"The Z-95 has changed throughout the years, eventually evolving into the T-65 Incom X-wing starfighter."
But that doesn't mean that there weren't similar vehicles being developed by Incom during the Clone Wars. The ARC-170 isn't a one man fighter, like the Z-95 and the T-65, it's a three man fighter. There is an eighteen year gap between ROTS (Ep3) and ANH (Ep4) and that a lot can happen in that time frame. The X-Wings are considered to be outdated by the time of ANH.
1. Yes, that "robot thing" is General Grievous and he is the one that was in the Clone Wars cartoons.
2. Don't know what the details are yet. The name of the Emperor from ROTJ is Palpatine. I wouldn't be surprised if one is a clone of the other or vice versa.
Actually, it's simply much easier to write a piece of spyware/adware for an unprotected OS with tons of exploitable flaws than it is for an OS that is more secure initially.
Most of the spyware writers are not hackers, they are hacks and couldn't write a piece of code that would work under the *NIX flavors out there because they are inherently safer operating systems to begin with.
Of course, running MS crap on these systems has a tendency to allow those OS's to be compromised with alarming frequency too.
"A twisted melding of flesh and metal, General Grievous' body is a deadly weapon forged by the cutting edge developers of the Confederacy. Within the hardened carapace beats the heart of a remorseless killer. Grievous hunted Jedi for sport and proudly displayed his victims' lightsabers around his belt as trophies of his conquests. His unorthodox fighting form and mechanical enhancements gave him an edge in close-quarters combat, and his strategic ingenuity and flawless cunning rendered him almost invincible against the Jedi."
"A twisted melding of flesh and metal, General Grievous' body is a deadly weapon forged by the cutting edge developers of the Confederacy. Within the hardened carapace beats the heart of a remorseless killer. Grievous hunted Jedi for sport and proudly displayed his victims' lightsabers around his belt as trophies of his conquests. His unorthodox fighting form and mechanical enhancements gave him an edge in close-quarters combat, and his strategic ingenuity and flawless cunning rendered him almost invincible against the Jedi."
He is NOT A DROID!!!
Re:Your example isn't close to the same thing.
on
Amazon Sales Record
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· Score: 1
Sounds like you've had good luck with them. I haven't been so lucky all the time. I and others I know have placed orders which were supposed to be overnight and Amazon has seemingly held onto some of those orders for up to five days before the actual shipment has occurred. This hasn't been the norm, but it has happened more than once to myself and a couple of people I know. We do quite a bit of ordering too. I believe that when a customer pays for overnight, then they should receive the package the next day.
Re:How many got their items on time though?
on
Amazon Sales Record
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the link. It's interesting that you decided to respond to yourself, but thanks just the same.
As you pointed out, according to Amazon's self congratulatory press release, they met their holiday shipping deadlines for "over 99 percent" of their orders. It's interesting how they left out the finer details and the seemingly more relevant statistics though.
Amazon hit a high order mark of 2.8 million "units" ordered in one day. While that's great, we can extrapolate from that one day, that up to 27999 people didn't have their packages shipped to them, for just that days orders, in time to arrive for the holidays as those customers had expected. I'd be very interested in some useful statistics, like what was their total number of holiday orders, which would make that "over 99 percent" figure a little more meaningful. Unfortunately, their carefully worded press release doesn't necessarily mean what you have assumed that it means and with that volume of sales, the number of people that didn't have their orders shipped in time for the holidays becomes staggering. Don't get me wrong, their claim is very impressive, but as the volume of sales grows, so does the amount of disappointment associated to failures too.
Like you said, some of the shipments that didn't arrive in time for the holidays may have been due to the shippers rather than Amazon. I and many others that I know have seen Amazon claim to have shipped items when in fact they remain in their shipping facilities for days before they are actually received by the companies that do the actual shipping, which is, in many cases, how Amazon manages to claim to have shipped a delivery when they haven't actually completed the shipment yet. They have arrangements with some of their shipping partners to only make pick-ups from their warehouses once a week. So, they are able to claim to have shipped on a Monday, and charge your account early, even though the delivery isn't picked up by UPS or whoever else until the following Saturday. This sort of behavior would help their claims and not appear misleading with the way that the press release is written.
It would be a valid statistic if Amazon provided some useful numbers/percentages, like how many of their total sales actually made it to their final destination in time for the holidays. The point is that their responsibility doesn't end after the shipping label is slapped on a box, it ends when the package actually arrives at the final destination. When a package doesn't arrive the next day, even though the customer paid for overnight shipping, the money is refunded to the customer by Amazon, not the shipping company. At least, not directly.
Re:How many got their items on time though?
on
Amazon Sales Record
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· Score: 1
Which "FPR"(press release) are you talking about? The link I posted said:
Now it [Amazon] is telling customers that iPods ordered in November will not arrive until February. Amazon customer services also told The Times that hundreds of other goods could not be delivered before Christmas. A spokesman would not give a more exact figure.
Which says nothing about successful on time deliveries. While the iWon article pointed to by the original/. post says nothing about total successful delivery percentage either.
Please point out the "FPR" you are referencing as it wasn't provided here and you've decided to carry on about it here.
If you could moderate, you wouldn't post as an AC. Which, thankfully, places you at a 0, where you appear to belong.
Verbosity can be highly overrated. But, just to keep you happy...
Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez appear to have hit the nail on the head here. If the look and feel of the trailer is any indication of the final film then this appears to capture the graphic novels perfectly. It is like looking at frames from the books. Never has a film looked more like the art that it represents. If the performances are on par with the writing of Frank Miller and the appearance of this trailer, then this film is going to be fantastic.
This is the first time that a comic book writer/artist/creator has made the leap to film direction. It certainly looks like FM has managed to completely maintain the integrity of his vision in the process.
Perhaps the film will be successful enough that we could actually see a FM directed version of DKR that would retain his vision as well. 300 has been announced and is scheduled for a 2006 release. Keep your fingers crossed.
Your example isn't close to the same thing.
on
Amazon Sales Record
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· Score: 1
I have to disagree with you, shipping obligations of an online retailer are completely their own fault.
Your mother doesn't have an obligation to you like an online retailer does, she didn't make any guarantees for a delivery date and she also didn't miss here expected delivery date by over a month.
According to the article I posted the link to, Amazon is going to deliver some products which were ordered in November of 2004 in February of 2005. This is most likely more than a mere shipping problem, but it doesn't change the fact that they still have an obligation to their customers. When you purchase an item from Amazon and pay for next day shipping, but they don't ship for a week, they haven't lived up to their obligation to their customers.
Amazon also has a system in place which is supposed to give their customers very detailed information about when they can expect their deliveries. I have to disagree with your comparison, as it's not a valid one.
How many got their items on time though?
on
Amazon Sales Record
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So, business is good, but some didn't get their gifts in time for the holidays. This kind of begs the question as to what the percentage of on-time deliveries were. Was this a worldwide issue or was it mainly in the UK only?
No problem. I agree wholeheartedly that there is too much silly nonsensical BS flying around fast and furious on this site at times. I assumed your position and I took the contrary approach. Sorry that I assumed you were taking the pro-iRiver tract. I hadn't intended any negativity in my post, but it might have come across that way. It's always better to try and raise the bar whenever possible.
Your point about the DAC or DACs is not lost on me. I hadn't really taken it into consideration in the past as I hadn't really seen it addressed before. I do recall back in the nineties, when I was working in the retail consumer electronics business, that there were distinct advantages to CD players that would use dual DACs (one for the left channel and one for the right channel) in their devices over their single DAC counterparts, of which there were far too many. The quality of the DAC itself is also an issue, I just wonder if this is a relevant issue to the average user of these devices.
Other "neat", however useless, things about the H10:
The H10 does appear to be one of the only MP3 players that has an SRS capability, I don't see the advantage to this, unless you're a classical music person, but this little tidbit will most likely escape the everyday user and impress them that it has yet another bell and/or whistle to show to their iPod carrying counterpart.
I ran across one article that says it has a 260k color screen, but I question the advantage of an 18-bit 1.5" color screen over a 16-bit 2" color screen. Perhaps this is just another marketing ploy on the part of the manufacturer. To the layperson it certainly sounds like a superior product would have 262144 colors rather than 65536 colors while in reality, it's not going to make a lick of difference to most.
Only problem seems to be that while iRiver supports the Linux centric OGG, it is also now supporting the MS centric PlayForSure DRM scheme. This new H10 iRiver is the first digital music device that completely embraces the PlayForSure scheme.
I have one question because of this. Will this allow the OGG format to be DRM'd with PlayForSure?
Proprietary? Well, there's certainly the Apple Lossless codec, which is proprietary and I suppose that you could argue that music purchased through the iTunes Music Store is proprietary as those AAC tracks have FairPlay, the Apple DRM, encoded into them. However, the H10 iRiver is the first device to fully support the Microsoft PlayForSure DRM scheme, so, not only the audio files, but the image files can contain the MS DRM and it can be in your MP3 and your WMA files. I don't know if it can be placed into the OGG files, I would doubt it though.
Fewer formats? The iPod also plays back non-DRM'd AAC, MP3, WAV and AIFF tracks too, which are all (more or less) non-proprietary formats. The iRiver device supports MP3, OGG, and WMA. So, as far as proprietary goes, it would seem that Apple supports four open formats while the iRiver supports two. The iPod also supports two proprietary standards while the iRiver fully supports the PlayForSure DRM scheme. Either way you look at it, the iRiver supports fewer open formats in total.
Price point is more or less irrelevant when it comes to the storage capacity question. But, since you insist that it's relevant, the H10 is more in line with the 20 GB iPod pricewise than the iPod mini with only a $43 difference as opposed to the $93 difference to the mini. The H10 has some very nice features, but those aren't really sensible when you look at the storage capacity. With photos and audio files you need more than 5 GB of storage space. Most people I know that use this type of device fill substantially more than 5 GB with just audio files. If you want to store images, I'd still lean towards the iPod Photo devices. True, they start at $499, $157 more than the H10 iRiver, without the FM tuner or the slightly better battery, but they have a larger (2") color screen and they start at 40 GB, eight times the capacity of the H10 iRiver device with it's smaller (1.5") color screen. For the extra money involved, the Apple devices are still the better buy.
As for sound quality, that really only depends upon your bitrate, which when you talk about portable devices like these, brings us back to the storage capacity issue, which leads directly back to the 20 GB iPod without images, FM or voice recording but quadruple the storage capacity for $43 less.
I can relate to your situation, as I too generally listen to entire albums, but there are some that I have that I only like select tracks from. With an iPod you have the ability to include some select tracks, if you so desire, rather than entire albums. Which is something that you can do with your CD player too, if you buy CD singles or want to change discs all the time. This ability, however, in no way restricts you from listening how you like. You have the ability to playback music on the device by artist, album, randomly by artist or album or completely randomly so your justification about listening through an entire album doesn't really hold up in regards to the iPod.
Assuming an album is about ten tracks long, you can store about one hundred entire albums on an iPod mini (4GB~1000 tracks). Which only costs $249, by the way. Rip at a higher rate and the number of albums decreases, but what would a person like yourself need with that many albums available to them at one time anyhow?
The devices are smaller and lighter than your CD player and without the need for a CD carrying case of some kind so that you can lug the player, the case and the discs around. There's also no need to change discs anymore.
It's about convenience, portability and your freedom to control the music you listen to in whichever way you choose.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like you're jumping to conclusions.
1. Yes, that "robot thing" is General Grievous and he is the one that was in the Clone Wars cartoons.
2. Don't know what the details are yet. The name of the Emperor from ROTJ is Palpatine. I wouldn't be surprised if one is a clone of the other or vice versa.
Let's not forget his incredible piloting skills too... :)
Actually, it's simply much easier to write a piece of spyware/adware for an unprotected OS with tons of exploitable flaws than it is for an OS that is more secure initially.
Most of the spyware writers are not hackers, they are hacks and couldn't write a piece of code that would work under the *NIX flavors out there because they are inherently safer operating systems to begin with.
Of course, running MS crap on these systems has a tendency to allow those OS's to be compromised with alarming frequency too.
When most haven't even heard of them? Adaware seems to be the most trustworthy standard spyware removal tool from what I understand.
Since MS and Giant say that Giant is the leader, they must be.
Sounds like you've had good luck with them. I haven't been so lucky all the time. I and others I know have placed orders which were supposed to be overnight and Amazon has seemingly held onto some of those orders for up to five days before the actual shipment has occurred. This hasn't been the norm, but it has happened more than once to myself and a couple of people I know. We do quite a bit of ordering too. I believe that when a customer pays for overnight, then they should receive the package the next day.
Thanks for the link. It's interesting that you decided to respond to yourself, but thanks just the same.
As you pointed out, according to Amazon's self congratulatory press release, they met their holiday shipping deadlines for "over 99 percent" of their orders. It's interesting how they left out the finer details and the seemingly more relevant statistics though.
Amazon hit a high order mark of 2.8 million "units" ordered in one day. While that's great, we can extrapolate from that one day, that up to 27999 people didn't have their packages shipped to them, for just that days orders, in time to arrive for the holidays as those customers had expected. I'd be very interested in some useful statistics, like what was their total number of holiday orders, which would make that "over 99 percent" figure a little more meaningful. Unfortunately, their carefully worded press release doesn't necessarily mean what you have assumed that it means and with that volume of sales, the number of people that didn't have their orders shipped in time for the holidays becomes staggering. Don't get me wrong, their claim is very impressive, but as the volume of sales grows, so does the amount of disappointment associated to failures too.
Like you said, some of the shipments that didn't arrive in time for the holidays may have been due to the shippers rather than Amazon. I and many others that I know have seen Amazon claim to have shipped items when in fact they remain in their shipping facilities for days before they are actually received by the companies that do the actual shipping, which is, in many cases, how Amazon manages to claim to have shipped a delivery when they haven't actually completed the shipment yet. They have arrangements with some of their shipping partners to only make pick-ups from their warehouses once a week. So, they are able to claim to have shipped on a Monday, and charge your account early, even though the delivery isn't picked up by UPS or whoever else until the following Saturday. This sort of behavior would help their claims and not appear misleading with the way that the press release is written.
It would be a valid statistic if Amazon provided some useful numbers/percentages, like how many of their total sales actually made it to their final destination in time for the holidays. The point is that their responsibility doesn't end after the shipping label is slapped on a box, it ends when the package actually arrives at the final destination. When a package doesn't arrive the next day, even though the customer paid for overnight shipping, the money is refunded to the customer by Amazon, not the shipping company. At least, not directly.
Please point out the "FPR" you are referencing as it wasn't provided here and you've decided to carry on about it here.
He did the screenplay and story for Robocop 2 and 3.
If you could moderate, you wouldn't post as an AC. Which, thankfully, places you at a 0, where you appear to belong.
Verbosity can be highly overrated. But, just to keep you happy...
Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez appear to have hit the nail on the head here. If the look and feel of the trailer is any indication of the final film then this appears to capture the graphic novels perfectly. It is like looking at frames from the books. Never has a film looked more like the art that it represents. If the performances are on par with the writing of Frank Miller and the appearance of this trailer, then this film is going to be fantastic.
This is the first time that a comic book writer/artist/creator has made the leap to film direction. It certainly looks like FM has managed to completely maintain the integrity of his vision in the process.
Perhaps the film will be successful enough that we could actually see a FM directed version of DKR that would retain his vision as well. 300 has been announced and is scheduled for a 2006 release. Keep your fingers crossed.
Wow!
I have to disagree with you, shipping obligations of an online retailer are completely their own fault.
Your mother doesn't have an obligation to you like an online retailer does, she didn't make any guarantees for a delivery date and she also didn't miss here expected delivery date by over a month.
According to the article I posted the link to, Amazon is going to deliver some products which were ordered in November of 2004 in February of 2005. This is most likely more than a mere shipping problem, but it doesn't change the fact that they still have an obligation to their customers. When you purchase an item from Amazon and pay for next day shipping, but they don't ship for a week, they haven't lived up to their obligation to their customers.
Amazon also has a system in place which is supposed to give their customers very detailed information about when they can expect their deliveries. I have to disagree with your comparison, as it's not a valid one.
It seems that Amazon did great business this holiday season, but they also seem to have miseed some delivery dates.
So, business is good, but some didn't get their gifts in time for the holidays. This kind of begs the question as to what the percentage of on-time deliveries were. Was this a worldwide issue or was it mainly in the UK only?
This is why I don't play Star Wars Battlefront anymore. Teams of these types would wait around spawn points and demolish other teams...
Your point about the DAC or DACs is not lost on me. I hadn't really taken it into consideration in the past as I hadn't really seen it addressed before. I do recall back in the nineties, when I was working in the retail consumer electronics business, that there were distinct advantages to CD players that would use dual DACs (one for the left channel and one for the right channel) in their devices over their single DAC counterparts, of which there were far too many. The quality of the DAC itself is also an issue, I just wonder if this is a relevant issue to the average user of these devices.
Other "neat", however useless, things about the H10:
The H10 does appear to be one of the only MP3 players that has an SRS capability, I don't see the advantage to this, unless you're a classical music person, but this little tidbit will most likely escape the everyday user and impress them that it has yet another bell and/or whistle to show to their iPod carrying counterpart.
I ran across one article that says it has a 260k color screen, but I question the advantage of an 18-bit 1.5" color screen over a 16-bit 2" color screen. Perhaps this is just another marketing ploy on the part of the manufacturer. To the layperson it certainly sounds like a superior product would have 262144 colors rather than 65536 colors while in reality, it's not going to make a lick of difference to most.
The VTR was invented in 1951.
Powell said in the article:
Is it 2006-2011 already? Or did he just mis-speak? Shouldn't the head of the FCC know the difference between a VTR and a VCR?
Interesting detail, it has 18-bit color (262144 colors) on it's expansive 1.5" screen.
Only problem seems to be that while iRiver supports the Linux centric OGG, it is also now supporting the MS centric PlayForSure DRM scheme. This new H10 iRiver is the first digital music device that completely embraces the PlayForSure scheme.
I have one question because of this. Will this allow the OGG format to be DRM'd with PlayForSure?
Most sites are saying that it will cost between $340 and $350 US.
Proprietary? Well, there's certainly the Apple Lossless codec, which is proprietary and I suppose that you could argue that music purchased through the iTunes Music Store is proprietary as those AAC tracks have FairPlay, the Apple DRM, encoded into them. However, the H10 iRiver is the first device to fully support the Microsoft PlayForSure DRM scheme, so, not only the audio files, but the image files can contain the MS DRM and it can be in your MP3 and your WMA files. I don't know if it can be placed into the OGG files, I would doubt it though.
Fewer formats? The iPod also plays back non-DRM'd AAC, MP3, WAV and AIFF tracks too, which are all (more or less) non-proprietary formats. The iRiver device supports MP3, OGG, and WMA. So, as far as proprietary goes, it would seem that Apple supports four open formats while the iRiver supports two. The iPod also supports two proprietary standards while the iRiver fully supports the PlayForSure DRM scheme. Either way you look at it, the iRiver supports fewer open formats in total.
Price point is more or less irrelevant when it comes to the storage capacity question. But, since you insist that it's relevant, the H10 is more in line with the 20 GB iPod pricewise than the iPod mini with only a $43 difference as opposed to the $93 difference to the mini. The H10 has some very nice features, but those aren't really sensible when you look at the storage capacity. With photos and audio files you need more than 5 GB of storage space. Most people I know that use this type of device fill substantially more than 5 GB with just audio files. If you want to store images, I'd still lean towards the iPod Photo devices. True, they start at $499, $157 more than the H10 iRiver, without the FM tuner or the slightly better battery, but they have a larger (2") color screen and they start at 40 GB, eight times the capacity of the H10 iRiver device with it's smaller (1.5") color screen. For the extra money involved, the Apple devices are still the better buy.
As for sound quality, that really only depends upon your bitrate, which when you talk about portable devices like these, brings us back to the storage capacity issue, which leads directly back to the 20 GB iPod without images, FM or voice recording but quadruple the storage capacity for $43 less.
How is it that a device that costs roughly $342 is only 10 percent more expensive than a device that costs $249?
I can relate to your situation, as I too generally listen to entire albums, but there are some that I have that I only like select tracks from. With an iPod you have the ability to include some select tracks, if you so desire, rather than entire albums. Which is something that you can do with your CD player too, if you buy CD singles or want to change discs all the time. This ability, however, in no way restricts you from listening how you like. You have the ability to playback music on the device by artist, album, randomly by artist or album or completely randomly so your justification about listening through an entire album doesn't really hold up in regards to the iPod.
Assuming an album is about ten tracks long, you can store about one hundred entire albums on an iPod mini (4GB~1000 tracks). Which only costs $249, by the way. Rip at a higher rate and the number of albums decreases, but what would a person like yourself need with that many albums available to them at one time anyhow?
The devices are smaller and lighter than your CD player and without the need for a CD carrying case of some kind so that you can lug the player, the case and the discs around. There's also no need to change discs anymore.
It's about convenience, portability and your freedom to control the music you listen to in whichever way you choose.
Simply put: God is in the details.