This is completely and utterly off-topic, but it’s Sunday, I’m having very irritating Windows problems, and Andy is a friend of mine:
Don’t buy a Zune for the holidays. Or ever.
This review is funny, articulate, and very biting. Andy Ihnatko is a god among electronics geeks, and reading that review you’ll see why. I love the way he writes. He has a funny blog, too.
I met Andy years ago at a meeting in Colorado, and we hit it off instantly (not the least of which because we are both wildly in love with Barbara Thompson who introduced us). I felt smarter just being near him, because his level of intelligence and cleverness just lifts the ambient level in his vicinity. And this is in no way a means to suck up to him and his Olympus-like status. I think. I’ll note that at that conference, he was able to slap down a Moon Hoax believer better than I could, which should really invoke feelings of murderous jealousy in me and not admiration, so there you go. He really is that cool.
November 26th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
This is the first time I heard of the “Zune” (a name that wants to convey cool way too desperately), and now I am even happier with my old iPod nano. Very funny article.
November 26th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
I just read a Macworld review, and it was decidedly . . . “softer,” though not nearly as entertaining. I think I’ll stick with iPod
November 26th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
I have been a fan of Andy’s since the endtimes of MacUser. And the Zune deserves to die under the weight of its own foolishness. But where’s my full-frontal-screen iPod? For now, my scratch and scuff-scarred 3G iPod from 2003 (when gas was cheap and candy was sweeter) rocks and rolls just fine.
November 26th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
« […] I’m having very irritating Windows problems […] »
Did you ever use Apple’s computers ? No viruses !
Â
November 26th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
“…he was able to slap down a Moon Hoax believer better than I could…”
Hey, you never told us that story! Now you have to, you know.
November 26th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
This article has some (actually many) good points:
MS could break the 1 dollar per track uniform pricing that Apple has fought so hard to retain. This might make the music industry happy in the short run- but in the long run it’s hard not to see it pushing customers back to piracy.
My music collection is ~99% legal. Now the music stores want to tax me on the premise that my hard-drive is a repository for pirated music. That’s going to make me feel a whole lot less good about obeying the law each time I pay inflated prices for a download.
Piracy is wrong- but there must be a better way.
November 26th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
Christian, you’ve put your finger on it. That’s why Andy had such bad words for the music industry guy: he assumes everyone is a pirate. Many people are, of course, but it’s a jerky kind of thing to say, and all it will do is tick off your real customers.
Personally, I think the big moguls of TV, movies, and music are in for a real shock in the next few years as business dies off. They are monolithic and ridden with inertia, and the ones who are flexible are the ones who will not only survive but make profit.
November 26th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
Thanks BA.
The only thing worse than the music industry is the scientific publishing industry.
A member of the public wants to look up a paper on (e.g.) thyroid cancer, or a schoolgirl wants to read a paper on (e.g.) partition functions. The research is funded by the tax-payers and reviewed by other scientists (for free). Sorry- both papers are copyrighted- but can be purchased for 30 dollars from the journal.
I could perhaps understand charging 50 cents for a paper to cover small costs, but it is a scandal that most scientific research is out of easy reach of the public.
Want to promote understanding of evolution or the big bang? Make the research papers that have amassed the evidence free for all to read.
November 26th, 2006 at 10:29 pm
This is why I just don’t listen to music any more, except what is on the radio. I have no interest in DRM, and I certainly find it unacceptable that anyone would try to restrict how I can personally use - among my own possessions - something that I have purchased.
My response to the advent of Extreme Copy Protection (aka DRM) is simply to cease buying music. I don’t download it either. I live what what I have on CD from the past years. Sure, I probably miss out on an occasional gem, but honestly, based on what I hear on the radio, I’m not missing out on many gems. It was weird at first, I must admit, and it’s not like I decided one day that I was going to boycott music… it just sort of happened over time. Music got poorer in quality, and the industry BS just made it so I wasn’t interested any more.
But on reflection, I am certain that if you want to sort out the RIAA, you have to stop listening to music - stop downloading, stop buying on iTunes, never use anything with DRM, etc. Only when enough people do that will the message get across. Every single time someone downloads a tune without paying for it, that person is fuelling the recording industry whiners and their push for abusive DRM. Every time you buy music (99 cents a song is still $20 US per CD) you’re proving that consumers want to be overcharged for music (that 99 cents is almost pure profit for Apple, without even the production cost of a CD and case).
If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you that I’d never be able to live without music… now, in 2006, I find it difficult to remember the last time I listened to music for entertainment outside of a concert.
November 26th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
You misunderstand, Christian. Data collection is what is funded by the government, and the raw data from research funded by the government must be released when requested (after some time limit has expired, in some cases). What the papers represent, however, is analysis of the data. This is not funded by the government, it is funded by the time and effort put in by the scientists. The papers represent conclusions and inferences drawn from the data. In fact, papers do not include the raw data. They only general information on the data that is needed to support the conclusions and inferences drawn. That is owned by the scientists, since it is their own idea. You are free to look at the data and draw your own conclusions and inferences, but the conclusions and inferences drawn by those who wrote the paper belong to them.
November 26th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
And if you are a musician, don’t fret (ouch, inadvertent pun)… I still buy music directly from musicians as long as it doesn’t come with DRM or similar copy protection schemes. So if you’re good and I like your work, I’ll pay for your stuff, and if you’re not, oh well.
November 26th, 2006 at 10:42 pm
BlackCat:
Analysis of the data is not funded by the government through research grants? That’s news to me.
November 26th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
Barbara … Yes I remember Barbara … I once drove her into Boulder after aerobics at NCAR. I’m a little worried I freaked her out telling her about the really nasty murder that happened a couple of months previously, just around the corner from the house where I dropped her.
November 27th, 2006 at 2:10 am
Well, this makes me glad I have an iPod. Even if it does install a service on my Windows box. But it’s nice and easy to install, set up and use.
But I think the Zune will survive… Alas, Microsoft has the money to absorb bad sales for a while. So what if it doesn’t make money in 6 months… in 12 months. If it is making money in 24 months, it is ok.
I hope it dies. And I hope Apple will go without DRM. Time will tell.
Philip from Australia.
November 27th, 2006 at 2:48 am
The current copyright law is fundamentally unable to deal with the possibilities offered by the internet. At this moment, we are evolving from the old pre-digital age into something new, where there is only a very limited place for a middle man. I can imagine people buying from the artist directly on a large scale, with a company like Google providing the connection between musician and user (the Google-charts, for example?).
In scientific circles it is already clear where we’re heading: large online repositories maintained collectively by the community. I am speaking of course of the arXiv. Pretty much everybody I know (under 65) puts their papers online, and institutions like APS and IoP even encourage this. That’s because they are themselves professional societies, which put their profits back into the community (via conferences and the like). There are even completely online journals that offer all their papers for free to the public. They get their money from the authors (or rather, their grants), and from advertising.
So I do dream of a brave new world without copyright…
November 27th, 2006 at 3:57 am
At first it looked like good odl fashioned M$ bashing, but then the author began to make very good points.
Regarding DRM, it all seems to be part of the huge modern war that all publishers are waging against their customers. Eventually they will realize what they have done and cancle all of it, but until then, they will loose a lot of money and we will jump a lot of hurdles.
November 27th, 2006 at 5:01 am
What I find interesting is that the video industry was sent a pretty clear message about DRM when the DivX vs DVD battle was quickly and decisively won by the DVD format, and although there might be some piracy, DVDs are still sold in huge quantities. The music world will learn this eventually, and they’ll learn it the way the DivX folks learned it: people won’t pay for the music just like they didn’t pay for DivX disks.
November 27th, 2006 at 6:35 am
The music industry is a double rip off!
Not only do we the consumers pay outrageous amounts for he music, but the musicians get almost none of it. Although recording hardware and software that can rival the quality of the big studios are available and affordable to the working musician, recording contracts require that all recordings must be done in the company studios. The cost of the studio is charged against future artist royalties. Although the artist (probably) wrote the songs, recorded the songs and toured to promote the songs, the studio keeps ~90% of the money and, as I said, takes the costs of production out of the artists ~10%!
November 27th, 2006 at 11:13 am
Let’s not forget the blank CD nonsense. Some are marketed as “music” CDs and some are marketed as “Data” CDs. The “music” CDs cost more and pay a royalty to the music indusrty. What is the difference between them? Nothing from what I can tell. I buy data CDs and burn music to them all the time (copies of music I bought legally…I keep copies in my car. If someone breaks into my car, they can steal copied CDs and I still have the originals).
Personally, my mp3 player is filled with all the free NPR and astronomy podcasts and I don’t have a single song on it!
Rob
November 27th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Microsoft’s Zune sucks? Am I surprised?
Eeeh…. No. I’m not
November 27th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
A little plug, for those annoyed with DRM — tracks downloaded from emusic have no DRM attached. They’re plain old mp3 files. The catch? You pay for a monthly allocation of downloads, rather than per song, and their catalog is comprised entirely of independent labels. I’m rather fond of them.
November 28th, 2006 at 4:00 am
Well, I talk about “the war on customers” because I am also somewhat familiar with the practices video game developers are engaging in nowadays to prevent piracy, some of which really do constitute an attack on paying customer (particularly since the pirate, who does not pay for the game, gets a game that does not have these nasty features, so the game developers are now actually penalising the people who pay before they play).
With DRM and all these things, we are coming to something similar in the music industry: if you download an mp3 illegally you get a file that is more useful and versatile than the DRM-protected mp3 you buy.
November 29th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
Yeah, that’s a bad philosophy, the more you comply the more you’re penalized.