>is less attractive This is a ridiculous thing to say, as it is purely a matter of perspective.
Yes, it is a matter of perspective, and having seen both devices in person my personal perspective is that the smaller, lighter iPod is more attractive. This seems to be the almost unanimous consensus among the many Zune reviews I've read. I'll absolutely concede that your perspective is just as valid as mine, but it also seems to be in the minority. For a new product trying to dislodge a well established and popular leader this is a Bad Thing. If the best thing that you can say in Zune's defense here is that it doesn't matter to you what they look like then I think my point is made.
>has a clumsier interface This is also a ridiculous thing to say, as it is also purely a matter of perspective. I tend to think the clickwheel is a gimmick at best.
Gimmick? That's a hoot! Let's look at it from an entirely objective standpoint- which interface gives a finer degree of control? Unless the Zune's buttons measure varying levels of pressure (and they don't) the only way it has of knowing if you want to scroll quickly or slowly is how long the button is held down, which requires extra time for it to "get up to speed" and doesn't give you the option of slowing down while scrolling through a long list of songs. A scroll wheel gives you much finer control because the iPod constantly knows how quickly you want to scroll.
Put another way, there's a reason why a car has a steering wheel and accelerator, instead of 4 buttons marked "left", "right", "forward", and "backward". Granular control matters.
>has poorer audio fidelity Well, a matter of perspective as well
You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means.;-) Audio fidelity is not subjective! It's a quantifiable measurement.
though from just the raw specs the Zune higher fidelity audio than the iPod. In fact, audiophiles have long decried the iPod for it's rather poor audio fidelity.
Citation please. I've yet to read a comparison that didn't rate the iPod as putting out the highest quality sound of any.mp3 player, though I freely admit that the reviews I've read have concentrated on the player itself, not the headphones/earbuds/whatever. Most of what I've heard about the Zune's audio quality is that it's good, but that having the wireless feature turned on causes a noticible degredation.
Not that anything but the highly trained ear of an audiophile could tell the difference, though.
Again you're basically saying "this feature doesn't matter to me anyway". It's a music player. It plays music. Audio quality matters. I've seen DJs in clubs use iPods as audio sources, and to me that speaks volumes. These are the people who only rip using completely lossless formats despite the huge files that result because it's their livelihood. When I see DJs switching to Zunes I'll concede the point.
>doesn't even support Microsoft's own previous DRM schemes Neither does the iPod?
Woah there, cowboy! I'm talking about consistency of support, and making a completely valid point. If you consider that to be a reasonable response then you should also ding the Zune for not being compatible with the largest and most popular legal digital music store on the planet. It's fair to assume that a music player will at least be compatible with the music formats put out and supported by its manufacturer, but the Zune doesn't even meet this basic standard.
The iPod is a nice device, but you are really reaching here for some of your points.
I was being thorough. Some of my points are stronger than others, but I stand behind each of them. Sure the Zune has an FM tuner. That's one point that I'll grant in its favor versus the laundry list I provided. The Zune's wireless capability could have been a huge factor in its favor, but frankly the impl
we have some serious problems going on right here at home that need tending first.
While your desire for fiscal responsibility in government is certainly understandable, the sad fact is that there will always be serious issues that need to be tended to. Always. If we wait until we fix all (or even most of) the problems here before looking outward then we will simply never leave home.
Look back at the years immediately preceeding Apollo 11. The country was in a shambles. The economy was a mess, American soldiers were dying by the hundreds in an enormously unpopular foreign war that makes Iraq look like a bar fight, popular leaders were being assassinated like it was going out of style (MLK was shot the same day that the Saturn V first flew), and civil unrest was so rampant that there were genuine concerns that martial law and/or open insurrection would break out. In short, it was everything that's going wrong in the country today only much much worse.
These types of advancements- pushing new frontiers, developing new technologies, exploring the universe- are long term investments not just for our country, but for our civilization and our species as a whole. It can be downright painful to know that such efforts are being expended toward far-flung pie-in-the-sky goals while such suffering and injustice exists right outside our window, but it really is the right thing to do. It's what makes the difference between a society that flourishes in the long term and one that stagnates.
Personally, I think that some variation of the Mars Direct plan is where we should be focusing our manned space flight efforts. However, between a moon base and further activity in LEO I completely agree with you that the moon is the better choice. I'm just glad that these kinds of conversations are even happening, and I'll take just about any plan that's actually committed to and implemented over one that's just talked about and then discarded when the next administration comes in.
Quick addendum to my last comment. I was checking to see how many computers Zune Marketplace purchases can be used on (just one, it would seem), and came across a deficiency in the Zune that's such an obvious oversight that I'd never even thought to check.
Apparently it can't be used as an external hard drive. Damn. I use my iPod as extra storage all the time. It's such a simple and useful bit of functionality that I'd assumed the Zune would have this capability. It turns out that it doesn't.
I've even used my iPod as a boot drive for troubleshooting Macs. I obviously wouldn't expect the Zune to be able to do this, but to not be usable for storing/transfering large files at all is absurd.
Let's see. It's larger, heavier, has shorter battery life, is less attractive, has a clumsier interface (no scroll wheel and a less user-friendly menu system), doesn't support podcasts, has a lower storage capacity than the top of the line iPod, almost nonexistant 3rd party peripheral support, doesn't support Audible.com audiobooks, has poorer audio fidelity, only supports the laughable Zune Marketplace for purchasing music online (no podcasts, TV shows, movies, or games), can't be used on a Mac, and doesn't even support Microsoft's own previous DRM schemes.
Additionally the display, while larger, is the same resolution. The software it comes with has quickly developed a reputation for bugginess. Its one potentially cool feature (wireless) is utterly crippled by its implementation, with ridiculous DRM, no way to purchase music wirelessly, and not even the ability to sync with your computer wirelessly.
Finally, while I realize that this is probably a non-issue for most of the Slashdot crowd, the fact remains that the iPod is simply considered cooler within the cultural zeitgeist.
Other than that you're right- the Zune is a fine.mp3 player. Well, for some definition of "fine", anyway.
Out of curiosity, does anyone out there know if music purchased in the Zune Marketplace can be shared with multiple computers? Purchases from iTMS can be authorized for up to 5 computers. I haven't heard one way or the other how this works for the Zune.
A carbon tax, levied on the f*ng idiots who drive SUVs in the city. Ideally, I'd like this tax to be paid each year, and it's amount to be directly proportional to the oil consumption of the car? Own an SUV? Fine, that will be 50% of its price, every year, as long as you own it.
Oh for fuck's sake, can we get over the "SUVs are teh evil" schtick? You're making an absurd suggestion based on a ridiculous overgeneralization. What you should be concerned with is fuel consumption, not what type of vehicle someone is using.
SUVs are not evil. They fill a particular niche, and in some cases they are the most efficient vehicle for the task. Based on your idea, if I'm moving a truckload of widgets it would make more sense for me to make three trips with a smaller, more efficient vehicle than one trip with an SUV with greater cargo capacity. Which plan would release more carbon into the atmosphere? Hint: not the SUV.
Your attempt to villainize people based solely on what classification of vehicle they drive, with no regard to other factors, makes you look like a fool.
That's an interesting idea. However, just as a reality check to one of your comments I think the only way that your personal oxygen consumption would be made up for by only 52 plants would be if you had redwoods growing in your apartment and spent most of your life in a coma.:-)
Look at it this way- if your apartment had an airtight seal with you and your plants locked inside do you really think that the overall O2 level would rise, or would you eventually suffocate?
I absolutely loved my kneeling chair for the first couple of months or so, until it began seriously aggrivating my knees and I had to switch back to a conventional chair. Did this happen to you at all? If so, how did you work around it? I'd switch back to it in a second if I could eliminate the knee problems.
It looks like those are other missing moon tapes. They contain experimental data and telemetry, not video.
Regardless, I see no sense in putting the entire program on hold until the tapes are located. They're simply higher-resolution originals of video that we have plenty of copies of.
It's disturbing to think of how close we came to losing them forever. It's also curious to note how little attention their recovery has gotten, in light of the hoopla over their misplacement.
The main source of gravity on the moon is still the earth This is true, but it doesn't provide the whole picture. As a former employee of a once-thriving gravity export business, I can confirm that the moon was our largest (by mass) customer. Things were going great until outsourcing forced our local gravity mine to close, as upper management realized that gravity is equally abundant in India, but that the miners there are willing to work for a pittance and the safety regulations are far more lax.
So now I'm unemployed and the Mooninites have to get by with gravity that's only a third of the quality that we normally enjoy here on Earth. *sigh*
Unfortunately your personal experience does not add meaningful data to the debate, though that's a very, very common misconception. In fact, I hear scientists use anecdotal evidence to support global warming theory on a regular basis.
Two reasons: 1) Global warming is about the average temperature of the entire planet from year to year. There's so much normal variation and so many local weather cycles that observations from a single location are statistically insignificant. Your statement that Tennessee is right between two different climate patterns actually harms the applicability of your observations to a world-wide scale.
2) If global warming *is* happening then it's generally agreed that the rate of warming is about 0.1 degrees per decade across the planet, or a 0.3 degree increase over the 30 years you describe.
I'm not trying to tear you down here at all, and I don't claim to have any insight whatsoever into the validity or lack thereof of global warming, but it's easy to find individual situations to support either side, which is part of the reason why the debate is so choked with bad data.
I think that Jack deserves Sub-Zero's fatality from MK: Deadly Alliance, wherein he rips out not just the head and spine but the entire fraggin' skeleton!
I was going to mention the Shamen CD (which I'm fortunate enough to have a copy of), but you beat me to it.:-)
Sigue Sigue Sputnik has encouraged fan remixes of their music for as long as I've been aware of the band. I'm not aware of them releasing a CD with specific tracks and samples, but they've made a lot of them available online. I don't have the URL, but there is/was a web site for them (unofficial, I suspect) that had a flash app that allowed you to mix tracks right on the web page. Nifty stuff.
It was, if you can believe this, a dumbed-down variant of Eliza that appeared in the back of a magazine. The program was in BASIC and as I recall was fairly short. It pretty much broke down what you told it into phrases, stored them, and then remixed and regurgitated them back to you.
Odd question: Was the AI program you got out of a magazine called "AVAIL" (A Very Artificial Intelligence Lesson)? I can't recall if it was from Run or Compute!'s Gazette, but I spent hours with that freaky little program, mostly trying to get it to say nasty things.:-)
Really, any of the games that can be played with four players simultaneously are great, but Bomberman and Chu Chu Rocket are a riot with groups. They're both frantic and kinetic, with plenty of "screw your buddy over" factor to keep everyone on their toes.
Damn skippy! I think I'm gonna have to go home and dig it out now. I've been on a retro gaming kick lately anyway. May as well brush up on my "mad zombie-busting typing skillz" while I'm at it.:-)
There are also driver issues to contend with when booting an arbitrary PC from a USB drive. Conversely, I've booted my G3 iMac, my tower at work, and a friend's G4 iMac all off of the backup I made of my 12" PowerBook. No driver issues, no waiting while it detects new hardware, no wizards to click through. Just boot and go.
The "It eats you, starting with your bottom" subject line is a quote from Andrew, one of the "nerd triad" in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was mis-translating an omen that actually meant "from beneath you, it devours".
"Hardware DRM"? Care to explain? I have yet to run into a CD or DVD that I can't play or rip (into an open, non-protected standard format) on my Mac, and the Sony rootkit bullshit never touched the Mac platform.
The problem is that I use ctrl, option, and cmd all the time, so losing any one of them would be a potential deal-breaker, and that doesn't leave many other valid options for remapping (I couldn't do without the 't' key, for example, though I probably could make due without caps lock).
The virtual keyboard does have a function key, but as it's used to send some commands to the device itself I don't know if it'd let me use it (for example) in place of the command key. That's actually what I'm hoping for.
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>is less attractive
;-) Audio fidelity is not subjective! It's a quantifiable measurement.
.mp3 player, though I freely admit that the reviews I've read have concentrated on the player itself, not the headphones/earbuds/whatever. Most of what I've heard about the Zune's audio quality is that it's good, but that having the wireless feature turned on causes a noticible degredation.
This is a ridiculous thing to say, as it is purely a matter of perspective.
Yes, it is a matter of perspective, and having seen both devices in person my personal perspective is that the smaller, lighter iPod is more attractive. This seems to be the almost unanimous consensus among the many Zune reviews I've read. I'll absolutely concede that your perspective is just as valid as mine, but it also seems to be in the minority. For a new product trying to dislodge a well established and popular leader this is a Bad Thing. If the best thing that you can say in Zune's defense here is that it doesn't matter to you what they look like then I think my point is made.
>has a clumsier interface
This is also a ridiculous thing to say, as it is also purely a matter of perspective. I tend to think the clickwheel is a gimmick at best.
Gimmick? That's a hoot! Let's look at it from an entirely objective standpoint- which interface gives a finer degree of control? Unless the Zune's buttons measure varying levels of pressure (and they don't) the only way it has of knowing if you want to scroll quickly or slowly is how long the button is held down, which requires extra time for it to "get up to speed" and doesn't give you the option of slowing down while scrolling through a long list of songs. A scroll wheel gives you much finer control because the iPod constantly knows how quickly you want to scroll.
Put another way, there's a reason why a car has a steering wheel and accelerator, instead of 4 buttons marked "left", "right", "forward", and "backward". Granular control matters.
>has poorer audio fidelity
Well, a matter of perspective as well
You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means.
though from just the raw specs the Zune higher fidelity audio than the iPod. In fact, audiophiles have long decried the iPod for it's rather poor audio fidelity.
Citation please. I've yet to read a comparison that didn't rate the iPod as putting out the highest quality sound of any
Not that anything but the highly trained ear of an audiophile could tell the difference, though.
Again you're basically saying "this feature doesn't matter to me anyway". It's a music player. It plays music. Audio quality matters. I've seen DJs in clubs use iPods as audio sources, and to me that speaks volumes. These are the people who only rip using completely lossless formats despite the huge files that result because it's their livelihood. When I see DJs switching to Zunes I'll concede the point.
>doesn't even support Microsoft's own previous DRM schemes
Neither does the iPod?
Woah there, cowboy! I'm talking about consistency of support, and making a completely valid point. If you consider that to be a reasonable response then you should also ding the Zune for not being compatible with the largest and most popular legal digital music store on the planet. It's fair to assume that a music player will at least be compatible with the music formats put out and supported by its manufacturer, but the Zune doesn't even meet this basic standard.
The iPod is a nice device, but you are really reaching here for some of your points.
I was being thorough. Some of my points are stronger than others, but I stand behind each of them. Sure the Zune has an FM tuner. That's one point that I'll grant in its favor versus the laundry list I provided. The Zune's wireless capability could have been a huge factor in its favor, but frankly the impl
we have some serious problems going on right here at home that need tending first.
While your desire for fiscal responsibility in government is certainly understandable, the sad fact is that there will always be serious issues that need to be tended to. Always. If we wait until we fix all (or even most of) the problems here before looking outward then we will simply never leave home.
Look back at the years immediately preceeding Apollo 11. The country was in a shambles. The economy was a mess, American soldiers were dying by the hundreds in an enormously unpopular foreign war that makes Iraq look like a bar fight, popular leaders were being assassinated like it was going out of style (MLK was shot the same day that the Saturn V first flew), and civil unrest was so rampant that there were genuine concerns that martial law and/or open insurrection would break out. In short, it was everything that's going wrong in the country today only much much worse.
These types of advancements- pushing new frontiers, developing new technologies, exploring the universe- are long term investments not just for our country, but for our civilization and our species as a whole. It can be downright painful to know that such efforts are being expended toward far-flung pie-in-the-sky goals while such suffering and injustice exists right outside our window, but it really is the right thing to do. It's what makes the difference between a society that flourishes in the long term and one that stagnates.
Personally, I think that some variation of the Mars Direct plan is where we should be focusing our manned space flight efforts. However, between a moon base and further activity in LEO I completely agree with you that the moon is the better choice. I'm just glad that these kinds of conversations are even happening, and I'll take just about any plan that's actually committed to and implemented over one that's just talked about and then discarded when the next administration comes in.
Quick addendum to my last comment. I was checking to see how many computers Zune Marketplace purchases can be used on (just one, it would seem), and came across a deficiency in the Zune that's such an obvious oversight that I'd never even thought to check.
Apparently it can't be used as an external hard drive. Damn. I use my iPod as extra storage all the time. It's such a simple and useful bit of functionality that I'd assumed the Zune would have this capability. It turns out that it doesn't.
I've even used my iPod as a boot drive for troubleshooting Macs. I obviously wouldn't expect the Zune to be able to do this, but to not be usable for storing/transfering large files at all is absurd.
Paul Thurrott, is that you? ;-)
Let's see. It's larger, heavier, has shorter battery life, is less attractive, has a clumsier interface (no scroll wheel and a less user-friendly menu system), doesn't support podcasts, has a lower storage capacity than the top of the line iPod, almost nonexistant 3rd party peripheral support, doesn't support Audible.com audiobooks, has poorer audio fidelity, only supports the laughable Zune Marketplace for purchasing music online (no podcasts, TV shows, movies, or games), can't be used on a Mac, and doesn't even support Microsoft's own previous DRM schemes.
.mp3 player. Well, for some definition of "fine", anyway.
Additionally the display, while larger, is the same resolution. The software it comes with has quickly developed a reputation for bugginess. Its one potentially cool feature (wireless) is utterly crippled by its implementation, with ridiculous DRM, no way to purchase music wirelessly, and not even the ability to sync with your computer wirelessly.
Finally, while I realize that this is probably a non-issue for most of the Slashdot crowd, the fact remains that the iPod is simply considered cooler within the cultural zeitgeist.
Other than that you're right- the Zune is a fine
Out of curiosity, does anyone out there know if music purchased in the Zune Marketplace can be shared with multiple computers? Purchases from iTMS can be authorized for up to 5 computers. I haven't heard one way or the other how this works for the Zune.
A carbon tax, levied on the f*ng idiots who drive SUVs in the city. Ideally, I'd like this tax to be paid each year, and it's amount to be directly proportional to the oil consumption of the car? Own an SUV? Fine, that will be 50% of its price, every year, as long as you own it.
Oh for fuck's sake, can we get over the "SUVs are teh evil" schtick? You're making an absurd suggestion based on a ridiculous overgeneralization. What you should be concerned with is fuel consumption, not what type of vehicle someone is using.
SUVs are not evil. They fill a particular niche, and in some cases they are the most efficient vehicle for the task. Based on your idea, if I'm moving a truckload of widgets it would make more sense for me to make three trips with a smaller, more efficient vehicle than one trip with an SUV with greater cargo capacity. Which plan would release more carbon into the atmosphere? Hint: not the SUV.
Your attempt to villainize people based solely on what classification of vehicle they drive, with no regard to other factors, makes you look like a fool.
That's an interesting idea. However, just as a reality check to one of your comments I think the only way that your personal oxygen consumption would be made up for by only 52 plants would be if you had redwoods growing in your apartment and spent most of your life in a coma. :-)
Look at it this way- if your apartment had an airtight seal with you and your plants locked inside do you really think that the overall O2 level would rise, or would you eventually suffocate?
I absolutely loved my kneeling chair for the first couple of months or so, until it began seriously aggrivating my knees and I had to switch back to a conventional chair. Did this happen to you at all? If so, how did you work around it? I'd switch back to it in a second if I could eliminate the knee problems.
It looks like those are other missing moon tapes. They contain experimental data and telemetry, not video.
Regardless, I see no sense in putting the entire program on hold until the tapes are located. They're simply higher-resolution originals of video that we have plenty of copies of.
News update: They've been found.
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/818
It's disturbing to think of how close we came to losing them forever. It's also curious to note how little attention their recovery has gotten, in light of the hoopla over their misplacement.
The main source of gravity on the moon is still the earth
This is true, but it doesn't provide the whole picture. As a former employee of a once-thriving gravity export business, I can confirm that the moon was our largest (by mass) customer. Things were going great until outsourcing forced our local gravity mine to close, as upper management realized that gravity is equally abundant in India, but that the miners there are willing to work for a pittance and the safety regulations are far more lax.
So now I'm unemployed and the Mooninites have to get by with gravity that's only a third of the quality that we normally enjoy here on Earth. *sigh*
Unfortunately your personal experience does not add meaningful data to the debate, though that's a very, very common misconception. In fact, I hear scientists use anecdotal evidence to support global warming theory on a regular basis.
Two reasons:
1) Global warming is about the average temperature of the entire planet from year to year. There's so much normal variation and so many local weather cycles that observations from a single location are statistically insignificant. Your statement that Tennessee is right between two different climate patterns actually harms the applicability of your observations to a world-wide scale.
2) If global warming *is* happening then it's generally agreed that the rate of warming is about 0.1 degrees per decade across the planet, or a 0.3 degree increase over the 30 years you describe.
I'm not trying to tear you down here at all, and I don't claim to have any insight whatsoever into the validity or lack thereof of global warming, but it's easy to find individual situations to support either side, which is part of the reason why the debate is so choked with bad data.
I think that Jack deserves Sub-Zero's fatality from MK: Deadly Alliance, wherein he rips out not just the head and spine but the entire fraggin' skeleton!
A bit corny, but oh-so-satisfying!
I was going to mention the Shamen CD (which I'm fortunate enough to have a copy of), but you beat me to it. :-)
Sigue Sigue Sputnik has encouraged fan remixes of their music for as long as I've been aware of the band. I'm not aware of them releasing a CD with specific tracks and samples, but they've made a lot of them available online. I don't have the URL, but there is/was a web site for them (unofficial, I suspect) that had a flash app that allowed you to mix tracks right on the web page. Nifty stuff.
It was, if you can believe this, a dumbed-down variant of Eliza that appeared in the back of a magazine. The program was in BASIC and as I recall was fairly short. It pretty much broke down what you told it into phrases, stored them, and then remixed and regurgitated them back to you.
Odd question: Was the AI program you got out of a magazine called "AVAIL" (A Very Artificial Intelligence Lesson)? I can't recall if it was from Run or Compute!'s Gazette, but I spent hours with that freaky little program, mostly trying to get it to say nasty things. :-)
Really, any of the games that can be played with four players simultaneously are great, but Bomberman and Chu Chu Rocket are a riot with groups. They're both frantic and kinetic, with plenty of "screw your buddy over" factor to keep everyone on their toes.
Damn skippy! I think I'm gonna have to go home and dig it out now. I've been on a retro gaming kick lately anyway. May as well brush up on my "mad zombie-busting typing skillz" while I'm at it. :-)
Apple has less OS market share than the "minor" ipod-wannabes
;-)
Really? How large are Real, Innovatek, and Archos' shares of the OS market?
There are also driver issues to contend with when booting an arbitrary PC from a USB drive. Conversely, I've booted my G3 iMac, my tower at work, and a friend's G4 iMac all off of the backup I made of my 12" PowerBook. No driver issues, no waiting while it detects new hardware, no wizards to click through. Just boot and go.
The "It eats you, starting with your bottom" subject line is a quote from Andrew, one of the "nerd triad" in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was mis-translating an omen that actually meant "from beneath you, it devours".
Joss Whedon is my master now.
"Hardware DRM"? Care to explain? I have yet to run into a CD or DVD that I can't play or rip (into an open, non-protected standard format) on my Mac, and the Sony rootkit bullshit never touched the Mac platform.
'Course, only one of 'em survived through the end of the series...
I think that we prefer sequels because it means that we finally get to see Kate Beckinsale naked.
Okay, so maybe this logic only applies to one specific case.
The problem is that I use ctrl, option, and cmd all the time, so losing any one of them would be a potential deal-breaker, and that doesn't leave many other valid options for remapping (I couldn't do without the 't' key, for example, though I probably could make due without caps lock).
The virtual keyboard does have a function key, but as it's used to send some commands to the device itself I don't know if it'd let me use it (for example) in place of the command key. That's actually what I'm hoping for.