My problem with that solution is that viewing the video content becomes dependent on the iPod. When I go on a business trip and take my iPod, my wife would still want to view the video content (stored on a PC) at our house. An iPod is also small enoug to easily lose or be stolen from your bag/pocket/car etc. The AirShow Express (my name for it) has a permanent place in your home theater setup and also serves to extend the range of your wireless network (not a required function, but something that the AirTunes Express does today).
Does anybody know if this video content is HD? According to Steve the video availabe through iTMS is all 320 x 240, which is the native resolution of the new iPod. Far from Hi-Def, but probably just right for the screen size that it's intended for.
I doubt this will have much if any impact on the HD DVD format wars since most people won't see this as a device for watching video on their TV. Apple is marketing it is as a portable video device, and if it works then that's what it will work as. I expect in the next year or so that we'll see them introduce a product similar to AirTunes Express, but with video capabilities. That's what would really get me excited.
Have you looked at Linksys' NSLU2? There's a very active community focused on exploiting the flexibility of a low-cost, low-energy, Linux-based NAS device. I don't have one myself, but have been eyeing one for some time.
I filled out the form at Sony BMG's website to receive their recommended method of getting around the copy protection on these discs in order to use them with an iPod. Here is the text of their automated email (with my comments in italics):
Thank you for contacting Sony BMG Online.
We appreciate your purchase of our CD and apologize for any inconvenience. Please follow the instructions below in order to move your content into iTunes and onto an iPod.
Should they really be allowed to refer to these discs as CDs? Isn't that misleading since it implies that the discs a) conform to the CD standard and b) will work in all CD players?
[Macintosh] If you have a Macintosh computer you can copy the songs using your iTunes Player as you would normally do.
So if I get a Mac instead of a Vaio as my next computer, I can expect less problems when dealing with digital media? For some reason, the various groups within Sony never seem to play well together.
[Windows] If you have a PC place the CD into your computer and allow the Sony BMG audio player on the CD to automatically start. If the player software does not automatically start, open your Windows Explorer. Locate and select the drive letter for your CD drive. On the disc you will find either a file named LaunchCD.exe or Autorun.exe. Double-click this file to manually start the player.
TIP: If your CD does not contain either the LaunchCD.exe or
Autorun.exe files, it may not be compatible with this iPod
solution. Please reply to this letter for more information.
Once the Sony BMG player application has been launched and the End User License Agreement has been accepted, you can click the Copy Songs button on the top menu.
Can anyone post a copy of the EULA that you have to accept in order to do this? I don't have one of these discs, but I'd be interested in seeing the restrictions.
Follow the instructions to copy the secure Windows Media Files (WMA) to your PC. Make a note of where you are copying the songs to, you will need to get to these secure Windows Media Files in the next steps.
Once the WMA files are on your PC you can open and listen to the songs with Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher (or another fully compatible player that can playback secure WMA files, such as MusicMatch, RealPlayer, and Winamp). You can then burn the songs to a standard Audio CD. Please note that in order to burn the files, you will need to upgrade to, or already have, Windows Media Player 9 or 10.
Once the standard Audio CD has been created, place this copied CD back into your computer and open iTunes. iTunes can now rip the songs as you would any normal audio CD.
Please note an easier and more acceptable solution requires cooperation from Apple, who we have already reached out to in hopes of addressing this issue. To help speed this effort, we ask that you use the following link to contact Apple and ask them to provide a solution that would easily allow you to move content from protected CDs into iTunes or onto your iPod rather than having to go through the additional steps above:
While Apple's cooperation would prevent this problem, I'd hardly call it "easier" or "more acceptable" than just not shipping these copy-protected discs in the first place. This is no more Apple's (or any other digital audio player manufacturer) fault than it is Sony's.
Thank you for the opportunity to be of assistance.
The problem with disqualifying Pluto because of Neptune being the more dominant body falls apart when you consider the eccentric orbit of Pluto and just how far that takes it from Neptune's "region of space".
What exactly is the definition of a region of space?
How much larger must an object be than its neighbors in order to be considered the dominant object of its neighbors? Twice as large? Four times?
As far as sending huge files goes, they still don't need to know the differences between file sizes. People shouldn't be sending large documents through email anyway.
If people don't need to know the differences between file sizes, how do you expect them to identify which files are too large for email?
Both Sony and Nintendo have a retail store in Manhattan. The Nintendo store has lots of games available to play and is completely focused on gaming, whereas the Sony store has very little space devoted to the PlayStation brand.
I have friends and like to play games with them. For the strictly one-player games that I play (FPS, RPG, and MMORPG) I prefer the PC as a platform. So, I want at least one extra controller for any console that I buy. The first 3 or 4 consoles that I owned shipped with 2 controllers, so I came to expect this (Odyssey 2, Atari 2600, NES, and SNES).
Looks like I need to invest in that +3 Cap of Reading Comprehension. I still disagree though; I doubt that most casual gamers/parents buying this for their kids have the slighest idea what a hard drive is for in the console. I also doubt the ability of most retail employees to be able to coax many of those customers into dropping an extra $100 for one.
$40 for a memory card? That's ridiculous. Agreed. I think that $15-$20 is the right price range for memory cards and I have a feeling that MS is over-pricing them to encourage hard drive sales. If the vast majority of users buy the hard drive, developers are more likely to support it.
I know most XBox 360 buyers will be interested in the HD In the US at least, I doubt that. Most homes still don't have an HD-capable TV and fewer still understand how to get the most out of the television. I think that a lot of causual gamers/parents buying this for their kids will hook it up to a standard def TV.
what happened to the reasoning people bought consoles in the first place? Companies realized that you could make more profits by not including vital components (two controllers, memory card, and a game) in the box. MS is, in my opinion, taking this too far in this generation by segmenting their customer base - if I want to buy a console game, I don't want to look at minimum system requirements.
I'll be waiting until all 3 systems have been released before making a purchase (I can't justify buying more than one console per generation).
You might want to go look at the pictures of the console at the official XBox 360 website. There are two slots on the front of the console labled "Memory Unit A" and "Memory Unit B". I think it's safe to assume that that these two slots will be used for memory sticks.
What if you play rpg's for hours on end and want the comfort your control won't run out of batteries, but still want a hard drive and ethernet?
Then you buy the external hard drive as an add-on (it's a removable, external drive) and buy an ethernet CABLE. Note that both versions will have an ethernet jack, the $399 version just also includes an ethernet cable.
odds are the version without a hard disk will still have the connectors on the inside, happily protected by "warranty void when opened".
As I understand it, all models of the XBox 360 will support an external removeable hard drive; the $399 version just ships with said hard drive. If you get the $299 version you'll still be able to buy the hard drive add-on seperately without voiding the warranty or even opening the 360.
And what about us poor schmucks who buy blank CDs for purposes other than music piracy? I don't want my CD-R purchases taxed more just because the RIAA is too stubborn to overhaul its business model.
I have to respectfully disagree with your assesment of how playable the game is for people over 15 who don't have 10 hours/day to play. I'm 25, have a full-time job and a wife and I manage to enjoy playing WoW. From just my experience, the game is very enjoyable if you have friends or colleagues to play with.
I regularly play with 5 other friends who are similar ages and have similar real life demands as my own, and we manage to do quite well. We don't power level, and we're not participating in 40 person raids, but we find about 6 hours a week to play together (usually on Wednesday nights) and are advancing through the game at an enjoyable pace that way (in the last two weeks we've had very successful runs through Uldaman and Zul'Farrak).
In my opinion, you don't have to be a level 60 member of a large, well-organized guild that makes regular large raid runs to enjoy the game, though I'm sure that is one way to enjoy it. Why don't you give some reasons why you feel that the gameplay sucks that the developers could actually respond to?
What other games (both MMO and not) did members of the development team play while initially developing WoW? What other games are developers playing? Did any of these games impacted design decisions during WoW development? If so, can you give us any examples of how?
The Maxtors that I have running right now are a 540MB, a 5GB, a 20GB, and a 160GB. The WDs ranged from a 1.2GB to a 40GB. I'm fairly careful not to stack drives too closely together and when possible use cases that allow for active cooling of the HDs.
Just to be clear, the 540MB drive isn't the only drive I'm using for reference. I also have 5GB, 20GB, and 160GB drives from Maxtor that are performing very well. I consider the 5GB old in terms of hard drives, and some poeple would say that the 20GB is old too. At any rate, from the 4 drives that I've got (covering over 10 years of Maxtor's product line) I haven't had a single problem. The WDs I've had fail on me ranged from a 1.2GB to a 40GB, so I feel that I gave them a fair chance before swearing them off.
As for Dell sending you a different drive, I doubt that it had anything to do with the failure rate of a particular brand. When I worked tech support for a university, we had a Dell support contract for all of our office and student lab machines and got in replacement drives at least 3 times a month. It often seemed that they switched drives on a weekly basis; I think they just buy and ship whatever they can get the best deal on at the time.
Offtopic, but I've never gotten why everyone is so down on Maxtor drives. Maybe it's just me, but Maxtors have been the most reliable drives in my experience. I just got my first two Seagate drives about 3 months ago, so I can't claim to make a good judgement about them yet, but they're doing better than I would expect out of a Western Digital. In the past decade I've had at least 5 WD drives fail on me. Someone once told me that I had to be abusing the case that 3 of these WDs failed in, but in that same case I had a 540MB Maxtor drive that was running fine (and seeing more use than the WDs). Actually, that 540MB Maxtor is STILL running just fine to this day (over 10 years after I got it). I'll be buying Maxtor (and probably Seagate) drives for the forseeable future and I've sworn off WD.
Slashdot Mirror
My problem with that solution is that viewing the video content becomes dependent on the iPod. When I go on a business trip and take my iPod, my wife would still want to view the video content (stored on a PC) at our house. An iPod is also small enoug to easily lose or be stolen from your bag/pocket/car etc. The AirShow Express (my name for it) has a permanent place in your home theater setup and also serves to extend the range of your wireless network (not a required function, but something that the AirTunes Express does today).
Does anybody know if this video content is HD?
According to Steve the video availabe through iTMS is all 320 x 240, which is the native resolution of the new iPod. Far from Hi-Def, but probably just right for the screen size that it's intended for.
I doubt this will have much if any impact on the HD DVD format wars since most people won't see this as a device for watching video on their TV. Apple is marketing it is as a portable video device, and if it works then that's what it will work as. I expect in the next year or so that we'll see them introduce a product similar to AirTunes Express, but with video capabilities. That's what would really get me excited.
Have you looked at Linksys' NSLU2? There's a very active community focused on exploiting the flexibility of a low-cost, low-energy, Linux-based NAS device. I don't have one myself, but have been eyeing one for some time.
I filled out the form at Sony BMG's website to receive their recommended method of getting around the copy protection on these discs in order to use them with an iPod. Here is the text of their automated email (with my comments in italics):
Thank you for contacting Sony BMG Online.
We appreciate your purchase of our CD and apologize for any inconvenience.
Please follow the instructions below in order to move your content into iTunes
and onto an iPod.
Should they really be allowed to refer to these discs as CDs? Isn't that misleading since it implies that the discs a) conform to the CD standard and b) will work in all CD players?
[Macintosh]
If you have a Macintosh computer you can copy the songs using your iTunes Player
as you would normally do.
So if I get a Mac instead of a Vaio as my next computer, I can expect less problems when dealing with digital media? For some reason, the various groups within Sony never seem to play well together.
[Windows]
If you have a PC place the CD into your computer and allow the Sony BMG audio
player on the CD to automatically start. If the player software does not
automatically start, open your Windows Explorer. Locate and select the drive
letter for your CD drive. On the disc you will find either a file named
LaunchCD.exe or Autorun.exe. Double-click this file to manually start the
player.
TIP: If your CD does not contain either the LaunchCD.exe or
Autorun.exe files, it may not be compatible with this iPod
solution. Please reply to this letter for more information.
Once the Sony BMG player application has been launched and the End User License
Agreement has been accepted, you can click the Copy Songs button on the top
menu.
Can anyone post a copy of the EULA that you have to accept in order to do this? I don't have one of these discs, but I'd be interested in seeing the restrictions.
Follow the instructions to copy the secure Windows Media Files (WMA) to your PC.
Make a note of where you are copying the songs to, you will need to get to these
secure Windows Media Files in the next steps.
Once the WMA files are on your PC you can open and listen to the songs with
Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher (or another fully compatible player that can
playback secure WMA files, such as MusicMatch, RealPlayer, and Winamp). You can
then burn the songs to a standard Audio CD. Please note that in order to burn
the files, you will need to upgrade to, or already have, Windows Media Player 9
or 10.
Once the standard Audio CD has been created, place this copied CD back into your
computer and open iTunes. iTunes can now rip the songs as you would any normal
audio CD.
Please note an easier and more acceptable solution requires cooperation from
Apple, who we have already reached out to in hopes of addressing this issue. To
help speed this effort, we ask that you use the following link to contact Apple
and ask them to provide a solution that would easily allow you to move content
from protected CDs into iTunes or onto your iPod rather than having to go
through the additional steps above:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html
While Apple's cooperation would prevent this problem, I'd hardly call it "easier" or "more acceptable" than just not shipping these copy-protected discs in the first place. This is no more Apple's (or any other digital audio player manufacturer) fault than it is Sony's.
Thank you for the opportunity to be of assistance.
The Sony BMG Online Support Team
CCKM
The problem with disqualifying Pluto because of Neptune being the more dominant body falls apart when you consider the eccentric orbit of Pluto and just how far that takes it from Neptune's "region of space".
What exactly is the definition of a region of space?
How much larger must an object be than its neighbors in order to be considered the dominant object of its neighbors? Twice as large? Four times?
As far as sending huge files goes, they still don't need to know the differences between file sizes. People shouldn't be sending large documents through email anyway.
If people don't need to know the differences between file sizes, how do you expect them to identify which files are too large for email?
a story ... about laser-scribed chicken eggs that will "fight terrorism"
I thought that you had to be joking until I googled it. Link for the lazy.
Both Sony and Nintendo have a retail store in Manhattan. The Nintendo store has lots of games available to play and is completely focused on gaming, whereas the Sony store has very little space devoted to the PlayStation brand.
I have friends and like to play games with them. For the strictly one-player games that I play (FPS, RPG, and MMORPG) I prefer the PC as a platform. So, I want at least one extra controller for any console that I buy. The first 3 or 4 consoles that I owned shipped with 2 controllers, so I came to expect this
(Odyssey 2, Atari 2600, NES, and SNES).
Looks like I need to invest in that +3 Cap of Reading Comprehension. I still disagree though; I doubt that most casual gamers/parents buying this for their kids have the slighest idea what a hard drive is for in the console. I also doubt the ability of most retail employees to be able to coax many of those customers into dropping an extra $100 for one.
$40 for a memory card? That's ridiculous.
Agreed. I think that $15-$20 is the right price range for memory cards and I have a feeling that MS is over-pricing them to encourage hard drive sales. If the vast majority of users buy the hard drive, developers are more likely to support it.
I know most XBox 360 buyers will be interested in the HD
In the US at least, I doubt that. Most homes still don't have an HD-capable TV and fewer still understand how to get the most out of the television. I think that a lot of causual gamers/parents buying this for their kids will hook it up to a standard def TV.
what happened to the reasoning people bought consoles in the first place?
Companies realized that you could make more profits by not including vital components (two controllers, memory card, and a game) in the box. MS is, in my opinion, taking this too far in this generation by segmenting their customer base - if I want to buy a console game, I don't want to look at minimum system requirements.
I'll be waiting until all 3 systems have been released before making a purchase (I can't justify buying more than one console per generation).
have a looksie at Wikipedia.
all donuts have a hole in the middle
Not true
You might want to go look at the pictures of the console at the official XBox 360 website. There are two slots on the front of the console labled "Memory Unit A" and "Memory Unit B". I think it's safe to assume that that these two slots will be used for memory sticks.
What if you play rpg's for hours on end and want the comfort your control won't run out of batteries, but still want a hard drive and ethernet?
Then you buy the external hard drive as an add-on (it's a removable, external drive) and buy an ethernet CABLE. Note that both versions will have an ethernet jack, the $399 version just also includes an ethernet cable.
odds are the version without a hard disk will still have the connectors on the inside, happily protected by "warranty void when opened".
As I understand it, all models of the XBox 360 will support an external removeable hard drive; the $399 version just ships with said hard drive. If you get the $299 version you'll still be able to buy the hard drive add-on seperately without voiding the warranty or even opening the 360.
The $299 version doesn't ship with an ethernet CABLE, it still has an ethernet jack on the box though.
And what about us poor schmucks who buy blank CDs for purposes other than music piracy? I don't want my CD-R purchases taxed more just because the RIAA is too stubborn to overhaul its business model.
I have to respectfully disagree with your assesment of how playable the game is for people over 15 who don't have 10 hours/day to play. I'm 25, have a full-time job and a wife and I manage to enjoy playing WoW. From just my experience, the game is very enjoyable if you have friends or colleagues to play with.
I regularly play with 5 other friends who are similar ages and have similar real life demands as my own, and we manage to do quite well. We don't power level, and we're not participating in 40 person raids, but we find about 6 hours a week to play together (usually on Wednesday nights) and are advancing through the game at an enjoyable pace that way (in the last two weeks we've had very successful runs through Uldaman and Zul'Farrak).
In my opinion, you don't have to be a level 60 member of a large, well-organized guild that makes regular large raid runs to enjoy the game, though I'm sure that is one way to enjoy it. Why don't you give some reasons why you feel that the gameplay sucks that the developers could actually respond to?
What other games (both MMO and not) did members of the development team play while initially developing WoW? What other games are developers playing? Did any of these games impacted design decisions during WoW development? If so, can you give us any examples of how?
Thanks, and keep up the great work.
Yeldarb, Undead Warrior, Durotan
The Maxtors that I have running right now are a 540MB, a 5GB, a 20GB, and a 160GB. The WDs ranged from a 1.2GB to a 40GB. I'm fairly careful not to stack drives too closely together and when possible use cases that allow for active cooling of the HDs.
Just to be clear, the 540MB drive isn't the only drive I'm using for reference. I also have 5GB, 20GB, and 160GB drives from Maxtor that are performing very well. I consider the 5GB old in terms of hard drives, and some poeple would say that the 20GB is old too. At any rate, from the 4 drives that I've got (covering over 10 years of Maxtor's product line) I haven't had a single problem. The WDs I've had fail on me ranged from a 1.2GB to a 40GB, so I feel that I gave them a fair chance before swearing them off.
As for Dell sending you a different drive, I doubt that it had anything to do with the failure rate of a particular brand. When I worked tech support for a university, we had a Dell support contract for all of our office and student lab machines and got in replacement drives at least 3 times a month. It often seemed that they switched drives on a weekly basis; I think they just buy and ship whatever they can get the best deal on at the time.
Offtopic, but I've never gotten why everyone is so down on Maxtor drives. Maybe it's just me, but Maxtors have been the most reliable drives in my experience. I just got my first two Seagate drives about 3 months ago, so I can't claim to make a good judgement about them yet, but they're doing better than I would expect out of a Western Digital. In the past decade I've had at least 5 WD drives fail on me. Someone once told me that I had to be abusing the case that 3 of these WDs failed in, but in that same case I had a 540MB Maxtor drive that was running fine (and seeing more use than the WDs). Actually, that 540MB Maxtor is STILL running just fine to this day (over 10 years after I got it). I'll be buying Maxtor (and probably Seagate) drives for the forseeable future and I've sworn off WD.