It won't kill the Mac game market in part because it involves effort and money (buying Windows XP) and you won't be able to buy a Mac already set up to dual-boot, so the vast majority of Macs will not be able to boot into Windows. If a game developer wants to tap the Mac market, they're still going to have to produce Mac versions of their software. There's always been problems with game developers not seeing the Mac market as worth their time, but this advent is not going to change that situation one way or the other. The developers currently make Mac games are going to continue doing so, and those currently not making Mac games will continue to not produce them, unless the Mac marketshare grows substantially.
If Mac marketshare does grow substantially, perhaps in part as a result of this new capability, then the incentive to produce Mac-native versions of games will increase, not decrease. You don't buy an Intel Mac because you want to run Windows on it. You buy one because you want to run Mac OS X on it, but you may also like being able to run Windows as needed. The less needed, the better.
The big difference here is that this capability sells Apple-branded hardware, just as the iTunes Music Store sells iPods. IBM was trying to sell the other operating system. Apple is not selling the other operating system, they are selling the hardware to run it on, and indirectly, their own operating system and future upgrades to it.
I'm not talking about macrovision. I'm talking about the picture on the TV regardless of source, including showing broadcast TV. When I say it is distorted, I mean that if you display a line box, the lines of the box are curvy instead of straight. The color is uneven left to right across the screen.
For one thing, Sony does not know how to make buttons. If a Sony product has a button on it, it will eventually stop working properly. My Sony "Trinitron" TV's remote long ago bit the big one - the buttons work intermittently at the very best. In addition the power light on the TV is intermittent. Also the picture is slightly distorted and the color is uneven and always has been. My Sony stereo receiver acquired a loud buzzing noise far too early in its life. I replaced it with a cheap Kenwood that has proven far more reliable, still going strong years later. Etc, etc. I, for one, have no trust whatsoever in Sony products. They are all crap as far as I can tell and it boggles my mind that they have such a good reputation. My experience, at least, has been pretty much the polar opposite.
Well, I suppose that's 3 words and one acronym, but you get the idea. Put the OS and some utilities on a USB keychain drive and you can have all the disaster recovery tools you need on your person. I'm looking forward to it.
So far, PS3 exists entirely in a hype-world. Nothing coming from Sony gives any confidence that this product will actually see the light of day any time even remotely soon, nor that it will be what everyone seems to think it will be. What if the PS3 goes with a whimper? What then of Blu-Ray? Sony hasn't exactly been on a roll of late, so why is there so much confidence in the success of the elusive PS3?
I recently made a series of unsatisfying purchases from iTMS. First it was the album "Winters Pageant" by The Softies. Most of the album was fine, but the first track was messed up, having a 1/2 second or so blank spot shortly after the song started. I tried playing the track on multiple computers and my vPod and they all showed it. I complained to them, and to their credit they not only refunded me for that one track, but for the entire album purchase. So I can't complain in that regard, but ultimately I just want that track intact. They told me not to buy the track again for 4 to 6 weeks so they'd have time to fix it. I allowed more than 2 months to pass and bought the track again, and it still had the same problem. I complained again and again they refunded my purchase (this time just for the one track as that is all I purchased.) As far as the refunds are concerned that was fine, but what I really wanted was track 1 intact. I don't think I'm going to try buying the track again from iTMS, only to perhaps once again find it is messed up and again having to request a refund. They seem unwilling, or unable, to tell me when the track has been fixed.
So instead I used the original album refund to buy a different album, Neutral Milk Hotel's "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea". This is a great album, and there were no such technical problems with the tracks, but, my god, is this album ever ruined by the inability of iTunes and the iPod to play the songs without gaps! Like no other. There are numerous seamless transitions between songs. At least they are suppose to be seamless. When listening to the iTMS versions you get heart-stopping gaps. Setting a 0 second crossfade slightly helps, but not much, and the iPod can't even do that. Unlike had I purchased a CD, I couldn't use the "Join CD Tracks" feature of iTunes to join my iTMS purchased tracks as a means to get around this issue. Again I complained and requested a refund. I requested that they give me my cash back, as opposed to crediting my account, because I wanted to buy the album on CD now, but they didn't do that and instead just credited my iTMS account for the album. I ended up then using the credit to buy an album that I knew didn't have seamless transitions between tracks, and I'm basically happy with that purchase, so all is well in that regard. I also then ordered a copy of the CD of "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" from an online store and happily used the "Join CD Tracks" feature of iTunes to join tracks 1-2, 4-5, 6-8 and 9-11, so those seamless transitions would be intact. Now I've got the album in a form that plays like it is suppose to in iTunes and on my iPod, something iTMS is completely incapable of.
So, Apple treated me fine, but I'm completely turned off to iTMS unless I can be sure the album does not have seamless transitions between tracks. Even then, I'm wary of the possibility that one or more of the tracks may be messed up, and that Apple wouldn't fix them, or at least that it is not possible for me to know if and when they fixed them.
Get the Gaminator 5200. It will have better network even then puny PS3! You want polygons? Gaminator 5200's got way more than pathetic Xbox 360. Xbox 360? You make me laugh! So, don't waste money now on Xbox 360, nor put in pre-order for PS3 in 2007. Come 2008, you will be sick with any such purchase, vomiting up little bits of cheetos having wasted money on puny and pathetic system. Better to save for Gaminator 5200!
Re:You can't man a .app look like a .jpg in OS X
on
First Mac OS X Virus?
·
· Score: 1
Ah, now I see, and it does work. Good point.
Re:You can't man a .app look like a .jpg in OS X
on
First Mac OS X Virus?
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps I don't know what you mean by a "plain executable", but as noted, I tried it and it didn't work. I tried to do this with "cp" in/bin and while making the name be "cp.jpg" did make the file look like a jpeg, it also caused the mac to try to open the file in Preview, as a jpeg, which failed because it isn't a jpeg. It didn't execute it.
Re:You can't man a .app look like a .jpg in OS X
on
First Mac OS X Virus?
·
· Score: 1
If you take a "plain executable" and give it an extension of.jpg, it will then in fact look like a jpeg (the file icon changes to that), but when you open this trojan file, it just attempts to open it in Preview, because it in fact things it's a jpeg, and Preview just says it can't open it. That's not going to do it either.
You can't man a .app look like a .jpg in OS X
on
First Mac OS X Virus?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I tried to create an application that had a name of test.jpg.app and was pleased to find that, at least in Mac OS X 10.4.5, when you try to do this, the Finder displays the entire name, including the entire extension ".jpg.app", even though normally the ".app" portion is hidden. Take out the ".jpg" and the ".app" goes missing again. The "hide extension" option in the get info window is disabled when you have a name like ".jpg.app". So, it isn't quite so easy to disguise an application as a jpeg in Mac OS X. Of course not everyone is going to know what the.app means and so it being visible won't help them. Then again, if that's the case, they probably don't know what the.jpg means either!
I also tried doing this with a.term file, which was set to hide the extension. When I made the name test.jpg.term, the full name was displayed including ".term", and the "hide extension" option was disabled.
You just need to use a tool such as RadioLover on the Mac, that lets you rip an MP3 stream to individual, tagged tracks. It's not even re-encoding, just pulling from the stream. The tracks get sent to iTunes automatically, and thus onto my iPod when I sync it. Viola, portable internet radio. I have it set to rip 2 hours worth of Indie Pop Rocks every night and that gives a pretty much endless supply of "internet radio" to listen to on the go. What's really sweet about this is that not only can you skip backward, but you can skip *forward* when you don't like a track. Try that on XM or Sirius! Moreover, I can use the iPod's star rating feature to "tag" tracks that I like when I hear them. When I sync later, those star ratings get copied over to my Mac's iTunes. I have a smart playlist that lists all tracks from the stream that I've tagged with such a star rating, so when somebody wants to get me a birthday or christmas gift, I just check out the list and can quickly put together a CD wish list. This is a fantastic way to find new music, and just a fantastic way to listen to "radio". I prefer it to actually listening to the stream "live".
I think the flaw in what you are saying is that using encryption with email is not only not commonplace, but is very difficult to do, and that's why it isn't and will remain uncommon for the forseable future. It is impractical to expect people to encrypt their email because no one has made it easy and practical. To turn your comparison on its head, it's like installing hidden and boobytrapped surveilance cameras in everyones bedroom, and justifying it by saying that everyone should know they are there, be able to find them and be able to disable them without getting killed.
I have had an iPod mini, iPod photo and now a vPod. They've been great, but one shortcoming of all these ipods which I come up against occasionally, particularly while using it in my car, is that you can't see the clickwheel in the dark. Thus I see a virtual touch-screen clickwheel as an obvious and much needed improvement, mainly because you'd be able to see it in the dark. That it allows for a larger display in the same (or smaller) form-factor would of course be a nice bonus. Yeah, you'll have to deal with fingerprints/smudges, but that's what a shirt sleeve is for. I'll take that minor nuisance in exchange for the night-time visibility of the scrollwheel and larger display.
Or at least I think so. I tried to research this topic by googling for "search engine fraud", but I think google was on the fritz, as all it ever found was "Cudly panda bears" and "A9.is.a.steaming.pile.of.shit.com"
Determined in an extremely unscientific and questionable fashion (plugging and unplugging the power cord over and over?) Plus they undoubtedly had the MB's set to max performance and full screen brightness, instead of a more normal mode. Apparently Apple is mum about battery life because they are still optimizing it. We shall see what it's like once they ship. The other big question is noise - will these things be as quiet as my 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4?
In spite of the fact that the files reside in the iTunes Music folder, I find that podcasts you are subscribed to (and have been downloaded) do not appear in your Library. You can get them to appear in your library by dragging them from the special Podcasts item (or from the Finder) to your Library, but they do not automatically appear there. Why not? Net result is that smart playlists are of no use for podcasts without some scripting trickery to do the dragging for you.
When you do drag the podcasts to your library, iTunes 4.9 treats the one in your Library as a separate item from the one shown in Podcasts - for example they have separate play dates/counts - even though they are the same exact file (revealing the file in either place reveals the same file in the same location in the Finder.) But it gets worse. Even though it treats them as separate things, if you delete the podcast from your Library, it also deletes it from the Podcasts listing, and they don't even show up again as there but not downloaded. There is no way to get them to show up again as undownloaded that I can find (so that you can redownload them) - refreshing the podcast does not put them back in the list. If you still have the files you can drag them from the Finder into the Podcasts listing and then they will show up there again, but not in your Library.
Also odd is how in the podcast "directory" at the music store, all podcasts show a "time" of "Not available". That's useful. And you can't have it show the size of the files either. Podcasts tend to be pretty large files and knowing how big a podcast is seems like something most people will want to know before they download it. Then there's the fact that what you first see when you start up this new version is a Podcast item. So you click it, of course, and what do you see? A pretty much blank window. Hidden at the bottom, below the scrollbar, is a small link to the "Podcast directory". This is just plain bad design.
This podcast stuff in iTunes is clearly a total rush-job. I certainly hope they improve upon it soon. Currently it appears that whoever designed it must recently have been hit on the head with a large metal pipe. I give the podcast feature 1 star, though overall iTunes is still a good music player/organizer application, albeit, amazingly, *STILL* missing gapless playback. They develop this pathetic Podcast implementation instead of addressing that long existing and oft-requested shortcoming? Argh!
Overall I have to knock it down to 3 stars due to the terrible podcast implementation, that it is more and more feeling like a hodgepodge, and the continuing failure to provide gapless playback. Sigh. I really wish there were some music player competition on the Mac again - obviously Apple needs it! The only hope is that this is cross-platform and there is music player competition on that other platform, even podcast plugin to iTunes competiton - maybe that will jar Apple into improving iTunes. Maybe they are doing a real update to iTunes, a complete rethinking, to be dubbed 5.0. God I hope so!
You can take a tape out of one tape deck (say at home), put it in another (like your car) and pick up exactly where you left off and without having to think about it. You can't do that with read-only media such as CD. As such, CD is only useful as a means of delivering content, which is then copied to computer and iPod. In contrast, tape still has playback utility at least for audio books, where picking up where you left off is essential, and means of doing this with read-only CDs is problematic/hackish, and tape has huge ease-of-use advantages in this regard, even over MP3 players (where it's easy to accidentally skip to the next chapter, and then getting back to where you were is a royal pain.)
Of course with the advent of the iTMS, etc, the days of CDs even as content delivery mechanism are numbered (though for me they won't be until iTMS goes AAC+ and includes full liner notes/lyrics with every album along with some really slick interface to it all, which is currently just wishful thinking....) Because tape still has use for audio book playback while CD has basically no use for playback, I think CDs will go the way of dinosaurs before tape does.
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It won't kill the Mac game market in part because it involves effort and money (buying Windows XP) and you won't be able to buy a Mac already set up to dual-boot, so the vast majority of Macs will not be able to boot into Windows. If a game developer wants to tap the Mac market, they're still going to have to produce Mac versions of their software. There's always been problems with game developers not seeing the Mac market as worth their time, but this advent is not going to change that situation one way or the other. The developers currently make Mac games are going to continue doing so, and those currently not making Mac games will continue to not produce them, unless the Mac marketshare grows substantially.
If Mac marketshare does grow substantially, perhaps in part as a result of this new capability, then the incentive to produce Mac-native versions of games will increase, not decrease. You don't buy an Intel Mac because you want to run Windows on it. You buy one because you want to run Mac OS X on it, but you may also like being able to run Windows as needed. The less needed, the better.
The big difference here is that this capability sells Apple-branded hardware, just as the iTunes Music Store sells iPods. IBM was trying to sell the other operating system. Apple is not selling the other operating system, they are selling the hardware to run it on, and indirectly, their own operating system and future upgrades to it.
I'm not talking about macrovision. I'm talking about the picture on the TV regardless of source, including showing broadcast TV. When I say it is distorted, I mean that if you display a line box, the lines of the box are curvy instead of straight. The color is uneven left to right across the screen.
For one thing, Sony does not know how to make buttons. If a Sony product has a button on it, it will eventually stop working properly. My Sony "Trinitron" TV's remote long ago bit the big one - the buttons work intermittently at the very best. In addition the power light on the TV is intermittent. Also the picture is slightly distorted and the color is uneven and always has been. My Sony stereo receiver acquired a loud buzzing noise far too early in its life. I replaced it with a cheap Kenwood that has proven far more reliable, still going strong years later. Etc, etc. I, for one, have no trust whatsoever in Sony products. They are all crap as far as I can tell and it boggles my mind that they have such a good reputation. My experience, at least, has been pretty much the polar opposite.
Four words: USB Keychain Disk Utilities
Well, I suppose that's 3 words and one acronym, but you get the idea. Put the OS and some utilities on a USB keychain drive and you can have all the disaster recovery tools you need on your person. I'm looking forward to it.
The one for the average user would look like this:
1. There is no step 1.
SSH and everything else is off by default and the average user won't enable them, probably won't even know how to enable them.
n/t
I've got your "bird" right here, Symantec.
So far, PS3 exists entirely in a hype-world. Nothing coming from Sony gives any confidence that this product will actually see the light of day any time even remotely soon, nor that it will be what everyone seems to think it will be. What if the PS3 goes with a whimper? What then of Blu-Ray? Sony hasn't exactly been on a roll of late, so why is there so much confidence in the success of the elusive PS3?
See subject
I recently made a series of unsatisfying purchases from iTMS. First it was the album "Winters Pageant" by The Softies. Most of the album was fine, but the first track was messed up, having a 1/2 second or so blank spot shortly after the song started. I tried playing the track on multiple computers and my vPod and they all showed it. I complained to them, and to their credit they not only refunded me for that one track, but for the entire album purchase. So I can't complain in that regard, but ultimately I just want that track intact. They told me not to buy the track again for 4 to 6 weeks so they'd have time to fix it. I allowed more than 2 months to pass and bought the track again, and it still had the same problem. I complained again and again they refunded my purchase (this time just for the one track as that is all I purchased.) As far as the refunds are concerned that was fine, but what I really wanted was track 1 intact. I don't think I'm going to try buying the track again from iTMS, only to perhaps once again find it is messed up and again having to request a refund. They seem unwilling, or unable, to tell me when the track has been fixed.
So instead I used the original album refund to buy a different album, Neutral Milk Hotel's "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea". This is a great album, and there were no such technical problems with the tracks, but, my god, is this album ever ruined by the inability of iTunes and the iPod to play the songs without gaps! Like no other. There are numerous seamless transitions between songs. At least they are suppose to be seamless. When listening to the iTMS versions you get heart-stopping gaps. Setting a 0 second crossfade slightly helps, but not much, and the iPod can't even do that. Unlike had I purchased a CD, I couldn't use the "Join CD Tracks" feature of iTunes to join my iTMS purchased tracks as a means to get around this issue. Again I complained and requested a refund. I requested that they give me my cash back, as opposed to crediting my account, because I wanted to buy the album on CD now, but they didn't do that and instead just credited my iTMS account for the album. I ended up then using the credit to buy an album that I knew didn't have seamless transitions between tracks, and I'm basically happy with that purchase, so all is well in that regard. I also then ordered a copy of the CD of "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" from an online store and happily used the "Join CD Tracks" feature of iTunes to join tracks 1-2, 4-5, 6-8 and 9-11, so those seamless transitions would be intact. Now I've got the album in a form that plays like it is suppose to in iTunes and on my iPod, something iTMS is completely incapable of.
So, Apple treated me fine, but I'm completely turned off to iTMS unless I can be sure the album does not have seamless transitions between tracks. Even then, I'm wary of the possibility that one or more of the tracks may be messed up, and that Apple wouldn't fix them, or at least that it is not possible for me to know if and when they fixed them.
Get the Gaminator 5200. It will have better network even then puny PS3! You want polygons? Gaminator 5200's got way more than pathetic Xbox 360. Xbox 360? You make me laugh! So, don't waste money now on Xbox 360, nor put in pre-order for PS3 in 2007. Come 2008, you will be sick with any such purchase, vomiting up little bits of cheetos having wasted money on puny and pathetic system. Better to save for Gaminator 5200!
Ah, now I see, and it does work. Good point.
Perhaps I don't know what you mean by a "plain executable", but as noted, I tried it and it didn't work. I tried to do this with "cp" in /bin and while making the name be "cp.jpg" did make the file look like a jpeg, it also caused the mac to try to open the file in Preview, as a jpeg, which failed because it isn't a jpeg. It didn't execute it.
If you take a "plain executable" and give it an extension of .jpg, it will then in fact look like a jpeg (the file icon changes to that), but when you open this trojan file, it just attempts to open it in Preview, because it in fact things it's a jpeg, and Preview just says it can't open it. That's not going to do it either.
I tried to create an application that had a name of test.jpg.app and was pleased to find that, at least in Mac OS X 10.4.5, when you try to do this, the Finder displays the entire name, including the entire extension ".jpg.app", even though normally the ".app" portion is hidden. Take out the ".jpg" and the ".app" goes missing again. The "hide extension" option in the get info window is disabled when you have a name like ".jpg.app". So, it isn't quite so easy to disguise an application as a jpeg in Mac OS X. Of course not everyone is going to know what the .app means and so it being visible won't help them. Then again, if that's the case, they probably don't know what the .jpg means either!
.term file, which was set to hide the extension. When I made the name test.jpg.term, the full name was displayed including ".term", and the "hide extension" option was disabled.
I also tried doing this with a
until I read that it was based on Frustrated Total Internal Reflection. This baby *is* for me. Plus, butt mousing.
You should never buy the first generation of anything
You just need to use a tool such as RadioLover on the Mac, that lets you rip an MP3 stream to individual, tagged tracks. It's not even re-encoding, just pulling from the stream. The tracks get sent to iTunes automatically, and thus onto my iPod when I sync it. Viola, portable internet radio. I have it set to rip 2 hours worth of Indie Pop Rocks every night and that gives a pretty much endless supply of "internet radio" to listen to on the go. What's really sweet about this is that not only can you skip backward, but you can skip *forward* when you don't like a track. Try that on XM or Sirius! Moreover, I can use the iPod's star rating feature to "tag" tracks that I like when I hear them. When I sync later, those star ratings get copied over to my Mac's iTunes. I have a smart playlist that lists all tracks from the stream that I've tagged with such a star rating, so when somebody wants to get me a birthday or christmas gift, I just check out the list and can quickly put together a CD wish list. This is a fantastic way to find new music, and just a fantastic way to listen to "radio". I prefer it to actually listening to the stream "live".
I think the flaw in what you are saying is that using encryption with email is not only not commonplace, but is very difficult to do, and that's why it isn't and will remain uncommon for the forseable future. It is impractical to expect people to encrypt their email because no one has made it easy and practical. To turn your comparison on its head, it's like installing hidden and boobytrapped surveilance cameras in everyones bedroom, and justifying it by saying that everyone should know they are there, be able to find them and be able to disable them without getting killed.
I have had an iPod mini, iPod photo and now a vPod. They've been great, but one shortcoming of all these ipods which I come up against occasionally, particularly while using it in my car, is that you can't see the clickwheel in the dark. Thus I see a virtual touch-screen clickwheel as an obvious and much needed improvement, mainly because you'd be able to see it in the dark. That it allows for a larger display in the same (or smaller) form-factor would of course be a nice bonus. Yeah, you'll have to deal with fingerprints/smudges, but that's what a shirt sleeve is for. I'll take that minor nuisance in exchange for the night-time visibility of the scrollwheel and larger display.
Or at least I think so. I tried to research this topic by googling for "search engine fraud", but I think google was on the fritz, as all it ever found was "Cudly panda bears" and "A9.is.a.steaming.pile.of.shit.com"
Determined in an extremely unscientific and questionable fashion (plugging and unplugging the power cord over and over?) Plus they undoubtedly had the MB's set to max performance and full screen brightness, instead of a more normal mode. Apparently Apple is mum about battery life because they are still optimizing it. We shall see what it's like once they ship. The other big question is noise - will these things be as quiet as my 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4?
In spite of the fact that the files reside in the iTunes Music folder, I find that podcasts you are subscribed to (and have been downloaded) do not appear in your Library. You can get them to appear in your library by dragging them from the special Podcasts item (or from the Finder) to your Library, but they do not automatically appear there. Why not? Net result is that smart playlists are of no use for podcasts without some scripting trickery to do the dragging for you.
When you do drag the podcasts to your library, iTunes 4.9 treats the one in your Library as a separate item from the one shown in Podcasts - for example they have separate play dates/counts - even though they are the same exact file (revealing the file in either place reveals the same file in the same location in the Finder.) But it gets worse. Even though it treats them as separate things, if you delete the podcast from your Library, it also deletes it from the Podcasts listing, and they don't even show up again as there but not downloaded. There is no way to get them to show up again as undownloaded that I can find (so that you can redownload them) - refreshing the podcast does not put them back in the list. If you still have the files you can drag them from the Finder into the Podcasts listing and then they will show up there again, but not in your Library.
Also odd is how in the podcast "directory" at the music store, all podcasts show a "time" of "Not available". That's useful. And you can't have it show the size of the files either. Podcasts tend to be pretty large files and knowing how big a podcast is seems like something most people will want to know before they download it. Then there's the fact that what you first see when you start up this new version is a Podcast item. So you click it, of course, and what do you see? A pretty much blank window. Hidden at the bottom, below the scrollbar, is a small link to the "Podcast directory". This is just plain bad design.
This podcast stuff in iTunes is clearly a total rush-job. I certainly hope they improve upon it soon. Currently it appears that whoever designed it must recently have been hit on the head with a large metal pipe. I give the podcast feature 1 star, though overall iTunes is still a good music player/organizer application, albeit, amazingly, *STILL* missing gapless playback. They develop this pathetic Podcast implementation instead of addressing that long existing and oft-requested shortcoming? Argh!
Overall I have to knock it down to 3 stars due to the terrible podcast implementation, that it is more and more feeling like a hodgepodge, and the continuing failure to provide gapless playback. Sigh. I really wish there were some music player competition on the Mac again - obviously Apple needs it! The only hope is that this is cross-platform and there is music player competition on that other platform, even podcast plugin to iTunes competiton - maybe that will jar Apple into improving iTunes. Maybe they are doing a real update to iTunes, a complete rethinking, to be dubbed 5.0. God I hope so!
You can take a tape out of one tape deck (say at home), put it in another (like your car) and pick up exactly where you left off and without having to think about it. You can't do that with read-only media such as CD. As such, CD is only useful as a means of delivering content, which is then copied to computer and iPod. In contrast, tape still has playback utility at least for audio books, where picking up where you left off is essential, and means of doing this with read-only CDs is problematic/hackish, and tape has huge ease-of-use advantages in this regard, even over MP3 players (where it's easy to accidentally skip to the next chapter, and then getting back to where you were is a royal pain.)
Of course with the advent of the iTMS, etc, the days of CDs even as content delivery mechanism are numbered (though for me they won't be until iTMS goes AAC+ and includes full liner notes/lyrics with every album along with some really slick interface to it all, which is currently just wishful thinking....) Because tape still has use for audio book playback while CD has basically no use for playback, I think CDs will go the way of dinosaurs before tape does.