The point is that only after extreme amounts of whining, petitioning, bomb threats (just kidding), etc, for years from the user community did they think it might be a good idea to play along nicely with the format that 95% of the digital music world uses. Even then it was an act of desperation after they realized that everybody else was making better devices than they were for the money and they didn't really have any competitive advantages to justify the crap you had to go through to use a MD. For the most part, everyone else realized that the simplest way of doing things is probably best.
I might be an apologist if NetMD didn't almost ruin my chances of bringing some tunes on an 11 day cruise with me. I eventually figured it out after about 8 hours of frustration. I had to install RealOne just to have basic drag/drop playlist capability (it's not as bad as the old real, but the obnoxious advertising you have to go out of your way to disable is almost as bad as spyware anyway), and I also had to track down a copy of OpenMG from a p2p network (I had lost the original media, and apperantly Sony is overprotective of even a piece of commodity software used to transfer music to a $100 portable music player) to make it work. I finished at 11:30 at night...
Had MiniDisc been the only way I could take music with me at the time, I might have put up with it, but knowing that the there were iPods, a plethra of flash devices and $20 CD players at WalMart that can play MP3 CDs, I felt ripped off.
Guess you have to consider where I'm coming from. I'm sure you know I'm not the only one who, if they didn't have problems with NetMDs, at least took offense to Sony's attitude. The introduction of HiMD only after the MiniDisc format became irrelevant and Sony had to do something to save it looks like an apology to people like me. I can't think of any reason someone would buy a HiMD now considering the alternatives that are out.
If you have a HiMD and enjoy it, then I'm sincerely glad for you. You made a better buying decision than I did. At least I learned to do my research first...
and their custom MP3 format whose name I don't recall.
You must be thinking of ATRAC (the butt of many jokes due to it's close pronunciation to "8 Track").
NetMD players (at least) will only play ATRAC files. If you have a library of music in MP3/OGG/WMA/whatever, you actually had to transcode the files to ATRAC to play them. Once they're transcoded, the (horribly designed and hard to use) software (OpenMG/Sonic Stage) will only let you upload any given file to your player 3 times....unless you delete the files and transcode them again. You have to go through elabroate "check in" and "check out" rituals just to transfer music to the device. Of course you can't use a NetMD in Mac OS or Linux, or even in Windows as a usb mass storage device (bypassing the horrible software for the simplicity of drag and drop), because none of the lawyers at Sony wanted you to be able to freely move files on and off! of the thing.
It's possible to use RealOne to get files on the thing without these restrictions, but you still have to have OpenMG or SonicStage installed in the first place, you also have to trudge through the RealOne install, incessantly telling it that you don't want to be advertised at, and this option is completely non-obvious (unless you actually use RealOne to interface with your portable music players, but who does that anyway?)
The MiniDisc's huge success is a testament to the popularity of formats like this.
I know about all this because I impulsively purchased a NetMD about 2 years ago and it's heard its fair share of obscenities in its day. Maybe that's why I'm so predjudiced against Sony...
The latest players actually have MP3 support, but Sony missed the opportunity and now they're irrelevant compared to the iPod.
But just because somebody writes a program doesn't mean Sony has to actually endorse it. Let the '1337 THREE DEE MINSWEEPAR' authors revel in their achievements on crappy shareware sites, while Sony gets payola from 'real' game companies from logo certification and distribution programs and the like.
Just remember that the same kind of ameteurs could also be working on games and utilities that are actually useful and could greatly enhance your PSP experience. For example, there's not much commercial interest to develop an ogg vorbis player for the PSP, but it would make perfect sense because of the smaller filesizes for equivelant quality and tiny sizes of memory sticks. Such a product wouldn't be 'commercially viable' enough to sell on store shelves, but a lot of people might find it useful and word of mouth would raise it above the rest of the freeware/shareware muck.
The exact same thing happens on Windows...I know from my friends and sites like slashdot what good Free/free programs there are out there so that I don't have to treck through cheesy shareware sites for days and fend of spyware from the less-than-scrupulous software packages just to have basic things like a good media player.
All the while you can still go to Best Buy and purchase all the multi-billion-dollars-to-develop software and games you can afford.
If the capabilities of these new devices are more in line with what computers' have always been, why can't the same sort of development structures come about, unhindered by the need to hack into proprietary formats? Why limit ourselves to commercially produced games and watching Spiderman 2 for all eternity?
By that, I mean the idea that you should only be able to do things with your device that licensed developers have been blessed enough to be allowed to do. If you want to make your own games or software, pony up a few Gs and sign an NDA for a 'development kit'.
Minidisc, Memory Stick, UMD, Sony just doesn't get it. Why go through all the trouble to put such promising power in the palms of your hands, only to lock up its capabilities in proprietary media formats, in the year 2005 when it's no longer technically or economically necessary to do so?
I can understand Sony's motivations to do this: protecting their image, preventing piracy, etc, but the PSP seems to me to be more than the simple game consoles of old. Why block out developers who could do amazing things for your platform (make it more attractive!) because your content division gets to make all the decisions...
True story, the deadline for a paper I was writing was closing in fast (i.e. the next time the sun comes up). I had compiled a ton of raw research in a single file, "notes.txt", and was in the process of going through it, combining redundant data, and copy/pasting in a logical order into a second file, "outline.txt" to base the first draft off of.
I forget exactly what it was, but one of my (nonessential) programs was acting up. I went into the task manager and futzed around a bit until I got it killed.
All was well....I thought.
Running on nothing but caffeine and determination, I wasn't in the clearest state of mind. Turns out that I had managed to kill the text editor I was using on outline.txt also, and I hadn't saved my changes for a while...oops...
My raction went something like this...
Denial. I truly cannot believe what happened. "What? I can't seem to find the outline...surely it's in the taskbar here somehwere...let me look again...I know I'm right. I'm always right. The computer is perfect. This can't be"
Rationalization (aka wild speculation). I try to think of 20 explanations for what went wrong and what I can do to fix it, all within half a second or so. "OK so it's not in the taskbar maybe there's an obscure bug such that it's not in the taskbar but the process still exists? surely that's it! let's see in the task manager here...what? I can't see it? I'm sure it's in there somewhere let's look again...not there? OK, I'm sure it automagically saved the file after every single keypress! I'm good to go..."
Stupidity. I sit staring at the screen drooling for a few seconds.
Acceptance and Pacification. "OK, so I screwed up. It's ok, I still have 5 more hours, I know I saved it recently, I'm fine this will only take 5 minutes to redo." I continue to stare at the screen and take deep breaths and feel at peace with the world for some strange reason.
Damage Assessment. This is the ugly part, when I go back and look at the most recent version of the file and discover that it's only 5 lines long! Hilarity, violence, and gratuitous foul language ensues. My feelings are a combination of panic and pure rage.
Recovery. I go back to acceptance and pacification for a bit, and work up the courage to start working again. Half an hour later I'm back where I started, albeit with half an hour less time.
This is actually the most complicated reaction to a crash I've had that I can think of. It seems like my reactions vary wildly depending on the situation...
For crashes with less severe consequencs, or ones that are completely obvious (power failure, etc), I usually jump straight from normalcy to damage assessment. Afterwards, anger comes first and then reflection on what caused the crash.
Sometimes I'm almost completely calm. This is usually when I'm already expecting Bad Stuff to happen, I've already accepted the consequences and know what I'm going to do. The last time I had a hard drive crash on me, I got a little worked up because I wasn't expecting it to happen right then, but it was an older drive and I had long since moved anything irreplacable off of it.
An Attempt at Insight
Remember though that people like you and I understand more about computers than most people, and we don't tend to focus our anger on the computer itself. A lot of people have no idea how computers work, they might as well run on fairy dust and wishes for all they care, so when they experience problems they feel helpless, they get mad at the computer, "ugh...computers suck they always fuck up like this and they're so hard to use", which results in the stories of people deep frying computers. The average nerd doesn't feel so helpless, he thinks of computers more as tools that he has complete command over, not insurmountable obstacles to his life, so he's probably not as likely to da
Splitting grammatical hairs here, but sayeth the informational blurb:
How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever <em>to be clicked on</em> in a web browser!"
It would be silly to make a point of clicking on the picture after it's loaded, and I'm assuming thumbnails were unnecessary, so it's possible that the user simply downloaded the file through the browser, and viewed it externally?
Then after they got the bright idea that you could send pictures over tcp/ip! (duh), support was built into browsers later?
I was checking this lady out, happily scanning along, when all of a sudden...it froze. It accepted none of the various harmless keystrokes I tried, the damn thing was just stuck showing the same thing as its only sign of life.
I thought to myself, "OK, these things fuck up like this sometimes, I've never seen it this bad, but I'm sure it's fixable."
I called over the customer service rep, told her what happened...
She said, "Did you try jiggling the handle on the check thing?"
Myself, "I'm sorry?"
She, "Here..."
She Jiggles the wire connecting the check reader to the terminal, it promptly gets back on its feet and I proceed with the transaction...
Who would have thought...
At least now I know what to do.
(And it had to have happened before for her to know about it...)
After struggling with making my grandparents computer work with the Windows ME "recovery cd" that came with the computer (they didn't tell me I was going to be working on it, and didn't have the best of resources at hand...), I finally decided to just bite the bullet and install Debian and Gnome on it.
I know, I know, Debian isn't exactly your "grandmother's distribution", but the distro in question is pretty irrelevant once I get to the point.
Anyway, I set it up so they basically couldn't screw it up. They don't know the root password, GDM is set to automatically log in their user (yes, their, hilarity would ensue trying to get them to understand the concept of users) on boot, and the desktop has I think 5 icons, "user's home", "Computer", "Pogo Games" (they love this for some reason), "E-Mail" (evolution), "Internet" (loads google in firefox), and "Trash".
They had to learn very few things to use this system, mainly what the icons do (which is easy because I made them visually huge and self explanatory), and how to shut down (Actions menu, not the Start menu)
Some other measures I put into place, like making a backup of/home so I could log in remotely and fix it (I had to do this once, because one day the icon for pogo games magically disappeared, even though they "Didn't do anything, I swear!"), but this is really turning rambly really quick...just to give you an idea of how idiot-proof the thing is.
They haven't had problems with it in about 2 months (since I installed it). Their usage is very basic, and this configuration serves them very well, since I can control the interface to be much less full of surprises than Windows.
So the world is all well and rosy...well...not quite...
I took no measures to clean up the default boot process, so it still outputs 'garbage' like
APM Bios version 1.2 Flags 0x02 (Driver version 1.2) Entry f000:c64e cseg16f000 dseg f000 cseg len ffff, dseg len ffff Connection version 1.1 AC off line, batter status high, battery life 82 [and so on...]
It fills the entire screen, and scrolls by so fast they couldn't comprehend it even if they knew what it all meant.
So I've counted about 5 times so far where my grandmother asks something like, "Now, is all that writing going to come up for good now?" It really, deeply bothers them to see all that as opposed to a pretty Windows logo. Not that I blame them.
So, that progress bar might be 'boring' to you, but it's blissful simplicity to somebody like my grandparents.
(FWIW, I prefer to see it all on a 1024x768 framebuffer, because I want to know when something is configured wrongly but can still pass that stage failing silently)
Done. Simple. One media player, one browser plugin, one set of file associations. Granted, this only works on x86, and doesn't cover everything, but I'll try to keep from going on any tangents here...
In Windows, it seems like you need to download a different player just to play everything. WMP, Quicktime, Real...The worst part is that they all suck ass.
They all have bloated, useless skins (especially RealOne (and yes, I have used Realplayer in Linux, I know it's "native" gtk and doesn't suck as bad. What could be expected, Linux users don't need that crap)).
They all seem to have stupid "Media Guides" which are nothing more than advertising, "Just $ a month for EXCLUSIVE, exciting "Real-Only" (tm) content! (Yes, there was audio advertising the first time I started RealOne. Disgusting)"
They all try to 'manage' your media for you.
They all hijack your associations, becuase they all think they're the most important players (or they're trying to get more advertising/mindshare out, and think being co-admins of people's computers is an OK way to do it)
Most of them have stupid 'agents', either invisible or in the system tray, that only server 2 or 3 purposes;
* Mindshare (a little logo there all the time reminding you and anyone in the world to see your computer or a screenshot that you have super duper media player 2005 installed)
* To sit there and hijack your associations if any other company's evil media player tries to take them.
* Check for updates (maybe the only legitimate reason, but I'd like for it to only update when it's run, not check every time I log in (...by default!))
They all require a fecal sample and lab tests just to install.
They all try to do too much...how many programs that can burn an audio cd do I need?
...and you can -only- use these media players to play some content.
...and why do we have to put up with it? "To protect our intellectual property and patents!", "Licensing costs!"
Guess what...
I.
Don't.
Give.
A.
Flying.
Fuck.
I just want to be able to play the content. Yes, I do feel guilty about 'stealing' the proprietary codecs and using them in mplayer or whatever, but not because I respect their IP, it's because I feel like I'm perpetuating the idea that all this proprietary nonsense is OK. Unfortunately, saying to my friends, "Oh, no, I can't see that movie because I use Linux." gives Linux a bad image, "What, you mean you can't even watch movies in Linux!?"
When will Real, Apple, et al become enlightened and release open source codecs for everything that can be used in any media player? I'd guess never...
Until then, "Legal MP3 playback on Linux!" will be a news story. *sigh* Fuck the World.
Slashdot Mirror
I know.
The point is that only after extreme amounts of whining, petitioning, bomb threats (just kidding), etc, for years from the user community did they think it might be a good idea to play along nicely with the format that 95% of the digital music world uses. Even then it was an act of desperation after they realized that everybody else was making better devices than they were for the money and they didn't really have any competitive advantages to justify the crap you had to go through to use a MD. For the most part, everyone else realized that the simplest way of doing things is probably best.
I might be an apologist if NetMD didn't almost ruin my chances of bringing some tunes on an 11 day cruise with me. I eventually figured it out after about 8 hours of frustration. I had to install RealOne just to have basic drag/drop playlist capability (it's not as bad as the old real, but the obnoxious advertising you have to go out of your way to disable is almost as bad as spyware anyway), and I also had to track down a copy of OpenMG from a p2p network (I had lost the original media, and apperantly Sony is overprotective of even a piece of commodity software used to transfer music to a $100 portable music player) to make it work. I finished at 11:30 at night...
Had MiniDisc been the only way I could take music with me at the time, I might have put up with it, but knowing that the there were iPods, a plethra of flash devices and $20 CD players at WalMart that can play MP3 CDs, I felt ripped off.
Guess you have to consider where I'm coming from. I'm sure you know I'm not the only one who, if they didn't have problems with NetMDs, at least took offense to Sony's attitude. The introduction of HiMD only after the MiniDisc format became irrelevant and Sony had to do something to save it looks like an apology to people like me. I can't think of any reason someone would buy a HiMD now considering the alternatives that are out.
If you have a HiMD and enjoy it, then I'm sincerely glad for you. You made a better buying decision than I did. At least I learned to do my research first...
What do you think?
NetMD players (at least) will only play ATRAC files. If you have a library of music in MP3/OGG/WMA/whatever, you actually had to transcode the files to ATRAC to play them. Once they're transcoded, the (horribly designed and hard to use) software (OpenMG/Sonic Stage) will only let you upload any given file to your player 3 times....unless you delete the files and transcode them again. You have to go through elabroate "check in" and "check out" rituals just to transfer music to the device. Of course you can't use a NetMD in Mac OS or Linux, or even in Windows as a usb mass storage device (bypassing the horrible software for the simplicity of drag and drop), because none of the lawyers at Sony wanted you to be able to freely move files on and off! of the thing.
It's possible to use RealOne to get files on the thing without these restrictions, but you still have to have OpenMG or SonicStage installed in the first place, you also have to trudge through the RealOne install, incessantly telling it that you don't want to be advertised at, and this option is completely non-obvious (unless you actually use RealOne to interface with your portable music players, but who does that anyway?)
The MiniDisc's huge success is a testament to the popularity of formats like this.
I know about all this because I impulsively purchased a NetMD about 2 years ago and it's heard its fair share of obscenities in its day. Maybe that's why I'm so predjudiced against Sony...
The latest players actually have MP3 support, but Sony missed the opportunity and now they're irrelevant compared to the iPod.
You make perfect sense.
But just because somebody writes a program doesn't mean Sony has to actually endorse it. Let the '1337 THREE DEE MINSWEEPAR' authors revel in their achievements on crappy shareware sites, while Sony gets payola from 'real' game companies from logo certification and distribution programs and the like.
Just remember that the same kind of ameteurs could also be working on games and utilities that are actually useful and could greatly enhance your PSP experience. For example, there's not much commercial interest to develop an ogg vorbis player for the PSP, but it would make perfect sense because of the smaller filesizes for equivelant quality and tiny sizes of memory sticks. Such a product wouldn't be 'commercially viable' enough to sell on store shelves, but a lot of people might find it useful and word of mouth would raise it above the rest of the freeware/shareware muck.
The exact same thing happens on Windows...I know from my friends and sites like slashdot what good Free/free programs there are out there so that I don't have to treck through cheesy shareware sites for days and fend of spyware from the less-than-scrupulous software packages just to have basic things like a good media player.
All the while you can still go to Best Buy and purchase all the multi-billion-dollars-to-develop software and games you can afford.
If the capabilities of these new devices are more in line with what computers' have always been, why can't the same sort of development structures come about, unhindered by the need to hack into proprietary formats? Why limit ourselves to commercially produced games and watching Spiderman 2 for all eternity?
I thought we had left cartridges behind.
By that, I mean the idea that you should only be able to do things with your device that licensed developers have been blessed enough to be allowed to do. If you want to make your own games or software, pony up a few Gs and sign an NDA for a 'development kit'.
Minidisc, Memory Stick, UMD, Sony just doesn't get it. Why go through all the trouble to put such promising power in the palms of your hands, only to lock up its capabilities in proprietary media formats, in the year 2005 when it's no longer technically or economically necessary to do so?
I can understand Sony's motivations to do this: protecting their image, preventing piracy, etc, but the PSP seems to me to be more than the simple game consoles of old. Why block out developers who could do amazing things for your platform (make it more attractive!) because your content division gets to make all the decisions...
True story, the deadline for a paper I was writing was closing in fast (i.e. the next time the sun comes up). I had compiled a ton of raw research in a single file, "notes.txt", and was in the process of going through it, combining redundant data, and copy/pasting in a logical order into a second file, "outline.txt" to base the first draft off of.
I forget exactly what it was, but one of my (nonessential) programs was acting up. I went into the task manager and futzed around a bit until I got it killed.
All was well....I thought.
Running on nothing but caffeine and determination, I wasn't in the clearest state of mind. Turns out that I had managed to kill the text editor I was using on outline.txt also, and I hadn't saved my changes for a while...oops...
My raction went something like this...
This is actually the most complicated reaction to a crash I've had that I can think of. It seems like my reactions vary wildly depending on the situation...
For crashes with less severe consequencs, or ones that are completely obvious (power failure, etc), I usually jump straight from normalcy to damage assessment. Afterwards, anger comes first and then reflection on what caused the crash.
Sometimes I'm almost completely calm. This is usually when I'm already expecting Bad Stuff to happen, I've already accepted the consequences and know what I'm going to do. The last time I had a hard drive crash on me, I got a little worked up because I wasn't expecting it to happen right then, but it was an older drive and I had long since moved anything irreplacable off of it.
An Attempt at Insight
Remember though that people like you and I understand more about computers than most people, and we don't tend to focus our anger on the computer itself. A lot of people have no idea how computers work, they might as well run on fairy dust and wishes for all they care, so when they experience problems they feel helpless, they get mad at the computer, "ugh...computers suck they always fuck up like this and they're so hard to use", which results in the stories of people deep frying computers. The average nerd doesn't feel so helpless, he thinks of computers more as tools that he has complete command over, not insurmountable obstacles to his life, so he's probably not as likely to da
Then after they got the bright idea that you could send pictures over tcp/ip! (duh), support was built into browsers later?
Just a thought...
I admit, I work at a grocery store (hey it's only until I'm learned enough to get a "real" job)
Our registers run viPOS on Windows 2000.
I was checking this lady out, happily scanning along, when all of a sudden...it froze. It accepted none of the various harmless keystrokes I tried, the damn thing was just stuck showing the same thing as its only sign of life.
I thought to myself, "OK, these things fuck up like this sometimes, I've never seen it this bad, but I'm sure it's fixable."
I called over the customer service rep, told her what happened...
She said, "Did you try jiggling the handle on the check thing?"
Myself, "I'm sorry?"
She, "Here..."
She Jiggles the wire connecting the check reader to the terminal, it promptly gets back on its feet and I proceed with the transaction...
Who would have thought...
At least now I know what to do.
(And it had to have happened before for her to know about it...)
I know, I know, Debian isn't exactly your "grandmother's distribution", but the distro in question is pretty irrelevant once I get to the point.
Anyway, I set it up so they basically couldn't screw it up. They don't know the root password, GDM is set to automatically log in their user (yes, their, hilarity would ensue trying to get them to understand the concept of users) on boot, and the desktop has I think 5 icons, "user's home", "Computer", "Pogo Games" (they love this for some reason), "E-Mail" (evolution), "Internet" (loads google in firefox), and "Trash".
They had to learn very few things to use this system, mainly what the icons do (which is easy because I made them visually huge and self explanatory), and how to shut down (Actions menu, not the Start menu)
Some other measures I put into place, like making a backup of
They haven't had problems with it in about 2 months (since I installed it). Their usage is very basic, and this configuration serves them very well, since I can control the interface to be much less full of surprises than Windows.
So the world is all well and rosy...well...not quite...
I took no measures to clean up the default boot process, so it still outputs 'garbage' likeIt fills the entire screen, and scrolls by so fast they couldn't comprehend it even if they knew what it all meant.
So I've counted about 5 times so far where my grandmother asks something like, "Now, is all that writing going to come up for good now?" It really, deeply bothers them to see all that as opposed to a pretty Windows logo. Not that I blame them.
So, that progress bar might be 'boring' to you, but it's blissful simplicity to somebody like my grandparents.
(FWIW, I prefer to see it all on a 1024x768 framebuffer, because I want to know when something is configured wrongly but can still pass that stage failing silently)
Many comments provide examples of some things to do to make you look busy (ping 127.0.0.1, etc)
This automates the issue.
Have fun.
Is one of the reasons I like Linux.
...and you can -only- use these media players to play some content.
...and why do we have to put up with it? "To protect our intellectual property and patents!", "Licensing costs!"
[apt-get | urpmi | yum | emerge] media-player
[apt-get | urpmi | yum | emerge] silly-proprietary-codecs
Done. Simple. One media player, one browser plugin, one set of file associations. Granted, this only works on x86, and doesn't cover everything, but I'll try to keep from going on any tangents here...
In Windows, it seems like you need to download a different player just to play everything. WMP, Quicktime, Real...The worst part is that they all suck ass.
They all have bloated, useless skins (especially RealOne (and yes, I have used Realplayer in Linux, I know it's "native" gtk and doesn't suck as bad. What could be expected, Linux users don't need that crap)).
They all seem to have stupid "Media Guides" which are nothing more than advertising, "Just $ a month for EXCLUSIVE, exciting "Real-Only" (tm) content! (Yes, there was audio advertising the first time I started RealOne. Disgusting)"
They all try to 'manage' your media for you.
They all hijack your associations, becuase they all think they're the most important players (or they're trying to get more advertising/mindshare out, and think being co-admins of people's computers is an OK way to do it)
Most of them have stupid 'agents', either invisible or in the system tray, that only server 2 or 3 purposes;
* Mindshare (a little logo there all the time reminding you and anyone in the world to see your computer or a screenshot that you have super duper media player 2005 installed)
* To sit there and hijack your associations if any other company's evil media player tries to take them.
* Check for updates (maybe the only legitimate reason, but I'd like for it to only update when it's run, not check every time I log in (...by default!))
They all require a fecal sample and lab tests just to install.
They all try to do too much...how many programs that can burn an audio cd do I need?
Guess what...
I.
Don't.
Give.
A.
Flying.
Fuck.
I just want to be able to play the content. Yes, I do feel guilty about 'stealing' the proprietary codecs and using them in mplayer or whatever, but not because I respect their IP, it's because I feel like I'm perpetuating the idea that all this proprietary nonsense is OK. Unfortunately, saying to my friends, "Oh, no, I can't see that movie because I use Linux." gives Linux a bad image, "What, you mean you can't even watch movies in Linux!?"
When will Real, Apple, et al become enlightened and release open source codecs for everything that can be used in any media player? I'd guess never...
Until then, "Legal MP3 playback on Linux!" will be a news story. *sigh* Fuck the World.