The usability, visual appeal, physical design... hell even the marketing is what makes Apple innovative.
I'll give you both visual appeal and physical design. Their stuff is gorgeous. But usability? That's subjective and totally depends on the application. For example, is it easier to get to your most used contacts by visually going to a contact list and searching through them or (as is the case of my w810i) pressing the 2 button and hitting the call button which i can do in my pocket. On the upside the in call visual interface is gorgeous(again) and very useful. But on the other hand most of the time your face is going to be right up against the screen rubbing, and generally smudging it up royally. I would say that some phones are better in certain regards and weaker in others. As a messaging device I'd rather have a Helio Ocean. As a phone and a media player I'd rather have my w810i. As a Internet device I'd rather have something with faster service like Helio service or HSDPA from Cingular.
Apple has a fantastically innovative interface for their iPhone, but is it really better in any given phone situation? I would say for me that would be no. For someone else who is willing to live with the limitations listed above, go for it. It's delicious. I'm a gadget hound, but I'd just use it like I would any toy.
Here's an idea: Have machines at stores that hold spindles and spindles of DVDs and CDs. Have the customer swipe their credit card at the machine and select the movie they want, and then a pre-made DVD (for a "hot" new release) can be spit out, or, if it's something that's a little more obscure/rarely needed, it can be burnt on the spot. Don't have or want to use a credit card? No problem - just take a voucher from a display, go to the check-out line, pay with cash and the clerk can activate the code on the voucher - then the machine will give you what you want when you scan your ticket in.
It's a great idea and it's already used today! Well it's similar anyways. The only difference is that the system I see is only for rentals. It's at my local Safeway and you just sign up and it's almost exactly as you describe. For $2, you get a rental to use as long as you want. It's burned on the spot and you just use a touchscreen to select the movie you want. It doesn't have a great deal of titles to choose from, but you get a lot of the latest and greatest. Great idea but could use expanding.
In the past human societies may not have had the ability to create subspecies genetically, but they did have the ability to declare entire groups of people as a subspecies and treat them accordingly.
Personally I think you hit it right on the head. But let me take this argument down a different road. Intelligence doesn't necessarily denote that it knows about itself. I can teach my cats to pee in a toilet but that doesn't necessarily mean it's as smart as any other human that can do the same thing. What if(and I'm really stretching here just for this argument), we created a being, semi-human, that was capable of taking direction(hit nail here on these blocks of wood) but incapable of understanding that they are an individual. What would be the difference between these beings and a robot programmed to do the same thing. Baring any religious discussion, the only real difference would be how you made it, whether it was organically or mechanically.
Now this is all some horrible thought that I wish wouldn't happen. We as a society would look upon those beings and only try to understand that they aren't capable of understanding the world. But there is something wrong with beings that look remotely like us told to do things that no normal American would ever do. Where do we draw the line? We have philosophical discussions about what makes a human aware/conscience/self aware/different from lower classes of animals. But it will do no good unless we have definitive answers to these questions.
I have a Live Hotmail, a Gmail, and a Yahoo! Mail account. Lets all realize that these are all free normal webmail accounts. Usually this means for regular non business uses. So lets get real here.
I'm currently using 60 MB in Gmail(highest out of all of them). And that's because I store some programs on it, thanks to Gspace. Most users wouldn't really care about the extra.6 GB.
The max attachment size I've used was 3MB so I'm still not sure or care what the max size is.
Gmail actually has text ads. I like it. They still get their revenue and I don't get anything intrusive. The contextual stuff sucks but I guess that's why it's still in beta.
Spam is handling in Hotmail sucks ass. They need a major update to the way they are handling it. But I've currently have it set up that only people in my address book go to my inbox and that seems to do just fine.
Interface - Actually I like the Live Hotmail interface the best out of the three. And it's what the user likes that is the most important right? It's about as fast as gmail but with all the goodies of Yahoo! Mail(drag and drop support,...). And this is on my god awful slow P3-700.
Prestige is something that's very temporary. Hotmail used to be the webmail to get, but it's been long since that title has been passed on. I'll tell you the truth when I say that I will never ever give a professional contact my hotmail address. But that could be temporary
Cross platform support - Yeah Gmail has better support(discounting Live Hotmail Classic). But lets be serious here. Both Opera and Safari have less than 1/4 the adoption that firefox has. Which is to say a very very small number. And since Live Hotmail works in Firefox, it's not going to be a huge item on their todo list
As long as they support English I'm good.
Live Hotmail does have CSV import and export. It's under Options.
This is not an argument just a helpful guide to those looking in.
Right-clicking should never, ever be the only way to get to some functionality.
Bullshiz. Lets just use Live Hotmail as an example. I've been a beta tester for it since a month after beta testing started. I've asked for a lot of things and each time after the next revision I got them(after of course they started supporting firefox). Not bad in my opinion. But the one thing I didn't ask for was "Mark as read." I have literally used that function twice in my life. And never in Hotmail/Live Hotmail. So lets just say that a good majority of people are like me and use that function only a little in their lives. Should we clutter up a interface just so that we have a function that we will only use twice a year? How about "Use as template" or "Add sender to Contact List." I'm sure there is no end to the buttons you could add to a interface but having the context menu for little used items are fine.
Btw. If you switch the interface to "Classic" the Mark As Read buttons are placed up in the toolbar , obviously since you can't use the right mouse button. Good enough for those other cases when you don't have a choice in the matter.
I'll agree with you for now about how a serious graphic artist would want a crt + Wacom tablet. But these limitations are degrading quick
LCD's will close the gap when it comes to accurate color and gamma when LED backlights become the norm and widely available. Also the page states that the apparatus has a resolution of 400 dpi. Not fantastic but not that bad. I'm sure with a couple iterations it could be very precise.
But I want to postulate a new idea. What if instead of having one monitor on which you drew, have 2. 1 CRT in front of you for accurate color representation and a second one mounted horizontally like you would a wacom. When you pick up the stylus you would know exactly where to put it down at because you could see where it would go. And you'd have a crt screen in front of you to make sure everything looks exactly how you want it to.
Wouldn't this also be indicative of a problem also from the general users point of view? There is no consistency in what you say. If there is no package in the repository you download and use the command line(bad). Sometimes you can download from the website directly and get it working... Sometimes. And for everything else there's Synaptics or your package manager of choice. I mean all these things are well and good for us who know what we want(which is always choice) but not for those who want consistency. OS X also fails in this regard for a few things... not as much as linux but some.
I can't remember a time in Windows where I didn't download something(.msi or.exe) from some website then install using whatever installer they provide. Say what you want about a good number of packages being available via the package manager but until they're ALL in there it's not going to provide a better experience.
I'm going to put this here since I don't feel like making a new conversation. I was talking with my girlfriend which I set up her computer with linux. 2nd thing she asks me about was how to install new applications. I showed her the package manager and told her that most things she'd want are in there, just look around and see if anything tickles her fancy. She looked for a while and saw a few things but then promptly asked me what they looked like. And this is the great failing I see with current package managers. We need screenshots. Any regular person would at least like to see what they are getting before they try something out. They aren't going to waste their time downloading and installing, then promptly uninstalling stuff because it doesn't work the way they think it should.
Um just a small note. When did Vista stop you from installing a open source player to play blu-ray discs? Are both the VLC and Media Player Classic icons on my quicklaunch bar just figments of my imagination?
As others have said, it must be a driver issue. I can move a few gigabytes around and play videos no problem(my video collection just never seems to be in the right spot for my tastes). Also my folders open very smoothly in the start menu although I don't use them that much since I'm used to just typing for the application that I want. And this is all on much less powerful hardware than you have. I'm using a Black MacBook with a C2D T7200, 1GB of RAM and a Intel GMA950. Smooth as butter. If there was incompatibilities with the software I was running then yes I'd still be using XP with it. But Since I don't have any, I'm very happy with the way Vista behaves.
From the comments in this story, it seems like the biggest selling point of Firefox is the plugins. It would probably be a better effort to make Firefox plugins work with Camino (an already excellent Mac browser) than to try and Mac-ify Firefox.
I'm going to reply here because it's reasonable relevant but there could be other places to stick this.
I don't think that Mac-ifying Firefox would be harder than making extensions work in Camino. But unlike other people I don't think a rewrite of Firefox for OSX is in order. Instead we should just have a series of Mac related extensions for these types of things. Keychain integration? Extension. Native widgets? Extension. Mac key bindings? Extension. Each would be simple to do by itself and updated by itself. But implementing a good Extension manager for Camino would be much harder.
It pains me to say, but on a PCC mac, FF is a bloated piece of shit. It feels like playing Mario 3, running in a nintendo emulator that's run through dosbox running on XP installed in Virtual PC, run through rosetta, on x86 version of os X, that got successfully installed on a Dell from 1998.
Man this just screams of prior experience. I hope it was just an experiment. =P
I'll second this motion. But as some I talk to will fail to remember, it will take seconds to reconfigure. Which make them horrible as primary processors(slower for general processes, take more power to use, must be made simpler); Who wants to wait seconds for the application folder to open up. But for long processes, like video encoding and compiling... Hoo boy, I'd love an FPGA that reconfigures itself in the first few seconds and make the hour long process shrink to mere minutes.
... currently. I just don't want people to get confused and think that if they aren't using HT they are stupid, even if there is a better technology soon(or relatively soon) from someone else. This is slashdot you know.
Vista's actually pretty solid on good hardware (even a Celeron with a gig of RAM and a GMA 950 will run it fairly efficiently), but I still don't see a point in upgrading to it, mainly due to the incompatibilities with certain applications, lower benchmark scores, and massive memory usage. If you've got in excess of 2GB of RAM and a dual core CPU, though, the system is more responsive than any I've ever seen.
I agree with you completely. If you have applications that can not be run under Vista then you are better off with something else. But if you don't have Windows and are buying into it and your hardware is a good fit then I don't see why you wouldn't get into it.
I'm still amazed the problem some people are having with it. I don't have nearly the hardcore hardware as described here but it's enough. I'm currently running a Black MacBook, 2Ghz Core2Duo, 1GB of Ram, and a Intel GMA 950. Nothing extraordinary but runs Vista fan-flipping-tastic. And I'm not light when it comes to my apps.
I encode in xvid, Photo edit in Photoshop, Program in Visual Studio(don't argue with me it's just what we use), Music is handled with Winamp, Internet via Firefox, and mail via Thunderbird. Most usually at the same time. I run with full Vista Aero and I have sidebar running at all time(I use it all the time, much better than the OS X Dashboard). There have been no slowdowns other than when I transfer over the wireless network(which has never been fast ever). I haven't had any major problems aside from needing to upgrade my outdated drivers once and have been great ever since.
Honestly if you want to get a great Vista experience then your Mac Pro will do it with justice. Amazing huh.
Now, if you had said it as below you would have had a point:
"No thanks. I'd like to be able to use my computer without needing five top-of-the-line graphics cards just to run the OS in 'fancy graphics' mode.
You know what's awesome. On my notebook I use the slowest gpu ever. Well maybe not the slowest but certainly the lowest one you can find on the market now. It is a Intel GMA 950 and it runs Vista Aero great. Honestly I was surprised when it booted the first time and I saw Glass. But it did and I've been running it wonderfully ever since. So no, you don't need five top-of-the-line graphics cards just for 'fancy graphics' mode, and those silly people don't really have that much to gripe on.
I have a to take a picture, possibly be charged depending on my mobile plan and if I choose that route, and then be tracked by Microsoft and the end company and then go to a website that would have been easier to just type in?
Right. Dumb.
HAHAHAHA. Easier to type in? Are you serious? Have you ever seen some of the urls required to get to some of the product websites available? I see it from anywhere in the range of 15-50 characters (if you're lucky). I'm one of the current people who do look up info on my phone but seriously, it's not easy. One wrong key and you're screwed. First you go to no where and trying to correct the url yourself is a nightmare on a normal phone keypad. Anything that helps remove this limitation is a god send. And since there is more and more camera phones in circulation, and people know how to use a camera as opposed to entering urls, I can only see this as a very good thing.
For 5 extra dollars on my current plan gives me 400 text/multimedia messages. Per month. I think that's worth being able to the ease of use of taking a picture getting my info in reasonable time. And as far as tracking goes I don't care if they see that I want to see what actors are in se7en. But say I didn't want them to know that I eat Ruffles, I don't have to use the system all the time. I can just search like normal without their service. No problem. Please stop the anti-MS rhetoric.
What's with all the violence? It's not like any developer has infinite amount of time on their hands to get the job done and out to the public. First order of business is always deal with the majority of users and make sure it works for them; When that's complete go ahead and make sure the rest can use the system as well as possible. I think it's a good step in acknowledging that everybody else exists and not to completely let them down.
If they are using ActiveX that relegates the site to only Windows users(a vast majority of computer users are still windows users). But that doesn't mean only IE users. So a go between in promoting something that will let them view the site now, and actually hacking out the code so that all users can view it, doesn't sound that bad. It's a small step but it's a step in the right direction.
Let me get this out of the way before my head explodes...
Even if you use a Microsoft or Real streaming server, the content is ultimately stored in QuickTime. MPEG-4 is the open standardization of the QuickTime file format, and using the standard H.264 video codec and AAC audio codec you can make a movie that plays everywhere.
Nice slant you got there. But the Quicktime file format(.mov) is only the basis for MPEG-4 file format(.mp4). You can have H.264 video in a.mov container but it it better not be using High Profile. Quicktime is a nice base but it's no end all be all.
YouTube files don't have to be portable or any of that jazz. They were meant to be streamed to an internet connected device. These aren't high quality by any stretch of the imagination but they are user created and I just want to watch them casually. Not a big deal. And if my non-video dedicated Windows P3-700 box with 256MB ram can run it I'm absolutely positive it won't burn down the AppleTV. Shit my 5 year old xbox runs it great.
Honestly you have a serious case of rabid fanboism that needs to be cured. And to top it off... This isn't a container for static video. It also allows for interactivity. Something no video codec can do by itself. Lets just be happy that there is some competitiveness left in the world and we're not all sitting idle with only one way to do things.
It's not a "special version" of Media Player. It's just a plugin that hooks into your current version of WMP so that you can play content. Having more available people to look through your stuff is always good for the company, there is no real evil motives going on here.
It's not that users couldn't watch WMV files using Firefox before. It's that some users who were doing it had firefox crash on them everytime they tried. It's not a common epidemic but it's out there and this fixes it. Not big news in any sense but helpful.
Bullshit. A lockdown is something for elementary school kids only if you don't give them enough information before hand because you don't think it's in their best interests. If everyone was notified then they would be able to leave on their own (to go to a safe place) and then the building locked down so that the perpetrator wouldn't have a place to go, I would consider that a good lockdown procedure.
Apple seems to be targeting the market segment that does want their music player to organize their music and keep track of things (import date, play counts, skip counts, last played, rating, etc) for them. Based on Apple's market share, compared to the rest of the market combined, it looks like they have a better idea of what will sell than you do.
That's a dumb argument. They should have targeted everyone not just those who do their bidding. They could have easily done both. Control everything if you give your soul to iTunes, but let you take over if you want to do things yourself.
Just because it has a huge market share doesn't mean that the product is any good or even the best thing for any given person. I really do like my iPod but I know if Rio stayed in the game and evolved their product line my money would be theirs.
See now this is why statistics suck. Everybody can fudge statistics and nobody has the real figures. Even your sources aren't valid for things like this.
But lets take one of your sources and apply a little bit of logic. From here http://www.vgchartz.com/ngwars.php we get that indeed the Wii has sold over 6 million consoles... but if we look closer we see that compared to the other consoles a greater amount(2.12 million it says) were sold to those in japan. Given that the other consoles don't have nearly that many sold in Japan we can see a great imbalance in the rise of sales in different locales.
Let me ask you a simple question... Do you think that Japan has enough people to say that this rise was anything more than temporary? And since close to half of the total sales so far have come from Japan this could be what we see as a greater sales presence. Yay for statistics.
Again even if Microsoft is fluffing the statistics, they aren't doing that bad.
The reason is that with a larger collection, lets say 12,000 songs, who wants to spend the time to pick which 8,000 song to sync to the device?????
and that's why even hard drive based players will also never be enough. Those have limits too and they will never equal what you can either have at home or what's available from the internet. Sometimes, even if you have 12,000 songs, it is not enough. Sometimes you want to hear something that you don't have.
That's why my Sony Ericcson w810i phone is perfect. I can have with me my songs that I absolutly love(4GB is enough for that), but when I need more I can just log into winamp remote and play anything else. Add in internet streams and you've already got something that can challenge any mp3 player on the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple has a fantastically innovative interface for their iPhone, but is it really better in any given phone situation? I would say for me that would be no. For someone else who is willing to live with the limitations listed above, go for it. It's delicious. I'm a gadget hound, but I'd just use it like I would any toy.
Now this is all some horrible thought that I wish wouldn't happen. We as a society would look upon those beings and only try to understand that they aren't capable of understanding the world. But there is something wrong with beings that look remotely like us told to do things that no normal American would ever do. Where do we draw the line? We have philosophical discussions about what makes a human aware/conscience/self aware/different from lower classes of animals. But it will do no good unless we have definitive answers to these questions.
- I'm currently using 60 MB in Gmail(highest out of all of them). And that's because I store some programs on it, thanks to Gspace. Most users wouldn't really care about the extra
.6 GB.
- The max attachment size I've used was 3MB so I'm still not sure or care what the max size is.
- Gmail actually has text ads. I like it. They still get their revenue and I don't get anything intrusive. The contextual stuff sucks but I guess that's why it's still in beta.
- Spam is handling in Hotmail sucks ass. They need a major update to the way they are handling it. But I've currently have it set up that only people in my address book go to my inbox and that seems to do just fine.
- Interface - Actually I like the Live Hotmail interface the best out of the three. And it's what the user likes that is the most important right? It's about as fast as gmail but with all the goodies of Yahoo! Mail(drag and drop support,...). And this is on my god awful slow P3-700.
- Prestige is something that's very temporary. Hotmail used to be the webmail to get, but it's been long since that title has been passed on. I'll tell you the truth when I say that I will never ever give a professional contact my hotmail address. But that could be temporary
- Cross platform support - Yeah Gmail has better support(discounting Live Hotmail Classic). But lets be serious here. Both Opera and Safari have less than 1/4 the adoption that firefox has. Which is to say a very very small number. And since Live Hotmail works in Firefox, it's not going to be a huge item on their todo list
- As long as they support English I'm good.
- Live Hotmail does have CSV import and export. It's under Options.
This is not an argument just a helpful guide to those looking in.Btw. If you switch the interface to "Classic" the Mark As Read buttons are placed up in the toolbar , obviously since you can't use the right mouse button. Good enough for those other cases when you don't have a choice in the matter.
I'll agree with you for now about how a serious graphic artist would want a crt + Wacom tablet. But these limitations are degrading quick
LCD's will close the gap when it comes to accurate color and gamma when LED backlights become the norm and widely available. Also the page states that the apparatus has a resolution of 400 dpi. Not fantastic but not that bad. I'm sure with a couple iterations it could be very precise.
But I want to postulate a new idea. What if instead of having one monitor on which you drew, have 2. 1 CRT in front of you for accurate color representation and a second one mounted horizontally like you would a wacom. When you pick up the stylus you would know exactly where to put it down at because you could see where it would go. And you'd have a crt screen in front of you to make sure everything looks exactly how you want it to.
You mean something like this
Pretty good looking too. Hope it won't kill too many birds.
Wouldn't this also be indicative of a problem also from the general users point of view? There is no consistency in what you say. If there is no package in the repository you download and use the command line(bad). Sometimes you can download from the website directly and get it working... Sometimes. And for everything else there's Synaptics or your package manager of choice. I mean all these things are well and good for us who know what we want(which is always choice) but not for those who want consistency. OS X also fails in this regard for a few things... not as much as linux but some.
.exe) from some website then install using whatever installer they provide. Say what you want about a good number of packages being available via the package manager but until they're ALL in there it's not going to provide a better experience.
I can't remember a time in Windows where I didn't download something(.msi or
I'm going to put this here since I don't feel like making a new conversation. I was talking with my girlfriend which I set up her computer with linux. 2nd thing she asks me about was how to install new applications. I showed her the package manager and told her that most things she'd want are in there, just look around and see if anything tickles her fancy. She looked for a while and saw a few things but then promptly asked me what they looked like. And this is the great failing I see with current package managers. We need screenshots. Any regular person would at least like to see what they are getting before they try something out. They aren't going to waste their time downloading and installing, then promptly uninstalling stuff because it doesn't work the way they think it should.
Um just a small note. When did Vista stop you from installing a open source player to play blu-ray discs? Are both the VLC and Media Player Classic icons on my quicklaunch bar just figments of my imagination?
As others have said, it must be a driver issue. I can move a few gigabytes around and play videos no problem(my video collection just never seems to be in the right spot for my tastes). Also my folders open very smoothly in the start menu although I don't use them that much since I'm used to just typing for the application that I want. And this is all on much less powerful hardware than you have. I'm using a Black MacBook with a C2D T7200, 1GB of RAM and a Intel GMA950. Smooth as butter. If there was incompatibilities with the software I was running then yes I'd still be using XP with it. But Since I don't have any, I'm very happy with the way Vista behaves.
I don't think that Mac-ifying Firefox would be harder than making extensions work in Camino. But unlike other people I don't think a rewrite of Firefox for OSX is in order. Instead we should just have a series of Mac related extensions for these types of things. Keychain integration? Extension. Native widgets? Extension. Mac key bindings? Extension. Each would be simple to do by itself and updated by itself. But implementing a good Extension manager for Camino would be much harder.
I'll second this motion. But as some I talk to will fail to remember, it will take seconds to reconfigure. Which make them horrible as primary processors(slower for general processes, take more power to use, must be made simpler); Who wants to wait seconds for the application folder to open up. But for long processes, like video encoding and compiling... Hoo boy, I'd love an FPGA that reconfigures itself in the first few seconds and make the hour long process shrink to mere minutes.
I'm still amazed the problem some people are having with it. I don't have nearly the hardcore hardware as described here but it's enough. I'm currently running a Black MacBook, 2Ghz Core2Duo, 1GB of Ram, and a Intel GMA 950. Nothing extraordinary but runs Vista fan-flipping-tastic. And I'm not light when it comes to my apps.
I encode in xvid, Photo edit in Photoshop, Program in Visual Studio(don't argue with me it's just what we use), Music is handled with Winamp, Internet via Firefox, and mail via Thunderbird. Most usually at the same time. I run with full Vista Aero and I have sidebar running at all time(I use it all the time, much better than the OS X Dashboard). There have been no slowdowns other than when I transfer over the wireless network(which has never been fast ever). I haven't had any major problems aside from needing to upgrade my outdated drivers once and have been great ever since.
Honestly if you want to get a great Vista experience then your Mac Pro will do it with justice. Amazing huh.
For 5 extra dollars on my current plan gives me 400 text/multimedia messages. Per month. I think that's worth being able to the ease of use of taking a picture getting my info in reasonable time. And as far as tracking goes I don't care if they see that I want to see what actors are in se7en. But say I didn't want them to know that I eat Ruffles, I don't have to use the system all the time. I can just search like normal without their service. No problem. Please stop the anti-MS rhetoric.
What's with all the violence? It's not like any developer has infinite amount of time on their hands to get the job done and out to the public. First order of business is always deal with the majority of users and make sure it works for them; When that's complete go ahead and make sure the rest can use the system as well as possible. I think it's a good step in acknowledging that everybody else exists and not to completely let them down.
If they are using ActiveX that relegates the site to only Windows users(a vast majority of computer users are still windows users). But that doesn't mean only IE users. So a go between in promoting something that will let them view the site now, and actually hacking out the code so that all users can view it, doesn't sound that bad. It's a small step but it's a step in the right direction.
YouTube files don't have to be portable or any of that jazz. They were meant to be streamed to an internet connected device. These aren't high quality by any stretch of the imagination but they are user created and I just want to watch them casually. Not a big deal. And if my non-video dedicated Windows P3-700 box with 256MB ram can run it I'm absolutely positive it won't burn down the AppleTV. Shit my 5 year old xbox runs it great.
Honestly you have a serious case of rabid fanboism that needs to be cured. And to top it off... This isn't a container for static video. It also allows for interactivity. Something no video codec can do by itself. Lets just be happy that there is some competitiveness left in the world and we're not all sitting idle with only one way to do things.
It's not a "special version" of Media Player. It's just a plugin that hooks into your current version of WMP so that you can play content. Having more available people to look through your stuff is always good for the company, there is no real evil motives going on here.
It's not that users couldn't watch WMV files using Firefox before. It's that some users who were doing it had firefox crash on them everytime they tried. It's not a common epidemic but it's out there and this fixes it. Not big news in any sense but helpful.
Bullshit. A lockdown is something for elementary school kids only if you don't give them enough information before hand because you don't think it's in their best interests. If everyone was notified then they would be able to leave on their own (to go to a safe place) and then the building locked down so that the perpetrator wouldn't have a place to go, I would consider that a good lockdown procedure.
Just because it has a huge market share doesn't mean that the product is any good or even the best thing for any given person. I really do like my iPod but I know if Rio stayed in the game and evolved their product line my money would be theirs.
But lets take one of your sources and apply a little bit of logic. From here http://www.vgchartz.com/ngwars.php we get that indeed the Wii has sold over 6 million consoles... but if we look closer we see that compared to the other consoles a greater amount(2.12 million it says) were sold to those in japan. Given that the other consoles don't have nearly that many sold in Japan we can see a great imbalance in the rise of sales in different locales.
Let me ask you a simple question... Do you think that Japan has enough people to say that this rise was anything more than temporary? And since close to half of the total sales so far have come from Japan this could be what we see as a greater sales presence. Yay for statistics.
Again even if Microsoft is fluffing the statistics, they aren't doing that bad.
That's why my Sony Ericcson w810i phone is perfect. I can have with me my songs that I absolutly love(4GB is enough for that), but when I need more I can just log into winamp remote and play anything else. Add in internet streams and you've already got something that can challenge any mp3 player on the market.