where the page breaks fall when you print it. aye-ei-ei.:-) But those are features for browsers to add some day.
I agree with you that version control was a very useful addition to wikis, and its importance (and ease of use) must not be underestimated.
So now every desktop and server OS of any significance will run on Intel chips. This does not bode well for encouraging innovation in new/alternative instruction sets. It's good that AMD is there, and it remains to be seen how the Cell will be used, but times are not the same as when the Intel, MIPS, Sparc, Alpha, 68K, PowerPC, etc. architectures were all competing at once.
But maybe GPUs and DSPs and gate arrays will be used in more general-purpose ways in future PC's.
I don't get it either; can somebody explain why Filipinos are more compassionate than other people?
It's not the techology, it's the people
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 2, Interesting
By the time I seriously started playing with PHP I already knew Java, yet it felt compelling somehow. I think it's just because it seems simpler, because the default choice is to put everything right in the page, rather than writing some JSP, some servlets, some EJBs and so on.
Writing JSP pages isn't really that much different from writing PHP pages; you can write them in a PHP style. But Java people tend to be degreed software engineers moreso than PHP hackers, so they make things complicated and build up layer upon layer of infrastructure, and you need to know a lot more to be able to deal with all those layers effectively. (And you end up needing to use struts, or EJB, for example, not because it's easy, but because management or coworkers pressure you into it.) Alternatively you can just do your database queries right in the JSP pages, which is ugly in a design sense (schema changes can be harder to propagate through the whole system) but very PHPish, and at least the whole pile of code will be smaller and more manageable if you have fewer layers to deal with.
The myth of software engineering is "after I write this nifty abstraction layer I'm never going to think about this facet of the problem again" (whether it be hardware abstraction, dealing with the database, the GUI API, dealing with web-based transactions and user-specific "state", or anything along those lines that you don't enjoy and would like to box up and forget about). The reality is that every layer you write also requires some maintenance, so you cannot avoid having to think about any of those things again. PHP hackers are just more likely to suck it up and deal with these annoyances head-on, with as terse code as possible, rather than try to abstract them away.
But some of the abstraction layers that have been created for Java applications are really elegant. Some much more than others.
Another factor is that large projects, for which more people are hired than is really necessary, with too much management, tend to take the long way around, in the name of elegance and maintainability. If programmers are smart enough to invent really elegant abstractions, and they have the time to do it, most will do it. But if you're on a scrappy underfunded little project you just take the most direct path to get the job done.
Well micro-SD (AKA TransFlash) has a wider following, among multiple manufacturers, so I imagine it's going to be around a while. And yes it really is much, much smaller, so the excuse that tiny cellphones need tiny memory cards has a little bit of merit. But RS-MMC is not that small, more like mini-SD (another useless half-measure that doesn't need to exist); so they are just muddying the water rather than making an actual improvement.
I like how some Zauri have both CF and SD slots. Both very well established, and you can even put in a microdrive if necessary.
I was wondering. The extra bit of resolution would be nice but it sounds like it's underpowered, and the apps out-of-the-box aren't any better, so the main advantages would be lower cost, and that it's the current vogue while the Zauri are now hard to find. I hope they manage to sell a ton of them anyway, but my hopes have fallen a bit since this device was announced.
What's with that RS-MMC crap that only Nokia is using? There is no way they couldn't afford the space for an SD slot. They are as bad as Sony in this regard trying to push yet-another-memory-card that nobody has a good reason to buy.
I wonder if they are making good use of the DSP? Maybe the PDF viewer could use it to accelerate some repetitive math stuff.
Well someone else pointed out the high-quality DACs but I think the real reason it's so expensive is the graphical VFD. It looks very cool, and costs too much but that's because Noritake doesn't have enough competition. Maybe there will be big OLED displays pretty soon for integration into stuff like this. Monochrome ones ought to be cheap, in theory.
Compare to a Roku. The one with a similar-sized display costs a similar price ($199) and the one with the huge VFD display costs way more. But the Roku is not open-source, and doesn't support as many codecs either in firmware or on the PC server software.
It does bother me a bit that after merely re-designing the case to be sexier, not changing the hardware, the price went from $179 to $249 for the wired model (and $299 for the wireless... ouch!) But anyway, the experience you will get will still be worth it. Or just pick up an older model on ebay...
But transcoding to FLAC is fine, I think. You don't lose any quality and it's half the bandwidth of streaming PCM. And even my slow server can do the transcoding just fine.
Nowadays when I rip CDs I encode to FLAC primarily, and also to MP3 if I want to be able to play it on devices that don't support anything else. But I play the FLACs at home. So I don't consider ogg as useful as I once did - it's lossy and it's not widely supported. Disk space is cheap, so why lose quality? abcde is a good program to use for the ripping BTW.
you do need a fairly fast machine to get that great performance to which the reviewer is referring. I'm trying to use an old dual-PII 233 machine and it's quite slow to serve up web pages, find tracks by artist, etc. Seems like it ought to be fast enough for this relatively simple task, but I guess perl is just slow. My perl is not threaded either, so all the load is on one of the processors, and lets the other be mostly idle. I've been wondering if there could be a way to compile it to machine code rather than having to run it interpreted?
One improvement is to use mysql instead of sqlite; I have done that, and it is still too slow. But on a 1 ghz or faster machine it's fine.
I've got 2 so far. There just isn't anything better right now. There aren't many alternatives for playing FLACs and OGGs at all. And the server software is free software, written in Perl! What more could a hacker ask for?
seem to have a need to cover every available flat surface with advertising. Why should this be any exception? Public restrooms will probably all have toilet paper printers eventually, assuming toilet paper is not somehow obsolete by then.
But having it print a personalized feed of interesting stuff at home is really not a bad idea. You can't even say that it's very bad environmentally, any more so than using toilet paper at all is bad. The ink should be biodegradeable of course.
Those guys need to be held back a bit, otherwise we'd all be in straitjackets all the time.
A lot of early Internet development happened because there wasn't any security. Nowadays if you aren't using HTTP in a proxy-compatible way, you've got some 'splainin to do, and the answer will be "no!" even after that.
I agree they should close obvious holes that are being exploited, but not have the typical "guilty until proven innocent" philosophy.
If there are 20 networks in range of you, why aren't they all doing the mesh thing to maximize bandwidth and get some redundancy too? This is just like with OSS - everybody wants to "homestead the frontier" instead of realizing that it's not a frontier anymore, and cooperate with what already exists. And those who are smart enough to do so want to secure the hell out of their networks too, not share with the neighbors at all. Just human nature, I guess.
The lack of organization is really inefficient. I'm surprised there aren't more organized free community networks nowadays; I really thought that was going to happen more, and that the big corporate empires wouldn't be as efficient about covering large areas with hotspots and then charging big fees to use them. A lot of hams have some sense of duty to use their skills for community service, but a lot of wifi hackers don't, apparently.
Wow. That's all you ask for? I mean, while you're dreaming about technology that doesn't exist, why not go all out?
Nonsense. PADDs, unlike much of Treknology, could be built today.
I think making them thin is just waiting for electronic paper to come down in price. I think we will see PADDs long before the electronic paper is cheap enough for newspapers and cereal boxes.
1/4" thick PADDs with this kind of display could already be built; the display itself is not as thick as glass, and you don't need a backlight. Give them a few gigs of built-in FLASH, plenty of RAM, and wifi, and make them rugged, and leave out the card slots and other extras. A device like that, running Linux, could have at least a 10-year life too; there's no reason for it to become obsolete. Hopefully the battery is replaceable because LiIon's aren't lasting that long.
is that gas prices are probably going up much further. Hard to say whether it is going to be soon or in a few more years, but we'll eventually be paying twice as much again, at least.
Another possibility is to convert your Prius into a plug-in hybrid. You could get several miles of your commute every day on pure electric power, without burning any gas for them. Or, you could install a bigger battery pack and get most of your commute gas-free.
If you want to do this in a cheaper way, consider converting an existing car to electric yourself. For a few thousand bucks you'd never have to visit a gas station again. Of course the prices for electricity may be going up too, but hopefully not quite as fast, since the majority of it doesn't come from oil.
Yep, you are right. So there probably is a bubble, but only some of the businesses are part of it (just as some of the dot-com's which had good business models have survived just fine). Hopefully the fallout after it bursts will not be the undoing of the more deserving ones.
Actually the bubble at Ximian already burst around the same time the dot-com one did, so maybe the VCs learned something from it. (Maybe? maybe.... nah.)
My favorites are the ones that make money on hardware and support it via free software. SlimDevices and Gumstix are executing this model very well. I think they are probably safe from the bursting of the bubble if/when it happens. And that kind of company is an interesting one to be the owner of, as well; in the pure-software plays, the part that you can make money from (support) is drudgery, compared to the fun part (writing the free software). (Of course, pure-software closed-source companies are like that too, but at least they can make more money for a while.)
Sun might end up falling into that camp as well (sell hardware, give away the software) if they can just get back to making hardware that is compelling enough.
I don't know about Oracle. Can't see a lot of room for growth there, despite their open-source strategy. Big companies will continue to buy just because "nobody got fired for buying Oracle" but smaller projects can keep using PostgreSQL and MySQL, too, as long as Oracle doesn't offer technical advantages that they need.
Is old software which simply states that it is released under the terms of the GPL construed to always be tracking the latest version? What if the author doesn't want to? I hope new releases will have to specifically state that they are using GPL 3.0?
I suppose I am the only person in the whole world who finds the ipod physical interface totally "the suck" and the software unintuitive.
I don't think you are the only person.
I wouldn't go as far as to say it sucks, but it's not quite perfect either, and I don't mind using a plain 5-way pad like most of the others have. And I don't really like interfaces that waste too much time animating things, at the expense of navigation/reading speed. The iPod isn't really too slow, but it's on the edge of being too slow, when you are scrolling side-to-side from one menu to the next; it wouldn't hurt if it did that about 2-3 times as fast.
What do you think about the players that have the finger-motion being linear, rather than in a circle? It's more intuitive, mabye? but the advantage of the circle is that it doesn't end, so you don't have to pick up your finger to keep going the same direction. Depends how far you need to go, I guess. And it's interesting that people always think of "clockwise" as "forward". I wonder if that's an archetype, or it's just an arbitrary tradition.
I've also had a wish for a long time that some player had really good fast-forward and rewind, like a real tape deck. It should have dedicated buttons for this, and it should completely decode and then speed up the sound (and optionally pitch-shift it back to the same frequency range), rather than skipping and decoding chunks here and there. (But you need some power for this - a fast CPU or a DSP.) Maybe the buttons could even be proportionally pressure-sensitive so that if you press harder, it goes faster. Or on the ipod, the wheel could have a shuttle mode where if you put your finger to the right of the top-center you get faster speeds, and to the left you get rewind (and when you stop touching it, it goes back to the normal speed, unless you hold the center button to "lock" the speed before releasing). You need a feature like this for language lessons, audio books and podcasts that have boring bits that you want to skip through.
But Apple always seems to stop a bit short of where they could go with any product. Like with that video ipod - why didn't the ipod photo already have video support? or be upgradeable to support it? And why is the screen so small? Their precious wheel is not more important than a big screen when you are watching video on it. So the Archos PMP's have the edge for video I think (besides the fact that they are Linux-based and therefore more easily hackable, to support new formats and stuff like that. If I didn't already have a Zaurus to play with, I'd get a PMP.)
It's amazing how quickly people have forgotten about ripping CDs. Just a few years ago, all portable MP3 players were (supposedly) sold for the purpose of playing music ripped from CDs, but today the common assumption is that all music is either legally downloaded and DRM-encrusted or illegally downloaded.
Unfortunately I'm afraid the CD's might be going away someday, because the labels want everything to be DRM-encrusted. But until they do go away, yeah I'd rather buy CD's and rip them than put up with FairPlay or its ilk; so I don't think this idea is "forgotten". Besides when you rip a CD, you can rip to FLAC for never-obsolete lossless quality; whereas iTunes is still using already-obsolete AAC-LC (they should be using AACplus by now). And if you buy used CD's like I do, it's always cheaper than iTunes. And there are legal sites where you can pay for and download non-DRM tracks, so that's the other alternative.
I think the rift between signed artists and indies is just going to keep getting wider; as DRM increases, it will become more and more possible to satisfy your musical tastes with "free" music (free of restrictions at least, even if you still have to pay a little money for it).
Now, how do you find the free music? Well iRate radio is a very good start. This project needs to be integrated into the others. E.g. I want it to stream to my SqueezeBox (and have a UI to do the rating right on the SB) and I want it to automatically put my favorites onto my portable player. Just with those features, a whole parallel universe can be developed in which the indie artists get much more exposure (among people who care about freedom at least, who, granted, are in the minority) and you the listener can find stuff you really like rather than having the labels shove it down your throat every day on the ClearChannel radio. This is my dream.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet they got it confused with hoard.
Ah, I thought you were referring to Tri-Sodium Phosphate...
Remember the Dukes of Hazzard episode in which Jesse entered some of his moonshine in a contest to find an alternative fuel?
If it has such a high energy content, what about building a powerplant surrounded by fields of this grass, and just burn it and use a steam turbine to generate electricity? Then use this technique to take care of the smoke emissions. If you compare the electrical transmission losses with the amount of energy lost by fermenting it and making alcohol and then transporting that, I wonder which is more efficient?
Well LaTeX seems too arcane to most people. Maybe it's just a matter of paring down all the non-essential features, but I think there is more to it than that. The wiki idea started by saying hey, people already have certain habits, for plain-text email, Usenet, etc., to express *boldface*, _italics_, paragraph breaks, hrules etc. so let's just parse those forms, and then there will be no learning curve - at least for people who already have those habits. The degenerate case is that plain text, with no adornment other than double-carriage-returns between paragraphs, is wiki syntax. Of course then you add a few more features and there is a little bit of a learning curve, but not too bad. TeX on the other hand makes you feel constrained rather than free, with a lot of rules to learn and follow. At least, it's always trial and error for me.
:-) But those are features for browsers to add some day.
I try to maintain my resume in LaTeX but haven't been really happy with the existing converters to generate HTML. So my impression is that it's really too paper-oriented, and I'm not sure what you would need to do to make the transformation to HTML as direct, efficient and suitable as possible.
Knuth I'm sure would say, web pages are so ugly - lousy default fonts, no kerning, no right-justification, and you can't even control where the page breaks fall when you print it. aye-ei-ei.
I agree with you that version control was a very useful addition to wikis, and its importance (and ease of use) must not be underestimated.
So now every desktop and server OS of any significance will run on Intel chips. This does not bode well for encouraging innovation in new/alternative instruction sets. It's good that AMD is there, and it remains to be seen how the Cell will be used, but times are not the same as when the Intel, MIPS, Sparc, Alpha, 68K, PowerPC, etc. architectures were all competing at once.
But maybe GPUs and DSPs and gate arrays will be used in more general-purpose ways in future PC's.
I don't get it either; can somebody explain why Filipinos are more compassionate than other people?
By the time I seriously started playing with PHP I already knew Java, yet it felt compelling somehow. I think it's just because it seems simpler, because the default choice is to put everything right in the page, rather than writing some JSP, some servlets, some EJBs and so on.
Writing JSP pages isn't really that much different from writing PHP pages; you can write them in a PHP style. But Java people tend to be degreed software engineers moreso than PHP hackers, so they make things complicated and build up layer upon layer of infrastructure, and you need to know a lot more to be able to deal with all those layers effectively. (And you end up needing to use struts, or EJB, for example, not because it's easy, but because management or coworkers pressure you into it.) Alternatively you can just do your database queries right in the JSP pages, which is ugly in a design sense (schema changes can be harder to propagate through the whole system) but very PHPish, and at least the whole pile of code will be smaller and more manageable if you have fewer layers to deal with.
The myth of software engineering is "after I write this nifty abstraction layer I'm never going to think about this facet of the problem again" (whether it be hardware abstraction, dealing with the database, the GUI API, dealing with web-based transactions and user-specific "state", or anything along those lines that you don't enjoy and would like to box up and forget about). The reality is that every layer you write also requires some maintenance, so you cannot avoid having to think about any of those things again. PHP hackers are just more likely to suck it up and deal with these annoyances head-on, with as terse code as possible, rather than try to abstract them away.
But some of the abstraction layers that have been created for Java applications are really elegant. Some much more than others.
Another factor is that large projects, for which more people are hired than is really necessary, with too much management, tend to take the long way around, in the name of elegance and maintainability. If programmers are smart enough to invent really elegant abstractions, and they have the time to do it, most will do it. But if you're on a scrappy underfunded little project you just take the most direct path to get the job done.
Well micro-SD (AKA TransFlash) has a wider following, among multiple manufacturers, so I imagine it's going to be around a while. And yes it really is much, much smaller, so the excuse that tiny cellphones need tiny memory cards has a little bit of merit. But RS-MMC is not that small, more like mini-SD (another useless half-measure that doesn't need to exist); so they are just muddying the water rather than making an actual improvement.
I like how some Zauri have both CF and SD slots. Both very well established, and you can even put in a microdrive if necessary.
I was wondering. The extra bit of resolution would be nice but it sounds like it's underpowered, and the apps out-of-the-box aren't any better, so the main advantages would be lower cost, and that it's the current vogue while the Zauri are now hard to find. I hope they manage to sell a ton of them anyway, but my hopes have fallen a bit since this device was announced.
What's with that RS-MMC crap that only Nokia is using? There is no way they couldn't afford the space for an SD slot. They are as bad as Sony in this regard trying to push yet-another-memory-card that nobody has a good reason to buy.
I wonder if they are making good use of the DSP? Maybe the PDF viewer could use it to accelerate some repetitive math stuff.
Well someone else pointed out the high-quality DACs but I think the real reason it's so expensive is the graphical VFD. It looks very cool, and costs too much but that's because Noritake doesn't have enough competition. Maybe there will be big OLED displays pretty soon for integration into stuff like this. Monochrome ones ought to be cheap, in theory.
Compare to a Roku. The one with a similar-sized display costs a similar price ($199) and the one with the huge VFD display costs way more. But the Roku is not open-source, and doesn't support as many codecs either in firmware or on the PC server software.
It does bother me a bit that after merely re-designing the case to be sexier, not changing the hardware, the price went from $179 to $249 for the wired model (and $299 for the wireless... ouch!) But anyway, the experience you will get will still be worth it. Or just pick up an older model on ebay...
But transcoding to FLAC is fine, I think. You don't lose any quality and it's half the bandwidth of streaming PCM. And even my slow server can do the transcoding just fine.
Nowadays when I rip CDs I encode to FLAC primarily, and also to MP3 if I want to be able to play it on devices that don't support anything else. But I play the FLACs at home. So I don't consider ogg as useful as I once did - it's lossy and it's not widely supported. Disk space is cheap, so why lose quality? abcde is a good program to use for the ripping BTW.
you do need a fairly fast machine to get that great performance to which the reviewer is referring. I'm trying to use an old dual-PII 233 machine and it's quite slow to serve up web pages, find tracks by artist, etc. Seems like it ought to be fast enough for this relatively simple task, but I guess perl is just slow. My perl is not threaded either, so all the load is on one of the processors, and lets the other be mostly idle. I've been wondering if there could be a way to compile it to machine code rather than having to run it interpreted?
One improvement is to use mysql instead of sqlite; I have done that, and it is still too slow. But on a 1 ghz or faster machine it's fine.
I've got 2 so far. There just isn't anything better right now. There aren't many alternatives for playing FLACs and OGGs at all. And the server software is free software, written in Perl! What more could a hacker ask for?
seem to have a need to cover every available flat surface with advertising. Why should this be any exception? Public restrooms will probably all have toilet paper printers eventually, assuming toilet paper is not somehow obsolete by then.
But having it print a personalized feed of interesting stuff at home is really not a bad idea. You can't even say that it's very bad environmentally, any more so than using toilet paper at all is bad. The ink should be biodegradeable of course.
The next movie ought to feature this product, and tell us whether it's useful or not.
Those guys need to be held back a bit, otherwise we'd all be in straitjackets all the time.
A lot of early Internet development happened because there wasn't any security. Nowadays if you aren't using HTTP in a proxy-compatible way, you've got some 'splainin to do, and the answer will be "no!" even after that.
I agree they should close obvious holes that are being exploited, but not have the typical "guilty until proven innocent" philosophy.
If there are 20 networks in range of you, why aren't they all doing the mesh thing to maximize bandwidth and get some redundancy too? This is just like with OSS - everybody wants to "homestead the frontier" instead of realizing that it's not a frontier anymore, and cooperate with what already exists. And those who are smart enough to do so want to secure the hell out of their networks too, not share with the neighbors at all. Just human nature, I guess.
The lack of organization is really inefficient. I'm surprised there aren't more organized free community networks nowadays; I really thought that was going to happen more, and that the big corporate empires wouldn't be as efficient about covering large areas with hotspots and then charging big fees to use them. A lot of hams have some sense of duty to use their skills for community service, but a lot of wifi hackers don't, apparently.
Wow. That's all you ask for? I mean, while you're dreaming about technology that doesn't exist, why not go all out?
Nonsense. PADDs, unlike much of Treknology, could be built today.
I think making them thin is just waiting for electronic paper to come down in price. I think we will see PADDs long before the electronic paper is cheap enough for newspapers and cereal boxes.
1/4" thick PADDs with this kind of display could already be built; the display itself is not as thick as glass, and you don't need a backlight. Give them a few gigs of built-in FLASH, plenty of RAM, and wifi, and make them rugged, and leave out the card slots and other extras. A device like that, running Linux, could have at least a 10-year life too; there's no reason for it to become obsolete. Hopefully the battery is replaceable because LiIon's aren't lasting that long.
is that gas prices are probably going up much further. Hard to say whether it is going to be soon or in a few more years, but we'll eventually be paying twice as much again, at least.
Another possibility is to convert your Prius into a plug-in hybrid. You could get several miles of your commute every day on pure electric power, without burning any gas for them. Or, you could install a bigger battery pack and get most of your commute gas-free.
If you want to do this in a cheaper way, consider converting an existing car to electric yourself. For a few thousand bucks you'd never have to visit a gas station again. Of course the prices for electricity may be going up too, but hopefully not quite as fast, since the majority of it doesn't come from oil.
Yep, you are right. So there probably is a bubble, but only some of the businesses are part of it (just as some of the dot-com's which had good business models have survived just fine). Hopefully the fallout after it bursts will not be the undoing of the more deserving ones.
Actually the bubble at Ximian already burst around the same time the dot-com one did, so maybe the VCs learned something from it. (Maybe? maybe.... nah.)
My favorites are the ones that make money on hardware and support it via free software. SlimDevices and Gumstix are executing this model very well. I think they are probably safe from the bursting of the bubble if/when it happens. And that kind of company is an interesting one to be the owner of, as well; in the pure-software plays, the part that you can make money from (support) is drudgery, compared to the fun part (writing the free software). (Of course, pure-software closed-source companies are like that too, but at least they can make more money for a while.)
Sun might end up falling into that camp as well (sell hardware, give away the software) if they can just get back to making hardware that is compelling enough.
I don't know about Oracle. Can't see a lot of room for growth there, despite their open-source strategy. Big companies will continue to buy just because "nobody got fired for buying Oracle" but smaller projects can keep using PostgreSQL and MySQL, too, as long as Oracle doesn't offer technical advantages that they need.
Is old software which simply states that it is released under the terms of the GPL construed to always be tracking the latest version? What if the author doesn't want to? I hope new releases will have to specifically state that they are using GPL 3.0?
I suppose I am the only person in the whole world who finds the ipod physical interface totally "the suck" and the software unintuitive.
I don't think you are the only person.
I wouldn't go as far as to say it sucks, but it's not quite perfect either, and I don't mind using a plain 5-way pad like most of the others have. And I don't really like interfaces that waste too much time animating things, at the expense of navigation/reading speed. The iPod isn't really too slow, but it's on the edge of being too slow, when you are scrolling side-to-side from one menu to the next; it wouldn't hurt if it did that about 2-3 times as fast.
What do you think about the players that have the finger-motion being linear, rather than in a circle? It's more intuitive, mabye? but the advantage of the circle is that it doesn't end, so you don't have to pick up your finger to keep going the same direction. Depends how far you need to go, I guess. And it's interesting that people always think of "clockwise" as "forward". I wonder if that's an archetype, or it's just an arbitrary tradition.
I've also had a wish for a long time that some player had really good fast-forward and rewind, like a real tape deck. It should have dedicated buttons for this, and it should completely decode and then speed up the sound (and optionally pitch-shift it back to the same frequency range), rather than skipping and decoding chunks here and there. (But you need some power for this - a fast CPU or a DSP.) Maybe the buttons could even be proportionally pressure-sensitive so that if you press harder, it goes faster. Or on the ipod, the wheel could have a shuttle mode where if you put your finger to the right of the top-center you get faster speeds, and to the left you get rewind (and when you stop touching it, it goes back to the normal speed, unless you hold the center button to "lock" the speed before releasing). You need a feature like this for language lessons, audio books and podcasts that have boring bits that you want to skip through.
But Apple always seems to stop a bit short of where they could go with any product. Like with that video ipod - why didn't the ipod photo already have video support? or be upgradeable to support it? And why is the screen so small? Their precious wheel is not more important than a big screen when you are watching video on it. So the Archos PMP's have the edge for video I think (besides the fact that they are Linux-based and therefore more easily hackable, to support new formats and stuff like that. If I didn't already have a Zaurus to play with, I'd get a PMP.)
It's amazing how quickly people have forgotten about ripping CDs. Just a few years ago, all portable MP3 players were (supposedly) sold for the purpose of playing music ripped from CDs, but today the common assumption is that all music is either legally downloaded and DRM-encrusted or illegally downloaded.
Unfortunately I'm afraid the CD's might be going away someday, because the labels want everything to be DRM-encrusted. But until they do go away, yeah I'd rather buy CD's and rip them than put up with FairPlay or its ilk; so I don't think this idea is "forgotten". Besides when you rip a CD, you can rip to FLAC for never-obsolete lossless quality; whereas iTunes is still using already-obsolete AAC-LC (they should be using AACplus by now). And if you buy used CD's like I do, it's always cheaper than iTunes. And there are legal sites where you can pay for and download non-DRM tracks, so that's the other alternative.
I think the rift between signed artists and indies is just going to keep getting wider; as DRM increases, it will become more and more possible to satisfy your musical tastes with "free" music (free of restrictions at least, even if you still have to pay a little money for it).
Now, how do you find the free music? Well iRate radio is a very good start. This project needs to be integrated into the others. E.g. I want it to stream to my SqueezeBox (and have a UI to do the rating right on the SB) and I want it to automatically put my favorites onto my portable player. Just with those features, a whole parallel universe can be developed in which the indie artists get much more exposure (among people who care about freedom at least, who, granted, are in the minority) and you the listener can find stuff you really like rather than having the labels shove it down your throat every day on the ClearChannel radio. This is my dream.
Patents should have mandatory licensing.