At the same time those "overclocking and modding circles" have something of a testosterone driven macho scene, were some people would probably refrain from admitting failure, for status reasons.
But otoh, i don't intend to suggest that water-cooling is particularly risky, i guess if you use quality equipment and keep a clear mind then there is not more risk in qater-cooling than in, say, not using datacenter-quality surge protection on the mains and i certainly don't do that.
i migtht actually get a reserator kit or something to make my box more silent, but there is still the money issue, the fact that i would still need a noisy airflow for my harddrives (if the cpu overheats the system might crash, annoying but not that much a problem, if the hdd is not kept cool enough i might loose data and need a general reinstall, really bad idea) and the transportation issue (haven't moved my system more than a few meters at a time during the last 2.5 years, but the moving a pc with an external cooling system starts being a hassle for any distance beyond maybe half a meter)
if all you want is really only a thin client then batteries are probably a waste too, since you will want a cable to that fat server anyway (we agree that wireless does not scale for users per space, right?)
another core idea of the thin client philosophy is that you won't have to carry around your personal computer at all, because your personal work environment can be accessed from any client and those generic clients are supposed to be available everywhere you go, at least anywhere where you would have the fat connection needed for thin clients.
Why does it need restrictions at all? You can do the same thing with an unrestricted email attachment. Just put in a warning notice about sharing, but don't restrict its functionality.
Because if email was invented today the inventor would likely be sent through all circles of legal hell by the various intellectual property lobbying organizations.
> if the gnome and gtk+ teams don't realize that software is > written for the end user and NOT for the developer
i often get the impression that the gnome people are secretly thinking that everybody who uses a gui is so lame that they could not make effective use of a computer anyway and consequently there would no be such a thing as GUI efficiency.
from that point of view writing for their assumed end user would be keeping everything simple and inefficient enough to force the advanced user to the command line. much like the reasoning behind the one-button mouse, just for CLI rather than for keyboard shortcuts on GUI.
personally i could not agree less but then i'm a badly windows tainted person with a strong tendency towards kde, so it might make more sense for other people.
too bad that in real life the choice is more often based on the different flavours of "free" and the difference between the UI philosophies only comes second.
You could either charge some average pricing from everybody or try to charge more from those with higher demand in your product and less from those with lower demand. With the fixed average price you might completely lose the sales to the potential clients with lower demand while at the same time getting less money from those with high demand, so the average price is not what you want.
The problem is to find some rule or measurement for "how much demand for my product does potential customer x have?", ideally one that would not seem too arbitrary to the customer.
CAL are one solution for this problem, of course they are just an approximation but it's not the worst imaginable.
yeah, first thing i thought when reading that headline was "thanks ford", great level!
that's one of those sad moments when you realize you spend too much time on/., i mean isn't this supposed to be some huge anonymous place where you would never ever remember a single name besides maybe cmdr taco and the cowboyneal option? seems like there are still people left who are able to get something done despite being on/.;-)
what is the music used in the mod? if it is original content, then pass on a big thumbs up from me if you read this, ford. fits perfectly to the rest of all the minerva goodness
Zigbee is as much not bluetooth as bluetooth is not WLAN.
If you see bluetooth as an alternative to WLAN then bluetooth has utterly failed because it is just a wholly different thing, with completely different application areas. Zigbee is for a third, completely separate application area.
The only thing those 3 technologies overlap in are the frequencies used.
i'm quite sure that losing the library reuse advantage of dynamic libraries is pretty much not a problem at all with games, since the typical user won't run a dozen of them at the same time (quite unlike anything office- or communication-related)
what you still have is the harddisk space issue, but considering the typical ratio of code vs media in games this won't be much of a problem either.
it would be a wholly different story in case of an IM client for example.
CLI is great for stuff you do all the time, but today there are many more different things people do with their computers than back in 1995. copy a file from floppy, open word processor, write away? using a mouse for that would be such a waste of time.
today people who are averagely accustomed with their GUI system can casually do email, IM, voip, filesharing, cd burning and a ton of other things without ever having read a manual (that the world might be better off if they would read the manual first is a completely unrelated topic). all because the interface can be _explored_.
btw, i share your opinion on those overcrowded icon bars, as a rule of thumb i'd say users can memorize a number of icon shortcuts per application that is proportional to the number of hours per week they spend on that app, plus generic icons like "new document" and "save". for me it might be around 1 icon per 5 hours, i am sure i could learn about twice as many keyboard shortcuts ("tactile memory"), but not more.
but then i guess pirates was one of the most famous games of it's time which qualifies it even less as an "underrated game" than battlezone.
if i had to pick a "most underrated sid meier game" i'd probably chose alpha centauri (and colonization as a close second of course), not because of lack of fame but because of lack of fame relative to the other civs despite of being the best.
Battlezone was really great. Most immersive game i've ever played, best UI.
Too bad they dropped those "cold war cliches" in bz2 and the mobility of the bases. Made the setting feel much more alive because the main base building became nearly as much a "recurring character" as the carrier ships in the old wing-commander games.
Everybody who liked bz and has bz2 should definitely check out that "forgotten enemies" mod, it feels a bit more bz1 than bz2 imho (can't say why)
mp3 players are not gapless because mp3 only does full blocks, so the tracks need padding at the end. there is no way to really find out where padding begins and where there just happened to be a zero signal before encoding.
lame enc can put the actual track sample count into a special id3 tag but i'd be surprised if any hardware would support that.
one more argument in favor of vorbis, which has sample-accurate track length. still wouldn't bet on the few makers of vorbis-aware really making the vorbis support better than mp3 though:(
cars certainly have far more room between starting to lose grip and completely losing control (and road cycles are completely all or nothing in this aspect) but there's another important difference between bikes and cars:
bikes can move their center of mass closer to the sides of the roads because they are not as wide as cars, allowing for a wider curve radius in the same corner. this makes a lot more difference on the narrow streets typical for tour de france downhills than on a wide racing track.
of course the grandparent did not mean distinct but that's what he described and using group by instead of distinct is not supposed to have different performance except for on the most moronic systems
you are asking for duplicate elimination as in relational algebra.
easily achieved in SQL by using SELECT DISTINCT instead of SELECT.
i guess what you really mean is "group by everything which is not explicitly in some form of aggregation in the select statement" which is a more special case, ironically one that fits exactly into the "* except x" pattern of the original poster.
When i read this i first thought "oh no, how could they let their plans slip to the public, now everybody will know that the 'sold out' news story is manipulated", but then i realized that this is not a problem at all. Any news is good news. And unlike the "sells 10 jillion on first day" headline the "artificial shortage" scandal will happen _before_ the release date, making it double-good news because anticipation is what creates the "blockbuster effect" that console manufactureres are obviously trying to create for their product launches.
The worst thing that could happen would be someone walking into a shop thinking "wasn't that xbox-thing over there much cheaper when it was black?"
the more i think of it i could even imagine that this is done all on purpose:
Microsoft: "hello PR-agency, any ideas to make us popular for our new xbox launch?"
PR-agency: "hello Microsoft, you are seen as an evil empire by most of the target audience and can't change anything about that, so try to make something positive out of it"
MS: "really? how can we do that? Look i will give you these nice $$$ if you tell me how"
PR: "hmm, it's not easy, but it has to be possible somehow *brainstorms*"
MS: "$$$$$"
PR: "Oh, now we have an idea: If we spread some clues that you will artificially create a product shortage to get 'sold out before noon' press then everbody will believe it. Nobody will ever think that MS, the evil empire, could do otherwise."
MS: "But won't that drive away customers? Wouldn't we then have to really create an artificial shortage to not look like fools who did not even sell those few xboxes?"
PR: "No, that's the good thing about that plan: The outcry following that 'scandal' will rise public awareness of the product launch to unheard levels and everybody will try to get some of those few xboxes. Of course you won't hold back the boxes, except for a few in a special warehouse that our 'journalists' will somehow gain access to to get some proof footage of the holdback, but now there will be so many more people trying to get one of those few exclusive-thanks-to-MS-evilness 'zero-day' xboxes that they will really sell out."
MS: "Wow, thank you, we did not know how good it is to be evil
Of course this is probably all mindless conspiracy crap, but i think the central point is still valid, MS has no problem with somebody finding out about their artificial xbox sellout.
what's so open-ended in the 3 gta3s anyways? sure, you can poke around between missions, play some minigames and can vary the order of the missions a bit where it does not hurt the missions' interdependencies, but to me it's still a heavily mission based gameplay just with more glue-gameplay than in other titles. that is certainly not a bad thing, but calling it "the invention of open-endedness" is so full of hype it hurts. would half-life be open-ended if it allowed you to walk around on xen after defeating the end boss?
the current gta is a very good game and it invites the player to stay a while after the end boss is defeated but imho that is still the moment the game ends. the only real advantage i can see in that is that it could prove to be a quite effictive way to keep you from starting the whole game again the moment you feel a bit like you could want have driving through a gta world now, which is a good thing because otherwise you would likely loose all those hours spent on playing through the game again;)
then most people will drive around, get lost much more than with the incremental unlocking and then wonder why there is nothing exciting to do. eventually they will get bored (much earlier) and decide to never ever buy a gta game again. rockstar games know that.
it's the same simple "constantly increase the dosage" dosage rule that forces cheap action movies to show the smallest explosion first and the biggest at the end, otherwise it would not stay exciting.
according to microsoft my system's performance is "WWOW!!!", i wonder how this translates into bogomips. or does that just mean "able to run Windows + WoW"?
> I do think that any game, online or not, should be > removing the CD protection check after 4 months or > so just so it pisses off the gamers less.
And don't forget how this would give the nocds much less exposure to the paying part of the audience. Not patching the cd protection away after a while is a big incentive for the honest customer to learn how to find cracks.
your suggestion about formal quantification is a very interesting one. rpg rules are an abstraction of the real (or fantasy) world into a limited set of numbers, lists and forms. pretty much the same as what a programmer does when he turns an application domain into code.
when i used to be into pen & paper roleplaying i was always much interested in the design of the different rule systems and how they affected gameplay, ease of play vs realism vs support for interesting stories.
i think making game rules kann be seen a form of programming in the broadest sense, much like legislature to run a society, the memes of a religion or even the way the technical and nontechnical features of a programming language lead to the way it is used.
all of that is defining some form of "code" beforehand in the hope that it is leading to the desired results when it is later executed/lived by/used/followed. rarely a sequential script but still code.
btw: the "power gaming" that you see way too often in pen & paper games that mainly consists of tweaking the highest battle performance out of a certain character class by finding the best combination of skills, spells, equipment and the various kinds of "point allocation", usually at the very limits of the rule set, is another task that sounds like something a typical programmer might like: it is completely "software" (words and numbers written on a piece of paper, nothing but data), it is creating something and it fits the desire to get a job well done.
oh, trendiness sure matters as well, but i don't think it could make anything close to that much of a difference on it's own. and besides, pda did have their fifteen minutes of hip: when the time came that mobile phone early adopters could not pose anymore with the fact of owning a cellphone, because suddenly everybody did, there was a short wave when the typical bars and cafes where that kind of people gathers where filled with people between their late 20ies and mid 30ies all trying to trump the palm pilot of the next guy with their newly bought shiny pocket pc. but unlike mobile phones and ipods (and, to a lesser extent, digital cameras) there simply wasn't any single application useful for the rich-and-hip, so those machines quickly disappeared again.
leaving out the obvious piracy option i agree that few people would have use for the 60 gig version, but those cf-format drives in the 5 gig region just would not nail it for me (disclaimer: i am stuck with carrying around a pack of cdr for that old rio/iriver thing i ordered 3 days before the ipod was announced, still would not have enough gadget-money for a decent hdd based mobile player).
my (stationary) 20 gig music disc has recently run out of free space and that's just about 80% of my (bought) cd collection encoded (and i think i'm neither rich nor insane), a few promo downloads (smaller labels are using that as an alternative to the airplay they can't get) and quite some relesaes from some of my favorite netlabels (labels publishing under some of the creative commons licences that allow gratis download, this is a huge source of great music if you happen to like the styles dominant in that scene).
having the whole collection in one small box would be an absolute killer feature for me, so far swapping the cdr every few days is annoying enough (i tend to listen to albums as a whole, not songs, so the mp3 cdr medium fits in rather well, since it's like a mixtape with albums instead of songs). but when i imagine i had to go through a whole usb sync session, with all the booting, waiting etc whenever i wanted to explore another sector of the music collection sounds like a really really bad idea to me.
video btw seems very unattractive to me, because imho video content is rarely good for seing more than once. i could imagine hotspots in "public waiting places" (like trains) offering a local(?) library of video content on a pay per view basis to be soemthing i could be interested in (lower reconsumption value than music, lower diversity of content than music since there is so much more audio content being produced than video)
Slashdot Mirror
sure but human buildings tend to have rooms significantly higher than 19 inch.
serious waste of space for anything other than geeking it out at home with rack-mount toys. the only reason for 1U hardware is saving space.
At the same time those "overclocking and modding circles" have something of a testosterone driven macho scene, were some people would probably refrain from admitting failure, for status reasons.
But otoh, i don't intend to suggest that water-cooling is particularly risky, i guess if you use quality equipment and keep a clear mind then there is not more risk in qater-cooling than in, say, not using datacenter-quality surge protection on the mains and i certainly don't do that.
i migtht actually get a reserator kit or something to make my box more silent, but there is still the money issue, the fact that i would still need a noisy airflow for my harddrives (if the cpu overheats the system might crash, annoying but not that much a problem, if the hdd is not kept cool enough i might loose data and need a general reinstall, really bad idea) and the transportation issue (haven't moved my system more than a few meters at a time during the last 2.5 years, but the moving a pc with an external cooling system starts being a hassle for any distance beyond maybe half a meter)
yes, and choice is bad...
if all you want is really only a thin client then batteries are probably a waste too, since you will want a cable to that fat server anyway (we agree that wireless does not scale for users per space, right?)
another core idea of the thin client philosophy is that you won't have to carry around your personal computer at all, because your personal work environment can be accessed from any client and those generic clients are supposed to be available everywhere you go, at least anywhere where you would have the fat connection needed for thin clients.
Because if email was invented today the inventor would likely be sent through all circles of legal hell by the various intellectual property lobbying organizations.
> if the gnome and gtk+ teams don't realize that software is
> written for the end user and NOT for the developer
i often get the impression that the gnome people are secretly thinking that everybody who uses a gui is so lame that they could not make effective use of a computer anyway and consequently there would no be such a thing as GUI efficiency.
from that point of view writing for their assumed end user would be keeping everything simple and inefficient enough to force the advanced user to the command line. much like the reasoning behind the one-button mouse, just for CLI rather than for keyboard shortcuts on GUI.
personally i could not agree less but then i'm a badly windows tainted person with a strong tendency towards kde, so it might make more sense for other people.
too bad that in real life the choice is more often based on the different flavours of "free" and the difference between the UI philosophies only comes second.
You could either charge some average pricing from everybody or try to charge more from those with higher demand in your product and less from those with lower demand. With the fixed average price you might completely lose the sales to the potential clients with lower demand while at the same time getting less money from those with high demand, so the average price is not what you want.
The problem is to find some rule or measurement for "how much demand for my product does potential customer x have?", ideally one that would not seem too arbitrary to the customer.
CAL are one solution for this problem, of course they are just an approximation but it's not the worst imaginable.
yeah, first thing i thought when reading that headline was "thanks ford", great level!
/., i mean isn't this supposed to be some huge anonymous place where you would never ever remember a single name besides maybe cmdr taco and the cowboyneal option? seems like there are still people left who are able to get something done despite being on /. ;-)
that's one of those sad moments when you realize you spend too much time on
what is the music used in the mod? if it is original content, then pass on a big thumbs up from me if you read this, ford. fits perfectly to the rest of all the minerva goodness
Zigbee is as much not bluetooth as bluetooth is not WLAN.
If you see bluetooth as an alternative to WLAN then bluetooth has utterly failed because it is just a wholly different thing, with completely different application areas. Zigbee is for a third, completely separate application area.
The only thing those 3 technologies overlap in are the frequencies used.
i'm quite sure that losing the library reuse advantage of dynamic libraries is pretty much not a problem at all with games, since the typical user won't run a dozen of them at the same time (quite unlike anything office- or communication-related)
what you still have is the harddisk space issue, but considering the typical ratio of code vs media in games this won't be much of a problem either.
it would be a wholly different story in case of an IM client for example.
you used a good word there: "exploring".
CLI is great for stuff you do all the time, but today there are many more different things people do with their computers than back in 1995. copy a file from floppy, open word processor, write away? using a mouse for that would be such a waste of time.
today people who are averagely accustomed with their GUI system can casually do email, IM, voip, filesharing, cd burning and a ton of other things without ever having read a manual (that the world might be better off if they would read the manual first is a completely unrelated topic). all because the interface can be _explored_.
btw, i share your opinion on those overcrowded icon bars, as a rule of thumb i'd say users can memorize a number of icon shortcuts per application that is proportional to the number of hours per week they spend on that app, plus generic icons like "new document" and "save". for me it might be around 1 icon per 5 hours, i am sure i could learn about twice as many keyboard shortcuts ("tactile memory"), but not more.
but then i guess pirates was one of the most famous games of it's time which qualifies it even less as an "underrated game" than battlezone.
if i had to pick a "most underrated sid meier game" i'd probably chose alpha centauri (and colonization as a close second of course), not because of lack of fame but because of lack of fame relative to the other civs despite of being the best.
Battlezone was really great. Most immersive game i've ever played, best UI.
Too bad they dropped those "cold war cliches" in bz2 and the mobility of the bases. Made the setting feel much more alive because the main base building became nearly as much a "recurring character" as the carrier ships in the old wing-commander games.
Everybody who liked bz and has bz2 should definitely check out that "forgotten enemies" mod, it feels a bit more bz1 than bz2 imho (can't say why)
mp3 players are not gapless because mp3 only does full blocks, so the tracks need padding at the end. there is no way to really find out where padding begins and where there just happened to be a zero signal before encoding.
:(
lame enc can put the actual track sample count into a special id3 tag but i'd be surprised if any hardware would support that.
one more argument in favor of vorbis, which has sample-accurate track length. still wouldn't bet on the few makers of vorbis-aware really making the vorbis support better than mp3 though
cars certainly have far more room between starting to lose grip and completely losing control (and road cycles are completely all or nothing in this aspect) but there's another important difference between bikes and cars:
bikes can move their center of mass closer to the sides of the roads because they are not as wide as cars, allowing for a wider curve radius in the same corner. this makes a lot more difference on the narrow streets typical for tour de france downhills than on a wide racing track.
which is the reason why it is not default.
of course the grandparent did not mean distinct but that's what he described and using group by instead of distinct is not supposed to have different performance except for on the most moronic systems
you are asking for duplicate elimination as in relational algebra.
easily achieved in SQL by using SELECT DISTINCT instead of SELECT.
i guess what you really mean is "group by everything which is not explicitly in some form of aggregation in the select statement" which is a more special case, ironically one that fits exactly into the "* except x" pattern of the original poster.
When i read this i first thought "oh no, how could they let their plans slip to the public, now everybody will know that the 'sold out' news story is manipulated", but then i realized that this is not a problem at all. Any news is good news. And unlike the "sells 10 jillion on first day" headline the "artificial shortage" scandal will happen _before_ the release date, making it double-good news because anticipation is what creates the "blockbuster effect" that console manufactureres are obviously trying to create for their product launches.
The worst thing that could happen would be someone walking into a shop thinking "wasn't that xbox-thing over there much cheaper when it was black?"
the more i think of it i could even imagine that this is done all on purpose:
Microsoft: "hello PR-agency, any ideas to make us popular for our new xbox launch?"
PR-agency: "hello Microsoft, you are seen as an evil empire by most of the target audience and can't change anything about that, so try to make something positive out of it"
MS: "really? how can we do that? Look i will give you these nice $$$ if you tell me how"
PR: "hmm, it's not easy, but it has to be possible somehow *brainstorms*"
MS: "$$$$$"
PR: "Oh, now we have an idea: If we spread some clues that you will artificially create a product shortage to get 'sold out before noon' press then everbody will believe it. Nobody will ever think that MS, the evil empire, could do otherwise."
MS: "But won't that drive away customers? Wouldn't we then have to really create an artificial shortage to not look like fools who did not even sell those few xboxes?"
PR: "No, that's the good thing about that plan: The outcry following that 'scandal' will rise public awareness of the product launch to unheard levels and everybody will try to get some of those few xboxes. Of course you won't hold back the boxes, except for a few in a special warehouse that our 'journalists' will somehow gain access to to get some proof footage of the holdback, but now there will be so many more people trying to get one of those few exclusive-thanks-to-MS-evilness 'zero-day' xboxes that they will really sell out."
MS: "Wow, thank you, we did not know how good it is to be evil
Of course this is probably all mindless conspiracy crap, but i think the central point is still valid, MS has no problem with somebody finding out about their artificial xbox sellout.
what's so open-ended in the 3 gta3s anyways? sure, you can poke around between missions, play some minigames and can vary the order of the missions a bit where it does not hurt the missions' interdependencies, but to me it's still a heavily mission based gameplay just with more glue-gameplay than in other titles. that is certainly not a bad thing, but calling it "the invention of open-endedness" is so full of hype it hurts. would half-life be open-ended if it allowed you to walk around on xen after defeating the end boss?
;)
the current gta is a very good game and it invites the player to stay a while after the end boss is defeated but imho that is still the moment the game ends. the only real advantage i can see in that is that it could prove to be a quite effictive way to keep you from starting the whole game again the moment you feel a bit like you could want have driving through a gta world now, which is a good thing because otherwise you would likely loose all those hours spent on playing through the game again
then most people will drive around, get lost much more than with the incremental unlocking and then wonder why there is nothing exciting to do. eventually they will get bored (much earlier) and decide to never ever buy a gta game again. rockstar games know that.
it's the same simple "constantly increase the dosage" dosage rule that forces cheap action movies to show the smallest explosion first and the biggest at the end, otherwise it would not stay exciting.
have you seen the gauge thing on the left side?
according to microsoft my system's performance is "WWOW!!!", i wonder how this translates into bogomips. or does that just mean "able to run Windows + WoW"?
> I do think that any game, online or not, should be
> removing the CD protection check after 4 months or
> so just so it pisses off the gamers less.
And don't forget how this would give the nocds much less exposure to the paying part of the audience. Not patching the cd protection away after a while is a big incentive for the honest customer to learn how to find cracks.
your suggestion about formal quantification is a very interesting one. rpg rules are an abstraction of the real (or fantasy) world into a limited set of numbers, lists and forms. pretty much the same as what a programmer does when he turns an application domain into code.
when i used to be into pen & paper roleplaying i was always much interested in the design of the different rule systems and how they affected gameplay, ease of play vs realism vs support for interesting stories.
i think making game rules kann be seen a form of programming in the broadest sense, much like legislature to run a society, the memes of a religion or even the way the technical and nontechnical features of a programming language lead to the way it is used.
all of that is defining some form of "code" beforehand in the hope that it is leading to the desired results when it is later executed/lived by/used/followed. rarely a sequential script but still code.
btw: the "power gaming" that you see way too often in pen & paper games that mainly consists of tweaking the highest battle performance out of a certain character class by finding the best combination of skills, spells, equipment and the various kinds of "point allocation", usually at the very limits of the rule set, is another task that sounds like something a typical programmer might like: it is completely "software" (words and numbers written on a piece of paper, nothing but data), it is creating something and it fits the desire to get a job well done.
oh, trendiness sure matters as well, but i don't think it could make anything close to that much of a difference on it's own. and besides, pda did have their fifteen minutes of hip: when the time came that mobile phone early adopters could not pose anymore with the fact of owning a cellphone, because suddenly everybody did, there was a short wave when the typical bars and cafes where that kind of people gathers where filled with people between their late 20ies and mid 30ies all trying to trump the palm pilot of the next guy with their newly bought shiny pocket pc. but unlike mobile phones and ipods (and, to a lesser extent, digital cameras) there simply wasn't any single application useful for the rich-and-hip, so those machines quickly disappeared again.
leaving out the obvious piracy option i agree that few people would have use for the 60 gig version, but those cf-format drives in the 5 gig region just would not nail it for me (disclaimer: i am stuck with carrying around a pack of cdr for that old rio/iriver thing i ordered 3 days before the ipod was announced, still would not have enough gadget-money for a decent hdd based mobile player).
my (stationary) 20 gig music disc has recently run out of free space and that's just about 80% of my (bought) cd collection encoded (and i think i'm neither rich nor insane), a few promo downloads (smaller labels are using that as an alternative to the airplay they can't get) and quite some relesaes from some of my favorite netlabels (labels publishing under some of the creative commons licences that allow gratis download, this is a huge source of great music if you happen to like the styles dominant in that scene).
having the whole collection in one small box would be an absolute killer feature for me, so far swapping the cdr every few days is annoying enough (i tend to listen to albums as a whole, not songs, so the mp3 cdr medium fits in rather well, since it's like a mixtape with albums instead of songs). but when i imagine i had to go through a whole usb sync session, with all the booting, waiting etc whenever i wanted to explore another sector of the music collection sounds like a really really bad idea to me.
video btw seems very unattractive to me, because imho video content is rarely good for seing more than once. i could imagine hotspots in "public waiting places" (like trains) offering a local(?) library of video content on a pay per view basis to be soemthing i could be interested in (lower reconsumption value than music, lower diversity of content than music since there is so much more audio content being produced than video)
i'm no specialist but i guess it might be something close enough to what neil stephenson called gargoyles