"Read again what you wrote. So basically it had piss-poor usability _and_ garbage as software, but you still blame it on the marketting that it didn't sell?"
reviews are made by people, and people are not perfect so neither are their reviews. Just because some reviewer doesn't like the "usability" doesn't mean it really has piss-poor usability, just one person's opinion. Bet you can find complaints about iPods out there too by reviewers who haven't completely succumb to the marketing hype.
Although I believe the iPod is mostly hype it has finally made competitors wake-up, producing better products at cheaper prices like the Nitrus, smaller & lighter and over $100 cheaper than the iPod mini all while only providing 25 hours of music vs 66 hours (darn). Really the people not buying iPods are benefiting the most. Go figure;)
"The Rio Carbon "iPod Mini Slayer" has been available in black for over a year now; it was actually released months before the iPod mini albiet at 1.5GB."
Hmmm... could it be the Rio Carbon and Rio Nitrus are two different products, hence the different colors, joystick vs. direction pad, 1.5gig vs 5gig? And that whole "iPod Mini Slayer" joke is because the Carbon has 5gig vs the Mini's 4gig, 5 is bigger than 4, hence "slaying", where the Nitrus has a paltry 1.5gig which doesn't exactly slay 4gig...
Nice try, back to the end of the line, although you did get the Apple marketing propaganda right so partial credit.
"I had a Nomad as well. It dropped from 2.5 feet, and the headphone jack broke. The hard drive started clicking, too... The limited experience I've had with the iPod gives the impression that it's just a better-built product."
I drop my Rio Nitrus from 5 feet almost daily, hell I darn right throw it when I'm running (I'm clumsy, ok?), it just bounces off the ground like a rubber ball, thanks to it's rubberized sides.
The Rio Carbon happens to have the same rubberized sides.
Guess the Nitrus and Carbon are just better-built products than iPods...
"1) USB Transfer...the Rio Karma has a cradle which allows network transfer over ethernet...plug it in and it gets an IP from DHCP server.
Oh, right, because we all need a mp3 player that gets an IP from a DHCP server... I for one like having a mp3 player that connects to the same ports that every other external device on the planet connects to.
"2) No support for Linux..."
shit!! so it only supports 99.9% of Operating Systems in use?!? The Horror!
"3) No OGG-Vorbis support"
crap!! No support for a music format that only 0.01% (mostly geeks) use? What is Digital Networks thinking?!?
p.s. the Rio Carbon is the upgrade for the Rio Nitrus, not the Karma, so it kinda makes sense that it wouldn't include all the features of a Karma, now doesn't it?
"In other news,/. editors buy 100,000 XMPCR receivers, publishes story their now worth $400 each and sells them on ebay, retiring as millionaires and outsources/. to India."
screw how long it lasts, I'm wondering how exactly it works? You only share with other people that already own the software or music? If they already have it, why would they need to download it again over the network? If they lose the original for whatever reason (virus, etc) how do they prove to the network that they owned it before?
Seems like a p2p network that would have lots of clients (pretty much everybody) but few trades because, after all, you can only download what you already have on your PC or purchase off the network.
The author lives in a dream world: Craiglist isn't nearly as popular as eBay, google, etc. Until recently it didn't even cover my city of 2.5 million people and even now it only has a whopping 290 housing listings and 156 jobs. Sorry Craigslist, but you have a long way to go before you reach the ranks of eBay or Google, might be great if you live in San Francisco but the rest of us are left in the cold.
sorry, problems with dial-up and it posted before I was ready, the last sentence was suppose to say: "I'm not impressed, how many of the 12,000 residents even know what WiFi is, or for that matter own computers?"
The entire time I read the post all I could think is how easy it'd be to cover a small city with WiFi. Then I read the article: "...the system uses several hundred WiFi (802.11a, b, g) radios strategically located upon the city infrastructure to blanket its six square miles..."
SIX SQUARE MILES?!? That's not a city, that's a oversized postage stamp. I'm not impressed, how many of is, or for that matter own computers?
"According to a recent survey, more than 69.6% of people don't answer polls. Over a third of the people surveyed love answering polls, and most indicated that they were fed up with having to take polls at all. Over 10% of those surveyed were not available for comment at the time of the poll."
Re:how does frame dragging relate to warp speed?
on
'Einstein Probe' Delayed
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"I don't know shit, but I expect they're probably talking about something like the Alcubierre warp drive."
you may not know shit, but you sure know your Alcubierre warp drives.
how does frame dragging relate to warp speed?
on
'Einstein Probe' Delayed
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This is a first, a/. article without enough links:
"...test frame dragging, predicted by the theory of relativity... will we get faster-than-light ships for Christmas?"
What does frame dragging have to do with faster-than-light?? The wikipedia link mentions nothing about how frame dragging has to do with faster-then-light, so I searched google and found this article on msn:
"Spinning black holes may pull in gaseous matter from their sister stars as a rapidly rotating "accretion disk," analogous to water circling down a bathtub drain.
The American scientists built on their previous research into the mass and spin of black holes to look for signs of space-time distortion, or frame-dragging.
In Einsteinian physics, the space-time continuum is often compared to a sheet of rubber. Mass creates a gravitational "dimple" in that space-time sheet. But a rotating object -- like a spinning black hole -- adds an extra twist to the dimple. Matter caught in that twist would appear to wobble in orbit around the object, like a toy top wobbling on its axis.
Cui explained that travelers passing close to a black hole would feel as if "nothing happened." But a distant observer would see the travelers being dragged around the black hole."
from the article: "Kellaris said random shuffle likely appeals to the MTV generation -- kids with short attention spans who are likely "brain damaged." "
Course, that article was written nearly a year ago and I have yet to hear anything about it in the news. Strange, considering the rising cost of gas, you'd think this would be front page news.
I especially love the public service announcement at the end: Mindfully.org note:... If you must drive your own car, please drive one that gets great mileage--28mpg or above in the city and above 50mpg highway.
Right, because there's lots of cars that get 28mpg city and 50+ highway.... in fact I can count the number on one hand, least the ones currently available in the US. Wonder if all the people working at mindfully.org take their own advice and drive hybrids or motorcycles?
"this stuff has a boiling point of 49.2C (120.6F). Processors burn hotter than that, how useful would it still be for cooling purposes if it were a gas?"
believe it or not water also boils, but somehow people use it to cool their PCs! How? They keep the water cool!
Won't that work here? Just pump it through a radiator with fans attached.
Real question is how well does this stuff cool? Water takes forever to boil, how well does this stuff absorb heat? The specific heat as a liquid is 1.103 kJ/kg*C, but I don't remember enough chemistry to have any clue what that means.
"Hard drives aren't hermetically sealed either -- They have small holse to allow the air inside to expand or contract based on heat load. The liquid would get in. It might not fry your electronics, but I'll bet it'd give the heads a hard time. possibly even corrupt the disks."
While that makes sense, didn't you read the post?
He filled a small fish tank with Sapphire and submerged a book, a laptop, and a flat panel TV. Both electronics were turned on when submerged; all three items came out completely unharmed.
He submerged a laptop, which obviously has ventilation holes which likely lead to the hard drive. Laptop was completely unharmed, or so they say: just because it was working for the 5 seconds it was on TV doesn't mean it'll continue to function.
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reviews are made by people, and people are not perfect so neither are their reviews. Just because some reviewer doesn't like the "usability" doesn't mean it really has piss-poor usability, just one person's opinion. Bet you can find complaints about iPods out there too by reviewers who haven't completely succumb to the marketing hype.
Although I believe the iPod is mostly hype it has finally made competitors wake-up, producing better products at cheaper prices like the Nitrus, smaller & lighter and over $100 cheaper than the iPod mini all while only providing 25 hours of music vs 66 hours (darn). Really the people not buying iPods are benefiting the most. Go figure ;)
Hmmm... could it be the Rio Carbon and Rio Nitrus are two different products, hence the different colors, joystick vs. direction pad, 1.5gig vs 5gig? And that whole "iPod Mini Slayer" joke is because the Carbon has 5gig vs the Mini's 4gig, 5 is bigger than 4, hence "slaying", where the Nitrus has a paltry 1.5gig which doesn't exactly slay 4gig...
Nice try, back to the end of the line, although you did get the Apple marketing propaganda right so partial credit.
I drop my Rio Nitrus from 5 feet almost daily, hell I darn right throw it when I'm running (I'm clumsy, ok?), it just bounces off the ground like a rubber ball, thanks to it's rubberized sides.
The Rio Carbon happens to have the same rubberized sides.
Guess the Nitrus and Carbon are just better-built products than iPods...
Oh, right, because we all need a mp3 player that gets an IP from a DHCP server... I for one like having a mp3 player that connects to the same ports that every other external device on the planet connects to.
"2) No support for Linux..."
shit!! so it only supports 99.9% of Operating Systems in use?!? The Horror!
"3) No OGG-Vorbis support"
crap!! No support for a music format that only 0.01% (mostly geeks) use? What is Digital Networks thinking?!?
p.s. the Rio Carbon is the upgrade for the Rio Nitrus, not the Karma, so it kinda makes sense that it wouldn't include all the features of a Karma, now doesn't it?
"In other news, /. editors buy 100,000 XMPCR receivers, publishes story their now worth $400 each and sells them on ebay, retiring as millionaires and outsources /. to India."
surprised no one mentioned that CF read speeds average 3 megabytes vs "transfer rates over 100 MB/sec" from this drive:
"all Viking and Microtech cards all put in performances of 4 MB/sec or greater (which is seriously fast)."
"Lexar's new 8GB CompactFlash card delivers a 40X speed-rating, signifying a minimum sustained write speed capability of 6MB/s."
screw how long it lasts, I'm wondering how exactly it works? You only share with other people that already own the software or music? If they already have it, why would they need to download it again over the network? If they lose the original for whatever reason (virus, etc) how do they prove to the network that they owned it before?
Seems like a p2p network that would have lots of clients (pretty much everybody) but few trades because, after all, you can only download what you already have on your PC or purchase off the network.
six miles by six miles is 36 square miles.
6 square miles is 2.45 mi by 2.45 mi, or 2 mi by 3 mi, etc. I've been on larger college campuses.
The author lives in a dream world: Craiglist isn't nearly as popular as eBay, google, etc. Until recently it didn't even cover my city of 2.5 million people and even now it only has a whopping 290 housing listings and 156 jobs. Sorry Craigslist, but you have a long way to go before you reach the ranks of eBay or Google, might be great if you live in San Francisco but the rest of us are left in the cold.
sorry, problems with dial-up and it posted before I was ready, the last sentence was suppose to say: "I'm not impressed, how many of the 12,000 residents even know what WiFi is, or for that matter own computers?"
The entire time I read the post all I could think is how easy it'd be to cover a small city with WiFi. Then I read the article:
"...the system uses several hundred WiFi (802.11a, b, g) radios strategically located upon the city infrastructure to blanket its six square miles..."
SIX SQUARE MILES?!? That's not a city, that's a oversized postage stamp. I'm not impressed, how many of is, or for that matter own computers?
Google it.
"According to a recent survey, more than 69.6% of people don't answer polls. Over a third of the people surveyed love answering polls, and most indicated that they were fed up with having to take polls at all. Over 10% of those surveyed were not available for comment at the time of the poll."
you may not know shit, but you sure know your Alcubierre warp drives.
"...test frame dragging, predicted by the theory of relativity... will we get faster-than-light ships for Christmas?"
What does frame dragging have to do with faster-than-light?? The wikipedia link mentions nothing about how frame dragging has to do with faster-then-light, so I searched google and found this article on msn:
"Spinning black holes may pull in gaseous matter from their sister stars as a rapidly rotating "accretion disk," analogous to water circling down a bathtub drain.
The American scientists built on their previous research into the mass and spin of black holes to look for signs of space-time distortion, or frame-dragging.
In Einsteinian physics, the space-time continuum is often compared to a sheet of rubber. Mass creates a gravitational "dimple" in that space-time sheet. But a rotating object -- like a spinning black hole -- adds an extra twist to the dimple. Matter caught in that twist would appear to wobble in orbit around the object, like a toy top wobbling on its axis.
Cui explained that travelers passing close to a black hole would feel as if "nothing happened." But a distant observer would see the travelers being dragged around the black hole."
odd... didn't see that reported on the news tonight... I'll watch again at 10, maybe it'll be on the late news.
from the article: "Kellaris said random shuffle likely appeals to the MTV generation -- kids with short attention spans who are likely "brain damaged." "
Kellaris is a Professor of Marketing, which naturally means he's an expert in brain damage. :rollseyes:
...if I point my camera at a beautiful woman does it tell me how to get to her house?
Course, that article was written nearly a year ago and I have yet to hear anything about it in the news. Strange, considering the rising cost of gas, you'd think this would be front page news.
I especially love the public service announcement at the end: ... If you must drive your own car, please drive one that gets great mileage--28mpg or above in the city and above 50mpg highway.
Mindfully.org note:
Right, because there's lots of cars that get 28mpg city and 50+ highway.... in fact I can count the number on one hand, least the ones currently available in the US. Wonder if all the people working at mindfully.org take their own advice and drive hybrids or motorcycles?
"dog ate my hard drive"
believe it or not water also boils, but somehow people use it to cool their PCs! How? They keep the water cool!
Won't that work here? Just pump it through a radiator with fans attached.
Real question is how well does this stuff cool? Water takes forever to boil, how well does this stuff absorb heat? The specific heat as a liquid is 1.103 kJ/kg*C, but I don't remember enough chemistry to have any clue what that means.
While that makes sense, didn't you read the post?
He filled a small fish tank with Sapphire and submerged a book, a laptop, and a flat panel TV. Both electronics were turned on when submerged; all three items came out completely unharmed.
He submerged a laptop, which obviously has ventilation holes which likely lead to the hard drive. Laptop was completely unharmed, or so they say: just because it was working for the 5 seconds it was on TV doesn't mean it'll continue to function.
needs to be high resolution to function well as a video projection, otherwise all you'll get is super-sized pixels.
Same here, but not because it's Iomega, it's because of the price: "Iomega said it will charge $60 a disk..."
35 gigs for $60? Why don't I just buy a USB 2.0 enclosure and 40gig hard drive. About the same price and probably more reliable. Or if I'm lazy I can get the 40gig drive already in a enclosure for ~$60 shipped. Least I don't have to buy the $400 drive.
Sorry Iomega, but too little too late.
i was a beta tester, and while I told her it was a mini ipod in my pocket it really wasn't...