Too bad it doesn't scare more people. I can't believe how many people think that TIPS, the Department of Homeland Security, and the US Patriot Act are good things. I've also met several people that think they aren't enough. Now that REALLY scares me.
I recently replaced a Soyo Dragon V Plus. It took them about 3.5 weeks. I had Abit replace several boards with bad capacitors and they took about 4 weeks each. Most people don't bother dealing with the warranty so many companies are sloppy. That's no reason to not get it replaced by the manufacturer, especially when it's a warranty covered issue or a manufacturer defect.
Actually your comparison doesn't fit. Drunk driving is potentially deadly. Which is one of the biggest reasons it's illegal. The only harm that comes from the above listed actions is going to be monetarily. Passing draconian laws simply because the legislators are uninformed or because thier pockets are being lined is not acceptable and we should let them know that. This goes for all types of laws not just tech laws. Yes, there are going to be times where actions occur that require legislation after the fact to curb the problem (of course you can debate this too). However, in this case we are going to put handcuffs on a 500 billion dollar industry for the sake of a 50 billion dollar industry. Does that make any sense? It doesn't to me. I spoke with a senetor for my state on Saturday night while at a college convention for my wife. During the discussion I asked how she made most of her voting decisions and I was told that in many cases she only had basic information returned to her from her staff. Summaries. How can you possibly make a good, educated decision from a summary?!?! She couldn't answer that with anything better than "The best I can."
That doesn't make the legislators any more right than the abusers. We can have a direct effect on the legislators while it is much harder to have a direct effect on the abusers you list. Beside, if you compare many of these representatives voting records with other bills you will find that they don't just push bad tech laws, many of them push bad laws in general.
You are absolutly correct, I realized my mistake after submitting the previewed comment and well.... no edit your own comment function here unfortunatly.
Ordering from sites that offer short warranties isn't that big of a deal since most manufacturers offer 1 year or longer warranties on thier products anyway. All the additional 30 day dealer warranty allows you to do is return the item to the retailer instead of the manufacturer. In my experience it's been cheaper to deal directly with the manufacturer. Depending on the item some will drop ship you a new item while yours is in transit to them, others will pay for shipping. Of course each manufacturer varies, and the companies that have had the worst products also seem to have the worst warranty and rma policies.
Well being that we are counting the percentages based on replies and if you are going to cry and not post a reply then that doesn't get figured in. Of course you could post about crying as you just did which would probably account for maybe.5% of the total posts.;)
The best part is.... I can't see a single way this site benefits from being done in flash. Of course the other pages of the site aren't all flash, but you don't know that as you can't get past the first screen and into the content.
What does two levels of cable have to do with anything? If the cable company doesn't offer what you want don't get broad band from the cable company. Look at ADSL, SDSL, Wireless, or see if you are too far away for many of these services try looking into the newer DSL offerings that are supposedly range unlimited (of course you are going to have to pay a premium for that). If you allow yourself to be locked into the what the cable company offers you are choosing to do so, there ARE other offerings. The point I made at the end of my main comment is that the average joe doesn't want unlimited high speed access if it means uploads, downloads and unblocked ports. They care about thier download speed and not much else. Companies claiming that users are bandwidth hogs will probably piss off thier customers, but those customers either need to learn yell louder or search out a differant service. Complaining that a company isn't playing fair but continuing to use the service is pointless.
I'd still rather have the TiBook as well. For one while this rips off the form factor it doesn't rip off the style that the TiBook has. I want a laptop that is going to have gauranteed unix functionality either by the vendor supporting it directly or by finding a laptop that uses components that are already supported in Linux. Of course going with apple you don't have to worry about that in the first place. The next thing I want is a a good screen size without a huge increase in weight. This fits that about as well as the TiBook. I also like for my laptops to be somewhat visually appealing. I loved my VAIO and it's tiny form factor and the purpleish silverish magnesium casing. The TiBook is equally as pleasing to the eye in 90% of it's design. I don't much care for the coloring of the plastic peices where the vents and ports are, but whatever. The problem with this laptop is that the keyboard area appears black. That's too sharp of a contrast to the magnesium casing in my opinion and is visually unappealing. Of course the price is the other issue. This is priced below the equivalent TiBook and will steal sales based on that alone. Of course the TiBook appears to offer more configuration options though I'd guess you probably have to head to your local BestBuy to find out for sure on that note.
I dunno, I still think the TiBook is cooler, and being that my VAIO finally died I'm in the market for a laptop, the TiBook is my first choice but I just can't afford it right now. This is a good option, but I'd be willing to spend the few extra dollars for gauranteed unix app support and what I consider to be better overall style.
As you can see from my other post just a little farther down I live in Reno Nevada which has a population of less than 300k people if you include the tourist population. Hardly New York either;)
I live in Reno Nevada. Hardly a large town though we do have the University of Nevada Reno here. Of course all but the SDSL options are available to my parents who live in Gardnerville Nevada bout 75 miles south of here. Gardnervill has a population of just over 40k people and was mostly a ranching/farming community that is basically just a suburb of the surrounding areas now. They use Charter Cable because of one reason. It's cheap and while it was still ATT @Home they could get free installation. One of the reasons that there are so many options available is New Edge Networks. Thier line is that if they don't have service available in your area they will try whatever they can to get you broadband. Of course you have to be willing to pay for it. http://www.newedgenetworks.com/
So, there are less options in suburban areas but there are still options for those that are willing to look for them. One of our local ISPs does a superb job of servicing smaller areas with broadband. Greatbasin.
There are options for most people in most places. However, these options are typically not cost effective. Here's an example of things in my area.
Dial-up: $20 per month ADSL: 1.5Mb/384Kb $40 per month Cable: 1.5-2Mb/128Kb $40 per month SDSL: 384Kb/384Kb $90-130 per month SDSL: 768Kb/768Kb $100-200 per month SDSL: 1.1Mb/1.1Mb $120-250 per month SDSL: 1.5Mb/1.5Mb $140-300 per month Wireless: 1Mb/1Mb $50-350 per month Wireless: 3Mb/3Mb $100-500 per month
Now, these all differ in policies, there are ports blocked on some of the cheaper solutions to prevent business from getting residential accounts and paying reduced prices etc, but for the most services this covers the cheapest residential services offered and the more expensive business counterparts from providers that aren't offering broadband to residential customers at a residential rate.
For the most part people don't need upload and don't care about ports being blocked so they are going to go for the cheap ADSL or Cable solution. For those that want high speed bidirection connections they are going to have to shell out a few more dollars. If you don't want ports blocked you are going to have to pay a bit more.
I currently pay $179 per month for a 1100/1100 SDSL connection and have had few complaints with the ISP. I'm getting what I'm paying for and I'm paying a premium. If your average consumer doesn't care about unblocked ports and thier upload capacity then $40 per month seems fair to them and anything more than that seems unreasonable. The broadband market is moving more towards these types of consumers and away from the geeks that want complete 100% unrestricted access with no ports blocked and no bandwidth restrictions. Bandwidth isn't cheap for the isps, and for the most part they have shouldered these costs to sell thier product. That's not feasable, and really never was. So what you see is the ISPs changing thier pricing policies and and thier service policies. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a smart business decision.
You get what you pay for, and if you aren't willing to pay more for a better service then you shouldn't expect it.
Hrm, I'm rereading this and not sure If I've made a point or remained coherant at all, but I had a point when I started..... Oh, right my point is there is plenty of competition, it's just not in the price range of the average joe because the average joe doesn't give a rats ass about what the competition is offering.
I believe that thier 10 tracks a month is only refering to their subscription service which is $9.95 a month. This new service would be pay as you go $0.99 per track. Also if you dig a bit deeper on thier site you'll find it's not even available yet.
With the bill blocked the small webcasters may have to pay a higher rate initially (or the flatfee), but have a better chance of getting more reasonable legislation passed rather than having to fight the legislation after it's passed.
As far as Ogg Vorbis goes you are going to see some songs be larger and others be smaller, and it mostly depends on the software you use and the quality settings you select. On average I see about a 5% differance in size between cd's that I've ripped to mp3 and ogg. Sound quality is going to depend a lot on your stereo equpitment and your hearing when you get both mp3 and ogg ripped with decent quality levels selected. Where I've noticed a big differance is with 64Kb encodings, ogg seems to sound much better than mp3 on the lower end. Of course I'm a bit biased towards ogg so it could just be my imagination;)
Some of us have already emailed creative asking for ogg support back when the second and third Nomads were released. If you head over to the Apple forums on apple.com you'll see many people asking for Ogg Vorbis support. The fact that everyone doesn't come back here and cross post "I just asked for Ogg support!" doesn't mean it isn't happening.
While I agree people who care about music quality don't use mp3, I have to add that those that care about patent issues don't use mp3 either. That's where Ogg comes in. In some cases Ogg sounds better at low bitrates, in others it doesn't. That will change over time. MP3 is the current default, but it isn't exactly difficult for Creative or other vendors to simply add Ogg support to a later firmware release to please the crowd that wants it. Especially since the only cost to them is developer time and not developer time plus royalties for the codec.
While your points are certainly fair I think that comparing Play Center to iTunes is also certainly fair. Music Match on windows is great for ripping audio, or it was I haven't used it in a good bit. Other than that I don't like it's music managment etc. The thing is this though, the nomad is a direct competitor to the iPod. I mean the thing even looks very much like the iPod. When Apple created the iPod and iTunes they put a hell of a lot of thought into makeing a nice system that works well together and is very easy for just about anyone to figure out. When apple added a "windows" version and bundled Music Match with the iPod it was more of an after thought and a method to snag all of the windows users that didn't want to buy a mac also. A good idea on Apples part, but certainly not as well planned as iTunes and the iPod. So, being that Creative is primarily a company that markets to Windows users you would hope that they would put in the same amount of time and effort into mergeing Play Center and thier iPod clone.
The extras that Apple has with the iPod like contacts are a nice bonus, and the hacker community can probably add it to the nomad if they really want it, but I don't think that's creatives angle. They are makeing a music player, the screen is smaller, the price is lower, etc. While it's a good clone, and I do think it's going to get some of the people that want an iPod but don't want to pay the price, it's not really as nice as the iPod.
That's actually a LOT cheaper than the iPod even without rebate. The 20GB iPod is $499, the 10GB iPod is $399. The high price of the iPod and the lack of Ogg Vorbis support are the only real reasons I can think of to not buy it.
Re:This is great and all but what about the softwa
on
Another iPod Competitor
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· Score: 3, Informative
I've used Play Center 3 a good bit because it came with my Sound Blaster Audigy, and I can't stand it. Version 3 is better than the older versions, but it's still clunky and over complicated. That's just my opinion of course and others may have had better experiences. Having used both Play Center 3 and iTunes though, I would say that iTunes is much better than Play Center. iTunes just has a ton of thought put into makeing the user interaction with the software as simple as possible.
Isn't that a chicken and egg problem? How does Ogg Vorbis become more pervasive if all consumer appliances and software like this support mp3 but not Ogg Vorbis out of the box? If this supported Ogg Vorbis out of the box you might see more people ripping cd's to Ogg Vorbis or at least visiting the website to find out what the hell this Ogg Vorbis thingy is.
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Too bad it doesn't scare more people. I can't believe how many people think that TIPS, the Department of Homeland Security, and the US Patriot Act are good things. I've also met several people that think they aren't enough. Now that REALLY scares me.
Which two would those be? I haven't seen any that haven't been broken.
I recently replaced a Soyo Dragon V Plus. It took them about 3.5 weeks. I had Abit replace several boards with bad capacitors and they took about 4 weeks each. Most people don't bother dealing with the warranty so many companies are sloppy. That's no reason to not get it replaced by the manufacturer, especially when it's a warranty covered issue or a manufacturer defect.
Actually your comparison doesn't fit. Drunk driving is potentially deadly. Which is one of the biggest reasons it's illegal. The only harm that comes from the above listed actions is going to be monetarily. Passing draconian laws simply because the legislators are uninformed or because thier pockets are being lined is not acceptable and we should let them know that. This goes for all types of laws not just tech laws. Yes, there are going to be times where actions occur that require legislation after the fact to curb the problem (of course you can debate this too). However, in this case we are going to put handcuffs on a 500 billion dollar industry for the sake of a 50 billion dollar industry. Does that make any sense? It doesn't to me. I spoke with a senetor for my state on Saturday night while at a college convention for my wife. During the discussion I asked how she made most of her voting decisions and I was told that in many cases she only had basic information returned to her from her staff. Summaries. How can you possibly make a good, educated decision from a summary?!?! She couldn't answer that with anything better than "The best I can."
That doesn't make the legislators any more right than the abusers. We can have a direct effect on the legislators while it is much harder to have a direct effect on the abusers you list. Beside, if you compare many of these representatives voting records with other bills you will find that they don't just push bad tech laws, many of them push bad laws in general.
You are absolutly correct, I realized my mistake after submitting the previewed comment and well.... no edit your own comment function here unfortunatly.
Ordering from sites that offer short warranties isn't that big of a deal since most manufacturers offer 1 year or longer warranties on thier products anyway. All the additional 30 day dealer warranty allows you to do is return the item to the retailer instead of the manufacturer. In my experience it's been cheaper to deal directly with the manufacturer. Depending on the item some will drop ship you a new item while yours is in transit to them, others will pay for shipping. Of course each manufacturer varies, and the companies that have had the worst products also seem to have the worst warranty and rma policies.
Well being that we are counting the percentages based on replies and if you are going to cry and not post a reply then that doesn't get figured in. Of course you could post about crying as you just did which would probably account for maybe .5% of the total posts. ;)
Another 3% will be posts containing "IAAL," followed by a shoddy, educated legal analysis.
do we determine that this star contains no metal? The articles are a bit short on details.
The best part is.... I can't see a single way this site benefits from being done in flash. Of course the other pages of the site aren't all flash, but you don't know that as you can't get past the first screen and into the content.
What does two levels of cable have to do with anything? If the cable company doesn't offer what you want don't get broad band from the cable company. Look at ADSL, SDSL, Wireless, or see if you are too far away for many of these services try looking into the newer DSL offerings that are supposedly range unlimited (of course you are going to have to pay a premium for that). If you allow yourself to be locked into the what the cable company offers you are choosing to do so, there ARE other offerings. The point I made at the end of my main comment is that the average joe doesn't want unlimited high speed access if it means uploads, downloads and unblocked ports. They care about thier download speed and not much else. Companies claiming that users are bandwidth hogs will probably piss off thier customers, but those customers either need to learn yell louder or search out a differant service. Complaining that a company isn't playing fair but continuing to use the service is pointless.
I'd still rather have the TiBook as well. For one while this rips off the form factor it doesn't rip off the style that the TiBook has. I want a laptop that is going to have gauranteed unix functionality either by the vendor supporting it directly or by finding a laptop that uses components that are already supported in Linux. Of course going with apple you don't have to worry about that in the first place. The next thing I want is a a good screen size without a huge increase in weight. This fits that about as well as the TiBook. I also like for my laptops to be somewhat visually appealing. I loved my VAIO and it's tiny form factor and the purpleish silverish magnesium casing. The TiBook is equally as pleasing to the eye in 90% of it's design. I don't much care for the coloring of the plastic peices where the vents and ports are, but whatever. The problem with this laptop is that the keyboard area appears black. That's too sharp of a contrast to the magnesium casing in my opinion and is visually unappealing. Of course the price is the other issue. This is priced below the equivalent TiBook and will steal sales based on that alone. Of course the TiBook appears to offer more configuration options though I'd guess you probably have to head to your local BestBuy to find out for sure on that note.
I dunno, I still think the TiBook is cooler, and being that my VAIO finally died I'm in the market for a laptop, the TiBook is my first choice but I just can't afford it right now. This is a good option, but I'd be willing to spend the few extra dollars for gauranteed unix app support and what I consider to be better overall style.
As you can see from my other post just a little farther down I live in Reno Nevada which has a population of less than 300k people if you include the tourist population. Hardly New York either ;)
I live in Reno Nevada. Hardly a large town though we do have the University of Nevada Reno here. Of course all but the SDSL options are available to my parents who live in Gardnerville Nevada bout 75 miles south of here. Gardnervill has a population of just over 40k people and was mostly a ranching/farming community that is basically just a suburb of the surrounding areas now. They use Charter Cable because of one reason. It's cheap and while it was still ATT @Home they could get free installation. One of the reasons that there are so many options available is New Edge Networks. Thier line is that if they don't have service available in your area they will try whatever they can to get you broadband. Of course you have to be willing to pay for it. http://www.newedgenetworks.com/
So, there are less options in suburban areas but there are still options for those that are willing to look for them. One of our local ISPs does a superb job of servicing smaller areas with broadband. Greatbasin.
There are options for most people in most places. However, these options are typically not cost effective. Here's an example of things in my area.
Dial-up: $20 per month
ADSL: 1.5Mb/384Kb $40 per month
Cable: 1.5-2Mb/128Kb $40 per month
SDSL: 384Kb/384Kb $90-130 per month
SDSL: 768Kb/768Kb $100-200 per month
SDSL: 1.1Mb/1.1Mb $120-250 per month
SDSL: 1.5Mb/1.5Mb $140-300 per month
Wireless: 1Mb/1Mb $50-350 per month
Wireless: 3Mb/3Mb $100-500 per month
Now, these all differ in policies, there are ports blocked on some of the cheaper solutions to prevent business from getting residential accounts and paying reduced prices etc, but for the most services this covers the cheapest residential services offered and the more expensive business counterparts from providers that aren't offering broadband to residential customers at a residential rate.
For the most part people don't need upload and don't care about ports being blocked so they are going to go for the cheap ADSL or Cable solution. For those that want high speed bidirection connections they are going to have to shell out a few more dollars. If you don't want ports blocked you are going to have to pay a bit more.
I currently pay $179 per month for a 1100/1100 SDSL connection and have had few complaints with the ISP. I'm getting what I'm paying for and I'm paying a premium. If your average consumer doesn't care about unblocked ports and thier upload capacity then $40 per month seems fair to them and anything more than that seems unreasonable. The broadband market is moving more towards these types of consumers and away from the geeks that want complete 100% unrestricted access with no ports blocked and no bandwidth restrictions. Bandwidth isn't cheap for the isps, and for the most part they have shouldered these costs to sell thier product. That's not feasable, and really never was. So what you see is the ISPs changing thier pricing policies and and thier service policies. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a smart business decision.
You get what you pay for, and if you aren't willing to pay more for a better service then you shouldn't expect it.
Hrm, I'm rereading this and not sure If I've made a point or remained coherant at all, but I had a point when I started..... Oh, right my point is there is plenty of competition, it's just not in the price range of the average joe because the average joe doesn't give a rats ass about what the competition is offering.
Uhm, you don't compile nightly builds, nightly builds are compiled for you. That's why they are called "builds."
I believe that thier 10 tracks a month is only refering to their subscription service which is $9.95 a month. This new service would be pay as you go $0.99 per track. Also if you dig a bit deeper on thier site you'll find it's not even available yet.
With the bill blocked the small webcasters may have to pay a higher rate initially (or the flatfee), but have a better chance of getting more reasonable legislation passed rather than having to fight the legislation after it's passed.
As far as Ogg Vorbis goes you are going to see some songs be larger and others be smaller, and it mostly depends on the software you use and the quality settings you select. On average I see about a 5% differance in size between cd's that I've ripped to mp3 and ogg. Sound quality is going to depend a lot on your stereo equpitment and your hearing when you get both mp3 and ogg ripped with decent quality levels selected. Where I've noticed a big differance is with 64Kb encodings, ogg seems to sound much better than mp3 on the lower end. Of course I'm a bit biased towards ogg so it could just be my imagination ;)
Some of us have already emailed creative asking for ogg support back when the second and third Nomads were released. If you head over to the Apple forums on apple.com you'll see many people asking for Ogg Vorbis support. The fact that everyone doesn't come back here and cross post "I just asked for Ogg support!" doesn't mean it isn't happening.
While I agree people who care about music quality don't use mp3, I have to add that those that care about patent issues don't use mp3 either. That's where Ogg comes in. In some cases Ogg sounds better at low bitrates, in others it doesn't. That will change over time. MP3 is the current default, but it isn't exactly difficult for Creative or other vendors to simply add Ogg support to a later firmware release to please the crowd that wants it. Especially since the only cost to them is developer time and not developer time plus royalties for the codec.
While your points are certainly fair I think that comparing Play Center to iTunes is also certainly fair. Music Match on windows is great for ripping audio, or it was I haven't used it in a good bit. Other than that I don't like it's music managment etc. The thing is this though, the nomad is a direct competitor to the iPod. I mean the thing even looks very much like the iPod. When Apple created the iPod and iTunes they put a hell of a lot of thought into makeing a nice system that works well together and is very easy for just about anyone to figure out. When apple added a "windows" version and bundled Music Match with the iPod it was more of an after thought and a method to snag all of the windows users that didn't want to buy a mac also. A good idea on Apples part, but certainly not as well planned as iTunes and the iPod. So, being that Creative is primarily a company that markets to Windows users you would hope that they would put in the same amount of time and effort into mergeing Play Center and thier iPod clone.
The extras that Apple has with the iPod like contacts are a nice bonus, and the hacker community can probably add it to the nomad if they really want it, but I don't think that's creatives angle. They are makeing a music player, the screen is smaller, the price is lower, etc. While it's a good clone, and I do think it's going to get some of the people that want an iPod but don't want to pay the price, it's not really as nice as the iPod.
That's actually a LOT cheaper than the iPod even without rebate. The 20GB iPod is $499, the 10GB iPod is $399. The high price of the iPod and the lack of Ogg Vorbis support are the only real reasons I can think of to not buy it.
I've used Play Center 3 a good bit because it came with my Sound Blaster Audigy, and I can't stand it. Version 3 is better than the older versions, but it's still clunky and over complicated. That's just my opinion of course and others may have had better experiences. Having used both Play Center 3 and iTunes though, I would say that iTunes is much better than Play Center. iTunes just has a ton of thought put into makeing the user interaction with the software as simple as possible.
Isn't that a chicken and egg problem? How does Ogg Vorbis become more pervasive if all consumer appliances and software like this support mp3 but not Ogg Vorbis out of the box? If this supported Ogg Vorbis out of the box you might see more people ripping cd's to Ogg Vorbis or at least visiting the website to find out what the hell this Ogg Vorbis thingy is.