We're getting a little off topic, but you can build the VNFS as a hybrid filesystem with "--hydrid --excludes-agressive=". This basically pulls all the non-essentials over NFS, we've been able to run X11 apps using warewulf with a 15-30MB ramdisk. If you have a half-decent setup you'll have different network adapters for NFS and MPI so the two don't step on each other's toes. As long as the program doesn't need to keep reloading libs (Gaussian for example is a pain for this reason), it works very well.
Also, if NFS solution isn't attractive you can add a few lines in rc.local to copy frequently used libs to a local partition on startup.
Agreed. We've now deployed Centos 4.2 with Warewulf on three Beowulf clusters, two of which I directly administer. RedHat EL was unfortunately priced outside of our budget (we're in academia), yet some scientific software vendors only *offically* support the Redhat series. For this type of situation, CentOS fits the bill nicely, not to mention there exists good VNFS scripts for warewulf already. Its a valuable resource filling the hole that Redhat Linux left.
Unfortunately, I know of no news program on television that really displays such a thing.
Try Jim Lehrer's News Hour. It's usually a few lengthly segments with really good focus. These are also available online: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/
Jeff
"A grave thermodynamic sin" I've even heard some say. For a published critique of hydrogen that supports parent's views, see "Demystifying the Hydrogen Myth", Dr. Reuel Shinnar, Chemical Engineering Progress, Nov 2004 pg 5.
I also agree with parent, diesel hybrids are the way to go in the near future. The Japanese are pouring money into research in this area and we're going to be left eating ours hats for chasing the hydrogen genie.
Mine (an iHP-120) came with a CD, but I've never even unwrapped it. The player presents itself as a mass storage device and Just Works.
Please, make me a playlist on the fly with your iRiver. What's that, you need to make your playlists on the computer ahead of time? What kind of digital player can only play one song at a time? Oh yeah, in the next firmware. Whenever that happens. Try making sense of the manual. Don't speak Korean, oh you're SOL. I originally bought one of these, had trouble with the nagivation, found the frequency of firmware updates pathetic, and the inability to make playlists was crap. Right onto ebay it went. Don't get me wrong the hardware is really really nice but third party software with instructions barely in English to get tagging to work? Cmon! Unless they've come leaps in bounds in the last year I would not inflict this device on anyone.
I actually emailed the EFF contact about the Tor issue, and was told that if one were to be held responsible for information passing thru your Tor client every anonymous proxy in the US would be shut down. We're not "common carriers" but you do need to draw the line somewhere... is your gateway responsible? ISP? School's proxy? All of those route your packets at various levels. The EFF obviously had their legal staff look into this before supporting Tor financially and decided its a non-issue, which actually surprised me.
Thanks, you get the award for good economics, please ignore the flames from the others:) For those who think this is incorrect, benefits attributable to economies of scale (cleary the case for a utility, and especially cable if I understand correctly) may actually boost the supply of a good past what a competitive market may provide. When we're dealing with massive infrastructures, it makes sense to keep one provider. The dereg in the power industry uncoupled generation from transmission, power companies still have a monopoly over transmission. Duplicating power lines would be insane! A free market would certainly lower cost, but you must consider the increased marginal costs - this will usually work to reduce supply.
Sometimes a regulated monopoly makes more sense, without it rural American would have been passed over for telephone and electricity, just like they are being passed over for broadband right now. Grant them the monopoly but require them to service everywhere. This type of social contract between the public and a utility has worked well in the past.
I'm still a bit confused as to how TC actually works, after reading some of the IBM rebuttal and the FOSS "attack". So let's say Microsoft runs a code evaluation lab, they sign the code with their private key, your computer has their public key built into the chip. This is in principle nice so you do know no one can tamper with the trusted public keys. The insecurity of the public/private key system comes from public key distribution really. You could build a web of trust from this key and have very good vendor authentication. Fine.
So I lauch piratedoffice.exe which is cracked, the operating system then checks the signature on the.exe finds it to be bad and pops up an error message, refuses to run it. But the decision to run is made at the operating system level, not the hardware level. How could it be shifted to the hardware level? Would the PC need to load the entire program into RAM and check for a sig? But the hardware doesn't know anything about applications, that's all OS specific/userland stuff. The software could ask the hardware to auth. a codeblock in RAM but this could still be cracked at the software level. If the software needs to make the ultimate decision to run or not we'll find a way around it via a software crack.
I'm having trouble working out the details of the "evilness" - it seems it needs to happen at the OS level. If that is not the case and this becomes adopted it will be a good day in FOSS land as every little programmer can't afford to auth with a code evaluation lab. It would remove a ton of freeware and shareware from the Win platform which seems counter MS's business interests. If they do do anything so stupid linux will take off like a rocket. Furthurmore, someone like RedHat can pay to have their key signed by whoever generates the public key on your board which means FOSS can even benefit here by building off this HW based web of trust. Remember when the FSF servers were comprised? Its not like isn't an issue.
You are usually given permission by the publishing firm to distribute a certain number of electronic copies free of charge. My last journal article this number was 50, more than enough to cover anyone that asks you personally via email for a copy.
Its also another issue if the publishing firm actually has a copyright on the original latex/word document, most times they will let you host this publically - they only enforce copyright with respect to the final typeset copy. Interested in an article? Email the corresponding author I'm sure you'll have no trouble getting a copy free of charge.
Its missing what I call the "grandmother" factor. I can explain it to most technical people I encounter (but can't convince any to use it), but its way too complex an implementation for most average users to handle - my mother or grandmother. Its not that they can't understand it, but the computer is already overwhelming and they need something that "just works(tm)". The Web of trust concept "just makes my head want to explode(tm)"
Unfortunately I can't see a good way to make things more transparent and invisible to the end user. Most folks don't pick good passwords, yet that is absolutely essential for PGP private key security. Also, a yearly drive reformat is not uncommon, so lost keys are a huge issue. This technology partially address that issue but I shouldn't need to check to see if someone updated there key every message, plus theres the trust issue with a constantly rotating keyset.
Oh right, those don't count because refuting environmental destruction claims isn't politically correct! Look, I don't agree with much of what Bjorn says, but the point is he compiled some statistics, came to some conclusions, and was then ostracized by the political machine for being "irresponsible" for advocating what a very liberal Euro nation dubbed "wreckless science". The critique of his science (that wasn't much of that) was second to the smear campaign leveled against him for being irresponsible. His work didn't "count" I guess in however cooked up his stupid statistic also.
This is the same thing John Stewart was talking about during his CNN Crossfire talk, we're so right or left now we can't have an honest debate about real issues, which we really need. No papers are published because its career death because a very liberal academia has decided anyone going against this trend is scum, without even looking at the science. Nature would not accept a paper from someone that claimed otherwise, but this is a debate we really need to have folks.
You further rub salt in the wounds by claiming that that scientists are doing this because they can't get funding for "everything's fine, situation normal" reports. Of course, this is balderdash anyway: the oil industry does fund such reports, and presumably the Bush administration would also rather see such things.
Oh Cmon! The prime objective of tgreenhe Bush admin or oil companies is not "raping of the environment" or even preservation of the status quo. They want to make money! Show them how to do it in a way more consistent with your environmental views and convince them that the new laws and taxes will remain constant for at least a decade so they can get a return on their investiment and they'll come along. I can't stress how important that last point is, design changes in chemical plants costs billions and lots of time to implement, read about the MTBE debacle, convince them there is a return on investment.
The problem is no *viable* alternative to fossil fuels (under the current tax system!) exist yet and controvesial global warming reports != businesss incentive. Bottom line == business incentive, tax CO2 if you want to make alternative energy more viable. But please don't paint petro companies and Republicans as a bunch of morons who get some sort of personal satisfaction out of habitat destruction. Paint them as greedy, which is exactly what capitalism is all about, and then you'll understand how to change things.
I'm not worried about Uncle Sam having my personal info, because the banks already do. Two weeks ago I recieved a letter from AES (ACS/A??, they change names every few weeks) informing me some of my personal information, include SS, loan balance, credit history, drivers license number, current location, course of study, martial status, and so on had been disclosed to someone they didracketn't mention, only "unauthorized" individuals. The letter went on to encourage me to put a hold on new lines of credit in my name by contacting Equifax, in the hopes of possibly stopping identity theft. Very nice of them, eh? I'm scared shitless to a certain extent...
Banks whore your information around like theres no tomorrow, sure they keep it in the company but when Citibank owns the whole damn country everyone everywhere knows what you're doing, they get the info from parent companies. You have no control over who services your students loan, the company giving away my identify in this case was http://www.brazosgroup.com/, someone I have never heard of and certainly didn't authorized to service my loan. I would feel much more comfortable if Uncle Sam safeguarded this info and acted like a proxy to these shithead companies.
Philadelphia has the second highest public transit cost in the US (San Diego is first I believe) but over $2 for bus fair is much more important to the working poor than wifi... lets provide basic services first, then worry about "useless" stuff like free wifi. Most households in West Philadelphia other than University City area don't have computers, most households in North Philadelphia don't have windows, and I don't mean the operating system. I can't believe our former mayor and state legilature really believes wifi is any kind of priority
It's important that our tools support binary packages, because binary packages are widely used and widely in demand in the Linux community. If our tools don't support binary packages, then we can't claim that our tools are designed to allow a user to do anything he or she might want to do.
And so on... Now in general, I can't say I'm a fan of this meta-package project. Forking and creating another tool is easy, bringing folks together is very difficult. We need some true leadership to start moving apt/yum/rpm/deb folks toward one package standard, one consistent filesystem layout and directory structure if the goal is cross-distribution compatability... adding another layer of abstraction is akin to treating symptoms and not causes, if one is convinced this package compatability issue is a problem
Vegetable oil powered electric hybrids are actually Solar Powered (think about it.)
Right, and we're burning thru a stored form of this "vegetable oil" at a rate several thousands (if not millions) of times its production rate. This is exactly what oil is, millions of years of photosynthetic production locked under the earth, which we're burning thru at an alarming rate. Do the math (or just use common sense), there is no way even if we farmed every available acre of this planet we would be able to meet our demands via bio-diesel, vegetable oil, or whatever crazy farmable energy source researchers have cooked up. Thats not to say there isn't a lot of government pork being passed around to look into these issues...
Non-falsifiability means that it's useless from a scientific point of view.
I used to hold this view very near and dear until I read a little about Bayesian statistics (the same stuff that makes your spam filter work). The problem is (and this is also brought up in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence) is that there is an infinite number of potentially valid hypothesis if one simply operates from this falsifiability standpoint, and therefore objective scientific progress is impossible.
Instead, all reason (scientific or religious) involves a prior subjective probability, a "hunch" if you will, against whichs one checks the validity of a experiment. In other words, scientists ask P(u|x), that is, what is probability of the truth "u" given the observation "x" which one can easily show depends strongly on your initial prior belief in what "u" should be. As you observe more "x", you become better able to judge the probability of "u" being true. Fundamentalists have a prior probability distribution of 1 and therefore even in the Bayesian approach will never reject "u". They are simply a limiting case of the scientific method, and most science falls in somewhere in the spectrum on this sliding scale, but science is by no means objective.
Don't blame the FEC, these guys are following orders - this shows how silly the notion of campaign finance reform/regulation really is. Instead of having the desired effect (make the contest more fair, I suppose), you quickly find that people are clever enough to cheat the system. Sinclair's recent "news" documentary about Kerry (http://www.theiowachannel.com/politics/3803572/de tail.html) *and* Moorse's F911 both fall into this category, both sides are doing it. Either one is really just a long political advertisement.
Its just like a complicated tax code; people find, exploit and profit off of loopholes and an unneccessarily complicated system. Make the system simple (flat tax for example) and stupid things like this don't happen. Let the candidates take as much money from whoever they want and spend it in any way they please and you'll find these awful "side-effects" of dumb legislation go away. You can't tell people how to spend their money and suggesting that gagging political organizations (or in the Sinclair/Moorse cases passionate individuals) during some artifical timeframe before an election is appropriate is simply unacceptable.
Right... the patent office has basically stopped screening patents in an effort to reduce costs. I've had a patent lawyer explain this to me, basically the USPTO office got sick of paying for detailed review of the ever increasing number of patent submissions. The unwritten protocol now is that almost anything goes and the review process essentially occurs if/when the case goes to court. In other words they want the companies to pay for the cost of review in the form of lawyers -only- if the claims in the patent are contested. If no one is going to contest the patent, why spend money reviewing? Its a sort of innocent until proven guilty approach with respect to prior art. Just because a patent is granted nowadays does not mean the claims were valid, it basically means they followed procedure properly.
I have this capability on my Sony 717, the problem is the record times for the lossless compression, upto 10 seconds at the 5 megapixel level of detail. It makes taking action shots next to impossible (aquarium photography in my case). In order for this to become practical it needs three things: faster media, hardware accelerated compression, and stanardization. I have no idea how Sony/Memory Stick compares to Nikon's Raw or Cannon's format, but I assume the problem is still present, altho not as bad...
Jeff
I would like to stress the no on-the-go playlisting here... I recently (4 days ago) got a iHP-140 and have since switched over to a iPod for this reason. There is no ability to queue songs on the iRivers! This means you must develop playlists ahead of time on the computer -or- be happy with playing whole albums/genres. I thought this feature was such a no-brainer every mp3 player would have one...
The navigation was a little difficult to figure out and out of the box search by artist or song name doesn't work. You need to download iRivium or some 3rd party software they recommend. iRiver makes a really quality device (killer battery, good construction) but the firmware/documentation area is terrible! Its almost like they don't want to be number #1...
So I swithced to an iPod (not a Mac zealot) very happy altho I had to reformat my HD since windows was not installed on c:... If we could one get player that works...;)
Slashdot Mirror
We're getting a little off topic, but you can build the VNFS as a hybrid filesystem with "--hydrid --excludes-agressive=". This basically pulls all the non-essentials over NFS, we've been able to run X11 apps using warewulf with a 15-30MB ramdisk. If you have a half-decent setup you'll have different network adapters for NFS and MPI so the two don't step on each other's toes. As long as the program doesn't need to keep reloading libs (Gaussian for example is a pain for this reason), it works very well.
Also, if NFS solution isn't attractive you can add a few lines in rc.local to copy frequently used libs to a local partition on startup.
Cheers,
Jeff
Agreed. We've now deployed Centos 4.2 with Warewulf on three Beowulf clusters, two of which I directly administer. RedHat EL was unfortunately priced outside of our budget (we're in academia), yet some scientific software vendors only *offically* support the Redhat series. For this type of situation, CentOS fits the bill nicely, not to mention there exists good VNFS scripts for warewulf already. Its a valuable resource filling the hole that Redhat Linux left.
Jeff
Try Jim Lehrer's News Hour. It's usually a few lengthly segments with really good focus. These are also available online: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/ Jeff
Just wondering if you could provide some print references that document some of this, I'm very interested in reading more.
"A grave thermodynamic sin" I've even heard some say. For a published critique of hydrogen that supports parent's views, see "Demystifying the Hydrogen Myth", Dr. Reuel Shinnar, Chemical Engineering Progress, Nov 2004 pg 5.
I also agree with parent, diesel hybrids are the way to go in the near future. The Japanese are pouring money into research in this area and we're going to be left eating ours hats for chasing the hydrogen genie.
Jeff
Or better yet "Player Piano" which is the correct name of the book :)
What good is capitalism for workers when there's absolutely no scarcity of labor
Hmm, see Kurt Vonnegut's "Piano Player" for some interesting sci-fi, humor and insight here.
Please, make me a playlist on the fly with your iRiver. What's that, you need to make your playlists on the computer ahead of time? What kind of digital player can only play one song at a time? Oh yeah, in the next firmware. Whenever that happens. Try making sense of the manual. Don't speak Korean, oh you're SOL. I originally bought one of these, had trouble with the nagivation, found the frequency of firmware updates pathetic, and the inability to make playlists was crap. Right onto ebay it went. Don't get me wrong the hardware is really really nice but third party software with instructions barely in English to get tagging to work? Cmon! Unless they've come leaps in bounds in the last year I would not inflict this device on anyone.
Jeff
I actually emailed the EFF contact about the Tor issue, and was told that if one were to be held responsible for information passing thru your Tor client every anonymous proxy in the US would be shut down. We're not "common carriers" but you do need to draw the line somewhere... is your gateway responsible? ISP? School's proxy? All of those route your packets at various levels. The EFF obviously had their legal staff look into this before supporting Tor financially and decided its a non-issue, which actually surprised me.
Jeff
Thanks, you get the award for good economics, please ignore the flames from the others :) For those who think this is incorrect, benefits attributable to economies of scale (cleary the case for a utility, and especially cable if I understand correctly) may actually boost the supply of a good past what a competitive market may provide. When we're dealing with massive infrastructures, it makes sense to keep one provider. The dereg in the power industry uncoupled generation from transmission, power companies still have a monopoly over transmission. Duplicating power lines would be insane! A free market would certainly lower cost, but you must consider the increased marginal costs - this will usually work to reduce supply.
Sometimes a regulated monopoly makes more sense, without it rural American would have been passed over for telephone and electricity, just like they are being passed over for broadband right now. Grant them the monopoly but require them to service everywhere. This type of social contract between the public and a utility has worked well in the past.
So I lauch piratedoffice.exe which is cracked, the operating system then checks the signature on the
I'm having trouble working out the details of the "evilness" - it seems it needs to happen at the OS level. If that is not the case and this becomes adopted it will be a good day in FOSS land as every little programmer can't afford to auth with a code evaluation lab. It would remove a ton of freeware and shareware from the Win platform which seems counter MS's business interests. If they do do anything so stupid linux will take off like a rocket. Furthurmore, someone like RedHat can pay to have their key signed by whoever generates the public key on your board which means FOSS can even benefit here by building off this HW based web of trust. Remember when the FSF servers were comprised? Its not like isn't an issue.
Its also another issue if the publishing firm actually has a copyright on the original latex/word document, most times they will let you host this publically - they only enforce copyright with respect to the final typeset copy. Interested in an article? Email the corresponding author I'm sure you'll have no trouble getting a copy free of charge.
Unfortunately I can't see a good way to make things more transparent and invisible to the end user. Most folks don't pick good passwords, yet that is absolutely essential for PGP private key security. Also, a yearly drive reformat is not uncommon, so lost keys are a huge issue. This technology partially address that issue but I shouldn't need to check to see if someone updated there key every message, plus theres the trust issue with a constantly rotating keyset.
Jeff
http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/help/top-100-language s-by-population.html
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=S WA
Only about 5 million first language speakers, 30 million bilinguals, so its not even in the top 100.
http://www.lomborg.com/books.htm Or any of the following reviews or responses in Nature and Science?
http://www.lomborg.com/critique.htm
Oh right, those don't count because refuting environmental destruction claims isn't politically correct! Look, I don't agree with much of what Bjorn says, but the point is he compiled some statistics, came to some conclusions, and was then ostracized by the political machine for being "irresponsible" for advocating what a very liberal Euro nation dubbed "wreckless science". The critique of his science (that wasn't much of that) was second to the smear campaign leveled against him for being irresponsible. His work didn't "count" I guess in however cooked up his stupid statistic also.
This is the same thing John Stewart was talking about during his CNN Crossfire talk, we're so right or left now we can't have an honest debate about real issues, which we really need. No papers are published because its career death because a very liberal academia has decided anyone going against this trend is scum, without even looking at the science. Nature would not accept a paper from someone that claimed otherwise, but this is a debate we really need to have folks.
Jeff
Oh Cmon! The prime objective of tgreenhe Bush admin or oil companies is not "raping of the environment" or even preservation of the status quo. They want to make money! Show them how to do it in a way more consistent with your environmental views and convince them that the new laws and taxes will remain constant for at least a decade so they can get a return on their investiment and they'll come along. I can't stress how important that last point is, design changes in chemical plants costs billions and lots of time to implement, read about the MTBE debacle, convince them there is a return on investment.
The problem is no *viable* alternative to fossil fuels (under the current tax system!) exist yet and controvesial global warming reports != businesss incentive. Bottom line == business incentive, tax CO2 if you want to make alternative energy more viable. But please don't paint petro companies and Republicans as a bunch of morons who get some sort of personal satisfaction out of habitat destruction. Paint them as greedy, which is exactly what capitalism is all about, and then you'll understand how to change things.
Jeff
Banks whore your information around like theres no tomorrow, sure they keep it in the company but when Citibank owns the whole damn country everyone everywhere knows what you're doing, they get the info from parent companies. You have no control over who services your students loan, the company giving away my identify in this case was http://www.brazosgroup.com/, someone I have never heard of and certainly didn't authorized to service my loan. I would feel much more comfortable if Uncle Sam safeguarded this info and acted like a proxy to these shithead companies.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/1025 8228.htm?1c
Philadelphia has the second highest public transit cost in the US (San Diego is first I believe) but over $2 for bus fair is much more important to the working poor than wifi... lets provide basic services first, then worry about "useless" stuff like free wifi. Most households in West Philadelphia other than University City area don't have computers, most households in North Philadelphia don't have windows, and I don't mean the operating system. I can't believe our former mayor and state legilature really believes wifi is any kind of priority
Jeff
It's important that our tools support binary packages, because binary packages are widely used and widely in demand in the Linux community. If our tools don't support binary packages, then we can't claim that our tools are designed to allow a user to do anything he or she might want to do.
And so on... Now in general, I can't say I'm a fan of this meta-package project. Forking and creating another tool is easy, bringing folks together is very difficult. We need some true leadership to start moving apt/yum/rpm/deb folks toward one package standard, one consistent filesystem layout and directory structure if the goal is cross-distribution compatability... adding another layer of abstraction is akin to treating symptoms and not causes, if one is convinced this package compatability issue is a problem
. Jeff
Vegetable oil powered electric hybrids are actually Solar Powered (think about it.)
Right, and we're burning thru a stored form of this "vegetable oil" at a rate several thousands (if not millions) of times its production rate. This is exactly what oil is, millions of years of photosynthetic production locked under the earth, which we're burning thru at an alarming rate. Do the math (or just use common sense), there is no way even if we farmed every available acre of this planet we would be able to meet our demands via bio-diesel, vegetable oil, or whatever crazy farmable energy source researchers have cooked up. Thats not to say there isn't a lot of government pork being passed around to look into these issues...
Non-falsifiability means that it's useless from a scientific point of view.
I used to hold this view very near and dear until I read a little about Bayesian statistics (the same stuff that makes your spam filter work). The problem is (and this is also brought up in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence) is that there is an infinite number of potentially valid hypothesis if one simply operates from this falsifiability standpoint, and therefore objective scientific progress is impossible.
Instead, all reason (scientific or religious) involves a prior subjective probability, a "hunch" if you will, against whichs one checks the validity of a experiment. In other words, scientists ask P(u|x), that is, what is probability of the truth "u" given the observation "x" which one can easily show depends strongly on your initial prior belief in what "u" should be. As you observe more "x", you become better able to judge the probability of "u" being true. Fundamentalists have a prior probability distribution of 1 and therefore even in the Bayesian approach will never reject "u". They are simply a limiting case of the scientific method, and most science falls in somewhere in the spectrum on this sliding scale, but science is by no means objective.
Its just like a complicated tax code; people find, exploit and profit off of loopholes and an unneccessarily complicated system. Make the system simple (flat tax for example) and stupid things like this don't happen. Let the candidates take as much money from whoever they want and spend it in any way they please and you'll find these awful "side-effects" of dumb legislation go away. You can't tell people how to spend their money and suggesting that gagging political organizations (or in the Sinclair/Moorse cases passionate individuals) during some artifical timeframe before an election is appropriate is simply unacceptable.
Right... the patent office has basically stopped screening patents in an effort to reduce costs. I've had a patent lawyer explain this to me, basically the USPTO office got sick of paying for detailed review of the ever increasing number of patent submissions. The unwritten protocol now is that almost anything goes and the review process essentially occurs if/when the case goes to court. In other words they want the companies to pay for the cost of review in the form of lawyers -only- if the claims in the patent are contested. If no one is going to contest the patent, why spend money reviewing? Its a sort of innocent until proven guilty approach with respect to prior art. Just because a patent is granted nowadays does not mean the claims were valid, it basically means they followed procedure properly.
I have this capability on my Sony 717, the problem is the record times for the lossless compression, upto 10 seconds at the 5 megapixel level of detail. It makes taking action shots next to impossible (aquarium photography in my case). In order for this to become practical it needs three things: faster media, hardware accelerated compression, and stanardization. I have no idea how Sony/Memory Stick compares to Nikon's Raw or Cannon's format, but I assume the problem is still present, altho not as bad... Jeff
I would like to stress the no on-the-go playlisting here... I recently (4 days ago) got a iHP-140 and have since switched over to a iPod for this reason. There is no ability to queue songs on the iRivers! This means you must develop playlists ahead of time on the computer -or- be happy with playing whole albums/genres. I thought this feature was such a no-brainer every mp3 player would have one...
... If we could one get player that works... ;)
The navigation was a little difficult to figure out and out of the box search by artist or song name doesn't work. You need to download iRivium or some 3rd party software they recommend. iRiver makes a really quality device (killer battery, good construction) but the firmware/documentation area is terrible! Its almost like they don't want to be number #1...
So I swithced to an iPod (not a Mac zealot) very happy altho I had to reformat my HD since windows was not installed on c:
Jeff