What a worthless review. Ars Technica once again shows us its commitment to the trivial side of technology:
My first impressions upon seeing photos of the new iPod was that it looked, well... awkward. For some inexplicable reason, the iPod looked wider than ever and I kept thinking to myself, "How could Steve sign off on such a weird diversion from the tried and true look of the original iPod?"
OH NOES! The Video ipod has a much larger screen that will improve the video watching experience... BUT IT LOOKS WEIRD! I CAN'T BE SEEN WITH THAT!
Yeah, so, pretty much as we all expected. Ars Technica reviews fashion accessories, not technology. They should call themselves Ars Fashionista.
i.e. "on one entry, me and several friends have inside sources (one being the entry) and when we try to correct it, or correct misinformation that has been posted, the sites owner locks it down or chooses the misinformation over what is even know as fact. starting to distrust information found on there due to personal experience."
Tverbeek was a good example, because he's a royal prick, but he's got no shortage of equivalents on Wikipedia.
And my points are reiterated by one of the Wiki admins there, as well (so no, I'm not "trolling", unless you're also accusing Wiki admins of trolling as well): The majority of edits on large topics are decreasing the quality of those articles. This is because, for most people, the quality of the article as a whole is taking a back seat to the desire everyone seemingly has to have their imprint on articles. This is turning many articles into long lists of disparate trivia instead of naturally-flowing, high-quality encyclopedia articles. Efforts to stem this and make the encyclopedia more encyclopedic are criticized as counter to the spirit of "openness."
Silly me, I once tried to include literature citations in the entry for Julius Caesar, they were promptly deleted and someone re-entered demonstrably false information.
Yeah, no kidding.
Point 1. The system doesn't favor true information, it favors whoever can be the most obstinate, anal-retentive, vindictive prick. Take this dipshit, for example. Imagine having a flaming, bitchy drag queen editing your stuff. Not to make it better or more correct-- changing/deleting/removing content just because he didn't like edits to other, unrelated articles you'd done.
Point 2. Then you get the tools that label your factually correct additions as "vandalism". They'll delete whole paragraphs just because they consider the article to be "their" article. This is especially prevalent by the older users towards the newer users.
Point 3. Then there's the "vote for deletion" nazis. See Tverbeek, above. Again, as "revenge" for some perceived past slight, these mental giants will put your stuff up for deletion with the rationale that it belongs on uncyclopedia, this is the typical rationale for deleting topics relating to fiction or pop-culture. Why then, do certain "uncyclopedia-quality" articles (i.e. the Klingon dictionary) stick while others don't? See Point 1.
The front page of the onion looks like a bomb went off in the middle of some content. You have stories all over the place.
The Onion is laid out like it is because it's a news parody site. As such, it would make sense to mimic other news sites (CNN, ABCNews, CBS, etc) with a featured story on the left, shorter summaries on the right, nav bar to the far left, and so on.
So let me get this straight, because these morons couldn't get their iTunes settings right, you convince them to chuck their player??
More like I show them there are players in the world that will let them easily use their music on more than one computer. Come with an FM tuner. Are less expensive. Are easier to use. None of these features are specific to iriver's models, but they're lacking on the ipod.
These people get an ipod because that's all they see on TV.
I thought the Treo was just a PHONE with only 23 MB of available flash memory.
Then you reveal your ignorance of the product, and thus, prove my point. They make SD cards in sizes larger than 23 megs, you know. (or maybe you didn't know, as your tech knowledge appears limited to whatever appears on the apple website)
Now, with the announcement of videos, my wife (the real old-movie freak) is mentioning "iPod" once or twice a day. My bet is that she'll wait until she sees a couple in action, and then she'll have to buy one...
Now if they'd just incorporate a "smartphone" (phone + calendar), with full-time internet access, it'd be an instant sell. We could carry just the one electronic barnacle.
That's already been out for a year and a half. It's called the Treo 650. Plays Music, movies, tv shows, is a palm organizer, has internet access.
Funny that you Apple nitwits ignore it, because it does't have a little fruit logo on it.
Hopefully the switch means increased popularity which will lead to more support from venders.
The switch will mean OS X will be easily pirated. Apple's whole plan is predicated on something Microsoft has known for years: piracy = marketshare. No matter how you slice it, people who otherwise wouldn't have bought an apple machine will download and install this on some machine or another, even just "because they can". Apple knows this.
When they release OS X for x86, you can expect a huge jump in marketshare from the current ~2%, simply because people will be torrenting this thing like crazy. (as if they aren't already)
Except that as a rehash of old tech, the metric is dictated by what's current tech. How does it stack up to what else is on the market NOW? How about the PSP?
Seriously. Not only that, but Ars Technica gave it a SEVEN. A SEVEN! For a slightly smaller re-hash of something that came out a couple years ago? I used to read Ars back in the day, but their stuff's really gone downhill from '00.
Nowadays Ars is all about the shiny plastic packaging and not about the actual tech. They should call it Ars Plastica.
Give me a real tech site like tech-report or anandtech any day of the week.
I think the Internet is the ideal way for small artists to make money. The catch is they have to use their own money to produce and market their record, but with a record contract they're doing that anyway. The old way of doing things is rapidly being replaced by the Internet reality and artists that embrace it will make money, I am sure of it.
Exactly-- Small artists make a large amount of their money from selling merch. CDs yes, but also shirts and stickers, patches, buttons and whatnot. Then there's live shows, where even non-MTV bands can make $3000-$4000 a night.
Market your band successfully and you can survive without having to sell records. That's just icing on the cake.
So, I have to ask...if very few people buy music from digital downloads according to this suit, then what the FUCK do these guys care what price Apple sells their music at? This is greed. Pure greed.
The only thing I can think is that these fuckwits heard the fable about the goose with the golden eggs and didn't get the moral of the story.
Yes, what's funny about this is that the few thousand Yahoo beta testers are going on and on about how fast it is. I'll evaluate which is faster after Yahoo has a few million users.
Here's the thing-- Yahoo doesn't really have to beta-test all that much. They swallowed a kickass webservice called Oddpost about a year ago, and they're just now getting around to crapping out a product.
The only thing they really needed to do was load-balance their servers. Oddpost was awesome as-is.
shhhh.. you're ruining the deluded Apple love-fest.
The only reason the ipod nitwits don't own a PSP is because it's not made by Apple. In a year and a half, Apple's going to come out with a video ipod (of similar size, but with less features as the PSP), and all the people here are going to be creaming in their pants and hailing it as a revolutionary, groundbreaking product, the likes of which we've never seen before.
They did that when the cingular itunes phone was released-- never mind that the treo 600's been out for 2 years now, works great for music, and has more storage capacity. it even does internet radio.
That's just it.... they're individual examples of widespread, continual problems with Macs... It's not one guy that had white spots on his powerbook screen, it's the majority of people. The paint flaking is common enough for a market for "touchup kits" to spring up.
And it's all compounded by the common experience of poor support from Applecare.
Can Google even count the number of problems people have had with PCs? The number of "out of warranty" PCs that crash? The screen defects in any consumer electronic device?
PCs don't market themselves as being flawless pieces of made-by-god-himself equipment that "just work", and will solve all those problems you have using computers.
That's the fucking difference.
Every computer will have problems; every computer will crash now and again; every computer will lose your data at some point--because they're made by human beings, and as far as I know, human beings are not yet perfect. Anyone who tells you anything different is a liar or a moron.
As was mentioned above, it is not the technical compliance with the machine that would cause the switch (ipod already works with PCs,) it is the "ease of use," fit and finish, attention to detail that makes PC users "mac curious."
My ipod is the only gadget I own that I can let someone play with and have them understand it immediatly and enjoy the the design of not only the hardware but also the software.
Yeah, these thousands of people are probably just doing something wrong. Their problems aren't Apple's fault, with their "beautiful hardware," and their "joyful software." After all, everything JUST WORKS, right? Right?
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What a worthless review. Ars Technica once again shows us its commitment to the trivial side of technology:
My first impressions upon seeing photos of the new iPod was that it looked, well... awkward. For some inexplicable reason, the iPod looked wider than ever and I kept thinking to myself, "How could Steve sign off on such a weird diversion from the tried and true look of the original iPod?"
OH NOES! The Video ipod has a much larger screen that will improve the video watching experience... BUT IT LOOKS WEIRD! I CAN'T BE SEEN WITH THAT!
Yeah, so, pretty much as we all expected. Ars Technica reviews fashion accessories, not technology. They should call themselves Ars Fashionista.
Point 1 & Point 2: Some interesting comments on Digg, mostly to the same effect as the points I was making.
i.e. "on one entry, me and several friends have inside sources (one being the entry) and when we try to correct it, or correct misinformation that has been posted, the sites owner locks it down or chooses the misinformation over what is even know as fact. starting to distrust information found on there due to personal experience."
Tverbeek was a good example, because he's a royal prick, but he's got no shortage of equivalents on Wikipedia.
And my points are reiterated by one of the Wiki admins there, as well (so no, I'm not "trolling", unless you're also accusing Wiki admins of trolling as well):
The majority of edits on large topics are decreasing the quality of those articles. This is because, for most people, the quality of the article as a whole is taking a back seat to the desire everyone seemingly has to have their imprint on articles. This is turning many articles into long lists of disparate trivia instead of naturally-flowing, high-quality encyclopedia articles. Efforts to stem this and make the encyclopedia more encyclopedic are criticized as counter to the spirit of "openness."
His User page is here.
Silly me, I once tried to include literature citations in the entry for Julius Caesar, they were promptly deleted and someone re-entered demonstrably false information.
Yeah, no kidding.
Point 1. The system doesn't favor true information, it favors whoever can be the most obstinate, anal-retentive, vindictive prick. Take this dipshit, for example. Imagine having a flaming, bitchy drag queen editing your stuff. Not to make it better or more correct-- changing/deleting/removing content just because he didn't like edits to other, unrelated articles you'd done.
Point 2. Then you get the tools that label your factually correct additions as "vandalism". They'll delete whole paragraphs just because they consider the article to be "their" article. This is especially prevalent by the older users towards the newer users.
Point 3. Then there's the "vote for deletion" nazis. See Tverbeek, above. Again, as "revenge" for some perceived past slight, these mental giants will put your stuff up for deletion with the rationale that it belongs on uncyclopedia, this is the typical rationale for deleting topics relating to fiction or pop-culture. Why then, do certain "uncyclopedia-quality" articles (i.e. the Klingon dictionary) stick while others don't? See Point 1.
The front page of the onion looks like a bomb went off in the middle of some content. You have stories all over the place.
The Onion is laid out like it is because it's a news parody site. As such, it would make sense to mimic other news sites (CNN, ABCNews, CBS, etc) with a featured story on the left, shorter summaries on the right, nav bar to the far left, and so on.
Because Sony's 4GB memory stick costs a hair shy of $600.
So let me get this straight, because these morons couldn't get their iTunes settings right, you convince them to chuck their player?? More like I show them there are players in the world that will let them easily use their music on more than one computer. Come with an FM tuner. Are less expensive. Are easier to use. None of these features are specific to iriver's models, but they're lacking on the ipod.
These people get an ipod because that's all they see on TV.
I thought the Treo was just a PHONE with only 23 MB of available flash memory.
Then you reveal your ignorance of the product, and thus, prove my point. They make SD cards in sizes larger than 23 megs, you know. (or maybe you didn't know, as your tech knowledge appears limited to whatever appears on the apple website)
They didn't buy it due to an Apple ad - they bought it because it works!
Maybe, maybe not. All the clueless users at my work with ipods bought them because they didn't know what else was out there.
Then they come to me when their voicemails start appearing on their ipod, because iTunes has sucked up all their file associations.
At which point, I show them the iriver lineup, and they end up ebay'ing their ipod.
Now, with the announcement of videos, my wife (the real old-movie freak) is mentioning "iPod" once or twice a day. My bet is that she'll wait until she sees a couple in action, and then she'll have to buy one...
Now if they'd just incorporate a "smartphone" (phone + calendar), with full-time internet access, it'd be an instant sell. We could carry just the one electronic barnacle.
That's already been out for a year and a half. It's called the Treo 650. Plays Music, movies, tv shows, is a palm organizer, has internet access.
Funny that you Apple nitwits ignore it, because it does't have a little fruit logo on it.
Hopefully the switch means increased popularity which will lead to more support from venders.
The switch will mean OS X will be easily pirated. Apple's whole plan is predicated on something Microsoft has known for years: piracy = marketshare. No matter how you slice it, people who otherwise wouldn't have bought an apple machine will download and install this on some machine or another, even just "because they can". Apple knows this.
When they release OS X for x86, you can expect a huge jump in marketshare from the current ~2%, simply because people will be torrenting this thing like crazy. (as if they aren't already)
Except that as a rehash of old tech, the metric is dictated by what's current tech. How does it stack up to what else is on the market NOW? How about the PSP?
Still gets a seven against the PSP? Pathetic.
Seriously. Not only that, but Ars Technica gave it a SEVEN. A SEVEN! For a slightly smaller re-hash of something that came out a couple years ago? I used to read Ars back in the day, but their stuff's really gone downhill from '00.
Nowadays Ars is all about the shiny plastic packaging and not about the actual tech. They should call it Ars Plastica.
Give me a real tech site like tech-report or anandtech any day of the week.
I work for a VFX company.
/fscking kids and "they're" shit grammar.
I'm guessing you don't do any writing for them, given "you're" inability to tell the difference between "its" and "it's."
I think the Internet is the ideal way for small artists to make money. The catch is they have to use their own money to produce and market their record, but with a record contract they're doing that anyway. The old way of doing things is rapidly being replaced by the Internet reality and artists that embrace it will make money, I am sure of it.
Exactly-- Small artists make a large amount of their money from selling merch. CDs yes, but also shirts and stickers, patches, buttons and whatnot. Then there's live shows, where even non-MTV bands can make $3000-$4000 a night.
Market your band successfully and you can survive without having to sell records. That's just icing on the cake.
Fact is, P2P swapping is hurting the music labels badly
That's exactly the desired effect. Kill the labels, there will always be kickass bands.
Fact is, P2P swapping is hurting the music labels badly That's exactly the desired effect. Kill the labels, there will always be kickass bands.
So, I have to ask...if very few people buy music from digital downloads according to this suit, then what the FUCK do these guys care what price Apple sells their music at? This is greed. Pure greed.
The only thing I can think is that these fuckwits heard the fable about the goose with the golden eggs and didn't get the moral of the story.
Yes, what's funny about this is that the few thousand Yahoo beta testers are going on and on about how fast it is. I'll evaluate which is faster after Yahoo has a few million users. Here's the thing-- Yahoo doesn't really have to beta-test all that much. They swallowed a kickass webservice called Oddpost about a year ago, and they're just now getting around to crapping out a product. The only thing they really needed to do was load-balance their servers. Oddpost was awesome as-is.
shhhh.. you're ruining the deluded Apple love-fest.
The only reason the ipod nitwits don't own a PSP is because it's not made by Apple. In a year and a half, Apple's going to come out with a video ipod (of similar size, but with less features as the PSP), and all the people here are going to be creaming in their pants and hailing it as a revolutionary, groundbreaking product, the likes of which we've never seen before.
They did that when the cingular itunes phone was released-- never mind that the treo 600's been out for 2 years now, works great for music, and has more storage capacity. it even does internet radio.
are you implying that the plane was shot down with... mind bullets?
The things you're listing are individual cases.
That's just it.... they're individual examples of widespread, continual problems with Macs... It's not one guy that had white spots on his powerbook screen, it's the majority of people. The paint flaking is common enough for a market for "touchup kits" to spring up.
And it's all compounded by the common experience of poor support from Applecare.
You do know that lots of people have bought iPods, right?
And as the man before me has said, that must mean that we should all eat more shit-- after all, it's popular with millions of flies...
Can Google even count the number of problems people have had with PCs? The number of "out of warranty" PCs that crash? The screen defects in any consumer electronic device?
PCs don't market themselves as being flawless pieces of made-by-god-himself equipment that "just work", and will solve all those problems you have using computers.
That's the fucking difference.
Every computer will have problems; every computer will crash now and again; every computer will lose your data at some point--because they're made by human beings, and as far as I know, human beings are not yet perfect. Anyone who tells you anything different is a liar or a moron.
Which are you?
As was mentioned above, it is not the technical compliance with the machine that would cause the switch (ipod already works with PCs,) it is the "ease of use," fit and finish, attention to detail that makes PC users "mac curious."
The "fit and finish" that causes the cheap-ass titanium paint on the TiBooks to flake off after two weeks?
Or the "attention to detail" lets through serious defects in the screen? And what about the high rate of premature logic board failures?
My ipod is the only gadget I own that I can let someone play with and have them understand it immediatly and enjoy the the design of not only the hardware but also the software.
Which, of course, explains why iTunes should crash repeatedly when syncing a 40gb ipod on a four-month-old powerbook. And why Applecare won't help the guy, because his 4-month-old powerbook is now "out of warranty."
Yeah, these thousands of people are probably just doing something wrong. Their problems aren't Apple's fault, with their "beautiful hardware," and their "joyful software." After all, everything JUST WORKS, right? Right?
So, you have 20-40GB of music on you at all times and you want to listen to the RADIO??
Unless you know of some other way to get Howard Stern on your portable in the morning.
Oh, that's right. I forgot-- because your ipod doesn't do it, that immediately makes the feature useless for everybody.