Scientific Linux. http://www.scientificlinux.org/ Has the benefit of RHEL: a stable OS environment without some of the headaches of CentOS. If you have money (you probably don't) RHEL is good.
Turing-complete means that it is able to perform all of the functions of a universal Turing machine, not that it is able to solve the Turing halting problem; a Turing-complete language (or system) by definition is unable to solve the halting problem expressed within that system.
Excuse me? RMS's views on free software as well as his opinions of Microsoft are well documented. He's consistently held the position that ideological purity is more important than widespread adoption (I'm not saying that it's a good thing or a bad thing.) He has been hostile to input from the corporate world as well as to others in the community that do not entirely agree with every aspect of his platform. See the 'GNU/Linux', `Open` v. `Free` Source, Lucid Emacs, glibc, 'BSD-style', issues on his website or wikipedia entry for the tip of the iceberg.
He supports the adoption of Linux primarily as a means to spread free software. I would argue that he would view any input from outside the FSF on how to increase acceptance of the GPLv3 that would limit (his perception of) freedom to be unacceptable. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing and I'm not that there's anything wrong with that, but to claim that he's as likely to mandate Windows usage as he is to modify the license on ideological grounds is frankly ridiculous.
I'm not saying he'd deliberately try to sabotage the overall success of Linux, just that he just doesn't care about it (or considers it secondary) w/r/t freedom. An argument could be made that the patent and DRM restrictions in the draft could be considered a poison-pill, given that definition, and depending on your POV (I'm not saying that it's a good or bad idea, just that a number of parties have raised serious concerns about them.)
Sure, you can keep using the older version if the community moves to GPLv3. But if you want new features, bug fixes, security patches, etc. from the community, you do have to move to GPLv3. No vendor has the resources necessary to maintain and develop every package that may be GPLv3 licensed in an average distribution. Alternatively, you have two versions of all the software: the GPLv2 branch, packages that are maintained as needed by corporate-funded work and people who prefer v2, and the v3 community, which includes new branches of gcc, et al.
Just because sleazy spokesdroid exaggerates the potential for problems with OSS doesn't mean that there isn't the potential for problems. You're no worse off than you would be if you were running closed source software and the vendor changed the license. However, the greatest thing about open source software (IMHO), the ability to reduce the cost of development and maintenance by sharing resources across common pool of software, is at risk.
As an aside, there are a lot of low UIDs in this thread:).
Consider the purely hypothetical clause: 'This software cannot be used in the production or use of closed-source software.' (Ignore for the sake of argument that GNU hasn't suggested this clause for V3.) No commercial vendor would distribute code under the GPLvN or contribute under that license. Now that we have established that there is a clause that could cause this problem, it is possible to consider a situation where RMS, given his stated opinions on software freedom, would include a poison-pill clause that would sabotage the overall success of Linux for ideological purposes? (I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing; just that it is a possibility.) Even seemingly innoculous license restrictions can cause problems- look at the difficulties that BSD's advertising clause caused.
Yes, it is largely fud w/r/t to the kernel; but there is the issue of the rest of the toolchain (gcc, binutils, etc.) that the GNU foundation owns the copyright on, in addition to the large body of code licensed "GPL v2 or Later." Sure, the commercial vendors could fork or use the BSD tools, but then you have two different branches: the commercial branch, and the branch with code that the community chooses to license under GPL3. If the final GPL3 contains terms that would make impossible to provide to enterprise users, then some vendors could not provide that.
You should be careful with your terminology: PCI-X is not PCI Express (or PCI-E, or PCIe), so referring to PCI-Xpress is wrong and confusing. Architecturally, PCIe is radicially different than PCI (and by extension, PCI-X.)
Pissant little backwater project of the remnants of a failed product getting beat like a red-headed stepchild in their own market gets pissy about an incidental name change of a project in an entirely different (if they were building their business model on name recognition of the product they were working on, they should've trademarked it before investing all that money/time/etc).
Crapflooding sites that have nothing to do with the project and generating a shitstorm in a teapot- and alienating almost everyone who might be interested in their product or services with their juvenile wanking. Damn right they aren't going to sue- they don't have a leg to stand on.
The Oscar-7 Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line November 15th, 1974. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Oscar-7 begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, April 29th, 1981. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
A few points: 1. There is no static. You either get the channel or you don't. 2. Digital cable is not HD. In fact, for the most part, the quality of the signal decreases as Cable TV companies try to squeeze more channels into less bandwidth. 3. DVDs are not HDTV killer apps. they look better, but they're still 480p. True HDTV (1080i or 720p) is amazing, but HD-DVDs are held up for reasons related to the next point. 4. The real problem for studios is that there is no copy protection on HDTV hardware. They are afraid of giving out theatre-quality resolution video, and component outputs (95% of HDTVs) have no built-in copy protection. It's not enough that there is no commercially available HDTV signal recorders. Networks and studios are belatedly seeing HDTV as a chance to integrate copy controls to prevent unauthorized recording, copying, etc. to combat TiVO/Replay. There had been at least one HD-DVD player that was pulled from the market shortly after introduction. As part of this, the industry is moving to Firewire instead of component signals, because Firewire has copy protection built into the hardware, obsoleting 99% of existing hardware. A Firewire -> Component converter is unlikely, because that would defeat copy protection. This pisses the early adopters off and hardware manufacturers are not interested in producing cutting edge new hardware which may be obsolete under the new Firewire standard, and distributors and retailers don't want to be stuck with unsellable new hardware. 5. There are websites that have information about which channels are broadcasting around your area and antenna recommendations.
There's a much more complete archive at: http://bofh.ntk.net,that has the three 'ages' of BOFH. (Usenet, some defunct British networking mag, and The Register.)
They do what they're good at, cutting edge technology run + gun FPSes. People buy them, and enjoy playing and modding them and playing the user-developed modifications, which brings the additional revenue of people buying copies of the software to play the mods. In addition, they indirectly generate people who are experienced with their development architecture, who the licensees or iD can hire.
Better that they license the tech that they develop to people that have innovative ideas and provide the tools for hobbyists to develop for the platform than try to develop more complex games that would require many more artists and developers that would require iD to migrate from their traditional small company model.
The truth is revealed!
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 2, Funny
hhhrm...
bash# nmap slashdot.org
Starting nmap V. 2.54BETA29 (www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Interesting ports on slashdot.org (64.28.67.150):
(The 1542 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port State Service
21/tcp open ftp
22/tcp open ssh
80/tcp open httpd
21345/tcp open SliMP3d
Remote operating system guess: Linux 2.2.13
Maybe you might want to put it on another box.:)I know it's already running Linux and Perl, but I don't think reuse is a good idea in this case.
Yep. 1X CD-ROM = 150 KB/s. 150*60 =9000 680000/9000 = 75.56X. (Of course, I'm not taking into account 1024 v 1000, but that's trivial, for this application.) Anything above ~48X can cause physical damage to CDs. (FWIW, 76x is only about 12MB/S, well within ATA66.) Did anyone else notice the change on apple.com's webpage from "Blazingly fast Firewire connection capable of downloading an entire CD in a minute" to "Blazingly fast Firewire connection capable of downloading an entire CD in just 10 seconds."?
Hey, _I'm_ not suggesting that the iPod would be the best portable firewire drive on the market, timothy did. I didn't agree with timothy, so I posted my reply. Then, people assumed that I was talking about the mp3 player, and commented on it. I replied- you seem to be unable to recognize that this thread has evolved into TWO issues:
1. Archos' portable firewire HD.
2. Archos' portable mp3 player.
my first post was about PORTABLE FIREWIRE HARD DRIVES. NOTHING MORE. NOTHING LESS. People saw Archos, assumed I was talking about an MP3 player, responded in kind. I clarified, and then said what I thought about the Archos.
it certainly doesn't look bad when it's in my pocket
You can fit that thing in your pocket?! I'm sorry, I tried doing that at a trade show, it doesn't work. Then again, maybe your rear is larger than mine.
Hmm, personal attack! My ass is not large, by any standard, and hell, it's almost svelte by US standards. Ever hear of cargo pants? Jacket pocket? Hell, it even fit in my front pants pocket, when wearing slacks. I'm still trying to factor in where the size of my ass fits in to this whole equasion. Ah well, whatever makes you feel better about yourself.
Of course, it also isn't based around a 3.5" mechanism, which, and this point may have dawned on you, is why it's so much more expensive.
Have I ever said that it was based on a 3.5"? Don't let others ignorance confuse your view of my comments.
It's not $-150 uglier than the iPod, or $-150 bigger.
How about this: Call Toshiba and tell them to drop the price on their drive. C'mon, go ahead. "It's too expensive! I don't care if it's smaller than anything else on the market! It's too expensive!" Expect to be written up as a crank and an idiot at the same time.
What I said was that it wasn't $150 slimmer or $150 prettier than the archos mp3 player, not that the parts that it contains are less expensive, or that Apple should charge less.
For what it's worth: On pricewatch, you can get a 6 GB Toshiba 8.5 MM, 2.5" form factor drive for $75. And that's RETAIL. That still gives you 11+ mm to fit all your circutry into to match the iPod. Yes, I know that this isn't the same drive, and it uses the new Toshiba tech. It is merely an example of a general price range on a 6 GB HD. As an aside, you're right, if I called Toshiba and asked them to lower their price on the drive, I'd be a lunatic. But if Apple called them up and said, "Hey, we want to buy 50,000 ultraslim hard drives. We already use you as a source for notebook HDs. Give us a discount!", Toshiba would.
(Note to flamers: I'm not saying that Apple paid under $XX for the hard drive for this unit, and I'm not saying that Apple got the drives from Toshiba below cost, but that they should be able to get a discounted rate of some sort as a bulk puchaser)
As someone has already informed you, the Archos MP3 player uses a USB connection and is substantially larger.
Again, confusing the issue. Timothy was talking about portable firewire hard drives, I pointed one out. I'm familiar with the Archos, and USB, shockingly enough. I don't consider the decreased size and increase in transfer speed of great enough utility to me to warrant an additional $150
Of course, you're probably one of those people who thinks Linux is "free". The joy of trying to reason with children who've never had to work a day in their life, and as a result have no idea how precious a commodity time really is.
Wow, out of left field, flamebait!
1. I never said the iPod was overpriced, merely that I didn't assign it the same value as what it was priced, relative to the competition.
2. What does the cost of Linux have to do with anything?
3. Nice condescending tone. I work. And I value my time.
If this was $100 cheaper, I'd buy it now. While it's a great piece of hardware, It's not at my price point, relative to the alternatives. $400 is half of the price of an iMac! I'd feel nervous jogging with that in my pocket.
P.S. You really can't call it reasoning with someone if you don't understand what they're saying, are unable to complete a paragraph without a personal insult, confuse the issue, make invalid assumptions about the person you're 'reasoning' with's POV, personally insult the correspondant, and repeat the same, confused arguments repeatedly.
Did you check the link? I was talking about Archos' Firewire drive, not their MP3 player, as an alternative to the iPod and timothy's comment that the ipod looked like the best option for a portable firewire HD. Archos's 20 Gig firewire HD is larger physicially, and doesn't have an mp3 player, but should be faster (I believe higher RPM on the drive), and has 4x storage capacity for $100 less.
I don't mind the looks of the Archos mp3 player, and it certainly doesn't look bad when it's in my pocket or bag:). Also can buy a remote control for it. It's not $-150 uglier than the iPod, or $-150 bigger.
The interface on the ipad looks good, but the archos mp3 player isn't bad.
As for the bad audio quality, I've demo'ed the Archos with a pair of Grado SR-60s. (high quality, limited manuf., better than the Sennheiser's and higher end Grados for portable use because they require less power to drive.) I've noticed no distortion with B+T. This was with the latest firmware, so earlier reviews may have been affected by this.
In closing, the iPod is cool, but not +$150 cooler than the archos.
The/back submitter said:
"And with the Firewire interface you can move an entire CD in under a minute"
I was being somewhat pedantic when I thought what it should've said was 'you can move a CD's worth of data from your hard drive to the iPod in under a minute'. FWIW, the drive's max transfer rate is 12 MB/s (see first story's comments)
I mentioned the Archos HD because Timothy said:
" That means (at least without further hacking) it can't be used as a transfer medium between the G3 and work and the iMac kept hidden in your darkest closet, which is sort of a shame considering that it has all the right things built in to be even better than the several portable firewire drives on the market."
Other than being smaller and having a built-in, I thought that the Archos was a better option for portable firewire hard drives (higher RPM, cheaper).
Did you follow the link? Did you notice that I didn't link to the Archos MP3 player, but the Archos Firewire HD? Did you notice I said "Portable Firewire HD", not "Portable Firewire HD And MP3 player"?
Portable firewire HD, sans music player, but:
http://www.archos.com/us/products/product_500047 .h tml
Archos has a 20 GB model, it is larger, but I would assume it would be faster- (I can't see having a 7200 RPM drive on an mp3 player, but IMBR), and $100 cheaper (search the net for a better price) for 2x the storage.
Also, it IS five gigabytes, unless apple.com's lying:
http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html
I would assume that the person who submitted the/. meant that you could move 70 minutes of mp3s in under a minute, because to read 680 meg from a CD would require a read spead of 76x.
Right, but it was used in the movie, so it was being taken from the soundtrack, rather than being used to promote a product. (Yeah, you can argue that movies are product, etc.)
IBM/Lotus had a commercial that used "Superman", which REM did, but REM didn't write it, so another artist could cover it.
Other than that, I don't know of any REM being used to sell products. OTOH, IANARE (REM Expert).
About a year and a half ago, a company tried selling these rebadged thru Comp USA as "Websurfer Pros". At first, they didn't make you sign an activation contract, so you could get them for $50 out the door, for a 233 with 32 and and Disk on chip.
A friend of mine had one of these- it's an OK piece of hardware, but not anything to write home about, when you can pick up complete PPro systems for under $100, which have none of the space and configuration limitations of that slimline formfactor (limited expansion slots, small case, etc). As a set-top, it's underpowered, for my taste. The IR keyboard (at least the one that came with the WSP) is nice, tho. TVout is decent, also. The WSP also did not have the built-in ethernet.
Note that you also can't swap out the CPUs on these beyond the Cyrix MediaGX processor (it has on cpu video and sound).
Slashdot Mirror
Scientific Linux. http://www.scientificlinux.org/ Has the benefit of RHEL: a stable OS environment without some of the headaches of CentOS. If you have money (you probably don't) RHEL is good.
Turing-complete means that it is able to perform all of the functions of a universal Turing machine, not that it is able to solve the Turing halting problem; a Turing-complete language (or system) by definition is unable to solve the halting problem expressed within that system.
Mea culpa. I should have been more specific; I was referring to BSD libc, make, tar, etc.
Excuse me? RMS's views on free software as well as his opinions of Microsoft are well documented. He's consistently held the position that ideological purity is more important than widespread adoption (I'm not saying that it's a good thing or a bad thing.) He has been hostile to input from the corporate world as well as to others in the community that do not entirely agree with every aspect of his platform. See the 'GNU/Linux', `Open` v. `Free` Source, Lucid Emacs, glibc, 'BSD-style', issues on his website or wikipedia entry for the tip of the iceberg.
He supports the adoption of Linux primarily as a means to spread free software. I would argue that he would view any input from outside the FSF on how to increase acceptance of the GPLv3 that would limit (his perception of) freedom to be unacceptable. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing and I'm not that there's anything wrong with that, but to claim that he's as likely to mandate Windows usage as he is to modify the license on ideological grounds is frankly ridiculous.
I'm not saying he'd deliberately try to sabotage the overall success of Linux, just that he just doesn't care about it (or considers it secondary) w/r/t freedom. An argument could be made that the patent and DRM restrictions in the draft could be considered a poison-pill, given that definition, and depending on your POV (I'm not saying that it's a good or bad idea, just that a number of parties have raised serious concerns about them.)
Sure, you can keep using the older version if the community moves to GPLv3. But if you want new features, bug fixes, security patches, etc. from the community, you do have to move to GPLv3. No vendor has the resources necessary to maintain and develop every package that may be GPLv3 licensed in an average distribution. Alternatively, you have two versions of all the software: the GPLv2 branch, packages that are maintained as needed by corporate-funded work and people who prefer v2, and the v3 community, which includes new branches of gcc, et al.
:).
Just because sleazy spokesdroid exaggerates the potential for problems with OSS doesn't mean that there isn't the potential for problems. You're no worse off than you would be if you were running closed source software and the vendor changed the license. However, the greatest thing about open source software (IMHO), the ability to reduce the cost of development and maintenance by sharing resources across common pool of software, is at risk.
As an aside, there are a lot of low UIDs in this thread
Consider the purely hypothetical clause: 'This software cannot be used in the production or use of closed-source software.' (Ignore for the sake of argument that GNU hasn't suggested this clause for V3.) No commercial vendor would distribute code under the GPLvN or contribute under that license. Now that we have established that there is a clause that could cause this problem, it is possible to consider a situation where RMS, given his stated opinions on software freedom, would include a poison-pill clause that would sabotage the overall success of Linux for ideological purposes? (I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing; just that it is a possibility.) Even seemingly innoculous license restrictions can cause problems- look at the difficulties that BSD's advertising clause caused.
Yes, it is largely fud w/r/t to the kernel; but there is the issue of the rest of the toolchain (gcc, binutils, etc.) that the GNU foundation owns the copyright on, in addition to the large body of code licensed "GPL v2 or Later." Sure, the commercial vendors could fork or use the BSD tools, but then you have two different branches: the commercial branch, and the branch with code that the community chooses to license under GPL3. If the final GPL3 contains terms that would make impossible to provide to enterprise users, then some vendors could not provide that.
Don't forget that Henry Winkler was the first to jump the shark....
i gin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark#Or
*ayyyyy*
You should be careful with your terminology: PCI-X is not PCI Express (or PCI-E, or PCIe), so referring to PCI-Xpress is wrong and confusing. Architecturally, PCIe is radicially different than PCI (and by extension, PCI-X.)
The first rule of a predator is to go after the weak and the infirm.
Ugh no.
m iles_archive.html#107570569615970184 . In short, the myth of agricultural bans on DDT preventing the public health use of DDT is demonstrably false.
See: http://kenethmiles.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_keneth
Pissant little backwater project of the remnants of a failed product getting beat like a red-headed stepchild in their own market gets pissy about an incidental name change of a project in an entirely different (if they were building their business model on name recognition of the product they were working on, they should've trademarked it before investing all that money/time/etc).
Crapflooding sites that have nothing to do with the project and generating a shitstorm in a teapot- and alienating almost everyone who might be interested in their product or services with their juvenile wanking. Damn right they aren't going to sue- they don't have a leg to stand on.
The Oscar-7 Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line November 15th, 1974. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Oscar-7 begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, April 29th, 1981. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
... And Oscar-7 fights back.
A few points:
1. There is no static. You either get the channel or you don't.
2. Digital cable is not HD. In fact, for the most part, the quality of the signal decreases as Cable TV companies try to squeeze more channels into less bandwidth.
3. DVDs are not HDTV killer apps. they look better, but they're still 480p. True HDTV (1080i or 720p) is amazing, but HD-DVDs are held up for reasons related to the next point.
4. The real problem for studios is that there is no copy protection on HDTV hardware. They are afraid of giving out theatre-quality resolution video, and component outputs (95% of HDTVs) have no built-in copy protection. It's not enough that there is no commercially available HDTV signal recorders. Networks and studios are belatedly seeing HDTV as a chance to integrate copy controls to prevent unauthorized recording, copying, etc. to combat TiVO/Replay. There had been at least one HD-DVD player that was pulled from the market shortly after introduction. As part of this, the industry is moving to Firewire instead of component signals, because Firewire has copy protection built into the hardware, obsoleting 99% of existing hardware. A Firewire -> Component converter is unlikely, because that would defeat copy protection. This pisses the early adopters off and hardware manufacturers are not interested in producing cutting edge new hardware which may be obsolete under the new Firewire standard, and distributors and retailers don't want to be stuck with unsellable new hardware.
5. There are websites that have information about which channels are broadcasting around your area and antenna recommendations.
There's a much more complete archive at: http://bofh.ntk.net ,that has the three 'ages' of BOFH. (Usenet, some defunct British networking mag, and The Register.)
They do what they're good at, cutting edge technology run + gun FPSes. People buy them, and enjoy playing and modding them and playing the user-developed modifications, which brings the additional revenue of people buying copies of the software to play the mods. In addition, they indirectly generate people who are experienced with their development architecture, who the licensees or iD can hire.
Better that they license the tech that they develop to people that have innovative ideas and provide the tools for hobbyists to develop for the platform than try to develop more complex games that would require many more artists and developers that would require iD to migrate from their traditional small company model.
hhhrm...
:)I know it's already running Linux and Perl, but I don't think reuse is a good idea in this case.
bash# nmap slashdot.org
Starting nmap V. 2.54BETA29 (www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Interesting ports on slashdot.org (64.28.67.150):
(The 1542 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port State Service
21/tcp open ftp
22/tcp open ssh
80/tcp open httpd
21345/tcp open SliMP3d
Remote operating system guess: Linux 2.2.13
Maybe you might want to put it on another box.
Yep. 1X CD-ROM = 150 KB/s. 150*60 =9000 680000/9000 = 75.56X. (Of course, I'm not taking into account 1024 v 1000, but that's trivial, for this application.) Anything above ~48X can cause physical damage to CDs. (FWIW, 76x is only about 12MB/S, well within ATA66.) Did anyone else notice the change on apple.com's webpage from "Blazingly fast Firewire connection capable of downloading an entire CD in a minute" to "Blazingly fast Firewire connection capable of downloading an entire CD in just 10 seconds."?
Hey, _I'm_ not suggesting that the iPod would be the best portable firewire drive on the market, timothy did. I didn't agree with timothy, so I posted my reply. Then, people assumed that I was talking about the mp3 player, and commented on it. I replied- you seem to be unable to recognize that this thread has evolved into TWO issues:
1. Archos' portable firewire HD.
2. Archos' portable mp3 player.
my first post was about PORTABLE FIREWIRE HARD DRIVES. NOTHING MORE. NOTHING LESS. People saw Archos, assumed I was talking about an MP3 player, responded in kind. I clarified, and then said what I thought about the Archos.
it certainly doesn't look bad when it's in my pocket
You can fit that thing in your pocket?! I'm sorry, I tried doing that at a trade show, it doesn't work. Then again, maybe your rear is larger than mine.
Hmm, personal attack! My ass is not large, by any standard, and hell, it's almost svelte by US standards. Ever hear of cargo pants? Jacket pocket? Hell, it even fit in my front pants pocket, when wearing slacks. I'm still trying to factor in where the size of my ass fits in to this whole equasion. Ah well, whatever makes you feel better about yourself.
Of course, it also isn't based around a 3.5" mechanism, which, and this point may have dawned on you, is why it's so much more expensive.
Have I ever said that it was based on a 3.5"? Don't let others ignorance confuse your view of my comments.
It's not $-150 uglier than the iPod, or $-150 bigger.
How about this: Call Toshiba and tell them to drop the price on their drive. C'mon, go ahead. "It's too expensive! I don't care if it's smaller than anything else on the market! It's too expensive!" Expect to be written up as a crank and an idiot at the same time.
What I said was that it wasn't $150 slimmer or $150 prettier than the archos mp3 player, not that the parts that it contains are less expensive, or that Apple should charge less.
For what it's worth: On pricewatch, you can get a 6 GB Toshiba 8.5 MM, 2.5" form factor drive for $75. And that's RETAIL. That still gives you 11+ mm to fit all your circutry into to match the iPod. Yes, I know that this isn't the same drive, and it uses the new Toshiba tech. It is merely an example of a general price range on a 6 GB HD. As an aside, you're right, if I called Toshiba and asked them to lower their price on the drive, I'd be a lunatic. But if Apple called them up and said, "Hey, we want to buy 50,000 ultraslim hard drives. We already use you as a source for notebook HDs. Give us a discount!", Toshiba would.
(Note to flamers: I'm not saying that Apple paid under $XX for the hard drive for this unit, and I'm not saying that Apple got the drives from Toshiba below cost, but that they should be able to get a discounted rate of some sort as a bulk puchaser)
As someone has already informed you, the Archos MP3 player uses a USB connection and is substantially larger.
Again, confusing the issue. Timothy was talking about portable firewire hard drives, I pointed one out. I'm familiar with the Archos, and USB, shockingly enough. I don't consider the decreased size and increase in transfer speed of great enough utility to me to warrant an additional $150
Of course, you're probably one of those people who thinks Linux is "free". The joy of trying to reason with children who've never had to work a day in their life, and as a result have no idea how precious a commodity time really is.
Wow, out of left field, flamebait!
1. I never said the iPod was overpriced, merely that I didn't assign it the same value as what it was priced, relative to the competition.
2. What does the cost of Linux have to do with anything?
3. Nice condescending tone. I work. And I value my time.
If this was $100 cheaper, I'd buy it now. While it's a great piece of hardware, It's not at my price point, relative to the alternatives.
$400 is half of the price of an iMac! I'd feel nervous jogging with that in my pocket.
P.S. You really can't call it reasoning with someone if you don't understand what they're saying, are unable to complete a paragraph without a personal insult, confuse the issue, make invalid assumptions about the person you're 'reasoning' with's POV, personally insult the correspondant, and repeat the same, confused arguments repeatedly.
Did you check the link? I was talking about Archos' Firewire drive, not their MP3 player, as an alternative to the iPod and timothy's comment that the ipod looked like the best option for a portable firewire HD. Archos's 20 Gig firewire HD is larger physicially, and doesn't have an mp3 player, but should be faster (I believe higher RPM on the drive), and has 4x storage capacity for $100 less.
:). Also can buy a remote control for it. It's not $-150 uglier than the iPod, or $-150 bigger.
I don't mind the looks of the Archos mp3 player, and it certainly doesn't look bad when it's in my pocket or bag
The interface on the ipad looks good, but the archos mp3 player isn't bad.
As for the bad audio quality, I've demo'ed the Archos with a pair of Grado SR-60s. (high quality, limited manuf., better than the Sennheiser's and higher end Grados for portable use because they require less power to drive.) I've noticed no distortion with B+T. This was with the latest firmware, so earlier reviews may have been affected by this.
In closing, the iPod is cool, but not +$150 cooler than the archos.
The /back submitter said:
"And with the Firewire interface you can move an entire CD in under a minute"
I was being somewhat pedantic when I thought what it should've said was 'you can move a CD's worth of data from your hard drive to the iPod in under a minute'. FWIW, the drive's max transfer rate is 12 MB/s (see first story's comments)
I mentioned the Archos HD because Timothy said:
" That means (at least without further hacking) it can't be used as a transfer medium between the G3 and work and the iMac kept hidden in your darkest closet, which is sort of a shame considering that it has all the right things built in to be even better than the several portable firewire drives on the market."
Other than being smaller and having a built-in, I thought that the Archos was a better option for portable firewire hard drives (higher RPM, cheaper).
Did you follow the link? Did you notice that I didn't link to the Archos MP3 player, but the Archos Firewire HD? Did you notice I said "Portable Firewire HD", not "Portable Firewire HD And MP3 player"?
Portable firewire HD, sans music player, but:7 .h tml
/. meant that you could move 70 minutes of mp3s in under a minute, because to read 680 meg from a CD would require a read spead of 76x.
http://www.archos.com/us/products/product_50004
Archos has a 20 GB model, it is larger, but I would assume it would be faster- (I can't see having a 7200 RPM drive on an mp3 player, but IMBR), and $100 cheaper (search the net for a better price) for 2x the storage.
Also, it IS five gigabytes, unless apple.com's lying:
http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html
I would assume that the person who submitted the
Right, but it was used in the movie, so it was being taken from the soundtrack, rather than being used to promote a product. (Yeah, you can argue that movies are product, etc.)
IBM/Lotus had a commercial that used "Superman", which REM did, but REM didn't write it, so another artist could cover it.
Other than that, I don't know of any REM being used to sell products. OTOH, IANARE (REM Expert).
About a year and a half ago, a company tried selling these rebadged thru Comp USA as "Websurfer Pros". At first, they didn't make you sign an activation contract, so you could get them for $50 out the door, for a 233 with 32 and and Disk on chip.
See: http://www.linux-hacker.net/websurfer/ws.html
A friend of mine had one of these- it's an OK piece of hardware, but not anything to write home about, when you can pick up complete PPro systems for under $100, which have none of the space and configuration limitations of that slimline formfactor (limited expansion slots, small case, etc). As a set-top, it's underpowered, for my taste. The IR keyboard (at least the one that came with the WSP) is nice, tho. TVout is decent, also. The WSP also did not have the built-in ethernet.
Note that you also can't swap out the CPUs on these beyond the Cyrix MediaGX processor (it has on cpu video and sound).