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Details of Next Gen Zune Surface
KMG writes "Zune Scene has got a scoop about the next generation Microsoft Zune. There will be two new models; a flash memory based and a hard drive based. Zune with HDD will be thinner and have larger storage capacity while the flash based will feature Wi-fi, video playback. So will we see another try from Microsoft to beat Apple's iPod or it will be another vain attempt from the Redmond guys."
Will it come in brown?
Someone actually bothered to put up a fan site for it?
Bring it on I say. MS has shown that they can learn from their mistakes. The difference between the Xbox and 360 being a prime example. MS has the money to burn to keep making mistakes and learning from them. If that means they *eventually* make an iPod killer, so be it. The market needs more competing products, not less.
Zune with HDD will be thinner and have larger storage capacity while the flash based will feature Wi-fi, video playback.
that's a pretty great feature. While I'm not fond [at all] of the zune, that is a welcome addition. I'm just curious how much smaller the flash-based unit will be, if smaller at all. It would be interesting if they offered a smaller capacity, same-size unit with flash for the same price.
Are there any other flash-based portable devices like this that play video out of the box?
when is someone going to release a device like this that allows for auxiliary storage media? like with a USB port on the side to plug in a drive?
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Why is every new mp3 player hyped as the next "iPod killer" by every hack blog writer and fanboy? Why can't they coexist peacfully? Afterall, more choice is good for the consumer, right?
Microsoft has a history of getting things sort of right eventually, usually around version 5.0 of something. Zune 1.0 was like Windows 1.0. Zune 2.0 will be like Windows 2.0
A viable variant in this line of work will probably hit the market in time for the Christmas shopping season of the year 2012, long rumored to be the next season of the Apocalypse by the tin foil hat types, in cahoots with the Maya calendar freaks. Give my regards to Zule.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Sure my flash drive can stand 1000 Gs, but since I can't even stand 10, I doubt I'll be taking advantage of that feature.
With enough retries, Microsoft usually gets it about right and succeeds in the end. (Deep pockets are a huge advantage). But my crystal ball says portable music will increasingly just be an expected feature of other devices, mainly cell phones. I think Apple may have milked the standalone music player fad dry by the time Microsoft gets out a good product.
This is a halfarsed attempt to get some hype going in the way Apple does. Hint, hint, hint, but no clear release schedule. Zune Scene editors are very hard to spot in the wild - you are more likely to meet them at Ms campus. What a joke.
Because umm... flash is OUTRAGEOUSLY EXPENSIVE? Hard drives let manufacturers sell these things for $3-400 with 30-80GB of storage, a 64GB flash drive is still in the $6-800 range in and of itself. Granted, prices will go down, but people want their storage now, and don't care so much about having to replace the thing every couple of years.
I hate sigs...
If they can get the Wi-fi to do something, you know, useful, then the Zune 2 might be a neat little device.
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
Microsoft Zune may not be quite up to the iPod standard but it's getting there. One of the good things about having microsoft join the mp3 player wars is that it will make iPod come out with better updates to their ipod (the 5.5gen ipod was a little weak in the upgrade features). That and with the music copyprotecting systems getting lifted off itunes there is going to be some big changes happening with mp3 players in the future. The competition will make both of their products better.
Come on guys, you can do better than that! Poor grammar, incorrect punctuation, and the two options don't contradict each other. It's not even a humorous or ironic "there is one option but we're pretending there are two" setup, it's just confusing.
</troll>
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
I don't really think Zune will stand up to the iPod for a few generations of the device, even if that. But lets pretend that they do come out with a competitive alternative...will it create a price war between MS and Apple? Judging from the pricing of PC's vs Macs I'd say no, it might be a $50-100 drop in prices but there is something about the iPod, call it social acceptance or prestige of owning one, its kind of a status symbol to own an iPod. Unless Zune can get to that level as whatever you want to call it they won't be much of a competitor. Just look at how many other MP3 players are out on the market, but the first one anyone will mention is always the iPod.
It's about time to replace my ancient (1st gen) iPod, which has given heroic service. What would it take for me to consider another brand, any other brand, beside Apple?
1. must play MP3 and M4A (AAC)
2. must play nice with my Power Mac
3. must sync with iTunes (practically my entire music collection is in iTunes)
4. must work with the iPod dock connector in my car
Zune should have no problem with 1, might possibly be okay with 2, but is locked out of 3 & 4 -- along with every other non-Apple player on the market, thus far, to the best of my knowledge. If anyone knows differently, please correct me!
(And before anyone says anything. . . . No, my 1st gen iPod doesn't have a dock connector. In fact, my car stereo has only an aux input, it doesn't yet have an iPod dock connector either. My next one will. I'm looking to the future here.)
Then how do you account for the XBox 360 which is a superb console?
How were you planning to get your harddrive up to 1000 G's? You'd have to launch it at a speeding train.
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They'll keep at it no matter how bad their device is and eventually, people will accept them. BUT, it'll cost Microsoft 10's of billions and 10's of billions in losses. Does anybody remember the first Microsoft WindowsCE based handhelds over 10 years ago? I think they were clamshell versions and after about 3 years on the market, most of those vendors quit selling the WinCE devices for lack of interest/sales. Microsoft then renamed the product to MS PocketPC after the courts said they could use PalmPC and also allowed vendors to build portrait based versions. Another 7+ years passed and billions in losses but today, people accept the product.
/. ) stopped giving them any air time. Atleast make em pay you for it. IMO.
So it really doesn't matter what they put out, they'll just keep doing it, paying billions in marketing, discounts, and other incentives to vendors to keep pushing the product. The ONLY way this would not happen is if the press( hello
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The first Zune boasted Wifi too. Misleading as hell.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
So will we see another try from Microsoft to beat Apple's iPod or it will be another vain attempt from the Redmond guys.
Just because you don't put a question mark at the end of your badly phrased attempt to stir up the flames doesn't mean it's any less of an annoying and pointless question.
PLEASE stop with the inane, pointless, content-free rhetorical questions at the end of submissions. They're annoying, biased, and make Slashdot look like amateur hour. The conversations would flow just as well, if not better, without the obvious "here's what you should think about this story" cues. Too bad the editors keep falling for them.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
I don't think they are too expensive. You can buy 4GB flash cards for around $50.00-$75.00 Also the benefit of Flash is that you can take it out and put in larger flash as long as the device can handle it. Its portable so you can transfer flash into a friends device or whatever cool idea of portability you want to think up. Upgrading over time is also a pretty nice feature IMO.
Maybe microsoft is trying to put out the best product it can without having to one-up other companies?
In all seriousness, perhaps they should wait until apple is forced to open up their drm scheme so that they can compete in the installed market. Everyone knows that ipods have a life span of anywhere between 6 months and 2 years before either being dropped, over used, or just used (anyone remember the battery issue?). If microsoft could come out with a cheaper substitute that worked with itunes, they'd probably replace people's 3rd or 4th ipod.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
This one somehow reminds me of the futile attempts Nokia made to get into video gaming market. Some people might remember this as the NGage.
With music though, I think there is a point well below 64GB where "enough is enough". My entire music library on my computer *MIGHT* reach 12GB tops; it's probably closer to 8GB, and that's with 2000-3000 songs. Now I realize that many people have collections that dwarf that in size, but honestly, do you really need to tote around your ENTIRE collection in your pocket? Just seems like a 2GB flash card holding a couple hundred songs that you feel like listening to at the time would be just fine.\
Of course video is a whole different matter. Even the low-quality stuff on iTunes takes a few hundred megs, and decent quality TV episodes are gonna run 0.5 to 1GB each. For those I can see using the hard drive for the extra space.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
WOW! This is IT! Thinner and larger storage capacity both? This is the breakthrough! However did those Microsoft boys do it?
I'm buying one for my granddaughter. True, she already has two iPods (don't ask), but she won't want them once she hears about this! I sure hope Microsoft can meet the demand. I wonder if any of the stores are taking pre-orders now? I wouldn't want to pay $800 to get one on eBay, but, gosh, when all of her friends have them and are squirting songs to each other, I can't let her be the one to be left out.
Actually, if she has two iPods I'd better get her two Zunes.
And just the other day, my wife was saying to me "If Microsoft ever makes a Zune that is thinner and has a larger storage capacity I'd like you to get one for me."
It really sounds almost perfect, but I wonder... do you suppose... there will be new colors, too? Maybe a triple-shot!
This certainly puts the lie to all those rumor sites that were saying the next Zune would be thicker and have less storage.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I am just stating the manufacture specs for failure. (SanDisk)
Just when Microsoft manages to catch up to the iPod's current 2-year-old design, the iPod is going to move to something totally new. I'm sure the iPod will be updated sometime this year to look much more like the iPhone with a large, wide screen.
You could either count the first console as being the Windows CE capable Dreamcast, or go back further in time and consider the MSX.
They always get it right by version 3.0.
They scoffed at Microsoft Bob, but look what happened with Microsoft Bob 3.0.
They laughed at PlaysForSure, but where are all the skeptics now?
They winced at WinCE, but can you name a single cell phone that doesn't use it today?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Microsoft's being rather ambitious if they're going to be manufacturing these things by the millions, considering the poor reception v.1.0 got.
;-)
My biggest gripe with the Zune is that their most touted feature, the ability to throw songs at other people. My gripe is that it wasn't implemented properly. People should be able to stream the songs as soon as they start receiving them. (And kill the receive if the song is crap.
Where's the Gapless Playback?
Summation 2
You're confusing flash memory with flash memory cards (such as SD, MMC, CF, xD, someonepleasestopitwiththeformats). iPod nanos and shuffles as well as many other players have flash memory in them, not hard drives. the iPod video and Zune have hard drives, but it's not feasible because the flash *is* too expensive for these players for the capacity they need (movies take up a lot of space, and replacing a 80GB with an 8GB device isn't feasible, which is why they have different lines of players). Just because YOU only need 2-8GB of storage doesn't mean everyone is the same, and that is also why Apple's iPod nano is the top selling player.
I hate sigs...
You assume that he purchased all of his songs from the iTunes Music Store, rather than having just ripped them from CDs into iTunes (the software program). No Kool-Aid necessary.
My other post is +5, Interesting
There was no mention of DRM there whatsoever. AAC is an open format, it doesn't necessarily have Apple's proprietary DRM applied.
It sounds more like a convenience thing than anything else, they want to keep using iTunes and of course they don't want to have problems with it working with their mac. If they really wanted to they could switch away from iTunes and use another player without losing their music.
My music library is 60gb. My wife's music library is upwards of 200gb.
There is still a place for high-capacity portable players. We may not be typical, but we definitely exist.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Salesman: The Zune allows you to wirelessly share songs with friends...
Customer: That sounds cool.
Me: But you can only play the shared song 3 times and it deletes itself after 3 days.
Customer: Thats lame and pointless then.
Test your net with Netalyzr
not just that, but you also have to consider that flash memory also has a smaller number of reads and writes before failure. the industrial grade units tend to be higher but are extremely cost inhibitive for this application. given, if you do hit the limit, it's probably time for a new player, but it's a better argument against flash than claiming flash's 1000G as an argument for it. modern hard drives are a great deal more robust than their older counterparts, I still wouldn't go tossing them into walls, but if you plan on dropping and trowing your player then you probably should get a cheap flash one anyway as the housing, screen and connectors will most likely be destroyed in the types of impacts that modern hard drives need to fail. and before someone pipes up with random hard drive crashes, flash is just as, if not more prone to crashes as hard drives, I've seen a large number of flash drive that are simply no longer readable.
He didn't mention that his music collection was bought from the iTunes Music Store, just that his entire collection is in iTunes, the application. He may not have any issue with losing music because of DRM restrictions.
My entire music collection is in iTunes, but none of it is encumbered with DRM, as I ripped it from my own CDs.
SlashDot used to be amateur hour, but these days it's mostly warmed over PR pieces from large "tech" corporations. (30% Google PR pieces, 15% Apple PR pieces, 15% game company PR pieces, 10% Microsoft FUD pieces, etc.)
If you're depending on SlashDot for anything more than entertainment value, you're probably getting duped right now.
The annoying questions at the end are basically added at the end of each PR piece to make it sound like each piece wasn't just copied straight from the related company's (or competitor's) PR department.
Remember the flash they're talking about here for the Zune is an iPod nano-like device, and similarly there is the iPod nano from Apple. These are the devices that you guys really are targeted at. Really the only thing that I can see that might be different is putting in a CF, SD or other kind of card slot so that you can upgrade the capacity if you want, but I guarantee you most people wouldn't upgrade it at all, they'd just get a new player when they wanted more space (remember that a large portion of the public have a 4-6MP digital camera and still use the 16MB card that came with it, and change the resolution down to 640x480 or 1600x1200 to be able to take more pictures, thus negating the fact that they chose a 6MP camera instead of a 1-2MP camera).
I hate sigs...
You could if it wasn't for the small fact that the Dreamcast was Sega's console. Designing the OS for a console and the overall console itself are two totally different things.
Then how do you account for the XBox 360 which is a superb console?
Do you mean the Xbox 360 Elite?
Summation 2
In many ways I agree with you - my extensive collection built up over 35 years or so has ~25Gb of music but...
The lads I play poker with on a Monday night who are not technical are, in the main, the target audience and for them bigger is better. Their phones have to have the latest gadgets and they can tell you the number of pixels in their cameras without having to think about it, despite the fact that I pretty sure none of them would know a pixel if they met one in the street. I'm in a desparate battle to stop them all upgrading to Vista 'because it's new'
It all really dates back to the playground and a 'my mp3 player has more storage than your mp3 player' attitude. That's what the purchasing public wants.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
With music though, I think there is a point well below 64GB where "enough is enough". My entire music library on my computer *MIGHT* reach 12GB tops; it's probably closer to 8GB, and that's with 2000-3000 songs. Now I realize that many people have collections that dwarf that in size, but honestly, do you really need to tote around your ENTIRE collection in your pocket? Just seems like a 2GB flash card holding a couple hundred songs that you feel like listening to at the time would be just fine.
If I didn't want the spontaneity of being able to instantly pull up and play Cream's albums, followed by mid-career Madonna, then Korn, then Tangerine Dream, some Isaac Hayes, some classic Who, then Enya's latest, I wouldn't even buy music, I'd just listen to the radio.
I buy music to have convenient, rapid access to what I want to hear. I don't buy music to have it sit on some distant shelf; if that was the utility of it, there's a library just down the street with a fairly good collection.
Why shouldn't I want a copy of my whole collection in my pocket? At least I'm realistic enough to know that given the size of my collection, it's not going to happen soon, though.
What DRM lock-in? I'm not the original poster, but my requirements are the same. I've got a few DRM tracks (most I got for free), but not enough to worry about. And I can easily un-DRM them.
But those are my requirements, and there's only one device that fits them all.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
360 is still has, by leaps and bounds, a far larger installed base than any of the other next-gen consoles. Discounting the Wii (which services a different market entirely), the 360 is selling like hotcakes in comparison to the other major competing next-gen console.
Smartphones are far from flops. Blackberry's market share is being eaten away ever so steadily by Win-Mobile devices. It's not an avalanche victory, but it is going well for MS nonetheless.
For MS's failures, they are getting quite a few things right. And this is coming from me, a die-hard Apple user.
This has less details than the April 1st Zune 360 article. But instead a nice big Google adwords banner running down the right hand side of the page. As for someone writing an unoffical Zune fansite running into an MS employee by accident, how likely is that? It looks like astroturf to me.
Anyway the Zune 360 in the April fools post sounds a lot better than the Zune announced on Zune Scene.
With music though, I think there is a point well below 64GB where "enough is enough". My entire music library on my computer *MIGHT* reach 12GB tops; it's probably closer to 8GB, and that's with 2000-3000 songs. Now I realize that many people have collections that dwarf that in size, but honestly, do you really need to tote around your ENTIRE collection in your pocket? Just seems like a 2GB flash card holding a couple hundred songs that you feel like listening to at the time would be just fine.
Ya, I agree. Someone should come out with a flash based music player.
You'd be surprised - I got an 8Gb nano just as they game out figuring that my music collection was unlikely to beat that size
Turned out it already filled it - actually had to cut some out.
Now I have about 14Gb and have to pick and choose play lists....
I'll admit there are tracks I haven't even listened to yet in there but I really don't have the time to trim it all down more neatly
what I'd love is a 8Gb nano with a microSD or similar slot on the side - especially one capabele of taking 4 or 8gb cards
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
Seconded. I won't touch an iPod, but I have a Creative Zen Xtra which came with a 60GB laptop hard drive inside it. It's full, and has been for some time. Every time I want to add some more music, I have to agonize over what to delete. Planning to swap the drive for a bigger one in the near future.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=935 48
I don't know if these players are any good, but they are compatible with iTunes and they aren't made by Apple.
Unless you're being dropped yourself, I doubt you'd have to worry about it too! I had a 30 gb Creative Xen MP3 player that, after having dropped it from my lap to the ground ONCE (getting out of my car), busted it. (It now rattles and won't boot...) So personally I've had to use flash drive mp3 players, I can't afford to bust another one!
Others have already jumped to answer this, but just to make it official. . .
When I wrote that my whole music collect is in iTunes, I'm talking about stuff ripped from CDs and acquired from. . . ah, other sources. I haven't bought music from ITMS thus far because I didn't want my music collection contaminated with DRM. When the non-DRM tracks become available, then I plan to give ITMS a spin.
And yeah. . . It's a convenience thing. I could live without a dock connector for my car, but I would be missing something highly convenient. I could live with a player that doesn't sync with iTunes, but it would be a pain in the neck. Why should I subject myself to a pain in the neck rather than simply buy an iPod?
Using iTunes to store and organize my whole music collection was a revelation to me. I can't imagine going back to the multiple shelves of CDs that I used to have stacked here.
The reason is that with a larger collection, lets say 12,000 songs, who wants to spend the time to pick which 8,000 song to sync to the device?????
And when I want to hear something, I want to hear it!
So, I will not buy an MP3 player that doesn't hold my entire collection of music. I also want TV shows and movies. Eventually I plan to put every movie and TV show I own on DVD onto my computer and sync it to my iPod.
I like hard drives. I'm not a child - I can carry around an iPod without dropping it.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Don't forget watermelon-colored!
http://www.skullsecurity.org/blog/
Both: we will see another try, and it will turn out to be a vain attempt. Oh yeah, and here's a question mark for you:
"?"
butter the donkey
Really a shame. So sorry you failed reading comprehension. What a shame. Now, go kill yourself, dufus.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
... will it run linux?
-1 not first post
Make the WiFi capable of easily handing off songs without attaching DRM and we can talk. Unleash what WiFi could really do on these and you're in business.
Make it so that if you're at a Starbucks and like the background music playing your Zune can check what artist and song and buy the album from the server streaming the music at Starbucks if you wish.
While you're at, if you have WiFi you should never have any reason to need to "dock" right? Just be on the same 802.11 network and sync over it.. right?
But I agree, give MS time, and let them throw their money in a hole slowly developing a good product.
I also agree that anybody whining that they can't switch because they have so many tunes locked in on iTunes should have to suffer through an inferior product until they get the DRM lock-in monkey off their back.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Okay, I'm tired of this. 260,000 MB of mp3s at approximately 1MB/min of music means you have 180 days worth of music if you ran it constantly without ever repeating. Seriously folks, it would probably take at least 5-10 years for you to realistically listen to 260GB of music. I have a hard time believing that you have a) ever listened to all of the music you own and b) have any reasonable use for carrying it all with you on a portable device. 5 days worth of music on constant play with no repeats is a little over 7GB. If that's not enough space for you, then you need a life.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
It's fun for us iPod people to make fun of the Zune *squirt* but after trying it out it's not really that bad. *squirt* Let there be competition *squirt* in the market! That's the whole point. That's why it's ok to have a bunch of linux distros and a couple of BSDs *squirt* and different desktop enviroments *squirt* like KDE and Gnome. Hopefully this will push Apple to innovate even more and release even better products *squirt* like bluetooth or wifi (I'd prefer bluetooth for neighbors but I know it's not the best protocol). Innovation doesn't hurt *squirt* anyone. Oh, you've got some, uhm, on your face.
None of the apple Flash-based players have removable flash memory. You're stuck with whatever's there.
I like the hard drive players. They hold so much data, aren't loud, don't get very hot, last a long time, have excellent transfer rates, and are cheap in comparison to Flash Memory.
If you can't remove it, I'd rather have a 60 or 80GB hard drive in there unless I was completely concerned with the size of the unit. You can't have everything.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
He said supports MP3 and M4A.
iTunes DRM'ed songs are M4P (think 'p' for protected). (which will mean the EMI ones are M4A as well). The interesting thing is that a number of WinMo things are starting to support M4A quite well - shocked me when I stuck in an SD card with my defanged iTunes Store songs and they were playable. And naturally, I always test my defanged songs using VLC (which plays M4A/AAC trivially).
My purchasing decisions are not subject to your value judgements. Fortunately, there are companies that want my money, and sell devices that suit my needs.
By happy coincidence, there are also companies that want your money, and sell devices that suit your needs. Your purchasing decisions are not subject to my value judgements.
See how this works?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Everyone know Microsoft can't get anything right until the third attempt. This is only the second.
Microsoft's hardware has always been spot-on. I love their home networking routers and wireless cards, and I'm kind of upset they stopped making them. (My 802.11g router from Microsoft has been by far the most reliable home networking device I've ever owned.) Same with their keyboards and mouses. And the Xbox.
Also, their Office products for Mac were pretty damn good even in the first incarnation in the mid-80s, at least as good as the OS and technology of the time would allow.
Also, it's "everyone knows". If you're going to throw out unfounded flamebait statements, at least use better grammar.
Comment of the year
do you really need to tote around your ENTIRE collection in your pocket? Just seems like a 2GB flash card holding a couple hundred songs that you feel like listening to at the time would be just fine.
Feel like listening to at WHICH time? The time where I sync my MP3 player to my computer, or the time where I take it out of my pocket and want to listen to something?
Thirded. My iTunes music library is currently just over 45GB. That's without any video.
However, I don't see the need for a portable device that will hold my entire collection, I certainly don't listen to everything every day! That's why my iPod is an 8GB nano. It has plenty of capacity for whatever music, etc. I want to listen to.
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
(1) So will we see another try from Microsoft to beat Apple's iPod
or
(2) will [it] be another vain attempt from the Redmond guys.
False Dichotomy.
It will be both.
ShoutingMan.com
Get a sandisk sansa, you can get the 8 gig model for about $150. It has the micro-SD expansion slot. I personally love the thing, but I'm not one of those people who need to have their entire music collection in their pocket either.
I got nothin'
Just so you know, putting a non-DRM file into iTunes does not, I will repeat for the special people out there, DOES NOT add DRM.
If you buy from iTMS, you have DRM on those files. If you just rip something with iTunes it will not have DRM.
How this FUD keeps getting modded up is beyond me.
I actually agree with you. Once your collection is large enough not to fit on any available player, you HAVE to manage your collection, and therefore it's not difficult to set up some smart playlists so you can have your "Deserted Island Mix" on your iPod at all times, and a good leavening of random good stuff.
My collection is just barely small enough that I can keep everything that's not total crap on my portable device. My wife has to be more selective, and likes her blue iPod mini just fine.
(Why don't I delete the total crap? Dunno. I suppose that someday, I might actually want to listen to Yngwie Malmsteen. I don't understand why that might be, but it's not impossible.)
Nevertheless: Flash has advantages, but cost per gigabyte ain't one. There is, therefore, a market niche for large-capacity portable devices. Hence, hard drives.
Are they for everybody? Of course not. Are they valuable for some people? Obviously. Isn't it cool that we've got a free market so everybody can get what they want?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I guess my dislike of the Zune wifi features were too early and/or poorly implemented. I'm not going to discuss the details of the shortcomings of the Zune's Wi-Fi feature. Some people may credit them with being the first to offer wi-fi of any sort but did anyone ever think about why no other manufacturer implemented it first? (Apple, Creative, Sandisk, etc) The reason being was that wireless would be (and still is) impratical.
Sure it would be cool to send songs wirelessly but that is only pratical for a few songs. You cannot transfer whole collections (measure in GBs) in a reasonable amount of time given the current state of wireless technology. 802.11g has a max rate of 54Mbps. 802.11n (540Mbps max) is the only version that can handle the rates required but wasn't in draft status until recently and won't be ratified until 2008. While USB2.0 has 480MBps and Fire400 has 400Mbps now. So if you were a manufacturer comtemplating wireless wouldn't you wait until 802.11n was more mature before implementing wireless?
Even if wireless had the transfer rates required today, there are issues with battery life and security. I have a large collection and it took over 20 minutes to put into my iPod using USB2.0. Transferring all that data wireless is going to drain the batteries quickly. And then there is security. I can see a lot of ramifications with using wireless transfers. Eventually these can be overcome but it will take time. I think MS was a bit too early. Just my 2cents.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
By "standard", we mean "right enough to be accepted by most people".
So yea, MSFT is "right" about a lot of things. Both past and present.
That does not mean, however, they are "right" about the Zune. Personally, I think it's wrong. Its the wrong product at the wrong time with the wrong capabilities and features.
I like having a choice from all my music, depending on my mood. It's not about trying to listen to all my music all at once. I also have a 1GB shuffle and it sucks when I want to listen to a song I didn't put on it. I suppose it's the same reason I have several thousand books in my house. Choice is cool!
I drank what? -- Socrates
I think the main reason is that the iPod is a digital media device, not just a digital music player. You can put photos, videos, etc. on there. I use it as a portable backup drive for my laptop and to transfer files.
Well, while your numerical analysis is interesting, the argument that no one would need that much space is fallacious. The parent poster never said they wanted to listen to their 200+ GB of music... sequentially. Some days I'm in the mood for blues. So, I want a good selection of my blues albums ready on my player. But I might not listen to any of it on any particular day. Wanting access to a large selection of music for personal use is not a sign that the individual lives plugged in to their player hour after hour. They might have a small amount of time they can actually enjoy their music and want to choose the exact selection they want to hear at the time they want to listen. Just like my Tivo, I want that thing loaded so if I want to watch TV, something good is available.
Still it is interesting to think that it would take that long to listen to that much music sequentially. I have a portable XM player that can record 5 hours of content. It seemed like a lot when I got it, but it is funny how quickly you start to feel like you wish you had more space.
"Contrarily the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea... "
Yeah, right. And then monkeys flew out of his butt.
It would explain the color choice, though.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I have some 800+ CDs that I've been buying over the last ~19 years. No, I don't listen to all of them all the time, but as things come and go I've heard everything there at least 5 times. My MP3 drive has around 200+ GB of files, and that's just the stuff I've kept after listening to everything at least twice. No iPod will ever hold my complete library and I don't expect it to, and since I mainly listen to music at work, not everything in my collection is condusive to working to in an office environment.
Take the long view: this stuff piles up after months and years, it's not like most people just suddenly had 80 GB of music out of nowhere!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Its a lot easier to sell something with 40-50-60 GIGABYTE then to inform the consumer why your 5 gigabyte device is better suited for some applications. There is also the issue of people with large library's and they MUST have the whole thing with them.
You are all a bunch of idots.
When you drop something a couple of feet, it accelerates for some fraction of a second, makes contact and decelerates in some smaller fraction of a second. (1 m/s)/0.01s = 100 m/s^2 = 10g. So it is rather easy to generate momentary accelerations in the 10s or 100s of gees. Having some head space is generally a good idea, so there isn't anything that crazy about 1000.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
360 is still has, by leaps and bounds, a far larger installed base than any of the other next-gen consoles. Discounting the Wii (which services a different market entirely), the 360 is selling like hotcakes in comparison to the other major competing next-gen console.
As long as you don't include its toughest competition, the XBOX 360 is doing batshit-awesome !
The reason is that with a larger collection, lets say 12,000 songs, who wants to spend the time to pick which 8,000 song to sync to the device?????
I don't know about you, but when I do that and don't do play lists... I end up fast forwarding through 10 consecutive songs until I find something I feel like listening too then repeating the steps when that song is done.
Apparently, I've collected a great deal of music over the years that I don't actually like anymore all the time, but sometimes I am in the mood for. Hence... It is easier to choose which songs I want to listen too.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Well, mainly because a lot of consumers, myself included, want to take their entire cd collection with them...not just flavor of the month selections. With well over 1000 cds in my collection, plus the fact that I rip all my music at nearly quality (I have good ears and good headphones to boot, I want my fidelity), I'm welcoming larger players with open arms. I would like to one day have my entire cd collection with me where ever I go. Sure, not everyone is a music nut / audiophile, but with other features such as USBtoGo, smaller players fill up quickly.
That being said, I also have a small 1 gb flash player with fm tuner for the gym and quick trips around town. There's definitely a markup for both devices.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
So, $50-$75 for 4 gigs is $500 - $750 for 40 gigs and $1500 for the 80 gigs my iPod has. Hmm..
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Help test the
I see the buzz on wifi for blackberrys. How hard is it to put wifi in a flash-based zune the size of a nano? Smart phones already have a file management system and a way to handle connecting, would the overhead of DOS be too much for something the size (or maybe its the price) of a nano.
thanks
That is a good argument for a flash device, not a good argument against a hard drive device.
What if you have your music stored in FLAC or extremely high bitrates? Then your assumption of 1MB/min is very far off. I personally would love a way to have all of my music available to me on the go. That way I would never have to waste my time figuring out which songs I might want to listen to in the near future, I could just throw it all on there and go. It's not like people want to listen to all of their music at the same time sequentially. They just want the option to listen to what they want, when they want. That's perfectly reasonable to me.
I once accidently dropped my harddrive-based player three feet onto a metal stairwell. It then would randomly hang and became basically unusable.
I've dropped my flash-based Nano from three feet onto concrete numerous times. It still plays perfectly.
The cake is a pie
Its not a special business model for apple. Microsoft has the same model. Look at the zune. Look at Windows Media. Look at Windows. Look at IE. Look at Office! Its very common in the computer industry.
By the way going open can be lock in too. If you think about it, you are stuck on that open source program which is not supported by a company (possibly). Say you use some player with say ogg from source forge. Then next week the OSS movement decides ogg sucks. That guy stops writting the app, a new GTK version comes out and boom.. your little sound program doesn't ship with your linux distro anymore. You can't run the same kernel forever. Someday you'll have to buy new hardware and want it to actually work.
I know, you're thinking but its open so I have the source code. Well guess what, not everyone can write code. I'm not thinking of an old school linux user, but more of people in business environments or home users that are typical. (the ms/apple crowd) Linux adoption means the community has to standardize and support things for the long term. This has to be addressed in the OSS community. Some apps are replaceable like web browsers. Some apps are not. Read the palm article threads with users complaining about a switch to linux could mean the end for their favorite palm app.
Someone else pointed out that you are wrong about iTunes DRM. I'd just like to clarify that burning to a CD/DVD only works for music. Video is still DRM'd from the ITMS. I know because I've been using iTunes since it came out and now I have this huge collection of content that isn't easy to migrate to MidnightBSD. Oddly, I boot into windows to use iTunes (for videos) and for gaming to a lesser degree. I could move my music over if I felt like burning all the cds/dvds.
Obviously my argument applies to any open source operating system.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
If not then it's a no go from me. Squirt 1.0 and the update Squirter 1.5 just didn't have the squirting range I was looking for. Rumors about Squirt 2.0 include a 30 foot radius and a cool squirt sound when it's done.
Can I bum a sig?
Wow I didn't mean to start a flamebait posting. I am more of a minimalist but more power to all the audiophiles out there that like their hard drives filled with years of music. I have no problem with that. I for one, am actually not one to say that anyone should be restricted to any device, size, type, mime whatever. I think technology is great for that reason.
The fact I can be happy with 4GB of Flash and you can be desire more than 80GB is awesome.
In regards to the iPhone taking off, there is another thing holding in back in the smartphone market. It does not integrate with Exchange. If you look at who is carrying around Blackberry's and similar products, it's the people who need to stay connected to work on the go. As someone who works in consulting, a lot of the higher-ups are constantly bouncing around to different client sites all over the country/world. Even during normal business hours, they don't have an opportunity to check e-mail in the traditional way. Almost all of these types of people carry some kind of smart phone with Exchange integration. It is the only way for them to do their jobs. The iPhone is not for these people because it will not sync with Exchange. I don't know about other enterprise mail servers, though, so maybe the Lotus Notes folks are in the clear.
This feature may be in the works in the future, just like I'm pretty sure Cingular won't be the only provider in the long run. But I feel that this is the main thing holding it back.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
Well, I think it depends not only on the size of your collection, but, to what level of quality you rip your songs to....higher bitrate will make for larger files for each song.
And I'd be one of those that would like to have their entire (or as close to it) collection at their immediate disposal. I hate it when I'm away from home, and really want to hear a song I think of...and not have it with me. I also never know what I'm in the mood to listen to , till I'm in the mood for it. Large storage helps if you have that way of enjoying music.
And like you'd mentioned earlier...if you're talking video...well, that really sucks up memory space...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Not to beat a dead horse, but that's sort of my point. You could pick 5 different genres and record 24 contiguous hours of music from each genre on an 8GB portable music device. Contrary to the belief of several posters below super high bit-rate or lossless audio is not really appropriate for portable audio. At 128kb/s it's impossible for anyone to tell the difference between that and CD quality in your car stereo with road noise and other background. The same is said for non-noise-canceling headphones in the office. I mean sure, it's your money and your drive space so do what you want with it. People are just kidding themselves though if they think it's magically superior.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
OK, I've never actually used a Zune, but I will say this--Microsoft is poised to actually make a significant dent in Apple's sales. I've maintained all along that it is not healthy for the recording industry in general for one company to have a dominant position in market share. We need competition. Apple needs competition. Apple simply cannot maintain their leadership position for very much longer, for the very simple reason that Apple has already commoditized the digital audio player. The iPod and iTunes experience clearly works for a huge number of users, and there isn't anything about it (aside from a few questionable patents) that prevents any other company from nearly duplicating the iPod's success. The staggering fact that no other company has been able to get out of their own way for long enough to do this is not evidence that it cannot or will not be done.
First of all, the one thing that everyone needs to wrap their heads around is that there is no effective way to protect digital content. DRM simply doesn't work from a technical standpoint, let alone a human rights standpoint. Once Apple (and by extension, everyone else) starts selling DRM-free files, there nothing preventing you moving your iTunes purchases (or any other digital content purchases) from device to device, regardless of manufacturer. When this happens, every other DAP manufacturer gets access to the iTunes store, and Apple gets access to everyone else's stores. I still think that DRM-free means the recording industry will be gutted, but that's going to happen even if we keep the DRM, so we may as well just get it out of the way now. There will always be a market for recordings that cost money, but it's going to be a lot smaller than the current mostly-CD based model. I think the recent report of CD sales being down 20% year over year is the first evidence that we've reached the tipping point.
Second, how many "innovative" features can you pack into a DAP before you run out of options? Let's face it, mobile convergence is upon us. The iPhone will be the first of the next generation of mobile computing platforms, but development isn't going to stop there. I'm sure that within five years, we will all be carrying primarily one mobile device. This class of devices will integrate all the telephony, Internet access, audio/video entertainment, gaming, photography, data storage, and PDA functions into one relatively seamless package. We've come close so far, but not quite grasped the cigar, with devices like Palm and Windows Mobile smartphones, the Nokia 770/N800, Sony Mylo & PSP, etc. Possibly, there may even be a few more new features that could be added, but eventually, you're going to reach a point of diminishing returns.
What are the main hardware factors that need to be solved? Battery life, flash memory prices, and power consumption, all of which we are making great strides on every year. What are the main software factors that need to be solved? Well, really none. It's more of a marketing issue than it is a software issue. Apple has already demonstrated (and conclusively, at last) that there actually is a market for software that works well and easily with iPod+iTunes. The complexity of Windows is becoming less of a factor, especially when you consider that from the mobile devices perspective, Apple has also demonstrated that you can make a standalone software package that works the same way on Windows that it does on Mac OS X.
So, bring it on Microsoft! And bring it in brown! I like brown! It's not going to kill the iPod or iTunes, but it will make everybody sit up, take notice, and keep innovating.
Maybe the Zune doesn't work as well as it should, but it was a good idea. I definitely think that we'll see a "squirt" feature not long after the iPhone ships, if it doesn't have it on day one. It runs Mac OS X. The programs are Dashboard widgets. I predict that the development platform will not be as closed as some others think. It will be hackable, and it will be hacked, at least in the classic sense and not t
You then add this spin, whereby you somehow suggest that your "50 hours a week" of listening at/to/from work might only be around 2 weeks. You don't actually say it, though, because it looks far better for your so-called "point" to use the figure of two weeks, when even at your 50 hours a week, said collection would take 13 MONTHS to listen to.
Let's consider this 3100 hour album collection, too. Give or take, an hour an album is a good bet. Some electronica (and others, but less so) fills the 74 minute CD. Plenty of other albums are 45 minutes, or less, so I think this isn't bad. So, we're looking at 3,100 albums. Not a bad effort. Let's say $12 a CD. That's fair, I think. Many albums go for $14-20. Some are discounts, $5-10.
Not a bad little music collection there, all thirty-seven thousand dollars worth of it.
I have no doubt many people have a music collection of this size. I have little doubt that many people who do haven't acquired it all legitimately. Some certainly have.
3100 albums requires a lot of shelf space, too. 105 ft of it, in fact. No small task. And that's before we even consider records.
Speaking of assholes:
The fuck are you talking about? The guy you labeled as "ASSHOLE OF THE YEAR" was specifically responding to:
But hey, let's not minor details like that stop your rant proceeding full throttle, huh?
you mean the 80GB your iPod will always have...
So you encode everything losslessly? Because even at 320kbps, your 800 CD collection would not even fill barely half of that 200+GB of files? That'd be nice... a good commitment to your music. :)
FLAC compresses at around 600kbps. At 250kbps there's well over 3,100 albums in that collection, so we're looking at around 1400 CDs in that collection. Definitely feasible, but uncommon.
I'm sorry, but shouldn't you be working and interacting with coworkers rather than listening to music? I personally find it really annoying when I want to ask someone a question and I either have to tap their shoulder to get their attention or yell really loud because they always have their headphones in their ears. I'm not saying people shouldn't listen to extensive amounts of music, but the work place is probably one of the worst places to wear headphones, and behind the wheel probably ranks up there with it. Sam
Why? Why do you bother? Exactly what is so wrong about upgrading to Vista? Sure, presently it's a waste of money, but is it your money they spend?
And exactly why is that wrong? If mp3-players and cell-phones are cheap enough for your mates to not really worry about what features they really need, or which models give the best bang for the buck, but can simply buy whatever they want, does that make it evil to do just that?
Exactly why do you feel that it is somehow your duty to tell other people how to spend their money? Even if they asked for your advice, that doesn't mean that they have to follow it.
By the way, do you take the same 'superiority' attitude with cars? If your mate buys a hot new sports car, are you going to argue with him that because of speed limits, traffic, and/or road quality, he will never be able to use its full potential, or that more horsepower does not equal better car? Are you going to ridicule him because he wanted a bad-ass car instead of a practical small japanese car that gives more bang for the buck? It's not like your mate wouldn't already know this. If he cared about it, he would buy a budget car, a budget cell-phone, and a budget mp3-player. The fact that he doesn't tells you that he has other priorities than you.
I was curious exactly what you'd have to do to get 1,000 Gs, so here are some back-of-the-envelope numbers for comparison:
r ation/ referencing medical literature from helmeted motorcycle crashesc ess_of_Wales
It wouldn't survive being fired out of a handgun (zero to 800fps along a 5" barrel [1] implies an acceleration, assuming I did my math right, of ~468000 m/s^2 or about ~47,000 Gs).
Still, it's better than your brain inside your head, which can only take about 150-200 Gs before you start doing serious/irreparable damage [2] (the rest of your body is a lot lower, like 8-20 Gs depending on direction and body part, but your head alone can take a bit more since it doesn't have all those squishy bits).
I was curious how fast you'd need to be going in a typical car accident to get 1,000Gs: The fatal accident that killed Princess Di was supposedly somewhere around 70-100 G [3]; if we assume that was the result of crashing at 120 MPH or so, 190 km/h [4], we can extrapolate that to get 1,000G, you'd need to have a speed of around 1682 MPH. [5] (That doesn't say anything really about surviving a car crash at that speed, because obviously there are mechanical and thermal problems involved...)
So if you swallowed one of those things, I think it's pretty clear that you'd be mush long before it got bothered.
[1] Pulling these numbers out of my ass, but they're roughly typical for a 1911.
[2] http://hypertextbook.com/physics/mechanics/accele
[3] ibid.
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Diana,_Prin
[5] You use the acceleration value and speed to calculate a "time" for the collision, around 0.07s, and then use that to get the velocity for an acceleration of 1000G. I never said it was that reliable a figure...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Remember ClubIE.com? It was a "fan site" set up by Microsoft ca. mid-1996 for Internet Explorer. Apparently they let it lapse and now it's domain-squatted.
-- Old Man Kensey
And what's with your beef. You've made a huge number of assumptions because I suggest that the target audience for mp3 players have other priorities than practicality. It's you that has assumed value jugements - and yes, my Mercedes was purchased with my heart, not my head.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
You can always spot the younger Slashdotters in these threads. "OMG how could you possibly need that much music? It would take 5-10 years of reasonable listening to hear it all!!!".
:)
Kids, some of us have been listening to music for several decades. 100GB of music might seem like a lot when you've been into it for 3 years. Not so when you've been into it for 30.
Hell, I can plow through 100GB of reasonably-encoded mp3s (say 1000 albums at MOST) in just under a year, between listening at home, work, and in the car. Which means that I've have heard every single one of those songs 20some times by now. No thanks, I prefer a little more variety
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
.. and it will always contain the same amount of music over time. what's the use of 3 million songs when you already have two?
Call me again when they've released an iPod that can contain all the music in the known universe. Then I might switch to a higher capacity one.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Wait for Microsoft to claim they were already talking to the labels about DRM-free music when Apple stole their idea.
...eww.
I'll take it!
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
This short article seems to me as just a way to get some free publicity for the Zune (Slashdot front page will reach a few million just by itself). Seriously how many "Zune Scene Editors" are there? Maybe a handful if you're generous, but more likely one. A random business trip will not have you sitting next to a Zune engineer on a plane (or where-ever) who will freely talk about the product. There are either details left out such as this editor visiting the Redmond campus and running into this guy eating lunch in the cafeteria or, much more likely, this is a ploy by the Microsoft marketing machine. I'll have to believe the one that is more plausible.
My library's about 6000 songs plus the complete run of Space Ghost, Sealab, ATHF, Brak, MST3k, and a few other fun shows. Plus the movies. NetFlix + handbrake = :)
The music and a few movies fills my iPod easily, so I have to pick and choose what I bring with me. And I almost ALWAYS wish I had brought something that I didn't.
I guess my point is that with a 2gig flash card, you can bring 200 songs or whatever, but what if you want to listen to that 201st song?
Why limit yourself when the tech exists that says you don't have to?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Personally I get by with a 1GB player. It holds all of what I want to have on hand at the time, and for video or the rest of my music, I've got a laptop that if not on my person, is always going to be reasonably close by. That's just my way of thinking though; I don't mind syncing information back to a non-portable (or less portable in the case of the laptop) base station.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Can you upgrade your nano easily? About as easily as I can upgrade the hard drive in my 80 gig iPod. Open it up and replace the drive. But a new 100 gig hard drive or whatever will be under $200, while I'm sure a 100 gig flash drive will cost slightly more.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Just stop doing stuff for free, and soon you will find that your friends and relatives stop expecting free favours from you. I'm not saying you should start being rude when being asked for help, but if anyone asks you to invest more than 2 minutes of your time in fixing their computer, simply tell them that you have no time; that fixing computers is your job, not your hobby; and that there are companies who do it cheaper than what you would have charged them. People will understand that in exactly the same way that you understand that your stock-broker friend is not going to do your finances for free, or private security guard friend is not going to guard your property for free, or plumber friend is not going to remove your flushed diapers for free, or doctor friend is not going to fix your rash for free, or taxi-driver friend is not going to drive you to the airport for free, or...
Ok, maybe I made the wrong value judgements about you. But it's still you who are trying to impose your choice of operating system on your friends. And who are deriding your friends for their choice in cell phones and mp3-players. So it's not just me who is value-judgemental here...
Well... considering the 360 has sold 12 million units after one year and the Wii is at 4.8 Million sold currently, I'd say that the Xbox360 does indeed have a lead in actual user base. Not to say that the Wii isn't currently dominating sales, but the Xbox isn't just sitting with 0 sales. It's selling plenty and saying it's a failure isn't warranted.
Does the current Zune have a 'disk mode' so that I can use it to store and transport large files?
Are you an AI? I think you may need service.
ipod is very heavily branded and Apple have worked very hard to build this as a coolness icon. You can't play the 99c vs $1 game against that. Unless Zune was at least 10-20% cheaper than ipod, price won't matter.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
That's why my Sony Ericcson w810i phone is perfect. I can have with me my songs that I absolutly love(4GB is enough for that), but when I need more I can just log into winamp remote and play anything else. Add in internet streams and you've already got something that can challenge any mp3 player on the market.
Products like the iPod don't die, they fade away. What you'll see in the next few years is the strange combination of iPod sales that are flat or growing, but steadily falling marketshare as the market grows, and more and companies put out products that are "good enough" to steal a few sales. In the aggregate, over time, the crowd will overwhelm any one company's share.
A semi-relevant example I can think of off the top of my head is the IBM PC. IBM always made great PCs, but in the end they lost the lead of the market to the "other" category. Today the largest single PC manufacturer in the world by marketshare is Dell, but even they have under 25% share. Expect the same thing to happen to Apple in the category of portable digital music players. They see the writing on the wall, which is why they are aggressively moving into a new market with the iPhone.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Is my iPod any less functional than yours?
Oh, and it's just a small hard drive. You can hook it up to anything with the right adapter.
I was responding to the claim that I couldn't upgrade my hard drive based iPod while a flash drive iPod could be upgraded, too. So your point is kinda.. well, it smells Troll-y.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
> I suppose that someday, I might actually want to listen to Yngwie Malmsteen.
Ridiculous name aside, he's actually not a bad guitarist.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
I use my ipod nano mainly for storage and for data transportation, found out having my stuff there, including some videos and isos ... Makes my life easier since I have a common place for data even for my multiple OSes...
Even this way 260GB seems like way too much I would be happy with 20 GB...
GP is crazy with 200GB in music library, seriously...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
You're missing 2 important things here related to convenience, the primary selling point of all mp3 players.
First, people want the totality of their collection (or at least their favorites) on the device at once. Plain and simple. No one knows for certain what they will want to listen to for the rest of the day. So in the morning, they might be feeling R&B, but by the end of the day, it's, classical. The topic of music might come up in a conversation, and to have all the songs being mentioned at the touch of a button would be extremely convenient. Thus, people want as much of their collection on one device as possible. Neither does anyone want to shuffle songs around between the PC and iPod every so often just to get a bit of variety. It's vastly inconvenient to do so. The shuffle sells less than the nano which sells less than the regular ipod for a reason.
Second, and this applies only to those who have the appropriate technical knowhow, anyone who rips mp3's will rip them at whatever bit rate they think will be best for the speakers at HOME. After all, it's pointless to have a consolidated music collection if you still have to play the good version from a CD. Nobody's going to rerip a bunch of 192k or 256k mp3's just to carry around, regardless of how much space they have. Now, those who don't rip their songs are at the mercy of iTMS. But they're definitely not going to rerip their songs at a lower bit rate just because they've suddenly run out of room on their mp3 player after a year or two of use.
You might not mind constantly swapping songs to and from your iPod. And you might not mind ripping and storing (due to reason #1) every song in your collection a second time just to save space. But I certainly mind. And I know most people who buy the iPod for the convenience and/or style will, at least for the former reason.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
My statistics differ from your statistics.
The Wii has sold more than 6 million, and Microsoft has been stuffing the retail channel with 360s to inflate "sales" (shipped) numbers to meet projections.
Wikipedia is not a valid source for things like this.
A skillful guitarist, indeed. I just really, really don't like the style. What can I say? I'm not much of a metalhead.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
But lets take one of your sources and apply a little bit of logic. From here http://www.vgchartz.com/ngwars.php we get that indeed the Wii has sold over 6 million consoles... but if we look closer we see that compared to the other consoles a greater amount(2.12 million it says) were sold to those in japan. Given that the other consoles don't have nearly that many sold in Japan we can see a great imbalance in the rise of sales in different locales.
Let me ask you a simple question... Do you think that Japan has enough people to say that this rise was anything more than temporary? And since close to half of the total sales so far have come from Japan this could be what we see as a greater sales presence. Yay for statistics.
Again even if Microsoft is fluffing the statistics, they aren't doing that bad.
Heh. That's what I thought. Proved myself wrong though...
Credit where it's due - I dropped my Zen several times without it flinching. But a couple of weeks ago, running for a train, flies out of my pocket onto the pavement (er, "sidewalk"), kaput.
Needless to say, this was nine days after my guarantee ran out :(
Anyway. I bought another one. Did I get a flash player instead? Heh, as if - was pleased to pick up an 80GB model for less than my previous 40GB me cost a year (and nine bloody days) earlier. So, I'm not actually disagreeing with you. Huge hard drive players for the win!
And as for all these people saying "you can't possibly listen to that music or if you do you probably stole it". Um - newsflash - not everybody is exactly like you? Personally I couldn't give a monkeys (er, "rat's ass") about compiling my own operating system, playing any sort of computer games / consoles, or many of the other pastimes which are clearly very popular here. Doesn't mean I'm piping up in the OSS stories saying "if you took 14 seconds to read a line of code, it would take you 82 years to read the Linux source, therefore nobody ever has any use for the Linux source". Or "if you took 11 seconds to look at every square km of the World of Warcraft environment, it would take you 17 years to see it all, therefore nobody has any valid reason to play an RPG".
Personally, music is easily my biggest "luxury" spending. Usually I'll pick up a handful of CDs every week. My 40GB Zen was full when I broke it, and I still regularly found myself frustrated at not finding something to suit my exact mood. All these maths posts about how long it would take to listen to every track end-to-end are spectacularly missing the point, nobody does that, it's about ALWAYS having something to fit your mood RIGHT NOW, whatever that may be. It's about a random event suddenly triggering the memory of a song you haven't heard in months or years, and being able to dial it up on the spot, or bumping into someone and wanting to play them something they'll love, without ever having to think "oh dear, shame I didn't have space for that when I stocked up my player three weeks ago".
One of the guys in this thread argued against that point by saying something like "you can still get a huge variety; for example you could put X amount of five different genres..." Five genres? Don't be f###ing ridiculous! So I put on (eg) some classic rock, some soul/funk, some ambient/downtempo, some hiphop, and some drum'n'bass. Oops - I'm in the mood for classical. Oh dear, shame I haven't got any trance. I could fancy a little jazz or maybe even some country - too bad I didn't include them in my five genre allocation. Honestly, what can you say to that except laugh?
In short, much as slashdotters might like to try, you can't actually explain away the mind of the music-obsessive with back-of-an-envelope arithmetic. Then again, every music related story is dominated by people saying "but all music you can buy these days is manufactured rubbish", which clearly illustrates that the poster doesn't care about music enough to spend even five minutes seeking out stuff beyond ClearChannel playlists. So from the outset their view on how much ipod space people "need" clearly bares no relation at all to people who actually love music more than anything (ie, the people buying those large hard drive players).
Details of Next Gen Zune Surface
Oh, I get it now. Surface is the verb. Geez, for a minute there I was thinking that it was a noun, and I was really curious about whether it had some revolutionary exterior coating or something... What a let-down.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
As long as you don't include its toughest competition, the XBOX 360 is doing batshit-awesome !
That's some great return on investment thar MS, yepm.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
I hope you're not serious with this post.
.zoo or .lha? This software is all available for Linux distros, even though it's been probably 15 years since I ever saw a file in one of those formats.
1) Ogg is not going to be abandoned any time soon. First, there's no replacement on the horizon, and everyone is happy with it (who cares about open-source codecs). It appears to be as good as or better than all other audio codecs out there (better than MP3 easily, probably about as good as AAC). Second, OSS people would never migrate from an OSS solution to a proprietary/non-open one without a great reason. It's unlikely any huge advance will be made in the field of audio codecs any time soon to warrant any big change. Audio codecs appear to be quite mature and stable at this time.
2) Linux distros never abandon old software unless it's so old that there really isn't anyone that uses it any more. I can't think of a lot of things this has happened to offhand. Do you have any old files in ancient compression formats like
As for Palm users complaining about the switch to Linux, that's irrelevant. They're complaining that their Palm app won't be available on Palm's Linux version. That's exactly one of the big problems with closed-source, proprietary software; when the vendor abandons it, you're SOL. If Palm had used Linux all along, and these apps were open-source, these users wouldn't have anything to complain about.
features: "Wi-fi" and "video playback"
Don't the current Zunes already have those?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Microsoft may have great plans to make the Zune the world-beating portable device that everyone wants, but until they actually release something they've got only their Zune.
Any company can promise greatness. That takes nothing more than a few rumours, some conversations on the side and a few hints. It's easy to do.
Actually delivering greatness is hard.
Microsoft promises greatness, but delivered mediocrity. All we have now are more promises, but nothing more tangible. If I were buying a music device, I wouldn't factor in some nebulous promise like this. There's no substance and a poor track record.
As a wise poster above said, my decisions are not subject to your value judgments. Your inability to perceive a difference (a) does not mean the difference isn't there, and (b) does not mean I cannot perceive it.
Yes, I'm not going to argue the point that you could in fact put a shitload of music of a mediocre to decent quality on an 8GB portable device. That is of course true. However, there are people that want all of their music on one portable device at a very high quality so they can listen to anything they want whenever they want. Yes, they could make do with what they have. I could also make do with a 8GB hard drive on my computer, but that doesn't mean I want to.
A portable music player is after all a luxury device. You don't *need* it do do a goddamn thing. If you're buying something, you may as well buy what you want. There are obviously enough people that have similar feelings, as 80GB iPods are selling well. It's not as if it is wasteful or anything. I don't really see why you seem to have a problem with it.
For the record the only portable audio player I have is a refurbished 2GB Nano, but if I could afford a 80GB video iPod I'd buy it in a second.
I'd, f'rinstance, rather not be asked, by friends who want me to write them a script, take a look at that keratoacanthoma, or send them for a CXR and C&S for that troubling cough, but I do, because I'd prefer that they have good health and peace of mind, than not. Certainly, I'm not going to sign off on a free breast augmentation (one, mainly because 95% of people don't need it, but because that is taking work away from private surgeons).
And, as a nice side benefit, I know that they'd do the same for me if I had concerns about something that they were skilled in that I wasn't.
"You've got a chart filling a whole wall with interlocking pathways
and reactions to shock and the researcher says "If I can just control
this one molecule/enzyme/compound I'll stop the whole negative
physiologic cascade of post haemorrhagic shock." Yeah, right."
Actually... no. The iPod nanos have the flash soldered onto the logic board. So, until Apple (unlikely) switches to some sort of removeable flash memory card, the nano is stuck with the size it was bought with for life. However, iPod videos can easily be upgraded (and I've replaced many a hard drive in iPods). Really cracking the screen isn't feasible unless you're just fucking with it, but the cable that connects the hold switch and headphone jack... that's another story. Only about $30-40 for that though (one side is attached to the hold/headphone jack, so you have to buy the whole thing).
The only iPod that you can easily upgrade with flash cards is the iPod mini, which uses a CF-format microdrive, so you can actually replace the hard drive with any size CF flash card you want (so long as color isn't important to you).
I hate sigs...
1) Ogg was a bad example. I was trying to make a point which apparently was missed by some.
2) Linux distros eventually upgrade their kernel, and gui components. Things break. You may not see it, but there is a lot of differences between versions of your favorite open source software. Things move fast in OSS. Try maintaining a ports system sometime and you'll see what I mean. Hell just watch a popular linux distro's software update feature. Redhat used to have more updates than Microsoft back when I ran linux. Its not necessarily bad since I think more things were patched that were reported to OSS vendors. You picked two easy packages to support. Try something complex like a QT app that runs on QT2. For instance, earlier versions of konquerer-embeded do NOT run on QT3. signal/slot handling changed in gtk/gtkmm 2.x which changed or broke some apps. (again just examples)
Yes, their apps won't run. This is no different than someone relying on PHP 4.0.x and then finding out when they move to 5.x that many things were changed including how to access environment various, mysql and a slew of other things. So it does happen in OSS.
It is relevant about palm since its a platform just as linux is. You can argue the merits of open source all day long, but for some people (non-programmers) it does not matter. They can not port their own app over to the new crap. Say the palm app was open source.. that doesn't mean it can magically run on linux. Say they did use linux and wrote a kernel module for 2.2. That won't work on 2.6. Sure it could be *made* to work if the person was a programmer. Yes, they could hire someone to fix it, but they could also hire someone to write a palm emulator for linux too.
I am serious.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
14% of the 15% of Apple PR you mention are probably just really satisfied customers like myself. I believe insecure people call us "FanBois" or something of similar intellectual emptyness.
Even companies that weren't bought out by Microsoft had similar features...Blizzard's service comes to mind. So yet again, Microsoft merely took someone else's good idea and either bought them straight up (Bungie) or just threw a lot of money at it to become the de facto standard. Not that I'm complaining, because Xbox Live is very good, but let's not pretend Microsoft invented it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Its a bit like having a watch which is pressure proof to 10 atm, but you can generate that by taking it down 10 metres and waving it around.
http://michaelsmith.id.au