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Is the iPod Shuffle Playing Favorites?
marksilverman writes "Steven Levy at Newsweek is reporting that his iPod Shuffle seems to favor certain songs. Is Apple receiving kickbacks to promote certain artists? Apple denies it, of course, and Levy had the good sense to ask a mathmatician and a cryptographer who explained that it's probably just humans finding patterns where there are none." Less neurotically, both CNet and PCWorld have discussions of the Shuffle's interior spaces.
Your feeble attempts to appease us combined with recent bias against those in your fold that sympathize with moral acitons has left us no choice. We gave you every opportunity to make amends. We gave you every opportunity to turn yourselves around to become a decent employer. We gave you every opportunity to have a graceful end to your oppression of your contractors. Don't act so suprised. Your wrongdoings will be avenged. Guerilla warfare will be the end of you.
The end is near for you. Vengeance will be sweet. Have you nothing to say? No last words?
FIRST POST
It should be something like "When did Apple IPod stop playing favourites?"
I normally hate the people who post "this is news?' or "how is this 'stuff that matters'?", but damn, who the hell cares? The industry (including Slashdot, I guess) knows how sexy Apple is right now, and will find any excuse at all to put them in a story. This isn't news; it's flat-out guessing.
I douldn't be surprised if the Shuffle favors "independant", low-quality hipster music that nobody but your average self-proclaimed metropolitan homosexual Apple customer would care about.
Don't worry though. As soon as these bands become mainstream, they won't be favored by the Shuffle anymore. Once that happens, the music becomes irrelevant to the hipster crowd, and therefore, irrelevant to the iPod Shuffle programmers.
I'm not sure why it would require firmware updates, or at least deliberate interaction. They could definitely make iTunes send the data to the unit and have it do something about it without your attention; it would be best to have iTunes set some bit somewhere saying which songs are preferred. Then there would be no trivial-to-find evidence on the device.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hey Steven Levy you stupid fucking dildo, maybe you just have a lot of Steely Dan faggot music on your iPod Shuffle, did you ever think of that?
This guy is all like "durr, mr scientist, tell me if it is really random?" and the scientist is like "pfft, you are probably just seeing a pattern (fucking stupid ass)"
What a fucking waste of flesh, they pay this guy to write this article FOR ME TO POOP ON
I agree. It really doesn't make sense for them to have a song played any more than any other one. It's not like playing a song you already own more often is going to make you purchase something. It's not like advertisement...you already have it.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Who pays for their music downloads, anyway? Crikey.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
well.. they wouldn't really need to - they could just manipulate itunes's autofill(and update the thing there, it could just use the itunes's scoring in which case it would be a feature that they just didn't tell about).
however, it could still be shitty random, choosing only from next 20 or last 20 songs or whatever, making it hover around a particular set of songs(but which would not be chosen).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
For less than $50 in parts (most of them can sampled for free from friendly parts manufacturers, you can easily hack an iPod shuffle... can it run Linux? Yes. A shot of the reassembly.