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Zune's Wireless Almost Totally Worthless
mikesd81 writes to mention an article at Engadget exploring what the Zune's wireless is good for. It turns out that, at least for now, that's not much. From the article: "You can search for and find other Zunes nearby. You can send songs / albums for the 3 x 3 trial. Songs past the three days / listens are deleted at next sync, but catalogued on your PC for record-keeping should you want to purchase them later. No word on whether Microsoft is going to keep track of which files are traded. You can send and receive image files for 'unlimited viewing.' (Oh, so copyrighted images aren't worth DRMing?) You can't: Connect to the internet, Download songs directly from the Zune store via WiFi, Sync to your computer via WiFi."
This from the company that brought us Bob and Clippy. MS is so consumed with keep aliances with companies by having heavily restricted DRM methods, it should come to no one as a shocker that the Zune is basically a "me, too" to the iPod, except it doesn't even do what the iPod can do.
Anything that has DRM and fails is a good thing.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Can't wait for homebrew\open source firmware for the Zune. DRM free sharing over WiFi :D
This sounds like a great way to inform the general public on why DRM blows. Look at all the cool functionality in there, imagine the awesome potential! Now... here's how we castrated it. How long till they crack it and get OSS running on it? Will there be wifi drivers for the hardware?
I'm still waiting for any mention of whether the Zune only lets you trade music purchased from the Zune Marketplace, or if it will allow you to trade any music files you have. I've seen endless speculation on what happens when it DRMs certain songs (see the recent Creative Commons fracas), but I have yet to see hard confirmation one way or the other on whether it will even allow you to share songs not purchased from MS.
This guy's the limit!
And the people who created all this content got paid how exactly?
I'd rather live in a world with has DRM and copyrights that expire after 5 years. P2P and copy all the old shit, leave the new stuff for artists to make a living.
Microsoft knows that this player is going to be hacked. As in windows piracy will be its success, people will buy it because it will be able to share music illegally with an illegal firmware. Once spread microsoft will close it a little more and open a "itune" online store rival.
Story repeats itself...
The trouble with wifi, although it seems like a great idea, is that its slow, takes a lot of battery power, and you can't charge the device using it. They could do a lot more with it, but it would kill the battery of a portable device fairly quickly.
I really can't figure this device out. Knowing how the Zune is an MS only device (Linux and Mac users need not apply), its seems likely to me the reason for zune is an "get locked into MS Windows/ Windows Media Player".
MS is not making a profit on the device, and content sale revenues are tiny.
Zune is a progressive attitude from Microsoft. However with Microsoft's penchant for tying Windows into everything, Zune will soon become hard-bloatware by the time it releases.
As it stands today, Zune (even with its crippled WiFi) MAY prove a formudable competitor to iPod, if the screen resolution and usage factor is good and NO bloatware.
The KISS attitude is a far cry for Microsoft. Their products tend to be bloatware almost always:
Expect the following "feature" from Zune when its released:
1. WiFi connection to internet (thus opening up way for new Worms and viruses).
2. Ability to add an SD Card.
3. Runs Pocket PC OS version 9.9 !
4. Comes with 30 GB hard-disk out of which 25GB is available to you! Rest 5GB is for the OS.
5. Comes with 128MB internal RAM !!! To run Zune Pocket PC OS.
6. Comes with a voice-activated interface that's enabled by default thus allowing your train pal to just say Maroon to make it switch playlists and start searching for Maroon 5 songs.
7. Comes with mouse-pointers.
8. Comes with virtual keyboard.
9. Plays AVI, WMV files inside Media Player inside Zune. Microsoft forgets Zune itself plays WMV natively.
For Microsoft multi-platform means Windows Mobile, Windows CE, Windows 98 SE, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows MCE, Windows Vista. All OS have to co-exist with one another and use same API. So Zune OS would be a version of Pocket PC Version 9.9
If Microsoft could pull its head out of the sand and Windows A*s am sure they would build a great new OS for Zune alone. Of course, it would never be compatible with Windows (as OS), but then who cares. Apple didn't exactly open up iPod API to developers.
No, Seriously, iam saying this is a good start, but am sure Microsoft will screw it up.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I *hate* drm, and the distrust of the end user that comes with it.
I'm working on a daz.com site that will hopefully solve that problem once and for all.
It is my nsho that record companies are dinosaurs that just don't quite realize they're already extinct and it will be my great pleasure to help nail shut the coffins.
Check out Janis Ian vs the RIAA to see how bad it really is.
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DRM is harmful to the economy. It results in businesses who create devices like the Zune, or software like iTunes, to spend millions of dollars adding this DRM.
Now, one might say that it is good for the economy, as the hardware and software developers who implement the DRM get paid for doing so. In a sense, such a suggestion may be right. But considered further, we see that such a suggestion is completely wrong. While those developers are producing, what they are producing is of little, if not negative, intrinsic value. On top of that, the consumers of the devices are forced to pay extra for this DRM functionality that the vast majority do not want or need. The end result is that resources are wasted, and that is always harmful for the economy.
It's much like the parable about the windowmaker who pays children to throw rocks through all the windows in the town, just so he can get paid fix them all later. It's well known that such a situation is not beneficial to the economy, because real value is not being created. The money paid to fix the broken windows, or in the Zune case paid towards the purchase and development of DRM, could have been better used in more productive ways.
Microsoft, for instance, could have released a DRM-less Zune as you propose. Then they could have put the money they saved towards improving the security of Windows. So in the end the developers still gets paid, the consumers aren't forced to waste their resources (ie. money) on DRM functionality they do not want or need, and the consumers further benefit from the security improvements to Windows. In short, DRM causes major harm to the economy.
I think people are focusing in on the "share with others" feature, which is how Microsoft is advertising the Zune but not really... pertinent. It's just all they can offer with the wireless now.
/. crowd expects.
Where this is going is to an "it just works" system where you can just bring your Zune into your car, the stereo detects it and you can start playing from it. It's basically undercutting the iPod/car adapters model since you don't have to go through the hassle of adapters and wires, etc. If they can do that and steal the iPod's battlecry (effective simplicity), they could steal a large chunk of the market quicker than the
Ironically, I have a cellphone running a Microsoft OS and I can do the same. It can also do it over Wifi using samba, FTP or HTTP. If it had an HD it would be better and smaller than the zune, but with SD cards at approx 20UKP / 2 gig it's not a big deal.
With 12-month contract mine actually cost a lot less, approx $50 USD.
That's where the irony just rolls over and dies. The MS phones cannot interact with MS wma DRM at all. They only way to listen to music is technically illegal, unless you are converting Creative Commons media.
It's telling that our culture seems to put emphasis on how shortlived it really is, instead of thinking of the future and how we can best preserve our legacy for those that will come after us.
I'd hate to be in the shoes of a 23rd century researcher trying to play back a 2005 issue SONY drm'd compact disc or the last copy of a tune surviving on some ancient file server in encrypted apple iTunes format.
At least make it mandatory that media have to be deposited in DRM free format with some agency to make sure that the future will have access to todays cashcows (cash mice ? Mickey comes to mind), just in case congress at some remote point in the future decides that Walts estate has earned enough dough.
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I thought he was saying that the bands will make more money because of an increase in revenue from their LIVE performances, which have traditionally been their main source of income anyway.
Record sales themselves may fall, but it's not the artists who suffer because of that but rather the labels/producers - and no one seems to have a bleeding heart for the music industry execs anyways becuase they're the ones behind all of this DRM crap in the first place, to protect their record sales!
It doesn't sound too far-fetched to me to imagine that if a band were to flood the market with free audio files of their best songs right before they came to town for a show, they'd probably see an increase in attendance relative to the turnout lacking the freely distributed music.
In a world where viral spreading of popular music was possible - read: no DRM or file-extension-specific players - this would be an especially useful and successful tactic, IMHO. Of course the band has to be good in the first place, but I took that as an assumption.
On another note, think about how nice it would have been if DRM would have been existant throughout history. Try to imagine archeaology with a past that had used DRM, encrypted scrolls, dutch masters that you can only see with the right kind of glasses, statues that desintegrate after being viewed more than three times on the same day by the same people.
It's telling that our culture seems to put emphasis on how shortlived it really is, instead of thinking of the future and how we can best preserve our legacy for those that will come after us.
There are people who are trying to preserve things for the future. I heard a story on NPR perhaps a couple of years ago about a group of people who were creating brand new 78 rpm records of current music. The reason was for preservaton because a 78 RPM records is apparently extrememly easy to play even without much technology. Personally, I fail to see how the music of eminem is going to help future generations living after the collapse of technology (perhaps as a warning of what to avoid?)
Our society may ultimately be remembered only for the work of those individuals.
Who is to say that our view of past societies isn't mostly based on things that those societies chose to preserve for the long term. They may very well have had other artworks that were shorter lasting that we won't know about.
I was reading about the history of photography. One thing I learned was that there were photographic techniques created in the 1700s that could take a photograph, but they had not yet developed technology to "fix" the photograph permanently. So, those images only lasted minutes in most cases.
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Mateo_LeFou wrote:
This sounds similar to a situation involving movies and books. In the case of movies, many old silent movies are being lost due to the unstable film stock that was used at the time. The films are literally disintegrating on the shelf and will be lost unless they can be transferred to a more lasting film stock.
With books, for a time (I think it was 50 years) many books were printed on paper that was prepared via a process involving acid. Due to this, the life span of these books are limited and as with the movies mentioned above, thousands of books will be lost forever. I remember reading somewhere that this will result in the biggest loss of information in history.
Finally, this is also an issue with computer files. Although copy protection is not much of an issue in this case, many files are no longer accessible because the program used to create them no longer exists. This has become a big problem with historical documents since they need to be accessible decades from now, and in some cases centuries from now.
I find it ironic that the thing which will supposedly save the music industry, DRM, will actually destroy music while the music with out DRM, which will supposedly kill the music industry, will actually save the music.
And yet, since the rise of filesharing, people who used to tour rarely now tour continuously. Springsteen is about to make his third swing through the UK in twelve months. Jackson Browne has been doing his acoustic solo/with David Lindley thing a lot, and I think I've seen him play three times in the past three years: prior to that it was twice a decade, if that. More prosaically, I've just bought tickets for Evan Dando --- charging 15 quid a head in a ~2000 capacity venue --- and Van Morrison, playing for 30 quid a head in a ~1000 capacity venue. Again, both were historically infrequent tourers. Morrison is these days doing gigs in small venues with a large band, usually only at weekends, and after the gig you can see him driving himself off in a somewhat ratty looking BMW 3 series. I refuse to believe that he's losing money on it, simply because he famously doesn't do things that lose money, and he's probably grossing less than 25K a night. Springsteen by contrast is charging 50 quid in an 8K venue, which is £400K per night: again, I refuse to believe you can lose money on that.
This was the theory behind the Voyager Golden Record, which one side of is nothing but audio. It is of course easy to play a record without much technology, because they were invented in the late 19th century and people back then, by our standards, "didn't have much technology," so maybe it's all a wash.
If we'd put the music of the Voyager Golden Record on a USB key in iTunes Fairplay ALC, I have little doubt that aliens with the capacity to recover a space probe from interstellar space could have decoded it (they have to be at least as smart as DVD Jon). Hell, it might have made it interesting for them.
If the last hundred or so years are any indication, the only music that becomes culturally significant is the music that can be authoritatively notated on paper. The recordings themselves are like gold on Inca temples: they're beautiful, far to beautiful to avoid being being stolen or otherwise being permanently locked away once the culture that honored them disappears. Paper is too boring to steal.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Record companies gouge? I will have you know the one and only album I had rights to that I am on sold a good 100k copies and to this day I still have a photocopy of my one and only $20 royalty check. Gouge? I WISH it was only a gouge! Gouge, gore, rip consume, spit out and/or defecate. Then they hit you up for manufacturing costs and you end up owing THEM!
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.