Not true. It's the perfect accessory. My girlfriend will tell you so!

Well do you consider the school computer to be a government computer? He did hack it to change the number of sick days on his record.

Whoa. Is the current QWERTY keyboard really a good design? A Standard, yes, but a good design? Think about that for a second.

GP was only talking about gaming resolution, not about desktop resolution. They are two different arenas.

I don't understand - how exactly is Apple making it hard to play your DRM free tracks on other media players?

At the high end, sure, but if GP wanted a low end iMac, as long as he was OK with doing a little upgrading of a mini, it's pretty comparable to the low end iMacs.

Hrm.. while I'm dubious that apple has the only hot swappable SIM card, I think the main reason was probably that every other phone manufacturer decided to put their SIM card _BEHIND_ the freakin' battery.

and arguably, you can say that Apple's implementation sucked cause you have to have a paper clip to replace the SIM card. Not so in other phones.

Funny? Insightful?

I guess I'll just say the obvious. Yes. you can't put _Digital_ Rights Management on a rock.

However regular rights management of a rock is infinitely easier. :)

While I don't disagree you there. More codec support is always welcome. I think there are some advantages to running lossy codecs on portable players.

1) Capacity
2) Battery Life

Capacity isn't quite where we need to be for the average person to use lossless all the time. Assuming people have roughly 1700 songs on it (A reference on Slashdot! woot!). If each mp3 song is 5megs you need an 8gig player to hold that. The lossless copy, is what? 30megs? You'd need about 50gigs to hold that same data, which is around, but not exactly mainstream yet. This problem will be mostly solved in 2-3 years.

Battery Life, might be the harder problem to solve. Cause just reading the bits and processing them with always take more energy than the lossy copies. I'm curious to know the battery life difference if anyone has done an experiment with their player? But battery life will become more important as people are integrating their mp3 players with their phones. Who cared if your iPod ran out of juice. People care a lot more when their iPhone runs out of power.

Great. I'll have 80% of the capacity of my MP3 player used up by bits I will never access. Great job solving the problem fellas.

Dude. It's not a question of who's better at what for what (tho generally I agree with you), but it's just the fact that someone wanted to buy intel integrated graphics, which directly refuted your original blanket statement. Which you chose to ignore in this post. That's all.

Yup. I have to laugh at all those prognosticators who thought that Cell would take over the world. Parallel programming is hard.

Hrm. I'm not sure that Nintendo has ever released a console with a "2" moniker yet?

I don't understand how this is objectionable. It's product differentiation and it pretty much happens with every product on the market to hit price points. Not everyone needs to create DVDs. Not everyone needs to backup a computer. (Think about it.)

If anything, I'd say you got a great salesperson for actually understanding your needs and recommending the appropriate software for you. Better that than buying it, going home, installing it, only to find out that it doesn't do what you need it to.

While, yes, the hype is there, I must say that I'm pretty happy that Slashdot didn't go all iPhone 3G news/rumor crazy in the past couple of weeks... I was suprised at the restrait. :)

and groceries? c'mon man, where are your priorities?!?