A stack of audio CDRs is not a sensible backup: they take up too much space, you lose your metadata, you lose some quality (not a massive deal, but galling nonetheless), and re-ripping any significant volume of music is a huge chore -- especially if your backups don't match anything in CDDB.
Mix, Burn, and Rip in one session. Your music keeps almost all the metadata and file name. The only difference you can see is the file name ends in "m4a" instead of "m4p" and you needed to manually copy over the cover art... and that's no longer even an issue. The difference you can hear... well, if you can hear it you probably should have bought a CD in the first place, since you're already losing quality going from CD to AAC.
Where does Apple let you re-download files from iTMS?
I think he's talking about the early days of iTMS where you could only enable three computers and if you lost the system disk the only way to disable one was to plead with Apple's support to reset all your systems and start over.
Apple got a black eye from that and loosened it up some, but you can still get stuck having to go cap-in-hand to Apple to beg for access to your music again.
Which is why audio CD is still the best backup for Fairplay encrypted content.:)
Okay, which people have been demanding compatibility outside of Slashdotters who think Ogg still matters and Apple competitors who haven't been able to make a better product?
The people who bought Real's "Harmony" plug-in for the iPod that allowed it to play content from Rhapsody, for one chunk of folks who want compatibility between iPod DRM and other people's. They still don't understand that DRM doesn't work, of course... the ones who do "get it" are following Apple's earlier advice, the stuff Michael Eisner said "encouraged piracy" (because of course Disney considered (and still considers) all kinds of protected "fair use" to be unethical at the least).
iTunes is the software for the iPod, and if you buy music through iTunes, it's clear it's only for the iPod.
Ah, that would be why you can "Mix" it, Burn" it to CD and "Rip" it in MP3, WMA, AAC, OGG, FLC, or whatever else you want. Now who ran an advertising campaign using those words?
Eisner accused the computer industry of considering piracy its new "killer app." He singled out Apple's "Rip, Mix, Burn" ad campaign of 2001 as an example of this type of behavior. -- Macworld, 2002
I'm sorry, I wasn't tryng to "make up quotes", I think I made it clear that those were my words, not Steve Jobs'. They're the words that I believe he would say if he were completely rejecting evasion and putting down what he believed, based on real quotes like:
"If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own." -- Steve Jobs, "Wall Street Journal" interview, 2002.
When we first went to talk to these record companies -- you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content. [There's] this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet -- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock -- open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it -- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. -- Steve Jobs, "Rolling Stone" interview, 2003.
There's no FUD here. There's nothing Apple needs to be ashamed of. The music industry forced them to make at least a token attempt at DRM in iTunes, and a token attempt is exactly whet they got... and serve them right!
Oh, I wasn't endorsing the Zune, I just don't think that beaming business cards is the droid you're looking for.
I think they've already missed the point of why people would want wireless in a portable music player. Rather than sending the song so that it can be saved and played 3 times, there should basically be a "share what I'm listening to" option and a "listen to what someone is sharing" option. How hard can it be to basically add a shoutcast server/client?
Oooh, you're right. That would solve the license issue because the receiving device would be listening to the stream from nearby Zunes *only*, and only while it was playing. It would be conceptually like hooking the Zune to a speaker that plays at a frequency only dogs can hear.
They would still need to have some kind of mechanism to keep people from logging the stream to disk, but it wouldn't need to be as sophisticated as a new DRM scheme... existing mechanisms for protecting streams between trusted devices would be sufficient.
NASA and/or their primary contractors seem to have a problem in general with maintaining production capability for capital equipment. I've seen accounts like this more than once... if something isn't officially a consumable they seem to build enough for their current plans, but make no provision for tooling up to build more if the failure rate on anything is higher than anticipated.
There's nothing cool about handing out business cards whether it's physical paper or digital data. Cool isn't even on the screen.
Beaming cards was mainstream... I had a wrecker driver wave a palm at me when he was towing my car in 2000... until the iPaq finally got a fast enough processor in the ARM to make Microsoft's handheld OS usable, and Palm lost the plot and tried to turn the Palm into the same kind of "laptop replacement" device Microsoft was pushing. Pocket PCs wrecked beaming.
Why?
The Pocket PC makes beaming business cards a cumbersome trial that only the geeky can handle. You had to navigate multiple menus, switch modes in the receiving device, and wait, and wait. The Palm made it simple and automatic... just hold one button down and it Just Works, and works *quickly*.
So the question is... will the Zune make beaming music "a cumbersome trial" or "simple and automatic"? How long will it take?
Good comments, but Jobs does have his own bits of doublespeak. When he says that customers aren't asking for compatibility he's either defining his terms VERY carefully or he's in denial.
On the other hand he can't say "we can't adopt Microsoft's proprietary DRM instead of our own proprietary DRM because: (A) Microsoft will crush us, and (B) Microsoft's DRM is too effective for customers to put up with... the main reason we can get away with what we're doing in the iTunes Store is because everyone knows our DRM is little more than 'honor system'."
Though it would be refreshing to hear that/ He could go on with "You know, back before we introduced DRM I pointed out that DRM is basically impossible to make more than 'honor system' anyway, and our success really proves how right I was."
Another more dubious feature is a new DRM system that will be exclusive to Zune and an updated MSM Music, mimicking Apple's proprietary system that locks users to the iPod/iTunes pairing.
If Microsoft thinks that the proprietary DRM is an advantage for the iPod, and they're trying to push that as part of the deal rather than because they're trying to keep the Zune-to-Zune stuff locked in to the Zune, they got another think coming.
When the iPod came out, most MP3 players didn't have DRM, Microsoft and Sony each had something in play and neither was really there. Apple hadn't started out behind DRM... Steve Jobs was on record as saying DRM was a bad idea... and where they've used it since then has been very minimal. Anyway, they realy didn't have a choice but to do it their own way... and they weren't seriously trying for a closed system: their files are regular MP4 files under the DRM. Having a lock on the DRM has turned out to be moderately useful once they won the lions share of the market through other means, but it's not going to help get you there... and since it's not that hard to get around, it's not much of a barrier.
DRM is basically not a feature that people want. It's something they put up with. They don't care what DRM you use, so long as it doesn't get in their way. When it's actually effective, THEN people look for other alternatives. And ineffective DRM (like Apple's) is only useful as a check-box for dealing with content providers.
Microsoft DID have some traction with their own proprietary DRM, but they just shot it in the foot. I for one welcome their incompetance.
1. A company name that people (rightly or wrongly) trust.
2. A commitment to maintaining the same hardware and software interfaces over the long term.
3. A user interface that looks good and works better than the iPod.
1: Microsoft does have this. So does Apple. Sony used to but it's thrown a lot away with years of deliberately broken players.
2: When you introduce the device by breaking compatibility to a commitment you made to "Plays for Sure" you're not likely to get the kind of accessory ecosystem the iPod has, and that accessory ecosystem is one of the main reasons I went with the iPod. Apple's not been 100% consistent with this, though. The new shuffle breaks compatibility with existing shuffle hardware, for example.
3: This is not as hard as it sounds. The click-wheel isn't all that it's talked up to be, a D-pad and a jog-wheel are at least as good for playlist navigation and MUCH better for anything else. It's a pity that the D-pad-and-jogwheel interface seems to have been abandoned even by Sony in favor of trying a radically new design on every device (which is NOT the way to convince people you're on top of #2).
XP blows the doors off any of the Win9X products, and is arguably better than 2K in some performance and multimedia areas.
Windows NT4 and Windows NT 3.51 and Windows NT 3.1 all blew the doors off Windows 9x. So did OS 2, BeOS, AmigaDOS, and... well, the only OS that wasn't significantly better across the board was classic MacOS... and for most users Mac OS (bad as it was) was more reliable.
So the point is that saying XP was "the most reliable Windows ever" was such faint praise that for most people it made it sound much much worse than it was.
Re:Biggest Issue with Pox Nora: Beta Tester Free U
on
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· Score: 1
Since they control the clients and servers they can nerf the Pox Harbinger any time they want.
If Open GL is so great why does Microsoft have a stangle hold with their direct X.
Microsoft Flight Simulator, and other flight simulators and programs that use multi screens.
Microsoft broke OpenGL for multiple screens, even for systems with identical cards and with manufacturers that supported multiple screens, while making sure that DirectX worked and that Microsoft Flight Simulator worked with it.
That meant that every game manufacturer had three choices:
Support DirectX *as well as* OpenGL, with attendant developer and support costs. Support openGL only and deliver an inferior experience for people who wanted mltiple screens on Windows. Support DirectX only and abandon the Mac market.
Double score for Micrsoft there.
Guess who is in bed with Adobe?
Not Apple. Adobe has been boning Apple hard since the mid-90s. They used their position to kill Rhapsody: they refused to cut a deal for Display Postscript that let Apple price Rhapsody for a consumer market, and then refused point blank to support OpenStep. Apple had to go back and come up with a transition API for moving OS 8 apps... Carbon. Apple had to come up with a replacement for Display Postscript. Aqua. Then Adobe dragged their feet out on Carbonizing Photoshop, and they're going to be the *last* major Mac app converted to Intel.
This is just Adobe finally showing Microsoft a little of the face they show Apple.
makali: Whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls.
jwz: I am fully in support of this proposed audio-cock technology.
How exactly is "syncing your home directory to removable media" an exciting new feature?
I've been doing this, using rsync, for years. On sane operating systems where your whole account lives in one directory (as opposed to insane ones where it's spread among half a dozen locations) this is just something that automatically works. What's the big deal?
Some of the adjacent comments are amusing... or maybe scary... I wonder how much security code can be bypassed by a parameter of 666.
# include <linux/posix_types.h>/* no, really, i hate you to death */
* STOP : if set to 666 then the library will stop
* (this is useful if you are using BUGS in a Thread)
/// ExactLog2sub1 - This function solves for (Val == (1 << (N-1))-1) /// and returns N. It returns 666 if Val is not 2^n -1 for some n.
enum { ROOT_MAGIC_COOKIE = 666 };
BTW, for writing this hack I got personal congratulations from Dennis
Ritchie and Bjarne Stroustrup sent me a bunch of flowers and asked me
to participate in the standardization committee for C-- v.6.0 as
responsible for the new Tab-Overriding-Operator and Scope-Sensitive-
Comments... but this makes my situation even worse;-)
/* 666 indicates demise of this object */
db->parent.type = 666;
Intel's problems are not and have never been in the implementation of processor architecture. Their problems have always been their grandiose instruction set and architectural fantasies, and the degree to which they've let their plans be guided by currently-popular acadedmic theories.
80286 segmentation was at least partly informed by the design of PL/1 and Pascal.
iApx432 was the super-CISC designed to deal with object-orientation at the hardware level.
i860 needed advanced compiler technology that was still theoretical when it came out.
IA64 has the same problem in spades... and also completely failed to learn from MIPS toying with delay slots, or else they'd never have made "bundles" explicit compiler-controlled objects. Alpha and Power barrier instructions provide the same capability without forcing the compiler to build code specific to the underlying microarchitecture.
The fact that Intel has managed to keep up and even surpass companies with far better designs is a testament to their chip designers and process technology. It's a pity they don't give people of that quality room to do their best work earlier in the design pipeline.
I'd much rather have an iPod that supported smart playlists fully than one that played videos.
I have a set of playlists based on ratings and a few arbitrary decisions about how often I wantto hear certain genres.
best: rating is 5 stars or rating is 4 stars and genre is not like "classical". good: rating is 4 stars or playlist is "weird but good"....
Then I have a second set of playlists like this:
day: Playlist is "best" and last play time is not within the past 24 hours. twoday: Playlist is "good" and last play time is not within the past 48 hours. week: Playlist is "weekly" and last play time is not within the last 7 days. fortnight: Playlist is "fortnightly" and last play time is not within the last 14 days. month: Playlist is "monthly" and last play time is not within the last 30 days.
Then a meta-list:
Playlist is "day" or playlist is "twoday" or playlist is "week" or playlist is "fortnight" or playlist is "month".
THAT list goes into party shuffle.
That produces a mix that's rarely predictable enough to be boring but still predictable enough to be comfortable. But the iPod can't handle it.:(
"The new initiative is intended to protect consumers from pirated software"
I know these guys, see, and they might be able to keep out any pirated software that might, you know, just happen to drop by your hard disk. Youse don't want to surf the internets without protection, you can't be too careful. I mean, this is a nice computer, it'd be a terrible pity if something happened to it.
Slashdot Mirror
A stack of audio CDRs is not a sensible backup: they take up too much space, you lose your metadata, you lose some quality (not a massive deal, but galling nonetheless), and re-ripping any significant volume of music is a huge chore -- especially if your backups don't match anything in CDDB.
Mix, Burn, and Rip in one session. Your music keeps almost all the metadata and file name. The only difference you can see is the file name ends in "m4a" instead of "m4p" and you needed to manually copy over the cover art... and that's no longer even an issue. The difference you can hear... well, if you can hear it you probably should have bought a CD in the first place, since you're already losing quality going from CD to AAC.
Where does Apple let you re-download files from iTMS?
:)
I think he's talking about the early days of iTMS where you could only enable three computers and if you lost the system disk the only way to disable one was to plead with Apple's support to reset all your systems and start over.
Apple got a black eye from that and loosened it up some, but you can still get stuck having to go cap-in-hand to Apple to beg for access to your music again.
Which is why audio CD is still the best backup for Fairplay encrypted content.
Okay, which people have been demanding compatibility outside of Slashdotters who think Ogg still matters and Apple competitors who haven't been able to make a better product?
The people who bought Real's "Harmony" plug-in for the iPod that allowed it to play content from Rhapsody, for one chunk of folks who want compatibility between iPod DRM and other people's. They still don't understand that DRM doesn't work, of course... the ones who do "get it" are following Apple's earlier advice, the stuff Michael Eisner said "encouraged piracy" (because of course Disney considered (and still considers) all kinds of protected "fair use" to be unethical at the least).
iTunes is the software for the iPod, and if you buy music through iTunes, it's clear it's only for the iPod.
Ah, that would be why you can "Mix" it, Burn" it to CD and "Rip" it in MP3, WMA, AAC, OGG, FLC, or whatever else you want. Now who ran an advertising campaign using those words?
Eisner accused the computer industry of considering piracy its new "killer app." He singled out Apple's "Rip, Mix, Burn" ad campaign of 2001 as an example of this type of behavior. -- Macworld, 2002
I'm sorry, I wasn't tryng to "make up quotes", I think I made it clear that those were my words, not Steve Jobs'. They're the words that I believe he would say if he were completely rejecting evasion and putting down what he believed, based on real quotes like:
"If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own." -- Steve Jobs, "Wall Street Journal" interview, 2002.
When we first went to talk to these record companies -- you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content. [There's] this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet -- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock -- open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it -- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. -- Steve Jobs, "Rolling Stone" interview, 2003.
There's no FUD here. There's nothing Apple needs to be ashamed of. The music industry forced them to make at least a token attempt at DRM in iTunes, and a token attempt is exactly whet they got... and serve them right!
All the buttons on the Zune are the wrong button.
In Redmond, the Zune presses YOUR button.
Oh, I wasn't endorsing the Zune, I just don't think that beaming business cards is the droid you're looking for.
I think they've already missed the point of why people would want wireless in a portable music player. Rather than sending the song so that it can be saved and played 3 times, there should basically be a "share what I'm listening to" option and a "listen to what someone is sharing" option. How hard can it be to basically add a shoutcast server/client?
Oooh, you're right. That would solve the license issue because the receiving device would be listening to the stream from nearby Zunes *only*, and only while it was playing. It would be conceptually like hooking the Zune to a speaker that plays at a frequency only dogs can hear.
They would still need to have some kind of mechanism to keep people from logging the stream to disk, but it wouldn't need to be as sophisticated as a new DRM scheme... existing mechanisms for protecting streams between trusted devices would be sufficient.
NASA and/or their primary contractors seem to have a problem in general with maintaining production capability for capital equipment. I've seen accounts like this more than once... if something isn't officially a consumable they seem to build enough for their current plans, but make no provision for tooling up to build more if the failure rate on anything is higher than anticipated.
No other backups are available, but the failed gyro currently is being refurbished.
Shouldn't they have had more than *one* spare in the production pipeline, or placed bids or whatever for a second spare back in 2003?
Ask any system admin: RAIG only improve reliability if the MTTR is significantly less than the MTTF.
There's nothing cool about handing out business cards whether it's physical paper or digital data. Cool isn't even on the screen.
Beaming cards was mainstream... I had a wrecker driver wave a palm at me when he was towing my car in 2000... until the iPaq finally got a fast enough processor in the ARM to make Microsoft's handheld OS usable, and Palm lost the plot and tried to turn the Palm into the same kind of "laptop replacement" device Microsoft was pushing. Pocket PCs wrecked beaming.
Why?
The Pocket PC makes beaming business cards a cumbersome trial that only the geeky can handle. You had to navigate multiple menus, switch modes in the receiving device, and wait, and wait. The Palm made it simple and automatic... just hold one button down and it Just Works, and works *quickly*.
So the question is... will the Zune make beaming music "a cumbersome trial" or "simple and automatic"? How long will it take?
Good comments, but Jobs does have his own bits of doublespeak. When he says that customers aren't asking for compatibility he's either defining his terms VERY carefully or he's in denial.
On the other hand he can't say "we can't adopt Microsoft's proprietary DRM instead of our own proprietary DRM because: (A) Microsoft will crush us, and (B) Microsoft's DRM is too effective for customers to put up with... the main reason we can get away with what we're doing in the iTunes Store is because everyone knows our DRM is little more than 'honor system'."
Though it would be refreshing to hear that/ He could go on with "You know, back before we introduced DRM I pointed out that DRM is basically impossible to make more than 'honor system' anyway, and our success really proves how right I was."
Another more dubious feature is a new DRM system that will be exclusive to Zune and an updated MSM Music, mimicking Apple's proprietary system that locks users to the iPod/iTunes pairing.
If Microsoft thinks that the proprietary DRM is an advantage for the iPod, and they're trying to push that as part of the deal rather than because they're trying to keep the Zune-to-Zune stuff locked in to the Zune, they got another think coming.
When the iPod came out, most MP3 players didn't have DRM, Microsoft and Sony each had something in play and neither was really there. Apple hadn't started out behind DRM... Steve Jobs was on record as saying DRM was a bad idea... and where they've used it since then has been very minimal. Anyway, they realy didn't have a choice but to do it their own way... and they weren't seriously trying for a closed system: their files are regular MP4 files under the DRM. Having a lock on the DRM has turned out to be moderately useful once they won the lions share of the market through other means, but it's not going to help get you there... and since it's not that hard to get around, it's not much of a barrier.
DRM is basically not a feature that people want. It's something they put up with. They don't care what DRM you use, so long as it doesn't get in their way. When it's actually effective, THEN people look for other alternatives. And ineffective DRM (like Apple's) is only useful as a check-box for dealing with content providers.
Microsoft DID have some traction with their own proprietary DRM, but they just shot it in the foot. I for one welcome their incompetance.
1. A company name that people (rightly or wrongly) trust.
2. A commitment to maintaining the same hardware and software interfaces over the long term.
3. A user interface that looks good and works better than the iPod.
1: Microsoft does have this. So does Apple. Sony used to but it's thrown a lot away with years of deliberately broken players.
2: When you introduce the device by breaking compatibility to a commitment you made to "Plays for Sure" you're not likely to get the kind of accessory ecosystem the iPod has, and that accessory ecosystem is one of the main reasons I went with the iPod. Apple's not been 100% consistent with this, though. The new shuffle breaks compatibility with existing shuffle hardware, for example.
3: This is not as hard as it sounds. The click-wheel isn't all that it's talked up to be, a D-pad and a jog-wheel are at least as good for playlist navigation and MUCH better for anything else. It's a pity that the D-pad-and-jogwheel interface seems to have been abandoned even by Sony in favor of trying a radically new design on every device (which is NOT the way to convince people you're on top of #2).
All the fixes in the world won't negate the fact that you're buying a poorly-designed machine.
Yep, you have three choices:
1. A poorly designed machine with an OS that doesn't suck and applications that don't suck.
2. A well designed machine with an OS that sucks and applications that don't suck.
3. A well designed machine with an OS that doesn't suck and applications that suck.
I've done all three, and there are no good answers.
Erm, if the thermal sensors are on the copper tube then wouldn't the temperature reported by CoreDuoTemp be lower?
XP blows the doors off any of the Win9X products, and is arguably better than 2K in some performance and multimedia areas.
Windows NT4 and Windows NT 3.51 and Windows NT 3.1 all blew the doors off Windows 9x. So did OS 2, BeOS, AmigaDOS, and... well, the only OS that wasn't significantly better across the board was classic MacOS... and for most users Mac OS (bad as it was) was more reliable.
So the point is that saying XP was "the most reliable Windows ever" was such faint praise that for most people it made it sound much much worse than it was.
Since they control the clients and servers they can nerf the Pox Harbinger any time they want.
If Open GL is so great why does Microsoft have a stangle hold with their direct X.
Microsoft Flight Simulator, and other flight simulators and programs that use multi screens.
Microsoft broke OpenGL for multiple screens, even for systems with identical cards and with manufacturers that supported multiple screens, while making sure that DirectX worked and that Microsoft Flight Simulator worked with it.
That meant that every game manufacturer had three choices:
Support DirectX *as well as* OpenGL, with attendant developer and support costs.
Support openGL only and deliver an inferior experience for people who wanted mltiple screens on Windows.
Support DirectX only and abandon the Mac market.
Double score for Micrsoft there.
Guess who is in bed with Adobe?
Not Apple. Adobe has been boning Apple hard since the mid-90s. They used their position to kill Rhapsody: they refused to cut a deal for Display Postscript that let Apple price Rhapsody for a consumer market, and then refused point blank to support OpenStep. Apple had to go back and come up with a transition API for moving OS 8 apps... Carbon. Apple had to come up with a replacement for Display Postscript. Aqua. Then Adobe dragged their feet out on Carbonizing Photoshop, and they're going to be the *last* major Mac app converted to Intel.
This is just Adobe finally showing Microsoft a little of the face they show Apple.
makali: Whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls.
jwz: I am fully in support of this proposed audio-cock technology.
How exactly is "syncing your home directory to removable media" an exciting new feature?
I've been doing this, using rsync, for years. On sane operating systems where your whole account lives in one directory (as opposed to insane ones where it's spread among half a dozen locations) this is just something that automatically works. What's the big deal?
Some of the adjacent comments are amusing... or maybe scary... I wonder how much security code can be bypassed by a parameter of 666.
Intel's problems are not and have never been in the implementation of processor architecture. Their problems have always been their grandiose instruction set and architectural fantasies, and the degree to which they've let their plans be guided by currently-popular acadedmic theories.
80286 segmentation was at least partly informed by the design of PL/1 and Pascal.
iApx432 was the super-CISC designed to deal with object-orientation at the hardware level.
i860 needed advanced compiler technology that was still theoretical when it came out.
IA64 has the same problem in spades... and also completely failed to learn from MIPS toying with delay slots, or else they'd never have made "bundles" explicit compiler-controlled objects. Alpha and Power barrier instructions provide the same capability without forcing the compiler to build code specific to the underlying microarchitecture.
The fact that Intel has managed to keep up and even surpass companies with far better designs is a testament to their chip designers and process technology. It's a pity they don't give people of that quality room to do their best work earlier in the design pipeline.
If you lose 7.5% of these jobs a year in ten years, 75% of them are gone.
I assume that the 55% of the jobs that are lost over that ten year period are the ones held by the engineers who don't understand basic math.
I'd much rather have an iPod that supported smart playlists fully than one that played videos.
...
:(
I have a set of playlists based on ratings and a few arbitrary decisions about how often I wantto hear certain genres.
best: rating is 5 stars or rating is 4 stars and genre is not like "classical".
good: rating is 4 stars or playlist is "weird but good".
Then I have a second set of playlists like this:
day: Playlist is "best" and last play time is not within the past 24 hours.
twoday: Playlist is "good" and last play time is not within the past 48 hours.
week: Playlist is "weekly" and last play time is not within the last 7 days.
fortnight: Playlist is "fortnightly" and last play time is not within the last 14 days.
month: Playlist is "monthly" and last play time is not within the last 30 days.
Then a meta-list:
Playlist is "day" or playlist is "twoday" or playlist is "week" or playlist is "fortnight" or playlist is "month".
THAT list goes into party shuffle.
That produces a mix that's rarely predictable enough to be boring but still predictable enough to be comfortable. But the iPod can't handle it.
You can buy prepaid debit cards in all the drugstores and supermarkets around here.
"The new initiative is intended to protect consumers from pirated software"
I know these guys, see, and they might be able to keep out any pirated software that might, you know, just happen to drop by your hard disk. Youse don't want to surf the internets without protection, you can't be too careful. I mean, this is a nice computer, it'd be a terrible pity if something happened to it.