Private companies aim at maximizing their revenues in the short and middle term range and are more efficient in that timeframe. Government is better for activities whose return on investment can only be expected in the long term range.
Sorry to enter your RDF, but there are other players than iPods on the market, some are better, most are worse. Why iPods are so popular is more due to the formidable Apple marketing machine and hype than their sheer qualities.
What you call "integrated experience" (as in Windows XP:) I would call lock-in. Music bought on iTunes can only be played at full quality on iPods, so when it will be time to buy another player, you will have too buy it from Apple in order to listen (in full quality) to the music you bought.
I had a local shop ordering one of the first PMP300. When I came to pick it up, the guys in the shop were like in a frenzy and asked me whether I could "demonstrate" them this new tiny player. It took me an hour to leave the shop, but they gave me some goodies with it. Like other early adopters mentionned, mine is still perfectly working, despite about 1'000 kilometers I have jogged with it, through heat and snow. I have replaced it later with a larger Rio/Nike Psa Play that I am still using for jogging now.
So this is a sad day, for Rio was a very innovative company, unfortunately without the marketing war machine that an Apple can use to promote its products.
Of course all this was many years before Apple "invented" the portable music player.
Hey, watch out, no one dares characterize the iPod UI with other words than "slick", "excellent" or "superior".
Failure to comply will expose you to the risk of being labelled as a "iRiver/Rio/Dell/Creative employee" or "envious that can not afford an iPod (yet)".
Actually, I have been long considering purchasing a portable player (to complement my old RIO PMP300 that I use only for jogging) and found using my PocketPC instead is a very viable alternative.
Of course, with the current affordable memory capacities of about 1GB, I have to synchronize my collection about once a week (replacing tunes I have already listened to with fresh ones), but with the increasing capacities and decreasing prices, the time when I will have most of my collection "on-line" is not too far.
As advantages of using my PDA, I do not have to carry two devices (I always have my PocketPC with me) and I can choose (or even develop my own) the player/navigation/synchronisation applications I use.
> Switzerland became ruled by a duly appointed/elected junta in WWII
This is of course completely wrong, all democratic rights remained active in Switzerland during WWII. Parlamentary elections were held in 1939, 1943 and 1947 as planned and 11 popular votations (also called referendum, the ultimate democratic expresssion, that the USA still does not have at the federal level) were held between 1939 and 1945.
1999 : Diamond Multimedia releases the 1st MP3 player. Sued by the recording industry, it wins against in the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that ruled the Rio PMP300 player is not a "digital recording device," as defined by the Audio Home Recording Act
I have a Rio PMP300 (yes the first portable MP3 player on the market) and have been using it for jogging about 40 km/week since January 1999, enduring heat, rain, freeze and sweat.
It has no moving parts, hence its still perfect condition. It is smaller and weights less than an iPod and uses a normal AA (replaceable) battery.
I do not think that a HD based player would have survived more than a year with the abuse my Rio has gone through.
You haven't presented any fact, just bold statements and the usual Apple hype.
Sorry to disrupt your RDF, but the iPod, although a very good product, only has a minority of the marketshare and no presence in the lower (light, RAM only) and higher (networked jukebox) segments. These are facts.
Sorry to bust your bubble, but according to http://www.macnn.com/news/24855 the iPod has 8% to 10% of the portable music player marketshare. Even the Apple claimed 25% would make it far from "no debate about portable MP3 players any more".
In many countries, signed faxes are recognized as legally binding, while emails are not. So it still is the only way to rapidly exchange contractual documents, until digitally signed documents are universally recognized by the law.
It always surprises me on/. to read so many geeks afraid by e-voting. Should it not be the opposite ?
Banks trust electronic payments and ATM to be accurate to the last cent. Why could e-voting not also be that accurate ?
I am a Swiss citizen and we are used to vote between 4 and 8 times a year. The attendance rates are usually low, due to the high frequency of voting.
Switzerland has already made some small scale trials and is considering applying e-voting (via Internet, SMS) at larger (state, federal) levels.
The expected benefits are: - Higher turnrate (especially by young voters) - Reduced costs (less people needed to man physical voting booth)
Tha last benefit is important, because it would allow more voting sessions at the same cost, so more democracy.
Of course, the swiss people are used to voting and are confident that the authorities will handle the voting process in a fair way. I do not see that the US citizens have such confidence, so maybe the USA will be ready for e-voting by the next century.
We were looking for something to do for the saturday night.
As an almost automatical reflex, I started googling to find sites that would list local events. Half an hour later, struggling with 404s and months old pages, I just had a listing of locally playing movies and museums.
Meanwhile, my wife had just gone through the week-end supplement of our local newspaper and had tons of relevant and uptodate suggestions.
Needless to say that I was shocked to realize that the dead-tree support could still be more efficient than the electronic one !
> It's not the same thing. As far as I know, Harry Potter came out on the same day worldwide. It's just that the translated versions won't be out for a while, which is quite reasonable since translating 700+ pages is not something you can do over a weekend.
This "just" means that billions of people will have to wait several months so that the few hundred millions of english reading people get the plot at the same time.
I figure the book was already finished being written months ago, but it publication was delayed to get enough copies printed for a worldwide release. This time could have been used to translate it in other languages.
Unfortunately, the risk of leaks was considered more important than having billions of readers not having to wait several additional months. To me, this is an even larger leak towards those non english reader....
Apple has been lagging behind the PCs for years in the performance field. This made Apple's user base frustrated, angry and/or anxious.
With the G5, Apple seems to be at an equivalent performance level with the PCs. With equivalent, I mean comparable, that is not extraordinarily faster or slower.
The message from these benchmarks are clearly targetet at their user base to turn their frustration / anxiety to exhilaration.
The Mac faithfuls will believe the message, even if the supporting evidence seems rather dubious, and deflect any rebuttal as coming from jalous / incompetents / trolls.
The rest of the crowd will not take Apple's words for granted and will wait for independant benchmarks when the G5 will be available, showing (my guess) that it is a very good CPU indeed, but certainly not significantly faster or slower than the best x86 offerings.
But Apple does not really care for the rest of the crowd. They passed the message to their base, it has strengthend their confidence and that is what mattered.
I presume the author refers to the fact that NT 3.5 was the first (and only ?) MS OS to receive the C2 level security certification, although as a stand-alone (non connected) machine.
I presume the author refers to the fact that NT 3.5 was the first MS OS that received the security C2 certification level (although as a stand-alone, non connected station).
I bought a Dell PII 266 MHz about 6 years ago (64 Mb RAM, 6Gb HD). I have since upgraded the RAM to 128 Mb, the HD to 20Gb and the original 2D Gfx card to a 3D capable one. It runs Windows XP/ Office XP flawlessly, although not like a racing horse. It runs most of the recent games, with Gfx options set to a minimum.
I predict its end of life as a gaming machine in about 2 years, as the motherboard does not have an AGP slot, the PCI 3dfx card is not supported anymore and all new Gfx cards require AGP.
Of course, it was the most powerful configuration that could be bought then, but it shows that quality made PC can last as long as Macs.
The company I work for is currently preparing a bid for pilot project that will allow the citizens of the largest Swiss state to vote via Internet and mobile phone, along with the usual paper method.
The main driver of the project is to increase turnover, especially for young citizen that are supposed to be more prone to vote via these "new" technologies.
Our (swiss) laws already incorporate specific requirements regarding e-Voting, including the ability to audit the process, the security of the whole system and the secrecy of the votes.
Swiss citizens usually have to vote or elect several times a year and the voting process is considered as mature, every step being supervised by committees containing members of different parties/lobbying groups.
The voting registers are held at the local level, and are continuously updated every time a citizen moves in or out of the city, reaches the voting age or dies, and are crosschecked by the higher authority. Voting material and voting cards are automatically sent several weeks in advance to the possible voters, they do not have to register themselves or require anything. So by design, we have no dead people voting or minorities prevented to vote because they did not register themselves due to lack of information.
e-Voting is considered here as a good thing, as it allows to streamline the counting process and should increase (our low) turnover by not requiring voters to physically present themselves to the voting booth (in some states, the majority of voters already use the generalized absentee (snail mail) voting process).
I find it quite surprising that a large majority of the US "geeks" has such a mistrust in the electronic vote in particular, and the ability of their authorities to conduct a fair and lawful election in general. Aren't the USA supposed to be the most democratic country in this world ?
Slashdot Mirror
The index computation does not seem to take into account the taxes (for the local **AA) that some countries are levying on MP3 players.
But, does it run Rockbox ?
Private companies aim at maximizing their revenues in the short and middle term range and are more efficient in that timeframe. Government is better for activities whose return on investment can only be expected in the long term range.
Sorry to enter your RDF, but there are other players than iPods on the market, some are better, most are worse. Why iPods are so popular is more due to the formidable Apple marketing machine and hype than their sheer qualities.
:) I would call lock-in. Music bought on iTunes can only be played at full quality on iPods, so when it will be time to buy another player, you will have too buy it from Apple in order to listen (in full quality) to the music you bought.
What you call "integrated experience" (as in Windows XP
I had a local shop ordering one of the first PMP300. When I came to pick it up, the guys in the shop were like in a frenzy and asked me whether I could "demonstrate" them this new tiny player. It took me an hour to leave the shop, but they gave me some goodies with it.
Like other early adopters mentionned, mine is still perfectly working, despite about 1'000 kilometers I have jogged with it, through heat and snow.
I have replaced it later with a larger Rio/Nike Psa Play that I am still using for jogging now.
So this is a sad day, for Rio was a very innovative company, unfortunately without the marketing war machine that an Apple can use to promote its products.
Of course all this was many years before Apple "invented" the portable music player.
In a free market, a comptetitor would be able to offer a single track, rather than the complete CD, at a more suitable price for me.
However, the copyright laws grant the entertainment industry a (almost) permanent monopoly on their product.
Hence the "core terms of a free market" do not apply here.
Hey, watch out, no one dares characterize the iPod UI with other words than "slick", "excellent" or "superior".
Failure to comply will expose you to the risk of being labelled as a "iRiver/Rio/Dell/Creative employee" or "envious that can not afford an iPod (yet)".
Actually, I have been long considering purchasing a portable player (to complement my old RIO PMP300 that I use only for jogging) and found using my PocketPC instead is a very viable alternative.
Of course, with the current affordable memory capacities of about 1GB, I have to synchronize my collection about once a week (replacing tunes I have already listened to with fresh ones), but with the increasing capacities and decreasing prices, the time when I will have most of my collection "on-line" is not too far.
As advantages of using my PDA, I do not have to carry two devices (I always have my PocketPC with me) and I can choose (or even develop my own) the player/navigation/synchronisation applications I use.
Gee, I was wondering what happened to Slashdot, we are already Friday and not a single ipod article this week yet !
I think I liked the SCO articles much more, at least they had some bad guys in.
K.
> Switzerland became ruled by a duly appointed/elected junta in WWII
This is of course completely wrong, all democratic rights remained active in Switzerland during WWII.
Parlamentary elections were held in 1939, 1943 and 1947 as planned and 11 popular votations (also called referendum, the ultimate democratic expresssion, that the USA still does not have at the federal level) were held between 1939 and 1945.
M.
Exactly :
1999 : Diamond Multimedia releases the 1st MP3 player. Sued by the recording industry, it wins against in the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that ruled the Rio PMP300 player is not a "digital recording device," as defined by the Audio Home Recording Act
2001 : Apple ships the 1st iPod and is not sued.
M.
I have a Rio PMP300 (yes the first portable MP3 player on the market) and have been using it for jogging about 40 km/week since January 1999, enduring heat, rain, freeze and sweat.
It has no moving parts, hence its still perfect condition. It is smaller and weights less than an iPod and uses a normal AA (replaceable) battery.
I do not think that a HD based player would have survived more than a year with the abuse my Rio has gone through.
You haven't presented any fact, just bold statements and the usual Apple hype.
Sorry to disrupt your RDF, but the iPod, although a very good product, only has a minority of the marketshare and no presence in the lower (light, RAM only) and higher (networked jukebox) segments. These are facts.
Sorry to bust your bubble, but according to http://www.macnn.com/news/24855 the iPod has 8% to 10% of the portable music player marketshare. Even the Apple claimed 25% would make it far from "no debate about portable MP3 players any more".
In many countries, signed faxes are recognized as legally binding, while emails are not. So it still is the only way to rapidly exchange contractual documents, until digitally signed documents are universally recognized by the law.
K
It always surprises me on /. to read so many geeks afraid by e-voting. Should it not be the opposite ?
:
Banks trust electronic payments and ATM to be accurate to the last cent. Why could e-voting not also be that accurate ?
I am a Swiss citizen and we are used to vote between 4 and 8 times a year. The attendance rates are usually low, due to the high frequency of voting.
Switzerland has already made some small scale trials and is considering applying e-voting (via Internet, SMS) at larger (state, federal) levels.
The expected benefits are
- Higher turnrate (especially by young voters)
- Reduced costs (less people needed to man physical voting booth)
Tha last benefit is important, because it would allow more voting sessions at the same cost, so more democracy.
Of course, the swiss people are used to voting and are confident that the authorities will handle the voting process in a fair way. I do not see that the US citizens have such confidence, so maybe the USA will be ready for e-voting by the next century.
My wife is a technophobe.
We were looking for something to do for the saturday night.
As an almost automatical reflex, I started googling to find sites that would list local events. Half an hour later, struggling with 404s and months old pages, I just had a listing of locally playing movies and museums.
Meanwhile, my wife had just gone through the week-end supplement of our local newspaper and had tons of relevant and uptodate suggestions.
Needless to say that I was shocked to realize that the dead-tree support could still be more efficient than the electronic one !
My 1998 RIO PMP 300 (32 + 32 MB) is now about 10'000 Km old (that is the distance I have jogged with it) and still working flawlessly.
That is provided these networks are solely used by american citizens, which is far from the truth.
This "just" means that billions of people will have to wait several months so that the few hundred millions of english reading people get the plot at the same time.
I figure the book was already finished being written months ago, but it publication was delayed to get enough copies printed for a worldwide release. This time could have been used to translate it in other languages.
Unfortunately, the risk of leaks was considered more important than having billions of readers not having to wait several additional months. To me, this is an even larger leak towards those non english reader....
Apple has been lagging behind the PCs for years in the performance field. This made Apple's user base frustrated, angry and/or anxious.
With the G5, Apple seems to be at an equivalent performance level with the PCs. With equivalent, I mean comparable, that is not extraordinarily faster or slower.
The message from these benchmarks are clearly targetet at their user base to turn their frustration / anxiety to exhilaration.
The Mac faithfuls will believe the message, even if the supporting evidence seems rather dubious, and deflect any rebuttal as coming from jalous / incompetents / trolls.
The rest of the crowd will not take Apple's words for granted and will wait for independant benchmarks when the G5 will be available, showing (my guess) that it is a very good CPU indeed, but certainly not significantly faster or slower than the best x86 offerings.
But Apple does not really care for the rest of the crowd. They passed the message to their base, it has strengthend their confidence and that is what mattered.
I presume the author refers to the fact that NT 3.5 was the first (and only ?) MS OS to receive the C2 level security certification, although as a stand-alone (non connected) machine.
Krouic
I presume the author refers to the fact that NT 3.5 was the first MS OS that received the security C2 certification level (although as a stand-alone, non connected station).
Krouic
I bought a Dell PII 266 MHz about 6 years ago (64 Mb RAM, 6Gb HD). I have since upgraded the RAM to 128 Mb, the HD to 20Gb and the original 2D Gfx card to a 3D capable one. It runs Windows XP/ Office XP flawlessly, although not like a racing horse. It runs most of the recent games, with Gfx options set to a minimum.
I predict its end of life as a gaming machine in about 2 years, as the motherboard does not have an AGP slot, the PCI 3dfx card is not supported anymore and all new Gfx cards require AGP.
Of course, it was the most powerful configuration that could be bought then, but it shows that quality made PC can last as long as Macs.
Krouic
The company I work for is currently preparing a bid for pilot project that will allow the citizens of the largest Swiss state to vote via Internet and mobile phone, along with the usual paper method.
The main driver of the project is to increase turnover, especially for young citizen that are supposed to be more prone to vote via these "new" technologies.
Our (swiss) laws already incorporate specific requirements regarding e-Voting, including the ability to audit the process, the security of the whole system and the secrecy of the votes.
Swiss citizens usually have to vote or elect several times a year and the voting process is considered as mature, every step being supervised by committees containing members of different parties/lobbying groups.
The voting registers are held at the local level, and are continuously updated every time a citizen moves in or out of the city, reaches the voting age or dies, and are crosschecked by the higher authority. Voting material and voting cards are automatically sent several weeks in advance to the possible voters, they do not have to register themselves or require anything. So by design, we have no dead people voting or minorities prevented to vote because they did not register themselves due to lack of information.
e-Voting is considered here as a good thing, as it allows to streamline the counting process and should increase (our low) turnover by not requiring voters to physically present themselves to the voting booth (in some states, the majority of voters already use the generalized absentee (snail mail) voting process).
I find it quite surprising that a large majority of the US "geeks" has such a mistrust in the electronic vote in particular, and the ability of their authorities to conduct a fair and lawful election in general. Aren't the USA supposed to be the most democratic country in this world ?