It came with a Super Powerful 350W Good For You Power Supply! Amazing value!
The N64's power draw is really small and the cheapo PSU runs it fine. Luckily it had an old-fashioned AT power connector so I could cut the 3.3V (orange) wire off that to feed into the N64. The alternative would be splicing into the ATX motherboard power connector, which I was nervous about doing. 3.3V isn't used very much in PCs anymore.
I hacked an N64 down to it's bare essentials, and put it in my PC.
It's powered by the PC's power supply and the video and audio cables are run through my digital TV tuner card so I can play it in all it's deinterlaced glory using tvtime, although it can be plugged into a large TV or a projector and a loud stereo.
It's great at LAN parties. Nobody can resist the attraction of a GoldenEye deathmatch. >:D
Because anarchy is so much worse than a nanny/police state THAT YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM.
The only thing that scares me more than the thought of an all-encompassing nanny state is the number of people who are willing to bend over and accept it. Perhaps it's because this generation has been conditioned into not caring about essential civil liberties, and to trust the government (i.e. The Man or any authority figure). RFID-tagging children is merely the next step. This is the Hitler Jungvolk on an even-greater scale.
Tracking our kids is just a precursor to tracking every member of society.
The safety of children really isn't the issue here. In the short term it's about contracts for RFID companies and kickbacks for school officials, and long term it's about leaving the impression on children to accept blatant abuse of their basic, vital, yet sacred and fragile right to privacy, and the basic legal notion of presumption of innocence.
If it was, about student safety, how about teachers start trusting the students and they might reciprocate. Give students a reason to be at school, other than "because it's the law". Lead by example. Otherwise you'll get the prison warden - prisoner relationship that exists at the moment in many schools (it's happening at my high school).
Your statement might have some truth to it.
Interestingly, at the time the Mac G4 Cube was released, rumours about the GameCube (then known as Project Dolphin) were circulating. It was known for quite a while the GameCube would use a PowerPC processor, that ATI were providing the 3D hardware, and Nintendo registered the trademark "StarCube" (changed later to GameCube), and was a multimedia powerhouse.
Although it was probably just a happy coincidence, the Mac G4 Cube and the GameCube shared all these traits. As Nintendo had been working with Apple to make Mac-based dev kits for the Dolphin, many considered it to be confirmation that the rumours of the GameCube's specifications were true; a tip of the hat from Apple to Nintendo's future console.
That might be what's happening here, although it might also be that we're looking too-far into it.
that MP3 hardware decoders are abundant but Vorbis hardware decoders are non-existant AFAIK.
That's why homebrew MP3 players are so easy to put together: you just throw together a PCB with an MP3 decoding chip (OK so it's not quite that simple).
In contrast, in order to play Ogg Vorbis you'll need an embedded integer processor (don't need a floating point processor thanks to Xiph.org's Tremor codec) with a decent amount of portable grunt (I'm thinking: the likes of an ARM7).
Then you'll have to write the software for the player, but having a CPU will allow greater flexibility (i.e. add support for other formats).
Luckily someone managed to revert the Wikipedia article before too many people saw it.
Perhaps before posting a story with a link to a Wikipedia article, the Slashdot editors could e-mail the Wikipeople to place a temporary lock on the mentioned article. That would be the best compromise between allowing anonymous, open group collaboration whilst countering the trolls.
As the great philosopher John Gabriel theorises, the large audience and relative anonymity of the internet can make good people do bad things.
While Ogg Vorbis encoders and decoders are still in development for the purposes of tweaking the compression and bugfixing, but for all intents and purposes, the bit stream format has been set in stone back with the 1.0 release quite a while ago.
All encoders should be compatible with all decoders (with the exception of some extreme encoders such as the 2Kbps encoder). Vorbis is no longer a moving target (like Theora still is at the moment) and if you make a decoder you can be assured that it will play all Vorbis files from the past (since 1.0 of the format), present, and future.
Xiph.org couldn't have made it any easier for hardware manufacturers, providing the integer codec Tremor (to run on embedded processors) and don't charge royalties for using or modifying a Vorbis codec in a hardware player (almost all other formats are patent-encumbered and charge royalties).
Was the name Jesusonic CrusFX an indulgence in saddism on the behalf of Mr Frankel? Imagine the heart attacks that would ensue the arrival of a new CrusFX effects processor at a Christian-boyband-pop recording studio.
Sadly, Nintendo is in the business of playing it safe.
As opposed to... what? Who's pushing the boundaries like Nintendo is at the moment? Sure, the Big N uses familiar franchises pretty often (which is the only gripe I could find the author had). That's to build on established brands, a common marketing strategy.
Despite familiar characters and storylines, Nintendo's in-house games are some of the most original and interesting available today, whereas Sony and Microsoft will play host to the latest multiplayer futuristic shooter or various racing games. Sony practically produces nothing in-house, yet the worldwide PS2 sales are well above GameCube, a distant second place, and Xbox.
The author of the article claims that Nintendo doesn't try new things, and then mentions Super Mario Sunshine. Sunshine tried a new concept, and the fact is that it wasn't well-recieved. EAD tried a new approach to the genre, but it's not their fault people didn't like it.
And that's the thing about innovation. New ideas usually don't start a revolution; they can often backfire, as did the Virtual Boy, or (to a far lesser extent) the graphical style of the new Zelda. For every hit, there are a number of misses. For every DS, there is a Virtual Boy, and an innovator must be prepared for that. Most take the easy, tried-but-true path and use a proven formula to produce a mediocre game, where success of some degree is guaranteed.
The problem with the article is that the author is trying to directly relate innovation with market domination, but if that were the case, Sony wouldn't be in the position they are today.
It's been a while since we did a good slashdotting, and I was starting to lose faith in our ability to exert domination over any thing with an electrical circuit.
We've slashdotted NASA, gameboys, and entire countries, but is this the first time we've slashdotted a house?!
The geeks strike again from their hidden rebel basements!
Web filtering might sound good in theory, but in practice too many sites with educational benefit are blocked.
However, web filtering is not just an inconvenience.
There is an alterior motive at work. The state is censoring information that might allow impressionable youths to form opinions that might be critical of the government.
I am a Year 12 student of a high school in NSW. Sites that have been blocked by the proxy that I have noticed include: *.mozilla.org; *.sourceforge.*; *.sf.net; etc, etc. I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before SlashDot is blocked too. However, porn popups often appear thanks to the school using IE and infested Windows 98 machines (Microsoft donates licences to our school, the practice of which ominously reflects Hitler's Jungvolk).
Of course, there are easy ways to get around the blocks, as there is no way you can completely filter the web effectively. It's an inconvenience for me, but someone who isn't a geek will miss out on access to a lot of information.
The stated goal of web filtering is to 'protect' us from viewing "objectionable material" such as dangerous, dangerous porn, but more and more sites are being censored to 'protect' us from websites that aren't directly-related to the short sighted curriculum, e.g. mozilla or sourceforge, and soon we will be 'protected' from material that the state finds objectionable, such as critics of the government. The political blogs will go first because few will notice, then soon the news sites until only Packer's and Murdoch's news sites are endorsed for student viewing by the government.
E16 has been quite-usable for a few years now. "Restarting" involves merely restarting the Enlightenment process, which takes a grand total of three seconds on any machine bought in the new millenium, during which time windows lose their positions and borders but are all back when E has finished reloading.
There is a common misconception (or more of a preconception as I doubt most people who hold this opinion have actually tried Enlightenment) that anything pretty must sacrifice speed. E16 (and from what I've seen so far, E17) are very fast to load and don't even register in 'top'. The main reason for this is that Enlightenment is just a window manager, not a desktop environment which has an entire framework of libraries that must be loaded to run the simplest programs. Enlightenment with all its bells and whistles will run faster on an old machine than KDE 2.x series or Gnome 1.x.
It seems that bashing Enlightenment of loading slow has become a Slashdotism as important as saying that Gentoo releases are made sooner than they can be compiled or Natalie Portman's hot grits.
Where did I say anything about Japanese being ethnically superior or Anglo-saxons inferior?
Societies are influenced by cultures rather than biology. Modern Japan has a culture of adeptness with technology, particularly consumer electronics. One might attribute this to geographic factors, like the urbanisation of practically the whole country. Not once have I made any refference to race or biology, but if I did and I supported it with a reason (such as some technology gene which Japanese people possess), then you might accept it or reject it at its absurdity, which is a pseudo form of the scientific process, but I would not necessarily be trolling.
First of all, you assume Australia is all-white, but it is a multicultural society.
I agree with you that if I had have been critical of the Japanese, or the Arabs, or whoever else (America-bashing is in vogue right now) I would be modded down as a troll. That is a problem with the perception of the moderators, not me.
So because it is unfair that I can be modded up for being critical of western society, and modded down because I'm critical of other societies, I shouldn't make my thought-out point, and thus contribute to the problem? What you are suggesting is, in a way, "reverse-reverse racism".
I don't know about where you're from, but self-criticism is a valued ability in Australian culture, and there is nothing wrong with me being critical of my own society, especially if I can do it objectively despite participating in it.
Get over it. Racial prejudice will never go away while people like you keep trying to even the balance. People have to stop caring who's right or wrong, and stop acting as if they are morally superior.
I'd like to think that I was modded up because I was offering insight into Australian society to non-Australians and offering an interesting theory.
Nintendo has been listening to it's fans. If you are interested in the new GameCube Zelda game, you have to check out this trailer, it's completely amazing, but I think it hasn't received enough attention because it was overshadowed by the DS at E3.
I have never been to Japan, but from what I gather Japanese society is generally tech-profficient and consumers make educated decisions when buying electronics.
Apart from us geeks who are skeptical of big business at the best of times and paranoid at other times, western society will consume what the television tells it to, and is short-sighted enough not to realise that micro-payments add up quickly.
I'm an Australian, and I can see this happening right now. SMS and MMS has become a huge fad, as have mobile phones in general. Many young people now face debt problems after running up phone bills in the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars.
Broadband internet service is well below basic for a developed nation, but that's mostly attributed to the reelection of the conservative federal government that has sold half of the telecommunications utility that owns all the copper phone infrastructure and DSLAMs and most of the outgoing internet pipes.
The population just isn't tech-savvy enough to force the market to be competitive, and as a result we are all fucked over, although only the geeks (and the farmers in the outback who can barely make phone calls) can see it.
For streaming sound to anywhere in the house, I have my Rio Karma (the ultimate geek music player) plugged into my stereo (the Karma dock has RCA out and the base glows blue and pulses to the music), as well as the ethernet wall socket just behind the stereo (the Karma has 100Mb ethernet on the dock).
I can upload music to the Karma from any one of my various Linux boxen scattered throughout the house (the Karma has a built-in web server that you can download the Java applet to access it from, which is fully Linux- and MacOS-compatible) as well as from my laptop via WiFi.
I don't do any video streaming, other than when I use "mplayer -vo aa" in an SSH terminal to stream video in ASCII art;) but a mate of mine tells me that VideoLAN is good for that sort of thing and it might be what you're looking for.
WiFi is handy, but sometimes you can't get full reception everywhere in the house, and 11Mb mightn't be enuogh to stream certain video formats, so when my house was rennovated recently, I ceased the opportunity to wire up CAT5 to every room, which is all run back to a central place (a cupboard in the middle of the house) which all plug into an ethernet switch, which is plugged into the ADSL modem and the WiFi AP.
I highly reccomend decking out your house with trusty old CAT5 if you have the chance.
The laptop's integrated Radeon chipset works with the GPL'd r200 drivers that come with Xorg.
Remember that before ATI began releasing any drivers at all for Linux they released the specifications of their chipsets and even gave cards to developers who wrote open source drivers.
Look in your kernel config under Direct Rendering Infrastructure.
This is but one of the many examples of overpolicing, degredation of privacy, mis-allocation of US taxpayers' resources that has come from the USDOHS, and highlights the ludicrous state of the US patent system which needs a major restructure.
If there is any consollation in stories like this, it's that there is no massive terrorist threat like the Bush administration has played up and is likely to win the approaching presidential election on.
It is a sad reality that government organisations use bully tactics for political purposes.
If I were running, say, an independent media company, I wouldn't be running my website, the main distribution method off a rack server with 19 other countries' IMCs.
Hard drives are fragile, especially for portable devices.
A better solution would have been 1.5GB of solid state memory like an included Secure Digital card slot, or built in Compact Flash.
Why was a hard drive chosen? I have a feeling this is all a gimmick to satisfy the new HDD craze that Apple has driven.
Slashdot Mirror
So this happened 50,000 years ago, and it's only now being posted to SlashDot?
Gotta be a new record.
Needless physical exertion? Grown men grappling each other? Pain, sweat and tears? A geek needs not these things.
An Amacrox "G5" Venticase.
It came with a Super Powerful 350W Good For You Power Supply! Amazing value!
The N64's power draw is really small and the cheapo PSU runs it fine. Luckily it had an old-fashioned AT power connector so I could cut the 3.3V (orange) wire off that to feed into the N64. The alternative would be splicing into the ATX motherboard power connector, which I was nervous about doing. 3.3V isn't used very much in PCs anymore.
I hacked an N64 down to it's bare essentials, and put it in my PC.
It's powered by the PC's power supply and the video and audio cables are run through my digital TV tuner card so I can play it in all it's deinterlaced glory using tvtime, although it can be plugged into a large TV or a projector and a loud stereo.
It's great at LAN parties. Nobody can resist the attraction of a GoldenEye deathmatch. >:D
invasive government.
Because anarchy is so much worse than a nanny/police state THAT YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM.
The only thing that scares me more than the thought of an all-encompassing nanny state is the number of people who are willing to bend over and accept it. Perhaps it's because this generation has been conditioned into not caring about essential civil liberties, and to trust the government (i.e. The Man or any authority figure). RFID-tagging children is merely the next step. This is the Hitler Jungvolk on an even-greater scale.
Tracking our kids is just a precursor to tracking every member of society.
The safety of children really isn't the issue here. In the short term it's about contracts for RFID companies and kickbacks for school officials, and long term it's about leaving the impression on children to accept blatant abuse of their basic, vital, yet sacred and fragile right to privacy, and the basic legal notion of presumption of innocence.
If it was, about student safety, how about teachers start trusting the students and they might reciprocate. Give students a reason to be at school, other than "because it's the law". Lead by example. Otherwise you'll get the prison warden - prisoner relationship that exists at the moment in many schools (it's happening at my high school).
Your statement might have some truth to it. Interestingly, at the time the Mac G4 Cube was released, rumours about the GameCube (then known as Project Dolphin) were circulating. It was known for quite a while the GameCube would use a PowerPC processor, that ATI were providing the 3D hardware, and Nintendo registered the trademark "StarCube" (changed later to GameCube), and was a multimedia powerhouse. Although it was probably just a happy coincidence, the Mac G4 Cube and the GameCube shared all these traits. As Nintendo had been working with Apple to make Mac-based dev kits for the Dolphin, many considered it to be confirmation that the rumours of the GameCube's specifications were true; a tip of the hat from Apple to Nintendo's future console. That might be what's happening here, although it might also be that we're looking too-far into it.
It's a joke.
that MP3 hardware decoders are abundant but Vorbis hardware decoders are non-existant AFAIK.
That's why homebrew MP3 players are so easy to put together: you just throw together a PCB with an MP3 decoding chip (OK so it's not quite that simple).
In contrast, in order to play Ogg Vorbis you'll need an embedded integer processor (don't need a floating point processor thanks to Xiph.org's Tremor codec) with a decent amount of portable grunt (I'm thinking: the likes of an ARM7).
Then you'll have to write the software for the player, but having a CPU will allow greater flexibility (i.e. add support for other formats).
Luckily someone managed to revert the Wikipedia article before too many people saw it.
Perhaps before posting a story with a link to a Wikipedia article, the Slashdot editors could e-mail the Wikipeople to place a temporary lock on the mentioned article. That would be the best compromise between allowing anonymous, open group collaboration whilst countering the trolls.
As the great philosopher John Gabriel theorises, the large audience and relative anonymity of the internet can make good people do bad things.
While Ogg Vorbis encoders and decoders are still in development for the purposes of tweaking the compression and bugfixing, but for all intents and purposes, the bit stream format has been set in stone back with the 1.0 release quite a while ago.
All encoders should be compatible with all decoders (with the exception of some extreme encoders such as the 2Kbps encoder). Vorbis is no longer a moving target (like Theora still is at the moment) and if you make a decoder you can be assured that it will play all Vorbis files from the past (since 1.0 of the format), present, and future.
Xiph.org couldn't have made it any easier for hardware manufacturers, providing the integer codec Tremor (to run on embedded processors) and don't charge royalties for using or modifying a Vorbis codec in a hardware player (almost all other formats are patent-encumbered and charge royalties).
I'm living the "digital lifestyle" because of the babe potential.
The potential has yet to be realised, however.
Was the name Jesusonic CrusFX an indulgence in saddism on the behalf of Mr Frankel? Imagine the heart attacks that would ensue the arrival of a new CrusFX effects processor at a Christian-boyband-pop recording studio.
This isn't the first time Microsoft has lost Passport.com, although I doubt that a Linux user will return it to them this time.
As opposed to... what? Who's pushing the boundaries like Nintendo is at the moment? Sure, the Big N uses familiar franchises pretty often (which is the only gripe I could find the author had). That's to build on established brands, a common marketing strategy.
Despite familiar characters and storylines, Nintendo's in-house games are some of the most original and interesting available today, whereas Sony and Microsoft will play host to the latest multiplayer futuristic shooter or various racing games. Sony practically produces nothing in-house, yet the worldwide PS2 sales are well above GameCube, a distant second place, and Xbox.
The author of the article claims that Nintendo doesn't try new things, and then mentions Super Mario Sunshine. Sunshine tried a new concept, and the fact is that it wasn't well-recieved. EAD tried a new approach to the genre, but it's not their fault people didn't like it.
And that's the thing about innovation. New ideas usually don't start a revolution; they can often backfire, as did the Virtual Boy, or (to a far lesser extent) the graphical style of the new Zelda. For every hit, there are a number of misses. For every DS, there is a Virtual Boy, and an innovator must be prepared for that. Most take the easy, tried-but-true path and use a proven formula to produce a mediocre game, where success of some degree is guaranteed.
The problem with the article is that the author is trying to directly relate innovation with market domination, but if that were the case, Sony wouldn't be in the position they are today.
It's been a while since we did a good slashdotting, and I was starting to lose faith in our ability to exert domination over any thing with an electrical circuit.
We've slashdotted NASA, gameboys, and entire countries, but is this the first time we've slashdotted a house?!
The geeks strike again from their hidden rebel basements!
No no no.
Web filtering might sound good in theory, but in practice too many sites with educational benefit are blocked.
However, web filtering is not just an inconvenience.
There is an alterior motive at work. The state is censoring information that might allow impressionable youths to form opinions that might be critical of the government.
I am a Year 12 student of a high school in NSW. Sites that have been blocked by the proxy that I have noticed include: *.mozilla.org; *.sourceforge.*; *.sf.net; etc, etc. I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before SlashDot is blocked too. However, porn popups often appear thanks to the school using IE and infested Windows 98 machines (Microsoft donates licences to our school, the practice of which ominously reflects Hitler's Jungvolk).
Of course, there are easy ways to get around the blocks, as there is no way you can completely filter the web effectively. It's an inconvenience for me, but someone who isn't a geek will miss out on access to a lot of information.
The stated goal of web filtering is to 'protect' us from viewing "objectionable material" such as dangerous, dangerous porn, but more and more sites are being censored to 'protect' us from websites that aren't directly-related to the short sighted curriculum, e.g. mozilla or sourceforge, and soon we will be 'protected' from material that the state finds objectionable, such as critics of the government. The political blogs will go first because few will notice, then soon the news sites until only Packer's and Murdoch's news sites are endorsed for student viewing by the government.
E16 has been quite-usable for a few years now. "Restarting" involves merely restarting the Enlightenment process, which takes a grand total of three seconds on any machine bought in the new millenium, during which time windows lose their positions and borders but are all back when E has finished reloading.
There is a common misconception (or more of a preconception as I doubt most people who hold this opinion have actually tried Enlightenment) that anything pretty must sacrifice speed. E16 (and from what I've seen so far, E17) are very fast to load and don't even register in 'top'. The main reason for this is that Enlightenment is just a window manager, not a desktop environment which has an entire framework of libraries that must be loaded to run the simplest programs. Enlightenment with all its bells and whistles will run faster on an old machine than KDE 2.x series or Gnome 1.x.
It seems that bashing Enlightenment of loading slow has become a Slashdotism as important as saying that Gentoo releases are made sooner than they can be compiled or Natalie Portman's hot grits.
Where did I say anything about Japanese being ethnically superior or Anglo-saxons inferior?
Societies are influenced by cultures rather than biology. Modern Japan has a culture of adeptness with technology, particularly consumer electronics. One might attribute this to geographic factors, like the urbanisation of practically the whole country. Not once have I made any refference to race or biology, but if I did and I supported it with a reason (such as some technology gene which Japanese people possess), then you might accept it or reject it at its absurdity, which is a pseudo form of the scientific process, but I would not necessarily be trolling.
First of all, you assume Australia is all-white, but it is a multicultural society.
I agree with you that if I had have been critical of the Japanese, or the Arabs, or whoever else (America-bashing is in vogue right now) I would be modded down as a troll. That is a problem with the perception of the moderators, not me.
So because it is unfair that I can be modded up for being critical of western society, and modded down because I'm critical of other societies, I shouldn't make my thought-out point, and thus contribute to the problem? What you are suggesting is, in a way, "reverse-reverse racism".
I don't know about where you're from, but self-criticism is a valued ability in Australian culture, and there is nothing wrong with me being critical of my own society, especially if I can do it objectively despite participating in it.
Get over it. Racial prejudice will never go away while people like you keep trying to even the balance. People have to stop caring who's right or wrong, and stop acting as if they are morally superior.
I'd like to think that I was modded up because I was offering insight into Australian society to non-Australians and offering an interesting theory.
Do you mean this realistic Zelda?
Nintendo has been listening to it's fans. If you are interested in the new GameCube Zelda game, you have to check out this trailer, it's completely amazing, but I think it hasn't received enough attention because it was overshadowed by the DS at E3.
_Not a troll_ just an observation.
I have never been to Japan, but from what I gather Japanese society is generally tech-profficient and consumers make educated decisions when buying electronics.
Apart from us geeks who are skeptical of big business at the best of times and paranoid at other times, western society will consume what the television tells it to, and is short-sighted enough not to realise that micro-payments add up quickly.
I'm an Australian, and I can see this happening right now. SMS and MMS has become a huge fad, as have mobile phones in general. Many young people now face debt problems after running up phone bills in the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars.
Broadband internet service is well below basic for a developed nation, but that's mostly attributed to the reelection of the conservative federal government that has sold half of the telecommunications utility that owns all the copper phone infrastructure and DSLAMs and most of the outgoing internet pipes.
The population just isn't tech-savvy enough to force the market to be competitive, and as a result we are all fucked over, although only the geeks (and the farmers in the outback who can barely make phone calls) can see it.
For streaming sound to anywhere in the house, I have my Rio Karma (the ultimate geek music player) plugged into my stereo (the Karma dock has RCA out and the base glows blue and pulses to the music), as well as the ethernet wall socket just behind the stereo (the Karma has 100Mb ethernet on the dock).
;) but a mate of mine tells me that VideoLAN is good for that sort of thing and it might be what you're looking for.
I can upload music to the Karma from any one of my various Linux boxen scattered throughout the house (the Karma has a built-in web server that you can download the Java applet to access it from, which is fully Linux- and MacOS-compatible) as well as from my laptop via WiFi.
I don't do any video streaming, other than when I use "mplayer -vo aa" in an SSH terminal to stream video in ASCII art
WiFi is handy, but sometimes you can't get full reception everywhere in the house, and 11Mb mightn't be enuogh to stream certain video formats, so when my house was rennovated recently, I ceased the opportunity to wire up CAT5 to every room, which is all run back to a central place (a cupboard in the middle of the house) which all plug into an ethernet switch, which is plugged into the ADSL modem and the WiFi AP.
I highly reccomend decking out your house with trusty old CAT5 if you have the chance.
The laptop's integrated Radeon chipset works with the GPL'd r200 drivers that come with Xorg.
Remember that before ATI began releasing any drivers at all for Linux they released the specifications of their chipsets and even gave cards to developers who wrote open source drivers.
Look in your kernel config under Direct Rendering Infrastructure.
...rather than a patent one.
This is but one of the many examples of overpolicing, degredation of privacy, mis-allocation of US taxpayers' resources that has come from the USDOHS, and highlights the ludicrous state of the US patent system which needs a major restructure.
If there is any consollation in stories like this, it's that there is no massive terrorist threat like the Bush administration has played up and is likely to win the approaching presidential election on.
It is a sad reality that government organisations use bully tactics for political purposes. If I were running, say, an independent media company, I wouldn't be running my website, the main distribution method off a rack server with 19 other countries' IMCs.
In fact, this is what Freenet is designed for.
Decentralise and conquer!
IMCs are like the guerillas of news media. They should start (contuinue) using this to their advantage.
Hard drives are fragile, especially for portable devices. A better solution would have been 1.5GB of solid state memory like an included Secure Digital card slot, or built in Compact Flash. Why was a hard drive chosen? I have a feeling this is all a gimmick to satisfy the new HDD craze that Apple has driven.