Non-programming CS jobs?
Fixing laptops, troubleshooting Windows problems, etc.
Heck, where I work I'm expected to be the DBA, a programmer, a project manager, a system designer, and (if no one else is around), the help desk. There are days where I invent processes to solve business problems, assign myself the job of writing a project plan, then delegate the programming tasks to myself, only to be interrupted by someone who's printer has ceased printing. Ahhh, the joys of working at a small company with a tiny IT department.
Disclaimers: I have never had Verizon service, nor do I know the details of your contract.
But I've had Sprint, Cingular/AT&T, and T-Mobile. With all of them, when my contract expired, the service simply reverted to a month-to-month plan. Same service, same plan, same cost, just no more contract.
So what I'm saying is that there's probably no reason for you to be *without* a phone while waiting for iPhone 2.0 to be released. Just stick with Verizon and cancel when you want, post June 6. But yeah, don't take my word for it, check your contract & ask Verizon.
Are we still bitching that the iPhone doesn't have MMS?
As discussed elsewhere ad nauseum, every major carrier in the US supports email address translation to 'dumb', phones. Phones that can only do SMS/MMS actually do have an email address. Even if the user doesn't know it. It's like [their phone number]@[carrier specific domain]. So like 5551234567@wireless.att.net, or 5551234567@tmobile.net, etc, etc, etc. You can find out exactly what the domain part is on your own. Ask the Google. Messages sent to that address will be translated and pushed out as an SMS/MMS message to the 'dumb' phone.
To send a photo from an iPhone to a non-email reading phone, all you have to do is email the photo to that email address. The 'dumb-phone' owner will be alerted just as if it was an MMS because it IS translated to an MMS message. No fuss, no hassle. Done. They can even reply to it, and their phone carrier's system will convert the response back to a normal email for the iPhone user. The carrier's network handles the translation in the middle. As a side bonus, the iPhone user won't even be charged for the message (or deducted from your bucket), because it's NOT being sent/received as an SMS/MMS, but just as email data, which (with AT&T) is unlimited. If the iPhone user is using a push-mail service such as Yahoo! mail, it will be pushed nearly instantly back to the iPhone.
I do agree that it is a somewhat perplexing technical limitation that the iPhone v1 doesn't have MMS. However, the 'work around' is trivial. I personally prefer corresponding via email rather than SMS/MMS messages anyway.
I had an original 1989-spec Gameboy (B&W). I would have been 11 or 12 when it was released and I do remember that it was the 'big deal' birthday present at the time for me. I remember that it worked fine for a year or so before all it would do is draw a grey line or two down the left-hand side of the screen when you turned it on, with no 'ding-DING' Nintendo noise or logo. At first a few on-off-on cycles would bring it back to life, but after a few months it wouldn't work at all. Did the same thing with all the cartridges I had. Being a Nintendo-era kid, I certainly tried the blow-it-out trick to both cartridges and the Game Boy's socket, to no avail.
I don't recall ever dropping it or otherwise abusing it. I guess they all weren't indestructable.
Maybe I'm stereotyping, but perhaps the/. crowd doesn't get out and live in the 'real world' often enough. I think most people will know what a sommelier is. Perhaps not your 'Joe Six-Pack' shopping at Wal-Mart, but most folks who are in the market for a higher-end cell phone probably will. Perhaps sommelier isn't the best term, but it's the right idea. A sommelier at a winery will tell you how this wine has a hint of peach, or that wine has lingering chocolate flavor, etc. Some of it is kind of smoke-and-mirrors if you're not really into wine. A sommelier at a good restaurant can make valuable suggestions of what to have with your dinner, because different wine goes with different things. The most general rule would be like whites for fish, reds for beef. But it gets far more complicated than that to a sommelier. "Eating the Chilean Sea Bass special? I'd recommend this such-and-such wine because it compliments the wasabi sauce, blah blah blah". Again, it's only as important as you want it to be. Some people care, some don't.
I know of a lot of upper-middle class (and up) people who want a nice phone (TV, stereo, car, toaster, etc) but have no idea what the features are or what they want. I'm talking about doctors, lawyers, successful business owners, politicians, etc. They want a nice, new, shiny phone, but have no idea what bluetooth is, or what SMS means, or why they should care that a certain phone is a quad-band. These are the the same sorts of people that pay thousands of dollars to have someone set up their Home Theater and program $1,500 touch-screen with icons for 'FOX', 'NBC', etc, on it. They want the best, they're not afraid to pay through the nose, but they want it to 'just work'. I would imagine that this class of people would gladly pay for a cell-phone 'sommelier'. Someone of who understands the difference between, say, how eMail works on a Blackberry vs. how it works on an iPhone and could set it up for them. Yes, yes, RTFM, but why do that if you can pay someone else to do it for them? I would imagine that in larger cities, one could probably earn a nice living if they were in the right 'circle'.
And to think, this is the company that will soon (already does?) own both Jaguar and Land Rover. They'll certainly have quite a wide range of vehicles to produce!
Unlike many slashdotters, I don't have a big problem with Microsoft. Writing software with their tools pays my bills. But it baffles me as to why they can't figure out that their whole DRM plan is broken. First they create a 'Plays For Sure' system, but then they release their own player that doesn't work with it. Who was the genius that decided that? It's as if Apple had different DRM's for different versions of the iPod. And now *another* name change? They just can't figure it out.
If Microsoft wants to win customers from Apple, they should just drop DRM all together. If Amazon and Apple (iTunes+) can do it, why not Microsoft?
I'd stand up and do a tap-dance on my desk for 5m/5m service from Verizon. Where I live, there are three choices in broadband : 1) Verizon DSL, 768k/128k = $20/month. 2) Rural cable company, 3MB/??? = $60/month if you buy their TV service for an additional $50/month for just the basic channels w/ dismal, snow-ridden service and a 'what's ach dee?' attitude when asked. 3) Rural Wifi network. Brand new in the area, I have no idea of speed, but it's about $50/month and capped at 5GB/month down.
Apparently, Verizon has differing levels of love for various parts of the country. From a business perspective, I can't really blame them. What do corn fields need with Fios? I'd just love a 1.5/768.
I'm a car guy. I can totally appreciate wanting to drive your modded M5 at autobahn speeds. It was designed for that. That car can run at 130mph+ all day long. It is, frankly, an automotive masterpiece. Very different than some kid with a fart-can on his Civic. But the US Highway system is not the place for this. Enjoy the art of driving fast and well where it belongs: on the track. It's a lot more enjoyable there anyway, and you don't have to have all those electronic doodads floating around the car. What he did/does is dangerous, illegal, and dumb. Bragging about it in the form of 'broken records' and YouTube videos is a slap in the face to every law enforcement agency in the country. I guarantee that they will be watching and waiting for him. Frankly, he's lucky he didn't get his precious bimmer blown off the road by a semi. I've traveled the highways enough with a CB to know that truckers frequently do not take kindly to crazy antics like this 'in their office'.
How does he possibly have sponsors for this? From that photo you can clearly see 'T-Mobile' and 'Meguiars' stickers. Many others that you can't quite see from the photo. I don't understand that. If they're actual sponsor decals, what in the world were these companies thinking in sponsoring an illegal activity like this? What's next, Coca-Cola branded cocaine smuggling cigar boats? If they're not actual sponsors, then what's the point of having the decals? Is this guy so starved for attention and praise that he's just another 'ricer' but with a big bank account? The 8-ball says, "Signs point to yes".
My notebook is running Vista Home Premium. Core2Duo, 1GB ram, blah blah blah. One of my hobbies is photography, and I have about 18,000 digital photos that I've taken over the years. I keep this collection on a couple of different computers for safety reasons. I also keep them backed up on an external USB drive, and use that drive as a transport mechanism between the other computers (I'm too cheap for a gigabit LAN). When I bought the notebook a few weeks ago, I had no problem copying all of those photos from the external drive to the notebook. While I have not spot checked every single photo, the byte counts match and it certainly appears that they are all there.
While it is unpopular around here to say so, Vista seems to work pretty well for me. YM, of course, MV.
I hate mail-in rebates as much as the next guy, and try to purchase things from vendors that don't use them whenever I can, but I have to say that I don't think I've ever had one *not* work. I totally agree that it is just some accounting trick that should be banished, but none-the-less, they've always worked for me.
Over the years I've mailed in probably two dozen rebates for various products at brick-and-mortar places like Best Buy, Circuit City, Office Depot, Staples, AT&T/Cingular, etc. I'm referring to $25-$200+ back on things like laptops, TV's, Tivos, software, cell phones, etc. I had a Cingular rebate once that was 4 weeks overdue. One 10 minute phone call and the rebate was re-issued and arrived 3 days later. I've even done a couple of the 'come test drive the new Mazda Whatever and get a $25 gift card' rebates, and those have always arrived as well.
OTOH, I've never bothered with the '$3.50 rebate on a $5 pack of CD-R' type things, as it's just not worth my time.
FWIW, I've always carefully followed the directions and have received the rebates within roughly the correct time period as stated. I keep a copy of everything I sent and make a note in my calendar for 6,8,12,whatever weeks away that I should have received it and then just forget about it until then. My point is, rebates suck, but they aren't *always* a scam....
Noname oddball phones that only work with Helio (it appears to use either Sprint or Verizon's network, as the maps correspond with CDMA coverage in my area), required 2 year contract, no options for laptop/pda tethering, etc. Great idea I suppose, but no thanks. Theyr'e not much different than any other carriers, they just have a simplified all-inclusive billing plan.
The problem with cell phones in the US is that everyone has gotten used to sub-par phones for free. Heavily subsidized phones = long contract lengths. No one understands why I choose to pay $200-$400 for an unlocked/unbranded OEM phone when their Cingutastic branded one cost them $29 and a 2 year contract. Then I show them how my phone can do feature X and their's can't because of the feature lockdown, and that I haven't been involved in a contract for years. It's the typical 'Verunca' line, "don't care how, I want it now" syndrome. Look, shiny new phone, just sign the dotted line, never mind the itty-bitty print. I've actually heard reps at a local store tell people not to bother reading it as it just is a bunch of legal stuff that doesn't matter (!).
The technology is there, I just think that the carriers choose to exclude some of the 'cool' features because people in general are either too stupid to use them (hang around your nearest Sprint/Verizon/AT&T store for 20-30 minutes around lunchtime and you'll wonder how those folks that work there survive the day), or on the other end of the spectrum they would abuse them (bluetooth dial-up-networking support is a prime example of this).
Another big problem are the standards that the US supports. I'm specifically talking GSM here, so Sprint and Verizon are excluded from my rant. I don't know whether it's the FCC, the carriers themselves, or some other right/left-wing conspiracy, but it seems daft that the US decided to use the 850/1900WCDMA bands for 3G when the rest of the freaking (GSM) world uses the 2100WCDMA band. It seems that only recently have Euro-OEM phones started being commonly available as quad band phones capable of supporting the common 850/1900mhz range here in the US. It just doesn't make sense to me why we'd intentionally choose to 'go our own way' on 3G technology, unless it *is* some sort of conspiracy by the carriers to drive up prices for 'specialized' handsets.
I have Dish Network for TV. When I signed up, the phone rep wanted me to sign a 2 year contract. I simply told them that I wasn't interested, and so they countered with a 1 year contract. Didn't really feel like that either, and so they finally offered a no-contract plan but required like a $49 activation fee. Fine by me.
Same deal with Cingular. They say a 2 year contract is required, but it isn't. All you have to do is ask for less. They'll do a 1 year and might charge you $25 or $50 more for the phone. Big deal. Bring your own phone and tell them you want a month-to-month plan, and they'll do that too.
Same deal with Verizon DSL. They have a month-to-month plan with DSL that costs a couple bucks a month more than the contract price. You just have to ask for it.
The point is, you have to stand up for your rights as a consumer. Tell the company, "I'm here, I'd like to pay for your services, but your terms are unacceptable. What can you do about it?" If they won't bend, find another company that will. I have no sympathy for people that blindly sign contracts and then whine about the consequences later.
Perhaps a http://www.solio.com/v2/ would be in order? It certainly won't help with the laptop, but it could keep your phone, GPS, iPod, and maybe the digital camera charged. You get that warm-and-fuzzy-save-the-planet feeling when you recharge from the sun, but you can also charge it from the wall and charge another devices at the same time. Mine came with a handfull of power adapters for use in other countries. I find it to be a fairly useful gadget, simply from the standpoint that it can recharge most of my 'gadgets' on it's own without needing to take a half dozen power adapters.
I know this is Slashdot, but did anyone read the article? There is no mention that this is a laser based system at all. To quote, "destroying an aging Chinese weather satellite target with a kinetic kill vehicle launched on board a ballistic missile." That's not a laser, that's a high speed rocket launced from a larger missile. This isn't some laser based ground weapon, it sounds quite similar to the system that the U.S. has that is almost deployed for attempting to knock down ICBM's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ballistic_missil e , just applied to taking out a satellite instead of an incomming missile.
I have taken the SS Badger several times. My sister took the Lake Express earlier this summer.
They are very different ships for different purposes. The Lake Express is newer, faster, and more prone to breakdowns and postponed trips due to the higher speed. The SS Badger is older, slower, and more reliable due to it being an 'old fashioned' coal-burning boat that chugs slowly across the lake. The Lake Express is pretty much assigned seating, enclosed from the elements, with very limited space outside on deck. The SS Badger is completely open seating and you can spend the entire trip outside enjoying the views, the rain, and the coal soot.
If you want to minimize your time spent on the water and travel in a new, state-of-the-art, fast boat, take the Lake Express. If you want to prolong the experience and enjoy being out on the lake, take the SS Badger.
The two companies can compete all the want, but I think they have two different customer bases.
Get a Blackberry. My 7100t has bluetooth (for headset usage, doesn't have OBEX or modem profiles) and no camera. I'm pretty sure that every current Blackberry has bluetooth, and I'm positive that no Blackberries have cameras.
Have you done back-to-back comparisons with the files to see if you can actually hear the differences? I have, and most of the time I can't. If the point is academic, I completely agree, as data is being lost as the decendant generations are created, and that eventually those losses will become audible, but in practice can you actually tell the difference on just the third generation? Digital artifacts that I can (and do) hear in the original DRM files are not any worse in the copies. For all intents and purposes, most of the time the files sound identical to me.
Besides, most of the stuff I buy online is more for driving in the car or working out at the gym, places where I am not super concerned with sound quality. When sound quality is paramount, I'm at home in my listening room with my SACD's.;-)
With Napster, it does actually indicate the track # from the original CD. So if you buy a whole CD, you will get all of the tracks and they will have a track #. That makes it easy to order them. When, however, you grab an entire CD in Napster and click-drag that whole CD to the "staging" area for CD-burning, it conveniently likes to reverse the order of the tracks. I don't know if this is a 'feature' or a 'bug', but it certainly serves the purpose of dis-allowing CDDB searches on the ripped CD if you're not paying attention and burn the CD that way. I usually have to add the tracks one-at-a-time to preserve the order on the CD.
In my experience, continuous-flow tracks will have a break in them.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, where I work I'm expected to be the DBA, a programmer, a project manager, a system designer, and (if no one else is around), the help desk. There are days where I invent processes to solve business problems, assign myself the job of writing a project plan, then delegate the programming tasks to myself, only to be interrupted by someone who's printer has ceased printing. Ahhh, the joys of working at a small company with a tiny IT department.
But I've had Sprint, Cingular/AT&T, and T-Mobile. With all of them, when my contract expired, the service simply reverted to a month-to-month plan. Same service, same plan, same cost, just no more contract.
So what I'm saying is that there's probably no reason for you to be *without* a phone while waiting for iPhone 2.0 to be released. Just stick with Verizon and cancel when you want, post June 6. But yeah, don't take my word for it, check your contract & ask Verizon.
As discussed elsewhere ad nauseum, every major carrier in the US supports email address translation to 'dumb', phones. Phones that can only do SMS/MMS actually do have an email address. Even if the user doesn't know it. It's like [their phone number]@[carrier specific domain]. So like 5551234567@wireless.att.net, or 5551234567@tmobile.net, etc, etc, etc. You can find out exactly what the domain part is on your own. Ask the Google. Messages sent to that address will be translated and pushed out as an SMS/MMS message to the 'dumb' phone.
To send a photo from an iPhone to a non-email reading phone, all you have to do is email the photo to that email address. The 'dumb-phone' owner will be alerted just as if it was an MMS because it IS translated to an MMS message. No fuss, no hassle. Done. They can even reply to it, and their phone carrier's system will convert the response back to a normal email for the iPhone user. The carrier's network handles the translation in the middle. As a side bonus, the iPhone user won't even be charged for the message (or deducted from your bucket), because it's NOT being sent/received as an SMS/MMS, but just as email data, which (with AT&T) is unlimited. If the iPhone user is using a push-mail service such as Yahoo! mail, it will be pushed nearly instantly back to the iPhone.
I do agree that it is a somewhat perplexing technical limitation that the iPhone v1 doesn't have MMS. However, the 'work around' is trivial. I personally prefer corresponding via email rather than SMS/MMS messages anyway.
Agreed. There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.
The US has produced over 8,000 of them, with over 5,000 still in active US military service. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/m1-specs.htm
I don't recall ever dropping it or otherwise abusing it. I guess they all weren't indestructable.
I know of a lot of upper-middle class (and up) people who want a nice phone (TV, stereo, car, toaster, etc) but have no idea what the features are or what they want. I'm talking about doctors, lawyers, successful business owners, politicians, etc. They want a nice, new, shiny phone, but have no idea what bluetooth is, or what SMS means, or why they should care that a certain phone is a quad-band. These are the the same sorts of people that pay thousands of dollars to have someone set up their Home Theater and program $1,500 touch-screen with icons for 'FOX', 'NBC', etc, on it. They want the best, they're not afraid to pay through the nose, but they want it to 'just work'. I would imagine that this class of people would gladly pay for a cell-phone 'sommelier'. Someone of who understands the difference between, say, how eMail works on a Blackberry vs. how it works on an iPhone and could set it up for them. Yes, yes, RTFM, but why do that if you can pay someone else to do it for them? I would imagine that in larger cities, one could probably earn a nice living if they were in the right 'circle'.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/dec2007/db20071220_511151.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_companies
If Microsoft wants to win customers from Apple, they should just drop DRM all together. If Amazon and Apple (iTunes+) can do it, why not Microsoft?
Apparently, Verizon has differing levels of love for various parts of the country. From a business perspective, I can't really blame them. What do corn fields need with Fios? I'd just love a 1.5/768.
How does he possibly have sponsors for this? From that photo you can clearly see 'T-Mobile' and 'Meguiars' stickers. Many others that you can't quite see from the photo. I don't understand that. If they're actual sponsor decals, what in the world were these companies thinking in sponsoring an illegal activity like this? What's next, Coca-Cola branded cocaine smuggling cigar boats? If they're not actual sponsors, then what's the point of having the decals? Is this guy so starved for attention and praise that he's just another 'ricer' but with a big bank account? The 8-ball says, "Signs point to yes".
My notebook is running Vista Home Premium. Core2Duo, 1GB ram, blah blah blah. One of my hobbies is photography, and I have about 18,000 digital photos that I've taken over the years. I keep this collection on a couple of different computers for safety reasons. I also keep them backed up on an external USB drive, and use that drive as a transport mechanism between the other computers (I'm too cheap for a gigabit LAN). When I bought the notebook a few weeks ago, I had no problem copying all of those photos from the external drive to the notebook. While I have not spot checked every single photo, the byte counts match and it certainly appears that they are all there.
While it is unpopular around here to say so, Vista seems to work pretty well for me. YM, of course, MV.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/25/1140253
And you thought you had a tough time of it when you got that bad sausage from PapaDomiHut's...
Over the years I've mailed in probably two dozen rebates for various products at brick-and-mortar places like Best Buy, Circuit City, Office Depot, Staples, AT&T/Cingular, etc. I'm referring to $25-$200+ back on things like laptops, TV's, Tivos, software, cell phones, etc. I had a Cingular rebate once that was 4 weeks overdue. One 10 minute phone call and the rebate was re-issued and arrived 3 days later. I've even done a couple of the 'come test drive the new Mazda Whatever and get a $25 gift card' rebates, and those have always arrived as well.
OTOH, I've never bothered with the '$3.50 rebate on a $5 pack of CD-R' type things, as it's just not worth my time.
FWIW, I've always carefully followed the directions and have received the rebates within roughly the correct time period as stated. I keep a copy of everything I sent and make a note in my calendar for 6,8,12,whatever weeks away that I should have received it and then just forget about it until then. My point is, rebates suck, but they aren't *always* a scam....
The lowest cost/GB I can find is about $.24/GB. 500GB external USB drives can easily be found online for about $120.
The problem with cell phones in the US is that everyone has gotten used to sub-par phones for free. Heavily subsidized phones = long contract lengths. No one understands why I choose to pay $200-$400 for an unlocked/unbranded OEM phone when their Cingutastic branded one cost them $29 and a 2 year contract. Then I show them how my phone can do feature X and their's can't because of the feature lockdown, and that I haven't been involved in a contract for years. It's the typical 'Verunca' line, "don't care how, I want it now" syndrome. Look, shiny new phone, just sign the dotted line, never mind the itty-bitty print. I've actually heard reps at a local store tell people not to bother reading it as it just is a bunch of legal stuff that doesn't matter (!).
The technology is there, I just think that the carriers choose to exclude some of the 'cool' features because people in general are either too stupid to use them (hang around your nearest Sprint/Verizon/AT&T store for 20-30 minutes around lunchtime and you'll wonder how those folks that work there survive the day), or on the other end of the spectrum they would abuse them (bluetooth dial-up-networking support is a prime example of this).
Another big problem are the standards that the US supports. I'm specifically talking GSM here, so Sprint and Verizon are excluded from my rant. I don't know whether it's the FCC, the carriers themselves, or some other right/left-wing conspiracy, but it seems daft that the US decided to use the 850/1900WCDMA bands for 3G when the rest of the freaking (GSM) world uses the 2100WCDMA band. It seems that only recently have Euro-OEM phones started being commonly available as quad band phones capable of supporting the common 850/1900mhz range here in the US. It just doesn't make sense to me why we'd intentionally choose to 'go our own way' on 3G technology, unless it *is* some sort of conspiracy by the carriers to drive up prices for 'specialized' handsets.
I have Dish Network for TV. When I signed up, the phone rep wanted me to sign a 2 year contract. I simply told them that I wasn't interested, and so they countered with a 1 year contract. Didn't really feel like that either, and so they finally offered a no-contract plan but required like a $49 activation fee. Fine by me.
Same deal with Cingular. They say a 2 year contract is required, but it isn't. All you have to do is ask for less. They'll do a 1 year and might charge you $25 or $50 more for the phone. Big deal. Bring your own phone and tell them you want a month-to-month plan, and they'll do that too.
Same deal with Verizon DSL. They have a month-to-month plan with DSL that costs a couple bucks a month more than the contract price. You just have to ask for it.
The point is, you have to stand up for your rights as a consumer. Tell the company, "I'm here, I'd like to pay for your services, but your terms are unacceptable. What can you do about it?" If they won't bend, find another company that will. I have no sympathy for people that blindly sign contracts and then whine about the consequences later.
Perhaps a http://www.solio.com/v2/ would be in order? It certainly won't help with the laptop, but it could keep your phone, GPS, iPod, and maybe the digital camera charged. You get that warm-and-fuzzy-save-the-planet feeling when you recharge from the sun, but you can also charge it from the wall and charge another devices at the same time. Mine came with a handfull of power adapters for use in other countries. I find it to be a fairly useful gadget, simply from the standpoint that it can recharge most of my 'gadgets' on it's own without needing to take a half dozen power adapters.
I know this is Slashdot, but did anyone read the article? There is no mention that this is a laser based system at all. To quote, "destroying an aging Chinese weather satellite target with a kinetic kill vehicle launched on board a ballistic missile." That's not a laser, that's a high speed rocket launced from a larger missile. This isn't some laser based ground weapon, it sounds quite similar to the system that the U.S. has that is almost deployed for attempting to knock down ICBM's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ballistic_missil e , just applied to taking out a satellite instead of an incomming missile.
They are very different ships for different purposes. The Lake Express is newer, faster, and more prone to breakdowns and postponed trips due to the higher speed. The SS Badger is older, slower, and more reliable due to it being an 'old fashioned' coal-burning boat that chugs slowly across the lake. The Lake Express is pretty much assigned seating, enclosed from the elements, with very limited space outside on deck. The SS Badger is completely open seating and you can spend the entire trip outside enjoying the views, the rain, and the coal soot.
If you want to minimize your time spent on the water and travel in a new, state-of-the-art, fast boat, take the Lake Express. If you want to prolong the experience and enjoy being out on the lake, take the SS Badger.
The two companies can compete all the want, but I think they have two different customer bases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(season_2 )#Episode_29_.E2.80.94_.22Cooling_a_Six_pack.22
Get a Blackberry. My 7100t has bluetooth (for headset usage, doesn't have OBEX or modem profiles) and no camera. I'm pretty sure that every current Blackberry has bluetooth, and I'm positive that no Blackberries have cameras.
Third hit down mentions this about halfway down the page..
http://www.atlasf1.com/2000/hun/faq.html
Besides, most of the stuff I buy online is more for driving in the car or working out at the gym, places where I am not super concerned with sound quality. When sound quality is paramount, I'm at home in my listening room with my SACD's. ;-)
In my experience, continuous-flow tracks will have a break in them.