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Big Demand for Digital Music Players

An anonymous reader writes "Market research company IDC is predicting a rosy future for MP3 player sales. They predict that by 2008 it will grow into a $58 billion industry - four times bigger than the US record industry. Also in the news, Sony will finally start making a digital music portable that plays MP3s. Their present players only read their proprietary ATRAC3 format, forcing you to transcode any MP3 files you want to play on them."

5 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Who would have thought?

    1. Re:Really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      You are so right!

      Just let's face the facts:

      - Google has long ago sold out to AOL Time Warner; the next round of IPO will increase their shares and they are likely to achieve a total majority of shares by the end of 2005.

      - Gmail fails to meet the standard of users above Novice-level; those who are used to the comfort of a sophisticated email-client, like Microsoft Outlook, connected to a powerful and secure server-side solution, like Microsoft Exchange. When I called the Google-helpdesk ("Hoogle") and asked for POP3 and IMAP support, I heard the insulting sound of muffled laughter, then a "Sorry, we really don't ...", again laughing; then the line was dead. Mind you, we are paying > 80,000 USD per month in AdSense-fees.

      - Gmail still does not work fully with less sopisticated browsers, such as Mozilla and Firefox. This may be caused by lacking standards-support in these browsers. Fortunately, barely nobody uses these nowadays, so the problem can safely be ignored for the time being. After all, the standard user-agent for web access is the mature and secure Internet Explorer, not the pet-project of laid-off Netscape employees

      - Google's investment in Doubleclick.com and other "online marketing" agencies is a dubious move; personally, I can live with text-only advertising as practised by Google so far, but our company ads are exclusively deployed using latest Macromedia Flash technology, because this simply is what our professional customers expect of us

      - The ethical credibility of Google has been on the decline since a new employee of Google (a "noogler", according to the company-internal nomenclatura, or "Goospeak") has leaked some disturbing information regarding cruel rituals of initiation, including gross acts of homoerotic sexuality, horses and mutants. However, law authorities are now more alert towards Google, since the so called FAGACT has passed the Californian legislative. Trivia: the percentage of heterosexual Google-employees has reached an all-time low of << 0.09% as of an assessment on 2004-08-22.

  2. fp by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    first post, fucking assholes!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    1. Re:fp by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      lol your dumb
      1-you don't have a first post
      2-who cares about an anonymous post only me will read

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Comment removed based on user account deletion