Decoying a steganographic message -- i.e., putting your real backup copy of your password and also your mother's maiden name steganographicaclly into a file -- seems to be a pretty good way of going about things.
Kind of like overt vs. covert safes. If you have a safe in plain view or an obvious location with $25, your thesis on a Zip disk, and your Social Security card in it, the $1,000,000 collection of heirloom diamond jewelry kept in a more covert location, a floor safe under the stairs or something.
Why? It's human nature to look for "the safe" or "the message," particularly if the decoy is itself tricky to find and access.
You don't need to tell me about the value or quality of iPods or iMacs -- I have both, and an iBook too, which I am using right now as I await a professor in a classroom.
Jobs and the Woz are unmistakably luminaries and then some, but I still think that Gates and Allen might qualify at least as boosters.
First of all, I don't think there are keylogger dongles for USB keyboards -- might I suggest that school computers be equipped with USB keyboards?
Secondly, though this was irrelevant here, Windows passwords are WORTHLESS -- as any network administrator who has had a user lock himself out can tell you, the tools for circumventing Windows passwords (and this includes XP Pro) are no secret. Sadly they aren't just used by admins.
It's not just a Windows problem either -- unless you use an Open Firmware password, all you need to root the system is a boot CD (like an installer disc) or another Mac and a FireWire cable. FileVault helps keep any files in user directories secure (even if the drive its yanked out), for what it's worth, and I believe that includes start-up applications, so on a Mac the most critical aspects are the activation of the Open Firmware password, the selection of decent passwords, and the use of FileVault.
Linux? All one would need is a copy of Knoppix to get around permissions -- so you'd want to disable floppy or CD booting in a (password-secured) BIOS, which helps against Windows physical exploits as well.
Another concept of value is old-fashioned physical security. If a public-access or other computer likely to be compromised has any way to lock down (a padlock loop, for example) the access door, it's worthwhile to use it, and if nothing else keep your RAM from being sold out of the back of a van somewhhere. What you need to remember about locks is, like encryption. that they don't have to be inpenetrable, just ned to take long enough to defeat that it's highly inconvenient -- so the lock only needs to be good enough to hold until a lab monitor or security can tell what's going on.
In recap: * USB peripherals make physical insertion of a keylogger harder * Your Windows passwords are worthless * Mac passwords need to be backed up with FileVault, which cannot be circumvented * BIOS/OpenFirmware protection should be used to prevent booting an alien copy of an operating system * Locks and guards
A good chunk of web and other servers, and moreover every TiVo box out there, are running Linux now.
If your criteria for being a luminary are CEOship at two public corps and a black mock turtleneck, you're leaving out just about everyone but Steve Jobs, who is certainly a luminary but is not the only luminary in the biz.
You could just as easily say that a couple phone service pirates in greater Frisco selling their VW and scientific calculator to hawk homebrew boxes under the name of a piece of fruit shouldn't get you called a luminary, or that Harvard dropouts who got lucky with IBM shouldn't be called luminaries, but you already said that Steve Jobs is a luminary, and it goes without saying that you can include Wozniak, Gates, and Allen.
Or how about a mortician who got pissed at a phone operator whom he thought was giving his calls to a competitor and decided to make a machine to replace the operator? Almon B. Strowger, inventor of automatic phone switches and pulse dialing.
If you want to use it like a regular phone I'd suggest you get a regular phone. Else you will find that unless you have a cell phone or a real landline from the local telco, when the cable or electricity is out you can't call the utilities... or 911. Well, to be fair I think they have to give you a "soft" dial tone and 911-only service when you disconnect your land line, so I'd suggest you get an attractive phone and plug it into a PSTN jack if you are going down this route.
I can see how something like this is cheaper for long distance, but it's not the best value for local at this time.
You can pry my land line from my cold, dead hands. Let the phone companies mess with the IP stuff and what not, as long as they give me my electified copper quartet (of which I use only half) every month for a fair, predictable fee. And I know Qwest will be here in a couple years if I am, though they may be part of Ma Bell by then, what with the SBC expansionism lately.
The real threats are still Linux and OS X, with which people are more familiar, and besides, they're better with hardware: you don't need to worry so much about hardware compatability lists with GNU/Linux; it'll run on most any modern system, though if you have odd hardware it can be shaky.
Au contraire, OS X on PowerPC is sort of like Solaris/SPARC, exccept that a Hell of a lot more people can afford it -- especially with the Mac mini now. Hardware done by software's manufacturer so you just buy a new computer done to get it, something people have to do from time to time anyhow.
So Solaris on IA32 is not the answer to weakening the Microsoft near-monopoly -- unless you want the technically challenged to unwittingly replace Windows with it on their incompatible computers, leading to either a geeky friend installing Linux or the purchase of a computer that didn't come with Windows in the first place.
And as has already been said, they've been fighting BSD -- when I spoke of OS X earlier in this post I was speaking of only the most accessible permutation of BSD; I understand that FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are well used in the server market, and that they are also usable as a general desktop.
Note that this is targeted at "developing" countries. So think eastern Europe or something. Or if you're looking at deploying these in (for example) Afghanistan, you'd be talking Kabul, not the hinterlands.
Well, a touchscreen (be it stylus or finger optimized) is a specialized case of one-button mouse, just like tapping a touchpad for those who use that feature.
It'd be a lot easier to use a touchscreen Mac than a touchscreen Windows or GNOME/KDE box, because they don't make touchscreens where you can right-click.
I imagine an interface optimized for one-button use also has applications in accessibility to disabled users.
Actually the phone number bit is more an issue of pranksterism than failure of fantasy distinguishment.
KLonkdike 5 numbers, the predecessors to our "555-01xx" (usually implemented liberally as "555-xxxx" ), were in the movies over fifty years ago for this reason.
Intel has't had very good luck in 64-bit. Probably a good chunk of 64-bit desktop computers (NOT servers or systems marketed as workstations) out there are G5s, and almost all all the rest are AMD.
Which is to say that if Dell switched over to AMD64 processors in everything, Intel would really be in the soup; even if most people probably don 't need 64-bit processors, once Apple gets the G5 in everything and AMD starts making mostly 64-bit chips, people will want it whether they need it or not.
TouchTone is NOT digital -- it's an analog dialing system, in fact, the only analog telephone dialing system of which I can think.
Actually, there are three ways to dial digitally with plain old landline telephone service:
*The pulse switch that most phones have *Tapping very quickly And you guessed it, since pulse dialing is digital, *A rotary dial.
Which shows you that progress isn't always digital -- the whole advantage of TouchTone is that it uses sounds within the spectrum of the human voice, meaning that the circuits need no capacity beyond what they already need to pass along DTMF -- which facilitates the menus. This is why cell phones go into a TouchTone mode after the call has been placed by their internal digital dialing systems which are nothing like TouchTone or pulse.
No, every home should have two or three; one in the kitchen, a nice wall model with a loud ringer, and a black one on a desk next to one of those bright white Apple i-series computers, to balance the color. Or a typewriter, another such object of intrigue.
A few educational games are a good thing -- but taking cues from Halo and Half-Life is not a good trend. The last thing we need is more software that makes it hard to replace the computers whenever you get to (like all the old proprietary games that won't run correctly on XP, and a few things aren't even happy with Classic on OS X). And speaking of hardware, when you start pressuring the schools to have decent hardware for fancy 3D gaming you're going to have to go to a 3-year or less upgrade cycle -- and I know of a local elementary school that is using a fair number of 5-10 year old Macs because with a bit of occasional repair they still do everything they need.
The risk is taking a step back -- some of the K-12 textbooks anymore are not worth the trouble of carrying them into the classroom -- and lose the advantages of a good book (though losing the dubious "advantages" of bad books is a plus, losing the good books is a definite minus). Which is to say, if you're going to make a history game, DON'T MAKE IT A GLORIFIED SET OF DATE FLASHCARDS -- instead try to simulate an experience, and tell the story of what happened. The same goes for any subject -- good educational games are fun and actually tell you something worth knowing, but you'd be better off playing Myst than a boring "educational" game that is not really very informative.
Do we really want Super Munchers running on the Half-Life engine to replace textbooks in:
The original Super Munchers was good for drilling on facts to assist learning in other fashions, but its hardware requirements were not like Halo or something; it'd run on a Mac Plus running System 6.0.5 or a PC with DOS 3.3.
It'd be a better investment to get some better textbooks. High-end gaming isn't suited to the elementary school upgrade cycle, and I doubt many high schools are much better.
But is anyone relaly willing to pay that kind of money for Outlook? I used to use it (with SpamBayes) but it started to be such a pain -- and I didn't use the calendar or anything, I use Palm Desktop for that and Lotus Notes for fancypants e-mail -- that I eventually downloaded Thunderbird, which is much less virus-prone than my old Outlook 2000.
Indeed -- BitTorrent was never designed for evadig either corporations or governments, but probably more for its legal uses anyhow -- like downloading Linux distributions a lot more quickly, but because of stuff like this (Don't want trouble with ye olde ISP) and the risk of accidentally using too much upstream bandwidth, I don't touch BitTorrent with a ten-foot pole.
It's a semantic difference involving proper nouns -- while Massachusetts falls into the category of States, its full name is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and therefore in and of itself it is a commonwealth, not a capital-S State like Nebraska or Iowa, and certainly not a lower-S state like France, the Vatican, or Japan.
I attend a school to which people in their right minds have referred as the "Harvard of the plains."
Walk into any intro-level class and you'll find that most are taught by full time and often tenure-track faculty, with a few part-timers thrown in, and some graduate students for things like public speaking. The professors went to good schools -- Illinois, Chicago, Harvard, Yale, UCLA, and others.
The catch? This is a public university with "at" in the name. Do the faculty and their allocation in classes really sound any worse -- if not better -- than an Ivy League school with much higher tuition?
Thus Windows XP is obviously broken because not only does F9 not work like it's supposed to, but F10 and F11 as well -- aren't they supposed to show all open windows, only the active app's, and none at all?
Oh. Wait. That's a Mac OS X feature, like the contextual drag is a Windows feature. Not every OS has every feature.
...they'd get a Linux-compatible client for Lotus Notes out there. It's not tied to Windows or anything; I use the Mac version on OS X every day, and there's already a Linux server. Disgruntlement against Windows is real, and there are and will be governments and businesses migrating away from it, slowly but surely, as much as is possible.
There are office suites on Linux that do everything that most people need. But if your company uses Lotus Notes (or MS Exchange, though I think there is a Linux client for it, from Ximian), any move from Windows is likely to be towards the Macintosh. Of course, that's what IBM really wants; remember that they make the PowerPC 970 processors for all G5 Macs, and are evidently selling them to Apple more quickly than they can make them.
But beyond IBM's motives, 500 software patents available like this is a good thing, as long as the license is not such that IBM can decide one day that they want to thenceforth collect royalties.
You could carry a laptop to your outbuilding as needed -- bring it in when it's cold -- and something like an Apple iBook (with its cover closed) is relatively durable impact-wise; I've seen them survive after being dropped.
I think what he was saying is that as good as any of those devices might be, none of them sell like the iPod.
To outdo the iPod you need to outdo the concept -- not just make what amounts to an iPod with way-too-small video playback and no iTMS compatibility. There are basically three companies that I believe could not only outdo the iPod in quality but then move the merchandise: Sony (if they get their act together), Microsoft (with their massive R&D potential), and Apple itself (Where do you think the iPod profits and the interest from that $4bn bank account are going? Most likely into research, the lifeblood of any company that depends largely on innovation).
It's my personal theory that the halo effect was just what Apple had in mind when they went full-bore with iPod and iTunes for Windows -- what may be the world's first self-sustaining itself-profitable ad campaign, with the intention of getting an iMac onto every desk and a PowerBook into every briefcase, with far higher margins than the iPod and a greater potential for sale of software.
This is particularly true for the iTunes Music Store, which is run at break-even -- its purpose is to provide iPod filler and introduce people slowly to Apple software. Why do you think the Windows version looks a lot like something out of OS X, when they could have easily made it look more like a regular Windows app? So when people go to the Apple store to get an iPod accessory, they stop to look at the G5 -- who could resist? -- and everything looks "just like iTunes" and they take one home. So it's not just a self-sustaining profitable ad campaign, but a multitiered one -- iTMS draws people to the iPod or vice versa, the iPod draws them into the Apple store or to the rear right corner of CompUSA, and then they buy a Mac.
That's why all the other online music stores are failing -- Napster isn't a hardware company, but they have to compete with Apple, which is running a superior product at just over even for the purposes of selling more hardware. So if anything is more "loser" than a theoretical iPod killer, it's an iTunes killer -- the Music Store business model isn't designed to be necessarily profitable (at least not to the extent of being a company's main business), but rather to transfer a low cost to the consumer to increase the likelihood of purchasing hardware.
* Even with predictive entry or whatnot, a TouchTone keypad is designed for inputting numbers, NOT letters, except as a shortcut for numberas as in "KLonkike 5-0123" (generic number in the fictional number space, represented with exchange-name mnemonic) or "1-800-MYAPPLE" (Apple Computer). We're starting to see some devicess with the QWERTY keyboard, which is significantly more efficient for typing.
* High rates -- it's a dime to send even if you have free reception, unless you are willing to pay $10 or so with a breakeven point of 100 SMS messages. I bet a lot of the people who break the bank on text messages have a lot of voice minutes left -- why don't they use them instead? It's a telephone, you can use it to talk to people in other places.
* Length limitations; if you want to spell properly and maybe even write in full sentences of decent size as you might in an e-mail or IM, forget about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Decoying a steganographic message -- i.e., putting your real backup copy of your password and also your mother's maiden name steganographicaclly into a file -- seems to be a pretty good way of going about things. Kind of like overt vs. covert safes. If you have a safe in plain view or an obvious location with $25, your thesis on a Zip disk, and your Social Security card in it, the $1,000,000 collection of heirloom diamond jewelry kept in a more covert location, a floor safe under the stairs or something. Why? It's human nature to look for "the safe" or "the message," particularly if the decoy is itself tricky to find and access.
You don't need to tell me about the value or quality of iPods or iMacs -- I have both, and an iBook too, which I am using right now as I await a professor in a classroom. Jobs and the Woz are unmistakably luminaries and then some, but I still think that Gates and Allen might qualify at least as boosters.
First of all, I don't think there are keylogger dongles for USB keyboards -- might I suggest that school computers be equipped with USB keyboards?
Secondly, though this was irrelevant here, Windows passwords are WORTHLESS -- as any network administrator who has had a user lock himself out can tell you, the tools for circumventing Windows passwords (and this includes XP Pro) are no secret. Sadly they aren't just used by admins.
It's not just a Windows problem either -- unless you use an Open Firmware password, all you need to root the system is a boot CD (like an installer disc) or another Mac and a FireWire cable. FileVault helps keep any files in user directories secure (even if the drive its yanked out), for what it's worth, and I believe that includes start-up applications, so on a Mac the most critical aspects are the activation of the Open Firmware password, the selection of decent passwords, and the use of FileVault.
Linux? All one would need is a copy of Knoppix to get around permissions -- so you'd want to disable floppy or CD booting in a (password-secured) BIOS, which helps against Windows physical exploits as well.
Another concept of value is old-fashioned physical security. If a public-access or other computer likely to be compromised has any way to lock down (a padlock loop, for example) the access door, it's worthwhile to use it, and if nothing else keep your RAM from being sold out of the back of a van somewhhere. What you need to remember about locks is, like encryption. that they don't have to be inpenetrable, just ned to take long enough to defeat that it's highly inconvenient -- so the lock only needs to be good enough to hold until a lab monitor or security can tell what's going on.
In recap:
* USB peripherals make physical insertion of a keylogger harder
* Your Windows passwords are worthless
* Mac passwords need to be backed up with FileVault, which cannot be circumvented
* BIOS/OpenFirmware protection should be used to prevent booting an alien copy of an operating system
* Locks and guards
A good chunk of web and other servers, and moreover every TiVo box out there, are running Linux now.
If your criteria for being a luminary are CEOship at two public corps and a black mock turtleneck, you're leaving out just about everyone but Steve Jobs, who is certainly a luminary but is not the only luminary in the biz.
You could just as easily say that a couple phone service pirates in greater Frisco selling their VW and scientific calculator to hawk homebrew boxes under the name of a piece of fruit shouldn't get you called a luminary, or that Harvard dropouts who got lucky with IBM shouldn't be called luminaries, but you already said that Steve Jobs is a luminary, and it goes without saying that you can include Wozniak, Gates, and Allen.
Or how about a mortician who got pissed at a phone operator whom he thought was giving his calls to a competitor and decided to make a machine to replace the operator? Almon B. Strowger, inventor of automatic phone switches and pulse dialing.
Moral: Influence is not dependent on origins.
If you want to use it like a regular phone I'd suggest you get a regular phone. Else you will find that unless you have a cell phone or a real landline from the local telco, when the cable or electricity is out you can't call the utilities ... or 911. Well, to be fair I think they have to give you a "soft" dial tone and 911-only service when you disconnect your land line, so I'd suggest you get an attractive phone and plug it into a PSTN jack if you are going down this route.
I can see how something like this is cheaper for long distance, but it's not the best value for local at this time.
You can pry my land line from my cold, dead hands. Let the phone companies mess with the IP stuff and what not, as long as they give me my electified copper quartet (of which I use only half) every month for a fair, predictable fee. And I know Qwest will be here in a couple years if I am, though they may be part of Ma Bell by then, what with the SBC expansionism lately.
The real threats are still Linux and OS X, with which people are more familiar, and besides, they're better with hardware: you don't need to worry so much about hardware compatability lists with GNU/Linux; it'll run on most any modern system, though if you have odd hardware it can be shaky. Au contraire, OS X on PowerPC is sort of like Solaris/SPARC, exccept that a Hell of a lot more people can afford it -- especially with the Mac mini now. Hardware done by software's manufacturer so you just buy a new computer done to get it, something people have to do from time to time anyhow. So Solaris on IA32 is not the answer to weakening the Microsoft near-monopoly -- unless you want the technically challenged to unwittingly replace Windows with it on their incompatible computers, leading to either a geeky friend installing Linux or the purchase of a computer that didn't come with Windows in the first place. And as has already been said, they've been fighting BSD -- when I spoke of OS X earlier in this post I was speaking of only the most accessible permutation of BSD; I understand that FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are well used in the server market, and that they are also usable as a general desktop.
Note that this is targeted at "developing" countries. So think eastern Europe or something. Or if you're looking at deploying these in (for example) Afghanistan, you'd be talking Kabul, not the hinterlands.
Well, a touchscreen (be it stylus or finger optimized) is a specialized case of one-button mouse, just like tapping a touchpad for those who use that feature.
It'd be a lot easier to use a touchscreen Mac than a touchscreen Windows or GNOME/KDE box, because they don't make touchscreens where you can right-click.
I imagine an interface optimized for one-button use also has applications in accessibility to disabled users.
Not if you don't want to pay too much for digital cable -- then the ball is in TiVo's court as the primary DVR provider for analog cable.
Actually the phone number bit is more an issue of pranksterism than failure of fantasy distinguishment.
KLonkdike 5 numbers, the predecessors to our "555-01xx" (usually implemented liberally as "555-xxxx" ), were in the movies over fifty years ago for this reason.
Intel has't had very good luck in 64-bit. Probably a good chunk of 64-bit desktop computers (NOT servers or systems marketed as workstations) out there are G5s, and almost all all the rest are AMD.
Which is to say that if Dell switched over to AMD64 processors in everything, Intel would really be in the soup; even if most people probably don 't need 64-bit processors, once Apple gets the G5 in everything and AMD starts making mostly 64-bit chips, people will want it whether they need it or not.
TouchTone is NOT digital -- it's an analog dialing system, in fact, the only analog telephone dialing system of which I can think.
Actually, there are three ways to dial digitally with plain old landline telephone service:
*The pulse switch that most phones have
*Tapping very quickly
And you guessed it, since pulse dialing is digital,
*A rotary dial.
Which shows you that progress isn't always digital -- the whole advantage of TouchTone is that it uses sounds within the spectrum of the human voice, meaning that the circuits need no capacity beyond what they already need to pass along DTMF -- which facilitates the menus. This is why cell phones go into a TouchTone mode after the call has been placed by their internal digital dialing systems which are nothing like TouchTone or pulse.
No, every home should have two or three; one in the kitchen, a nice wall model with a loud ringer, and a black one on a desk next to one of those bright white Apple i-series computers, to balance the color. Or a typewriter, another such object of intrigue.
...to suck the taxpayers' money.
A few educational games are a good thing -- but taking cues from Halo and Half-Life is not a good trend. The last thing we need is more software that makes it hard to replace the computers whenever you get to (like all the old proprietary games that won't run correctly on XP, and a few things aren't even happy with Classic on OS X). And speaking of hardware, when you start pressuring the schools to have decent hardware for fancy 3D gaming you're going to have to go to a 3-year or less upgrade cycle -- and I know of a local elementary school that is using a fair number of 5-10 year old Macs because with a bit of occasional repair they still do everything they need.
The risk is taking a step back -- some of the K-12 textbooks anymore are not worth the trouble of carrying them into the classroom -- and lose the advantages of a good book (though losing the dubious "advantages" of bad books is a plus, losing the good books is a definite minus). Which is to say, if you're going to make a history game, DON'T MAKE IT A GLORIFIED SET OF DATE FLASHCARDS -- instead try to simulate an experience, and tell the story of what happened. The same goes for any subject -- good educational games are fun and actually tell you something worth knowing, but you'd be better off playing Myst than a boring "educational" game that is not really very informative.
Do we really want Super Munchers running on the Half-Life engine to replace textbooks in:
*History
*Ecology
*Popular Culture
*Astronomy
*Geography
*Anatomy
*Music
*Chemistry
*"And Much More!"
The original Super Munchers was good for drilling on facts to assist learning in other fashions, but its hardware requirements were not like Halo or something; it'd run on a Mac Plus running System 6.0.5 or a PC with DOS 3.3.
It'd be a better investment to get some better textbooks. High-end gaming isn't suited to the elementary school upgrade cycle, and I doubt many high schools are much better.
But is anyone relaly willing to pay that kind of money for Outlook? I used to use it (with SpamBayes) but it started to be such a pain -- and I didn't use the calendar or anything, I use Palm Desktop for that and Lotus Notes for fancypants e-mail -- that I eventually downloaded Thunderbird, which is much less virus-prone than my old Outlook 2000.
Well, if you're shopping for a workstation you can probably afford MS Office, or if you don't need a spreadsheet, iWork.
Indeed -- BitTorrent was never designed for evadig either corporations or governments, but probably more for its legal uses anyhow -- like downloading Linux distributions a lot more quickly, but because of stuff like this (Don't want trouble with ye olde ISP) and the risk of accidentally using too much upstream bandwidth, I don't touch BitTorrent with a ten-foot pole.
It's a semantic difference involving proper nouns -- while Massachusetts falls into the category of States, its full name is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and therefore in and of itself it is a commonwealth, not a capital-S State like Nebraska or Iowa, and certainly not a lower-S state like France, the Vatican, or Japan.
I attend a school to which people in their right minds have referred as the "Harvard of the plains."
Walk into any intro-level class and you'll find that most are taught by full time and often tenure-track faculty, with a few part-timers thrown in, and some graduate students for things like public speaking. The professors went to good schools -- Illinois, Chicago, Harvard, Yale, UCLA, and others.
The catch? This is a public university with "at" in the name. Do the faculty and their allocation in classes really sound any worse -- if not better -- than an Ivy League school with much higher tuition?
...is the bit on reduced cognitive function -- just look at all the idiotic drivers with cell phones in their ears.
Thus Windows XP is obviously broken because not only does F9 not work like it's supposed to, but F10 and F11 as well -- aren't they supposed to show all open windows, only the active app's, and none at all?
Oh. Wait. That's a Mac OS X feature, like the contextual drag is a Windows feature. Not every OS has every feature.
...they'd get a Linux-compatible client for Lotus Notes out there. It's not tied to Windows or anything; I use the Mac version on OS X every day, and there's already a Linux server. Disgruntlement against Windows is real, and there are and will be governments and businesses migrating away from it, slowly but surely, as much as is possible.
There are office suites on Linux that do everything that most people need. But if your company uses Lotus Notes (or MS Exchange, though I think there is a Linux client for it, from Ximian), any move from Windows is likely to be towards the Macintosh. Of course, that's what IBM really wants; remember that they make the PowerPC 970 processors for all G5 Macs, and are evidently selling them to Apple more quickly than they can make them.
But beyond IBM's motives, 500 software patents available like this is a good thing, as long as the license is not such that IBM can decide one day that they want to thenceforth collect royalties.
You could carry a laptop to your outbuilding as needed -- bring it in when it's cold -- and something like an Apple iBook (with its cover closed) is relatively durable impact-wise; I've seen them survive after being dropped.
I think what he was saying is that as good as any of those devices might be, none of them sell like the iPod.
To outdo the iPod you need to outdo the concept -- not just make what amounts to an iPod with way-too-small video playback and no iTMS compatibility. There are basically three companies that I believe could not only outdo the iPod in quality but then move the merchandise: Sony (if they get their act together), Microsoft (with their massive R&D potential), and Apple itself (Where do you think the iPod profits and the interest from that $4bn bank account are going? Most likely into research, the lifeblood of any company that depends largely on innovation).
It's my personal theory that the halo effect was just what Apple had in mind when they went full-bore with iPod and iTunes for Windows -- what may be the world's first self-sustaining itself-profitable ad campaign, with the intention of getting an iMac onto every desk and a PowerBook into every briefcase, with far higher margins than the iPod and a greater potential for sale of software.
This is particularly true for the iTunes Music Store, which is run at break-even -- its purpose is to provide iPod filler and introduce people slowly to Apple software. Why do you think the Windows version looks a lot like something out of OS X, when they could have easily made it look more like a regular Windows app? So when people go to the Apple store to get an iPod accessory, they stop to look at the G5 -- who could resist? -- and everything looks "just like iTunes" and they take one home. So it's not just a self-sustaining profitable ad campaign, but a multitiered one -- iTMS draws people to the iPod or vice versa, the iPod draws them into the Apple store or to the rear right corner of CompUSA, and then they buy a Mac.
That's why all the other online music stores are failing -- Napster isn't a hardware company, but they have to compete with Apple, which is running a superior product at just over even for the purposes of selling more hardware. So if anything is more "loser" than a theoretical iPod killer, it's an iTunes killer -- the Music Store business model isn't designed to be necessarily profitable (at least not to the extent of being a company's main business), but rather to transfer a low cost to the consumer to increase the likelihood of purchasing hardware.
SMS is a general pain in more ways than one:
* Even with predictive entry or whatnot, a TouchTone keypad is designed for inputting numbers, NOT letters, except as a shortcut for numberas as in "KLonkike 5-0123" (generic number in the fictional number space, represented with exchange-name mnemonic) or "1-800-MYAPPLE" (Apple Computer). We're starting to see some devicess with the QWERTY keyboard, which is significantly more efficient for typing.
* High rates -- it's a dime to send even if you have free reception, unless you are willing to pay $10 or so with a breakeven point of 100 SMS messages. I bet a lot of the people who break the bank on text messages have a lot of voice minutes left -- why don't they use them instead? It's a telephone, you can use it to talk to people in other places.
* Length limitations; if you want to spell properly and maybe even write in full sentences of decent size as you might in an e-mail or IM, forget about it.