While there is insight in your post, "they are a stabilizing force in the region," is frankly laughable. They are the single most destabilizing force in the region, and perhaps in the world, and they have been for more than a generation. Saudi oil money has financed and promoted jihadi terrorism throughout the Arab world and the broader Muslim world. Regarding the rest of what you said, yes, and then some: from what I've read, Saudi oil can be extracted from the ground "profitably" at anything over about 8 dollars a barrel, but the country's national budget (including a ludicrously high and also ludicrously ineffective military budget) requires something like 100 dollar a barrel oil now. As you note, they are spending down their foreign reserves so fast that they will be gone in five years and the Saudis will be running a deficit. And then they are screwed.
Yeah, it had only been operating for three months in the surveyed period, and they'd only spent $1.7 million dollars, meaning about $21,000 per job. Not too bad, and it's only 2 percent of the program's projected budget, according to the second linked article. The Dice.com 'article' is ridiculous equivalent to hiring a coder, then the next morning issuing a performance evaluation saying "he's only written 12 lines of code!"
This is not really a purely online college, as the poster describes. It's an interesting mix between online and offline: all the students are supposed to live together; they do their classes on computers. The physical location can change annually too. The Atlantic had a better article about Minerva a couple of months ago, and it's not behind a paywall:
http://www.theatlantic.com/fea...
What's really interesting is the instant and continuous feedback from the professor described here as the Minerva method. It sounds like truly scientific learning, a much better technique than the big lecture hall format, with students zoning out half the time.
Every grammar school kid knows that the other gas giants also have (faint) ring systems. How did the submitter AND the Slashdot editor put such a ridiculous mistake on the front page of a nerd site? (Also this is kind of old news, widely reported last week).
Reading the Effing Article suggests that this was a more or less planned separation, even before the crash. They were doing a contracted design/build for Virgin, and were supposed to handoff the project after successful completion of these test flights; Virgin decided (for publicity reasons I suspect) to take nominal control now. Also, note that Scaled Composites is now an (autonomous) unit of Northrop, so the end of their direct partnership with Virgin isn't a very big deal for Rutan and his team.
Well, with Ted Cruz taking over the Senate Committee on Science and Space (!), we can expect less support for weather modeling supercomputers, I suppose. Since those are the computers those pesky climate change scientists run their simulations on.
Glad somebody pointed this out. The Forbes writer, and the Slashdot headline and introduction are extremely, and in the case of Forbes intentionally, misleading. Who knows, the numbers may well be true. But to say that "Actual Results were Leaked" is a crock of shit; this is just some Putin-sock-puppet human rights "council" *speculating* on what the true numbers might have been. Sort of funny that his own people are saying this, but not actually informative. Makes you more suspicious of Forbes than anything else.
It's interesting that the Boston Globe's article talks about astrophysics and chemistry PhDs as if that is still where all the smart people end up.
I would say that one of this country's biggest problems is that we 'track' so many of our best and brightest into the financial 'industry' where their mathematical and creative talents are frittered away coming up with better arbitraging formulas and the like. In other words, not doing anything useful at all, just figuring out ways to make the overall economy more unstable and susceptible to crashes. If all of the great minds who ended up on Wall Street over the past two generations had ended up in science careers, there would have been less market instability, and more scientific and industrial advancement.
On a side note, it's too bad (and somewhat depressingly predictable) that the 'debate' here largely turned into a boring malthusian/eugenics discussion.
I deleted my Whatsapp account from my phone and my wife's as soon as this news broke for this precise reason. I don't want Facebook having my telephone number, IMEI, router information, etc.
But you make the very good point that all of my 2 dozen or so Whatsapp contacts that have my phone number will be giving it to Facebook anyway. As we are all well aware, Facebook's backend is VERY good at identifying who you are through its analysis of social networks [viz. the 'People You May Know' feature], so they will likely be able to fill in phone numbers for basically all of their users using Whatsapp's database, even if those users do not actually have a Whatsapp account.
When I lived in Egypt some years ago, before the fall of Mubarak, I used to hang out with quite a few anti-regime activist types. They would organize pathetic little demonstrations, frequently via Facebook. And every once in a while, if they were organizing something that the regime really didn't want them to do (demonstrating at the Interior Ministry or something), the government would come in and efficiently round up everyone who had checked in or whatever via Facebook, before the demo got started. It was pretty clear that they had penetrated the online social networks pretty thoroughly, either with or without help from Menlo Park. I've had a very healthy skepticism of Facebook ever since.
It's funny how when we were kids (and for generations before), the bugbear was the all-encompassing government surveillance state. And it has arrived, but it crept in through the ethernet port, with our own little voluntary checkmarks next to the User Agreement. And it came through private companies like Facebook and Google.
The fact that Jan was on food stamps just a couple of years ago and now is worth something like 10 billion dollars on paper should say...something to all of the right wing assholes who hate on the poor for being shiftless losers, and who try to destroy the tiny little safety nets this country has left for people on the edge of starvation or homelessness.
Public key cryptography using open source tools that have been tested and retested by lots of other coders still works pretty well. The RSA backdoor you are referring to is certainly discouraging news. But on the other hand, the fact that RSA had backdoored itself was sort of understood by the community at large as far back as 2006, shortly after they issued the compromised tool. This week's news is merely confirmation. That's why PGP and its ilk, open source and made by activists, might be a better option than commercial tools by companies with a strict profit motive.
If you are really concerned about security, you might very well want to roll your own machine, and certainly should run a fresh, clean linux install off a CD every time you start up, to reduce the chances your machine is compromised.
anachragnome - that's a very interesting document. however to me it has the feel of someone speculating about how govt agents might take control of a forum, rather than a real instructional document. Any background info or further knowledge about it?
"Cultural immersion is the most effective way to learn a foreign tongue" because you are forced to communicate exclusively in the foreign tongue. It's a lot more practice in a lot more contexts 100 percent of the time, instead of just some casual class time that you barely pay attention to. It has nothing to do with this fairly irrelevant research about cues for your home culture causing temporary confusion.
Likewise immigrants who settle in ethnic enclaves don't learn the local language as fast for the very simple reason that they don't have to; they get most of their business done in their original language, and most of their social interactions are in their original language. Less practice, less forced use of the new language means slower learning.
I have experienced both alternatives; I have twice been put into complete immersion situations. Both times I learned the local language relatively fluently in about 4 to 6 months. And the one time that I lived in a sort of foreign enclave bubble for two to three years, despite working very hard at studying the local language, I never attained full fluency. It's just too easy to fall back on speaking English if it's there all around you.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it's not really a zero day 'sploit if it's internally known, the attack is internal penetration testing, and the exploit gets closed before it's known.
While there is probably some truth to the notion that Samsung took the best external design elements of the Ipad for the Tab, it's sort of ludicrous to ban their product because of it. The underlying principle of the law in the US as I understand it is that Samsung can't sell something that confuses buyers into thinking that they are actually buying an Ipad. I imagine that the basis of the German law is similar.
I am quite surprised that Apple actually won this case, and dare I say that I think Apple is probably surprised as well? I think that they do these design lawsuits mostly as pushback against competitors, kind of policing the boundaries, scaring the Samsungs and Sonys of the world from copying too much. I don't think they actually expect to win injunctions though.
The weak link on Slashdot is the writing. I opened this article link mainly because after reading Lantrix's summary twice, I could not understand for the life of me what had happened. Thank you, 26199 for giving a one-sentence summary which actually made sense, unlike slashdot's FPP. With only a couple of hundred new words per day on the front page, couldn't Slashdot hire an editor to rewrite the summaries to make them understandable?
I agree that the journalist is a fool for writing an article using a Wikipedia article as his source. I am a big fan of Wikipedia but it is this kind of thing which makes me think there must have been something seriously wrong with that study which said that wiki was as accurate as Britannica. I am betting their sample size was too small, and they just happened to miss the fairly high percentage of Wiki articles that contain wild inaccuracies; I notice them all the time in my particular field.
In addition to the journalistic world, I think Wiki research is becoming a problem in academia as well: first-and-second-year students doing their 'research' by reading and recycling wikipedia articles on the topic, and little else. The Britannica was probably used for 'research' like this back in the day, but it had a much smaller range of articles, whereas Wiki has articles on practically everything, making bad-faith research efforts by younger students proportionally easier.
Finally, for those who suggest this isn't a 'big deal', think about what this says about the new and supposedly accuracy-enhancing Wikipedia footnoting fetish. I've thought about this myself with Wiki articles I have worked on. It so happens that a good number of my edits have drawn on out-of-print and banned books published in Arabic by obscure publishing houses in Egypt. I have duly footnoted passages and quotes, but how many Wiki readers are ever going to be able to check on my sources? By citing these sources (and there really were no other options), I have in some sense armored my edits against any challenges, since I am footnoting, but with things that can't really be checked.
Hard to believe, but they were taken offline by court order in the United States. A corrupt Swiss Bank, Julius Baer, objected to wikileaks posting documents showing malfeasance on the part of the bank, so this crazy judge, Jeffrey White, who really doesn't understand the First Amendment (and was nominated to the Federal bench by Bush of course), ordered the site to be taken offline.
Here's a BBC link describing what happened.
And another one from Counterpunch.
Right, so this mathematician's idea is to bring us closer to one-man-one-vote by taking away even more congressional representation from the 'big states' (like California, where one senator equals around fifteen million citizens) and giving more to small states (like Montana where one senator equals around a quarter of a million citizens) by increasing their numbers in the house of representatives too. Sheer genius.
yeah I was wondering the other day if there's a potential market for sub-10k slashdot ID's on ebay. I could sell mine to some young whippersnapper who wants to prove something. But I figured you only get real geek cred if its in 3 digits...
Sometimes I wonder if the editors even read the stuff they pick for the front page. This is one of the most empirically worthless slashdot stories I've seen in a while though.
This "story," submitted by an "anonymous reader" (ie the author of the review), was a complete waste of time. It's nothing but a collection of PR gibberish copied from the product pages of the players being reviewed. There is nothing of any interest in ANY of the blurbs, no evidence that the author has even seen the players he's "reviewing," and to top it all off, no links to the products he's "reviewing." (I googled one of the players he "reviewed" and got a bunch of garbage on the first page.
I don't mean to insult Michael here, but I think he probably picked this one based on the headline (the writeup is better than the "story" linked to, and not supported by the story.)
Obviously, people are indeed hoping to take some marketshare from Apple, but (1)none of the players reviewed in this story are going to take it (they're all obscure 2-bit companies which will be lucky to move 10k units.) and (2) Others (http://cnet.com/, http://wired.com/, and (don't laugh) even NYT's Circuits do a better job of reviewing gadgets). My advice though: just do a search for MP3 Player on http://engadget.com/ and http://gizmodo.com/.
I am not trolling here. Please read the story yourself before moderating me.
when the AUTHOR of the paper makes a comment
on
Flying By Brain
·
· Score: 1
...Slashdot's loser moderators don't even notice. This is the essence of a relevant post, people!
The LA Times did an excellent series on Walmart's negative effects on US manufacturers, overseas suppliers, its own workers, and the US economy last year. It was sparked by the impending entry of Walmart into the Southern California grocery market. Which also indirectly caused the painful, drawn out strike by workers at other grocery chains there.
It starts, oddly, with a jar of pickles. And talks about how getting a distribution deal with Walmart eventually undermines and nearly destroys the Vlasic pickle company, due to savage cost cuts forced by Walmart, and undermining of the company's brand-image as they moved to selling big, cheap jars of pickles.
Along the way, the article shows how Walmart forces US manufacturers to move overseas, and even advises them on how to do it.
ZMcNulty or Holly Gates, or anyone who's actually gotten to play with one of these things for a minute:
I'm curious (and I'm sure a lot of people on slashdot are): how long does it take the book to refresh the screen when you turn the page?
This seems important for two reasons: if it's really slow, like to the point of being a visible lag time, it would be sort of annoying to read a book on it. I used to read ebooks on my PDA, and there were lots of annoying things about that (tft screens suck in bright light, the batteries die really quickly, the screen size is so small you have to flip the page every paragraph, etc). But the biggest annoyance was that it would sometimes take a whole second or two for the PDA to flip the page.
The other reason is that if the refresh rate of the EInk is fast enough, you could presumably run animations on them. Which would be a pretty cool application. Although 10k screens at 25fps yields only about 6.6 minutes of animation, so they'd have to work on the battery life.
Also, does anyone know what kind of processor and OS this thing is based on? Sony uses PalmOS for their PDAs; although PalmOS would be overkill for a simple device like this, I wonder if they bothered to build a whole new one.
Slashdot Mirror
While there is insight in your post, "they are a stabilizing force in the region," is frankly laughable. They are the single most destabilizing force in the region, and perhaps in the world, and they have been for more than a generation. Saudi oil money has financed and promoted jihadi terrorism throughout the Arab world and the broader Muslim world. Regarding the rest of what you said, yes, and then some: from what I've read, Saudi oil can be extracted from the ground "profitably" at anything over about 8 dollars a barrel, but the country's national budget (including a ludicrously high and also ludicrously ineffective military budget) requires something like 100 dollar a barrel oil now. As you note, they are spending down their foreign reserves so fast that they will be gone in five years and the Saudis will be running a deficit. And then they are screwed.
Yeah, it had only been operating for three months in the surveyed period, and they'd only spent $1.7 million dollars, meaning about $21,000 per job. Not too bad, and it's only 2 percent of the program's projected budget, according to the second linked article. The Dice.com 'article' is ridiculous equivalent to hiring a coder, then the next morning issuing a performance evaluation saying "he's only written 12 lines of code!"
This is not really a purely online college, as the poster describes. It's an interesting mix between online and offline: all the students are supposed to live together; they do their classes on computers. The physical location can change annually too. The Atlantic had a better article about Minerva a couple of months ago, and it's not behind a paywall: http://www.theatlantic.com/fea... What's really interesting is the instant and continuous feedback from the professor described here as the Minerva method. It sounds like truly scientific learning, a much better technique than the big lecture hall format, with students zoning out half the time.
Every grammar school kid knows that the other gas giants also have (faint) ring systems. How did the submitter AND the Slashdot editor put such a ridiculous mistake on the front page of a nerd site? (Also this is kind of old news, widely reported last week).
Reading the Effing Article suggests that this was a more or less planned separation, even before the crash. They were doing a contracted design/build for Virgin, and were supposed to handoff the project after successful completion of these test flights; Virgin decided (for publicity reasons I suspect) to take nominal control now. Also, note that Scaled Composites is now an (autonomous) unit of Northrop, so the end of their direct partnership with Virgin isn't a very big deal for Rutan and his team.
Well, with Ted Cruz taking over the Senate Committee on Science and Space (!), we can expect less support for weather modeling supercomputers, I suppose. Since those are the computers those pesky climate change scientists run their simulations on.
Glad somebody pointed this out. The Forbes writer, and the Slashdot headline and introduction are extremely, and in the case of Forbes intentionally, misleading. Who knows, the numbers may well be true. But to say that "Actual Results were Leaked" is a crock of shit; this is just some Putin-sock-puppet human rights "council" *speculating* on what the true numbers might have been. Sort of funny that his own people are saying this, but not actually informative. Makes you more suspicious of Forbes than anything else.
It's interesting that the Boston Globe's article talks about astrophysics and chemistry PhDs as if that is still where all the smart people end up.
I would say that one of this country's biggest problems is that we 'track' so many of our best and brightest into the financial 'industry' where their mathematical and creative talents are frittered away coming up with better arbitraging formulas and the like. In other words, not doing anything useful at all, just figuring out ways to make the overall economy more unstable and susceptible to crashes. If all of the great minds who ended up on Wall Street over the past two generations had ended up in science careers, there would have been less market instability, and more scientific and industrial advancement.
On a side note, it's too bad (and somewhat depressingly predictable) that the 'debate' here largely turned into a boring malthusian/eugenics discussion.
I deleted my Whatsapp account from my phone and my wife's as soon as this news broke for this precise reason. I don't want Facebook having my telephone number, IMEI, router information, etc.
But you make the very good point that all of my 2 dozen or so Whatsapp contacts that have my phone number will be giving it to Facebook anyway. As we are all well aware, Facebook's backend is VERY good at identifying who you are through its analysis of social networks [viz. the 'People You May Know' feature], so they will likely be able to fill in phone numbers for basically all of their users using Whatsapp's database, even if those users do not actually have a Whatsapp account.
When I lived in Egypt some years ago, before the fall of Mubarak, I used to hang out with quite a few anti-regime activist types. They would organize pathetic little demonstrations, frequently via Facebook. And every once in a while, if they were organizing something that the regime really didn't want them to do (demonstrating at the Interior Ministry or something), the government would come in and efficiently round up everyone who had checked in or whatever via Facebook, before the demo got started. It was pretty clear that they had penetrated the online social networks pretty thoroughly, either with or without help from Menlo Park. I've had a very healthy skepticism of Facebook ever since.
It's funny how when we were kids (and for generations before), the bugbear was the all-encompassing government surveillance state. And it has arrived, but it crept in through the ethernet port, with our own little voluntary checkmarks next to the User Agreement. And it came through private companies like Facebook and Google.
The ship has sailed.
As you say, cue the fawning Forbes ''analysis.''
The fact that Jan was on food stamps just a couple of years ago and now is worth something like 10 billion dollars on paper should say...something to all of the right wing assholes who hate on the poor for being shiftless losers, and who try to destroy the tiny little safety nets this country has left for people on the edge of starvation or homelessness.
Public key cryptography using open source tools that have been tested and retested by lots of other coders still works pretty well. The RSA backdoor you are referring to is certainly discouraging news. But on the other hand, the fact that RSA had backdoored itself was sort of understood by the community at large as far back as 2006, shortly after they issued the compromised tool. This week's news is merely confirmation. That's why PGP and its ilk, open source and made by activists, might be a better option than commercial tools by companies with a strict profit motive.
If you are really concerned about security, you might very well want to roll your own machine, and certainly should run a fresh, clean linux install off a CD every time you start up, to reduce the chances your machine is compromised.
anachragnome - that's a very interesting document. however to me it has the feel of someone speculating about how govt agents might take control of a forum, rather than a real instructional document. Any background info or further knowledge about it?
"Cultural immersion is the most effective way to learn a foreign tongue" because you are forced to communicate exclusively in the foreign tongue. It's a lot more practice in a lot more contexts 100 percent of the time, instead of just some casual class time that you barely pay attention to. It has nothing to do with this fairly irrelevant research about cues for your home culture causing temporary confusion.
Likewise immigrants who settle in ethnic enclaves don't learn the local language as fast for the very simple reason that they don't have to; they get most of their business done in their original language, and most of their social interactions are in their original language. Less practice, less forced use of the new language means slower learning.
I have experienced both alternatives; I have twice been put into complete immersion situations. Both times I learned the local language relatively fluently in about 4 to 6 months. And the one time that I lived in a sort of foreign enclave bubble for two to three years, despite working very hard at studying the local language, I never attained full fluency. It's just too easy to fall back on speaking English if it's there all around you.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it's not really a zero day 'sploit if it's internally known, the attack is internal penetration testing, and the exploit gets closed before it's known.
While there is probably some truth to the notion that Samsung took the best external design elements of the Ipad for the Tab, it's sort of ludicrous to ban their product because of it. The underlying principle of the law in the US as I understand it is that Samsung can't sell something that confuses buyers into thinking that they are actually buying an Ipad. I imagine that the basis of the German law is similar.
I am quite surprised that Apple actually won this case, and dare I say that I think Apple is probably surprised as well? I think that they do these design lawsuits mostly as pushback against competitors, kind of policing the boundaries, scaring the Samsungs and Sonys of the world from copying too much. I don't think they actually expect to win injunctions though.
The weak link on Slashdot is the writing. I opened this article link mainly because after reading Lantrix's summary twice, I could not understand for the life of me what had happened. Thank you, 26199 for giving a one-sentence summary which actually made sense, unlike slashdot's FPP. With only a couple of hundred new words per day on the front page, couldn't Slashdot hire an editor to rewrite the summaries to make them understandable?
I agree that the journalist is a fool for writing an article using a Wikipedia article as his source. I am a big fan of Wikipedia but it is this kind of thing which makes me think there must have been something seriously wrong with that study which said that wiki was as accurate as Britannica. I am betting their sample size was too small, and they just happened to miss the fairly high percentage of Wiki articles that contain wild inaccuracies; I notice them all the time in my particular field.
In addition to the journalistic world, I think Wiki research is becoming a problem in academia as well: first-and-second-year students doing their 'research' by reading and recycling wikipedia articles on the topic, and little else. The Britannica was probably used for 'research' like this back in the day, but it had a much smaller range of articles, whereas Wiki has articles on practically everything, making bad-faith research efforts by younger students proportionally easier.
Finally, for those who suggest this isn't a 'big deal', think about what this says about the new and supposedly accuracy-enhancing Wikipedia footnoting fetish. I've thought about this myself with Wiki articles I have worked on. It so happens that a good number of my edits have drawn on out-of-print and banned books published in Arabic by obscure publishing houses in Egypt. I have duly footnoted passages and quotes, but how many Wiki readers are ever going to be able to check on my sources? By citing these sources (and there really were no other options), I have in some sense armored my edits against any challenges, since I am footnoting, but with things that can't really be checked.
Hard to believe, but they were taken offline by court order in the United States. A corrupt Swiss Bank, Julius Baer, objected to wikileaks posting documents showing malfeasance on the part of the bank, so this crazy judge, Jeffrey White, who really doesn't understand the First Amendment (and was nominated to the Federal bench by Bush of course), ordered the site to be taken offline. Here's a BBC link describing what happened. And another one from Counterpunch.
Right, so this mathematician's idea is to bring us closer to one-man-one-vote by taking away even more congressional representation from the 'big states' (like California, where one senator equals around fifteen million citizens) and giving more to small states (like Montana where one senator equals around a quarter of a million citizens) by increasing their numbers in the house of representatives too. Sheer genius.
yeah I was wondering the other day if there's a potential market for sub-10k slashdot ID's on ebay. I could sell mine to some young whippersnapper who wants to prove something. But I figured you only get real geek cred if its in 3 digits...
I take it from your nick you're a Jack from Alaska, like me. I grew up on Kodiak. Nice to find another one on Slashdot.
...err..other than Aiwa and Sony (which are the same company, I mean...
Sometimes I wonder if the editors even read the stuff they pick for the front page. This is one of the most empirically worthless slashdot stories I've seen in a while though.
This "story," submitted by an "anonymous reader" (ie the author of the review), was a complete waste of time. It's nothing but a collection of PR gibberish copied from the product pages of the players being reviewed. There is nothing of any interest in ANY of the blurbs, no evidence that the author has even seen the players he's "reviewing," and to top it all off, no links to the products he's "reviewing." (I googled one of the players he "reviewed" and got a bunch of garbage on the first page.
I don't mean to insult Michael here, but I think he probably picked this one based on the headline (the writeup is better than the "story" linked to, and not supported by the story.)
Obviously, people are indeed hoping to take some marketshare from Apple, but
(1)none of the players reviewed in this story are going to take it (they're all obscure 2-bit companies which will be lucky to move 10k units.) and
(2) Others (http://cnet.com/, http://wired.com/, and (don't laugh) even NYT's Circuits do a better job of reviewing gadgets). My advice though: just do a search for MP3 Player on http://engadget.com/ and http://gizmodo.com/.
I am not trolling here. Please read the story yourself before moderating me.
...Slashdot's loser moderators don't even notice. This is the essence of a relevant post, people!
The LA Times did an excellent series on Walmart's
negative effects on US manufacturers, overseas suppliers, its own workers, and the US economy last year. It was sparked by the impending entry of Walmart into the Southern California grocery market. Which also indirectly caused the painful, drawn out strike by workers at other grocery chains there.
But my favorite story on Walmart I've read so far (other than the lady who was nearly killed last year in the scramble for a cheap dvd player) is Fast Company's analysis of the company's effect on US manfacturers.
It starts, oddly, with a jar of pickles. And talks about how getting a distribution deal with Walmart eventually undermines and nearly destroys the Vlasic pickle company, due to savage cost cuts forced by Walmart, and undermining of the company's brand-image as they moved to selling big, cheap jars of pickles.
Along the way, the article shows how Walmart forces US manufacturers to move overseas, and even advises them on how to do it.
ZMcNulty or Holly Gates, or anyone who's actually gotten to play with one of these things for a minute:
I'm curious (and I'm sure a lot of people on slashdot are): how long does it take the book to refresh the screen when you turn the page?
This seems important for two reasons: if it's really slow, like to the point of being a visible lag time, it would be sort of annoying to read a book on it. I used to read ebooks on my PDA, and there were lots of annoying things about that (tft screens suck in bright light, the batteries die really quickly, the screen size is so small you have to flip the page every paragraph, etc). But the biggest annoyance was that it would sometimes take a whole second or two for the PDA to flip the page.
The other reason is that if the refresh rate of the EInk is fast enough, you could presumably run animations on them. Which would be a pretty cool application. Although 10k screens at 25fps yields only about 6.6 minutes of animation, so they'd have to work on the battery life.
Also, does anyone know what kind of processor and OS this thing is based on? Sony uses PalmOS for their PDAs; although PalmOS would be overkill for a simple device like this, I wonder if they bothered to build a whole new one.