I've been using a 20GB Rio Karma for the last, oh, four years. For my anniversary this year (13 years, woot!) I got a 6GB Sansa e270. It was a piece of crap. The UI is horrible (wtf, I can choose "Normal" or "High" for volume? there's no volume control beyond that?!), the buttons on the front were awkward, and getting content onto the thing was totally hit or miss... how the heck do you screw up "I am a USB mass storage device." anyway? Overall, this brand new-ish Sansa e270 (last year's model, I think; I picked it up at Costco) was much worse than the old Karma. RIP, Rio.
Returned it, and picked up an 8GB iPod Nano "fatty" after playing with one in the Apple Store. This thing is, in my opinion, significantly better than the Sansa. The hardware has a much better screen, the click-wheel button thingy on the front is much better to use (and hey, I can choose my own volume), and the device's UI is much easier to use.
All of this is subjective, of course, and I'm not allergic to iTunes like some people seem to be, so YMMV.
If you're in the market for a portable music player, you should visit a store or two and actually play with the devices for a bit, see which UI is the smoothest, etc. You'd be doing yourself a disservice by ignoring what's out there. Except the Zune, nobody loves that thing.
Oh, and I was "downgrading" to a smaller player because I'm mostly using it for podcasts and audiobooks while commuting now, so I don't "need" as much space, but I wanted to get away from a device with moving parts.
Hey, Brain Age isn't just math equations, it's got a kick-butt Sudoku implementation as well!
A bunch of us play Mario Kart DS in the office at lunch, using the ad-hoc wireless network; for a number of the players, this was the "killer app" that made them buy the system.
I'm pretty impressed with the DS overall, it's probably the best tech gadget I've ever bought. Still haven't had time to hack around with it (I bought a SuperCard DS a while back to run homebrew apps on the thing) though, unfortunately.
I'm curious about this "premium" Apple charges. Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is $129 US, straight from Apple's website. That's the full version, no dicking around with a half dozen or so "different" versions. Vista Home Basic, which nobody recommends or wants, is $99.95 US from MS. Home Premium, considered the minimal acceptable version of Vista, is $159.95. Vista Ultimate, which contains most of the features of OS X and vice-versa, is $259.95. That's $130 premium for the MS product.
As for the hardware premium, various reviews have pointed out that, for desktops, it's fairly consistent with the likes of HP, IBM, etc. while the laptops are generally a better value.
Having a machine with a nice GUI on top of a proper UNIX is awesome. The only thing I'm going to miss is gaming, but my old XP box was starting to get unusable for that anyway (and hey, I'm getting sick of the copy protection/activation/SecuROM/rootkit BS the publishers are using to kill PC gaming).
I glued mine back on with some Krazy Glue, I didn't even consider returning it in a huge huff or whatever these bozos are doing. I mean, come on people, didn't you pay any attention during arts and crafts at school?
Vista's context switching and/or interrupt handling code must take "too long"; heavy network traffic and multimedia performance starts pushing you into realtime system requirements... if you start dropping packets or whatever, your networking will suffer, but if you start dropping multimedia deadlines, your audio/video playback is going to suffer.
Is Vista trying to do "too much" during each interrupt or during each context switch? Is the scheduling wasting too much time trying to decide what the right thread to run would be?
Back in the BBS heyday, some doofus got mad at me for ending a post with NO CARRIER; his crappy PC terminal emulator software caught that and thought the line had been dropped, so it hung up on him.
The definition for "high speed" and "broadband" in Canada seems to be "faster than 56kbps"; I've seen Rogers and Bell both offering "high speed" services that maxed out at about twice the speed of your typical modem connection. The cost differential between a dial-up account and real broadband (which I'm going to define as "at least 4Mbps down-stream") means these "high-speed lite" connections are aimed squarely at the 100% clueless, who will then learn that "high-speed" isn't worth the money because their connection isn't much better than their old dial-up account.
Jack Thompson's Baby Slicing, Dicing, Cooking, and Chomping Challenge would probably play better on the Wii; you could hold the remote/nunchuck together like jaws and actually "chomp" on the babies in-game.
Crap, I'll probably get sued for taking part in this thread. I hope Canada doesn't extradite people for stupidity...
Curious as to which features are in NTFS but not supported by ZFS; I'm really exited about ZFS and would like to see more comparisons between it and other filesystems (these days I'm mostly familiar with NTFS and HFS+Journal, but was interested in BFS back in the day).
Has anyone got a link to a good NTFS vs. ZFS comparison article?
I'd much rather have a Win32 port of ZFS, or better yet, FUSE. Sure NTFS is better than FAT32, but I don't trust the NTFS-3G source code not to get in a fight with XP's implementation.:-\
We've got the same problem in Canada; today $1 CAD is about $0.96 US, but books (for example) are still priced 33% - 50% higher than the US price. For example, the omnibus edition of His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman (chosen because that's what I'm reading now, and because it was released recently) lists for $21.99 US on amazon.com, or $27.99 CAD on amazon.ca... at a proper exchange rate, it would be $22.81 CAD. When the Canadian dollar goes above $1.00 US again, nobody's going to adjust their pricing, they'll just keep pocketing the extra bucks.
On the plus side, if you can find an e-tailer who ships to Canada without raping you for postage, it's a great time to order stuff from the US.
The white film could just be limestone, depending on where you are; when I lived in Waterloo, Ontario, we had the same thing, but it was just because of the extremely hard water, not because of any sinister pollution.
That said, we've been using Brita filters for ages now, no matter where we've been living.
I'm not willing to "invest" in HD until I'm positive they've got this crap sorted out. How many times now have the early adopters been burned because Hollywood (or whoever) changed the DRM they wanted to foist on HD, or the format changed, etc.?
As I understand it, Japan has a much, much higher per-capita HD installed base. Why do American companies hate the rest of us so much?;-)
An exciting data point that indicates the quality of Visual SourceSafe; Microsoft will not use it in-house. Existing projects use a customized version of Perforce, and new ones are using their own Team Server (which is good... "eating your own dog food" always results in a better product).
I'm still a little surprised that people are stupid enough to buy things from spam. If it wasn't profitable, it would disappear.
I think we're approaching this problem the wrong way. We should execute anyone who buys anything from spam. This would remove these "customers" from the email pool, and also increase the average intelligence of the planet.
The Core system is awesome when you've got the red ring of death though; unplug the hard drive and slap it on a Core, cheaper than buying a whole new system and trying to transfer your data.
Assuming, of course, that your Premium system dies while it's out of warranty.
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I've been using a 20GB Rio Karma for the last, oh, four years. For my anniversary this year (13 years, woot!) I got a 6GB Sansa e270. It was a piece of crap. The UI is horrible (wtf, I can choose "Normal" or "High" for volume? there's no volume control beyond that?!), the buttons on the front were awkward, and getting content onto the thing was totally hit or miss... how the heck do you screw up "I am a USB mass storage device." anyway? Overall, this brand new-ish Sansa e270 (last year's model, I think; I picked it up at Costco) was much worse than the old Karma. RIP, Rio.
Returned it, and picked up an 8GB iPod Nano "fatty" after playing with one in the Apple Store. This thing is, in my opinion, significantly better than the Sansa. The hardware has a much better screen, the click-wheel button thingy on the front is much better to use (and hey, I can choose my own volume), and the device's UI is much easier to use.
All of this is subjective, of course, and I'm not allergic to iTunes like some people seem to be, so YMMV.
If you're in the market for a portable music player, you should visit a store or two and actually play with the devices for a bit, see which UI is the smoothest, etc. You'd be doing yourself a disservice by ignoring what's out there. Except the Zune, nobody loves that thing.
Oh, and I was "downgrading" to a smaller player because I'm mostly using it for podcasts and audiobooks while commuting now, so I don't "need" as much space, but I wanted to get away from a device with moving parts.
Hey, Brain Age isn't just math equations, it's got a kick-butt Sudoku implementation as well!
A bunch of us play Mario Kart DS in the office at lunch, using the ad-hoc wireless network; for a number of the players, this was the "killer app" that made them buy the system.
I'm pretty impressed with the DS overall, it's probably the best tech gadget I've ever bought. Still haven't had time to hack around with it (I bought a SuperCard DS a while back to run homebrew apps on the thing) though, unfortunately.
Porn... the universal language of international diplomacy!
I'm curious about this "premium" Apple charges. Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is $129 US, straight from Apple's website. That's the full version, no dicking around with a half dozen or so "different" versions. Vista Home Basic, which nobody recommends or wants, is $99.95 US from MS. Home Premium, considered the minimal acceptable version of Vista, is $159.95. Vista Ultimate, which contains most of the features of OS X and vice-versa, is $259.95. That's $130 premium for the MS product.
As for the hardware premium, various reviews have pointed out that, for desktops, it's fairly consistent with the likes of HP, IBM, etc. while the laptops are generally a better value.
Having a machine with a nice GUI on top of a proper UNIX is awesome. The only thing I'm going to miss is gaming, but my old XP box was starting to get unusable for that anyway (and hey, I'm getting sick of the copy protection/activation/SecuROM/rootkit BS the publishers are using to kill PC gaming).
I glued mine back on with some Krazy Glue, I didn't even consider returning it in a huge huff or whatever these bozos are doing. I mean, come on people, didn't you pay any attention during arts and crafts at school?
Rogue's in there, what are you talking about?
Tinfoil hat time!
USB causes higher CPU loads. USB is Intel's standard. Intel makes CPUs. Hmm...
Vista's context switching and/or interrupt handling code must take "too long"; heavy network traffic and multimedia performance starts pushing you into realtime system requirements... if you start dropping packets or whatever, your networking will suffer, but if you start dropping multimedia deadlines, your audio/video playback is going to suffer.
Is Vista trying to do "too much" during each interrupt or during each context switch? Is the scheduling wasting too much time trying to decide what the right thread to run would be?
Back in the BBS heyday, some doofus got mad at me for ending a post with NO CARRIER; his crappy PC terminal emulator software caught that and thought the line had been dropped, so it hung up on him.
+++ATH0 used to work sometimes, too.
Good times, good times...
Welcome to the No Fly List, citizen!
The definition for "high speed" and "broadband" in Canada seems to be "faster than 56kbps"; I've seen Rogers and Bell both offering "high speed" services that maxed out at about twice the speed of your typical modem connection. The cost differential between a dial-up account and real broadband (which I'm going to define as "at least 4Mbps down-stream") means these "high-speed lite" connections are aimed squarely at the 100% clueless, who will then learn that "high-speed" isn't worth the money because their connection isn't much better than their old dial-up account.
Jack Thompson's Baby Slicing, Dicing, Cooking, and Chomping Challenge would probably play better on the Wii; you could hold the remote/nunchuck together like jaws and actually "chomp" on the babies in-game.
Crap, I'll probably get sued for taking part in this thread. I hope Canada doesn't extradite people for stupidity...
Curious as to which features are in NTFS but not supported by ZFS; I'm really exited about ZFS and would like to see more comparisons between it and other filesystems (these days I'm mostly familiar with NTFS and HFS+Journal, but was interested in BFS back in the day).
Has anyone got a link to a good NTFS vs. ZFS comparison article?
I'd much rather have a Win32 port of ZFS, or better yet, FUSE. Sure NTFS is better than FAT32, but I don't trust the NTFS-3G source code not to get in a fight with XP's implementation. :-\
We've got the same problem in Canada; today $1 CAD is about $0.96 US, but books (for example) are still priced 33% - 50% higher than the US price. For example, the omnibus edition of His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman (chosen because that's what I'm reading now, and because it was released recently) lists for $21.99 US on amazon.com, or $27.99 CAD on amazon.ca... at a proper exchange rate, it would be $22.81 CAD. When the Canadian dollar goes above $1.00 US again, nobody's going to adjust their pricing, they'll just keep pocketing the extra bucks.
On the plus side, if you can find an e-tailer who ships to Canada without raping you for postage, it's a great time to order stuff from the US.
AW CRAP, it's already taking over my brain. I totally saw "... but Red Bull vs. Blue ..." there.
The white film could just be limestone, depending on where you are; when I lived in Waterloo, Ontario, we had the same thing, but it was just because of the extremely hard water, not because of any sinister pollution.
That said, we've been using Brita filters for ages now, no matter where we've been living.
Welcome to the mysterious and secret No Fly List, citizen!
I'm not willing to "invest" in HD until I'm positive they've got this crap sorted out. How many times now have the early adopters been burned because Hollywood (or whoever) changed the DRM they wanted to foist on HD, or the format changed, etc.?
;-)
As I understand it, Japan has a much, much higher per-capita HD installed base. Why do American companies hate the rest of us so much?
I'll buy as soon as they support any of the platforms I'm currently interested in (DS, Wii, and/or Mac).
An exciting data point that indicates the quality of Visual SourceSafe; Microsoft will not use it in-house. Existing projects use a customized version of Perforce, and new ones are using their own Team Server (which is good... "eating your own dog food" always results in a better product).
Be sure to bring your Zunes so you can squirt music all over the place.
Unfortunately, nobody was interested in downloading the Zunesquirt.
I'm still a little surprised that people are stupid enough to buy things from spam. If it wasn't profitable, it would disappear.
I think we're approaching this problem the wrong way. We should execute anyone who buys anything from spam. This would remove these "customers" from the email pool, and also increase the average intelligence of the planet.
The Core system is awesome when you've got the red ring of death though; unplug the hard drive and slap it on a Core, cheaper than buying a whole new system and trying to transfer your data.
Assuming, of course, that your Premium system dies while it's out of warranty.