It doesn't change the fact that they're poor earbuds, giving you horrible sound reproduction (and not in a "CD-zealot's anti-MP3 rant" way, but in a "my god that sounds absolutely horrible" way):-P
It is vain, though... kind of negates the coolness if people are self-destructively vain like that:) "I'm gonna forego decent sound, so people can tell I have an iPod, which is the reason I have an iPod" riiight;)
I have to stand up for Microsoft here - they adhere to their standards, even when they innovate. Take Media Player 9s interface - avant guarde, it could be said. Non-square independently-skinned window, without the regular XP title bar and buttons. What they did was add the functionality so when the user hovered their mouse where the bar should be, it appears. Best of both worlds.
That's one thing to be said for Windows - the GUI is tiiiight.
Hardware compatibility is still an issue, especially for users on dial-up, as softmodems are a nightmare to get installed on linux.
It's one of those catch-22 situations - people don't use linux because of the lack of drivers, and mfrs don't make drivers because no-one uses linux... go figure.
I'm all for Linux, but when people start throwing around unfounded opinion as fact, I gots to step in:)
"On Windows, you get media players battling it out for control of your media. You get video playback that fails for no apparent reason. Something as simple as playing a hard disk mirror of a DVD can be nearly impossible (unless you install the same OSS s/w you'd run on Linux as well)."
That's insane. Have you ever used Windows before? Judging by your rant, obviously not. I regularly use Windows machines for media playback (and authoring), and those problems are indicative of a bad user, not bad software. I never have media players "battling". I never have playback failing "for no apparent reason". And I regularly play DVD backups from anything, even my iPod, across the network.
Windows XP has excellent media support, better than Linux, by far. Maybe you don't want to hear it, but it's true.
Windows offers DirectX support for video overlays, meaning Windows passes most of the video processing directly to your video hardware. It supports every sort of codec imaginable. It has incredible audio support.
Say what you want about Windows - but when you start slinging unfounded lies around, you only hurt your side of the argument, not the other.
Oh, and I agree with you about Apple. My friend has a powerbook, and getting video to play on it is a nightmare. We usually end up playing it on a windows notebook instead (much lower spec, but much better for video).
The fact you admit to being able to hate an entire country for the actions of a few shows just how intelligent you are. Seriously. How on earth can you think like that? Anyway, if you want to hate a country for ignoring war crimes, look no further than the US.
The entire American campaign was an atrocity, not just a few "loose cannons". They weren't "found, tried, convicted and punished". The US systematically, not accidentally, dropped thousands of tons of napalm on villages. Imagine if a foreign power did that to the US - you'd be spitting mad!
America ignores more war crimes than any other country, by far. You don't think so, because they tell you everything you know. They leave out the bits where they get their hands dirty. The US military has no regard for human life. It demonstrates this every time it goes into war.
America is so over-run with supposed patriotism that the act of speaking out against something American is regarded as unpatriotic. You don't have a problem with that?
America lords itself as a bastion of democracy and freedom, yet has hundreds of people illegally imprisoned in Cuba. If another country had US citizens imprisoned without a trial or access to legal defense or their national consulate, America would be in an outcry. Once again, the rules America imposes on other countries don't apply at home.
The new American Dream -> Hypocrisy. By the bucket.
The fact that a self-proclaimed news channel has regular cooking spots speaks volumes about their professionalism.
It's OK for a channel to be right-leaning, but they have to come out and say it. Otherwise, they're passing off right-wing ideas as unbiassed, which they are by their very definition.
"Deaniacs" or not, their captioning of the anti-war marches as "march madness" sums up my argument completely.
CNN isn't much better, by the way. Neither were any of the local TV stations I've seen.
This whole Bush thing has been given one hell of a slant. You can't judge a station's coverage by what you see, but by what you don't. They're not putting any effort into investigating claims of Bush's AWOL. The fact that numerous $10,000+ rewards for any evidence supporting Bush's claims haven't been taken doesn't seem to register. Sure, they'll report something verging on negative about Bush when they have to (it would be eerily suspicious of them to not, which I'm sure they're well aware of), but they don't seek to question his leadership, just to question those who question it.
They're also incredibly US-biassed, too. Being a journalist requires you to step away from your personality, including your country. To be truly impartial, you can't call yourself "an American" when you talk about the US/Iraq war. Just doing that adds bias to everything they say. If they're so professional and unbiassed, why did every single news reporter have a US flag on?
Arguing US media is anything but pandering to whoever throws them cookies is absurd. They're funded by sponsors, who have agendas. Them not defending those agendas means they go out of business. It doesn't take a trained chimp with a harvard degree to realise they're not impartial.
But there's no conflict of interests, which is what was being discussed (as in Ford making a car that can only use Ford petrol). The BBC have no reason to pick WMP over anything else - they just chose the better product. What people here are annoyed about is that they can't get it on their machines, which is a completely different issue altogether.
It's a war crime when you don't try to stop innocents being killed. The US doesn't try, ever. They kill anyone, even themselves. They view anyone non-American as a second-class human, with a bulls-eye on their chest.
There's no difference between a Panasonic TV and a Sony. A real comparison would be between a radio and a TV... the same frequencies, different content. Imagine if after TVs were released, everyone with a radio complained the way you are... It hardly makes sense. There is a huge difference between Windows, macs and Linux. Seeing as windows has about 90% of the desktop market, they can hardly be blamed for not focussing 50% of their attention on the other 10%...
It all seems like sour grapes to me...:-P
This is nothing personal, but for a tiny minority to expect the same treatment as the rest of the users (which would cost the provider a lot of money), is immature, no matter how you look at it.
People are blinded by the flag. They think to be patriotic means to take everything the government tells you. They couldn't be further from the truth.
Jane Fonda stood up for her beliefs. The same thing the founding fathers did for America, yet because she's on the other side, "patriots" call her the traitor.
American Patriots need to learn the true meaning of the word. At the moment, they're anything but patriotic.
I was at an anti-war protest in LA, and the free republic people were there. A woman, in her 40s, elbowed me in the face. They also tried to cover my "stop bush" sign with an American flag. Oh, the irony.
The Free Republicans are racist and hateful. They gave my wife racist abuse (she's chinese american), saying "We saved your country's ass in WW2!", even though she was born in Australia, and moved to the US later on. They even told me to "go back to Germany!" (I'm British - go figure).
I'm not one for spreading much or name-calling, but those guys are full of hatred, and think the sun shines out of their collective asses. They're dangerous. Read their forums - you'll see.
Oh yeah, and don't try posting anything anti-republican there - they don't believe in free speech.
And the US were handing out candy in Vietnam, I suppose...
That's the thing about American hypocrisy - it's so blatantly obvious to the rest of the world.
On 9/11, America grieved for the thousands of innocent people killed in NY. In the Vietnam war, however, the US killed many times more innocents, and glossed over it completely. The US used napalm on entire villages, killing thousands. They used helicopter-based machine guns to mow down farmers in the paddy fields. Jane Fonda didn't like that, but because it was the US gov't doing the bad stuff, she was branded a traitor.
It seems every American associated with the military can't think for themselves, and sees the US as infallible, and a bastion of decency. As it is, it's a bastion of doing whatever the fuck it wants, screwing over people who can't defend themselves in the process.
I've got more respect for Jane Fonda than Bush, any day.
America is the land of the hypocrite, and home of the blind. You're living proof.
Yet, there's nothing wrong with those B52s dropping napalm on villages, because the US army was too piss-poor to clear them of enemy troops, killing innocent men, women and children in the act? Wasn't all of America pissed off on 9/11? Where's the difference?
That's the thing - she had a point. The US was running rampant over SE asia, killing indiscriminantly. Napalming towns, opening fire at groups of people from helicopters, etc. The US is full of hypocrisy. If you were a real American, you'd hate America for some of the things it does. Unfortunately, you're smoking the patriotic pole, and won't say a damned word against them for fear of being "unAmerican". The irony is delicious.
The US media is right-wing, not left. You can't even question that. Look at the Fox network with O'Reilly et al... Captions like "Deaniacs" and "March Madness" (for the anti-war protests) demonstrate how "objective" the US media is. They claim to be reporting news, but 90% of their show is pure opinion, splattered in the image of a news show. Imagine The Onion, but written by unfunny fascists. That's the state of the US media.
You'll notice how the media in the US doesn't show Bush in a bad light, ever. Seeing as the man can't speak properly and has a tendency for war, you'd think people would be questioning his ethics just a tiny bit, but no. The news channels are too busy calling democrats names and patting themselves on the back for another piece of extraordinary professional journalism.
Here's a good example: Bush's AWOL trip... The US media didn't contemplate, even once, the mere possibility it could actually be true. They put it down to "commie pinko left-wing anarchists" stirring up trouble and left it at that. If they were truly objective, they would have tried to do some research. Oh no - that's too much like real journalism.
I bet you're one of those people who calls the BBC biassed, right?
Rich people are more greedy than poor folks. Rich people are easier to buy. Look at bush. He's not wantin' for nothin', yet he's in EVERYONE's pocket. the slut.
Sony's MDs could only hold 74minutes of audio per disc - you'd have to have a bag FULL of discs to rival the iPod's capacity. They also couldn't play for as long, and making MDs of your favourite music had to be done at 1x speed (digital/analogue inputs, real-time only).
With my iPod, I can copy music to it whenever I want (in seconds), and copy music off it just as fast. I don't have to hunt around in my bag for a different disc if I want to listen to something else. I just press a couple of buttons and I'm listening to something else.
Imagine being in a shop, and a great song comes on the radio (I know, shock!), but you can't hear it because of the people around you. With an iPod, 2 seconds later, you could be listening to it on your headphones, without interruptions. Or if you're having a discussion with someone about music (or spoken word, a la Noam Chomsky), and you can just whip it out and play them whatever, in seconds. That's the difference.
I've had tape walkmans, CD walkmans, MDs and 2 iPods (5 & 40gig), and the difference is mind-blowing. iPods shouldn't be compared to anything else, as they're so different.
Did I mention it's as small as a deck of cards?:-P
You see people wearing their iPod white earbuds everywhere. Don't they realise the earbuds are some of the worst out there? The iPod sounds horrible with them - you have to spend a bit of money on proper headphones/earbuds to really appreciate the sound. I feel sorry for those still using the original ones. I don't know how to break it to them... It's like buying a ferrari, and staying in 1st gear.
This is what I don't get about Slashdot... how a comment so based in fiction and opinion can be modded as "interesting".
The BBC is a humongous corporation. They do EVERYTHING from web-hosting, R&D, TV/film/radio production, digital and analogue broadcasting. You name something to do with computers, and there'll be a team at the BBC talking about it, at least. To say every single BBC employee is a MS-zealot just shows your ignorance about the corporation. "Pretty Apples"?? What are you on? Have you looked at a modern PC recently? Obviously not... Again, ignorance.
The OGG streams were shut down because no-one used them. OGG users are in the minority, by a large margin. Providing every obscure format for every techno-zealot of every description would drive them into the ground. We get the formats that matter, which is good enough.
When you step away from the mainstream, you lose all right to complain no-one's catering for you. That's life.
It's "Digital Rights Management", and if you don't want it, don't download it. Seriously. Anyway, DRM isn't a Bad Thing(tm) - it's giving people control of what they spent $millions making after they distribute it. Without it, many companies wouldn't share anything. Just because it can stop you doing something doesn't mean it's intrinsically bad.
Slashdot Mirror
You're forgetting unprovoked international terrorism! go team! :-P
It is vain, though... kind of negates the coolness if people are self-destructively vain like that :) "I'm gonna forego decent sound, so people can tell I have an iPod, which is the reason I have an iPod" riiight ;)
It's just another case of the little guys being pissed off at the big guys, nothing more, nothing less.
That's one thing to be said for Windows - the GUI is tiiiight.
I beg to differ - being ugly does add to its unusability. If a UI looks like a car crash, I'm less likely to want to wrestle with it...
It's one of those catch-22 situations - people don't use linux because of the lack of drivers, and mfrs don't make drivers because no-one uses linux... go figure.
"On Windows, you get media players battling it out for control of your media. You get video playback that fails for no apparent reason. Something as simple as playing a hard disk mirror of a DVD can be nearly impossible (unless you install the same OSS s/w you'd run on Linux as well)."
That's insane. Have you ever used Windows before? Judging by your rant, obviously not. I regularly use Windows machines for media playback (and authoring), and those problems are indicative of a bad user, not bad software. I never have media players "battling". I never have playback failing "for no apparent reason". And I regularly play DVD backups from anything, even my iPod, across the network.
Windows XP has excellent media support, better than Linux, by far. Maybe you don't want to hear it, but it's true.
Windows offers DirectX support for video overlays, meaning Windows passes most of the video processing directly to your video hardware. It supports every sort of codec imaginable. It has incredible audio support.
Say what you want about Windows - but when you start slinging unfounded lies around, you only hurt your side of the argument, not the other.
Oh, and I agree with you about Apple. My friend has a powerbook, and getting video to play on it is a nightmare. We usually end up playing it on a windows notebook instead (much lower spec, but much better for video).
The entire American campaign was an atrocity, not just a few "loose cannons". They weren't "found, tried, convicted and punished". The US systematically, not accidentally, dropped thousands of tons of napalm on villages. Imagine if a foreign power did that to the US - you'd be spitting mad!
America ignores more war crimes than any other country, by far. You don't think so, because they tell you everything you know. They leave out the bits where they get their hands dirty. The US military has no regard for human life. It demonstrates this every time it goes into war.
America is so over-run with supposed patriotism that the act of speaking out against something American is regarded as unpatriotic. You don't have a problem with that?
America lords itself as a bastion of democracy and freedom, yet has hundreds of people illegally imprisoned in Cuba. If another country had US citizens imprisoned without a trial or access to legal defense or their national consulate, America would be in an outcry. Once again, the rules America imposes on other countries don't apply at home.
The new American Dream -> Hypocrisy. By the bucket.
Proud?
It's OK for a channel to be right-leaning, but they have to come out and say it. Otherwise, they're passing off right-wing ideas as unbiassed, which they are by their very definition.
"Deaniacs" or not, their captioning of the anti-war marches as "march madness" sums up my argument completely.
CNN isn't much better, by the way. Neither were any of the local TV stations I've seen.
This whole Bush thing has been given one hell of a slant. You can't judge a station's coverage by what you see, but by what you don't. They're not putting any effort into investigating claims of Bush's AWOL. The fact that numerous $10,000+ rewards for any evidence supporting Bush's claims haven't been taken doesn't seem to register. Sure, they'll report something verging on negative about Bush when they have to (it would be eerily suspicious of them to not, which I'm sure they're well aware of), but they don't seek to question his leadership, just to question those who question it.
They're also incredibly US-biassed, too. Being a journalist requires you to step away from your personality, including your country. To be truly impartial, you can't call yourself "an American" when you talk about the US/Iraq war. Just doing that adds bias to everything they say. If they're so professional and unbiassed, why did every single news reporter have a US flag on?
Arguing US media is anything but pandering to whoever throws them cookies is absurd. They're funded by sponsors, who have agendas. Them not defending those agendas means they go out of business. It doesn't take a trained chimp with a harvard degree to realise they're not impartial.
But there's no conflict of interests, which is what was being discussed (as in Ford making a car that can only use Ford petrol). The BBC have no reason to pick WMP over anything else - they just chose the better product. What people here are annoyed about is that they can't get it on their machines, which is a completely different issue altogether.
And how, exactly, has the BBC written Windows and Media Player?
It's a war crime when you don't try to stop innocents being killed. The US doesn't try, ever. They kill anyone, even themselves. They view anyone non-American as a second-class human, with a bulls-eye on their chest.
It all seems like sour grapes to me... :-P
This is nothing personal, but for a tiny minority to expect the same treatment as the rest of the users (which would cost the provider a lot of money), is immature, no matter how you look at it.
People are blinded by the flag. They think to be patriotic means to take everything the government tells you. They couldn't be further from the truth.
Jane Fonda stood up for her beliefs. The same thing the founding fathers did for America, yet because she's on the other side, "patriots" call her the traitor.
American Patriots need to learn the true meaning of the word. At the moment, they're anything but patriotic.
The Free Republicans are racist and hateful. They gave my wife racist abuse (she's chinese american), saying "We saved your country's ass in WW2!", even though she was born in Australia, and moved to the US later on. They even told me to "go back to Germany!" (I'm British - go figure).
I'm not one for spreading much or name-calling, but those guys are full of hatred, and think the sun shines out of their collective asses. They're dangerous. Read their forums - you'll see.
Oh yeah, and don't try posting anything anti-republican there - they don't believe in free speech.
Unless they were using a webcache, in which case it could be tens/hundreds of thousands of people... :-P
That's the thing about American hypocrisy - it's so blatantly obvious to the rest of the world.
On 9/11, America grieved for the thousands of innocent people killed in NY. In the Vietnam war, however, the US killed many times more innocents, and glossed over it completely. The US used napalm on entire villages, killing thousands. They used helicopter-based machine guns to mow down farmers in the paddy fields. Jane Fonda didn't like that, but because it was the US gov't doing the bad stuff, she was branded a traitor.
It seems every American associated with the military can't think for themselves, and sees the US as infallible, and a bastion of decency. As it is, it's a bastion of doing whatever the fuck it wants, screwing over people who can't defend themselves in the process.
I've got more respect for Jane Fonda than Bush, any day.
America is the land of the hypocrite, and home of the blind. You're living proof.
That's the thing - she had a point. The US was running rampant over SE asia, killing indiscriminantly. Napalming towns, opening fire at groups of people from helicopters, etc. The US is full of hypocrisy. If you were a real American, you'd hate America for some of the things it does. Unfortunately, you're smoking the patriotic pole, and won't say a damned word against them for fear of being "unAmerican". The irony is delicious.
The US media is right-wing, not left. You can't even question that. Look at the Fox network with O'Reilly et al... Captions like "Deaniacs" and "March Madness" (for the anti-war protests) demonstrate how "objective" the US media is. They claim to be reporting news, but 90% of their show is pure opinion, splattered in the image of a news show. Imagine The Onion, but written by unfunny fascists. That's the state of the US media.
You'll notice how the media in the US doesn't show Bush in a bad light, ever. Seeing as the man can't speak properly and has a tendency for war, you'd think people would be questioning his ethics just a tiny bit, but no. The news channels are too busy calling democrats names and patting themselves on the back for another piece of extraordinary professional journalism.
Here's a good example: Bush's AWOL trip... The US media didn't contemplate, even once, the mere possibility it could actually be true. They put it down to "commie pinko left-wing anarchists" stirring up trouble and left it at that. If they were truly objective, they would have tried to do some research. Oh no - that's too much like real journalism.
I bet you're one of those people who calls the BBC biassed, right?
Rich people are more greedy than poor folks. Rich people are easier to buy. Look at bush. He's not wantin' for nothin', yet he's in EVERYONE's pocket. the slut.
With my iPod, I can copy music to it whenever I want (in seconds), and copy music off it just as fast. I don't have to hunt around in my bag for a different disc if I want to listen to something else. I just press a couple of buttons and I'm listening to something else.
Imagine being in a shop, and a great song comes on the radio (I know, shock!), but you can't hear it because of the people around you. With an iPod, 2 seconds later, you could be listening to it on your headphones, without interruptions. Or if you're having a discussion with someone about music (or spoken word, a la Noam Chomsky), and you can just whip it out and play them whatever, in seconds. That's the difference.
I've had tape walkmans, CD walkmans, MDs and 2 iPods (5 & 40gig), and the difference is mind-blowing. iPods shouldn't be compared to anything else, as they're so different.
Did I mention it's as small as a deck of cards? :-P
You see people wearing their iPod white earbuds everywhere. Don't they realise the earbuds are some of the worst out there? The iPod sounds horrible with them - you have to spend a bit of money on proper headphones/earbuds to really appreciate the sound. I feel sorry for those still using the original ones. I don't know how to break it to them... It's like buying a ferrari, and staying in 1st gear.
This is what I don't get about Slashdot... how a comment so based in fiction and opinion can be modded as "interesting".
The BBC is a humongous corporation. They do EVERYTHING from web-hosting, R&D, TV/film/radio production, digital and analogue broadcasting. You name something to do with computers, and there'll be a team at the BBC talking about it, at least. To say every single BBC employee is a MS-zealot just shows your ignorance about the corporation. "Pretty Apples"?? What are you on? Have you looked at a modern PC recently? Obviously not... Again, ignorance.
The OGG streams were shut down because no-one used them. OGG users are in the minority, by a large margin. Providing every obscure format for every techno-zealot of every description would drive them into the ground. We get the formats that matter, which is good enough.
When you step away from the mainstream, you lose all right to complain no-one's catering for you. That's life.
It's incredibly immature to get huffy about this point - they're protecting something the british taxpayer has spent millions on.
Also, DRM serves to sign the content, so no-one distributes anything harmfull under the BBC brand... think about that consequence - pretty important.
It's "Digital Rights Management", and if you don't want it, don't download it. Seriously. Anyway, DRM isn't a Bad Thing(tm) - it's giving people control of what they spent $millions making after they distribute it. Without it, many companies wouldn't share anything. Just because it can stop you doing something doesn't mean it's intrinsically bad.