I'm sure somebody will parse these comments to see how well this advertising move worked out.
I have no new issue with Plantronics, somebody probably sold them that Slashdot is a great way to reach tech nerds and IT guys that can influence buying decisions. I can't blame them for targeted advertising, and though I won't be buying or recommending their kit that has nothing to do with this advertisement.
Slashdot however has screwed up. You guys aren't dumb, you know why commenters would object to this. You knew in advance it wouldn't go over welI because you can't sit in nerd-stew this long without picking up the flavour of the community. We had a good run but you've tossed in the towel. Shame on you.
Whether you agree with the outcome or not, foreign labor has helped to reduce the price of many of the goods and services that westerners rely on every day. India has allowed us to save $0.05, $5, $50, maybe $500 on a consumer goods at the cost of our manufacturing base.
The reason your typical Dell computer costs $400 is because they can ship part of the costs of support out to India. The same is true of big-box retailers like Walmart selling t-shirts and teapots cranked out in Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian factories for substantially less than local boutiques like American Apparel that sell US-made goods. Part of what you're paying for is branding, distribution chain inefficiency, fashion, etc. but it's important not to discount the labor cost--no matter how small--because that's all part of the race to the bottom.
If you don't like outsourced IT for any reason--"I don't like China's stance on Tibet" is as good a reason as "I find their accent makes resolving a problem over the telephone difficult"--then don't buy from companies that use it. You'll probably have to pay more for it, but nobody said having principles and sticking to them wouldn't require some sacrifices. Chances are good you'll find it's not as expensive as you think and a lot of times you'll end up with a better product/service because of it.
The masses have spoken: saving a few bucks is worth it. If you don't like it--vote with your dollars and encourage your friends and family to do the same. Arguing for government regulation so that american workers don't' have to be competitive is ridiculous. Screaming nonsense like "India hasn't done a damned thing for the USA" is rediculous when you consider the role workers in developing nations play in producing the products that fuel every aspect of our lives.
The language added on March 30 to AT&T's wireless data service Terms and Conditions was done in error. It was brought to our attention and we have since removed it. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
They did. All of Microsoft's Macintosh applications still runs in the Rosetta processor emulation environment. Macs with Intel processors have been shipping for more than a year and no fix is expected until the second half of this year. There wasn't a version of Microsoft Office that worked in OS X until after Apple had released 10.1 - before that it ran in the classic environment.
but most will end up with the same cookie-cutter projects for which these frameworks are always tailored (look to scaffolding in Ruby on Rails for an example of the omnipresent "database browser").
Scaffolding is a tiny portion of Rails, only a few dozen lines of code out of thousands. There's more code wrapped up in pluralization than scaffolding yet for some reason everyone's remains fixed on "scaffod:foo". DHH has said time and time again that scaffolding is there just so that you can get a quick way to get you running, by the time you're done the scaffolding code should be long gone.
Think of it as the 'genie' effect in OS X: easily recognizable but mostly for show. People may not 'get' things like Unit testing, database agnostic schemas, MVC patterns, domain specific languages, duck-typing, or any of the other things that make rails really productive but they sure as hell get "1 line of code and I've connected to a database to perform CRUD functions." Once you've got them with the scaffolding hook people are receptive to the things that really make Ruby on Rails cool.
Scaffolding makes for a nifty screencast but the real joy comes when you actually learn how to use the language and framework.
if I were Microsoft, I'd pull out of the EU market.
That's why Microsoft is sitting on billions sailing around in their yachts and you're at home posting on slashdot as an anonymous coward.
Nobody ever got rich by walking away form a multi-billion dollar market as long as it was still widely profitable just because they weren't allowed to cheat to make money.
If I lost 5% of my market to an "overnight" upstart with a fraction of my mind share, resources, and and distribution network - I'd consider them a pretty major player. I'd be even more concerned if that competitor had a "technically superior" but cheaper product that seems to get nothing but great press. If my product was a platform for building other products on top of, and my developers were clamoring for the features in my competitors product--features I had no plans to match--I'd be crapping my pants trying to squash them before things got any worse.
If I didn't then next year I might be wondering where another 10% of my market went, and three years from now you could be wondering how incompetent I would have had to be in order to make my product as irrelevant as Netscape.
Obviously I'm not sitting on top of a multi-billion dollar software empire, but it's not too unreasonable to think Microsoft is paying careful attention to Firefox: it's the only serious competition Internet Explorer has had in nearly half a decade.
Despite the unforutnate name, WinFS is a service that runs above the filesystem. The data is still stored on a plain old NTFS partition(s).
For traditional file-based data, such as text documents, audio tracks, and video clips, WinFS is the new Windows file system. Typically, you will store the main data of a file, the file stream, as a file on an NTFS volume. However, whenever you call an API that changes or adds items with NTFS file stream parts, WinFS extracts the metadata from the stream and adds the metadata to the WinFS store.
The data is still just as (in)accessible as it's always been. The meta data is locked away in the WinFS store but we haven't been using that all this time so it's not like we're going to be any worse off.
as for writting NTFS, I suggest you take a look at captive NTFS which lets you read and write your NTFS partitions in Linux with the same confidence that you do in Windows.
The other nice thing about Altivec on OS X is that Apple has done a fairly good job of making it accessible without forcing the programmer to learn and use assembly language. These libraries will automatically fall back to a scaler code path if they're running on a G3 so it saves you from a fair bit of work there too. They have included a number of optimized libraries that use Altivec that are ready to go "out of the box" with xCode including:
Vimage: for image processing
vDSP: for signal processing
BLAS: the name says it all: "Basic Linear Algebra"
LAPAC: for solving systems of equations and matrix factorization
Vector Math Library: unloads common operations like square root, transcendental functions, division, etc to VMX
vBasicOps: for simple algebra operations like integer addition, subtraction, etc.
VBN: for dealing with 256-1024bit numbers easily
Apple has documentation and source code for the libraries on their Developer Connection Website. What good are vector units if nobody can make use of them? I can't wait for Apple to put the GPUs image processing abilities into my hads with CoreImage/Video.
Just when you think the Internet can't get any uglier or more difficult to use we get another browser with piss-poor interface.
Why the heck do I need the weather below my address bar?
Why is the menu bar over by the close/minimize/maximize widgets (don't miss click the help menu or your window will vanish to the task bar)?
I/love/ the way they use completley non-standard UI elements throughout and the grace us with the standard windows scroll bar on the right.
I think i'll leave my family/neighbors/girlfriend with Firefox or Mozilla thank-you. They may not be the perfect interface but they're an order of magnitude more useful than this monstrosity.
And no, it doesn't run on Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, or anything but Windows. I guess that's a good thing in this case.
Canada has the population of California, a bigger land mass, and better broadband penetration than the US (source). Even considering that most Canadians live within a few hundred kilometers of the US/Canada border you're still lagging behind.
It's been a while since I carefully looked at my cable bill but IIRC the total bill is $100 CDN
$60 for tv cable service
$30 for "high speed" internet
$10 to bump the internet up to 5mbit down/1.5mbit up
$33 USD for reasonably fast internet doesn't looks pretty good to me.
The whole point of going to University is to learn how to think, not what to think. I would hope that any University computer science major would be able to figure out how to make a basic network application (like a mass-mailer) by reading the RFCs and API documentation for their platform of choice. I can program a word processor even though I never took "Word Processor Coding 204" and "Text Editor Development 189". Maybe these courses will not only teach how to write a piece of crap-ware but also how to exert a little self-discipline and ethics when they're making all those semi-colons and curly brackets.
These courses actually look interesting and I'm considering taking some courses part-time to work towards my masters there just because they're offering a little variety.
To get things started, I whipped one up with 15 lines of applescript. For those too lazy to open up AppleScript Editor I posted a 'compiled' version.
Just add extract and toss on your desktop or in your dock: drop files on to see the wc magic.
Source code follows:
on open (somefiles) try repeat with afile in somefiles set realpathtofile to POSIX path of afile set wcresult to do shell script ("wc " & realpathtofile) set displaymessage to "File: " & realpathtofile & "
Lines: " & first word of wcresult & " Words: " & second word of wcresult & " Characters: " & third word of wcresult display dialog displaymessage with icon note end repeat on error errormessage display dialog errormessage end try end open
I know you were half-joking, but when it's so easy, why not?
However like the article already mentioned, jurors who convicted Jeremy D. Jaynes, 30, and Jessica DeGroot, 28, later sentenced Jaynes to a nine-year prison term
I hate spam as much as the next guy but 9 years is a bit excessive IMO. I did a quick bit of googling to figure out what sort of sentences people get for other crimes in Virginia (because this was so out of alignment with how people are sentenced in Alberta) and I found this:
COMMONWEALTH v. Milton Tanner
On March 22, 2002, this defendant received ten years to serve for Rape, two counts of Carnal Knowledge and Taking Indecent Liberties with a minor.
Yes we need to crack down on online frauds, spam, worms, et al as much as the next guy but I really don't think that sending spam should carry (roughly) the same penalty as a rape conviction. Looking at these sentences our court is either saying "Sending spam is a horrific a crime as rape" or "Rape is no more worse than sending spam."
If only it were that simple! Cache sizes, prediction facilities, execution units, register count, etc. all play a significant part in CPU performance and to reduce this to an argument about who's pipeline is bigger ignores many of the important issues.
Pipeline length has some impact on performance and until recently Intel has been able to perform well by jacking up the clock speed. Sure it ate tons of power, and heated your room but it didn't really matter provided Intel's chips could perform as well as the AMD, IBM, Motorola, etc. competition. Think of a trip to the drag strip: if my 5.7L corvette runs the quarter mile in 12.5 seconds and your 1.6L civic does it in 13 seconds I still win the race. In a race to be the fastest you can't lean out the window and yell "You won, but I was almost as quick and I did it with 75% less motor!": you'll look like a fool. The performance crown is about being the fastest. period.
For the last 9 months or so Intels small-block Corvettes have not only been losing the races, they're getting beaten by Subarus that produce more power, get twice the gas mileage, and cost less.
You might want to read some of the ARS Technica articles that cover CPU design and illustrate some of the differences between the various architectures:
I thought XP is the safest and most secure version yet!
It is the most secure version yet, but that's a relative term. Past versions of Windows set the bar so low that just about anything would be the most secure Windows to date. Notice how they didn't say "Most secure OS" or even "Most secure Microsoft OS": the devil is in the details!
My last poop* is the least smelly one to date. It stinks an order of magnitude less than the shit from New Years 1997--that one was bad enough to make a janitor gag--but I wouldn't want to find it in my server close all the same.
So all I have to do is wait a couple more years! Then I will buy a naked machine, connect it to the internet, and in minutes a full OS will be installed by a worm! The best part is that it will probably be more up to date than the Windows machines spreading this garbage.
Maybe I should patch emacs to propagate itself and get the jump on the script kiddies;)
When we play (see my post above) we use the theater sound system. The projector to run the advertising accepts standard RCA type connections and is patched into the sound system for the theater - there's no real rummaging around to find empty jacks. I would assume this is to allow a PC to be used to run a slideshow or multimedia presentation when it's rented out for company meetings and such. The advertising is driven by a standard Wintel PC: keep in mind that we're interested in the advertising project (800x600 lcd project) not the projector that shows your the movies. This system is independent of the main projection system but is still tied into the theaters audio system.
It's not 7.1 THX surround, but it's still loud enough to rumble the ice in your cup.
I have a friend who is a manager at a one of the Famous Players theaters here in town. Occasionally late at night there will be an "xbox night". Everyone brings in a controller and their xbox (well 4 people do). Add a few meters of Cat5 and a $19 SMC 4 port router and you've got a recipe for good times. Last weekend we had 16 player games of Halo running for hours. Crimson Skies wouldn't go more than 4 player (2 theaters * 2 players) which was a shame. The new zelda really comes into it's own on a huge screen though.
Pretty much every theater these days has a digital projector for displaying those powerpoint-esque advertisements so it's just like plugging in at home: at least some good came out of those. It's worth buying the controller extension cables so you can sit 2 or 3 rows up rather than right against the back wall. Walkie-talkies cover the inter-theater communication because cellphones can be hit-and-miss.
They sell beer at the concession now and there is a Pizza Hut right there for the food so I can see how it could make a good night out for the guys. All that said, I'm not sure this is something I'd be willing to pay for. 4 players * 4 theater is great because there is no down time. If I had to sit out every 4th round I think I'd rather just play at home on my puny 130cm TV and xbox live. Splitting $60 4 ways also seams a little pricey (though not much more than a regular movie). Not being able to eat and drink while playing would be a major disappointment too.
"Revolutionary"? I don't think it will be any more revolutionary than when they were showing saturday morning cartoons on them a few years ago. A good novelty, but ultimately to expensive, inconvenient (can't just go-and-play) to compete with the home gathering.
iPods configured to sync with a Macintosh will be using an HFS+ file system. A PC formatted iPod will use a FAT32 partition which apparently allows you to use your iPod on Windows and Mac OS X computers without paying any special software. I would guess that most Macintosh based iPod users have HFS formatted drives--especially if they use it as an external hard disk.
Not the end of the world, but it is something to keep in mind if you're going to be working in a mixed environment. Tossing your term-paper onto your iPod only to find out that Windows can't read your data when you get to school is just not a pleasant situation to be in.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure somebody will parse these comments to see how well this advertising move worked out. I have no new issue with Plantronics, somebody probably sold them that Slashdot is a great way to reach tech nerds and IT guys that can influence buying decisions. I can't blame them for targeted advertising, and though I won't be buying or recommending their kit that has nothing to do with this advertisement. Slashdot however has screwed up. You guys aren't dumb, you know why commenters would object to this. You knew in advance it wouldn't go over welI because you can't sit in nerd-stew this long without picking up the flavour of the community. We had a good run but you've tossed in the towel. Shame on you.
Whether you agree with the outcome or not, foreign labor has helped to reduce the price of many of the goods and services that westerners rely on every day. India has allowed us to save $0.05, $5, $50, maybe $500 on a consumer goods at the cost of our manufacturing base.
The reason your typical Dell computer costs $400 is because they can ship part of the costs of support out to India. The same is true of big-box retailers like Walmart selling t-shirts and teapots cranked out in Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian factories for substantially less than local boutiques like American Apparel that sell US-made goods. Part of what you're paying for is branding, distribution chain inefficiency, fashion, etc. but it's important not to discount the labor cost--no matter how small--because that's all part of the race to the bottom.
If you don't like outsourced IT for any reason--"I don't like China's stance on Tibet" is as good a reason as "I find their accent makes resolving a problem over the telephone difficult"--then don't buy from companies that use it. You'll probably have to pay more for it, but nobody said having principles and sticking to them wouldn't require some sacrifices. Chances are good you'll find it's not as expensive as you think and a lot of times you'll end up with a better product/service because of it.
The masses have spoken: saving a few bucks is worth it. If you don't like it--vote with your dollars and encourage your friends and family to do the same. Arguing for government regulation so that american workers don't' have to be competitive is ridiculous. Screaming nonsense like "India hasn't done a damned thing for the USA" is rediculous when you consider the role workers in developing nations play in producing the products that fuel every aspect of our lives.
Engadget is saying the terms have already been retracted
They did. All of Microsoft's Macintosh applications still runs in the Rosetta processor emulation environment. Macs with Intel processors have been shipping for more than a year and no fix is expected until the second half of this year. There wasn't a version of Microsoft Office that worked in OS X until after Apple had released 10.1 - before that it ran in the classic environment.
Scaffolding is a tiny portion of Rails, only a few dozen lines of code out of thousands. There's more code wrapped up in pluralization than scaffolding yet for some reason everyone's remains fixed on "scaffod :foo". DHH has said time and time again that scaffolding is there just so that you can get a quick way to get you running, by the time you're done the scaffolding code should be long gone.
Think of it as the 'genie' effect in OS X: easily recognizable but mostly for show. People may not 'get' things like Unit testing, database agnostic schemas, MVC patterns, domain specific languages, duck-typing, or any of the other things that make rails really productive but they sure as hell get "1 line of code and I've connected to a database to perform CRUD functions." Once you've got them with the scaffolding hook people are receptive to the things that really make Ruby on Rails cool.
Scaffolding makes for a nifty screencast but the real joy comes when you actually learn how to use the language and framework.
There's an old bit of Unix Folklore about recovering from an "rm -rf /" by Mario Wolczko that originally made the rounds on Usenet in 1986.
It's one heck of a read.
The car swtiches to electric when it reaches 25 km/hr according to the Energine website which is actually more like 15 miles per hour.
That's why Microsoft is sitting on billions sailing around in their yachts and you're at home posting on slashdot as an anonymous coward.
Nobody ever got rich by walking away form a multi-billion dollar market as long as it was still widely profitable just because they weren't allowed to cheat to make money.
If I lost 5% of my market to an "overnight" upstart with a fraction of my mind share, resources, and and distribution network - I'd consider them a pretty major player. I'd be even more concerned if that competitor had a "technically superior" but cheaper product that seems to get nothing but great press. If my product was a platform for building other products on top of, and my developers were clamoring for the features in my competitors product--features I had no plans to match--I'd be crapping my pants trying to squash them before things got any worse.
If I didn't then next year I might be wondering where another 10% of my market went, and three years from now you could be wondering how incompetent I would have had to be in order to make my product as irrelevant as Netscape.
Obviously I'm not sitting on top of a multi-billion dollar software empire, but it's not too unreasonable to think Microsoft is paying careful attention to Firefox: it's the only serious competition Internet Explorer has had in nearly half a decade.
Despite the unforutnate name, WinFS is a service that runs above the filesystem. The data is still stored on a plain old NTFS partition(s).
source: Microsoft's WinFS developer page
The data is still just as (in)accessible as it's always been. The meta data is locked away in the WinFS store but we haven't been using that all this time so it's not like we're going to be any worse off.
as for writting NTFS, I suggest you take a look at captive NTFS which lets you read and write your NTFS partitions in Linux with the same confidence that you do in Windows.
The other nice thing about Altivec on OS X is that Apple has done a fairly good job of making it accessible without forcing the programmer to learn and use assembly language. These libraries will automatically fall back to a scaler code path if they're running on a G3 so it saves you from a fair bit of work there too. They have included a number of optimized libraries that use Altivec that are ready to go "out of the box" with xCode including:
Apple has documentation and source code for the libraries on their Developer Connection Website. What good are vector units if nobody can make use of them? I can't wait for Apple to put the GPUs image processing abilities into my hads with CoreImage/Video.
Just when you think the Internet can't get any uglier or more difficult to use we get another browser with piss-poor interface.
/love/ the way they use completley non-standard UI elements throughout and the grace us with the standard windows scroll bar on the right.
Why the heck do I need the weather below my address bar?
Why is the menu bar over by the close/minimize/maximize widgets (don't miss click the help menu or your window will vanish to the task bar)?
I
I think i'll leave my family/neighbors/girlfriend with Firefox or Mozilla thank-you. They may not be the perfect interface but they're an order of magnitude more useful than this monstrosity.
And no, it doesn't run on Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, or anything but Windows. I guess that's a good thing in this case.
Canada has the population of California, a bigger land mass, and better broadband penetration than the US (source). Even considering that most Canadians live within a few hundred kilometers of the US/Canada border you're still lagging behind.
It's been a while since I carefully looked at my cable bill but IIRC the total bill is $100 CDN$33 USD for reasonably fast internet doesn't looks pretty good to me.
The whole point of going to University is to learn how to think, not what to think. I would hope that any University computer science major would be able to figure out how to make a basic network application (like a mass-mailer) by reading the RFCs and API documentation for their platform of choice. I can program a word processor even though I never took "Word Processor Coding 204" and "Text Editor Development 189". Maybe these courses will not only teach how to write a piece of crap-ware but also how to exert a little self-discipline and ethics when they're making all those semi-colons and curly brackets.
These courses actually look interesting and I'm considering taking some courses part-time to work towards my masters there just because they're offering a little variety.
To get things started, I whipped one up with 15 lines of applescript. For those too lazy to open up AppleScript Editor I posted a 'compiled' version.
Just add extract and toss on your desktop or in your dock: drop files on to see the wc magic. Source code follows:I know you were half-joking, but when it's so easy, why not?Yes we need to crack down on online frauds, spam, worms, et al as much as the next guy but I really don't think that sending spam should carry (roughly) the same penalty as a rape conviction. Looking at these sentences our court is either saying "Sending spam is a horrific a crime as rape" or "Rape is no more worse than sending spam."
15 years is the sentence handed out in a rape & sexual battery conviction involving a minor. This doesn't sit right.If only it were that simple! Cache sizes, prediction facilities, execution units, register count, etc. all play a significant part in CPU performance and to reduce this to an argument about who's pipeline is bigger ignores many of the important issues.
Pipeline length has some impact on performance and until recently Intel has been able to perform well by jacking up the clock speed. Sure it ate tons of power, and heated your room but it didn't really matter provided Intel's chips could perform as well as the AMD, IBM, Motorola, etc. competition. Think of a trip to the drag strip: if my 5.7L corvette runs the quarter mile in 12.5 seconds and your 1.6L civic does it in 13 seconds I still win the race. In a race to be the fastest you can't lean out the window and yell "You won, but I was almost as quick and I did it with 75% less motor!": you'll look like a fool. The performance crown is about being the fastest. period.
For the last 9 months or so Intels small-block Corvettes have not only been losing the races, they're getting beaten by Subarus that produce more power, get twice the gas mileage, and cost less.
You might want to read some of the ARS Technica articles that cover CPU design and illustrate some of the differences between the various architectures:
It is the most secure version yet, but that's a relative term. Past versions of Windows set the bar so low that just about anything would be the most secure Windows to date. Notice how they didn't say "Most secure OS" or even "Most secure Microsoft OS": the devil is in the details!
My last poop* is the least smelly one to date. It stinks an order of magnitude less than the shit from New Years 1997--that one was bad enough to make a janitor gag--but I wouldn't want to find it in my server close all the same.
* poop is an underrated word.
How About Mac OS X?
Finder doesn't play with the WWW at all unless you count it's WebDAV support, and it doesn't ship with Lynx or Links either (much to my dismay)
. I might as well point out that BASH, ZSH, TCSH, are the shell: Lynx is a browser that you launch from the shell.So all I have to do is wait a couple more years! Then I will buy a naked machine, connect it to the internet, and in minutes a full OS will be installed by a worm! The best part is that it will probably be more up to date than the Windows machines spreading this garbage.
Maybe I should patch emacs to propagate itself and get the jump on the script kiddies ;)
Are x86 manufacturers are selling 10kg 20" tablet PCs with aluminum stands and no battery now?
I think they'll say "Nice LCD display but where's the computer?" and that is kinda the point.
When we play (see my post above) we use the theater sound system. The projector to run the advertising accepts standard RCA type connections and is patched into the sound system for the theater - there's no real rummaging around to find empty jacks. I would assume this is to allow a PC to be used to run a slideshow or multimedia presentation when it's rented out for company meetings and such. The advertising is driven by a standard Wintel PC: keep in mind that we're interested in the advertising project (800x600 lcd project) not the projector that shows your the movies. This system is independent of the main projection system but is still tied into the theaters audio system.
It's not 7.1 THX surround, but it's still loud enough to rumble the ice in your cup.
I have a friend who is a manager at a one of the Famous Players theaters here in town. Occasionally late at night there will be an "xbox night". Everyone brings in a controller and their xbox (well 4 people do). Add a few meters of Cat5 and a $19 SMC 4 port router and you've got a recipe for good times. Last weekend we had 16 player games of Halo running for hours. Crimson Skies wouldn't go more than 4 player (2 theaters * 2 players) which was a shame. The new zelda really comes into it's own on a huge screen though.
Pretty much every theater these days has a digital projector for displaying those powerpoint-esque advertisements so it's just like plugging in at home: at least some good came out of those. It's worth buying the controller extension cables so you can sit 2 or 3 rows up rather than right against the back wall. Walkie-talkies cover the inter-theater communication because cellphones can be hit-and-miss.
They sell beer at the concession now and there is a Pizza Hut right there for the food so I can see how it could make a good night out for the guys. All that said, I'm not sure this is something I'd be willing to pay for. 4 players * 4 theater is great because there is no down time. If I had to sit out every 4th round I think I'd rather just play at home on my puny 130cm TV and xbox live. Splitting $60 4 ways also seams a little pricey (though not much more than a regular movie). Not being able to eat and drink while playing would be a major disappointment too.
"Revolutionary"? I don't think it will be any more revolutionary than when they were showing saturday morning cartoons on them a few years ago. A good novelty, but ultimately to expensive, inconvenient (can't just go-and-play) to compete with the home gathering.
"Bless me google for I have sinned" doesn't work for me.
Damn! Google must know I'm not catholic!
iPods configured to sync with a Macintosh will be using an HFS+ file system. A PC formatted iPod will use a FAT32 partition which apparently allows you to use your iPod on Windows and Mac OS X computers without paying any special software. I would guess that most Macintosh based iPod users have HFS formatted drives--especially if they use it as an external hard disk.
Not the end of the world, but it is something to keep in mind if you're going to be working in a mixed environment. Tossing your term-paper onto your iPod only to find out that Windows can't read your data when you get to school is just not a pleasant situation to be in.