Because of language that is in most contracts saying that certain provisions are "non-transferrable."
While the Lala contracts weren't made public, many speculated at the time of the sale that the Lala Uploader feature could not be transferred over to Apple without re-negotiation. The labels were happy to give this kind of feature to a startup that hardly anybody knew about, but they weren't going to give it to Apple without more money. Hence, the speculated language in the contract to prevent Apple from buying up Lala (which they did) and taking over the Uploader feature.
And in the end, the labels did get more money, because you now have to pay $25 per year to use iTunes Match, when the feature was free at Lala.
I mean, for $25 I get legal versions of every singleâ"ahem, questionably procured, shall we sayâ" tracks in my gigantic iTunes library? Did the record companies read the fine print on this?
Lala had this feature. They called it "iTunes Uploader" or something along those lines. Of course, it didn't actually upload your iTunes library; it matched your rips with the rips Lala had in their library.
And yes, the record labels (the big ones along with a wide selection of indies) agreed to this with Lala. When Apple bought Lala, it wasn't immediately clear that the deals that Lala had made with the labels would apply to the sale, but clearly Apple has worked it out to the labels' satisfaction.
Yes, there is some merit to this argument. And Apple is not the only company who feels this way.
In 2009, the Beastie Boys reissued their classic LP Paul's Boutique, and those who ordered online got some downloadable content, including a video commentary with the Boys discussing the album's making while it played in the background. When the song "Johnny Ryall" came on, Mike D talked about the real-life homeless person who inspired the song. D gave the homeless guy one of his Def Jam jackets. Def Jam head honcho Russell Simmons promptly chewed him out for giving such nice gear to a "bum" because he didn't want the Def Jam image to be associated with poor people.
Typically, Apple uses BSD boxen when they are not using OS X Server. Since OS X's kernel has some BSD heritage, that doesn't seem too out of line. I think they only time Apple stuff has been identified as being served up from Linux has been on third-party hosting services like Akamai.
...with "Generation Z" college students that we hire as summer interns. So far, our answer to personal devices is a pretty firm "no." They can check company email via the web interface from any internet-connected device, which is by far our most lenient security policy. Personal devices can join our guest WiFi network if they like (password changes every week), and any and all machines need to be in our asset database to join the LAN or connect up via VPN.
So far, they are fine with it. Well, OK, they bitch about it, but they like making money better than fighting for use of their personal devices.
This is OK by me, if Apple will stick with LightPeak/Thunderbolt for at least as long as they've stuck with FireWire. I don't want to buy a bunch of devices that are obsolete in 2-3 years, but I can still use my FireWire 400 drives from 10 years ago, along with my FireWire 800 drives from this year. Who cares if Thunderbolt doesn't wipe USB3 off the face of the earth? It's cool, it' works well, and as long as it isn't forcefully obsoleted, I will be happy with it for years to come.
I'd say Apple won't care; the port will be seen as a useful feature that is unique to Macs (or at least most heavily used in Macs). Intel probably doesn't mind if Thunderbolt stays a Mac niche thing either, as they are making money off Thunderbolt and USB3 both. No matter which way the hardware makers go, Intel is making sales and/or collecting royalties.
So what's the big deal here? Does every new connector type have to become a universal standard to be considered a success? If you want a drive that will work on Mac/Win/Linux, get USB.
It's all good, man...I think somewhere along the line in this discussion we went separate ways by making assumptions, filling in details based on people that we know.
For my part, my wife and kid (I have only 1) never felt forced upon me. My wife and I were together as a couple+marriage for a total of 11 years before our daughter was born. Our kid doesn't scream or make a mess of the house. The first year is hell, sure, but that girl is my pride and joy and watching her grow and learn is the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed. I also love my job, but don't deny that I am now in a position of much more responsibility...hence, heightened stress and pressure. But it's a great job and I am thankful for it, and really couldn't see myself doing anything else.
Somewhere this started as me just saying I don't want to spend my nights hacking together old computers anymore. But I certainly could if I wanted to; there's just things I enjoy more. My wife and I still do a lot of computer stuff in our spare time (we just set up a RAID 5 system at home to collect all the music/video/photos we had strung out amongst terabytes of external hard drives hooked to tour HDTV computer and that was an all-nighter!), it's just not what we do regularly anymore.
I see clearly that you don't understand, and that's OK. I am not poor or miserable and having a kid didn't ruin my life. The extra money I make goes toward stability in my life, and I can definitely remember a time 12-15 years ago when I wouldn't have even known what that meant.
The main thing you don't seem to understand is that you--yes, even you, the guy that's full of life and piss and vinegar--will see your priorities change over time (not after waking up one day). The stuff that interests you now, and the ways you fill your free time, will change. Maybe kids will never be in the cards for you, but I really doubt your life will be the same when you're 37 like I am today. And you will be OK with it, I promise you. it will be OK!
The moral of the story that I got out of your post was "Don't have kids" or possibly "Don't get married" because it sucks all the fun out of life.
Hmmm....well, possibly. Don't forget "job" turning into "career" (you know, where you can afford to have a kid, take a vacation every once in a while and sock some money back) is also a big factor that limits the time I can spend on computer hobby activities. Perhaps the fact that I am an IT manager means that I'd just like to use my computers in the evenings, and not fix up old classics.
But what I was more going for was maturity is the real reason you drop unfettered nostalgia for your computing past. I had my teens and 20s. They were great...I worked hard and played hard and I wouldn't trade them for anything. My daughter was born when I was 31. But I am far more content now and really have no desire to still be the Mac geek who stayed up till 4 am modding a Mac Color Classic so that it could take a 68040 processor and up its screen resolution to 640x480. A solid seven hours of sleep and getting a big old hug from my kiddo when I wake her up for school is immensely more satisfying.
Maybe I am boring, but marriage didn't suck the joy out of my life. My wife was there for all that Mac hacking, too. If I do happen to break out the tiny Phillips and torx T-8 screwdrivers without her, she gets really, really pissed. The moral there is if you are going to have computers take up a significant portion of your life, choose a life partner who is at the very least OK with that, or at best will be right there with you, hacking away.
I think you hit the nail on the head. It's really about getting older, priorities shifting, and having less time to play around with this old stuff.
Being a long-time Apple user, I used to love to let people donate their old hardware to me, and I'd spend time digging up the latest System Software/Mac OS it would run, cram all the 30-pin SIMMS it would take into it, and installi the latest versions of Excel, Photoshop, etc., it cold run. I would proudly show it off to those who could give a shit, to show how old hardware could still be useful, how I could bridge it into my WiFi network, connect to OS X boxes, and even how "fast" these things could be when running age appropriate software.
Then a year after my daughter was born, we bought our first home. Moving out of our rented home, I decided that anything that couldn't run the latest version of OS X had to go to the trash. With life changes that come with more responsibility at work, the aforementioned kid, getting old and not being able to stay up all night jacking with computer crap, I knew I didn't need all that old junk. It was hard to part with it, but I feel much better now, leaving it in the past.
The real test was when I ran across a pretty nice Apple//c at the local Salvation Army for $5, complete with the//c green monitor. That was my first computer. Oh, the memories! Wouldn't I just love to get that beast up and running? I resisted, went home and loaded up Lemonade Stand in Basilisk and realized I'd never use the damn thing, and it wasn't even worth $5 to me, considering the amount of time I'd spend on getting it up and running and maintaining it. Unlike the olden days, my time is worth something these days, and downtime is even more valuable to me.
To sum up, let it go. Throw the crap out with next week's trash pickup. (Err, I mean recycle it all responsibly.) If you ever do get the urge to play some of those old games, DOSBox will always be there, along with torrents or other repositories full of disk images of all that old software.
Ummm, no. What Apple stops is non-iPod devices showing themselves as iPods to iTunes. They do not stop iPods from syncing with 3rd party apps. There are a metric shit-ton of Linux apps that can sync individual MP3s or playlists to iTunes and Apple cannot give a shit.
Remember, iTunes and its music store exist to sell iPods. If you've already bought that iPod, then great. Just don't make your device pretend to be an iPod, like Palm did with the Pre.
No doubt...if programs would actually load themselves completely into RAM, you'd see an overall performance increase AND battery life would improve. It's apps that are constantly writing out to disk and hogging the CPU that drain battery life.
Since they should be getting close to the final release of 11.04, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade last night. Unity has not crashed on me, even though I've been poking around quite a bit to see what it has to offer.
I can say that it's pretty bizarre in a lot of cases, and I'm not sure that Canonical is really going the right direction here. Time will tell as polish is added, but right now Unity is far from intuitive. Getting everything set up the way I like it is proving to be a chore, but on the plus side, I don't think I will have to mess with it too much after I'm done configuring it to my liking. It should then stay out of my way and just let me use my apps.
I won't be turning up in a Sony store tomorrow because I haven't cared about Sony for years.
Indeed, until two months ago, I hadn't been a Sony customer for years either. In fact, the last thing I bought from Sony was a real, brand-name Walkman in 1984. It held up admirably well, until at least 1991 or 1992. Since then, it was a long time before I was impressed enough to buy a Sony anything at their asking price. By that, I mean they had some nice stuff over the years, but I didn't feel it was worth the extra cost in comparison to competitors' products. I recently got a Sony USB turntable for a good price from buy.com. Not sure I would have paid retail for it, but I digress...
The point is, the most effective boycott is to not buy their products. With Sony, this is easy, because their products are priced way high and don't offer the value to back up that high price. I suppose a PS3 might be something I would consider, if it weren't for the fact I've been buying Nintendo products since Ronald Reagan was president.
You are right. I will concede one more decent use of PDF, and that is as a LaTeX output format.
But then again, that might be because that is in line with one of the original purposes of the format--a compact, streamlined and consistent way to view PostScript output (a better encapsulated PostScript format than EPS itself).
For me, yes, I would rather have an external app. Specifically, I want PDFs to download and NOT open automatically. I want them to go to my downloads folder and I will open them at my own discretion. If I want to open it instantly after downloading, I can use the browser's download manager to open it with an extra click.
Why, you ask? Because I am one of those who still feels that PDFs are not fit for human consumption. Outside of pre-press and raster image printing work, PDF is a terrible file format. In their lust to own as much of the computing market as possible, Adobe has pushed PDF well beyond its original, intended use and into areas that are better served by plain text, RTF or HTML pages. Hell, I loathe the Word.doc format, but I find it preferable to PDF.
The link above gives more reasons for why I don't want to deal with PDFs unless I have to. And that article is eight years old; things have only gotten worse since. I sure don't want them loading automatically in my browser.
When Safari is up front and center, let it have the majority of the CPU time. When a "web app" is on the home screen, let it compete for clock cycles with the rest of the "web apps" on the home screen and the main functions of the home screen (and the phone in general).
Maybe I am not qualified to speak on this topic, because I don't use any "web apps" to speak of on my iPhone 4, as I vastly prefer native apps. I have no web pages pinned to my home screen at all.
And stop bitching about the 30 percent that Apple takes for App Store sales. It's right in line with what Kagi, et. al., take for selling software. I fail to see how it is unfair in the least, as Apple is bringing developers a huge audience, hosting the files, footing the bandwidth, managing the update system, etc. In an ideal world, the standard percentage that a distributor takes would be less, but 30 percent is perfectly average in not only the software distribution world, but in other areas too (e.g., 20th Century Fox generally gets a lot more than 30 percent on the first run of the movies it distributes for other producers--it's more like 50 or 60 percent; maybe it will get down to 30 percent at second-run movie houses and for DVD sales).
Okay, I see you don't know how screeners work. They are sent out to the Academy members so that they can decide who to nominate, i.e., the results of which were announced today. Therefore, the screeners have been out for quite some time (since at least December). On Usenet, probably. And your favorite torrent tracker.
The latest iPod Nanos, with touchscreens, lack a home button. You press and hold (with one finger) anywhere on the screen to return to the home screen. I have gotten used to it, but would still prefer a real home button.
And if the Nano is any indication of what Steve likes, I don't think it's fewer buttons. The top of the Nano has one volume up button, one volume down button, and a "power" button (actually more of a "sleep the screen" button). I would have gladly taken a rocker switch for the volume (or even a dial!) and traded in one of those volume buttons for a real Home button.
Yes, I will concede that Ubuntu has made great strides with regards to making things like MP3, AAC, MP4 video, WMV, DVD playback, etc., "just work." So VLC on Ubuntu is probably not essential anymore, although I still put it on all my Ubuntu installs because it has a ton of functionality in a single app, and I like its interface, flexibility and ease of configuration better than the built-in players. I also like software that is available for--and looks and works the same--on Mac, Windows and Linux.
Also, remember that there are thousands of other Linux distros that don't handle automatic codec installation with anything resembling Ubuntu's grace and elegance. Keeping in mind that Ubuntu != Linux, VLC is, if not essential, pretty darn nice to have around for Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Because of language that is in most contracts saying that certain provisions are "non-transferrable."
While the Lala contracts weren't made public, many speculated at the time of the sale that the Lala Uploader feature could not be transferred over to Apple without re-negotiation. The labels were happy to give this kind of feature to a startup that hardly anybody knew about, but they weren't going to give it to Apple without more money. Hence, the speculated language in the contract to prevent Apple from buying up Lala (which they did) and taking over the Uploader feature.
And in the end, the labels did get more money, because you now have to pay $25 per year to use iTunes Match, when the feature was free at Lala.
I mean, for $25 I get legal versions of every singleâ"ahem, questionably procured, shall we sayâ" tracks in my gigantic iTunes library? Did the record companies read the fine print on this?
Lala had this feature. They called it "iTunes Uploader" or something along those lines. Of course, it didn't actually upload your iTunes library; it matched your rips with the rips Lala had in their library.
And yes, the record labels (the big ones along with a wide selection of indies) agreed to this with Lala. When Apple bought Lala, it wasn't immediately clear that the deals that Lala had made with the labels would apply to the sale, but clearly Apple has worked it out to the labels' satisfaction.
Yes, there is some merit to this argument. And Apple is not the only company who feels this way.
In 2009, the Beastie Boys reissued their classic LP Paul's Boutique, and those who ordered online got some downloadable content, including a video commentary with the Boys discussing the album's making while it played in the background. When the song "Johnny Ryall" came on, Mike D talked about the real-life homeless person who inspired the song. D gave the homeless guy one of his Def Jam jackets. Def Jam head honcho Russell Simmons promptly chewed him out for giving such nice gear to a "bum" because he didn't want the Def Jam image to be associated with poor people.
Typically, Apple uses BSD boxen when they are not using OS X Server. Since OS X's kernel has some BSD heritage, that doesn't seem too out of line. I think they only time Apple stuff has been identified as being served up from Linux has been on third-party hosting services like Akamai.
...with "Generation Z" college students that we hire as summer interns. So far, our answer to personal devices is a pretty firm "no." They can check company email via the web interface from any internet-connected device, which is by far our most lenient security policy. Personal devices can join our guest WiFi network if they like (password changes every week), and any and all machines need to be in our asset database to join the LAN or connect up via VPN.
So far, they are fine with it. Well, OK, they bitch about it, but they like making money better than fighting for use of their personal devices.
This is OK by me, if Apple will stick with LightPeak/Thunderbolt for at least as long as they've stuck with FireWire. I don't want to buy a bunch of devices that are obsolete in 2-3 years, but I can still use my FireWire 400 drives from 10 years ago, along with my FireWire 800 drives from this year. Who cares if Thunderbolt doesn't wipe USB3 off the face of the earth? It's cool, it' works well, and as long as it isn't forcefully obsoleted, I will be happy with it for years to come.
I'd say Apple won't care; the port will be seen as a useful feature that is unique to Macs (or at least most heavily used in Macs). Intel probably doesn't mind if Thunderbolt stays a Mac niche thing either, as they are making money off Thunderbolt and USB3 both. No matter which way the hardware makers go, Intel is making sales and/or collecting royalties.
So what's the big deal here? Does every new connector type have to become a universal standard to be considered a success? If you want a drive that will work on Mac/Win/Linux, get USB.
It's all good, man...I think somewhere along the line in this discussion we went separate ways by making assumptions, filling in details based on people that we know.
For my part, my wife and kid (I have only 1) never felt forced upon me. My wife and I were together as a couple+marriage for a total of 11 years before our daughter was born. Our kid doesn't scream or make a mess of the house. The first year is hell, sure, but that girl is my pride and joy and watching her grow and learn is the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed. I also love my job, but don't deny that I am now in a position of much more responsibility...hence, heightened stress and pressure. But it's a great job and I am thankful for it, and really couldn't see myself doing anything else.
Somewhere this started as me just saying I don't want to spend my nights hacking together old computers anymore. But I certainly could if I wanted to; there's just things I enjoy more. My wife and I still do a lot of computer stuff in our spare time (we just set up a RAID 5 system at home to collect all the music/video/photos we had strung out amongst terabytes of external hard drives hooked to tour HDTV computer and that was an all-nighter!), it's just not what we do regularly anymore.
I'll never understand you people with kids.....
I see clearly that you don't understand, and that's OK. I am not poor or miserable and having a kid didn't ruin my life. The extra money I make goes toward stability in my life, and I can definitely remember a time 12-15 years ago when I wouldn't have even known what that meant.
The main thing you don't seem to understand is that you--yes, even you, the guy that's full of life and piss and vinegar--will see your priorities change over time (not after waking up one day). The stuff that interests you now, and the ways you fill your free time, will change. Maybe kids will never be in the cards for you, but I really doubt your life will be the same when you're 37 like I am today. And you will be OK with it, I promise you. it will be OK!
The moral of the story that I got out of your post was "Don't have kids" or possibly "Don't get married" because it sucks all the fun out of life.
Hmmm....well, possibly. Don't forget "job" turning into "career" (you know, where you can afford to have a kid, take a vacation every once in a while and sock some money back) is also a big factor that limits the time I can spend on computer hobby activities. Perhaps the fact that I am an IT manager means that I'd just like to use my computers in the evenings, and not fix up old classics.
But what I was more going for was maturity is the real reason you drop unfettered nostalgia for your computing past. I had my teens and 20s. They were great...I worked hard and played hard and I wouldn't trade them for anything. My daughter was born when I was 31. But I am far more content now and really have no desire to still be the Mac geek who stayed up till 4 am modding a Mac Color Classic so that it could take a 68040 processor and up its screen resolution to 640x480. A solid seven hours of sleep and getting a big old hug from my kiddo when I wake her up for school is immensely more satisfying.
Maybe I am boring, but marriage didn't suck the joy out of my life. My wife was there for all that Mac hacking, too. If I do happen to break out the tiny Phillips and torx T-8 screwdrivers without her, she gets really, really pissed. The moral there is if you are going to have computers take up a significant portion of your life, choose a life partner who is at the very least OK with that, or at best will be right there with you, hacking away.
I think you hit the nail on the head. It's really about getting older, priorities shifting, and having less time to play around with this old stuff.
Being a long-time Apple user, I used to love to let people donate their old hardware to me, and I'd spend time digging up the latest System Software/Mac OS it would run, cram all the 30-pin SIMMS it would take into it, and installi the latest versions of Excel, Photoshop, etc., it cold run. I would proudly show it off to those who could give a shit, to show how old hardware could still be useful, how I could bridge it into my WiFi network, connect to OS X boxes, and even how "fast" these things could be when running age appropriate software.
Then a year after my daughter was born, we bought our first home. Moving out of our rented home, I decided that anything that couldn't run the latest version of OS X had to go to the trash. With life changes that come with more responsibility at work, the aforementioned kid, getting old and not being able to stay up all night jacking with computer crap, I knew I didn't need all that old junk. It was hard to part with it, but I feel much better now, leaving it in the past.
The real test was when I ran across a pretty nice Apple //c at the local Salvation Army for $5, complete with the //c green monitor. That was my first computer. Oh, the memories! Wouldn't I just love to get that beast up and running? I resisted, went home and loaded up Lemonade Stand in Basilisk and realized I'd never use the damn thing, and it wasn't even worth $5 to me, considering the amount of time I'd spend on getting it up and running and maintaining it. Unlike the olden days, my time is worth something these days, and downtime is even more valuable to me.
To sum up, let it go. Throw the crap out with next week's trash pickup. (Err, I mean recycle it all responsibly.) If you ever do get the urge to play some of those old games, DOSBox will always be there, along with torrents or other repositories full of disk images of all that old software.
Thanks for the backup.
No problem, I thought it was funny. :-)
A couple more that I hear in IT these days are:
SSD drive
ACL list
Ummm, no. What Apple stops is non-iPod devices showing themselves as iPods to iTunes. They do not stop iPods from syncing with 3rd party apps. There are a metric shit-ton of Linux apps that can sync individual MP3s or playlists to iTunes and Apple cannot give a shit.
Remember, iTunes and its music store exist to sell iPods. If you've already bought that iPod, then great. Just don't make your device pretend to be an iPod, like Palm did with the Pre.
Or perhaps the same local LAN network?
Oh, I give up...this joke has apparently gone over everyone's collective heads.
Can't you just run a script to tighten up that loose data? It't not like you would *lose* data, would you?
No doubt...if programs would actually load themselves completely into RAM, you'd see an overall performance increase AND battery life would improve. It's apps that are constantly writing out to disk and hogging the CPU that drain battery life.
Happy iPad (WiFi + 3G) owner here. Is Apple seriously the only one offering a tablet with both?
Since they should be getting close to the final release of 11.04, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade last night. Unity has not crashed on me, even though I've been poking around quite a bit to see what it has to offer.
I can say that it's pretty bizarre in a lot of cases, and I'm not sure that Canonical is really going the right direction here. Time will tell as polish is added, but right now Unity is far from intuitive. Getting everything set up the way I like it is proving to be a chore, but on the plus side, I don't think I will have to mess with it too much after I'm done configuring it to my liking. It should then stay out of my way and just let me use my apps.
I won't be turning up in a Sony store tomorrow because I haven't cared about Sony for years.
Indeed, until two months ago, I hadn't been a Sony customer for years either. In fact, the last thing I bought from Sony was a real, brand-name Walkman in 1984. It held up admirably well, until at least 1991 or 1992. Since then, it was a long time before I was impressed enough to buy a Sony anything at their asking price. By that, I mean they had some nice stuff over the years, but I didn't feel it was worth the extra cost in comparison to competitors' products. I recently got a Sony USB turntable for a good price from buy.com. Not sure I would have paid retail for it, but I digress...
The point is, the most effective boycott is to not buy their products. With Sony, this is easy, because their products are priced way high and don't offer the value to back up that high price. I suppose a PS3 might be something I would consider, if it weren't for the fact I've been buying Nintendo products since Ronald Reagan was president.
You are right. I will concede one more decent use of PDF, and that is as a LaTeX output format.
But then again, that might be because that is in line with one of the original purposes of the format--a compact, streamlined and consistent way to view PostScript output (a better encapsulated PostScript format than EPS itself).
For me, yes, I would rather have an external app. Specifically, I want PDFs to download and NOT open automatically. I want them to go to my downloads folder and I will open them at my own discretion. If I want to open it instantly after downloading, I can use the browser's download manager to open it with an extra click.
Why, you ask? Because I am one of those who still feels that PDFs are not fit for human consumption. Outside of pre-press and raster image printing work, PDF is a terrible file format. In their lust to own as much of the computing market as possible, Adobe has pushed PDF well beyond its original, intended use and into areas that are better served by plain text, RTF or HTML pages. Hell, I loathe the Word .doc format, but I find it preferable to PDF.
The link above gives more reasons for why I don't want to deal with PDFs unless I have to. And that article is eight years old; things have only gotten worse since. I sure don't want them loading automatically in my browser.
When Safari is up front and center, let it have the majority of the CPU time. When a "web app" is on the home screen, let it compete for clock cycles with the rest of the "web apps" on the home screen and the main functions of the home screen (and the phone in general).
Maybe I am not qualified to speak on this topic, because I don't use any "web apps" to speak of on my iPhone 4, as I vastly prefer native apps. I have no web pages pinned to my home screen at all.
And stop bitching about the 30 percent that Apple takes for App Store sales. It's right in line with what Kagi, et. al., take for selling software. I fail to see how it is unfair in the least, as Apple is bringing developers a huge audience, hosting the files, footing the bandwidth, managing the update system, etc. In an ideal world, the standard percentage that a distributor takes would be less, but 30 percent is perfectly average in not only the software distribution world, but in other areas too (e.g., 20th Century Fox generally gets a lot more than 30 percent on the first run of the movies it distributes for other producers--it's more like 50 or 60 percent; maybe it will get down to 30 percent at second-run movie houses and for DVD sales).
I hope no one out there dun goofed!
Okay, I see you don't know how screeners work. They are sent out to the Academy members so that they can decide who to nominate, i.e., the results of which were announced today. Therefore, the screeners have been out for quite some time (since at least December). On Usenet, probably. And your favorite torrent tracker.
The latest iPod Nanos, with touchscreens, lack a home button. You press and hold (with one finger) anywhere on the screen to return to the home screen. I have gotten used to it, but would still prefer a real home button.
And if the Nano is any indication of what Steve likes, I don't think it's fewer buttons. The top of the Nano has one volume up button, one volume down button, and a "power" button (actually more of a "sleep the screen" button). I would have gladly taken a rocker switch for the volume (or even a dial!) and traded in one of those volume buttons for a real Home button.
Yes, I will concede that Ubuntu has made great strides with regards to making things like MP3, AAC, MP4 video, WMV, DVD playback, etc., "just work." So VLC on Ubuntu is probably not essential anymore, although I still put it on all my Ubuntu installs because it has a ton of functionality in a single app, and I like its interface, flexibility and ease of configuration better than the built-in players. I also like software that is available for--and looks and works the same--on Mac, Windows and Linux.
Also, remember that there are thousands of other Linux distros that don't handle automatic codec installation with anything resembling Ubuntu's grace and elegance. Keeping in mind that Ubuntu != Linux, VLC is, if not essential, pretty darn nice to have around for Linux.