Zens have always been larger than iPods, but the Xtra is the smallest yet, coming in at 11.3 x 7.6 x 2.2cm and weighing 224g. The 40GB iPod is a lighter 176g and a more compact 10.4 x 6.1 x 1.9cm
The Zen is more for geeks who like to count and compare features, and the iPod is more for people who don't like to have full pockets or purses. No offence, this is just an observation.
I mean no disrespect and I don't wish to underestimate your achievements. Most people in this forum will have a similarly biased view because it's unusual to be poor and illiterate while posting on Slashdot, so we are not likely to see someone post here and say "well I'm poor and I can't get ahead even though I work 80h weeks". It doesn't mean that these people don't exist. How many of your childhood friends made it the same way you did?
Like you said your family helped you, there are lots of people with dysfunctional families. There is a lot of crime, especially violent crimes, in the US compared with most western democracies and there are certainly a lot more people in prison than almost anywhere else except China. Why is that?
To answer one of your question I used to live in the US. Maybe things have changed so dramatically since 1992 but then there were already incredible contrasts between neighborhoods. One street would be all prim and neat and the next would be full of run down houses. Maybe the parent post would like us to believe that now all the run down houses have become prim and neat while the prim and neat now have indoor swimming pools, but somehow I doubt this is the case.
To answer your next question my family was sufficiently non-rich that my parent never paid any income tax, but I wouldn't call it poor and like yours it was pretty supportive. Like you they never paid for my education and I worked my way to college etc, then went to the US for a while and now Australia. My sisters managed to get various scholarships and did quite well. Most of my childhood friends have not moved on much from where their parents were. Yet I don't think they are lazy bastards. I just don't believe in meritocracy so much because it assumes that everyone is given the same chance in life which is simply not true.
I'm still of the opinion that a widening gap is not a sign of a healthy society. Gaps are widening everywhere in the Western world. There is more money around for sure but it's not moving around evenly. How can that not be a recipe for envy and frustration?
is like with everything: 90% of it is crap. People who download shareware often find they end up using a piece of crap that halfway solves their problem, and they are unwilling to spend $25 on something which is not well written and probably not well supported, so they go online to find a pirated key and use the software anyway.
The pizza and cinema analogy are completely flawed. Pizza is a recurring purchase and so if it is crap you don't buy it anymore, and as for movies there is a lot of choice for essentially the same product (2h of entertainment). A lot of it is indeed crap but you only get angry with yourself for choosing a film you didn't like.
Then people get used to not paying for shareware, they don't pay either for the 10% of shareware which is not crap. While they are looking for a key to the crap shareware they may stumble on a key for something else actually useful and someone doesn't get their fair price for the effort they put in the software.
The problem is completely different with open-source. Still 90% of it is crap but it tends to either drop out entirely due to its inherent crapness or gets improved because the developer that sees it may be inspired by it and at least has the source of the crap stuff to get started and sometimes it does help.
For example I remember learning to touch-type on an application for NeXTStep all these years ago (you know the kind, letters dropping out from te top, etc) that was absolute crap. It was slow and leaked all over the place. If it had been shareware I would still have used it for the two weeks it took me to learn the skill (restarting and swearing at the incompetent developer all the time and definitely not paying for it) but it was in fact a free and open-source application. I debugged it and made it fast and non-leaky in about 3h of work, submitted the changes to the original authors and then I was really happy.
People do really get angry at shareware, when they pay the price, it doesn't work as expected, it wastes their time and they can't return the product.
To me shareware is a doomed concept and I don't have a solution for all these clever people who write good software and would like to be paid for their efforts.
You go tell that to someone in a trailer park near Saint Louis or Detroit, then if you live you can come back and tell us the tale of how it went.
The gap does matter, because when a significant proportion of the population becomes richer and the rest doesn't or not as much, large items such as houses, access to private health care, private education and even cars become a lot more expensive and you have the making of deprived neighborhoods where everyone is a tenant in a shabby house, and then crime flourishes.
In the US there is a lot of crime, a lot of drugs, a lot of people under a federally declared line of poverty who live a short and dangerous life that a Roman Emperor certainly wouldn't have chosen for himself.
This is also true of most countries in the west. In Australia where I live Aboriginal people on average live 20 years less than non-aboriginal, even in the middle of Sydney. A lot of it is due to poor sanitation, lack of education and general poverty.
There are poor people in the US and elsewhere who are not given a fair deal in life because they happen to have been born in a poor neighborhood and I can tell you that it does in fact suck.
I'm pretty damn certain you wouldn't want to take their place next to the beautiful cell phone they have so please stop patronizing, you are insulting a lot of people.
I may be wrong but these sort of "I can upgrade later" argument don't really work anymore. An entirely new PC without the monitor is worth what? US$800 at present? In two years time you'll find that populating your currently new shiny with significantly upgraded components will be more expensive and less worthwhile than buying a new system entirely.
Very likely the PCI-express component you'll want to buy in 2 years time will not be compatible with your present motherboard, neither will the memory or the CPUs. This is the first iteration of PCI-express, expect major changes coming.
Just look at the AGP 2x vs. 4x example. Same name, different voltages, incompatible.
I just bought an AMD64 system for a very low price. I don't even plan to reuse the case when I upgrade this machine. I do plan to use this machine as a secondary system until it dies. All I plan to do is double the memory in it in a year's time or so when memory prices have fallen a bit.
Not quite. If *you* publish something then in the US *you* still have one year to patent it. Someone else can't. In most of the rest of the world if you publish then even you can't patent.
OK, very good, this is precisely my point. XP is not recent enough that you can build a PC with it as an O/S without a floppy drive. With Linux there is no problem whatsoever. The installer finds the SATA drive and puts the O/S on it, end of story.
If you are really plucky you *can* install XP on SATA drives without a floppy drive but it's a rough ride, not at all a point-and-click thing.
FYI, the PC in question was a SFF without space for a floppy drive or even a power connector for them. Moreover it has only room for one HDD.
To install XP on this beast I had to jury-rig a FDD through the open case. Fortunately the motherboard has a FDD controller, and it is possible to find molex-to-floppy power cable converters, so I was home and dry.
OK, have you tried to install Windows XP on a computer with only SATA drives and no floppy?
XP doesn't have any SATA drivers, and the only way Microsoft has seen fit to present extra drivers to the normal install is through a floppy drive. Nothing else works. Another CD? nope. A USB key drive? sorry.
The only way around this that I've found is to "slipstream" the drivers into the normal install on CD. This involves a complicated process of ripping the content of the original XP install CD, hacking into various files, modifying the directory structure and rebuilding another bootable CD-rom from the result.
It cannot be done unless you have access to another computer with a CD burner and the right software (that can produce a bootable CD), and if your version of the XP medium is provided by a third party vendor like DELL or IBM, chances are even this process won't work.
In other words it makes installing Debian on the same machine a walk in the park in comparison.
Search google for "slipstream SATA drivers XP" if you want to know the gory details.
With all due respect, you should get out of your cosy, well known environment and take a trip to Beijing. You'll see the same kind of yuppies there as in America. 15 years ago everyone was riding a bicycle but now they commute in cars and taxis. China is sending people into space, and they are building more modern nuclear plants than anywhere in the US.
Even if we are talking about products that affect the top 1% earners in China this still represents well over 10 million people who can easily spend $1000 a year on such products, and therefore as a community tens of billions of dollars. Not only that but China is growing very fast and is quite urbanised.
Not only is it feasible to develop "something that works for China" but if you are a large multinational company and you ignore the Chinese market, then you are making an enormous mistake.
What would Linux be used for? desktop or server room? Debian makes more sense for the latter (stability, consistency and good response time to security issues) than for the former (unease of install, antiquated desktop on Debian Stable, lots of work needed to maintain essentially your own desktop-ready distribution, obvious support issues with IBM, look on the management people face when you tell them your wonderful distro is based on "Debian Unstable", etc).
Maybe you can make the pill easier to swallow if you go to a more commercial version of Linux first, e.g. SuSE or RedHat? This way you only have to clear the first hurdle of making Linux acceptable in your company. It will still come with support contracts, releases, and other things management can cope with. Not to mention that these distros and others have to some extent caught up with Debian, using apt themselves or yum.
If your setup is Linux for the desktop, how much experience do you have with managing more than a handfull of machines and a couple of users under Debian Linux ? Debian currently makes a fine meta-distribution but don't make the mistake of assuming it will be as easy to maintain as your own machine. You'll have to cope with more user demands than just your own and a wider array of hardware.
Let me see if I get this right: if it takes more than 18 months to upgrade n-qbit computers into (n+1)-qbit computers and if Moore's law holds, then we'll have a way of factoring 128-bit numbers faster via the conventional route quicker than via QC?
Yes, start hanging on these party balloons, they'll be worth a fortune in 50 year's time.
Hopefully in 50 year's time we can go and mine Helium on the Moon, where it was deposited by Solar wind, or we can produce it in nuclear fusion reactors.
Re:Have it do something worthwhile
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
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· Score: 1
The PDAs are perfect for jotting down little notes. I have hundreds of them. For me doing that on most cellphone with thumb input is torture.
Title of that album you loved, ISBN number of that book, directions, shopping lists, URLs you read about at the newsagent, etc. Things that are too long to remember faithfully but short enough that it takes no time to write down with a stylus.
It's also perfect for train/bus timetables, reading a short novel, etc.
None of the existing competing HD mp3 players is as small as the iPod (not even talking about the iPod mini), or at least I haven't seen one. Wherever I go to look at mp3 players it's either underpowered solid-state players, big chunky heavy players or the iPod.
Small and light is really really important (to fit in pocket and not be bothered by it) and people understand why they need to pay a premium for the size. Besides the iPod's design is usable, nice and simple but that's extra.
To me the brand is nothing. I don't care who does what as long as it is well done. Just do a side by side comparison in the real world and you'll have your answer why the iPod is so popular.
The question I'm always asking myself is: is creating an (n+1) qbit computer twice as hard (or harder) than creating a n qbit computer? If so really this QC approach is doomed.
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However the iPod is also significantly smaller. Put them side by side.
From the register:
The Zen is more for geeks who like to count and compare features, and the iPod is more for people who don't like to have full pockets or purses. No offence, this is just an observation.
Sorry, this is not quite correct.
Your formula
1/R_t = \sum 1/R_n
*is* correct, but all the R_n are not 1. You have to go from A to B via a knight's move, so this is 3 resistors away.
Ah, your HDs are lulling you into a false sense of security, and then boom, all data gone.
I mean no disrespect and I don't wish to underestimate your achievements. Most people in this forum will have a similarly biased view because it's unusual to be poor and illiterate while posting on Slashdot, so we are not likely to see someone post here and say "well I'm poor and I can't get ahead even though I work 80h weeks". It doesn't mean that these people don't exist. How many of your childhood friends made it the same way you did?
Like you said your family helped you, there are lots of people with dysfunctional families. There is a lot of crime, especially violent crimes, in the US compared with most western democracies and there are certainly a lot more people in prison than almost anywhere else except China. Why is that?
To answer one of your question I used to live in the US. Maybe things have changed so dramatically since 1992 but then there were already incredible contrasts between neighborhoods. One street would be all prim and neat and the next would be full of run down houses. Maybe the parent post would like us to believe that now all the run down houses have become prim and neat while the prim and neat now have indoor swimming pools, but somehow I doubt this is the case.
To answer your next question my family was sufficiently non-rich that my parent never paid any income tax, but I wouldn't call it poor and like yours it was pretty supportive. Like you they never paid for my education and I worked my way to college etc, then went to the US for a while and now Australia. My sisters managed to get various scholarships and did quite well. Most of my childhood friends have not moved on much from where their parents were. Yet I don't think they are lazy bastards. I just don't believe in meritocracy so much because it assumes that everyone is given the same chance in life which is simply not true.
I'm still of the opinion that a widening gap is not a sign of a healthy society. Gaps are widening everywhere in the Western world. There is more money around for sure but it's not moving around evenly. How can that not be a recipe for envy and frustration?
This is not bad, but what about the incredible feat the software engineers at JPL and elsewhere regularly pull off with the deep space probes? Example
> Another selling point is that truly digital
> recordings stored on random access media do not
> degrade over time
You've never had a HD crash?
is like with everything: 90% of it is crap. People who download shareware often find they end up using a piece of crap that halfway solves their problem, and they are unwilling to spend $25 on something which is not well written and probably not well supported, so they go online to find a pirated key and use the software anyway.
The pizza and cinema analogy are completely flawed. Pizza is a recurring purchase and so if it is crap you don't buy it anymore, and as for movies there is a lot of choice for essentially the same product (2h of entertainment). A lot of it is indeed crap but you only get angry with yourself for choosing a film you didn't like.
Then people get used to not paying for shareware, they don't pay either for the 10% of shareware which is not crap. While they are looking for a key to the crap shareware they may stumble on a key for something else actually useful and someone doesn't get their fair price for the effort they put in the software.
The problem is completely different with open-source. Still 90% of it is crap but it tends to either drop out entirely due to its inherent crapness or gets improved because the developer that sees it may be inspired by it and at least has the source of the crap stuff to get started and sometimes it does help.
For example I remember learning to touch-type on an application for NeXTStep all these years ago (you know the kind, letters dropping out from te top, etc) that was absolute crap. It was slow and leaked all over the place. If it had been shareware I would still have used it for the two weeks it took me to learn the skill (restarting and swearing at the incompetent developer all the time and definitely not paying for it) but it was in fact a free and open-source application. I debugged it and made it fast and non-leaky in about 3h of work, submitted the changes to the original authors and then I was really happy.
People do really get angry at shareware, when they pay the price, it doesn't work as expected, it wastes their time and they can't return the product.
To me shareware is a doomed concept and I don't have a solution for all these clever people who write good software and would like to be paid for their efforts.
Since when are EULA binding?
You go tell that to someone in a trailer park near Saint Louis or Detroit, then if you live you can come back and tell us the tale of how it went.
The gap does matter, because when a significant proportion of the population becomes richer and the rest doesn't or not as much, large items such as houses, access to private health care, private education and even cars become a lot more expensive and you have the making of deprived neighborhoods where everyone is a tenant in a shabby house, and then crime flourishes.
In the US there is a lot of crime, a lot of drugs, a lot of people under a federally declared line of poverty who live a short and dangerous life that a Roman Emperor certainly wouldn't have chosen for himself.
This is also true of most countries in the west. In Australia where I live Aboriginal people on average live 20 years less than non-aboriginal, even in the middle of Sydney. A lot of it is due to poor sanitation, lack of education and general poverty.
There are poor people in the US and elsewhere who are not given a fair deal in life because they happen to have been born in a poor neighborhood and I can tell you that it does in fact suck.
I'm pretty damn certain you wouldn't want to take their place next to the beautiful cell phone they have so please stop patronizing, you are insulting a lot of people.
You'd get a Nobel prize and a Fields medal at the same time, believe me.
I may be wrong but these sort of "I can upgrade later" argument don't really work anymore. An entirely new PC without the monitor is worth what? US$800 at present? In two years time you'll find that populating your currently new shiny with significantly upgraded components will be more expensive and less worthwhile than buying a new system entirely.
Very likely the PCI-express component you'll want to buy in 2 years time will not be compatible with your present motherboard, neither will the memory or the CPUs. This is the first iteration of PCI-express, expect major changes coming.
Just look at the AGP 2x vs. 4x example. Same name, different voltages, incompatible.
I just bought an AMD64 system for a very low price. I don't even plan to reuse the case when I upgrade this machine. I do plan to use this machine as a secondary system until it dies. All I plan to do is double the memory in it in a year's time or so when memory prices have fallen a bit.
Not quite. If *you* publish something then in the US *you* still have one year to patent it. Someone else can't. In most of the rest of the world if you publish then even you can't patent.
OK, very good, this is precisely my point. XP is not recent enough that you can build a PC with it as an O/S without a floppy drive. With Linux there is no problem whatsoever. The installer finds the SATA drive and puts the O/S on it, end of story.
If you are really plucky you *can* install XP on SATA drives without a floppy drive but it's a rough ride, not at all a point-and-click thing.
FYI, the PC in question was a SFF without space for a floppy drive or even a power connector for them. Moreover it has only room for one HDD.
To install XP on this beast I had to jury-rig a FDD through the open case. Fortunately the motherboard has a FDD controller, and it is possible to find molex-to-floppy power cable converters, so I was home and dry.
Boy does the floppy drive legacy die hard.
Here is the data I could find on the web:
A: There are five Intel "mobile" processors that can be used in current notebooks.
* Mobile Pentium 4-M
400MHz bus, 512KB, max. TDP* ~30-35W
* Mobile Pentium 4
533MHz bus, 512KB, max. TDP ~60-76W
Prescott (90nm) variant of Mobile P4: 88W (!)
* Mobile Celeron
400MHz bus, 256KB, max. TDP 30-35W.
* Pentium M
400MHz bus, 1MB, max. TDP ~22-24.5 W.
Dothan (90nm) TDP lowered to 21W.
So you are quite right, however the P-IV M notebooks are seen as "luggable desktop replacements", not as true portable. Autonomy is very limited.
Current Apple notebooks are noted for small size and long battery life. Maybe they don't want to destroy this image.
Not to mention MS-Office, Photoshop, games, etc.
Then let's see what this does for the alternatives.
OK, have you tried to install Windows XP on a computer with only SATA drives and no floppy?
XP doesn't have any SATA drivers, and the only way Microsoft has seen fit to present extra drivers to the normal install is through a floppy drive. Nothing else works. Another CD? nope. A USB key drive? sorry.
The only way around this that I've found is to "slipstream" the drivers into the normal install on CD. This involves a complicated process of ripping the content of the original XP install CD, hacking into various files, modifying the directory structure and rebuilding another bootable CD-rom from the result.
It cannot be done unless you have access to another computer with a CD burner and the right software (that can produce a bootable CD), and if your version of the XP medium is provided by a third party vendor like DELL or IBM, chances are even this process won't work.
In other words it makes installing Debian on the same machine a walk in the park in comparison.
Search google for "slipstream SATA drivers XP" if you want to know the gory details.
Actually, in the Capitalist West, this is the case as well, and YOU don't need Microsoft.
With all due respect, you should get out of your cosy, well known environment and take a trip to Beijing. You'll see the same kind of yuppies there as in America. 15 years ago everyone was riding a bicycle but now they commute in cars and taxis. China is sending people into space, and they are building more modern nuclear plants than anywhere in the US.
Even if we are talking about products that affect the top 1% earners in China this still represents well over 10 million people who can easily spend $1000 a year on such products, and therefore as a community tens of billions of dollars. Not only that but China is growing very fast and is quite urbanised.
Not only is it feasible to develop "something that works for China" but if you are a large multinational company and you ignore the Chinese market, then you are making an enormous mistake.
Your scenario is a bit vague.
What would Linux be used for? desktop or server room? Debian makes more sense for the latter (stability, consistency and good response time to security issues) than for the former (unease of install, antiquated desktop on Debian Stable, lots of work needed to maintain essentially your own desktop-ready distribution, obvious support issues with IBM, look on the management people face when you tell them your wonderful distro is based on "Debian Unstable", etc).
Maybe you can make the pill easier to swallow if you go to a more commercial version of Linux first, e.g. SuSE or RedHat? This way you only have to clear the first hurdle of making Linux acceptable in your company. It will still come with support contracts, releases, and other things management can cope with. Not to mention that these distros and others have to some extent caught up with Debian, using apt themselves or yum.
If your setup is Linux for the desktop, how much experience do you have with managing more than a handfull of machines and a couple of users under Debian Linux ? Debian currently makes a fine meta-distribution but don't make the mistake of assuming it will be as easy to maintain as your own machine. You'll have to cope with more user demands than just your own and a wider array of hardware.
Let me see if I get this right: if it takes more than 18 months to upgrade n-qbit computers into (n+1)-qbit computers and if Moore's law holds, then we'll have a way of factoring 128-bit numbers faster via the conventional route quicker than via QC?
Yes, start hanging on these party balloons, they'll be worth a fortune in 50 year's time.
Hopefully in 50 year's time we can go and mine Helium on the Moon, where it was deposited by Solar wind, or we can produce it in nuclear fusion reactors.
The PDAs are perfect for jotting down little notes. I have hundreds of them. For me doing that on most cellphone with thumb input is torture.
Title of that album you loved, ISBN number of that book, directions, shopping lists, URLs you read about at the newsagent, etc. Things that are too long to remember faithfully but short enough that it takes no time to write down with a stylus.
It's also perfect for train/bus timetables, reading a short novel, etc.
None of the existing competing HD mp3 players is as small as the iPod (not even talking about the iPod mini), or at least I haven't seen one. Wherever I go to look at mp3 players it's either underpowered solid-state players, big chunky heavy players or the iPod.
Small and light is really really important (to fit in pocket and not be bothered by it) and people understand why they need to pay a premium for the size. Besides the iPod's design is usable, nice and simple but that's extra.
To me the brand is nothing. I don't care who does what as long as it is well done. Just do a side by side comparison in the real world and you'll have your answer why the iPod is so popular.
The question I'm always asking myself is: is creating an (n+1) qbit computer twice as hard (or harder) than creating a n qbit computer? If so really this QC approach is doomed.
I don't think so,
All the *NP-Complete* are in the same class and therefore equivalent to TSP, which is not approximately linear anywhere.
What you are describing are some problems in P and some in NP\P, not the NP-complete problems.