What is this recent spat of discussions about stereo component MP3 players? Uh, I ran cables from the back of a standard Creative Live! sound card to my stereo system for a lot less than $1500. Even the more reasonable 'stereo component' systems still cost $250, which strikes me as a lot of money for not much more functionality. My total cost was about $40 (including the $30 for the MusicMatch Jukebox) by the time i got done with cables, etc - with it all running off of an old P200 I had sitting around.
So, what does the extra $1460 get me here? A remote? A LCD screen? A CDRW? And a box that looks about the same size as an XBox that I will have to cram into my stereo cabinet.
If you want a 40 gig MP3 player for your stereo that isn't based off of your PC, buy a Creative Nomad Jukebox retrofitted with a bigger HD from www.nomadjukebox.net for 1/3rd of the price - and you can take it with you when you want to go somewhere! I just don't get this obsession with adding another large box to a stereo setup....
While it's interesting to think about how long it takes to fill 10 gig via USB (short answer: overnight) that really isn't a big deal to me. Fine, I transfer your music one evening & I have it from then on on the Treo. There are two bigger 'time' questions though, IMO.
1) How long does it take to start playing from the moment I boot the machine (for reference, Creative Nomad Jukebox's take up to 50 seconds for an initial boot, check out News.Creative.Com - Products.Nomad and the comments there by Nomad owners & you'll see this is a common issue)?
2) How long does it take for the Treo to shuffle from one track to another one? In other words, are there noticable delays between non-sequential tracks as the hard drive searches for the next song? This would also come into play if I searched for a song - how long will it take to find it?
Anyway, I can live with a long process of transfering my music to the machine as it will only have to be done once (with periodic smaller updates as I get new music), but the other issues would affect me every time I try to play music...and would just be annoying.
The one thing that a reader expects is for you to be honest. (Speaking of the media outlets.)
This doesn't quite cover everything. It might be the FIRST thing that readers expect, but as anyone who has taken Journalism 101 would know, your readers also expect:
1) Timely reporting or, if you are not a daily/weekly publication, new angles on older topics.
2) An attempt to be objective. To expect every reporter to be completely unbiased is rather naive - reporters are people, people have biases and are subjective by nature. This is different from the concept of 'honesty' discussed in the article! You can be completely honest about the fact that your magazine receives its add money from M$ or Apple or whoever and still be unobjective simply because you didn't do your research.
3) Fairness and a willingness to mention and discuss (if only briefly) both sides to the story. Personally I think that this causes bigger problems for most media outlets (online & other) than biases installed by their advertizers. It just takes longer to do a story if you have to research both sides and lots of reporters seem to take the (lazy, easy, whatever) way out!
This list can go on and on. Of course the article is right that honesty but realistically a newspaper can lose trust through dishonesty and then just gain it back as long as they fall on their sword later. Don't think so? How about using the Washington Post as an example:
Do you remember the Janet Cooke fiasco of 1981 when the Pulizer prize committee had to rescind the award given to a Washington Post reporter? All she did was wrote a series of fake stories about a nonexistent eight-year-old heroin addict, called "Jimmy's World", all of which appeared on the front page of the Post. Journalistic failings and scandals don't come much bigger than this: a reporter decided to just fake an entire series in one of the largest newspapers in the country, her editors didn't check up on her, the Pulizer committee didn't catch anything - it was only much later that the story started to fall apart. The Post got (rightfully) hammered for being dishonest and not having enough internal checks to prevent this crap from happening and they moved on. Do folks today still care or remember? Nah.
I'd say this is just my $.02, but this is long enough that it's probably more like my $2.00....
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What is this recent spat of discussions about stereo component MP3 players? Uh, I ran cables from the back of a standard Creative Live! sound card to my stereo system for a lot less than $1500. Even the more reasonable 'stereo component' systems still cost $250, which strikes me as a lot of money for not much more functionality. My total cost was about $40 (including the $30 for the MusicMatch Jukebox) by the time i got done with cables, etc - with it all running off of an old P200 I had sitting around.
So, what does the extra $1460 get me here? A remote? A LCD screen? A CDRW? And a box that looks about the same size as an XBox that I will have to cram into my stereo cabinet.
If you want a 40 gig MP3 player for your stereo that isn't based off of your PC, buy a Creative Nomad Jukebox retrofitted with a bigger HD from www.nomadjukebox.net for 1/3rd of the price - and you can take it with you when you want to go somewhere! I just don't get this obsession with adding another large box to a stereo setup....
-Mark
While it's interesting to think about how long it takes to fill 10 gig via USB (short answer: overnight) that really isn't a big deal to me. Fine, I transfer your music one evening & I have it from then on on the Treo. There are two bigger 'time' questions though, IMO.
.02 worth.
1) How long does it take to start playing from the moment I boot the machine (for reference, Creative Nomad Jukebox's take up to 50 seconds for an initial boot, check out News.Creative.Com - Products.Nomad and the comments there by Nomad owners & you'll see this is a common issue)?
2) How long does it take for the Treo to shuffle from one track to another one? In other words, are there noticable delays between non-sequential tracks as the hard drive searches for the next song? This would also come into play if I searched for a song - how long will it take to find it?
Anyway, I can live with a long process of transfering my music to the machine as it will only have to be done once (with periodic smaller updates as I get new music), but the other issues would affect me every time I try to play music...and would just be annoying.
Just my
-Mark
From Section 5 of the article:
The one thing that a reader expects is for you to be honest. (Speaking of the media outlets.)
This doesn't quite cover everything. It might be the FIRST thing that readers expect, but as anyone who has taken Journalism 101 would know, your readers also expect:
1) Timely reporting or, if you are not a daily/weekly publication, new angles on older topics.
2) An attempt to be objective. To expect every reporter to be completely unbiased is rather naive - reporters are people, people have biases and are subjective by nature. This is different from the concept of 'honesty' discussed in the article! You can be completely honest about the fact that your magazine receives its add money from M$ or Apple or whoever and still be unobjective simply because you didn't do your research.
3) Fairness and a willingness to mention and discuss (if only briefly) both sides to the story. Personally I think that this causes bigger problems for most media outlets (online & other) than biases installed by their advertizers. It just takes longer to do a story if you have to research both sides and lots of reporters seem to take the (lazy, easy, whatever) way out!
This list can go on and on. Of course the article is right that honesty but realistically a newspaper can lose trust through dishonesty and then just gain it back as long as they fall on their sword later. Don't think so? How about using the Washington Post as an example:
Do you remember the Janet Cooke fiasco of 1981 when the Pulizer prize committee had to rescind the award given to a Washington Post reporter? All she did was wrote a series of fake stories about a nonexistent eight-year-old heroin addict, called "Jimmy's World", all of which appeared on the front page of the Post. Journalistic failings and scandals don't come much bigger than this: a reporter decided to just fake an entire series in one of the largest newspapers in the country, her editors didn't check up on her, the Pulizer committee didn't catch anything - it was only much later that the story started to fall apart. The Post got (rightfully) hammered for being dishonest and not having enough internal checks to prevent this crap from happening and they moved on. Do folks today still care or remember? Nah.
I'd say this is just my $.02, but this is long enough that it's probably more like my $2.00....
Cheers.