It clearly says "in case of invasion." We're invading Iraq, aren't we? The founding fathers couldn't have actually meant to limit the power of the president.
Well on the mac, the mac 512K, the mac+, the SE and possibly other early models, the programmers switch was a pair of detachable buttons that came in the box with the computer. It wasn't installed by default and users generally didn't install it unless they needed to use a debugger. Later models like the Classic and the Classic II pictured at wikipedea had it integrated. Since the early macs were so small, the power switch on the back of the machine was just about as easy to reach as a reset switch on the back of the left side.
I don't know how it works elsewhere, but here at the University of Maryland anyone can use the library while it is open for regular use. On weekdays between 11pm and 8am, half of the first and second floor are open for late night study, but the stacks and periodicals area are locked. Since nobody has access to the books overnight, the public doesn't have any right to be inside. A valid student id is required to enter and you have to show it on request. I'm pretty sure that the staff only checks ids of people in the building if they're disruptive. I've never been asked for mine once I'm inside.
Science education definitely not going downhill. Here at the university of Maryland everybody learns the latest findings of the science of feng shui. It has numbers and elements just like all the other sciences. Fire, earth, water, metal, and wood are so much easier to remember than all those funny abbreviations.
I've bought a rt2500 and the drivers are not really good. The code is messy enough that the kernel developers won't accept the driver and the driver is missing features such as WPA. They are rewriting it, but the new version will not be accepted into the kernel until the devicescape framework is. I still can't get WPA to work with the beta driver.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't buy the card. I bought the card because there are no better option. It is one of the few that will be supported out of the box with linux since it doesn't require a binary firmware or a binary kernel module. It just isn't ready quite yet.
Intel does distribute the firmware for the newer ipw3945 driver under a sane license. Unfortunately, nobody distributes that since it requires a binary daemon to function. One has to wonder why Intel has not relicensed the other firmware files. They have acknowledged that the ipw2100/2200 license is too complicated and doesn't meet the needs of distributors, but they don't want to fix that problem. It would seem that Intel does not want their drivers supported out of the box on open source operating systems.
If I were to write to Intel, I would ask that all wireless firmware be released under the ipw3945 license. Intel legal has already approved it and it provides a clear description of exactly what we want.
Um, this is Montgomery County MD. There are no Republicans here, just Democrats. I didn't even bother to vote because all the Republicans were running unopposed except for the school board. The Republicans are all going to loose in the general election. Which party is going to care enough to fix the results?
This is exactly the sort of politics that gets presented as science that TFA was complaining about. The article claims that it isn't really certain that any of these treatments will be successful. The article claimed that the processes are not yet fully worked out enought to be useful, but the patients are being brought out to discuss how Bush is denying them treatment.
I think that Bush's reasoning could be sane. I think that I shouldn't have to fund the experiments, but I don't think that they are provably immoral. As a libertarian, I don't think that the government should outlaw anything that isn't proved to be unethical/harmful. I doubt the president really thinks this way because this logic probably has some application to first trimester abortions also.
Personally, I think that universities should be able to do the research, but I don't think the government should be giving grants for it.
The article in Time raises the issue of whether the existing supply of embryos would be sufficient for treatment. They didn't give any reference as to why this would be so, but it would appear that the issue isn't quite as simple as some politicians would have us believe. The later pages of the article had a nice table that sumarized the pros and cons of each method of obtaining stem cells.
I doubt they will do it. Target is fairly big into credit cross promotion. While some grocery executives didn't realize that self check lanes would reduce impulse buys, I doubt the executives at Target are dumb enough to believe that a computer will convince many people to open or use a Target credit card.
I also don't think that reducing cashiers would have a huge impact on payroll. A significant percentage of employees in the store work on the sales floor, the stock room, and on the overnight trailer unload and stocking team. Assuming they eliminated half of the cashiers, I would guess that store payroll would only be cut by about 10%. There are probably other ways to increase productivity 10% without buying so much expensive equipment.
Target sells lots of stuff that would not work well with self check, including clothing, outdoor furniture, grills, and toys. Durring certain seasons we do significant business in these departments. I wouldn't want to be on duty for Black Friday if they ripped out half the registers in exchange for self check stations. In my store we run all 28 main registers on that day. If we could only use 14 on the busiest day of the year, it would be a disaster.
In addition, Target believes strongly in limiting the length of lines at checkout. No line at Target is ever supposed to have more than 2 people. They can not fire most of the regular cashiers and force everyone into the self check without violating this standard and alienating their customers. The grocery stores can only do so becuase they have always had long lines at busy periods.
They were actually made that way so that they can read the embedded chips on the older Target Visa cards and the amex blue card. A machine that could read smart cards inserted in both directions would probably be much more expensive than one that just reads the magnetic strip from both sides.
I think that attempting to save money by making the readers only work in one direction is foolish because 25% of the people put their cards in backwards. Another 25% of people's cards are not read on the first try. To make matters worse, if you insert your credit card backwards it takes about 15 seconds to come back out as compared to 3 seconds if you put it in correctly. With all the other efforts that Target makes to speed up the check out process(such as allowing the customer to swipe the card and sign before the cashier finishes), this seems to be a silly way to ecconomize. If I didn't know otherwise, I would suggest that IBM doesn't know much about making cash registers.
I don't think that most people mind that the fedora project is a place that does QA for RHEL. As a Fedora user, I don't mind if the rawhide testers are doing free QA for RHEL. The problem is that Fedora has no real process in place to ensure that the rawhide process produces a quality product for both the Fedora and RHEL users. Red Hat needs Fedora end users to find significant flaws in their product. RedHat applies these fixes and then branches off a particular Fedora release and tests it in order to produce a quality product.
Basically Red Hat should be applying their extra QA processes to Fedora while it is still in testing instead of only after release. They seem to be moving in that direction. If they can automate the testing that ensures that basic functionality of Fedora works at release time, the users will probably stop referring to it as a beta for RHEL. I know I would be happy if totem, Evolution, xsane, and gnome pilot were verified to be working before each release.
I know that clean flix was actually renting movies on DVD-R media with laser printed labels. There would be know way to confuse the edited disc for the real thing.
Having said that, you are correct that filtered movies are very anoying. Fast action sequences in war movies are very disconcerting when the action skips one second every Mel Gibson whacks someone with a Tomohawk or someone gets sliced with a sword.
As an ex-employee of a day trading brokerage, I would have to disagree with your statement.
The overall upward trend of stocks is often drowned out by the minute to minute changes in the stock. The intraday volitility of a stock price can often be greater than the overall move of the stock in a day. It is common for a stock to repeatedly move up and down by a half, but only finish up or down by a quarter. While this volitility can be profitable, it also means that one can loose money by buying on the peaks on the assumption that the stock is breaking upwards. The stock may not recover to that peak point for another week or two. Day traders who hold such stocks on the hope that they will go up often loose lots of money. You have to be able to take your losses and move on while you can still afford it. Many traders have a policy of selling a stock if it drops by a quarter point. On a thousand share lot, that can be $125 loss on a trade that didn't work out. This adds up over time.
The other factor that negates the If you pay $20 per trade in commissions, this is not necessarily true. This is not an unreasonable fee for a brokerage that directly routes an order to the exchange(as opposed to one that tries to combine multiple orders together to save on expenses). If a trader makes 20 trades(10 buy, 10 sell) in a day, that will cost $400. The goal in trading is to make enough profit to cover that cost, but it is not uncommon for a trader to break even for a day.
I would agree that bundling every shared library with a program in order to make it portable is a bad idea. I believe that selective bundling is the right way to portably develop software. If the LSB standardizes glibc, gtk, dbus, openssl, and all the image libraries, then software can be compiled against those standardized interfaces and any additional libraries can be bundled with the application. For example a video conferencing application might bundle a library for SIP that changes interface frequently while using standardized libraries for everything else. Using the standard versions of common libraries gives the application developer most of the security and space savings of compiling against each distribution's libraries while preserving portability.
Yeah. Bricks and mortar shops like car dealers and stuff that want to advertise their inventory and prices.
The poster I replied to wanted to know how Base differs from Froogle and implied that he wanted to know why this feature wasn't being added to froogle instead. The big difference is that instead of comparing prices from web merchants, it allows people to find items offered for sale based on detailed criteria including the physical location of the vendor. Is that clear enough for you?
It is sort of like froogle without the screen scraping. Because the content provider enters the information about the item, there is all kinds of neat attributes that can be used to narrow the search. For example a honda civic can be classified by price, make, year, color, model, engine, mileage, door count, and body style. You can actually search for a used 2000-2002 civic sedan with 50-75k miles that costs less than $12,000 and is less than 100 miles from your house. It appears that cars.com has put all their car classifieds into the system which means that any car advertised in the washington post is in the system. If the car dealerships started to add their inventories it would be really cool. I'm not sure if it will take off because it of the desire of businesses to keep their prices from being compared.
I might have been exagerating a bit, but my father did such an upgrade on his beige G3 about the time I replaced my 6100. He spent an absurd amount of money upgrading it. I think he spent at least $300 on a Sonnet upgrade card. It wasn't even a very good upgrade card compared to the price of an equivalent intel or amd processor and motherboard. He continued upgrading by adding a firewire/usb card and a new hard disk and controller card. He should have just bought a new machine. Withing a year I built an entire computer for about the same amount of money as my father spent on upgrading the G3. I'm pretty sure mine performed better. Although the upgrade was a much better value than useless upgrade he bought for a Mac Plus (a clip on 68030 at 20mhz if I remember correctly), I still don't think that it was worth the money spent. My father replaced the G3, with a G4 tower within a year because the machine still didn't run OS X well, which was the primary motivation for the upgrade.
I'm not saying that nobody upgraded those machines, just that I think that it wasn't economical. The people that did it wanted the upgrade to be a good value, just like tons of mac users bought into the 3rd party cd caching software scam that claimed that you could double or tripple the speed of your cd rom by buying a $50 caching program. Mac World/Mac User said it was a good idea, so people bought it.
The processors may have been socketed or slotted, but buying a new one was usually expensive because there is no significant market for such chips. There are many vendors that sell intel chips competing to supply chips for white box vendors and enthusiasts. Because these markets are very price sensiteve, intel chips can be found fairly inexpensively compared to PowerPC chips that are sold at premium prices as upgrade solutions for macs.
Mandrake starting a music service is harmful because all the artists who want to distribute without DRM have to sign up for yet another service if they want Mandrake's customers to easily see their music. If Mandrake really cared about promoting online music distribution in a way that is acceptable to their customers they would partner with one of the existing services. They could exchange free promotion of the service for a commitment by the service provider not to change the terms of the service. Unfortunately, that sort of press release would produce less investor interest than this one.
The difference between Free Software and Free Music is that Free Music isn't really usefull to me. Sure, I want to be able to load music onto my iPod or onto a house-wide music server, but I can't think of anything else I want to do with it because I'm not a musician. Because music is more transparent to the listner than compiled code is, musicians can learn from each other just by listening to each other's proprietary music. While there is some interest among musicians in re-using other musicians' work, it is much less than the desire of coders to re-use source code.
Just like many software users don't want to wait 5 years for the Free Software community to provide usefull software for X, I don't want to wait five years for the possibly non-existent Free Music community to start making interesting music in genre X or Y. I see no advantage to having Free Music instead of sane copyrigh laws.
I am for reasonable copyright laws that explicitly recognize the right of individuals to make copies for personal use and I also support the idea of copyright expiring in 20 years. Once the government eliminates the restrictions on breaking copyright on puchased items and distributing software to do so, the music industry will begin to focus cracking down on anonymous copyright infringement and on providing interesting services to the customer instead of abusing their law abiding customers with DRM.
Um yes, with my old rio karma (which I lost), the scroll wheel acted in much the same way. I could just as easily move up or own 1, 2, 5, 10, or 2000 songs in one go.
The scroll wheel on the karma did work better than I expected it to, but not quite as well as my iPod because the touch wheel can be turned continuously while the scroll wheel can't.
Oh, and it also plays flac and ogg, not to mention having the best sound of any mp3 player and (I think) the best battery life of any hdd player
And it was cheap
I'll agree with you there. The scroll wheel worked great until it broke off. I guess I shouldn't have carried a cordless phone in the same pocket. I kept using it until the hard drive died even after the ethernet interface started dropping 10-20% of packets which made adding songs slow and unreliable. I saved $40 by buying the cheaper player and it died within a year. I suppose it was a valuable life lesson.
If I could get a player with the interface of the karma and the build quality of an iRiver, I wouldn't hesitate to buy it. After my experience with those two brands, I've reevaluated the importance of ogg playback. I can't justify buying a device based on format support unless it has a well designed interface and is built well. The iPod has both qualities. It might even play vorbis one day. Unlike the iRiver I owned which hinted in the documentation that they might add ogg support to the product, the iPod is at least technically capable of playing vorbis files.
Does it matter if the irregularities were caused by hardware flaws or not? If the vendor can't properly maintain the machines so that these sorts of anomalies don't occur, then it becomes difficult to trust the logs. If we assuming that all anomalies that show up in the logs are hardware or software errors, then why bother looking at the logs? Once the politicians know about these bugs, they might try to cheat the system in a way that looks like a normal anomaly.
The errors these cases probably are the result of an incompetent vendor, but I don't think that this sort of incompetence can be tolerated.
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It clearly says "in case of invasion." We're invading Iraq, aren't we? The founding fathers couldn't have actually meant to limit the power of the president.
Well on the mac, the mac 512K, the mac+, the SE and possibly other early models, the programmers switch was a pair of detachable buttons that came in the box with the computer. It wasn't installed by default and users generally didn't install it unless they needed to use a debugger. Later models like the Classic and the Classic II pictured at wikipedea had it integrated. Since the early macs were so small, the power switch on the back of the machine was just about as easy to reach as a reset switch on the back of the left side.
Guilt?
Umm. I can't visualize the inverse of an m x n matrix. Only square matrices are invertible anyway.
I don't know how it works elsewhere, but here at the University of Maryland anyone can use the library while it is open for regular use. On weekdays between 11pm and 8am, half of the first and second floor are open for late night study, but the stacks and periodicals area are locked. Since nobody has access to the books overnight, the public doesn't have any right to be inside. A valid student id is required to enter and you have to show it on request. I'm pretty sure that the staff only checks ids of people in the building if they're disruptive. I've never been asked for mine once I'm inside.
Science education definitely not going downhill. Here at the university of Maryland everybody learns the latest findings of the science of feng shui. It has numbers and elements just like all the other sciences. Fire, earth, water, metal, and wood are so much easier to remember than all those funny abbreviations.
I've bought a rt2500 and the drivers are not really good. The code is messy enough that the kernel developers won't accept the driver and the driver is missing features such as WPA. They are rewriting it, but the new version will not be accepted into the kernel until the devicescape framework is. I still can't get WPA to work with the beta driver.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't buy the card. I bought the card because there are no better option. It is one of the few that will be supported out of the box with linux since it doesn't require a binary firmware or a binary kernel module. It just isn't ready quite yet.
Intel does distribute the firmware for the newer ipw3945 driver under a sane license. Unfortunately, nobody distributes that since it requires a binary daemon to function. One has to wonder why Intel has not relicensed the other firmware files. They have acknowledged that the ipw2100/2200 license is too complicated and doesn't meet the needs of distributors, but they don't want to fix that problem. It would seem that Intel does not want their drivers supported out of the box on open source operating systems.
If I were to write to Intel, I would ask that all wireless firmware be released under the ipw3945 license. Intel legal has already approved it and it provides a clear description of exactly what we want.
Um, this is Montgomery County MD. There are no Republicans here, just Democrats. I didn't even bother to vote because all the Republicans were running unopposed except for the school board. The Republicans are all going to loose in the general election. Which party is going to care enough to fix the results?
This is exactly the sort of politics that gets presented as science that TFA was complaining about. The article claims that it isn't really certain that any of these treatments will be successful. The article claimed that the processes are not yet fully worked out enought to be useful, but the patients are being brought out to discuss how Bush is denying them treatment.
I think that Bush's reasoning could be sane. I think that I shouldn't have to fund the experiments, but I don't think that they are provably immoral. As a libertarian, I don't think that the government should outlaw anything that isn't proved to be unethical/harmful. I doubt the president really thinks this way because this logic probably has some application to first trimester abortions also.
Personally, I think that universities should be able to do the research, but I don't think the government should be giving grants for it.
The article in Time raises the issue of whether the existing supply of embryos would be sufficient for treatment. They didn't give any reference as to why this would be so, but it would appear that the issue isn't quite as simple as some politicians would have us believe. The later pages of the article had a nice table that sumarized the pros and cons of each method of obtaining stem cells.
I doubt they will do it. Target is fairly big into credit cross promotion. While some grocery executives didn't realize that self check lanes would reduce impulse buys, I doubt the executives at Target are dumb enough to believe that a computer will convince many people to open or use a Target credit card. I also don't think that reducing cashiers would have a huge impact on payroll. A significant percentage of employees in the store work on the sales floor, the stock room, and on the overnight trailer unload and stocking team. Assuming they eliminated half of the cashiers, I would guess that store payroll would only be cut by about 10%. There are probably other ways to increase productivity 10% without buying so much expensive equipment. Target sells lots of stuff that would not work well with self check, including clothing, outdoor furniture, grills, and toys. Durring certain seasons we do significant business in these departments. I wouldn't want to be on duty for Black Friday if they ripped out half the registers in exchange for self check stations. In my store we run all 28 main registers on that day. If we could only use 14 on the busiest day of the year, it would be a disaster. In addition, Target believes strongly in limiting the length of lines at checkout. No line at Target is ever supposed to have more than 2 people. They can not fire most of the regular cashiers and force everyone into the self check without violating this standard and alienating their customers. The grocery stores can only do so becuase they have always had long lines at busy periods.
They were actually made that way so that they can read the embedded chips on the older Target Visa cards and the amex blue card. A machine that could read smart cards inserted in both directions would probably be much more expensive than one that just reads the magnetic strip from both sides.
I think that attempting to save money by making the readers only work in one direction is foolish because 25% of the people put their cards in backwards. Another 25% of people's cards are not read on the first try. To make matters worse, if you insert your credit card backwards it takes about 15 seconds to come back out as compared to 3 seconds if you put it in correctly. With all the other efforts that Target makes to speed up the check out process(such as allowing the customer to swipe the card and sign before the cashier finishes), this seems to be a silly way to ecconomize. If I didn't know otherwise, I would suggest that IBM doesn't know much about making cash registers.
I don't think that most people mind that the fedora project is a place that does QA for RHEL. As a Fedora user, I don't mind if the rawhide testers are doing free QA for RHEL. The problem is that Fedora has no real process in place to ensure that the rawhide process produces a quality product for both the Fedora and RHEL users. Red Hat needs Fedora end users to find significant flaws in their product. RedHat applies these fixes and then branches off a particular Fedora release and tests it in order to produce a quality product.
Basically Red Hat should be applying their extra QA processes to Fedora while it is still in testing instead of only after release. They seem to be moving in that direction. If they can automate the testing that ensures that basic functionality of Fedora works at release time, the users will probably stop referring to it as a beta for RHEL. I know I would be happy if totem, Evolution, xsane, and gnome pilot were verified to be working before each release.
I know that clean flix was actually renting movies on DVD-R media with laser printed labels. There would be know way to confuse the edited disc for the real thing.
Having said that, you are correct that filtered movies are very anoying. Fast action sequences in war movies are very disconcerting when the action skips one second every Mel Gibson whacks someone with a Tomohawk or someone gets sliced with a sword.
As an ex-employee of a day trading brokerage, I would have to disagree with your statement.
The overall upward trend of stocks is often drowned out by the minute to minute changes in the stock. The intraday volitility of a stock price can often be greater than the overall move of the stock in a day. It is common for a stock to repeatedly move up and down by a half, but only finish up or down by a quarter. While this volitility can be profitable, it also means that one can loose money by buying on the peaks on the assumption that the stock is breaking upwards. The stock may not recover to that peak point for another week or two. Day traders who hold such stocks on the hope that they will go up often loose lots of money. You have to be able to take your losses and move on while you can still afford it. Many traders have a policy of selling a stock if it drops by a quarter point. On a thousand share lot, that can be $125 loss on a trade that didn't work out. This adds up over time.
The other factor that negates the If you pay $20 per trade in commissions, this is not necessarily true. This is not an unreasonable fee for a brokerage that directly routes an order to the exchange(as opposed to one that tries to combine multiple orders together to save on expenses). If a trader makes 20 trades(10 buy, 10 sell) in a day, that will cost $400. The goal in trading is to make enough profit to cover that cost, but it is not uncommon for a trader to break even for a day.
Day trading isn't as easy as it looks.
I would agree that bundling every shared library with a program in order to make it portable is a bad idea. I believe that selective bundling is the right way to portably develop software. If the LSB standardizes glibc, gtk, dbus, openssl, and all the image libraries, then software can be compiled against those standardized interfaces and any additional libraries can be bundled with the application. For example a video conferencing application might bundle a library for SIP that changes interface frequently while using standardized libraries for everything else. Using the standard versions of common libraries gives the application developer most of the security and space savings of compiling against each distribution's libraries while preserving portability.
Yeah. Bricks and mortar shops like car dealers and stuff that want to advertise their inventory and prices. The poster I replied to wanted to know how Base differs from Froogle and implied that he wanted to know why this feature wasn't being added to froogle instead. The big difference is that instead of comparing prices from web merchants, it allows people to find items offered for sale based on detailed criteria including the physical location of the vendor. Is that clear enough for you?
It is sort of like froogle without the screen scraping. Because the content provider enters the information about the item, there is all kinds of neat attributes that can be used to narrow the search. For example a honda civic can be classified by price, make, year, color, model, engine, mileage, door count, and body style. You can actually search for a used 2000-2002 civic sedan with 50-75k miles that costs less than $12,000 and is less than 100 miles from your house. It appears that cars.com has put all their car classifieds into the system which means that any car advertised in the washington post is in the system. If the car dealerships started to add their inventories it would be really cool. I'm not sure if it will take off because it of the desire of businesses to keep their prices from being compared.
I might have been exagerating a bit, but my father did such an upgrade on his beige G3 about the time I replaced my 6100. He spent an absurd amount of money upgrading it. I think he spent at least $300 on a Sonnet upgrade card. It wasn't even a very good upgrade card compared to the price of an equivalent intel or amd processor and motherboard. He continued upgrading by adding a firewire/usb card and a new hard disk and controller card. He should have just bought a new machine. Withing a year I built an entire computer for about the same amount of money as my father spent on upgrading the G3. I'm pretty sure mine performed better. Although the upgrade was a much better value than useless upgrade he bought for a Mac Plus (a clip on 68030 at 20mhz if I remember correctly), I still don't think that it was worth the money spent. My father replaced the G3, with a G4 tower within a year because the machine still didn't run OS X well, which was the primary motivation for the upgrade.
I'm not saying that nobody upgraded those machines, just that I think that it wasn't economical. The people that did it wanted the upgrade to be a good value, just like tons of mac users bought into the 3rd party cd caching software scam that claimed that you could double or tripple the speed of your cd rom by buying a $50 caching program. Mac World/Mac User said it was a good idea, so people bought it.
The processors may have been socketed or slotted, but buying a new one was usually expensive because there is no significant market for such chips. There are many vendors that sell intel chips competing to supply chips for white box vendors and enthusiasts. Because these markets are very price sensiteve, intel chips can be found fairly inexpensively compared to PowerPC chips that are sold at premium prices as upgrade solutions for macs.
Mandrake starting a music service is harmful because all the artists who want to distribute without DRM have to sign up for yet another service if they want Mandrake's customers to easily see their music. If Mandrake really cared about promoting online music distribution in a way that is acceptable to their customers they would partner with one of the existing services. They could exchange free promotion of the service for a commitment by the service provider not to change the terms of the service. Unfortunately, that sort of press release would produce less investor interest than this one.
The difference between Free Software and Free Music is that Free Music isn't really usefull to me. Sure, I want to be able to load music onto my iPod or onto a house-wide music server, but I can't think of anything else I want to do with it because I'm not a musician. Because music is more transparent to the listner than compiled code is, musicians can learn from each other just by listening to each other's proprietary music. While there is some interest among musicians in re-using other musicians' work, it is much less than the desire of coders to re-use source code.
Just like many software users don't want to wait 5 years for the Free Software community to provide usefull software for X, I don't want to wait five years for the possibly non-existent Free Music community to start making interesting music in genre X or Y. I see no advantage to having Free Music instead of sane copyrigh laws.
I am for reasonable copyright laws that explicitly recognize the right of individuals to make copies for personal use and I also support the idea of copyright expiring in 20 years. Once the government eliminates the restrictions on breaking copyright on puchased items and distributing software to do so, the music industry will begin to focus cracking down on anonymous copyright infringement and on providing interesting services to the customer instead of abusing their law abiding customers with DRM.
The scroll wheel on the karma did work better than I expected it to, but not quite as well as my iPod because the touch wheel can be turned continuously while the scroll wheel can't.
Oh, and it also plays flac and ogg, not to mention having the best sound of any mp3 player and (I think) the best battery life of any hdd player
And it was cheap
I'll agree with you there. The scroll wheel worked great until it broke off. I guess I shouldn't have carried a cordless phone in the same pocket. I kept using it until the hard drive died even after the ethernet interface started dropping 10-20% of packets which made adding songs slow and unreliable. I saved $40 by buying the cheaper player and it died within a year. I suppose it was a valuable life lesson.
If I could get a player with the interface of the karma and the build quality of an iRiver, I wouldn't hesitate to buy it. After my experience with those two brands, I've reevaluated the importance of ogg playback. I can't justify buying a device based on format support unless it has a well designed interface and is built well. The iPod has both qualities. It might even play vorbis one day. Unlike the iRiver I owned which hinted in the documentation that they might add ogg support to the product, the iPod is at least technically capable of playing vorbis files.
Does it matter if the irregularities were caused by hardware flaws or not? If the vendor can't properly maintain the machines so that these sorts of anomalies don't occur, then it becomes difficult to trust the logs. If we assuming that all anomalies that show up in the logs are hardware or software errors, then why bother looking at the logs? Once the politicians know about these bugs, they might try to cheat the system in a way that looks like a normal anomaly. The errors these cases probably are the result of an incompetent vendor, but I don't think that this sort of incompetence can be tolerated.