Re:Yes but you can't lose it
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 1
This is the reason that I only buy celphones, etc, that use mini-USB terminals. I can charge my RAZR and my Garmin GPS from my laptop, and don't have to try to pack those annoyingly bulky chargers. For me, when I'm traveling a lot, that's worth real money.
Even so, I wouldn't get these batteries. But still, its a good theory.
One issue here is that you're comparing the overall pixel count rather than any kind of lines-per-inch measurement. Let's take, as an example, a 42" TV (because its one I happen to have handy). This is approximately 36" wide by 20.5" tall. Looking at those resolutions again:
480i: 852x240 - 23dpi x 9dpi 480p: 852x480 - 23dpi x 18dpi 720p: 1280x720 - 35dpi x 35dpi 1080i: 1920x540 - 53dpi x 26dpi 1080p: 1920x1080 - 53dpi x 52dpi
Notice something? At the two standard progressive resolutions, the horizontal and vertical pitches are almost identical. This makes for a very even watchable image. At 1080i you get great horizontal resolution, but the vertical resolution is by far the worst measurement of the lot. And in this, as in many things, its your weakest link that's going to affect the perceived image quality the most. At an even 53dpi (on this screen size), the picture is excellent at normal viewing distances.
A rule of thumb for viewing distance seems to be a minimum of 2000/dpi in inches. For 1080p (on a 47" screen), that gives us 38", or about 3 feet. At 720p you end up with 5 feet. At 1080i you have a more distressing (but still very reasonable) 6 1/2 feet. At 480p we're really limited to 9 feet or further to get a crisp image. That's all based on a reasonable guideline, and some quick experimentation seems to bear it out pretty well. Not that you can't watch closer, but at that point the scanlines become a lot more noticable. People with good vision will appreciate higher resolution, but shouldn't be "disappointed" as long as you've got those minimum distances.
Using megapixels is pretty bad, though. After all, you could have a screen that was 19,200 x 54. That would still be one megapixel, but I doubt that anyone would be happy with it. Consistent resolution is good. Smaller TVs will give you higher DPI, of course. Personally, my TV is between 7-8 feet away from most viewing positions, which is pretty good even with 1080i but slightly disappointing at 480p. YMMV depending on your vision, tolerance, and television size.
That's because 720p is more information-rich than 1080i. Your xBox is actually downconverting the signal in that case. Seriously. 1080i has the same information content that 540p has, and its smoother to boot, so its really no wonder that your TV shows a better image converting from 720p. 1080p should be just fine.
Not only that, but the image has to be in "Kernal Raw" format, which I'm guessing makes it ready to just stream out to the video card through whatever "standard" process is already in place at a lower-than-driver level.
When you get right down to it, if you send a text stream you're assuming that your video card is still working just as much as if you send a raw video signal. There's nothing magical about text except that for many years it was the lowest common denominator. These days, you need a certain driverless graphical ability to play - the lowest common denominator has increased - so there's no harm in taking advantage of that fact. Text was never magical in and of itself.
While I have a lot of problems with the whole half-hd-ness of these, one of your points seemed a little off:
And the players would have to be able to ask you which layer you want to view on a given side, the DVD layer(s) or HD-DVD layer(s).
If my DVD player can support HD content, even if only the crappy 15gb single layer option is available, I'd pick that over the 8gb non-HD DVD option. I can't actually think of anyone who, also having HD capable readers, would choose otherwise. This being/. I'm sure some clever dick can, but in the real world? Just play whatever's the best quality you can read. Problem solved.
And if they can make a case for pain and suffering (not too hard to see, since they may lose their marriages -- i agree that they're scumbags, but, just as it's not legal to kill all jerkface fuckers, being a scumbag doesn't automatically preclude you from protection under the law), then I hope he has to pony that up to.
So in that case he'd have to replace the marriage? Well, I guess he could find himself on the receiving end of those 178 dominant men. "Ponying up" indeed. Think of it like truth in advertising, only after the fact. Harsh punishment, but he did say that he wanted it, right? Isn't that pretty much the logic he's using anyway?
Why is it more embarrassing to send these emails to the general public than some completely random member of the general public?
Possibly because nobody actually just wrote up a sexually-explicit post and sent it to mailto:random(). They sent it to someone who, under false pretenses, was luring them into the open. Were they stupid? Sure. But there's a huge difference between responding to a request for information from an individual and broadcasting your response to the known world.
The weaknesses of paper have less to do with hacking as with other failures. In 2000 paper ballots caused all sorts of problems. Some marks were ambiguous. Ballot designs were confusing, and some people either checked the wrong boxes or missed some votes entirely. There's no way to have a "is this who you meant to vote for?" checksum step at the end.
So again, the real answer seems to be having a nice, easy to use electronic voting machine (with references to all referendums, lots of scrollable space for names, et cetera) that summarizes and confirms your choices for you. It then, upon your approval, prints out an unambiguous paper ballot. You then read the paper ballot (which is either OCRable or barcoded but either way can be trivially spot-checked by humans against the eventual electronic counting machine that reads it). After printing, the voting machine wipes its short-term memory and waits for the next valid vote code to be entered.
If you approve of what it says, you fold it up and place it into the ballot box. If you don't, for whatever reason, you can trade it in (shred it in front of the poll worker perhaps) and get another go on the machine. You leave without any kind of a paper trace following you, but leaving behind damn near uncontestable evidence of your political preferences. After the polls are closed, the boxes are opened and the paper ballots are fed into a scanner, which tabulates the votes. At will, any box may be hand-counted and the results compared to the electronic tallies: any significant variance is proof of tampering.
Simple, easy, relatively inexpensive, and above all understandable to the voting public. What's not to love?
And while it's true that Amazon's actions cannot be compared to the adware/spyware authors, they also have a "good name" to protect (remember all the flak Sony caught over that rootkit?) and so they could not afford to attempt that marketer's-wet-dream of greater intrusion and control. As a result, they must take more limited steps. In the same direction.
You know, I'm still not understanding how Amazon remembering what you previously looked at on their website and bringing it to the forefront -- just like it would be in a physical store if you'd rifled through thousands of products and dropped the one you were considering at the front of the rack -- is so heinous a crime as to have you up in arms. I guess that Mom & Pop shops that offer you "the usual," or ask if you want some batteries when you come in a day after buying Junior the electroSuck 2000 are Satan's spawn to you as well? Same concept with Amazon, they just do it electronically. And well.
Even worse. Let's say that you're in a district where your candidate is in the minority, but that's not the case overall. You can reasonably expect most of the votes on whatever machine you're given to vote on are for her opponent. Well, simply rip the tag! Worst case, nothing happens. Best case (for you, although not for the rest of us) all of the votes on that machine get tossed out.
Anyone with a few kick-ass gaming machines. Or an aftermarket turbo/intercooler for their honda. Or a fancy watch. Or any marquis car brand. Or a car stereo fetish. Or...
In other words, lots of people. The market was there, but they alienated it and then failed to capitalize upon it.
AdMuncher (the single best Windows ad-blocking program, for whatever browser, bar none (IMnsHO)) already provides this functionality out of the box. Any 'sploits are easily blocked, once they're identified, as are damn near all the ads. As a bonus, when people are doing things like not properly recognizing IE7's flash handling (and I'm looking at you, SWFObject), you can easily rewrite the fairly recognizable line of code in a standard library as it comes down the pipe and fix a whole ton of "broken" webpages.
"Correct"? Probably not. Convenient? Absolutely.
AM is one of the very few modern shareware programs I not only paid for, but paid early and promote often. And no, I'm not involved, just an incredibly happy customer (and boy do the Mac blockers have a long way to go in comparison).
This is actually a) very useful, b) very clever on Amazon's part, and c) not at all slimy. IMO at least. Kudos to their web developers for making a relatively simple (technically speaking) mod that dramatically increased their store value to most people... at least, if you ignore the ultraParanoid amongst us.
I have 2gb (maybe 2.5gb, I don't remember) in my Windows machine, and I just disabled the swap file. The only times I ever have issues is when I'm working a memory leak, and I'd have issues with that no matter how much swap space I used. RAM is cheap enough to make this a non-issue. Besides, it makes Eclipse feel really snappy not to keep having its plugins swapped out from under it.
Well, a lot of his early work (although not everything by any means) was aimed directly at the Boy Scouts, for publication in their magazine. And back then, they weren't out, so pretty much no sex scenes.
Re:Back-seat drivers: discipline
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 1
So why doesn't the US Military simply license the RIAA's catalog? I bet that the RIAA would even go for it as a publicity stunt at some fantastically low rate. Because, if they don't but they condone the situation, then what they're doing is nothing less than allowing the military to use the intellectual property of others, generally US citizens and corporations, without recompense. And that's a slippery slope, especially since that's the kind of "rule of law" that they're supposed to be fighting for.
And yes, those companies do have IP rights and copyright according to the US constitution, one of those quaint documents that the military is supposed to be in favor of. Argue that its not fair all you want -- I probably even agree with you -- its the law right now, damnit, and official US organizations should respect that, especially when the alternative is getting remarkably close to violating the spirit of the 3rd amendment. After all, if its okay for them to use IP without permission, isn't it our duty to give up our iPods to soldiers who don't have them?
Note: supplying soldiers with iPods and tunes is something that I'd actually be in favor of, if done legitimately. I'm not arguing, at all, that its useful, morale boosting, popular, or even that its anything other than inexpensive. But it needs to be done legally. That's what the USA is (used to be?) all about: the triumph of codified law over convenience for the mighty.
The "spirit of the GPL" is that if I own the hardware and the software, I should be able to modify the software as I wish, run the modified version on my hardware, and distribute the modified version.
Fine! Great! I agree! But you have two different components here, a hardware component and a software component. I see the value of releasing software designs (code) in a GPLd or "force open" format. And I think that only "purchasing" software (whether downloading, or bundled with hardware) that is GPLd is a valiant statement.
So why not create a comparable "Open Hardware" standard? If instead you say that anyone who wants to create hardware that works with GPL(3)d software will, by fiat, be creating "open hardware" then that's pretty heavy handed. The short-term effect will be for people to stick with currently available GPL(2) software for their devices or PCs. I completely and utterly support the notion of an OH standard and that people using it as a serious criteria in their HW evals are probably doing a Good Thing, both for themselves and their peers.
But why insist on the "bundling" with the GPL? After all, if you follow that logic, what's next... requiring all GPL hardware (ie: hardware that ships with GPL(3) software and has to comply with the GPL(3) spec thereon) to be available at a discounted or free cost to "good causes?" That's not quite a strawman argument, by the way, since we're already assuming to dictate how the hardware is built, how it runs, how the components are licensed, et cetera.
In the TiVo case, I do not have the freedom to run modified TiVo software for the purpose of controlling my TiVo.
Wah. You do have the freedom to run modified TiVo software on your own machine, don't you? You don't have the option to use it for the purpose of controlling your car, do you?
I'll tell you one thing... if this took off, you'd see the end of people using GPLd software in "loss leader" hardware.
After all, there's nothing stopping you from taking their software and modifying it then using it on your own, different, hardware. They never ever claimed that their hardware would be able to run arbitrary software, after all. And if you wanted to create a whateverWidget you'd be way ahead in that the software, at least, would already exist and be open, and you'd just have to reverse-engineer (or fresh design) some hardware to run it on.
Admittedly you could make the point that vendors of embedded hardware should allow you to run whatever you want on it, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the license that the software uses. After all, an open piece of hardware should run my app whether its closed-source, BSDd, GPLd, et cetera.
Bottom line: the hardware's failure to run any software other than the factory software doesn't in any way limit my use of the software. In fact, if the software is that great, I could purchase some other company's open hardware solution, get a copy of the great software (since its GPLd) from somewhere else, modify the great software to run on the open hardware, and be very happy. How is this not the true spirit of the GPL?
Yup. For that matter, I recently purchased a 42" LCD (Westinghouse LVM-42 or something similar) that does 1080p native, has a really impressive upscaler for those 420p programs that I still watch sometimes (and DVDs -- after buying the TV I'm actually seeing no reason to move to an upscaling DVD player, which surprised me greatly, since my last HDTV (from '01) didn't do a great job), is only a few inches thick and generally kicks ass. Oh, and it cost $1499 at best buy. I've never seen a CRT that looked this good, or one that hangs on the wall with our artwork, or one I really liked at this size for significantly under $1,500 (significantly enough that I might ignore the whole "style" aspect) for that matter.
According to the gizmodo coverage, one thing not missing (that I haven't seen anyone mention on here yet) is an FM Transmitter. Yup, not only can you listen to the radio, but you can transmit as well, all built-in. That's pretty significant in my opinion. Not only that, but it also has RDS support, which is something I haven't seen on any of the iPod ones (not that I've looked particularly hard). That way, you get your artist/track information right on your radio while you're in the car. Nice! That's the kind of useful innovation that I'm happy to see in this market.
Arranging the four buttons into the shape of a trackwheel, well, that's just stupid. At least, that's how it looks at this point.
But getting back to the transmitter. That's a great way of defeating, somewhat, the advantage that Apple has in that tons of manufacturers are putting iPod interfaces into their cars now. Tons. I guess I should say mitigating, not defeating, but anyway. Sure, the iPod interface will sound a lot better because its direct-connect, but they'll both sound the same with the windows open. And its been proven time and time again (sadly) that most people just don't care that much. Maybe most/. listeners would, but most consumers just want something that kinda works.
And hey, as a totally unrelated item, for people who like Apple/Windows hybrids, check out Swift, which is basically Safari on Windows. Airborne pigs can't be too far behind.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the reason that I only buy celphones, etc, that use mini-USB terminals. I can charge my RAZR and my Garmin GPS from my laptop, and don't have to try to pack those annoyingly bulky chargers. For me, when I'm traveling a lot, that's worth real money.
Even so, I wouldn't get these batteries. But still, its a good theory.
One issue here is that you're comparing the overall pixel count rather than any kind of lines-per-inch measurement. Let's take, as an example, a 42" TV (because its one I happen to have handy). This is approximately 36" wide by 20.5" tall. Looking at those resolutions again:
480i: 852x240 - 23dpi x 9dpi
480p: 852x480 - 23dpi x 18dpi
720p: 1280x720 - 35dpi x 35dpi
1080i: 1920x540 - 53dpi x 26dpi
1080p: 1920x1080 - 53dpi x 52dpi
Notice something? At the two standard progressive resolutions, the horizontal and vertical pitches are almost identical. This makes for a very even watchable image. At 1080i you get great horizontal resolution, but the vertical resolution is by far the worst measurement of the lot. And in this, as in many things, its your weakest link that's going to affect the perceived image quality the most. At an even 53dpi (on this screen size), the picture is excellent at normal viewing distances.
A rule of thumb for viewing distance seems to be a minimum of 2000/dpi in inches. For 1080p (on a 47" screen), that gives us 38", or about 3 feet. At 720p you end up with 5 feet. At 1080i you have a more distressing (but still very reasonable) 6 1/2 feet. At 480p we're really limited to 9 feet or further to get a crisp image. That's all based on a reasonable guideline, and some quick experimentation seems to bear it out pretty well. Not that you can't watch closer, but at that point the scanlines become a lot more noticable. People with good vision will appreciate higher resolution, but shouldn't be "disappointed" as long as you've got those minimum distances.
Using megapixels is pretty bad, though. After all, you could have a screen that was 19,200 x 54. That would still be one megapixel, but I doubt that anyone would be happy with it. Consistent resolution is good. Smaller TVs will give you higher DPI, of course. Personally, my TV is between 7-8 feet away from most viewing positions, which is pretty good even with 1080i but slightly disappointing at 480p. YMMV depending on your vision, tolerance, and television size.
That's because 720p is more information-rich than 1080i. Your xBox is actually downconverting the signal in that case. Seriously. 1080i has the same information content that 540p has, and its smoother to boot, so its really no wonder that your TV shows a better image converting from 720p. 1080p should be just fine.
I was going for Score 3: Funny. Guess I had an off day..
Not only that, but the image has to be in "Kernal Raw" format, which I'm guessing makes it ready to just stream out to the video card through whatever "standard" process is already in place at a lower-than-driver level.
When you get right down to it, if you send a text stream you're assuming that your video card is still working just as much as if you send a raw video signal. There's nothing magical about text except that for many years it was the lowest common denominator. These days, you need a certain driverless graphical ability to play - the lowest common denominator has increased - so there's no harm in taking advantage of that fact. Text was never magical in and of itself.
If my DVD player can support HD content, even if only the crappy 15gb single layer option is available, I'd pick that over the 8gb non-HD DVD option. I can't actually think of anyone who, also having HD capable readers, would choose otherwise. This being
LORT? The Lord of Ripened Tomatoes saga? That's so lame compared to Tolkein's original.
So in that case he'd have to replace the marriage? Well, I guess he could find himself on the receiving end of those 178 dominant men. "Ponying up" indeed. Think of it like truth in advertising, only after the fact. Harsh punishment, but he did say that he wanted it, right? Isn't that pretty much the logic he's using anyway?
Sure, although I'll pay extra for:
a) massively high quality
b) responsive support
c) easy access (client, browser integration)
Its all about what does the job and, well, I thought that other products did until I got AM. Not involved at all, just a satisfied customer.
Why is it more embarrassing to send these emails to the general public than some completely random member of the general public?
Possibly because nobody actually just wrote up a sexually-explicit post and sent it to mailto:random(). They sent it to someone who, under false pretenses, was luring them into the open. Were they stupid? Sure. But there's a huge difference between responding to a request for information from an individual and broadcasting your response to the known world.
The weaknesses of paper have less to do with hacking as with other failures. In 2000 paper ballots caused all sorts of problems. Some marks were ambiguous. Ballot designs were confusing, and some people either checked the wrong boxes or missed some votes entirely. There's no way to have a "is this who you meant to vote for?" checksum step at the end.
So again, the real answer seems to be having a nice, easy to use electronic voting machine (with references to all referendums, lots of scrollable space for names, et cetera) that summarizes and confirms your choices for you. It then, upon your approval, prints out an unambiguous paper ballot. You then read the paper ballot (which is either OCRable or barcoded but either way can be trivially spot-checked by humans against the eventual electronic counting machine that reads it). After printing, the voting machine wipes its short-term memory and waits for the next valid vote code to be entered.
If you approve of what it says, you fold it up and place it into the ballot box. If you don't, for whatever reason, you can trade it in (shred it in front of the poll worker perhaps) and get another go on the machine. You leave without any kind of a paper trace following you, but leaving behind damn near uncontestable evidence of your political preferences. After the polls are closed, the boxes are opened and the paper ballots are fed into a scanner, which tabulates the votes. At will, any box may be hand-counted and the results compared to the electronic tallies: any significant variance is proof of tampering.
Simple, easy, relatively inexpensive, and above all understandable to the voting public. What's not to love?
And while it's true that Amazon's actions cannot be compared to the adware/spyware authors, they also have a "good name" to protect (remember all the flak Sony caught over that rootkit?) and so they could not afford to attempt that marketer's-wet-dream of greater intrusion and control. As a result, they must take more limited steps. In the same direction.
You know, I'm still not understanding how Amazon remembering what you previously looked at on their website and bringing it to the forefront -- just like it would be in a physical store if you'd rifled through thousands of products and dropped the one you were considering at the front of the rack -- is so heinous a crime as to have you up in arms. I guess that Mom & Pop shops that offer you "the usual," or ask if you want some batteries when you come in a day after buying Junior the electroSuck 2000 are Satan's spawn to you as well? Same concept with Amazon, they just do it electronically. And well.
Even worse. Let's say that you're in a district where your candidate is in the minority, but that's not the case overall. You can reasonably expect most of the votes on whatever machine you're given to vote on are for her opponent. Well, simply rip the tag! Worst case, nothing happens. Best case (for you, although not for the rest of us) all of the votes on that machine get tossed out.
Anyone with a few kick-ass gaming machines. Or an aftermarket turbo/intercooler for their honda. Or a fancy watch. Or any marquis car brand. Or a car stereo fetish. Or...
In other words, lots of people. The market was there, but they alienated it and then failed to capitalize upon it.
AdMuncher (the single best Windows ad-blocking program, for whatever browser, bar none (IMnsHO)) already provides this functionality out of the box. Any 'sploits are easily blocked, once they're identified, as are damn near all the ads. As a bonus, when people are doing things like not properly recognizing IE7's flash handling (and I'm looking at you, SWFObject), you can easily rewrite the fairly recognizable line of code in a standard library as it comes down the pipe and fix a whole ton of "broken" webpages.
"Correct"? Probably not. Convenient? Absolutely.
AM is one of the very few modern shareware programs I not only paid for, but paid early and promote often. And no, I'm not involved, just an incredibly happy customer (and boy do the Mac blockers have a long way to go in comparison).
Hmm. Did it come with any kind of money back guarantee?
This is actually a) very useful, b) very clever on Amazon's part, and c) not at all slimy. IMO at least. Kudos to their web developers for making a relatively simple (technically speaking) mod that dramatically increased their store value to most people... at least, if you ignore the ultraParanoid amongst us.
I have 2gb (maybe 2.5gb, I don't remember) in my Windows machine, and I just disabled the swap file. The only times I ever have issues is when I'm working a memory leak, and I'd have issues with that no matter how much swap space I used. RAM is cheap enough to make this a non-issue. Besides, it makes Eclipse feel really snappy not to keep having its plugins swapped out from under it.
Well, a lot of his early work (although not everything by any means) was aimed directly at the Boy Scouts, for publication in their magazine. And back then, they weren't out, so pretty much no sex scenes.
So why doesn't the US Military simply license the RIAA's catalog? I bet that the RIAA would even go for it as a publicity stunt at some fantastically low rate. Because, if they don't but they condone the situation, then what they're doing is nothing less than allowing the military to use the intellectual property of others, generally US citizens and corporations, without recompense. And that's a slippery slope, especially since that's the kind of "rule of law" that they're supposed to be fighting for.
And yes, those companies do have IP rights and copyright according to the US constitution, one of those quaint documents that the military is supposed to be in favor of. Argue that its not fair all you want -- I probably even agree with you -- its the law right now, damnit, and official US organizations should respect that, especially when the alternative is getting remarkably close to violating the spirit of the 3rd amendment. After all, if its okay for them to use IP without permission, isn't it our duty to give up our iPods to soldiers who don't have them?
Note: supplying soldiers with iPods and tunes is something that I'd actually be in favor of, if done legitimately. I'm not arguing, at all, that its useful, morale boosting, popular, or even that its anything other than inexpensive. But it needs to be done legally. That's what the USA is (used to be?) all about: the triumph of codified law over convenience for the mighty.
The "spirit of the GPL" is that if I own the hardware and the software, I should be able to modify the software as I wish, run the modified version on my hardware, and distribute the modified version.
... requiring all GPL hardware (ie: hardware that ships with GPL(3) software and has to comply with the GPL(3) spec thereon) to be available at a discounted or free cost to "good causes?" That's not quite a strawman argument, by the way, since we're already assuming to dictate how the hardware is built, how it runs, how the components are licensed, et cetera.
Fine! Great! I agree! But you have two different components here, a hardware component and a software component. I see the value of releasing software designs (code) in a GPLd or "force open" format. And I think that only "purchasing" software (whether downloading, or bundled with hardware) that is GPLd is a valiant statement.
So why not create a comparable "Open Hardware" standard? If instead you say that anyone who wants to create hardware that works with GPL(3)d software will, by fiat, be creating "open hardware" then that's pretty heavy handed. The short-term effect will be for people to stick with currently available GPL(2) software for their devices or PCs. I completely and utterly support the notion of an OH standard and that people using it as a serious criteria in their HW evals are probably doing a Good Thing, both for themselves and their peers.
But why insist on the "bundling" with the GPL? After all, if you follow that logic, what's next
In the TiVo case, I do not have the freedom to run modified TiVo software for the purpose of controlling my TiVo.
Wah. You do have the freedom to run modified TiVo software on your own machine, don't you? You don't have the option to use it for the purpose of controlling your car, do you?
I'll tell you one thing... if this took off, you'd see the end of people using GPLd software in "loss leader" hardware.
Yup, just like IBM owned them when they came out with OS/2 Warp.
Er, wait a minute...
After all, there's nothing stopping you from taking their software and modifying it then using it on your own, different, hardware. They never ever claimed that their hardware would be able to run arbitrary software, after all. And if you wanted to create a whateverWidget you'd be way ahead in that the software, at least, would already exist and be open, and you'd just have to reverse-engineer (or fresh design) some hardware to run it on.
Admittedly you could make the point that vendors of embedded hardware should allow you to run whatever you want on it, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the license that the software uses. After all, an open piece of hardware should run my app whether its closed-source, BSDd, GPLd, et cetera.
Bottom line: the hardware's failure to run any software other than the factory software doesn't in any way limit my use of the software. In fact, if the software is that great, I could purchase some other company's open hardware solution, get a copy of the great software (since its GPLd) from somewhere else, modify the great software to run on the open hardware, and be very happy. How is this not the true spirit of the GPL?
Yup. For that matter, I recently purchased a 42" LCD (Westinghouse LVM-42 or something similar) that does 1080p native, has a really impressive upscaler for those 420p programs that I still watch sometimes (and DVDs -- after buying the TV I'm actually seeing no reason to move to an upscaling DVD player, which surprised me greatly, since my last HDTV (from '01) didn't do a great job), is only a few inches thick and generally kicks ass. Oh, and it cost $1499 at best buy. I've never seen a CRT that looked this good, or one that hangs on the wall with our artwork, or one I really liked at this size for significantly under $1,500 (significantly enough that I might ignore the whole "style" aspect) for that matter.
According to the gizmodo coverage, one thing not missing (that I haven't seen anyone mention on here yet) is an FM Transmitter. Yup, not only can you listen to the radio, but you can transmit as well, all built-in. That's pretty significant in my opinion. Not only that, but it also has RDS support, which is something I haven't seen on any of the iPod ones (not that I've looked particularly hard). That way, you get your artist/track information right on your radio while you're in the car. Nice! That's the kind of useful innovation that I'm happy to see in this market.
/. listeners would, but most consumers just want something that kinda works.
Arranging the four buttons into the shape of a trackwheel, well, that's just stupid. At least, that's how it looks at this point.
But getting back to the transmitter. That's a great way of defeating, somewhat, the advantage that Apple has in that tons of manufacturers are putting iPod interfaces into their cars now. Tons. I guess I should say mitigating, not defeating, but anyway. Sure, the iPod interface will sound a lot better because its direct-connect, but they'll both sound the same with the windows open. And its been proven time and time again (sadly) that most people just don't care that much. Maybe most
And hey, as a totally unrelated item, for people who like Apple/Windows hybrids, check out Swift, which is basically Safari on Windows. Airborne pigs can't be too far behind.