"Yeah, but it means agreeing to a draconian EULA. (I take it you've never read the thing.)"
I have read it and it's not the 'sell your soul to the devil' document that Slashdot has made it out to be. Most of the 'violations' had to do with Automatic Update.
"How does passing laws to restrict the sale of violent games and put tight restrictions on the industry's labeling systems help parents raise their children?"
Well....
Actually I think there is a legitimate answer to this question. Part of being a parent is knowing what it is they're allowing their child to be exposed to. I think few would argue that if a McDonald's store hired a stripper to entertain for a day that a parent bringing their child in for a happy meal wouldn't have a right to complain. A ratings system, for example, (and I do mean this hypothetically) would let the parent know at a glance if they'd approve of the game being sold.
I'll be honest, I don't mind a ratings system. There are far too many games out there to assume the parent is going to stay up on what each title is and what it's about. Giving them a little help is okay in my opinion. But... restricting the sale of video games... Ugh. You know, I understand the thought behind it'. I wouldn't call it 'evil'. I mean, if a parent goes with their child to buy a game because they HAVE to, then it's hard to argue that the parent could be all that shocked if something bad came as a result of it. But man, now we're interferring with parenting. What if you, as a parent, think your 16 year old is old enough to play these games? I mean, he can drive a car. He's got a job. But you have to accompany him to buy Grand Theft Auto? Lame.
I'm also worried that this really doesn't solve any problems. Potentially, it could cause parents to be lazier in their duties. Do we really want parents to feel like the world should be safe for their kids? I don't feel that way. I don't think I could raise a well adjusted child if I didn't take the time to teach them about the dangers of life in general, or what right and wrong is. Should we stop using heat to cook food because a kid could stick his hand in an oven?
Maybe I'm a little biased. I grew up with video games. I don't have a criminal record. I stayed in school. Never did drugs. I have a good career. I grew up with kids that all played these games as well. They're all doing fine, too. I can't speak for them, but I know that cartoons caused my parents and I to have a little chat. They basically taught me what right and wrong is, and that TV is meant to be silly. There are, for example, no such things as talking dogs. And if there are no talking dogs, why should I expect that I inherent their laws of physics? (it's worth mentioning that I have never broken any bones. Never attempted to 'fly'. Worst I ever did was rack myself with a pair of Ninja Turtle style nunchucks.)
Would my parents have had this discussion with me if everything was made 'kid safe'? What would happen, at that point, if I did walk past an arcade and saw Mortal Kombat going on?
I don't mind helping out with the job of parenting. I don't mind putting labels on games. Restricting them, however, is going too far.
"Yeah, it's like having dual citizenship in both the USA and Cuba!"
Actually, it's more like having a pick-up truck and a small inexpensive sports car.
"PS: Apparently some on slashdot don't realize that many of us have dumped Windows for non-ideological reasons."
Yet many of you still whine about things like game availability or software incompatibility on Linux. I hope for your sake the benefit outweighs the negative. If it doesn't, then I'd strongly recommend you pay more attention to the suggestion the other dude made. You would think I was a total retard if I bitched about Linux only software but had some excuse not to dual boot with Linux. "I saw Linus eating non-dolphin-safe tuna!"
Actually he said to install Windows to broaden the availability of software to you. For some strange reason, most of Slashdot doesn't understand the idea that having both Linux and Windows around means you can do more stuff than just having either one of them up and running.
"It's not all or nothing. Windows is great for stuff like this. Don't let your ideology get in the way of cheap, efficient, widely avaiable software that'll make your life easier."
What's even cooler about that approach is you suddenly have a huge library of games available to you. If you ever get bored with Tux Racer...
"So because you can't manage to install Linux or have hardware that for some reason is not supported by Linux (and I really would like to know if you are just trolling and what hw and problems you have had), you claim that the parent poster is wrong. Amazing!"
To be fair, the anti-MS zealots use the same tactic. Evidently, if a version of Windows crashes on their machine, then everybody on the planet must be dealing with 14 bluescreens a day. Those of us, and there are a lot of us, who run Windows without these problems, are ignored or accused of working for Microsoft.
"Personally, I'm willing to sacrifice the convenience of flash animations, or of photoshop, for a free (as in beer) solution. I'm cheap. The fact that the free (as in beer and in freedom) software often is excellent quality,"
Ugh. Any other pixel pushers out there wince at that comment? Heh.
"A couple of those and another GameCube memory card to support them will close that $100 console gap reeeeally quickly."
That's a fair point, however the PS2 is a year older than the GameCube. That difference is not all that surprising.
"In a way, it also qualifies GameCube as a "Dreamcast II" from a numbers standpoint. It establishes that GameCube only posted as well as it did against Sony because Microsoft wasn't in town yet, analogous to Dreamcast vs. PS2."
Hardly. The XBOX came out like a month after the GameCube.
"PS2, Xbox, and PC owners are enjoying GTA3 and Vice City. Why aren't GameCube owners? Don't make it so it's not worth a third-party's time and effort to compete on your platform."
It wasn't for lack of storage. I don't know why Rockstar didn't do it, but if I had to venture a guess I'd say it was because it didn't look to be all that profitable. Demographics, yadda yadda.
"Nintendo fans love to point out that Nintendo always makes a profit in the end, while overlooking that they can post a profit and still come out a loser. Nintendo's failure to respond to the Microsoft threat is especially distressing."
Nintendo is a business. If they're making a healthy profit, that's not losing. Nintendo isn't going the way of Sega this generation, and not likely for the next either. There's a real possibility they could leave the console (note: not portable) market. Whatever they decide, it won't be because they're broke.
"With the "oh, we only play games" strategy of the GameCube having failed,"
I wouldn't call that strategy a failure. They're holding quite strong despite XBOX's greater graphical prowess and Sony's massive library of games.
" Nintendo has no choice but to shake things up for "Revolution". "
Despite some of our disagreeances on this topic, I want you to know I firmly agree with you on this one. Nintendo does need to try harder. I really hope they relent and broaden their games library.
I'm a hardcore Nintendo fan, I'd even call myself a zealot. Despite that, I still look over at the PS2 with envy. Give me a little credit, I'm not totally a raving idiot.;)
"Why spend upwards of 2 bucks for a crap ringtone when we could (assuming it supports this feature) use actual song snippets"
Heh. I have a cheapy Motorola phone. (I want to say V-100 but I honestly don't remember for sure.) It plays back.MP3 files, but they insist that I should go download and pay for ring tones. I found a way around that by uploading an MP3 file to my webserver and downloaded it from my internet feature on my phone. Pain in the butt, but I saved $2, and now my phone sounds like Ziggy from Quantum Leap!
Boy that gives me an idea of a prank I could play on my boss next time he leaves his phone laying around...
"I'm tired of hearing this excuse. The lack of DVD support, coupled with the way-too-cute form factor and name, the kiddie purple launch color, and the anemic 59 block memory card killed mainstream adoption of the GameCube. It's an inescapable fact."
No it's not. The inescapable fact is that GC doesn't have the game library people want. I'm a Nintendo zealot and even *I* can't escape that one.
"Yeah, sure, I can buy a GameCube along with a $100 DVD player, but why bother when I can get a DVD and game player all in one with no wiring mess?"
For an extra $100? I seriously doubt everybody would find that to be a small price to pay.
"You can't even fit GTA3 or Katamari Damacy on a single GameCube mini-DVD."
Wrong. GTA3 and Vice City were 2 CD games. The space was taken up with music. A simple MP3 compression would have easily fit the entire of each of those games on one CD, let alone a 1.5 gig DVD.
" What they basically did was launch Dreamcast II against Sony. Turns out that wasn't such a great idea."
Really? They're making a healthy profit. Maybe not as much as Sony, but they're still very much afloat. Sega wasn't so lucky.
"If the Gamecube would at least have added DVD capability like the PS2 and XBox, it would have been more on-par with them in terms of capability."
I can buy a $30 DVD player. I seriously doubt DVDs on the GameCube would have really been all that interesting from a sales #'s point of view.
"Ever since the NES/SNES they've relied more on their name to sell games, rather than their innovation. A key example of this is how most of their games squeeze the last bit of life from their franchises, instead of trying to develop additional ones."
That'd be a fine point if it wasn't something that happens quite often on the XBOX or PS2. At least Nintendo has the sense to make some serious changes to the franchise games instead of just creating what amounts to just a level expansion.
"Nintendo's been sitting on its laurels for too long in the console gaming market and they're clearly falling behind because of it."
I don't think your reasoning is all that sound. Nintendo's making a killing in the portable market. If Nintendo was really all that frustrating to be around, seems like it would have been a hell of a lot easier to crack their monopoly. No luck on that front, yet.
You can justify your crime all you want, but it still boils down to your decision to deprive someone of potential earnings."
This statement, right here, is exactly where the gray area is residing. Whether or not potential earnings were lost. There are some out there who are doing exactly that. Downloading music in lieu of buying it. There are some who are downloading music because they already have the CD and want an MP3 version of it. There are some out there that are simply trying to find new music to get into, those tend to turn into serious customers. And, simply, there are some who acquire it just to have it. (I actually met somebody like that. Had like a 10 gig collection and never really listened to it.) This is why there is so much flack over use of the term 'theft'. This is, by no means, a black and white situation.
What really irks me is this scenario: What if an album is really hyped up. What if I download a song from that album and go "bleech". The song is deleted and I never go buy the album. Did I steal from the righteous RIAA, or did I save myself some money that the RIAA would have shafted me for if I had done it their way? I can't return the album if I don't like it so gee, where's that leave us?
"stop buying them for christ's sake! now these idiots will believe that the frivolous lawsuits against 15-year-olds were successful."
Well it's sorta an inverse of the same standard Slashdot uses with Microsoft. When sales go down, it's piracy's fault. When they go up, it's because their campaign was effective.
" Who wants a screen that small anymore? You get better resolution on any $100 Palm now..."
I can think of a few reasons:
1.) It's $800, like you said. Do you really want to spend $900?
2.) The nice thing about 320 by 240 is that it's half of 640 by 480, which nearly all videos run at. (Not sure what it captures at, so bear with me...) 640 by 480 screens in that size are still quite rare. At 480 by 320 (correction please?) that Palm runs at is a little more common, but the resizing artifacts would be annoying. Even capturing at that oddball resolution would be a little weird, not to mention the increase in size.
3.) The screen is small. If you're reading an e-book or somethihg that's one thing, but most of us who do a little too much porn surfing know that 320 by 240 is more than acceptable. Heck, you're lucky if you can practically exceed that with TV.
4.) There are probably rebuttals to each of my points. They're not the strongest in the world, so I won't take offense to them. But you have to understand that a company designing these things has to make these considerations. Though I'd like a higher res screen, too, there are other concerns such as price and practicality. That's really what my point's about. Not so much about whether they're right or wrong, or whether they made the right choice overall. Personally, from what I read, I think they did fine.
"It kind of figures that one of the major product features of a Linux-based handheld is that it supports a media standard championed by MS, doesn't it? I mean why not support open-source standards like OGG?"
You don't think that the 10's of millions of Windows computers out there that can readily play the format aren't a compelling reason?
If you're saying support both, fine, great, but if you're saying don't support WMV... what business sense would that make? That'd be sorta like designing an American car using the metric system for its speedometer. Yeah, it might be a better system, but it'd bite you in the butt on the road here.
"I don't give a damn who posts what, or who makes money from something. If something interests me, I'll have a look. Its not like I have to get my credit card and sign my life away."
Glad somebody was finally modded up for this point. The whole reason advertising is such a big business is that a lot of businesses come up with interesting products and services, but they can't sell them if people don't know that they even exist.
I really don't care if Slashdot actually does use articles for advertising. If it's interesting, how you heard about it isn't important. If you're worried about how well a product/service stands up to the claims they're making, that's totally understandable, at least you know what it is you want to do research on.
"Apple doesn't have a monopoly. They can't charge monopoly rents - people will just buy CDs and rip to mp3. They can't restrict entry - anyone else could negotiate distribution contracts and sell music in just the same way."
Yeah, that's why they only have a measly 80% of the market.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yeah, but it means agreeing to a draconian EULA. (I take it you've never read the thing.)"
I have read it and it's not the 'sell your soul to the devil' document that Slashdot has made it out to be. Most of the 'violations' had to do with Automatic Update.
"How does passing laws to restrict the sale of violent games and put tight restrictions on the industry's labeling systems help parents raise their children?"
Well....
Actually I think there is a legitimate answer to this question. Part of being a parent is knowing what it is they're allowing their child to be exposed to. I think few would argue that if a McDonald's store hired a stripper to entertain for a day that a parent bringing their child in for a happy meal wouldn't have a right to complain. A ratings system, for example, (and I do mean this hypothetically) would let the parent know at a glance if they'd approve of the game being sold.
I'll be honest, I don't mind a ratings system. There are far too many games out there to assume the parent is going to stay up on what each title is and what it's about. Giving them a little help is okay in my opinion. But... restricting the sale of video games... Ugh. You know, I understand the thought behind it'. I wouldn't call it 'evil'. I mean, if a parent goes with their child to buy a game because they HAVE to, then it's hard to argue that the parent could be all that shocked if something bad came as a result of it. But man, now we're interferring with parenting. What if you, as a parent, think your 16 year old is old enough to play these games? I mean, he can drive a car. He's got a job. But you have to accompany him to buy Grand Theft Auto? Lame.
I'm also worried that this really doesn't solve any problems. Potentially, it could cause parents to be lazier in their duties. Do we really want parents to feel like the world should be safe for their kids? I don't feel that way. I don't think I could raise a well adjusted child if I didn't take the time to teach them about the dangers of life in general, or what right and wrong is. Should we stop using heat to cook food because a kid could stick his hand in an oven?
Maybe I'm a little biased. I grew up with video games. I don't have a criminal record. I stayed in school. Never did drugs. I have a good career. I grew up with kids that all played these games as well. They're all doing fine, too. I can't speak for them, but I know that cartoons caused my parents and I to have a little chat. They basically taught me what right and wrong is, and that TV is meant to be silly. There are, for example, no such things as talking dogs. And if there are no talking dogs, why should I expect that I inherent their laws of physics? (it's worth mentioning that I have never broken any bones. Never attempted to 'fly'. Worst I ever did was rack myself with a pair of Ninja Turtle style nunchucks.)
Would my parents have had this discussion with me if everything was made 'kid safe'? What would happen, at that point, if I did walk past an arcade and saw Mortal Kombat going on?
I don't mind helping out with the job of parenting. I don't mind putting labels on games. Restricting them, however, is going too far.
"Yeah, it's like having dual citizenship in both the USA and Cuba!"
Actually, it's more like having a pick-up truck and a small inexpensive sports car.
"PS: Apparently some on slashdot don't realize that many of us have dumped Windows for non-ideological reasons."
Yet many of you still whine about things like game availability or software incompatibility on Linux. I hope for your sake the benefit outweighs the negative. If it doesn't, then I'd strongly recommend you pay more attention to the suggestion the other dude made. You would think I was a total retard if I bitched about Linux only software but had some excuse not to dual boot with Linux. "I saw Linus eating non-dolphin-safe tuna!"
"Why do you need such a great CPU? ... I though graphics cards started doing MPEG2 assist and later complete MPEG2 decoding years ago?"
Because progressive full-res HDTV is 12 times as much data as what your DVD playback feature on your card supports?
"Why would he install another OS just for taxes?"
Actually he said to install Windows to broaden the availability of software to you. For some strange reason, most of Slashdot doesn't understand the idea that having both Linux and Windows around means you can do more stuff than just having either one of them up and running.
"It's not all or nothing. Windows is great for stuff like this. Don't let your ideology get in the way of cheap, efficient, widely avaiable software that'll make your life easier."
What's even cooler about that approach is you suddenly have a huge library of games available to you. If you ever get bored with Tux Racer...
"So because you can't manage to install Linux or have hardware that for some reason is not supported by Linux (and I really would like to know if you are just trolling and what hw and problems you have had), you claim that the parent poster is wrong. Amazing!"
To be fair, the anti-MS zealots use the same tactic. Evidently, if a version of Windows crashes on their machine, then everybody on the planet must be dealing with 14 bluescreens a day. Those of us, and there are a lot of us, who run Windows without these problems, are ignored or accused of working for Microsoft.
"Personally, I'm willing to sacrifice the convenience of flash animations, or of photoshop, for a free (as in beer) solution. I'm cheap. The fact that the free (as in beer and in freedom) software often is excellent quality,"
Ugh. Any other pixel pushers out there wince at that comment? Heh.
"someone's work that is done for money will always be inferior to the work of someone who does it for love."
Hmm.. how'zat work when you love money?
"I wonder if these things also make that ch-ch-ch-ch-ch noise when I bend things or jump over stuff..."
Heh. Imagine it as a marital aid.
"Hey baby, wanna role play? Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch..."
"A couple of those and another GameCube memory card to support them will close that $100 console gap reeeeally quickly."
;)
That's a fair point, however the PS2 is a year older than the GameCube. That difference is not all that surprising.
"In a way, it also qualifies GameCube as a "Dreamcast II" from a numbers standpoint. It establishes that GameCube only posted as well as it did against Sony because Microsoft wasn't in town yet, analogous to Dreamcast vs. PS2."
Hardly. The XBOX came out like a month after the GameCube.
"PS2, Xbox, and PC owners are enjoying GTA3 and Vice City. Why aren't GameCube owners? Don't make it so it's not worth a third-party's time and effort to compete on your platform."
It wasn't for lack of storage. I don't know why Rockstar didn't do it, but if I had to venture a guess I'd say it was because it didn't look to be all that profitable. Demographics, yadda yadda.
"Nintendo fans love to point out that Nintendo always makes a profit in the end, while overlooking that they can post a profit and still come out a loser. Nintendo's failure to respond to the Microsoft threat is especially distressing."
Nintendo is a business. If they're making a healthy profit, that's not losing. Nintendo isn't going the way of Sega this generation, and not likely for the next either. There's a real possibility they could leave the console (note: not portable) market. Whatever they decide, it won't be because they're broke.
"With the "oh, we only play games" strategy of the GameCube having failed,"
I wouldn't call that strategy a failure. They're holding quite strong despite XBOX's greater graphical prowess and Sony's massive library of games.
" Nintendo has no choice but to shake things up for "Revolution". "
Despite some of our disagreeances on this topic, I want you to know I firmly agree with you on this one. Nintendo does need to try harder. I really hope they relent and broaden their games library.
I'm a hardcore Nintendo fan, I'd even call myself a zealot. Despite that, I still look over at the PS2 with envy. Give me a little credit, I'm not totally a raving idiot.
"Why spend upwards of 2 bucks for a crap ringtone when we could (assuming it supports this feature) use actual song snippets"
.MP3 files, but they insist that I should go download and pay for ring tones. I found a way around that by uploading an MP3 file to my webserver and downloaded it from my internet feature on my phone. Pain in the butt, but I saved $2, and now my phone sounds like Ziggy from Quantum Leap!
Heh. I have a cheapy Motorola phone. (I want to say V-100 but I honestly don't remember for sure.) It plays back
Boy that gives me an idea of a prank I could play on my boss next time he leaves his phone laying around...
"Touch rotary dialing, apple will dominate the phone market!"
I'm so pissed I can't buy a phone these days that does rotary dialing.
Actually I'm not0 I'm just short of karma and I figure that if I bitch about something lost due to evolution of technology, I'll get modded up.
"Keep your eye on that one robot near the corner... he keeps mumbling something about Sarah Conner."
He's saying: "I'm getting tired of people approaching me asking if I'm looking for Sarah Connor. Tee hee hoddle haw."
"The robots will be commenting on Slashdot too! Maybe then the editing will be consistant..."
That's funny. I've always described complaints about spelling errors, dupes, and posts from Roland as consistent.
"I'm tired of hearing this excuse. The lack of DVD support, coupled with the way-too-cute form factor and name, the kiddie purple launch color, and the anemic 59 block memory card killed mainstream adoption of the GameCube. It's an inescapable fact."
No it's not. The inescapable fact is that GC doesn't have the game library people want. I'm a Nintendo zealot and even *I* can't escape that one.
"Yeah, sure, I can buy a GameCube along with a $100 DVD player, but why bother when I can get a DVD and game player all in one with no wiring mess?"
For an extra $100? I seriously doubt everybody would find that to be a small price to pay.
"You can't even fit GTA3 or Katamari Damacy on a single GameCube mini-DVD."
Wrong. GTA3 and Vice City were 2 CD games. The space was taken up with music. A simple MP3 compression would have easily fit the entire of each of those games on one CD, let alone a 1.5 gig DVD.
" What they basically did was launch Dreamcast II against Sony. Turns out that wasn't such a great idea."
Really? They're making a healthy profit. Maybe not as much as Sony, but they're still very much afloat. Sega wasn't so lucky.
"When the Gamecube was released, this was obviously not true. DVD players still cost upwards of $100-$150."
That was true when the PS2 came out. By the time the GC came out, DVD players were available at $80.
"If the Gamecube would at least have added DVD capability like the PS2 and XBox, it would have been more on-par with them in terms of capability."
I can buy a $30 DVD player. I seriously doubt DVDs on the GameCube would have really been all that interesting from a sales #'s point of view.
"Ever since the NES/SNES they've relied more on their name to sell games, rather than their innovation. A key example of this is how most of their games squeeze the last bit of life from their franchises, instead of trying to develop additional ones."
That'd be a fine point if it wasn't something that happens quite often on the XBOX or PS2. At least Nintendo has the sense to make some serious changes to the franchise games instead of just creating what amounts to just a level expansion.
"Nintendo's been sitting on its laurels for too long in the console gaming market and they're clearly falling behind because of it."
I don't think your reasoning is all that sound. Nintendo's making a killing in the portable market. If Nintendo was really all that frustrating to be around, seems like it would have been a hell of a lot easier to crack their monopoly. No luck on that front, yet.
You can justify your crime all you want, but it still boils down to your decision to deprive someone of potential earnings."
This statement, right here, is exactly where the gray area is residing. Whether or not potential earnings were lost. There are some out there who are doing exactly that. Downloading music in lieu of buying it. There are some who are downloading music because they already have the CD and want an MP3 version of it. There are some out there that are simply trying to find new music to get into, those tend to turn into serious customers. And, simply, there are some who acquire it just to have it. (I actually met somebody like that. Had like a 10 gig collection and never really listened to it.) This is why there is so much flack over use of the term 'theft'. This is, by no means, a black and white situation.
What really irks me is this scenario: What if an album is really hyped up. What if I download a song from that album and go "bleech". The song is deleted and I never go buy the album. Did I steal from the righteous RIAA, or did I save myself some money that the RIAA would have shafted me for if I had done it their way? I can't return the album if I don't like it so gee, where's that leave us?
It's not black and white.
"stop buying them for christ's sake! now these idiots will believe that the frivolous lawsuits against 15-year-olds were successful."
Well it's sorta an inverse of the same standard Slashdot uses with Microsoft. When sales go down, it's piracy's fault. When they go up, it's because their campaign was effective.
" Who wants a screen that small anymore? You get better resolution on any $100 Palm now..."
I can think of a few reasons:
1.) It's $800, like you said. Do you really want to spend $900?
2.) The nice thing about 320 by 240 is that it's half of 640 by 480, which nearly all videos run at. (Not sure what it captures at, so bear with me...) 640 by 480 screens in that size are still quite rare. At 480 by 320 (correction please?) that Palm runs at is a little more common, but the resizing artifacts would be annoying. Even capturing at that oddball resolution would be a little weird, not to mention the increase in size.
3.) The screen is small. If you're reading an e-book or somethihg that's one thing, but most of us who do a little too much porn surfing know that 320 by 240 is more than acceptable. Heck, you're lucky if you can practically exceed that with TV.
4.) There are probably rebuttals to each of my points. They're not the strongest in the world, so I won't take offense to them. But you have to understand that a company designing these things has to make these considerations. Though I'd like a higher res screen, too, there are other concerns such as price and practicality. That's really what my point's about. Not so much about whether they're right or wrong, or whether they made the right choice overall. Personally, from what I read, I think they did fine.
"It kind of figures that one of the major product features of a Linux-based handheld is that it supports a media standard championed by MS, doesn't it? I mean why not support open-source standards like OGG?"
You don't think that the 10's of millions of Windows computers out there that can readily play the format aren't a compelling reason?
If you're saying support both, fine, great, but if you're saying don't support WMV... what business sense would that make? That'd be sorta like designing an American car using the metric system for its speedometer. Yeah, it might be a better system, but it'd bite you in the butt on the road here.
"I don't give a damn who posts what, or who makes money from something.
If something interests me, I'll have a look.
Its not like I have to get my credit card and sign my life away."
Glad somebody was finally modded up for this point. The whole reason advertising is such a big business is that a lot of businesses come up with interesting products and services, but they can't sell them if people don't know that they even exist.
I really don't care if Slashdot actually does use articles for advertising. If it's interesting, how you heard about it isn't important. If you're worried about how well a product/service stands up to the claims they're making, that's totally understandable, at least you know what it is you want to do research on.
Advertising is not a sin.
"That's because 80% of people chose the iPod."
That's called a de-facto monopoly, just like Microsoft has.
"Apple doesn't have a monopoly. They can't charge monopoly rents - people will just buy CDs and rip to mp3. They can't restrict entry - anyone else could negotiate distribution contracts and sell music in just the same way."
Yeah, that's why they only have a measly 80% of the market.