I cannot imagine I am alone in throwing up my hands in frustration in my search for a portable 20GB player. I have been waiting for years.
Every single player has some sort of very serious issue that makes it extremely difficult to justify the purchase.
iPod: obviously way too pricey and lacks voice recording, FM, alternative formats, and a slew of other very reasonable expectations which is insists on not meeting.
iRiver iHP-120: this bastard is great, but it is at the same pricepoint as the iPod, and has a non-removeable battery with not even a third-party hack to replace it. The new version, with a color screen, is thicker and heavier, and more expensive.
Karma: see above posts... it is perilous enough traipsing around new york city with a spinning HD, let alone one prone to locking up. plus it's the size of a Chunky bar. and chunky bars are just that -- CHUNKY!
iAudio M3: slim like iPod, but no screen except on the remote, and a lousy screen at that.
Neuros: extremely enormous, portable only in theory.
Nomad Zen: decent prices, but traps you into using its own garbagy software.
As you go down the list, there isn't a single player that I would feel comfortable plunking down huge wads of cash for. The only interesting player right now is the Archos Gmini400 -- it's tiny, has neat Wonderswan design, plays video... but it's still 350 dollars worth of plastic toy.
i'm astonished to find a contrary voice to all this kevin smith worship that didn't get modded down to tar, but i'm also thrilled to see it.
smith has always been a self-serving, self-satisfied fat man whose aspirations to fap onscreen to his own genius have always been interpreted mistakenly as either "genius" or "eagerness to entertain". did anyone ever see the comic he made -- about his own life -- that he got published in the NYT Magazine? should have gone into the latest issue of Fat Hack Review.
every single character in smith's movies has the same personality, the same type of humor, and same voice overall... it has been said that he uses his characters merely as "mouthpieces", and there is much truth to that. there is a special place in hell for fraudulent geniuses like him and tarantino, and there are only spiders there.
"Competition" implies the possibility of success. A competition is "won" when one company vanquishes all other competitors. Competition where the victory of one company is artificially suspended in order to prolong competition, is no longer "competition".
i am responsible for providing storage solutions for a mid-sized content creation company which, through version archiving, accumulates near 1-200 GB per day. they require access to their media backups on a rolling basis, so tapes are not an option.
i have found that a Teutonium cluster of 6.5 TB Spongedrives (either Cray or SecreTech are fine) fits the bill nicely. housed in a 15-unit rack server, the amoeba-shaped drives utilize BioLas technology to store data on 6-dimensional Moebius Cilia for a slick seek time of 0.00 ms.
a cluster costs about $45,000 USD but the price should come down in 2004 Q4 when SecreTech launches their new 40-platter blackholium SCSI's.
at first, i was with most everyone else in wondering where the market was for these devices. folks are pretty sharp in realizing that for the price, these things don't deliver commensurate ease of use and battery life, not to mention legal content.
but i believe very strongly that these devices are the precursors to what will, in the future, be a single catch-all portable device that does do all of these things... phone, pc w/ lots of storage, media player etc. of course, in the future, battery power will be amazing, and storage media miniscule and impossibly dense. can you imagine someone in 2030 walking around with a separate device for each of these things (excepting, perhaps digital cameras)? why, futureboy wouldn't be caught dead looking so square.
look at it this way: laptops keep getting smaller and more feature-filled, phones/PDAs keep getting larger and more feature filled. eventually both worlds will converge.
Lug this giant pooper into a destitute region of SA or China, and lay down inexpensive shelter for an entire town. Encourage corporate sponsorship - no joke - I'm sure Pepsi wouldn't mind putting up some cash for this process, if each house built had a big pepsi logo carved into it. Of course, people destitute enough to live in a soft-serve house probably aren't too embroiled in the cola wars. Ebola wars, maybe.
The video shows girders neatly and precisely arranged in preparation for the construction. The labor involved in lugging these onsite and then ordering them fussily along the ground, in addition to the laying of tracks for the giant house-plotter, would seem to be better spent actually building a real house instead of one made out of the semi-liquid gak that Hordak poured onto He-Man.
i can't seem to find where poster got the 3,300 price tag. From dell.com:
New Inspiron XPS Starting at $2599 After $250 Mail-in Rebate
Pentium(R)4 w/HT Technology 3.4GHz,15.4 WUXGA
512MB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM at 400MHz
60GB 7200 rpm Ultra ATA Hard Drive
4X CD/DVD burner(DVD+RW/+R) including Sonic RecordNow and MyDVD LE $2,849
2600 bucks is actually fairly well inline, and a huge difference from 3,300 in the makes-the-eyeballs-bulge dep't.
the simpsons writers absolutely love showing off that they can write convincing musical theater. they also remain dogmatically naive in failing to realize that no fan is interested in seeing how well they do songs.
the worst episodes in simpsons history have been ones with songs. and yet, if you put your hand on your heart and close your eyes, you just KNOW this movie will be a musical.
i am really rather shocked that so many of you guys are lauding this device. if you are the kind of (reasonable) person who will not buy a combo tv/vcr/dvd player for any or all of the salient reasons not to do so (problems if one of the components break, inability to upgrade one component, doing three+ things adequately instead of doing one thing extremely well), then you had better be consistent and laugh this horror off the map.
i don't know who said that real workstation synths run from 8-10k, because that's a filthy lie. no one in the world needs more than a korg triton, which max out at only a few thousand. most people can make do extremely well with a lightweight, versatile synth and a cheap, fast pc or laptop. not only can you upgrade parts for either with much greater ease, but you can do so for about 1/5th of the price and (with a laptop) 1/3 the weight.
i have a 61-key korg synth and it is monstrous to lug around, and it doesn't even have A FREAKING COMPUTER in it. good luck lugging this...this THING to an actual gig.
this device is, to both musicians and technophiles, an absolute monstrosity and an utter joke. all should join in the mockery, as it is right to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
why do you have the "right" to determine what changes take place in your neighborhood? did you buy the whole neighborhood?
I cannot imagine I am alone in throwing up my hands in frustration in my search for a portable 20GB player. I have been waiting for years.
... it is perilous enough traipsing around new york city with a spinning HD, let alone one prone to locking up. plus it's the size of a Chunky bar. and chunky bars are just that -- CHUNKY!
... but it's still 350 dollars worth of plastic toy.
Every single player has some sort of very serious issue that makes it extremely difficult to justify the purchase.
iPod: obviously way too pricey and lacks voice recording, FM, alternative formats, and a slew of other very reasonable expectations which is insists on not meeting.
iRiver iHP-120: this bastard is great, but it is at the same pricepoint as the iPod, and has a non-removeable battery with not even a third-party hack to replace it. The new version, with a color screen, is thicker and heavier, and more expensive.
Karma: see above posts
iAudio M3: slim like iPod, but no screen except on the remote, and a lousy screen at that.
Dell DJ: underfeatured garbage, embarrassingly ugly
Neuros: extremely enormous, portable only in theory.
Nomad Zen: decent prices, but traps you into using its own garbagy software.
As you go down the list, there isn't a single player that I would feel comfortable plunking down huge wads of cash for. The only interesting player right now is the Archos Gmini400 -- it's tiny, has neat Wonderswan design, plays video
That's hard to swallow.
i'm astonished to find a contrary voice to all this kevin smith worship that didn't get modded down to tar, but i'm also thrilled to see it.
... it has been said that he uses his characters merely as "mouthpieces", and there is much truth to that. there is a special place in hell for fraudulent geniuses like him and tarantino, and there are only spiders there.
smith has always been a self-serving, self-satisfied fat man whose aspirations to fap onscreen to his own genius have always been interpreted mistakenly as either "genius" or "eagerness to entertain". did anyone ever see the comic he made -- about his own life -- that he got published in the NYT Magazine? should have gone into the latest issue of Fat Hack Review.
every single character in smith's movies has the same personality, the same type of humor, and same voice overall
"Competition" implies the possibility of success. A competition is "won" when one company vanquishes all other competitors. Competition where the victory of one company is artificially suspended in order to prolong competition, is no longer "competition".
i am responsible for providing storage solutions for a mid-sized content creation company which, through version archiving, accumulates near 1-200 GB per day. they require access to their media backups on a rolling basis, so tapes are not an option.
i have found that a Teutonium cluster of 6.5 TB Spongedrives (either Cray or SecreTech are fine) fits the bill nicely. housed in a 15-unit rack server, the amoeba-shaped drives utilize BioLas technology to store data on 6-dimensional Moebius Cilia for a slick seek time of 0.00 ms.
a cluster costs about $45,000 USD but the price should come down in 2004 Q4 when SecreTech launches their new 40-platter blackholium SCSI's.
no, no. this is all wrong.
You should RTFA. Fragbooks "apparently" come with absolutely no dead pixels, guaranteed.
The chandelier ships with the default message "Hey you down there...you have waaay too much money."
Your iHP-120 also has a non-removable battery which iRiver has no plans to offer replacements for. Enjoy your paperweight.
of course you're right...it is after all unreasonable to punish someone for being good. for being successful.
for creating a product with such a strong business plan that you end up the most successful company in modern history, dominating your field.
if your principles demand you stand up for companies who are punished for getting better, then stand in front of microsoft and defend them too.
would have all of your heads. The correct usage is iPods Mini.
at first, i was with most everyone else in wondering where the market was for these devices. folks are pretty sharp in realizing that for the price, these things don't deliver commensurate ease of use and battery life, not to mention legal content.
but i believe very strongly that these devices are the precursors to what will, in the future, be a single catch-all portable device that does do all of these things
look at it this way: laptops keep getting smaller and more feature-filled, phones/PDAs keep getting larger and more feature filled. eventually both worlds will converge.
Lug this giant pooper into a destitute region of SA or China, and lay down inexpensive shelter for an entire town. Encourage corporate sponsorship - no joke - I'm sure Pepsi wouldn't mind putting up some cash for this process, if each house built had a big pepsi logo carved into it.
Of course, people destitute enough to live in a soft-serve house probably aren't too embroiled in the cola wars. Ebola wars, maybe.
The video shows girders neatly and precisely arranged in preparation for the construction. The labor involved in lugging these onsite and then ordering them fussily along the ground, in addition to the laying of tracks for the giant house-plotter, would seem to be better spent actually building a real house instead of one made out of the semi-liquid gak that Hordak poured onto He-Man.
the DOJ wishes to preserve and maintain competition, but when one of the competitors is about to win, they don't let them?
doesn't the concept of "competition" imply the possibility of victory?
all of humankind has filed a class-action lawsuit against mandrake for its infringement upon the concept of "names".
could someone plz mirror google.com? looks like it got /.'ed
i can't seem to find where poster got the 3,300 price tag. From dell.com:
New Inspiron XPS Starting at $2599 After $250 Mail-in Rebate
Pentium(R)4 w/HT Technology 3.4GHz,15.4 WUXGA
512MB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM at 400MHz
60GB 7200 rpm Ultra ATA Hard Drive
4X CD/DVD burner(DVD+RW/+R) including Sonic RecordNow and MyDVD LE
$2,849
2600 bucks is actually fairly well inline, and a huge difference from 3,300 in the makes-the-eyeballs-bulge dep't.
at that price point it had better come with a firewire vagina.
the simpsons writers absolutely love showing off that they can write convincing musical theater. they also remain dogmatically naive in failing to realize that no fan is interested in seeing how well they do songs.
the worst episodes in simpsons history have been ones with songs. and yet, if you put your hand on your heart and close your eyes, you just KNOW this movie will be a musical.
This is a printer/plotter. Moves on wires. Makes marks. Hooray.
I don't use the internet.
i am really rather shocked that so many of you guys are lauding this device. if you are the kind of (reasonable) person who will not buy a combo tv/vcr/dvd player for any or all of the salient reasons not to do so (problems if one of the components break, inability to upgrade one component, doing three+ things adequately instead of doing one thing extremely well), then you had better be consistent and laugh this horror off the map.
i don't know who said that real workstation synths run from 8-10k, because that's a filthy lie. no one in the world needs more than a korg triton, which max out at only a few thousand. most people can make do extremely well with a lightweight, versatile synth and a cheap, fast pc or laptop. not only can you upgrade parts for either with much greater ease, but you can do so for about 1/5th of the price and (with a laptop) 1/3 the weight.
i have a 61-key korg synth and it is monstrous to lug around, and it doesn't even have A FREAKING COMPUTER in it. good luck lugging this...this THING to an actual gig.
this device is, to both musicians and technophiles, an absolute monstrosity and an utter joke. all should join in the mockery, as it is right to do so.
RE a "precious insurance policy" for humankind should catastrophe befall us in the next millenium:
Why do people care at all what will happen after they die?
Objective: Look out window.
1954 -
1. Look out window.
2004 -
1. Turn off computer.
2. Look out window.
I thought progress was supposed to eliminate extra steps?