I got sick and tired of the acution frauds so i started finding them and bidding them up to inifity. Its not like you have too look hard to find them. Basically any high priced commodity item proably has frauds. One day while looking at apple powerbooks I notcies that over 90% of the auctions were definite frauds. Most of the other ones, probably real, maybe not.
its usually pretty easy to spot: only takes western union, item is new in box for absurdly low price, eithe rmultiple auctions or a "private auction". You used to tell by low feed back but its getting so that can be a misleader. You send them an e-mail and it gets answered during romanian daylight hours.
My favorite gambit is to ask them some absurd question that makes no sense like is this the power book that had the DVI fibrulator? They will answer "yes". Ask them if they take paypal and they dont answer.
I have to say that for all the problems and accusations about pay-pal, it is a hallmark of an honest seller.
E-bay claims a low fraud rate, but I think that is on a per-sale basis (most fruads dont result in sales, and there are many many honest auctions for $1.99 baseball cards, etc...). On a per dollar basis I'd bet it looks bad for e-bay. And certainly if you restrict the search to high vlaue commondity items i'd bet they average around fifty percent. E-bay needs to get sued and sued hard for knowing letting this go on.
Some lawyer should go get a job ther coverty, find out what they do internally to prevent this, then sue the shit out of them for negligence.
The timing of this article I think is simply intended to make the author look prescient. Apple's stock price just surged way ahead creating a ludicrous price-to-earning ratio (about 70). Part of this was the Sony-buy-out rumor, and the other was a wave of good i-pod press and g5 super computer press.
Any idiot can tell you the stock price will come down a bit since the p/E is not supported by the present facts known. On the other hand if ipod sales continue to boom and people start flipping their old mac for new G5s (by the way the imac g4 inventory is being cleared out for the introduction of some yet to be announce product). Then their earnings will go up and the stock price should rise. This is why analysts are rating apple and hold and not a sell. the price is high and will fluctuate down but may zoom up on the next earning statement.
I think this author,probably in the pay of microsoft, is planting a story anticipating the near term price fall of apple stock to make himeslef look good and maybe stimie apples encroachment on windowns in the enterprise world.
The main difference from my perspective is that with Windows you know with certainty you have already been rooted. With Linux you are never certain if you have been rooted.
I have the same sort of nightmares about linux and I do about going to work without any pants on. Few people are experts enough to really know how to lock down their boxes and keep them up to date on linux. So you always worry you forgot you pants (did I enable SSH-KEYS over an NFS network? oops no pants. Is this apache module up to date? Which daemons have latent SUID root? Should I install the package as root or as a non-priviledged user. Should I launch tomcat as Root or as a non priviedged user. Is truly bewildering ). Keeping your pants up is hard.
With windows you know theres always a security hole lurking but at least the company is trying to help you patch it. If they could get the Lag time as short as apples they would become a real threat to linux.
Cant beleive I missed this in my previous post: On that same chart which is dated 2002, it also list Microsoft as the 9th largest investor in Baystar. So paul allen is the number on investor in baystar (1.8 billion) and Microsoft has 0.6 billion invest baystar.
all of the other major companies investing (janus, Warburg, Putnam, wellington, citadel) are just brokerage houses and are not going to be activist partners just passive investors. Thus microsoft and its senior advisor paul allen are in the driver's seat at this company
The above poster is totally correct. Here is a link to the PDF file from Baystar's own website. On page 3 of this there is a chart showing the top ten investors in Baystar. Number one on this chart is Vulcan Ventures which has 1.8 billion dollars invested in Baystar!!!!
I have a litmus test to propose. but first some analsis. Why would a tanited recommendation from Microsoft be useful to baystar? I can understand from baystars position why they might invest in SCO for their own selfish reasons: if they are a company that specializes in high-risk high-reward investments then the SCO investment can be argued logically as a win for SCo would have a huge payback. You might disagree on the odds but well that's their bussiness and the odds*payoff actually is not so bad looking.
But why would microsoft recommending SCO be a useful thing to baystar? Microsoft supposedly has no financial dealing with baystar so there's not "favor" to be granted here. And Microsoft obviously had a vested interest in giving the advice and I'm sure baystar was smart enough to see through that--so the advice would have no tangible use.
KEY point: The most benign explanation is that they were merely bringing it to baystars attention and presumbaly did so to many other companies. The key test is then: did they or did they not call hundreds of other speculative investment houses in hopes of convincing one with this long shot advice?
If they did not do so with many other companies then why did they think they had any standing to cold call baystar and give tainted advice? If they just called baystar alone then its very fishy. they must have promised other tangibles. Such as investing in companies baystar recommended back or promising cash influxes and supprt for the lawsuit.
Mac OSX comes with textedit which can read most simple word documents. But it does not parse complex ones or metadata. This last bit is a feature not a bug: open the document in TextEdit, if it renders well, save it again. and poof a clean document
The first is trivial and certain to succeed but has a Drawback to spammers: only send e-mail to single recpients. The drawback is this puts a much higher load on their servers since every message is sent individually.
The second method is to always include dummy addresses in the mailing list that the recpients probably have in their address books. For example, add the following names to the to-field: notifications@paypal.com and list-notication@ebay.com. Any recpieint that of the spam message that also has recieved e-mail from e-bay or pay-pal will trust the message.
One can do even better by planning ahead when harvesting e-mails. For example, if you harvest a set of e-mails from a pqarticular bulliten board you can make note of message cliques at the time of harvesting, and send messages in the same groupings. for good measure you also send the addresses of the buliten board admins as well.
Third, all the spammer really has to do is to know is one recipient you have gotten messages from. Thus either buy mailing lists from legitimate companies people actually do bussniess with. Or create your own loss-leader messages. For example, send out some political action alert or anything that has some vlaue or use to most people, maybe a lottery drawing for a prize, or a discount subsciption to time magazine, so they will accpet the message. the sender does not have to be the same as your spammer address. Now you know someone in the adress book of the victim. Now you spam the crap out of them while including the trojan address in the to: field.
I recall the case of a family vineyard in upstae new york run by a man named taylor (actually a descendant of the taylor in talyor wines). Taylor wines sued him for using his own name on the wine. Since he had already printed the labels, he hired some college kids to use a magic marker to black out the word "taylor".
this gave the wine an underground cachet. So the next year he just had the lables printed with the black dash. This was great till Taylor wines sued him again, and arguning before the same judge, won the case that the black mark had become identified with "taylor".
So the next year he left off the black mark and instead just put oil paintings of his deceased relatives on the bottles with the captions, joe TAYLOR. mary TAYLOR, etc....
Taylor wines sued him again. So he once again he erased the name and left the pictures that every one now recognized as the taylor family portraits..
Taylor sued again and won. He was ordered to turn over the lables so he loaded them in the manure spreader and spread them around taylor wines office building.
Finally he altered all the portraits to cyclopses and dared them to say he was related. Around then he also adopted the name "bully hill winery". ANd there it ended.
I'd say lindash should just use a strategically placed Star or fig leaf to cover the last part of its name.
The MS techs run around putting out virus fires, and unsnarling people's windows desktop machines. They dont actually do anything useful in terms of producing products. They just allow others to work. They are over worked because they worm-hole is an endless sucking vortex of time and paranoia. No matter how many people we hired we could not get ahead of it--always reactive. Sure we do the firewalls and have policies about clicking on e-mail messages but guess what, they dont stop the problems.
The sys admins that dont get sucked into the widows vortex and do linux still have to deal with network probelms and shared disk space with rooted windows machines. But they actually do work that produces products so they are too few in the sense that every time we get someone good they seem to get drawn into the latest Worm crisis management is panicing over, and we lose them.
as for what kind of management allows techs to vote? its the same kind that is everywhere and buys windows because its cheaper. If they understood the problem they would not be listening to the Windows people. But they are management. THe CIO is came from within so its a windows turd that floated to the top. But locally out CIO does get it. But windows is entrenched. the same secretary that cant keep her comuter virus free is also the one that would have to retrain to use a mac. Plus we have crap like "meeting maker" that runs best on windows. The Windows tech mafia picks software standards without regard to cross platform issues because all they are trained on is windows.
see the point I'm making is that thw windows tech mafia rises to the top in sheer numbers and is guided by perpetual crisis management. They make the decisions because they are their and visible and numerous.
there's an old managment adage that says the BEST manager is the one that builds an operation that does not need him: Make yourself dipsensible. But the manager that gets kept is the one that makes himself indespensible. That's mac versus windows techs in a nutshell.
Aha, I found it!..Pixelt seems to have vanished from view. Here's the description of Pixlet from apple's website.
Pixlet, the first studio-grade codec for filmmakers that was developed in conjunction with Pixar to deliver breathtaking HD-quality video on the Mac that is free from visual artifacts.
"High-end Video Codec
Pixlet is the first studio-grade codec for filmmakers. Pixlet provides 20-25:1 compression, allowing a 75MB/sec series of frames to be delivered in a 3MB/sec movie, similar to DV data rates. Or a series of frames that are over 6GB in size can be contained within a 250MB movie. Pixlet lets high-end digital film frames play in real time with any 1GHz G4 or faster Panther Mac, without investing in costly, proprietary hardware."
You may recall Jobs demoed it in october. He showed in particular how you could use the scrubber to move through the film in faster than real time to any place and the codec kept up with the presentation. And the quality was near DVD. very impressive.
So where is it? it vanished off Apple's main web pages though you can find it in their archives. It vanished about the same time as "home-on-ipod" vanished. I assume panther, ilife and ipod ate its brain share. Perhaps its going to be held back as a premium product to differentiate final cut pro. any guesses
Zilla, NeXT renderman and new apple Pixlet codec
on
Steve Jobs' Grand Vision
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Remember how last october Job introduced the new codec called "pixlet" or something like that? He said it was the number one requested feature designed for Pixar to be able to exchange compressed 24 frame per second movies. So they came up with a new high quality compression format.
Second back when I had my NeXT it came with Renderman which was I beleive the Pixar developed shader for 3-d rendering. It was very slick and blow-your-socks off fast on a 486 computer.
NeXT also came with Zilla, the predecessor to all grid computing that let the Zilla project steal unused cycles on all volunteer NeXT computers in the world. Among its feats was part of the four-color-map theorem proof (an exhaustive proof), and the early CGI movie rendering.
So the convergence of Jobs computer platforms and Pixar in not a new thing. The fact that its running on Intel hardware is also no suprise since NeXTstep and Renderman ran on INTEL hardware.
but it seems that with pixlet, Xgrid, Xraid, and the new rackmount G5 all the peices are in place to go back to an all apple platform if he chooses too. But circumstantially they probably will wait till their next movie is done. But presumably with Pixlet, and finalcut pro they can do all the desktop work on apples now.
At my 10,000+ employee facility, we have loads of overworked microsoft techs and way too few linux techs. Whenever our institution tires to force us to standardize on a platform the techs vote and of course windows always wins because there are so many techs.
if you actually normalized their numbers by number of machines they support I suspect that the mac techs would win. Hard to say about the linux techs. Linux techs tend to support giant computer farms. They have huge problems getting them all working nicely but they arent running around putting out virus and worm fires every week or searching for some stupid third pary driver.
My soda fountain turns on when I insert the storage vessel (akak a cup)
the tape player in my car turns on and reads the tape and generates amplified music when you insert it.
my paper shredder and paper-port scanner turn on when I insert the storage media (paper).
my toaster turns on when I insert the bread-storage media.
The K2 - "fours" have embedded piezos hooked to leds. the piezo's in turn are hooked to the fiberglass top sheet. when the ski vibrates excesivley the energy is damped by draining the piezo through a load, in this case an LED. The LED is used in stead of a resistor for two reasons 1) it sells skis cause its cool to watch and you know its "working". 2) the diode has a threshold for activation that turns on the damping only when the vibration is excessive. so your ski is lively up to a point.
they got the idea from the airforce who uses this idea to damp wing vibration.
in both cases active vibration is lighter weight than passive damping materials. (unfortunately the K2s are still heavy as sin, so really it was a gimmick aimed at nerds. still it worked--I bought the skis!)
Go look. there are two clicks I see. the big "FREE REAL PLAYER (14 day trial) which occupies 95 % of the page and a tiny one that says "free realplayer one". Which if you didn't know there was a difference you would assume was the same one.
I'm looking at this from a mac computer, and it is detecting my appleness, so maybe the sight looks different from different browsers?
I run Zone alarm on my windows 98 box. and what it showed me was that real player runs daemons that periodially send outbound infomrmation to the mothership. It doesn't look like update notifications either. what are they sending?? I dont know but its spyware in my book not to mention one more process to crash windows 98.
On the otherhand windows media player has all sorts of problems on macs. On my macs I often find radio stations that echo when you connect using WMA.
Mineral nutrients in the soil come from two sources, glaciers and microbes that eat rocks. 100,000 years of glaciation is a daunting thing to try to make up for with egineering.
On the otherhand rock eating microbes are now sterilized from farmland soil due to the ammonia fertilizers and pesticides used. So that source of mineralization is gone as well. and this is affecting forest and streams as well.
I would be a little skeptical we could finely balance the large offsetting rate terms in global warming differntial equation: polar reflection verus water/co2 green house absorption, versus evaporative transport verus conveciton currents from differnetial heating. Suppose you spread ajust a wee bit too much soot. how would you know and how would you undo it?
There is a decade old book called "the END" which advances the scientifc case that all ice ages were preceded by globla warming and plant death. Plant death releases avalibale carbon which creates CO2. evidence is seen in pollen abd seed deposits in the beds of lakes and in tree ring records.
The thesis is that to have an ice age you need increaced moisture transport to the polls. with out this it could get cold but it would be dry and no ice age. Once enough ice accumulates the reflectivity of the earth shifts and global warming becomes global cooling. this last for ~90,000 years.
during this time glaciers grind rocks up and create mineral rich soils. When trees return they thrive on this till the nutirents run low which takes about 10,000 years. then plant death starts the cycle.
by the way were about 13000 years since the last ice age.
The price difference between the 15Gig ipod and dell is $50. for this you get: -it feels nicer in your hands and slips into your pants pocket better and is less of a pocket weight in you jacket or shirt. -Best quality earphones magnets you can buy, with low-tangle coated wires -Firewire charging. Did you see the brick the Dell comes with?/ this is not really a portable device. -you can charge the apple anywhere with a tiny plug for the fire wire. -you can plug the apple into most computers with or without software -better wheel interface. -store more songs with better high quality song format AAC
THe price difference bwteen the 20 Gig model is 100$. for this you get all of the above plus -- a dock for your desk -- a smaller remote than the dell.
Slashdot Mirror
its usually pretty easy to spot: only takes western union, item is new in box for absurdly low price, eithe rmultiple auctions or a "private auction". You used to tell by low feed back but its getting so that can be a misleader. You send them an e-mail and it gets answered during romanian daylight hours.
My favorite gambit is to ask them some absurd question that makes no sense like is this the power book that had the DVI fibrulator? They will answer "yes". Ask them if they take paypal and they dont answer.
I have to say that for all the problems and accusations about pay-pal, it is a hallmark of an honest seller.
E-bay claims a low fraud rate, but I think that is on a per-sale basis (most fruads dont result in sales, and there are many many honest auctions for $1.99 baseball cards, etc...). On a per dollar basis I'd bet it looks bad for e-bay. And certainly if you restrict the search to high vlaue commondity items i'd bet they average around fifty percent. E-bay needs to get sued and sued hard for knowing letting this go on.
Some lawyer should go get a job ther coverty, find out what they do internally to prevent this, then sue the shit out of them for negligence.
Any idiot can tell you the stock price will come down a bit since the p/E is not supported by the present facts known. On the other hand if ipod sales continue to boom and people start flipping their old mac for new G5s (by the way the imac g4 inventory is being cleared out for the introduction of some yet to be announce product). Then their earnings will go up and the stock price should rise. This is why analysts are rating apple and hold and not a sell. the price is high and will fluctuate down but may zoom up on the next earning statement.
I think this author,probably in the pay of microsoft, is planting a story anticipating the near term price fall of apple stock to make himeslef look good and maybe stimie apples encroachment on windowns in the enterprise world.
Is there a slick perl or shell script to rot or unrot a string?
I have the same sort of nightmares about linux and I do about going to work without any pants on. Few people are experts enough to really know how to lock down their boxes and keep them up to date on linux. So you always worry you forgot you pants (did I enable SSH-KEYS over an NFS network? oops no pants. Is this apache module up to date? Which daemons have latent SUID root? Should I install the package as root or as a non-priviledged user. Should I launch tomcat as Root or as a non priviedged user. Is truly bewildering ). Keeping your pants up is hard.
With windows you know theres always a security hole lurking but at least the company is trying to help you patch it. If they could get the Lag time as short as apples they would become a real threat to linux.
--ZardOS.
all of the other major companies investing (janus, Warburg, Putnam, wellington, citadel) are just brokerage houses and are not going to be activist partners just passive investors. Thus microsoft and its senior advisor paul allen are in the driver's seat at this company
The above poster is totally correct. Here is a link to the PDF file from Baystar's own website. On page 3 of this there is a chart showing the top ten investors in Baystar. Number one on this chart is Vulcan Ventures which has 1.8 billion dollars invested in Baystar!!!!
But why would microsoft recommending SCO be a useful thing to baystar? Microsoft supposedly has no financial dealing with baystar so there's not "favor" to be granted here. And Microsoft obviously had a vested interest in giving the advice and I'm sure baystar was smart enough to see through that--so the advice would have no tangible use.
KEY point: The most benign explanation is that they were merely bringing it to baystars attention and presumbaly did so to many other companies. The key test is then: did they or did they not call hundreds of other speculative investment houses in hopes of convincing one with this long shot advice?
If they did not do so with many other companies then why did they think they had any standing to cold call baystar and give tainted advice? If they just called baystar alone then its very fishy. they must have promised other tangibles. Such as investing in companies baystar recommended back or promising cash influxes and supprt for the lawsuit.
Zilla, which foreshadowed Xgrid, shipped on all the NeXT computer. and let any next user donate their clock cycles. see here
Wont the airport's fire wall NAT, mask how many MAC addresses you have?
Mac OSX comes with textedit which can read most simple word documents. But it does not parse complex ones or metadata. This last bit is a feature not a bug: open the document in TextEdit, if it renders well, save it again. and poof a clean document
There are three ways one can beat the filter.
The first is trivial and certain to succeed but has a Drawback to spammers: only send e-mail to single recpients. The drawback is this puts a much higher load on their servers since every message is sent individually.
The second method is to always include dummy addresses in the mailing list that the recpients probably have in their address books. For example, add the following names to the to-field: notifications@paypal.com and list-notication@ebay.com.
Any recpieint that of the spam message that also has recieved e-mail from e-bay or pay-pal will trust the message.
One can do even better by planning ahead when harvesting e-mails. For example, if you harvest a set of e-mails from a pqarticular bulliten board you can make note of message cliques at the time of harvesting, and send messages in the same groupings. for good measure you also send the addresses of the buliten board admins as well.
Third, all the spammer really has to do is to know is one recipient you have gotten messages from. Thus either buy mailing lists from legitimate companies people actually do bussniess with. Or create your own loss-leader messages. For example, send out some political action alert or anything that has some vlaue or use to most people, maybe a lottery drawing for a prize, or a discount subsciption to time magazine, so they will accpet the message. the sender does not have to be the same as your spammer address. Now you know someone in the adress book of the victim. Now you spam the crap out of them while including the trojan address in the to: field.
Lindowpane. if anybody out there is old enough to get the LSD pun.
this gave the wine an underground cachet. So the next year he just had the lables printed with the black dash. This was great till Taylor wines sued him again, and arguning before the same judge, won the case that the black mark had become identified with "taylor".
So the next year he left off the black mark and instead just put oil paintings of his deceased relatives on the bottles with the captions, joe TAYLOR. mary TAYLOR, etc....
Taylor wines sued him again. So he once again he erased the name and left the pictures that every one now recognized as the taylor family portraits. .
Taylor sued again and won. He was ordered to turn over the lables so he loaded them in the manure spreader and spread them around taylor wines office building.
Finally he altered all the portraits to cyclopses and dared them to say he was related. Around then he also adopted the name "bully hill winery". ANd there it ended.
I'd say lindash should just use a strategically placed Star or fig leaf to cover the last part of its name.
The sys admins that dont get sucked into the widows vortex and do linux still have to deal with network probelms and shared disk space with rooted windows machines. But they actually do work that produces products so they are too few in the sense that every time we get someone good they seem to get drawn into the latest Worm crisis management is panicing over, and we lose them.
as for what kind of management allows techs to vote? its the same kind that is everywhere and buys windows because its cheaper. If they understood the problem they would not be listening to the Windows people. But they are management. THe CIO is came from within so its a windows turd that floated to the top. But locally out CIO does get it. But windows is entrenched. the same secretary that cant keep her comuter virus free is also the one that would have to retrain to use a mac. Plus we have crap like "meeting maker" that runs best on windows. The Windows tech mafia picks software standards without regard to cross platform issues because all they are trained on is windows.
see the point I'm making is that thw windows tech mafia rises to the top in sheer numbers and is guided by perpetual crisis management. They make the decisions because they are their and visible and numerous.
there's an old managment adage that says the BEST manager is the one that builds an operation that does not need him: Make yourself dipsensible. But the manager that gets kept is the one that makes himself indespensible. That's mac versus windows techs in a nutshell.
Pixlet, the first studio-grade codec for filmmakers that was developed in conjunction with Pixar to deliver breathtaking HD-quality video on the Mac that is free from visual artifacts.
"High-end Video Codec
Pixlet is the first studio-grade codec for filmmakers. Pixlet provides 20-25:1 compression, allowing a 75MB/sec series of frames to be delivered in a 3MB/sec movie, similar to DV data rates. Or a series of frames that are over 6GB in size can be contained within a 250MB movie. Pixlet lets high-end digital film frames play in real time with any 1GHz G4 or faster Panther Mac, without investing in costly, proprietary hardware."
You may recall Jobs demoed it in october. He showed in particular how you could use the scrubber to move through the film in faster than real time to any place and the codec kept up with the presentation. And the quality was near DVD. very impressive.
So where is it? it vanished off Apple's main web pages though you can find it in their archives. It vanished about the same time as "home-on-ipod" vanished. I assume panther, ilife and ipod ate its brain share. Perhaps its going to be held back as a premium product to differentiate final cut pro. any guesses
Second back when I had my NeXT it came with Renderman which was I beleive the Pixar developed shader for 3-d rendering. It was very slick and blow-your-socks off fast on a 486 computer.
NeXT also came with Zilla, the predecessor to all grid computing that let the Zilla project steal unused cycles on all volunteer NeXT computers in the world. Among its feats was part of the four-color-map theorem proof (an exhaustive proof), and the early CGI movie rendering.
So the convergence of Jobs computer platforms and Pixar in not a new thing. The fact that its running on Intel hardware is also no suprise since NeXTstep and Renderman ran on INTEL hardware.
but it seems that with pixlet, Xgrid, Xraid, and the new rackmount G5 all the peices are in place to go back to an all apple platform if he chooses too. But circumstantially they probably will wait till their next movie is done. But presumably with Pixlet, and finalcut pro they can do all the desktop work on apples now.
if you actually normalized their numbers by number of machines they support I suspect that the mac techs would win. Hard to say about the linux techs. Linux techs tend to support giant computer farms. They have huge problems getting them all working nicely but they arent running around putting out virus and worm fires every week or searching for some stupid third pary driver.
My soda fountain turns on when I insert the storage vessel (akak a cup) the tape player in my car turns on and reads the tape and generates amplified music when you insert it. my paper shredder and paper-port scanner turn on when I insert the storage media (paper). my toaster turns on when I insert the bread-storage media.
they got the idea from the airforce who uses this idea to damp wing vibration.
in both cases active vibration is lighter weight than passive damping materials. (unfortunately the K2s are still heavy as sin, so really it was a gimmick aimed at nerds. still it worked--I bought the skis!)
I'm looking at this from a mac computer, and it is detecting my appleness, so maybe the sight looks different from different browsers?
I run Zone alarm on my windows 98 box. and what it showed me was that real player runs daemons that periodially send outbound infomrmation to the mothership. It doesn't look like update notifications either. what are they sending?? I dont know but its spyware in my book not to mention one more process to crash windows 98.
On the otherhand windows media player has all sorts of problems on macs. On my macs I often find radio stations that echo when you connect using WMA.
On the otherhand rock eating microbes are now sterilized from farmland soil due to the ammonia fertilizers and pesticides used. So that source of mineralization is gone as well. and this is affecting forest and streams as well.
I would be a little skeptical we could finely balance the large offsetting rate terms in global warming differntial equation: polar reflection verus water/co2 green house absorption, versus evaporative transport verus conveciton currents from differnetial heating. Suppose you spread ajust a wee bit too much soot. how would you know and how would you undo it?
The thesis is that to have an ice age you need increaced moisture transport to the polls. with out this it could get cold but it would be dry and no ice age. Once enough ice accumulates the reflectivity of the earth shifts and global warming becomes global cooling. this last for ~90,000 years.
during this time glaciers grind rocks up and create mineral rich soils. When trees return they thrive on this till the nutirents run low which takes about 10,000 years. then plant death starts the cycle.
by the way were about 13000 years since the last ice age.
The price difference between the 15Gig ipod and dell is $50.
for this you get:
-it feels nicer in your hands and slips into your pants pocket better and is less of a pocket weight in you jacket or shirt.
-Best quality earphones magnets you can buy, with low-tangle coated wires
-Firewire charging. Did you see the brick the Dell comes with?/ this is not really a portable device.
-you can charge the apple anywhere with a tiny plug for the fire wire.
-you can plug the apple into most computers with or without software
-better wheel interface.
-store more songs with better high quality song format AAC
THe price difference bwteen the 20 Gig model is 100$. for this you get all of the above plus
-- a dock for your desk
-- a smaller remote than the dell.
It also works with itunes music store.