But if it's not that large of a demographic how is it the "core?" Or has "core" here taken on the redefinition put forth by microsoft to be synonymous with "lame" and "not worth thinking about?"
This is why political speech is protected by the First Amendment in the United States, and why we tolerate things like the Nazi Party and the Stalinists and any number of other kooks.
Encouraging people to change laws that they don't agree with often isn't even productive for society. There are a lot of stupid people out there and deciding what is best for anyone (never mind for everyone) is about the furthest thing from what most of them should be doing.
Maybe he tried to play them while they were still encrypted instead of using something that could decrypt the audio. I imagine that more often than not that will have a negative effect on the sound quality...
I like Amarok a lot better than iTunes. You might be out of luck on windows and mac though. I don't know about macs, as far as what else is available (I'm assuming not much), but windows audio players have all seemed pretty limited since WinAMP stopped being enough like 6 years ago.
Most people are probably are served well enough by iPods. But then again, most are probably fine with a lot of much cheaper players. If you aren't buying DRM'd music and don't care to have high quality audio there are a lot of players that will get the job done at half the price of an equivolent sized iPod. I mostly find it sad that people hold up iPod as some kind of gold standard in audio players when there are much better players in the same price range.
I definitely wouldn't recommend that anyone buy an A2 for $600usd, that's insane. Are iPods in Europe priced more closely to those in the United States?
Which is all well and good, but not at all what we were talking about. I was suggesting it as an alternative to microsoft's zune thing that is a) better and b) not microsoft.
For the record the A2 goes for about $315 (20GB) and $370 (30GB) and isn't even a comparable product to ipod, though Cowon does make ones that are. Also, itunes kind of blows.
You do realize that FLAC is lossless and not uncompressed, right? So that maybe people want FLAC support so they can store more music on their portable player? Even a 60GB player will only fit around 12 albums uncompressed. In FLAC that number at least doubles.
Didn't microsoft leak a way to break plays for sure so that they could kill the format and come up with some other new thing? I'm sure I read that somewhere...
Also, would it even matter if someone sued the LAME guys? That stuff is pretty mature and it's not like anyone's going to be able or even interested in coming to your home and removing it from your computer.
I'm pretty sure most people buy ipod because it's what everyone they know has. The number of "think different" apple lusers out there with ipods is insignificant next to the number of non-mac users with one.
And if you guys want a bigger screen, better features, and the best sound you can get in a portable audio player, why not go for the Cowon iAudio A2? Though I don't think it plays h.264 right now, but maybe in a future firmware upgrade.
You understand that this is because analog television doesn't actually have a fixed "width" size, right? It has a fixed number of scanlines (vertical resolution) which allows for players to output video with non-square pixels. On a fixed resolution screen with square (or roughly square) pixels, like an LCD, yes you can tell the aspect from the resolution.
I'm sure you'll see what I'm talking about when you've had some more experience with it.
Have you ever used a web browser on an NTSC set? It sucks. Doesn't matter what browser you're using. Firefox would fair no better than Opera, though it might be marginally better than the DC browser just because that was lacking some key features. At 1080p or greater it shouldn't be a problem with an HDTV, but what's that got to do with the SD-/ED-only Wii and Dreamcast?
Yes, and already announced that Wii was going to ship with it on the flash drive. Who wants a browser on their tv anyway? It sucked on Dreamcast and it's going to suck on Wii.
One handle, retro titles, and online multiplay are being pitched by all 3 systems, with one console currently in the marketplace.
xbox 360 has one-handed control? I guess that only counts for DOA Volleyball, right? I don't remember seeing one-handed play (officially, there was that "RPG" controller for PSX) on any PlayStation/PLAYSTATION either, unless you count the microphone or playing EyeToy with your hand behind your back.
Other consoles have "retro" titles, but only Nintendo has the Nintendo back catalog. I'm still not convinced that online play is that big of a deal for consoles (as far as moving units), otherwise xbox would have sold a lot better than it did. I know I don't care personally. Playing occasionally with friends would probably be fun, but the rest of the time it's just 12-year-olds with nothing better to do than be lame. I'll pass.
I was going to reply and refute your claims, but it's not even worth my time. You're a fucking idiot. Go read that gamespot article you linked. Then gtfo out of my country. We don't need morons like you and have too many already.
Look at Microsoft: Their operating systems range from mediocre to absolute garbage, their office suites are pretty nice, and their console systems are now wildly popular. If we had just considered Microsoft's past history with operating systems, could we have accurately predicted the success of the Xbox?
Wildly popular? The first xbox sold about 20 million units worldwide (this is about 14% of the market for the generation) while losing buckets of loot. The xbox 360 is going to do about 5 million units (projected) by the end of the year, which is right on track to match the original's 20 million number by the time microsoft jumps the gun again in 4 years and releases xbox 720.
If we were using microsoft's history with operating systems to predict what would happen then we would see xbox actually being "wildly popular", at least if sales and installed base were the determining metric.
xbox so far is a pretty big disaster and will remain so until it gets any sort of mainstream acceptance as the living room extension of microsoft's desktop monopoly. Hopefully this won't happen, but it's about the only way that xbox will be a "success."
Slashdot Mirror
Totally agree. Pretty depressing though.
But if it's not that large of a demographic how is it the "core?" Or has "core" here taken on the redefinition put forth by microsoft to be synonymous with "lame" and "not worth thinking about?"
This is why political speech is protected by the First Amendment in the United States, and why we tolerate things like the Nazi Party and the Stalinists and any number of other kooks.
Unfortunately it also makes us tolerate even crazier idiots.
Encouraging people to change laws that they don't agree with often isn't even productive for society. There are a lot of stupid people out there and deciding what is best for anyone (never mind for everyone) is about the furthest thing from what most of them should be doing.
Well, they did stay at a Holiday Inn on September 10th.
I thought X was "shi"? And the proper spelling is "xian" (pronounced "shii-an"), not "xtian."
Maybe he tried to play them while they were still encrypted instead of using something that could decrypt the audio. I imagine that more often than not that will have a negative effect on the sound quality...
I like Amarok a lot better than iTunes. You might be out of luck on windows and mac though. I don't know about macs, as far as what else is available (I'm assuming not much), but windows audio players have all seemed pretty limited since WinAMP stopped being enough like 6 years ago.
Most people are probably are served well enough by iPods. But then again, most are probably fine with a lot of much cheaper players. If you aren't buying DRM'd music and don't care to have high quality audio there are a lot of players that will get the job done at half the price of an equivolent sized iPod. I mostly find it sad that people hold up iPod as some kind of gold standard in audio players when there are much better players in the same price range.
I definitely wouldn't recommend that anyone buy an A2 for $600usd, that's insane. Are iPods in Europe priced more closely to those in the United States?
Which is all well and good, but not at all what we were talking about. I was suggesting it as an alternative to microsoft's zune thing that is a) better and b) not microsoft.
For the record the A2 goes for about $315 (20GB) and $370 (30GB) and isn't even a comparable product to ipod, though Cowon does make ones that are. Also, itunes kind of blows.
Are you looking at the same website as I am? I don't see any blinking logos.
You do realize that FLAC is lossless and not uncompressed, right? So that maybe people want FLAC support so they can store more music on their portable player? Even a 60GB player will only fit around 12 albums uncompressed. In FLAC that number at least doubles.
Didn't microsoft leak a way to break plays for sure so that they could kill the format and come up with some other new thing? I'm sure I read that somewhere...
Also, would it even matter if someone sued the LAME guys? That stuff is pretty mature and it's not like anyone's going to be able or even interested in coming to your home and removing it from your computer.
I'm pretty sure most people buy ipod because it's what everyone they know has. The number of "think different" apple lusers out there with ipods is insignificant next to the number of non-mac users with one.
And if you guys want a bigger screen, better features, and the best sound you can get in a portable audio player, why not go for the Cowon iAudio A2? Though I don't think it plays h.264 right now, but maybe in a future firmware upgrade.
You understand that this is because analog television doesn't actually have a fixed "width" size, right? It has a fixed number of scanlines (vertical resolution) which allows for players to output video with non-square pixels. On a fixed resolution screen with square (or roughly square) pixels, like an LCD, yes you can tell the aspect from the resolution.
I'm sure you'll see what I'm talking about when you've had some more experience with it.
Have you ever used a web browser on an NTSC set? It sucks. Doesn't matter what browser you're using. Firefox would fair no better than Opera, though it might be marginally better than the DC browser just because that was lacking some key features. At 1080p or greater it shouldn't be a problem with an HDTV, but what's that got to do with the SD-/ED-only Wii and Dreamcast?
Yes, and already announced that Wii was going to ship with it on the flash drive. Who wants a browser on their tv anyway? It sucked on Dreamcast and it's going to suck on Wii.
One handle, retro titles, and online multiplay are being pitched by all 3 systems, with one console currently in the marketplace.
xbox 360 has one-handed control? I guess that only counts for DOA Volleyball, right? I don't remember seeing one-handed play (officially, there was that "RPG" controller for PSX) on any PlayStation/PLAYSTATION either, unless you count the microphone or playing EyeToy with your hand behind your back.
Other consoles have "retro" titles, but only Nintendo has the Nintendo back catalog. I'm still not convinced that online play is that big of a deal for consoles (as far as moving units), otherwise xbox would have sold a lot better than it did. I know I don't care personally. Playing occasionally with friends would probably be fun, but the rest of the time it's just 12-year-olds with nothing better to do than be lame. I'll pass.
Yeah, I'd be pissed if I were paying for /. and didn't get at least 66% more dupes!
Why not, you can solar power your Nintendo DS, GBA SP, or PSP?
Both fail as video disc formats, BluRay survives as a niche recordable media format similar to DVD-RAM or Jazz disk.
I was going to reply and refute your claims, but it's not even worth my time. You're a fucking idiot. Go read that gamespot article you linked. Then gtfo out of my country. We don't need morons like you and have too many already.
My computer idles several degrees (Celsius) hotter under windows than under Linux and the disparity increases under load. So how is this news?
User friendly long ago came to mean "difficult and frustrating to do anything useful with." No thanks.
Multi-monitor and virtual desktop on windows are a complete joke. I've never seen them stable enough to use.
Guess you guys need to make better decisions with what to do with your public money.
Look at Microsoft: Their operating systems range from mediocre to absolute garbage, their office suites are pretty nice, and their console systems are now wildly popular. If we had just considered Microsoft's past history with operating systems, could we have accurately predicted the success of the Xbox?
Wildly popular? The first xbox sold about 20 million units worldwide (this is about 14% of the market for the generation) while losing buckets of loot. The xbox 360 is going to do about 5 million units (projected) by the end of the year, which is right on track to match the original's 20 million number by the time microsoft jumps the gun again in 4 years and releases xbox 720.
If we were using microsoft's history with operating systems to predict what would happen then we would see xbox actually being "wildly popular", at least if sales and installed base were the determining metric.
xbox so far is a pretty big disaster and will remain so until it gets any sort of mainstream acceptance as the living room extension of microsoft's desktop monopoly. Hopefully this won't happen, but it's about the only way that xbox will be a "success."