The "iPod Killer", if there ever is one, would be the rumored Rio Chroma. It's basically a Rio Karma with cool new features and none of the old flaws.
Some of the new stuff - read up on the Rio Karma first: 1. SDIO slot - synch via 802.11b, and upload pictures to your MP3 player. 2. Registers as a USB mass storage device (FINALLY!!!) 3. 16 bit color screen for viewing photos 4. Digital coax on the docking device. Weirdly, ethernet has not been confirmed, although it would be odd if they left it off - it was a fairly popular option for the Karma. 5. Costs $330.
The Rio Chroma is the first large-size digital music player that I actually want to buy.
"One problem with any such network is the "free rider" problem: people like me who just listen to the channel and "suck" information without sharing. Sound familiar?"
I guess my only concern is that the "cheater" problem might turn out to be the bigger issue. You really, really do not want someone broadcasting false information. The danger might be so great that free riding is less of a problem than the cheating.
On _average_, humanity will be wiped out once during every 45500 years. And, yes, it does seem a mind-blowingly high probability, which casts a bit of doubt on Mr. Young's opinions.
Frankly, it kind of reminds me of the whole SETI thing - depending on which set of numbers you plug in, ET life is either a near certainty or totally impossible.
You do realize that attorney-client conversations are privileged and can't normally be used in court, right? At least not in any Western country I'm aware of. The fact that it got "intercepted" does not change this in the slightest.
Besides, at the end of the day, if an attorney has to "give up" his client's secrecy, the court isn't going to bother with logs and taps - they're going to ask the lawyer what he was told, and if he doesn't fess up, they'll throw his ass in jail for contempt.
OTR GAIM is not going to solve that "problem", because said problem does not exist.
IIRC, the R-ratings at movie theaters are a movie industry policy. There's no _law_ enforcing it per se.
I guess the issue is the link between harm and video games. There is quite a bit of scientific reason to believe that alcohol and tobacco are _harmful_ substances which poison and/or kill you when not taken in appropriate doses. The science is not really there on the video game issue - we don't _know_ whether it has harmful effects even when taken in "massive doses". That is why the age restriction is problematic.
Is it really the government's decision to ban/restrict things which _could_ be harmful? I'm not really up in arms about this restriction, but then again, I also am not quite supporting it either. A _lower_ age limit (13?) might win me over - it seems like early childhood would be the place where the most damage would occur.
There's a link to a blog about how this guy is Satan's brother-in-law, and then the submitter accuses him of trying to "impose legislation".
At least here in the South[1], our state governor doesn't "impose" legislation on us. He tries to get it into legislature to vote on, and our legislature is composed of _elected_ officials. I've heard it's a similar story up north. I don't know why the submitter has a hard-on for disparaging his governor, but it puts his entire summary of the issue into doubt, since he's so obviously biased.
Leave out the personal attacks, guys.
-Erwos
[1] OK, we're not really culturally part of "The South", but Maryland _is_ below the Mason-Dixon line.
I'm a student at U of MD at College Park, and it was a rather well-known fact that Pandora's Cube was doing console modding. No surprise they got busted.
I would imagine that's exactly how it'll work. This isn't a new space for Linux or anything. Even the 16mb RAM iPAQ H3100 can run Linux plus Qtopia just fine.
As for benefits, I see it mostly as easier driver development and maintenance, and reducing development costs. With Linux, they only need to make very specific changes to the kernel, especially now that they're on a platform with an MMU. That lets them spend more money on the GUI, which is what's really important on these things anyways.
This is, of course, a horrible generalization, but my fiance and I had many friends in college who came here straight from Korea for the education. Yes, they went from school to 6AM-6PM in high school, but when they get to college, trust me, they're as lazy as everyone else.
They might have the head start in high school, but it seems to rapidly dissolve once they get to college.
"Can we stop with the steriotype? All of the CEOs I have known have been honest, hardworking people that are just trying to make a living. While I am sure there are dishonest CEOs around, I sure that like anywhere else the vast majority are not crooks."
So, look: if Europe implements it all and there's no bad effects, it'll be much easier to convince the US to do it in the future.
However, you've got to understand it from this perspective, too: is it really sensible to maybe cripple your economy on something which will have, at best, a small, impossible-to-measure effect?
I think you miss the point. The Geneva Conventions only work if both sides are abiding by them. You can't seriously demand that no one bomb a church if one side is using it as a firebase.
Basically, insurgents everywhere are now using the Geneva Conventions as an _advantage_. That's not how it was intended to work - if anything, the Geneva Conventions outlaw that sort of warfare with the clear demand that both sides wear clearly identifiable uniforms. The Geneva Conventions were intended to protect civilians and prevent horrifying non-conventional weapons from being used. They are NOT supposed to be a shield that your insurgency hides behind.
The reviewer's comments on editing are spot-on. Somewhere in the past year or so, WotC apparently decided that editing wasn't worth the time past, MAYBE, one read-through.
The proof is the debacle that was D20 Modern Weapons Locker. There were so many glaring typos, so many missing tables that you have to wonder if anyone even proof-read it ONCE.
Thankfully, D20 Future isn't so bad. But, something over there seriously needs to get fixed, and soon.
Have you ever tried to take out a laptop and do something useful with it while walking?
I could easily press a button on a keychain while walking. Hell, even that $50 fancy one looks easy enough to manage. There's NO WAY your laptop is going to be as easy to use.
If I am hunting for a WiFi signal, I don't want to stop, find a place to rest a laptop, spend thirty seconds setting it up, and then clicking a couple times to see if, indeed, there is a signal even ONCE. Screw doing it over and over.
This kind of usage (phone link to PC) is also not supported by your PCS Vision contract, or so Sprint claims. If you're just using it to check your email, I doubt Sprint would ever notice, but I would think twice about downloading the Fedora Core 3 DVD over it.
If you don't need much bandwidth, need the voice service, and can live with possibly being shut off[1], it's not a bad option for $15-$20 extra a month.
-Erwos
[1] Can anyone provide a link to a story about this actually happening? It seems more like a threat than a reality at the moment.
I've done a lot of statistics in school, and, yeah, the 200 number is fine - the issue is more whether the 200 people were a truly random sample from the population of the US.
In order to actually determine what was going on, I went to Piper Jaffray's website. The only iPod news release they've got is from early October - and that's a survey of only students. I would like to see more details about this survey.
Simple reason: the government is not supposed to be going into business. If the local government offering a service that businesses offer (or something similar), there's no reason that the government shouldn't step out and let the business take care of things.
The Citizen's Decency Brigade has a lot more important things to do than fight about some LAN store, at least in Baltimore.
I could see this being a fun activity for the ACM at school here - head down to Baltimore, and blow $20 a head on a huge-ass LAN party. I mean, LAN partying is fun, but not for longer than four hours, I should think.
I'm not sure this is true - I think you misunderstand R-square. R-square is a measurement of the ENTIRE model R-square of 0 means that the predictions _don't fit the model at all_.
The researchers included (in the models) a number of other independent variables which were _supposed_ to have tried to encompass who the people were trying to vote for (Bush 2000, Dole 96, income). What we were hoping for was the coefficients of the electronic voting variables to be statistically insignificant (ie, electronic voting makes no difference on votes). A zero value of R-square would seem to imply that previous voting records have no predictive value, ie that previous voting records don't explain any variation.
Finally, I have no idea what "0.5 is more that 99% certain to be different from 0" means. You realize that R-Square isn't affected in any way by the confidence level, right? SSE/SST isn't affected by any alpha.
Shooting Nazis is generally considered good form, because they're universally regarded as evil personified and with damn good reason. You'll notice that this is the objective of 99.9% of FPS WWII games. Not too many games where you start off as an SS soldier out to kill FDR, some famous Jewish rabbi, etc.
More to the point, you get _points_ for drilling JFK just so with your rifle. That's pretty tasteless, and for a president who was liked pretty well (so I'm told) by most of the world, you'd think they could stay away from that...
I am blessed (cursed?) with a background in econometrics from school.
The figures look nice, until your eyes stray to the R-square (goodness of fit) results for their regressions - it's about.5 for all of them, which means there's quite a bit to do before their models are actually believable and worth using as "evidence" of voter fraud.
More formally, R-square is the percentage of sample variation in the dependent variable that is explained by the independent variables. So, in this study, they can generally explain about 50% of the variation - which is not exactly what I'd want to take to court.
In fairness to the researchers, R-square is not the end-all, be-all of proof, and.5 really isn't terrible for social science stuff. However, this is the only statistic they posted regarding the correctness of the models, and I'd like to see some more numbers in this regard.
I find the willingness of people to take this as "proof" of vote fraud is disturbing. This is evidence that places that had electronic voting had more votes for Bush. This evidence is of correlation rather than causation. Maybe Bush supporters were more likely to come out in places with electronic voting?
In any case, I would also direct people to read page 4, where it points out that electronic voting in Ohio didn't cause any change in percent voting for Bush (using model 1, I believe).
Nice theory regarding the cell phones. Your giant corporate conspiracy theory is much more plausible than different cultural tastes.
Well, OK, it's not. The fact is, Europeans and Asians are apparently willing to spend more, on average, for cell phones than Americans. If cell phones ever become more important to the American consumer (or, rather, the additional features of these super-cell-phones do), Americans will be willing to pay more - and they will be released there.
In addition, the costs of cell phone service are different in the US, Europe, and Asia. If you have to pay per kilobyte of data, all these fancy features jack up the real cost of the phone even further. When American consumers wise up and start demanding more for their dollar (and it's happened, just slowly), I would expect those fancy phones to get popular in the US.
"So I guess the reporter was exaggerating to make a point? Does he actually have data to back this up?"
It is a well-known fact that Red Hat has done very, very well over there. I would not be surprised to hear that Sun had started sliding downhill rapidly over the course of a year. In fact, at a recent meeting, Red Hat told us they had gotten two new extremely large customers over there. In fact, they claimed that they had ported RHN to work for Solaris, too. Weird, but I guess it's not technically too hard.
There is probably some exaggeration in the given statement, but, frankly, the author is right - Sun no longer has the stranglehold they used to have.
Sounds like the same advantages the Dreamcast had. Ask Sega how well things worked out sometime.
The reason that the PS2 won wasn't that it had better graphics or was faster. It won because it had a DVD player built in. It was something utterly unrelated to game-playing that put the PS2 ahead - and that is what people are forgetting in the whole PSP vs. GBA discussion.
If Sony turns around and gives people a semi-decent way to play video and music on their PSP, the entire equation gets altered dramatically. That $150-$200 PSP looks a lot better if it has more functionality.
Similarly, Nintendo could also do something paradigm shifting (but I do not consider PictoChat to be any way, shape, or form to be a paradigm shift) to pull away.
And, frankly, it might not even be features that distinguish the two. A single bad production run by either of them could ruin the product's reputation. Calling a winner before the race has started seems foolish to me.
Slashdot Mirror
The "iPod Killer", if there ever is one, would be the rumored Rio Chroma. It's basically a Rio Karma with cool new features and none of the old flaws.
Some of the new stuff - read up on the Rio Karma first:
1. SDIO slot - synch via 802.11b, and upload pictures to your MP3 player.
2. Registers as a USB mass storage device (FINALLY!!!)
3. 16 bit color screen for viewing photos
4. Digital coax on the docking device. Weirdly, ethernet has not been confirmed, although it would be odd if they left it off - it was a fairly popular option for the Karma.
5. Costs $330.
The Rio Chroma is the first large-size digital music player that I actually want to buy.
-Erwos
"One problem with any such network is the "free rider" problem: people like me who just listen to the channel and "suck" information without sharing. Sound familiar?"
I guess my only concern is that the "cheater" problem might turn out to be the bigger issue. You really, really do not want someone broadcasting false information. The danger might be so great that free riding is less of a problem than the cheating.
-Erwos
On _average_, humanity will be wiped out once during every 45500 years. And, yes, it does seem a mind-blowingly high probability, which casts a bit of doubt on Mr. Young's opinions.
Frankly, it kind of reminds me of the whole SETI thing - depending on which set of numbers you plug in, ET life is either a near certainty or totally impossible.
-Erwos
You do realize that attorney-client conversations are privileged and can't normally be used in court, right? At least not in any Western country I'm aware of. The fact that it got "intercepted" does not change this in the slightest.
Besides, at the end of the day, if an attorney has to "give up" his client's secrecy, the court isn't going to bother with logs and taps - they're going to ask the lawyer what he was told, and if he doesn't fess up, they'll throw his ass in jail for contempt.
OTR GAIM is not going to solve that "problem", because said problem does not exist.
-Erwos
IIRC, the R-ratings at movie theaters are a movie industry policy. There's no _law_ enforcing it per se.
I guess the issue is the link between harm and video games. There is quite a bit of scientific reason to believe that alcohol and tobacco are _harmful_ substances which poison and/or kill you when not taken in appropriate doses. The science is not really there on the video game issue - we don't _know_ whether it has harmful effects even when taken in "massive doses". That is why the age restriction is problematic.
Is it really the government's decision to ban/restrict things which _could_ be harmful? I'm not really up in arms about this restriction, but then again, I also am not quite supporting it either. A _lower_ age limit (13?) might win me over - it seems like early childhood would be the place where the most damage would occur.
-Erwos
There's a link to a blog about how this guy is Satan's brother-in-law, and then the submitter accuses him of trying to "impose legislation".
At least here in the South[1], our state governor doesn't "impose" legislation on us. He tries to get it into legislature to vote on, and our legislature is composed of _elected_ officials. I've heard it's a similar story up north. I don't know why the submitter has a hard-on for disparaging his governor, but it puts his entire summary of the issue into doubt, since he's so obviously biased.
Leave out the personal attacks, guys.
-Erwos
[1] OK, we're not really culturally part of "The South", but Maryland _is_ below the Mason-Dixon line.
That's like saying an AthlonXP emulates a Pentium4. It's reimplementing something, not emulating it.
-Erwos
I'm a student at U of MD at College Park, and it was a rather well-known fact that Pandora's Cube was doing console modding. No surprise they got busted.
-Erwos
I would imagine that's exactly how it'll work. This isn't a new space for Linux or anything. Even the 16mb RAM iPAQ H3100 can run Linux plus Qtopia just fine.
As for benefits, I see it mostly as easier driver development and maintenance, and reducing development costs. With Linux, they only need to make very specific changes to the kernel, especially now that they're on a platform with an MMU. That lets them spend more money on the GUI, which is what's really important on these things anyways.
-Erwos
This is, of course, a horrible generalization, but my fiance and I had many friends in college who came here straight from Korea for the education. Yes, they went from school to 6AM-6PM in high school, but when they get to college, trust me, they're as lazy as everyone else.
They might have the head start in high school, but it seems to rapidly dissolve once they get to college.
-Erwos
"Can we stop with the steriotype? All of the CEOs I have known have been honest, hardworking people that are just trying to make a living. While I am sure there are dishonest CEOs around, I sure that like anywhere else the vast majority are not crooks."
-Erwos
So, look: if Europe implements it all and there's no bad effects, it'll be much easier to convince the US to do it in the future.
However, you've got to understand it from this perspective, too: is it really sensible to maybe cripple your economy on something which will have, at best, a small, impossible-to-measure effect?
-Erwos
I think you miss the point. The Geneva Conventions only work if both sides are abiding by them. You can't seriously demand that no one bomb a church if one side is using it as a firebase.
Basically, insurgents everywhere are now using the Geneva Conventions as an _advantage_. That's not how it was intended to work - if anything, the Geneva Conventions outlaw that sort of warfare with the clear demand that both sides wear clearly identifiable uniforms. The Geneva Conventions were intended to protect civilians and prevent horrifying non-conventional weapons from being used. They are NOT supposed to be a shield that your insurgency hides behind.
-Erwos
The reviewer's comments on editing are spot-on. Somewhere in the past year or so, WotC apparently decided that editing wasn't worth the time past, MAYBE, one read-through.
The proof is the debacle that was D20 Modern Weapons Locker. There were so many glaring typos, so many missing tables that you have to wonder if anyone even proof-read it ONCE.
Thankfully, D20 Future isn't so bad. But, something over there seriously needs to get fixed, and soon.
-Erwos
Have you ever tried to take out a laptop and do something useful with it while walking?
I could easily press a button on a keychain while walking. Hell, even that $50 fancy one looks easy enough to manage. There's NO WAY your laptop is going to be as easy to use.
If I am hunting for a WiFi signal, I don't want to stop, find a place to rest a laptop, spend thirty seconds setting it up, and then clicking a couple times to see if, indeed, there is a signal even ONCE. Screw doing it over and over.
"I don't really see the use for these devices"
Stop being so self-centered, and maybe you would.
-Erwos
This kind of usage (phone link to PC) is also not supported by your PCS Vision contract, or so Sprint claims. If you're just using it to check your email, I doubt Sprint would ever notice, but I would think twice about downloading the Fedora Core 3 DVD over it.
If you don't need much bandwidth, need the voice service, and can live with possibly being shut off[1], it's not a bad option for $15-$20 extra a month.
-Erwos
[1] Can anyone provide a link to a story about this actually happening? It seems more like a threat than a reality at the moment.
I've done a lot of statistics in school, and, yeah, the 200 number is fine - the issue is more whether the 200 people were a truly random sample from the population of the US.
In order to actually determine what was going on, I went to Piper Jaffray's website. The only iPod news release they've got is from early October - and that's a survey of only students. I would like to see more details about this survey.
-Erwos
Simple reason: the government is not supposed to be going into business. If the local government offering a service that businesses offer (or something similar), there's no reason that the government shouldn't step out and let the business take care of things.
-Erwos
The Citizen's Decency Brigade has a lot more important things to do than fight about some LAN store, at least in Baltimore.
I could see this being a fun activity for the ACM at school here - head down to Baltimore, and blow $20 a head on a huge-ass LAN party. I mean, LAN partying is fun, but not for longer than four hours, I should think.
-Erwos
"The R-Squared should be precisely Zero"
I'm not sure this is true - I think you misunderstand R-square. R-square is a measurement of the ENTIRE model R-square of 0 means that the predictions _don't fit the model at all_.
The researchers included (in the models) a number of other independent variables which were _supposed_ to have tried to encompass who the people were trying to vote for (Bush 2000, Dole 96, income). What we were hoping for was the coefficients of the electronic voting variables to be statistically insignificant (ie, electronic voting makes no difference on votes). A zero value of R-square would seem to imply that previous voting records have no predictive value, ie that previous voting records don't explain any variation.
Finally, I have no idea what "0.5 is more that 99% certain to be different from 0" means. You realize that R-Square isn't affected in any way by the confidence level, right? SSE/SST isn't affected by any alpha.
Or am I misunderstanding you on this?
-Erwos
Shooting Nazis is generally considered good form, because they're universally regarded as evil personified and with damn good reason. You'll notice that this is the objective of 99.9% of FPS WWII games. Not too many games where you start off as an SS soldier out to kill FDR, some famous Jewish rabbi, etc.
More to the point, you get _points_ for drilling JFK just so with your rifle. That's pretty tasteless, and for a president who was liked pretty well (so I'm told) by most of the world, you'd think they could stay away from that...
-Erwos
I am blessed (cursed?) with a background in econometrics from school.
.5 for all of them, which means there's quite a bit to do before their models are actually believable and worth using as "evidence" of voter fraud.
.5 really isn't terrible for social science stuff. However, this is the only statistic they posted regarding the correctness of the models, and I'd like to see some more numbers in this regard.
The figures look nice, until your eyes stray to the R-square (goodness of fit) results for their regressions - it's about
More formally, R-square is the percentage of sample variation in the dependent variable that is explained by the independent variables. So, in this study, they can generally explain about 50% of the variation - which is not exactly what I'd want to take to court.
In fairness to the researchers, R-square is not the end-all, be-all of proof, and
I find the willingness of people to take this as "proof" of vote fraud is disturbing. This is evidence that places that had electronic voting had more votes for Bush. This evidence is of correlation rather than causation. Maybe Bush supporters were more likely to come out in places with electronic voting?
In any case, I would also direct people to read page 4, where it points out that electronic voting in Ohio didn't cause any change in percent voting for Bush (using model 1, I believe).
-Erwos
Nice theory regarding the cell phones. Your giant corporate conspiracy theory is much more plausible than different cultural tastes.
Well, OK, it's not. The fact is, Europeans and Asians are apparently willing to spend more, on average, for cell phones than Americans. If cell phones ever become more important to the American consumer (or, rather, the additional features of these super-cell-phones do), Americans will be willing to pay more - and they will be released there.
In addition, the costs of cell phone service are different in the US, Europe, and Asia. If you have to pay per kilobyte of data, all these fancy features jack up the real cost of the phone even further. When American consumers wise up and start demanding more for their dollar (and it's happened, just slowly), I would expect those fancy phones to get popular in the US.
-Erwos
"So I guess the reporter was exaggerating to make a point? Does he actually have data to back this up?"
It is a well-known fact that Red Hat has done very, very well over there. I would not be surprised to hear that Sun had started sliding downhill rapidly over the course of a year. In fact, at a recent meeting, Red Hat told us they had gotten two new extremely large customers over there. In fact, they claimed that they had ported RHN to work for Solaris, too. Weird, but I guess it's not technically too hard.
There is probably some exaggeration in the given statement, but, frankly, the author is right - Sun no longer has the stranglehold they used to have.
-Erwos
Sounds like the same advantages the Dreamcast had. Ask Sega how well things worked out sometime.
The reason that the PS2 won wasn't that it had better graphics or was faster. It won because it had a DVD player built in. It was something utterly unrelated to game-playing that put the PS2 ahead - and that is what people are forgetting in the whole PSP vs. GBA discussion.
If Sony turns around and gives people a semi-decent way to play video and music on their PSP, the entire equation gets altered dramatically. That $150-$200 PSP looks a lot better if it has more functionality.
Similarly, Nintendo could also do something paradigm shifting (but I do not consider PictoChat to be any way, shape, or form to be a paradigm shift) to pull away.
And, frankly, it might not even be features that distinguish the two. A single bad production run by either of them could ruin the product's reputation. Calling a winner before the race has started seems foolish to me.
-Erwos