As usual, Slashdot manages to link to a vaguely interesting article and be completely incorrect and misleading in the title and summary.
This is *not* intended to be built by you, the hobbyist -- it is no "DIY" kit.
This is intended for people like Sony who want to be selling products based on this in a year or so. For them, $3k is more than reasonable, and not particularly out of line with the dev kits for many more mundane systems.
What is cool about this from the Slashdot reader's standpoint is that:
(a) It runs Linux. Linux is becoming dominant in the embedded world. Why not? It's flexible, there are no licensing fees, it's quite powerful, it's very well tested, and there is a huge pool of application developers available to hire from when you need to write your apps. The only drawback over a custom OS is memory usage -- but, hell, memory is getting cheaper every day, and for a high-end embedded device, it's not a big chunk of the cost.
(b) With any luck, it means that companies will start shipping e-paper products within two years or so. The last crop of "ebook readers" pretty much failed, which I think is too bad -- too expensive, and people didn't like the DRM. Perhaps the lower battery requirements of e-paper will make it feasible.
(c) The display drivers are open source. The concept of making drivers open source, the idea that it's valuable to avoid being stuck with hardware in your product that has NDA requirements, may be spreading. Maybe not. It still makes me hopeful.
Slashdot very frequently runs alarmist articles about the state of engineering, computer science, and so forth.
While there are market shifts, if you were to just look at Slashdot for your information, you'd get a *wildly* distorted view of the world. You'd think that the entire career world is incredibly volatile. The people who are worried about their career post, and so you get the perception that the majority of people are concerned about what's going on.
If you want to do engineering, computer science, or whatever, just go for it. You'll be fine. Until a computer can drive my car, display custom paintings on my wall each morning, understand what I'm saying and speak back to me, until all this happens and beyond, there will always be demand to produce new computer systems. And as long as there's demand, you can get a job doing it.
The catch is that at some point, with existing applications, people just *plain don't use that much data*. Right now, P2P in particular has pushed demand for bandwidth up above what is reasonably available. You probably wind up throttling the tiny percentage of people that continuously saturate your lines, and you just handle the bursty demands of everyone else. Honestly, once someone has a week long MP3 playlist and all the movies and porn and games and whatever that they can possibly consume, demand is simply going to taper off, at least until someone comes up with new uses that demand more bandwidth.
Take newshosting, for example. Newshosting.com is one of the popular Usenet providers. They have a plan that provides unlimited access to their newsfeed. Could that exist if everyone saturated the thing? Of course not. But if you assume that most people are simply not going to, over the long term, come anywhere near continuous usage, then it works.
A lot of ISPs got in trouble back in the day because they tried making this assumption (valid for the Web and email) and then were hit by changing technology (P2P came along). But at some point, you have to think that there really is enough bandwidth for everyone.
Okay, I could see maybe serving this stuff up. I could maybe see someone doing a research project consuming this much data. But who is going to suck down 3-4 DVDs a day? I can see doing so for maybe a couple of days at a stretch, but maintaing that continuously? There just isn't enough time to *consume* that much data using existing devices. Even if you're sucking down MPEG2 DVDs, you still have to watch the things, and presumably you have a job or school or something filling most of your day, and you do things like read email or webbrowse some of the time.
Bittorrent is trackable - the person seeding/hosting the.torrent is not anonymous.
No major P2P systems that I am aware of (other than Freenet) provide anonymity for the person who is knowingly causing infringing data to be retransmitted. Gnutella, FastTrack, BitTorrent, whatever.
The difference between BitTorrent and some of the other popular P2P systems out there (Napster, Gnutella, eDonkey, FastTrack) is that with BitTorrent, anyone that can download a file can determine who else is downloading the file. They already know who is sharing the file.
Many (most?) P2P filesharing clients already do automatic resharing by default, and in all systems that I am aware of, it is very easy to link the original file to any reshared instances of that file. Thus, for the overwhelming number of users out there, the privacy difference between BitTorrent and Gnutella/eDonkey/etc is relatively minor. Granted, a user technically adept enough to disable such resharing can achive a slightly greater degree of privacy in the Gnutella/eDonkey/etc systems, whereas in BT the protocol forces your IP address to be non-anonymous to any other downloaders.
In general, existing P2P systems (with the exception of a few systems designed to be more private, such as Freenet) do not provide much by way of anonymity or privacy, especially considering that there are software development firms engaged to track such behavior.
If someone is really concerned about the possibility of running into trouble over their copyright infringement, the most practical solution (other than, obviously, not infringing) is probably to simply maintain a lower profile. IRC, WASTE, etc -- file transfer mechanisms designed to transfer files between small groups of people -- are probably the best bet. Such smaller scale infringment flew under radar for years before the massive and idiot-proof P2P filesharing systems started raising hackles at publishing companies.
Frankly, at the current rates of litigation, the chances of any infringer actually being sued are quite low. The issue is just that there are so *many* people infringing on copyright that, at least in the current state of affairs, concern about being the one-in-a-hundred-thousand that gets caught and is faced with a couple thousand dollars in fines is probably misplaced.
The Gnutella network is used for piracy and little else, but Bittorrent is a pretty poor choice for such use.
Gnutella provides one very important features that BitTorrent does not -- content-based addressing. I can make a link from a web page to a hash of a file, and as long as anyone anywhere on the GnutellaNet has that file, I can download it. BitTorrent is far more primitive when it comes to locating files -- you need that original.torrent file, you need the tracker to still be running, and you need one of the users in the torrent to still be seeding. I can post a Gnutella link on a webpage and expect it to potentially be useful for years -- with BitTorrent, it would take luck for my link to be useful for a month.
No wikipedia is the reason wikipedia has the problems it does. would you sit $10,000 in unmarked bills in the middle of a crowded shopping mall and expect someone not to fuck with it? No you'd take it away and keep it among people you can trust only.
How do you explain the fact that Open Source works? People should be slipping hidden malicious code into it all the time, by this logic.
You, and people like you are the reason Wikipedia has the problems it does.
Actually, Wikipedia *doesn't* have this problem, en masse. From a traditional computer security theoretical standpoint, Wikis are appalling. In real life, it seems that they do generally work. Maybe over time, they'll take some tweaking (as the content stabilizes), but the "it's prone to horrible malicious attacks" argument lacks a bit when you consider that it actually works.
As long as IP addresses are expensive IDs (i.e. a user can't just get another at will), the problem is partly solved, anyway. When I catch one instance of vandalism, I list other submissions from that IP, and start ripping out other changes. Vandals very rarely are useful contributors.
Someone that contributes 95% useful information with a few wrong things thrown in could probably cause some damage -- but nobody seems to want to really hurt Wikipedia thus far. [shrug]
Also, most of the vandals seem to be schoolchildren, and the vandalism is pretty amateur, whereas the regular Wiki contributors have worked such that the grammar and writing style of the bulk of Wikipedia is of excellent quality. Against this backdrop, vandalism tends to stand out -- someone who has graduated from high school with a solid English background seems to be less likely to be interested in running around vandalising other people's donations. "Teacher" is a popular article to vandalize, for instance, as are those of pop bands.
Slashdot sees a lot of trolls, but I think that part of the "troll psychology" is that trolling is considered fun -- successful trolling takes some skill, causes little or no damage (at least on the individual level, though Slashdot being flooded with trolls can get annoying), and people see an immediate reaction to what they've written. On Wiki, where vandalizing articles does hurt people, the most common reaction is just to see some inert text followed by the vandalism being backed out. There's no "modding up", and messages don't become part of a timeless archive (as they can be backed out).
I, personally, think that creating/improving vandalism flagging to Wikipedia would be one of the more useful research projects out there (i.e. this is applicable to a lot of things besides Wikipedia, successfully doing this can directly cause a lot of good, and there is interesting data mining research involved), and I'm guessing that if someone hasn't already jumped on this, someone will at some point.
most people in China value socioeconomic freedom over political freedom anyday
The idea is that, long term, political freedom tends to lead to socioeconomic freedom (because democratic governments/governments where people have a voice are more stable, and stable governments don't have rebellions. Rebellions are very bad from an economic standpoint.)
I'm looking forward to the Rolex(tm) Edition iPod nano, with 10k gold-plated clickwheel, obsidian faceplate, and quartz lens (the back will probably be polished titanium).
You started me thinking about traditionally-built computer components. A few Googles later, some neat links:
I'm not familiar with the details of what iTunes is doing, but could this be replicated by just using general-purpose synchronization software like Unison?
I'm curious as to how well Ubuntu stacks up versus Debian for a competent CLI/non-GNOME-and-KDE user.
One nice thing about Debian is that there seems to be emphasis on making the config utilities all available via a text UI, and I'm a little suspicious that Ubuntu might drop that.
On the other hand, I am vaguely interested in the more-frequent-release concept. It's really great that Debian stable exists, because it means that there's a Free real, stable, server-class distro out there. But all my friends that use Debian on their desktops seem to frequently bemoan how out-of-date the desktop software in stable gets, and how unstable/testing isn't really suitable for day-to-day use.
I currently use Fedora, but after a brief stint with Debian in a router that I'm building, I was quite impressed and considering, for the first time in about seven years, making my main desktop machine run something other than a Red Hat distribution.
What I'm wondering is whether Ubuntu swings more towards Debian (but with more frequent releases) or Linspire (but based on Debian). The former is more what I'm looking for.
I'm calling bullshit on that one too. arstechnica threw theirs out a car window at 50mph and it's less scratched than the grandparent poster's image.
The arstechnica picture has fewer, larger scratches (pretty obviously made by impact with a rough surface like asphalt with slight variations in height where rocks protrude). I looked at the picture (when imageshack hadn't taken it down for bandwidth) and it had very many small scratches covering the thing, mostly in a curved line -- maybe where the fabric rubbed against the Nano's faceplate when the guy was sitting down. There were a couple of larger scratches where the guy would have had his thumbnail when tapping the rewind button, and there were more scratches on the screen.
The ArsTechnica picture might have a smaller count of scratches, but they are larger and deeper than the ones in this picture from ordinary use.
To put it another way, if the only way to keep an iPod scratch-free is to keep it in a leather case, why don't they just make the iPod out of some tough material like leather in the first place?
Just a guess: It makes it look smaller because you can build the device without the protective outer casing.
The logical progression of this idea leads to just dropping the housing and shipping a circuit board with an LCD on top...
The US Navy refers to its dolphin units as "Marine Mammal Systems", and documents the purpose of each unit. Individual units are trained for mine hunting, force protection, and object recovery.
Assuming that these dolphins are not part of a separate program, presumably the loose mammals are part of Marine Mammal System Mark VI. Note that the Navy Marine Mammal Program FAQ includes the following item:
Does the Navy train its dolphins for offensive warfare, including attacks on ships and human swimmers or divers? No. The Navy does not now train, nor has it ever trained, its marine mammals to harm or injure humans in any fashion or to carry weapons to destroy ships. A popular movie in 1973 ("The Day of the Dolphin") and a number of charges and claims by animal rights organizations have resulted in theories and sometimes actual beliefs that Navy dolphins are assigned attack missions. This is absolutely false. Since dolphins cannot discern the difference between enemy and friendly vessels, or enemy and friendly divers and swimmers, it would not be wise to give that kind of decision authority to an animal. The animals are trained to detect, locate, and mark all mines or all swimmers in an area of interest or concern, and are not trained to distinguish between what we would refer to as good or bad. That decision is always left to humans.
I find trace references to the fact that the former anti-swimmer system (the Shallow Water Intruder Detection System) was supplanted by something new involving dolphins. In the old system, a sea lion would swim up to an unknown frogman with an open-jawed clamp attached to a line attached to its nose, ram into the frogman, and then signal the handler -- the frogman would essentially become "handcuffed" to the line, easy to reel in.
Actually, if you go through the whole the forum linked to in the article, this is not the case for some owners. Apparently, Apple *is* sending out replacements to at least some of the Nano owners that request replacements (it may depend a bit on luck; who you get connected to, as some other folks appear to be brushed off. If I had a damaged Nano, I'd probably try calling back until I got a representative who was willing to send out a replacement).
I'm sure it's the same issue here, though I haven't seen any pictures, I've just read reports that the nano scratches. Ho hum. My 4G ipod has scratches. Everyone I know who's owned an mp3 player for more than a few days, there's probably a little wear and tear somewhere. It's lost it's "new car smell". I bet the things still work and that you can still navigate the menu system. It's still a hell of a little device.
The question is not whether any scratches exist at all. The point is that the Nano scratches very easily; much more easily than earlier devices. You'll notice that a bunch of the folks discussing the Nano are owners of earlier Apple iPods and are comparing the Nano to them. A couple quotes:
"I am in the same boat as everyone else. I bought my black nano 3 weeks ago and it has a smear like scratch on the lcd. I had a mini for 1.5 years and not one scratch."
"I own a 3rd gen iPod, a PDA and a nintendo DS. All have LCD screens and consist mainly out of plastic. None of them are as sensitive to scratches like the nano. I treat my nano with the utmost care, even being alone in my pocket or cleaning the surface with my shirt scratches like you won't believe."
"I join you in complaining. My wife gave me a Nano as a gift. Now I'm embarrassed to let her see how scratched-up it's become. One day I carried it in a pocket with change in it, and now it's covered with scratches. I have an iPod Shuffle, Mini, and original iPod, and never had these problems.
When I first got the Nano, people'd want to see it, and I'd be proud to show it to them. Now, I prefer to keep it hidden.
It works great (so far), and I'm happy with it's performance, but it's the first iPod I ever owned that I wish I'd gotten a "skin" right away. None of my other iPods need it."
The people on those forums are often are avid Apple product buyers, have purchased previous iPods, and are not expecting the Nano to be "unscratchable", but rather that it not be significantly more scratchable than earlier products released by Apple, or their cell phone screens.
I don't see many people saying "I should buy a Sony device", or something along those lines. There are even a bunch of people saying "I'm going to wait until Rev 2 comes out."
I've seen two types of solutions that seem to work listed. One is curative; to take an abrasive and basically grind down the top surface. Another is preventative; to slap various more-durable (and more importantly, disposable) substances over the top of the thing.
AFAI can tell, people who have already made the purchase have had good success in getting Apple to send out replacements. Consensus seems to be that using a screen protector/packing tape/etc to cover the thing helps a good deal. I would assume that it's possible to use abrasive on the iPod and then place a protective sheet over it if it's already been damaged.
Given past Apple history, I assume that there will be a number of vendors selling prepackaged (through probably not rock-bottom-priced) solutions specifically for first-gen Nano owners.
I've seen a couple of similar posts on the Apple forums, and I'm curious whether, perhaps, the "scratching" experienced by the Nano owners might not be scratching. It could be that lint and dust is just filling in and making visible existing scratches from the manufacturing process.
Two questions:
1) After the initial period, do you notice new scratches being formed? (If so, presumably they are, in fact, new scratches) 2) Does cleaning make all the scratches invisible? (Which could replicate the conditions when you got it new).
If so, I'm wondering whether it might be possible to carefully clean the thing and then use a very small some sort of clear coating to fill in the "scratches".
I have never figured out why owners of Apple products refuse to hold Apple to a high standard across the board.
If Apple does some things right (and they certainly have in the past), good. They should be credited for this. What I don't understand is why people get unbelivably defensive whenever someone points out a flaw in Apple's products. I've skimmed the Apple forums involved, and all I can say is that the end user doesn't really care about the physics involved. All he cares about is that if he buys one of the earlier iPods, his product continues to look nice. If he buys a Nano, however, it looks like shit in short order. I think that it's *perfectly* reasonable for someone that buys such a product to be able to air criticism on those grounds.
You can argue that the scratches aren't so bad, that you don't need the screen, that people should "take better care of their product" (why they didn't need to with earlier products, though, is an interesting question), but it comes down to the fact that some folks are not happy with their experience. End of a story. Customer happiness is all that matters at the end of the day.
So now Apple can take a look at seeing what it can do to fix the problem. I doubt that it's so difficult to fix, given that they managed to do earlier iPods successfully, so I don't think that the iPod Nano can't be successfully fixed by Apple. So sit back and wait for them to churn out a fix.
The Register also referenced the Cube, which was a good point. The Cube had a case that often looked damaged, even straight from the factory. Apple's response was apparently to claim that the cracks were actually some sort of non-serious molding defect, IIRC, and a lot of Apple fans poured out and started accusing anyone that expressed unhappiness with their product. You don't win customers by acting like that. You tend to piss people off. All that the customer cares about is that his new, shiny product, which he bought to look new and shiny, does not, in fact, look new and shiny. Start dancing around the issue, and you start losing repeat customers. You can't keep a company running in the long term by simply attacking anyone that is unhappy with their experience.
Where our President sends out some barely-literate crony to dodge questions, the Prime Minister directly answers extremely pointed questions from the members of parliament (that congress would be too afraid to even ask), and he answers them intelligently, and on the spot no less. Question after question on anything imaginable, and he has an answer. He's also informed enough about each of the members of parliment to expose them when they're being disingenuous.
I was thinking the same thing, but about the French Ambassador to the United States. Sometime around the Freedom Fries debacle, there was very clearly concern about the public view, and I would guess that the French diplomats were concerned enough to want to try to get the word out through whatever venues possible. There was a late night interview on educational systems involving the Ambassador that I was watching, and I was stunned by how mature, informed, intelligent, and reasonable his statements were. It was *miles* away from Bush on CNN stumbling over his pre-prepared speech and sticking "terrorists" in every tenth word.
Hey genius: a Middle Easterner is more likely to be a terrorist than you are. Focusing on Middle Easterners is an efficient way to use scarce resources. If you prefer they be less effective regarding things like, you know, your life and stuff like that, go ahead and start a campaign for costlier, less safe security procedures. Just know what you're starting.
Good point. Someone like Timothy McVeigh would *never* be a terrorist. Keep the common sense alive, brother!
Or do you agree with their means of retaliation? Sure... go ahead and blow up a bus of innocent people and your neighborhood will have 5 cruise missles on target in the morning.
And boy, has that ever worked. I mean, there is *no* terrorism targeting Israel any more! I mean, not even a *bit*!
Slashdot Mirror
As usual, Slashdot manages to link to a vaguely interesting article and be completely incorrect and misleading in the title and summary.
This is *not* intended to be built by you, the hobbyist -- it is no "DIY" kit.
This is intended for people like Sony who want to be selling products based on this in a year or so. For them, $3k is more than reasonable, and not particularly out of line with the dev kits for many more mundane systems.
What is cool about this from the Slashdot reader's standpoint is that:
(a) It runs Linux. Linux is becoming dominant in the embedded world. Why not? It's flexible, there are no licensing fees, it's quite powerful, it's very well tested, and there is a huge pool of application developers available to hire from when you need to write your apps. The only drawback over a custom OS is memory usage -- but, hell, memory is getting cheaper every day, and for a high-end embedded device, it's not a big chunk of the cost.
(b) With any luck, it means that companies will start shipping e-paper products within two years or so. The last crop of "ebook readers" pretty much failed, which I think is too bad -- too expensive, and people didn't like the DRM. Perhaps the lower battery requirements of e-paper will make it feasible.
(c) The display drivers are open source. The concept of making drivers open source, the idea that it's valuable to avoid being stuck with hardware in your product that has NDA requirements, may be spreading. Maybe not. It still makes me hopeful.
Just wanted to drop one note.
Slashdot very frequently runs alarmist articles about the state of engineering, computer science, and so forth.
While there are market shifts, if you were to just look at Slashdot for your information, you'd get a *wildly* distorted view of the world. You'd think that the entire career world is incredibly volatile. The people who are worried about their career post, and so you get the perception that the majority of people are concerned about what's going on.
If you want to do engineering, computer science, or whatever, just go for it. You'll be fine. Until a computer can drive my car, display custom paintings on my wall each morning, understand what I'm saying and speak back to me, until all this happens and beyond, there will always be demand to produce new computer systems. And as long as there's demand, you can get a job doing it.
The catch is that at some point, with existing applications, people just *plain don't use that much data*. Right now, P2P in particular has pushed demand for bandwidth up above what is reasonably available. You probably wind up throttling the tiny percentage of people that continuously saturate your lines, and you just handle the bursty demands of everyone else. Honestly, once someone has a week long MP3 playlist and all the movies and porn and games and whatever that they can possibly consume, demand is simply going to taper off, at least until someone comes up with new uses that demand more bandwidth.
Take newshosting, for example. Newshosting.com is one of the popular Usenet providers. They have a plan that provides unlimited access to their newsfeed. Could that exist if everyone saturated the thing? Of course not. But if you assume that most people are simply not going to, over the long term, come anywhere near continuous usage, then it works.
A lot of ISPs got in trouble back in the day because they tried making this assumption (valid for the Web and email) and then were hit by changing technology (P2P came along). But at some point, you have to think that there really is enough bandwidth for everyone.
Okay, I could see maybe serving this stuff up. I could maybe see someone doing a research project consuming this much data. But who is going to suck down 3-4 DVDs a day? I can see doing so for maybe a couple of days at a stretch, but maintaing that continuously? There just isn't enough time to *consume* that much data using existing devices. Even if you're sucking down MPEG2 DVDs, you still have to watch the things, and presumably you have a job or school or something filling most of your day, and you do things like read email or webbrowse some of the time.
Bittorrent is trackable - the person seeding/hosting the .torrent is not anonymous.
.torrent file, you need the tracker to still be running, and you need one of the users in the torrent to still be seeding. I can post a Gnutella link on a webpage and expect it to potentially be useful for years -- with BitTorrent, it would take luck for my link to be useful for a month.
No major P2P systems that I am aware of (other than Freenet) provide anonymity for the person who is knowingly causing infringing data to be retransmitted. Gnutella, FastTrack, BitTorrent, whatever.
The difference between BitTorrent and some of the other popular P2P systems out there (Napster, Gnutella, eDonkey, FastTrack) is that with BitTorrent, anyone that can download a file can determine who else is downloading the file. They already know who is sharing the file.
Many (most?) P2P filesharing clients already do automatic resharing by default, and in all systems that I am aware of, it is very easy to link the original file to any reshared instances of that file. Thus, for the overwhelming number of users out there, the privacy difference between BitTorrent and Gnutella/eDonkey/etc is relatively minor. Granted, a user technically adept enough to disable such resharing can achive a slightly greater degree of privacy in the Gnutella/eDonkey/etc systems, whereas in BT the protocol forces your IP address to be non-anonymous to any other downloaders.
In general, existing P2P systems (with the exception of a few systems designed to be more private, such as Freenet) do not provide much by way of anonymity or privacy, especially considering that there are software development firms engaged to track such behavior.
If someone is really concerned about the possibility of running into trouble over their copyright infringement, the most practical solution (other than, obviously, not infringing) is probably to simply maintain a lower profile. IRC, WASTE, etc -- file transfer mechanisms designed to transfer files between small groups of people -- are probably the best bet. Such smaller scale infringment flew under radar for years before the massive and idiot-proof P2P filesharing systems started raising hackles at publishing companies.
Frankly, at the current rates of litigation, the chances of any infringer actually being sued are quite low. The issue is just that there are so *many* people infringing on copyright that, at least in the current state of affairs, concern about being the one-in-a-hundred-thousand that gets caught and is faced with a couple thousand dollars in fines is probably misplaced.
The Gnutella network is used for piracy and little else, but Bittorrent is a pretty poor choice for such use.
Gnutella provides one very important features that BitTorrent does not -- content-based addressing. I can make a link from a web page to a hash of a file, and as long as anyone anywhere on the GnutellaNet has that file, I can download it. BitTorrent is far more primitive when it comes to locating files -- you need that original
No wikipedia is the reason wikipedia has the problems it does. would you sit $10,000 in unmarked bills in the middle of a crowded shopping mall and expect someone not to fuck with it? No you'd take it away and keep it among people you can trust only.
How do you explain the fact that Open Source works? People should be slipping hidden malicious code into it all the time, by this logic.
You, and people like you are the reason Wikipedia has the problems it does.
Actually, Wikipedia *doesn't* have this problem, en masse. From a traditional computer security theoretical standpoint, Wikis are appalling. In real life, it seems that they do generally work. Maybe over time, they'll take some tweaking (as the content stabilizes), but the "it's prone to horrible malicious attacks" argument lacks a bit when you consider that it actually works.
As long as IP addresses are expensive IDs (i.e. a user can't just get another at will), the problem is partly solved, anyway. When I catch one instance of vandalism, I list other submissions from that IP, and start ripping out other changes. Vandals very rarely are useful contributors.
Someone that contributes 95% useful information with a few wrong things thrown in could probably cause some damage -- but nobody seems to want to really hurt Wikipedia thus far. [shrug]
Also, most of the vandals seem to be schoolchildren, and the vandalism is pretty amateur, whereas the regular Wiki contributors have worked such that the grammar and writing style of the bulk of Wikipedia is of excellent quality. Against this backdrop, vandalism tends to stand out -- someone who has graduated from high school with a solid English background seems to be less likely to be interested in running around vandalising other people's donations. "Teacher" is a popular article to vandalize, for instance, as are those of pop bands.
Slashdot sees a lot of trolls, but I think that part of the "troll psychology" is that trolling is considered fun -- successful trolling takes some skill, causes little or no damage (at least on the individual level, though Slashdot being flooded with trolls can get annoying), and people see an immediate reaction to what they've written. On Wiki, where vandalizing articles does hurt people, the most common reaction is just to see some inert text followed by the vandalism being backed out. There's no "modding up", and messages don't become part of a timeless archive (as they can be backed out).
I, personally, think that creating/improving vandalism flagging to Wikipedia would be one of the more useful research projects out there (i.e. this is applicable to a lot of things besides Wikipedia, successfully doing this can directly cause a lot of good, and there is interesting data mining research involved), and I'm guessing that if someone hasn't already jumped on this, someone will at some point.
most people in China value socioeconomic freedom over political freedom anyday
The idea is that, long term, political freedom tends to lead to socioeconomic freedom (because democratic governments/governments where people have a voice are more stable, and stable governments don't have rebellions. Rebellions are very bad from an economic standpoint.)
Unison would work pretty well for syncing an entire library, such as when you're using a big iPod
Ah, okay. I thought that people were copying an entire library rather than just a subset. That explains it.
but you still don't get the playlists, song ratings, address book/calender/todo/notes stuff, etc.
Sure.
I'm looking forward to the Rolex(tm) Edition iPod nano, with 10k gold-plated clickwheel, obsidian faceplate, and quartz lens (the back will probably be polished titanium).
You started me thinking about traditionally-built computer components. A few Googles later, some neat links:
Wood Contour (wood and stone computers)
Swedx (rather less ritzy, but less cool-looking than the above.
I'm not familiar with the details of what iTunes is doing, but could this be replicated by just using general-purpose synchronization software like Unison?
I'm curious as to how well Ubuntu stacks up versus Debian for a competent CLI/non-GNOME-and-KDE user.
One nice thing about Debian is that there seems to be emphasis on making the config utilities all available via a text UI, and I'm a little suspicious that Ubuntu might drop that.
On the other hand, I am vaguely interested in the more-frequent-release concept. It's really great that Debian stable exists, because it means that there's a Free real, stable, server-class distro out there. But all my friends that use Debian on their desktops seem to frequently bemoan how out-of-date the desktop software in stable gets, and how unstable/testing isn't really suitable for day-to-day use.
I currently use Fedora, but after a brief stint with Debian in a router that I'm building, I was quite impressed and considering, for the first time in about seven years, making my main desktop machine run something other than a Red Hat distribution.
What I'm wondering is whether Ubuntu swings more towards Debian (but with more frequent releases) or Linspire (but based on Debian). The former is more what I'm looking for.
I'm calling bullshit on that one too. arstechnica threw theirs out a car window at 50mph and it's less scratched than the grandparent poster's image.
The arstechnica picture has fewer, larger scratches (pretty obviously made by impact with a rough surface like asphalt with slight variations in height where rocks protrude). I looked at the picture (when imageshack hadn't taken it down for bandwidth) and it had very many small scratches covering the thing, mostly in a curved line -- maybe where the fabric rubbed against the Nano's faceplate when the guy was sitting down. There were a couple of larger scratches where the guy would have had his thumbnail when tapping the rewind button, and there were more scratches on the screen.
The ArsTechnica picture might have a smaller count of scratches, but they are larger and deeper than the ones in this picture from ordinary use.
To put it another way, if the only way to keep an iPod scratch-free is to keep it in a leather case, why don't they just make the iPod out of some tough material like leather in the first place?
Just a guess: It makes it look smaller because you can build the device without the protective outer casing.
The logical progression of this idea leads to just dropping the housing and shipping a circuit board with an LCD on top...
BUT: How is this different from LCD panels? What kind of moron touches the screen?
Based on my experience with the panels on my desktop, every bloody person in the office, usually when asking for assistance tracking down a bug.
The US Navy refers to its dolphin units as "Marine Mammal Systems", and documents the purpose of each unit. Individual units are trained for mine hunting, force protection, and object recovery.
Assuming that these dolphins are not part of a separate program, presumably the loose mammals are part of Marine Mammal System Mark VI. Note that the Navy Marine Mammal Program FAQ includes the following item:
Does the Navy train its dolphins for offensive warfare, including attacks on ships and human swimmers or divers?
No. The Navy does not now train, nor has it ever trained, its marine mammals to harm or injure humans in any fashion or to carry weapons to destroy ships. A popular movie in 1973 ("The Day of the Dolphin") and a number of charges and claims by animal rights organizations have resulted in theories and sometimes actual beliefs that Navy dolphins are assigned attack missions. This is absolutely false. Since dolphins cannot discern the difference between enemy and friendly vessels, or enemy and friendly divers and swimmers, it would not be wise to give that kind of decision authority to an animal. The animals are trained to detect, locate, and mark all mines or all swimmers in an area of interest or concern, and are not trained to distinguish between what we would refer to as good or bad. That decision is always left to humans.
I find trace references to the fact that the former anti-swimmer system (the Shallow Water Intruder Detection System) was supplanted by something new involving dolphins. In the old system, a sea lion would swim up to an unknown frogman with an open-jawed clamp attached to a line attached to its nose, ram into the frogman, and then signal the handler -- the frogman would essentially become "handcuffed" to the line, easy to reel in.
Apple will not replace it.
Actually, if you go through the whole the forum linked to in the article, this is not the case for some owners. Apparently, Apple *is* sending out replacements to at least some of the Nano owners that request replacements (it may depend a bit on luck; who you get connected to, as some other folks appear to be brushed off. If I had a damaged Nano, I'd probably try calling back until I got a representative who was willing to send out a replacement).
I'm sure it's the same issue here, though I haven't seen any pictures, I've just read reports that the nano scratches. Ho hum. My 4G ipod has scratches. Everyone I know who's owned an mp3 player for more than a few days, there's probably a little wear and tear somewhere. It's lost it's "new car smell". I bet the things still work and that you can still navigate the menu system. It's still a hell of a little device.
The question is not whether any scratches exist at all. The point is that the Nano scratches very easily; much more easily than earlier devices. You'll notice that a bunch of the folks discussing the Nano are owners of earlier Apple iPods and are comparing the Nano to them. A couple quotes:
"I am in the same boat as everyone else. I bought my black nano 3 weeks ago and it has a smear like scratch on the lcd. I had a mini for 1.5 years and not one scratch."
"I own a 3rd gen iPod, a PDA and a nintendo DS.
All have LCD screens and consist mainly out of plastic.
None of them are as sensitive to scratches like the nano.
I treat my nano with the utmost care, even being alone in my pocket or cleaning the surface with my shirt scratches like you won't believe."
"I join you in complaining. My wife gave me a Nano as a gift. Now I'm embarrassed to let her see how scratched-up it's become. One day I carried it in a pocket with change in it, and now it's covered with scratches. I have an iPod Shuffle, Mini, and original iPod, and never had these problems.
When I first got the Nano, people'd want to see it, and I'd be proud to show it to them. Now, I prefer to keep it hidden.
It works great (so far), and I'm happy with it's performance, but it's the first iPod I ever owned that I wish I'd gotten a "skin" right away. None of my other iPods need it."
The people on those forums are often are avid Apple product buyers, have purchased previous iPods, and are not expecting the Nano to be "unscratchable", but rather that it not be significantly more scratchable than earlier products released by Apple, or their cell phone screens.
I don't see many people saying "I should buy a Sony device", or something along those lines. There are even a bunch of people saying "I'm going to wait until Rev 2 comes out."
I've seen two types of solutions that seem to work listed. One is curative; to take an abrasive and basically grind down the top surface. Another is preventative; to slap various more-durable (and more importantly, disposable) substances over the top of the thing.
AFAI can tell, people who have already made the purchase have had good success in getting Apple to send out replacements. Consensus seems to be that using a screen protector/packing tape/etc to cover the thing helps a good deal. I would assume that it's possible to use abrasive on the iPod and then place a protective sheet over it if it's already been damaged.
Given past Apple history, I assume that there will be a number of vendors selling prepackaged (through probably not rock-bottom-priced) solutions specifically for first-gen Nano owners.
I've seen a couple of similar posts on the Apple forums, and I'm curious whether, perhaps, the "scratching" experienced by the Nano owners might not be scratching. It could be that lint and dust is just filling in and making visible existing scratches from the manufacturing process.
Two questions:
1) After the initial period, do you notice new scratches being formed? (If so, presumably they are, in fact, new scratches)
2) Does cleaning make all the scratches invisible? (Which could replicate the conditions when you got it new).
If so, I'm wondering whether it might be possible to carefully clean the thing and then use a very small some sort of clear coating to fill in the "scratches".
I have never figured out why owners of Apple products refuse to hold Apple to a high standard across the board.
If Apple does some things right (and they certainly have in the past), good. They should be credited for this. What I don't understand is why people get unbelivably defensive whenever someone points out a flaw in Apple's products. I've skimmed the Apple forums involved, and all I can say is that the end user doesn't really care about the physics involved. All he cares about is that if he buys one of the earlier iPods, his product continues to look nice. If he buys a Nano, however, it looks like shit in short order. I think that it's *perfectly* reasonable for someone that buys such a product to be able to air criticism on those grounds.
You can argue that the scratches aren't so bad, that you don't need the screen, that people should "take better care of their product" (why they didn't need to with earlier products, though, is an interesting question), but it comes down to the fact that some folks are not happy with their experience. End of a story. Customer happiness is all that matters at the end of the day.
So now Apple can take a look at seeing what it can do to fix the problem. I doubt that it's so difficult to fix, given that they managed to do earlier iPods successfully, so I don't think that the iPod Nano can't be successfully fixed by Apple. So sit back and wait for them to churn out a fix.
The Register also referenced the Cube, which was a good point. The Cube had a case that often looked damaged, even straight from the factory. Apple's response was apparently to claim that the cracks were actually some sort of non-serious molding defect, IIRC, and a lot of Apple fans poured out and started accusing anyone that expressed unhappiness with their product. You don't win customers by acting like that. You tend to piss people off. All that the customer cares about is that his new, shiny product, which he bought to look new and shiny, does not, in fact, look new and shiny. Start dancing around the issue, and you start losing repeat customers. You can't keep a company running in the long term by simply attacking anyone that is unhappy with their experience.
Where our President sends out some barely-literate crony to dodge questions, the Prime Minister directly answers extremely pointed questions from the members of parliament (that congress would be too afraid to even ask), and he answers them intelligently, and on the spot no less. Question after question on anything imaginable, and he has an answer. He's also informed enough about each of the members of parliment to expose them when they're being disingenuous.
I was thinking the same thing, but about the French Ambassador to the United States. Sometime around the Freedom Fries debacle, there was very clearly concern about the public view, and I would guess that the French diplomats were concerned enough to want to try to get the word out through whatever venues possible. There was a late night interview on educational systems involving the Ambassador that I was watching, and I was stunned by how mature, informed, intelligent, and reasonable his statements were. It was *miles* away from Bush on CNN stumbling over his pre-prepared speech and sticking "terrorists" in every tenth word.
But they *are* driving cars into people, and cars hitting people kill more people each and every month in the US than all of 9/11 did.
So, who exactly is being irrational?
Hey genius: a Middle Easterner is more likely to be a terrorist than you are. Focusing on Middle Easterners is an efficient way to use scarce resources. If you prefer they be less effective regarding things like, you know, your life and stuff like that, go ahead and start a campaign for costlier, less safe security procedures. Just know what you're starting.
Good point. Someone like Timothy McVeigh would *never* be a terrorist. Keep the common sense alive, brother!
Dammit, I was certain it was Austin too.
I think the guy still has a good point.
Try reading rightnation.us or the ever-popular freerepublic. There are plenty of right-wing wackos out there.
Or do you agree with their means of retaliation? Sure... go ahead and blow up a bus of innocent people and your neighborhood will have 5 cruise missles on target in the morning.
And boy, has that ever worked. I mean, there is *no* terrorism targeting Israel any more! I mean, not even a *bit*!