That's not exactly an insightful response to "someone with an african-sounding name with the *same qualifications* has been show to be a fraction as likely to get the same job as someone with a traditional French-sounding name." Stars mine.
This is a standard method to evaluate employment discrimination in a society. The researchers concoct a series of resumes which are exactly the same except with different names, and send those randomly to a sample of potential employers. Since the name is the only independent variable, any variation in responses must be caused by the different names. Presumably Rei is referring to such a study by the words "has been shown", but you'd have to ask her for the link.
I'm sorry that I didn't explain it clearly enough for you. I'm unable to find the "iRiver H320" available for sale. There is absolutely no mention of it on iRiver's site. You have utterly failed to show me a link to a product that currently exists.
Well, iAudio seems to be a completely different company; at least I can't find any information about them on the iRiver site. Maybe they're the same company with a different brand... hard to tell with these little manufacturers.
Anyway, the comparable product from them these days seems to be the iAudio X5. The X5 is 129% the size of the iPod, which is similar, though if you want the double battery life you have to get the X5L which is 29% larger than the X5. The screen is 160x128, which is much less than the iPod's at 320x240. The kicker, though, is that the X5's video is at 15fps, while the iPod's is 30. All this for $20 more than an iPod. I also don't see a mention of video output to a TV like the iPod has, but for all I know it's capable of that -- the website is awful.
Look, I'm not trying to dis iRiver or iAudio or whatever. The problem is that the thesis is "the iPod is significantly more expensive than its competitors", not "there are other music players with different advantages and disadvantages". You can't prove that to me by showing me a more expensive device with serious deficiencies compared to the iPod. Sure, somebody who wants FM and voice and ogg bundled in might get better value from the X5, but that doesn't mean the iPod is overpriced.
Perhaps you are referring to the iRiver PMC-120, which has only 20GB of storage, costs $150 more than the 30GB iPod, and takes up more than five times as much space? I'm not surprised if it does more -- for those willing to spend lots of cash and carry around a man-purse, anyway.
I don't have a problem with any of that, but in your original post you were comparing what is available now, not what was available before color screens were added to iPods. Your thesis, I believe, was that the only advantage of the iPod was to be "cool". As the topic is discussing what choices to make, I feel it makes sense to compare currently shipping products.
Don't you think "same basic product" is a little bit of a stretch, when the Apple product has the advantage of a color screen, video playback, and charging over USB?
Did you hear about the other court decision this week, where they ruled unanimously that time spent changing into special protective gear and walking to the actual work station counted as "work" and must be done on-the-clock? That's in favor of the employees, and against a corporation.
Posts asking "how does the first post get modded redundant" should hereafter be modded "Redundant", as this question has been asked and answered over and over again.
The score has always been 8/10 (or sometimes an unadorned "8") since the early days of Slashdot book reviews. It's just a tradition, and I presume a testament to the folly of assigning numeric scores to work of art.
Useless. I want to watch the movie, not run around looking for the manager. I know the manager will give me free passes to come see the movie again, but I don't have that kind of time to waste.
A far better solution is to find theatres where rude viewers aren't a problem. The theatres that ignore their problems will suffer and go out of business, blaming Hollywood, the DVD, and movie piracy the whole time.
No, that's not the way it works. Disney's market cap is the value of all outstanding Disney stock, and represents the market's valuation of the company as a whole. Anything Disney owns is thus included in this size.
More to the point, though, Disney lists its current assets as $54 billion. That's certainly larger than Apple's at $8 billion, though Disney does have some significant debt whereas Apple does not.
The premium price the market has placed on Apple is essentially because the market believes that Apple has good growth prospects, as opposed to Disney which will presumably move more slowly. Certainly some would argue that hype plays a factor as well.
Anyway, probably the best measure of corporate size is not market cap but rather yearly revenue. After all, market cap is a sort of fiction created by whimsical traders, whereas revenue is the amount in real dollars that a company has managed to attract from its customers. By revenue, Disney is about three times the size of Apple -- not enough of a difference to call Disney "huge" and Apple "tiny".
I've never stepped into the world of commercial online games, and this basically sums up the reason. A mud may not have some fancy 3d graphical interface, but it's run by regular people, not some faceless corporation. A good mud gives you the feeling that you're a part of the world you in, that in some sense it belongs to you. Commercial games are 100% the property of BigCorp, Inc.
Not that I have an opinion here, but the Mac Mini's maximum power draw is 85 watts. Also, the unit itself runs on DC only. The power input is some nonstandard connector but I imagine there's nothing special about it.
You didn't even bother to research whether sapphire is used for watch faces or not, because even a cursory Google search would have found out that it is. Why don't you try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphire, under "synthetic sapphire for non-gemstone applications"?
And yes, you'll only find this on watches starting around $800 minimum; that's why it's not practical on an iPod! Which was the point of my post, at least.
As for your contention that hard materials are not expensive, can you please present an appropriate counter-example?
Diamonds are WAY more expensive than they should be, but even if the prices were reasonable a diamond sheet big enough to cover an iPod screen would still cost more than the unit.
A synthetic sapphire crystal of that size would be the best choice, and even then you're talking hundreds of dollars.
Well, I don't know about CHEAP watches. Good watches have sapphire crystals, which aren't very easy to scratch.
Fundamentally it's a matter of hardness; anything will scratch if it encounters something harder. Hard materials like diamond and sapphire are pretty much inherently expensive. Thus, any material that would be practical for an iPod will scratch.
Oxygen disposal! I love it... when you oxidize the hydrogen later, you'd re-absorb the oxygen.
There are great ways to get hydrogen from water. The problem that it takes more energy to go from H2O->2H+O than you get back from the hydrogen's oxidation is a matter of fundamental physics and will never be "solved".
Ok, so we have The Register with an article "Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems". The article consists mostly of unsubstantiated Wikipedia bashing. There is only one sentence which discusses anything the Wikipedia founder actually said -- and that is only in reference to two specific articles, not the project as a whole. Besides, it was a comment on a Wikipedia mailing list.
Slashdot, of course, turns the headline into "Wikipedia founder sees serious quality problems", as if Zonk didn't RTFA. There's a constant dialogue about where Wikipedia is good and where it is bad on Wikipedia mailing lists. Nothing has changed.
The Register's real point in the article is a propaganda one: the concept that "an encyclopedia is only as good as its worst article". Puh-leeze. That's an insult to the intelligence of readers, as if we can't tell when we are reading gold and when we are reading crap. Then again, maybe that's a problem for regular readers of The Register.
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Seems to me like that's exactly the point.
That's not exactly an insightful response to "someone with an african-sounding name with the *same qualifications* has been show to be a fraction as likely to get the same job as someone with a traditional French-sounding name." Stars mine.
This is a standard method to evaluate employment discrimination in a society. The researchers concoct a series of resumes which are exactly the same except with different names, and send those randomly to a sample of potential employers. Since the name is the only independent variable, any variation in responses must be caused by the different names. Presumably Rei is referring to such a study by the words "has been shown", but you'd have to ask her for the link.
I'm sorry that I didn't explain it clearly enough for you. I'm unable to find the "iRiver H320" available for sale. There is absolutely no mention of it on iRiver's site. You have utterly failed to show me a link to a product that currently exists.
Well, iAudio seems to be a completely different company; at least I can't find any information about them on the iRiver site. Maybe they're the same company with a different brand... hard to tell with these little manufacturers.
Anyway, the comparable product from them these days seems to be the iAudio X5. The X5 is 129% the size of the iPod, which is similar, though if you want the double battery life you have to get the X5L which is 29% larger than the X5. The screen is 160x128, which is much less than the iPod's at 320x240. The kicker, though, is that the X5's video is at 15fps, while the iPod's is 30. All this for $20 more than an iPod. I also don't see a mention of video output to a TV like the iPod has, but for all I know it's capable of that -- the website is awful.
Look, I'm not trying to dis iRiver or iAudio or whatever. The problem is that the thesis is "the iPod is significantly more expensive than its competitors", not "there are other music players with different advantages and disadvantages". You can't prove that to me by showing me a more expensive device with serious deficiencies compared to the iPod. Sure, somebody who wants FM and voice and ogg bundled in might get better value from the X5, but that doesn't mean the iPod is overpriced.
Perhaps you are referring to the iRiver PMC-120, which has only 20GB of storage, costs $150 more than the 30GB iPod, and takes up more than five times as much space? I'm not surprised if it does more -- for those willing to spend lots of cash and carry around a man-purse, anyway.
I don't have a problem with any of that, but in your original post you were comparing what is available now, not what was available before color screens were added to iPods. Your thesis, I believe, was that the only advantage of the iPod was to be "cool". As the topic is discussing what choices to make, I feel it makes sense to compare currently shipping products.
By the way, the video iPod can output to a TV.
Don't you think "same basic product" is a little bit of a stretch, when the Apple product has the advantage of a color screen, video playback, and charging over USB?
Well, if you're sleeping in a building owned by your employer, and pressing the snooze button is an integral part of your job, then you're all set.
Did you hear about the other court decision this week, where they ruled unanimously that time spent changing into special protective gear and walking to the actual work station counted as "work" and must be done on-the-clock? That's in favor of the employees, and against a corporation.
Posts asking "how does the first post get modded redundant" should hereafter be modded "Redundant", as this question has been asked and answered over and over again.
The score has always been 8/10 (or sometimes an unadorned "8") since the early days of Slashdot book reviews. It's just a tradition, and I presume a testament to the folly of assigning numeric scores to work of art.
How many editors do you think Slashdot has? Don't be a jerk.
Useless. I want to watch the movie, not run around looking for the manager. I know the manager will give me free passes to come see the movie again, but I don't have that kind of time to waste.
A far better solution is to find theatres where rude viewers aren't a problem. The theatres that ignore their problems will suffer and go out of business, blaming Hollywood, the DVD, and movie piracy the whole time.
No, that's not the way it works. Disney's market cap is the value of all outstanding Disney stock, and represents the market's valuation of the company as a whole. Anything Disney owns is thus included in this size.
More to the point, though, Disney lists its current assets as $54 billion. That's certainly larger than Apple's at $8 billion, though Disney does have some significant debt whereas Apple does not.
The premium price the market has placed on Apple is essentially because the market believes that Apple has good growth prospects, as opposed to Disney which will presumably move more slowly. Certainly some would argue that hype plays a factor as well.
Anyway, probably the best measure of corporate size is not market cap but rather yearly revenue. After all, market cap is a sort of fiction created by whimsical traders, whereas revenue is the amount in real dollars that a company has managed to attract from its customers. By revenue, Disney is about three times the size of Apple -- not enough of a difference to call Disney "huge" and Apple "tiny".
The average PC runs 24/7? Please turn your computer off when you're not using it!
I've never stepped into the world of commercial online games, and this basically sums up the reason. A mud may not have some fancy 3d graphical interface, but it's run by regular people, not some faceless corporation. A good mud gives you the feeling that you're a part of the world you in, that in some sense it belongs to you. Commercial games are 100% the property of BigCorp, Inc.
Not that I have an opinion here, but the Mac Mini's maximum power draw is 85 watts. Also, the unit itself runs on DC only. The power input is some nonstandard connector but I imagine there's nothing special about it.
You didn't even bother to research whether sapphire is used for watch faces or not, because even a cursory Google search would have found out that it is. Why don't you try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphire, under "synthetic sapphire for non-gemstone applications"?
And yes, you'll only find this on watches starting around $800 minimum; that's why it's not practical on an iPod! Which was the point of my post, at least.
As for your contention that hard materials are not expensive, can you please present an appropriate counter-example?
I assume that when you buy a car, you go "omg $15,000!" and demand that it be made of solid gold?
Diamonds are WAY more expensive than they should be, but even if the prices were reasonable a diamond sheet big enough to cover an iPod screen would still cost more than the unit.
A synthetic sapphire crystal of that size would be the best choice, and even then you're talking hundreds of dollars.
Well, I don't know about CHEAP watches. Good watches have sapphire crystals, which aren't very easy to scratch.
Fundamentally it's a matter of hardness; anything will scratch if it encounters something harder. Hard materials like diamond and sapphire are pretty much inherently expensive. Thus, any material that would be practical for an iPod will scratch.
The astronauts left behind a lander in shinny gold foil.
Dude, how do you think they got back to Earth? On the bus?
It's for the best, anyway. "CoolTechZone" is a terrible site. I'd rather see more casemod links on Slashdot than links to CoolTechZone.
Oxygen disposal! I love it... when you oxidize the hydrogen later, you'd re-absorb the oxygen.
There are great ways to get hydrogen from water. The problem that it takes more energy to go from H2O->2H+O than you get back from the hydrogen's oxidation is a matter of fundamental physics and will never be "solved".
Ok, so we have The Register with an article "Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems". The article consists mostly of unsubstantiated Wikipedia bashing. There is only one sentence which discusses anything the Wikipedia founder actually said -- and that is only in reference to two specific articles, not the project as a whole. Besides, it was a comment on a Wikipedia mailing list.
Slashdot, of course, turns the headline into "Wikipedia founder sees serious quality problems", as if Zonk didn't RTFA. There's a constant dialogue about where Wikipedia is good and where it is bad on Wikipedia mailing lists. Nothing has changed.
The Register's real point in the article is a propaganda one: the concept that "an encyclopedia is only as good as its worst article". Puh-leeze. That's an insult to the intelligence of readers, as if we can't tell when we are reading gold and when we are reading crap. Then again, maybe that's a problem for regular readers of The Register.