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40GB RCA Lyra: Apple Fans Needn't Fret
PaulEshoreLives writes "The Globe and Mail isn't taking too kindly to RCA's Lyra 40GB iPod 'competitor.' Amongst its gripes are a crazy-slow FFW. How slow? Like 6 minutes to get to the end of a 60 minute file. Gotta wonder how these things get missed at the beta stage."
Will it make your iPod quit working? Or make you love your iPod less?
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Why does every new hard disk mp3 player have to be labeled an iPod competitor? Some of these devices aren't even close to the iPod.
So the forward-scan button gives you a 10x speed ffw. And? Why is this bad?
But then, I'm not getting my head round having single mp3 files that are 60 minutes long either, so that might explain it. I mean, there's Eno's Neroli, but I can't think of any others off the top of my head.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Most cassette players and VCRs can go from start to end of a tape in about 1-2 minutes. That's sad.
Gotta wonder how these things get missed at the beta stage."
PHB: Beta stage? What beta stage?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Apple Fans Needn't Fret
What is that saying about a group of people, that a competitor's product to Apple might cause you to "fret"? I guess its implying that Apple users don't like competition? But beyond that, why should competition cause anyone outside of Apple cause any stress for anyone that doesn't make a living selling Apple realted products? Its just wierd thats all. I understand that we can all get caught up in fandom every now and then, but geez louise give it a break.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Gee, you'd think someone with views as meticulously thought out as yours would realize that the Globe & Mail is a Toronto paper. Perhaps you have a similar screed about consumenadians, eh?
... yield better sales results than the iPod.
Maybe that's *GASP* not the aim? as long as I make positive profit, I don't really care if I make more sales than the iPod.
Insanity is not taking advantage of a clean, healthy profit which requires minimal marketing because that's all been done by your competitors...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
What are you on about? What is an 'uncompressed' mpeg4 file? The real issue is the bitrate, is it variable or fixed per frame? Most decent codecs are the latter and you need to build an offset list to handle ffw correctly. Rewind is even harder that ffw, especially with b-frames.
It seems the Rio Karma hasn't had a feature bump since it's introduction last year. Sure, it's pricing is on par with the 20 GB iPod (and the Karma comes with a dock, featuring an ethernet port, not to mention native support for Ogg Vorbis and FLAC), but I think Rio can do even better. =)
What the fuck... you put most of a country's name in a word like that and then get vaginal when someone thinks you're talking about that country?
There's nothing about it or your comment that indicated it was meant to be a generic term encompassing people all over the world.
So take your sneer and cram it sideways.
IMHO, there are roughly two kinds of people buying off-iPod HD mp3 players: 1) "geeks" who value raw specs above all else and getting "money's worth" in that regard and 2) "parents" who's been asked to get an "iPod" but thought it wasn't so important to actually get an "iPod"
RCA/Thompson has a firmware update that gets rid of the necessity to encrypt mp3s thru MusicMatch. It works great. My Lyra looks and acts just like a portable usb drive to windows now, and I don't have to use MusicMatch either. Check out Yahoo Groups RCA-Lyra-MP3, or go to www.rca.com/digitalaudiosupport
I'm thinking you kinda invalidate any right you may have thought you had to grouse about American "consumer marketplace economics" when you lazily request Hollywood warez sites be e-mailed to you in your perch in Germany.
Maybe we're just supposed to send you warez sites for those great German movies. Yeah, that's it, that's what you meant...
As far as America's "innate desire for fascism" goes, uhhhh, don't you think might be just projecting a teensy bit? Fascism is on the rise, all right. But we Americans are dorky amateurs at it. You guys remain the world-class professionals at it.
Uh, what, hello.. there are still some ME and African countries that practice slavery. We certainly don't have the lock on genocide. And our history, while bloody, pales compared to Europe and the Soviet Union.
Who's this "we"? I'm a US citizen, but I committed none of those crimes. I am a peaceful individual, not an aggressor. I will NOT be held responsible for the actions of other individuals, let alone the actions of government.
I am exactly responsible for my own actions. No more, no less. I take offense that you imply that I somehow had something to do with those crimes.
What are you talking about?
Apple fans WANT something to fret about because thats what makes thing better. The worst thing that could happen to the industry is for no one to bother challenging Apple.
See what happened when no one challenged Microsoft?
Apple fans WANT some one to beat the pants off Apple, 'cause it means that after Apple has gotten up off the floor and brushed itself off, it is going to come up with something freakin amazing to get back into the game.
Thats what makes healthy competition great.
First, give us non-proprietary batteries. Not only to keep it from becoming a paper weight after a couple years, but also to be able to toss in some other batteries if you forget to recharge it.
Second, give us an easily to use intuitive interface. In other words, TEST IT WITH REAL PEOPLE BEFORE YOU EVEN ATTEMPT TO SELL IT!!!
Third, allow us to sort and organize our music without any proprietary software crap. Simply let me transfer my MP3s by artist/cd name folders. If you want proprietary crap for newbies, let that be an option, not a mandate.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
"You know, that White-Picket Fence "keeping up with the Joneses" agitated nervousness that comes as a result of being breast-fed consumerican ethics from the day you were born .."
Nothing of the sort.
The fact is, most other companies have proven that once they get to the point of being in a monopoly state, start building crap and giving the consumer shit they don't need, ignoring all their failings.
Apple, on the other hand, acts as if their market share nor do their users wishes and needs expectations exist. This is actually a good thing under the right influences. If you listened to all the fanboys, you'd have a 120G iPod that could play full motion pictures in Xvid and play Ogg and maybe hook up Mame and a few controllers and heck, we need a projection unit on this and otherwise. I have one of those things from Apple...its called an Powerbook. It doesn't need to fit in my pocket. I want something that makes music and nothing more.
Apple is one of the few companies that once its in a position of power, it isn't trying to shore up the power with artificial bullshit that no one needs for its product class. Instead, they focus on making the shit better. Personally, I don't care for the photo bit of the new iPod...but it was almost the least they could do considering color screens are nearly as cheap as the screens they current use (they'd had to mode to the 2 color screen on the cheaper model it displays Black and Blue as it was what the company that made the old screen moved on to). Its a nifty hack, but I really don't want more than that, even if it had power to do more.
Apple puts out good products. If others put out an inferior product that caught the attention span of the public, we'd all suffer. Its happened in the past. The iPod won't be at its 70% mark forever, and it will eventually happen again. The fact that Apple is at 70% and the next highest is at like 5% even though its selling for half of Apples price and 2x the features (what ever the fuck that means) probably means that its past the point of consumerism -- it means folks are buying it almost solely because they realize its the best of class and its worth just a little more to have.
And just to make certain this doesn't get modded up:
Fuck All Ya'll
This got moderated +5 insightful? The hell? Was someone blinded by the low UID and edgy sounding pseudo-postmodern claptrap? The first paragraph/sentence doesn't even end -- it's a goddamned fragment.
The whole comment reads like some frothy liner note from a Rage Against the Machine album. "Consumerican"?! Holy shit.
Glad to see that freshman Social Psychology class is going so well for you...
First, we do not live in a democracy. It is a democratic republic. If it were a democracy, your statement would be correct. There is a level of responsibility that the electorate has in the actions of the elected, but not to the extent you are suggesting. In a pure democracy, the actions of the government are dependant on the opinions of the people. In a representative democracy, people are elected to represent the people in the decision making process, to make the right choice for the people, not necessarily the popular choice.
This is more than an esoteric distinction, it is a fundamental difference. BTW, this is why character is essential, and not a secondary consideration. We are electing people to stand in for us, to make decisions for us, not just to merely parrot our own opinions. If I'm going to have someone assigned to make all my decisions for me, I want to trust that they have some sort of moral framework on which to base their decisions.
The big revolution from, say, 1973 to 1980 was making computers affordable, an activity which the IBMs of the world had no interest in whatsoever. They saw microprocessors as a direct thread to mainframes and sought use them in limited ways and protect products like the DataMaster from cannibalization by cheap general-purpose PCs. The result was that the personal computer revolution was fueled by technies and hobbyists.
From 1980 to 1990 it was all about making computers usable and seducing ordinary people who had no interest in learning how to program in BASIC or learn a traditional CLI. The result was a revolution in usability. The overall computer usability experience (not just the GUI shell, but quality, installability, and usability of applications, ease of adding peripherals, etc.) probably peaked in the Mac world circa Apple System 7.
Ever since then, it's all been slowly downhill, as user familiarity and "computer literacy" have increased the tolerance of the general public for complexity, crashes, and other things that are now accepted as "what computers are like." Usability has been in a slow but perceptible decline.
You can see it in all sorts of little things. The latest Dell computer we got has six USB ports on the back, two of which are totally unlabelled and four of which are in close proximity to the letters "A," "B," "C," "D" in circles which are spaced closely together and are not aligned with the USB connectors they are probably labelling. There are color-coded, iconically labelled jacks for speakers and headphones, and but no obvious clue as to where mouse and keyboard are supposed to plug in.
Meanwhile, every new gadget I buy has a microprocessor in it... and usability problems. The $10 thermometer I bought in a drugstore has several different measurement modes, all incomprehensible, controlled by two unlabelled buttons and an LCD screen which displays not only the temperature but smiley faces and pictures of a running stick figure while emitting incomprehensible beeps. I can guess that if it tells me my temperature is 98-something degrees it is probably in Fahrenheit mode and if it tells me it's 37-something degrees it is probably in Celsius mode, but I'm darned if I know how to set it, or what it is that I'm doing that causes the mode to change.
My cell phone comes with a 100-page manual but frequently emits strange beeps and displays messages that the manual does not explain. (In this case, the explanation is that the cell phone user interface as experienced by the user is a combination of what the phone itself does and what the specific set of services offered by Verizon does. But the user experience is one of a low-quality UI.
Thank goodness there is at least one arena in which the market is apparently still rewarding usable design.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Canadian (n): An American in all but name, who is proud that s/he doesn't have the name.
(Yes, I'm Canadian.)
You seem to be confusing voluntary support with forced participation in socialism.
You seem to be under the impression that you can withdraw your support from your government. Go ahead, try it. Stop paying taxes. Right now. Start today with sales taxes. Refuse to pay them. The fact is that you are NOT a free man, and there are precious few places on this earth, if there are any at all, where you could claim to be free.
People like you are exactly the reason why I claim to be Canadian when I travel outside the country. Not because I'm unpatriotic, but because people like you have made it dangerous to be an American.