You can already do that by enabling disk usage, but I don't understand what the reason for doing that would be...the idea behind iTunes is to remove the hassle of dealing with a massive folder hierarchy by using metadata.
VC-1 is Microsoft's WMV codec. H.264 is considered the standard successor to MPEG-2 and is expected to be the dominant Blu-Ray/HD-DVD codec given its superior quality to both MPEG-2 and VC-1. Why is Warner going with VC-1? Some deal with Microsoft?
What's wrong with a product that appeals to emotion? That's what good design does (just like automobiles). Look at Apple's higher-ups--a lot of them come from the art and architecture world. Apple approaches its products with that kind of mindset, wanting to create things that look and feel good and would be something you'd want to keep with you at all times. It's a far cry from their competitors, who design ugly-looking hardware with cheap plastic, pointless lines and seams, and give them unpalatable engineering names like "Sony XT-135zc."
Creating a device that people feel an emotional attachment to requires superior design in both hardware and software. The iPod fits the bill, and that made it #1.
Now, I agree, iPod's interface is superior in every form or fashion, but superior software? The iPod's ability to see how much power is left in the battery simply does not exist.
That's a result of the battery technology, although the iPod battery indicator is plenty accurate.
Like I said, I completely agree that the iPod's form and function are superior, but that DEFINATELY was not the deciding factor in iPod's success.
I completely disagree. You've got the process backwards--it was the iPod's form and function that made it a popular item. It didn't become popular through marketing first, and then people discovered it also happened to have superior design after the fact. The design drove its popularity, and it still does.
I just think there's a small but vocal contingent of iPod-haters who disparage the devices for no other reason than they don't want to associate themselves with something that's popular. It's an attempt in itself to appear cool and unique. I think a popular method of doing this is to criticize iPod owners as if they only bought their players because of marketing. I bought my iPod nano because of its extremely thin design, which fits easily into my pocket at the office, as well as the fact that it uses flash for its storage, making it extremely durable (I've dropped it countless times). Like I said, the nano has a superior design first, and that in turn MAKES it popular.
your use of the word "skip" illustrates quite clearly how you feel you'd be "missing out" what "others are not missing" and you want to "belong" or see your Ipod as status or whatever.
As much fun as you're having playing armchair psychologist here, I used the word "skip" because the way you worded it in your post implied that you were purposely not buying an iPod because others had iPods. If you don't have an iPod simply because you don't need one, then the point didn't apply to you.
I just often question the drive behind that drive that brings everyone to buy something they don't really need and lose interest in shortly after.
Your assumption here is that people who buy iPods are mindless sheep who have no need for it and keep it on a shelf as a status symbol. I just don't buy it. It sounds like bitterness over a piece of technology you apparently don't like becoming very popular with a lot of people.
I think its a mixture of the DRM/format lock-in, regular market saturation and growing competition.
The mainstream public absolutely doesn't give a crap about iTunes DRM. It's so lax that you never notice it's there (and when people bring up iTunes DRM as a negative point, in almost every case you find that they've never tried it themselves). Most people's music collections are made up of ripped MP3s anyway.
As for the other two points, market saturation and growing competition have been around since the iPod came out in 2001, so that's nothing new. The market was saturated when Apple came to the game, yet they still won (pissing Creative off something awful). It seems the company performs its best when people are assuming they're down for the count. For the last 20 years, armchair pundits have been claiming Apple was dead, their products weren't selling, that "saturation and growing competition" were going to take them out, and so on.
I don't get this pervasive need to always hope for Apple's demise all the time. Without them, it'd be all Microsoft, all the time, with the awful WMA-based "PlaysForSure" dominating your music players and turning them into the typical Microsoft experience--unreliable, weird bugs and quirks, a hundred ugly little pieces of hardware running Microsoft software with no seamless vertical experience like you get from Apple.
Look, new automobiles have freakin' iPod dock ports built into them. The iPod isn't going away anytime soon.
Personally I think that the lack of on the fly recording is one of the many reasons why I would get another mp3-player and not an iPod.
I assume you mean you want it built-in, because the iPod has had built-in recording functionality for years now, accessible with add-ons like the Griffin iTalk.
It's one big advertisement given in the form of a staged interview with Microsoft's general manager of their Windows Digital Media Division. Revel in the humor as he gives choice quotes such as, "iTunes captured some early media interest with their store on the Mac, but I think the Windows platform will be a significant challenge for them." Or "With Windows Media 9 Series, you get faster starts, better quality music, and support for the most devices."
Be aware that the Windows OS provides hooks to run programs when devices are attached, so there's no reason for a device vendor to have a program always running in memory waiting for the device to be attached.
First off, iTunesHelper barely takes any memory at all (less than 4MB last I checked), and it gets paged out if you never use it. Second, Windows would see the iPod as a normal storage device, since it's nothing more than a FAT32-formatted external drive with some system folders on it.
The reason they put "iTunesHelper" in memory at all times is merely to make their program appear to load faster.
It also monitors for iPod connections and aids iTunes in performing CD burning operations. You can monitor the process and see for yourself that it only kicks in when an iPod is plugged in or when you burn a CD in iTunes.
It should be noted that the Mac version also has an iTunesHelper process listed in the user's StartupItems folder. On the Mac, iTunesHelper is run from inside the iTunes bundle itself. This isn't some Window-only feature; it's cross-platform and is a part of iTunes' design.
Honestly, all doom-and-gloom iPod discussion in this article is going to look silly after this Tuesday's media event by Apple, which is rumored to be offering new metal-enclosed nanos in multiple colors, new iPods, a cell phone, a video streaming device, and movie downloads from Disney (which also means studios like Miramax).
Let's sit back and enjoy the negative comments from iPod haters wanting to look really cool and outside-the-norm for bashing a popular piece of technology that's left them behind. After all, it's par for course around here--let's not forget the original iPod announcement or the iPod mini discussions which were oh-so-accurate in their future predictions. Ahem.
We had PCs. We still do. We had Nintendo Gameboys. We still do. We had cell phones. We still do. I could go on and on here.
We had mp3 players popular. No more
Huh? MP3 players are popular.
You guys have been predicting for five years now that the iPod was on its way out. I trust that prediction just as much as I trust the predictions you guys made when the iPod mini came out, or when the original iPod came out. Seriously, go back and read the discussion and laugh at how short-sighted people were.
Who wants to be a flocking person? 12 million Ipods, how does that make you feel unique and cool when you have something that everyone is carrying?
People get iPods because they're fun and easy to use, not to appear "unique and cool." Whenever someone makes that criticism, they come off--to me anyway--as really bitter and desperate to appear unique and cool themselves by disparaging a popular product.
I still haven't bought an Ipod in any form:)
Dude, you are super-cool! It makes you enlightened if you purposely skip out on a really good piece of technology!
Actually, your post makes a point indirectly. Taco's comment was flat-out stupid in retrospect. And remember everyone's doom-and-gloom predictions here on Slashdot about the iPod mini?
Perhaps people should reconsider calling the iPod down for the count every six months. It's making them look idiotic. The iPod has never had a year-over-year quarter that went down in sales. Rumors are that Apple waited so long to update their iPod line this year because they've been in negotiations with major studios.
I'm so sick of this meme from geeks on Slashdot that the only reason the iPod was successful is that it was a "fashion accessory." Nope, wrong. It's the most successful because of its superior interface, its superior software, and its superior hardware design. Typically, the critics claiming the iPod won due to marketing are the same ignorant yahoos who think anybody cares about Ogg.
As for the iPod "losing its cool," we've heard this every single year since the iPod's release. And then Apple releases something like the iPod nano, and all the doom-and-gloom writers suddenly go quiet and forget what they wrote. There's a major media event this Tuesday in which its expected that we'll see new nanos and a widescreen video iPod with a streaming device. This whole discussion is going to look moot.
iTunesHelper isn't a "useless service." It simply waits for an iPod to be plugged in, after which it starts up iTunes and syncs your tracks. There's no "phone home activity," and you shouldn't be surprised it messes things up when you stop it manually. Are you actually surprised that when you messed with an iTunes background service, it affected the app's functionality?
You don't give specifics for any of your other complaints, so I can only assume you're just bitchin' and whinin' about nothin'. Furthermore, you claim your experience with iTunes resembles the Amazon Unbox experience described in the article. So you're saying you weren't able to play a video without messing with the progress bar, iTunes started up automatically, and you had problems uninstalling the application? Or were you just making a meaningless comparison as an excuse to vaguely bitch about iTunes?
All iTunesHelper.exe does is sit dormant until an iPod is connected, after which it fires up iTunes and syncs tracks. There's no "phone home" activity as described in the grandparent post.
It's the reason Amazon has so many studios on board, while Apple will (reportedly) only have Disney next Tuesday. Steve Jobs wants to sell for only $9.99 or $12.99, while the studios wanted higher prices (yeah, I want to pay as much as a DVD for an online video version...right). Jobs wouldn't budge, so they went to Amazon. I'm sure the disaster of Amazon's service compared to the inevitable success of Apple's will put the ball in Jobs' court, and the other studios will come around.
You have got to be joking. Vista is one of the most inconsistent interfaces Microsoft will have ever delivered. As for the end-of-line shortcut, I have never encountered an app that didn't use the standard shortcut, and you don't give any examples that can be addressed.
It's really bizarre to me that someone would prefer waiting for Vista instead of having a modern OS today with OS X Tiger.
Microsoft didn't succeed due to its management ideas. Its management ideas have been a hindrance, as evidenced by the process problems behind Vista's development cycle. The reason Microsoft is successful goes all the way back to a single agreement with IBM in which Microsoft shipped the OS on all PCs while retaining the rights to the software. This brought in massive revenues and allowed them to expand into other areas, some successfully, most unsuccessfully. In other words, they got lucky. Otherwise, Microsoft is well-known for missing the boat on key technologies (hello, Internet) and generally being a follower, not an innovator.
You're able to turn in an early alpha version to select faculty staff before releasing it to the public half a year later as long as you write a page-long essay about how you are "on track" to deliver the assignment on time, and that "user feedback" has led you to remove several key portions of the work that you had advertised previously. You have to tell everyone you meet, over and over again, that you are "on track" to deliver by the Fall.
I think it's funny that anyone would want Microsoft's management techniques taught in the classroom given how it's taken over half a decade for them to squeeze Vista out, sans major features they originally promised.
You're talking about the $999 model that used to be the education-only model with the integrated video chipset. The other formerly baseline 17-inch model, with the Radeon x1600 and Apple Remote, is still for sale.
When anyone uses words like "DRM-encumbered" when describing iTunes, it's proof they've never, ever tried buying anything from iTunes or had any personal experience with its extremely liberal DRM--so liberal you never notice it's there.
I'm sure the artists will just love that you're making such a defiant stand with Pirate Bay by not compensating them. It amuses me that you attempt a moral stance against DRM in one breath, then advocate piracy in the next. Ah, Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Cirdan gave Gandalf the ring when the Istari first arrived in Middle-Earth in the early Third Age.
No, I don't get laid.
No, it's not Apple's format. It's the official successor to MPEG-2 as drafted by the consortium.
You can already do that by enabling disk usage, but I don't understand what the reason for doing that would be...the idea behind iTunes is to remove the hassle of dealing with a massive folder hierarchy by using metadata.
VC-1 is Microsoft's WMV codec. H.264 is considered the standard successor to MPEG-2 and is expected to be the dominant Blu-Ray/HD-DVD codec given its superior quality to both MPEG-2 and VC-1. Why is Warner going with VC-1? Some deal with Microsoft?
What's wrong with a product that appeals to emotion? That's what good design does (just like automobiles). Look at Apple's higher-ups--a lot of them come from the art and architecture world. Apple approaches its products with that kind of mindset, wanting to create things that look and feel good and would be something you'd want to keep with you at all times. It's a far cry from their competitors, who design ugly-looking hardware with cheap plastic, pointless lines and seams, and give them unpalatable engineering names like "Sony XT-135zc."
Creating a device that people feel an emotional attachment to requires superior design in both hardware and software. The iPod fits the bill, and that made it #1.
That's a result of the battery technology, although the iPod battery indicator is plenty accurate.
I completely disagree. You've got the process backwards--it was the iPod's form and function that made it a popular item. It didn't become popular through marketing first, and then people discovered it also happened to have superior design after the fact. The design drove its popularity, and it still does.
I just think there's a small but vocal contingent of iPod-haters who disparage the devices for no other reason than they don't want to associate themselves with something that's popular. It's an attempt in itself to appear cool and unique. I think a popular method of doing this is to criticize iPod owners as if they only bought their players because of marketing. I bought my iPod nano because of its extremely thin design, which fits easily into my pocket at the office, as well as the fact that it uses flash for its storage, making it extremely durable (I've dropped it countless times). Like I said, the nano has a superior design first, and that in turn MAKES it popular.
I would consider PCs and cell phones as having "master popularity," wouldn't you?
As much fun as you're having playing armchair psychologist here, I used the word "skip" because the way you worded it in your post implied that you were purposely not buying an iPod because others had iPods. If you don't have an iPod simply because you don't need one, then the point didn't apply to you.
Your assumption here is that people who buy iPods are mindless sheep who have no need for it and keep it on a shelf as a status symbol. I just don't buy it. It sounds like bitterness over a piece of technology you apparently don't like becoming very popular with a lot of people.
The mainstream public absolutely doesn't give a crap about iTunes DRM. It's so lax that you never notice it's there (and when people bring up iTunes DRM as a negative point, in almost every case you find that they've never tried it themselves). Most people's music collections are made up of ripped MP3s anyway.
As for the other two points, market saturation and growing competition have been around since the iPod came out in 2001, so that's nothing new. The market was saturated when Apple came to the game, yet they still won (pissing Creative off something awful). It seems the company performs its best when people are assuming they're down for the count. For the last 20 years, armchair pundits have been claiming Apple was dead, their products weren't selling, that "saturation and growing competition" were going to take them out, and so on.
I don't get this pervasive need to always hope for Apple's demise all the time. Without them, it'd be all Microsoft, all the time, with the awful WMA-based "PlaysForSure" dominating your music players and turning them into the typical Microsoft experience--unreliable, weird bugs and quirks, a hundred ugly little pieces of hardware running Microsoft software with no seamless vertical experience like you get from Apple.
Look, new automobiles have freakin' iPod dock ports built into them. The iPod isn't going away anytime soon.
I assume you mean you want it built-in, because the iPod has had built-in recording functionality for years now, accessible with add-ons like the Griffin iTalk.
Want to read something funny in retrospect? Read Microsoft's Press Pass interview released to combat the press coverage when iTunes for Windows came out: Q&A: Choosing a Digital Music Service for Windows Users.
It's one big advertisement given in the form of a staged interview with Microsoft's general manager of their Windows Digital Media Division. Revel in the humor as he gives choice quotes such as, "iTunes captured some early media interest with their store on the Mac, but I think the Windows platform will be a significant challenge for them." Or "With Windows Media 9 Series, you get faster starts, better quality music, and support for the most devices."
Tee-hee...
First off, iTunesHelper barely takes any memory at all (less than 4MB last I checked), and it gets paged out if you never use it. Second, Windows would see the iPod as a normal storage device, since it's nothing more than a FAT32-formatted external drive with some system folders on it.
It also monitors for iPod connections and aids iTunes in performing CD burning operations. You can monitor the process and see for yourself that it only kicks in when an iPod is plugged in or when you burn a CD in iTunes.
It should be noted that the Mac version also has an iTunesHelper process listed in the user's StartupItems folder. On the Mac, iTunesHelper is run from inside the iTunes bundle itself. This isn't some Window-only feature; it's cross-platform and is a part of iTunes' design.
Honestly, all doom-and-gloom iPod discussion in this article is going to look silly after this Tuesday's media event by Apple, which is rumored to be offering new metal-enclosed nanos in multiple colors, new iPods, a cell phone, a video streaming device, and movie downloads from Disney (which also means studios like Miramax).
Let's sit back and enjoy the negative comments from iPod haters wanting to look really cool and outside-the-norm for bashing a popular piece of technology that's left them behind. After all, it's par for course around here--let's not forget the original iPod announcement or the iPod mini discussions which were oh-so-accurate in their future predictions. Ahem.
We had Nintendo Gameboys. We still do.
We had cell phones. We still do.
I could go on and on here.
Huh? MP3 players are popular.
You guys have been predicting for five years now that the iPod was on its way out. I trust that prediction just as much as I trust the predictions you guys made when the iPod mini came out, or when the original iPod came out. Seriously, go back and read the discussion and laugh at how short-sighted people were.
People get iPods because they're fun and easy to use, not to appear "unique and cool." Whenever someone makes that criticism, they come off--to me anyway--as really bitter and desperate to appear unique and cool themselves by disparaging a popular product.
Dude, you are super-cool! It makes you enlightened if you purposely skip out on a really good piece of technology!
Actually, your post makes a point indirectly. Taco's comment was flat-out stupid in retrospect. And remember everyone's doom-and-gloom predictions here on Slashdot about the iPod mini?
Perhaps people should reconsider calling the iPod down for the count every six months. It's making them look idiotic. The iPod has never had a year-over-year quarter that went down in sales. Rumors are that Apple waited so long to update their iPod line this year because they've been in negotiations with major studios.
I'm so sick of this meme from geeks on Slashdot that the only reason the iPod was successful is that it was a "fashion accessory." Nope, wrong. It's the most successful because of its superior interface, its superior software, and its superior hardware design. Typically, the critics claiming the iPod won due to marketing are the same ignorant yahoos who think anybody cares about Ogg.
As for the iPod "losing its cool," we've heard this every single year since the iPod's release. And then Apple releases something like the iPod nano, and all the doom-and-gloom writers suddenly go quiet and forget what they wrote. There's a major media event this Tuesday in which its expected that we'll see new nanos and a widescreen video iPod with a streaming device. This whole discussion is going to look moot.
iTunesHelper isn't a "useless service." It simply waits for an iPod to be plugged in, after which it starts up iTunes and syncs your tracks. There's no "phone home activity," and you shouldn't be surprised it messes things up when you stop it manually. Are you actually surprised that when you messed with an iTunes background service, it affected the app's functionality?
You don't give specifics for any of your other complaints, so I can only assume you're just bitchin' and whinin' about nothin'. Furthermore, you claim your experience with iTunes resembles the Amazon Unbox experience described in the article. So you're saying you weren't able to play a video without messing with the progress bar, iTunes started up automatically, and you had problems uninstalling the application? Or were you just making a meaningless comparison as an excuse to vaguely bitch about iTunes?
All iTunesHelper.exe does is sit dormant until an iPod is connected, after which it fires up iTunes and syncs tracks. There's no "phone home" activity as described in the grandparent post.
It's the reason Amazon has so many studios on board, while Apple will (reportedly) only have Disney next Tuesday. Steve Jobs wants to sell for only $9.99 or $12.99, while the studios wanted higher prices (yeah, I want to pay as much as a DVD for an online video version...right). Jobs wouldn't budge, so they went to Amazon. I'm sure the disaster of Amazon's service compared to the inevitable success of Apple's will put the ball in Jobs' court, and the other studios will come around.
You have got to be joking. Vista is one of the most inconsistent interfaces Microsoft will have ever delivered. As for the end-of-line shortcut, I have never encountered an app that didn't use the standard shortcut, and you don't give any examples that can be addressed.
It's really bizarre to me that someone would prefer waiting for Vista instead of having a modern OS today with OS X Tiger.
Microsoft didn't succeed due to its management ideas. Its management ideas have been a hindrance, as evidenced by the process problems behind Vista's development cycle. The reason Microsoft is successful goes all the way back to a single agreement with IBM in which Microsoft shipped the OS on all PCs while retaining the rights to the software. This brought in massive revenues and allowed them to expand into other areas, some successfully, most unsuccessfully. In other words, they got lucky. Otherwise, Microsoft is well-known for missing the boat on key technologies (hello, Internet) and generally being a follower, not an innovator.
You're able to turn in an early alpha version to select faculty staff before releasing it to the public half a year later as long as you write a page-long essay about how you are "on track" to deliver the assignment on time, and that "user feedback" has led you to remove several key portions of the work that you had advertised previously. You have to tell everyone you meet, over and over again, that you are "on track" to deliver by the Fall.
I think it's funny that anyone would want Microsoft's management techniques taught in the classroom given how it's taken over half a decade for them to squeeze Vista out, sans major features they originally promised.
Heh, are you new to Slashdot or something?
You're talking about the $999 model that used to be the education-only model with the integrated video chipset. The other formerly baseline 17-inch model, with the Radeon x1600 and Apple Remote, is still for sale.
When anyone uses words like "DRM-encumbered" when describing iTunes, it's proof they've never, ever tried buying anything from iTunes or had any personal experience with its extremely liberal DRM--so liberal you never notice it's there.
I'm sure the artists will just love that you're making such a defiant stand with Pirate Bay by not compensating them. It amuses me that you attempt a moral stance against DRM in one breath, then advocate piracy in the next. Ah, Slashdot.