i want one- you know, the thnigs that have a tiny hard drive and you can put lots of songs on them. where should i go to look at them?

Creative makes a wonderful series of mp3 players called the nomad, I highly suggest it. Mac is making the iPod but I dont really like mac, if you do I would also suggest this. The nomad series has both the harddrive type data storage as well as flash disks.

I'd say go with an iPod. I'm not sure if Nomads have firewire yet, if they don't, then iPod is the clear choice.

The Nomad 3 has firewire and USB 2.0, and has much more storage space for the price. The iPod has the spiffy design and extreme ease of use. The Rio Riot is similar, but not really as good as either of these.

Bantam is releasing a jukebox sometime soon that should be in the same league as these.

the juke box is a piece of shit because you have to use creatives play center software to transfer songs to it. i have one and just this week took it back after it completely refused to sync with my pc. fuck creative, they could have just offered a windows driver to explore that file system and make it appear as a system drive, instead they try to force you to use their gay ass software that doesnt even work.

i would buy the ipod if i were you. there is a pc version out now and its firewire. the ipod is more money but it is also a fraction of the size and far better as far as battery life, responsiveness, and support.

Syphon, surely a man of your resources would have found a solution.

Notmad Explorer.

Third-party software with a drag-and-drop GUI. Much better than Creative's feeble software.
http://gear.ign.com/articles/362/362172p1.html

if i am going to pay 400+ for the NJB the better give me software that works with it. im not going to spend more money on more software because someone at creative didnt do their job right.

aside from that i have a moral problem with paying for software.

i don't even have 500 songs, i don't need a nomad jukebox. but the thing is, all creatives other guff is tiny, and won't fit all my songs. gr. what to do, what to do

if not creative, then what? (apart from the iPod, i have no firewire )

quote:

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Originally posted by syphon detonator:

aside from that i have a moral problem with paying for software.

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i just want to hear the explanation to that... what is im-moral about paying for whats for sale?

software comes from source code which is information. i dont believe any information should be sold.

Do you have any idea how much unemployment that would cause?

Zoks just a windows lover. He doesn't know the value of free software.

VIVA LA REVOLUTION!!!

"hitler we must stop the holocost, its wrong"

"but do you know how many of my nazi henchmen would lose thier jobs?"


the employment rate has about zero relevency in a moral debate. the bad situation should have never been created initially. are you willing to sellout to save some jobs? im not

Well if I may borrow something Jadedfool had once said (more or less) is that the people who make free software make their living selling non-free software, so by making all software free you are also unemploying all of your free software engineers.

And back to topic: I have heard rumor of nullsoft and creative making an aliance, I hope this would mean winamp plugins for creative mp3 players (at least ones that work better.)

quote:

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...in a moral debate...

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hmmm syphon, I know you use windows and have never paid for it, yet windows is "immoral". That's fairly hypocritical. If you want to fight the corporate software giants, you don't do it by pirating their software, that just makes it worse. By using their software, you are maintaining the market for it. Your use (legal or illegal) of their software is what forces business to by it. If you only know windows, businesses is not going to get you trained in linux just so they can have free software and be "moral". And that is refering to a whole population, not you in general.

If you want to fight the corporate software giants, it is far more effective to do it by using and providing free software to the community, not by pirating.

I think your morals are good (and I wish I had the same strength in mine), but I think you execute them in a manner which is rather hypocritical, and that, belittles your credibility in a debate about morals.

oh stop whining. i've decided to get a creative cd-mp3 player, cuz theyre cheap(er), although i would rather a jukebox

aside from all that, someone worked pretty hard to write the software. i dont see how you could find it "morally wrong" to pay someone for their hard work. this is like saying that i shouldnt have to buy my textbooks, because its just information. i shouldnt have to pay for college, theyre just dispensing information.

i think you forgot that we live in a capitalist nation. in the end, stealing is wrong. whether it be by napster, morpheus, or warez, stealing... is wrong. someone put their time and money into creating a product, it is well within their rights to sell that which is theirs.

your point of view is very childish.

let it be known that every piece of software i use is freeware, or is payed for. and i dont have a problem with that at all.

and if your explanation is "well, microsoft makes enough money; well, the smashing pumpkins make enough money; etc..." then once again, youre missing the point of capitalism.

my using windows does not further their empire because i do not purchase any software for the windows platform aside from a very select few games. it would be a different story if i was simply pirating windows yet paying for tons of other software. also i do not depend entirely on windows OS's. as far as software design, if i was good enough that anyone wanted my software i would be glad to give it to them. and there are people who write free software yet are unemployed in the computer field altogether.

junglist the thing your ignoring is that writing a piece of software is like writing in any other language. they are all communal and contributed to by all of the programers in the world, past and present. i would be like me trying to charge you for saying a certain sequence of words since i thought of them first. a person has no real right to intelectual property and i dont think you do or ever will understand that as i do. im not trying to be insulting but its a radically different idea than most americans have been raised with.

the money argument is a moot point because i have the money and have no problem spending money on a quality PRODUCT but i do find it very wrong to spend it on information. it seems you believe i do this to save the money which isnt the case, i do not care about money.

quote:

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Originally posted by syphon detonator:
...it would be like me trying to charge you for saying a certain sequence of words since i thought of them first. a person has no real right to intelectual property and i dont think you do or ever will understand that as i do...

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Except software is millions of lines of code, not few words. To keep the comparison accurate you should be comparing it to a book, and yes, you can copyrite a book so that people dont steal the idea.

quote:

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By using their software, you are maintaining the market for it. Your use (legal or illegal) of their software is what forces business to by it. If you only know windows, businesses is not going to get you trained in linux just so they can have free software and be "moral".

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quote:

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my using windows does not further their empire because i do not purchase any software for the windows platform aside from a very select few games.

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I don't think you understood what i was saying, or alternatively, you don't think im right. Just because you don't pay for anything running on the Windows platform software, it DOESN'T mean you arent supporting it. You still use Windows, along with all the other people using Windows create a push for business to use Windows, and we all know that most business pays for Windows... Now, if you eliminate that push by reducing the number of people using Windows (and familiarizing them with alternatives) you give the business world the choice to say NO to microsoft...

If everyone only knows Windows, that is what business will buy. If people are aware and able to use alternatives, business will be aware and able to use alternatives... Microsoft's major market is businesses. As long as you (and others, including myself) support the use of Windows (by using it), this WILL NOT change.

Pirating the software DOES NOT let you escape the immorality of buying it.

[This message has been edited by cense (edited 10-10-2002).]

Well said.

I think it goes without saying that nothing in life is free. Everything has a price. The question is: are you willing to pay? If you ask me, its the same as a book, you write it, you can charge for it. If people go around selling pdf files of your book it causes less people to pay for the book, thus you dont get money and you have to find a new job.

Do you remember when stephen King decided to come out with a series of internet books? He asked everybody who read/downloaded them to donate 1$. He did nothing but ask, didnt make a subscription fee or anything, just said that if you read it you need to donate. Every 1 person out of 100 donated money, he soon canceled the series due to costs and the ammount of people who would not pay. Now if it were mandatory for all books to be free matter, no charging allowed, how many authors do you think would actualy publish their books? How many editors, authors and publishers do you think would be out of buisness? The exact same thing goes for software, if the creator has no job there is little chance that they are going to be producing software for free, much less producing software at all. Sure an author can write a news article every once an a while, that the same way we get free software, like the *nixs. But for all of it to be free would mean that the author/coder has no money and no real job.

Nothing is free in a capitalism.

[This message has been edited by Zok (edited 10-10-2002).]

that is along the line of my point. a program (especially an OS) is not a "series of words." it is millions of lines of intricately written code. it would be more comparable to an eloquent poem, or a novel. only certain parts fit, not just any old thing thrown together. so someone labored over this piece of software (or book) for many hours, probably months, if not years; and they deserve credit for it. in the american market, or the world for that matter, it is common practice to pay people for their services. ultimately; a book, or a piece of software is a service. thus, it is not out of line to ask for a monetary reimbursement for time and labor. and its not like writing a program is easy either. many software developers work quite hard, im sure of that.

pirating software is only making it more expensive for honest people.

and i totally agree with what cense said, and i think he said it very well.

sorry to turn this thread off topic, but a healthy debate isnt a bad thing. currently this in one of the only forums left where this can happen between mature people who can express ideas without being total jackasses or acting like children. im jealous

i pirate software cause im cheap.

if i could afford it, i would buy some stuff, but until then....

back to the topic, skalez, have you considered a minidisk player. they seem fairly good (although ive never owned one, nor an mp3player).

ive seen mp3 players advertised with 64meg. thats like 6 songs @ 256k bitrate. seems a bit crap to me.

Minidisc recorders do indeed rock. The new NetMD units have potential, but there are a few quirks. You can now download songs to the player via pc, at a rate greater than 1x. This negates the main advantage mp3 players had. The problem is that the software only converts your music in the LP bitrates, giving you sound closer to mp3 than CD. There's also quite a bit of copyright bullshit involved, not surprising since Sony owns a record label.

Minidiscs are a lot cheaper (per song) than any solid-state mp3 unit, and on par with some of the jukeboxes. You can also pick up one of the older MDLP units cheaply, and they give you great sound.

you can also find a minidisc player that will also record with mic inputs and start stealth taping concerts you go to, if thats of any interest to you. minidisc recording does use a lossless algorhythm though, so its not as high quality as a DAT, but thats not the focus of the thread, and ive already taken it off topic once

i think this debate isnt goign to come to a conclusion because no matter what i say or do you cant understand where im coming from in my point of view since im from an entirely different school of philosophy. to each his own i suppose.

as far as minidisc they are really great. i have a home deck and a portable and love them both. the only shitty thing is that a mini disk costs about 2 dollars which is obviously alot more than cdr's. other than that no complaints from me.

i suppose...

if you believe that me walking into a bookstore and running out the door with all the books i can carry is a "moral" thing to do, youre right, we will not agree.

some civics, sociology, and economics classes may help you understand capitalism a little better.

quote:

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Originally posted by syphon detonator:
i think this debate isnt goign to come to a conclusion because no matter what i say or do you cant understand where im coming from in my point of view since im from an entirely different school of philosophy. to each his own i suppose...

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Oh, blaim the bigotry on us why dont you?

quote:

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Originally posted by junglist:
some civics, sociology, and economics classes may help you understand capitalism a little better.

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understanding and aproving are two entirely different things. any man can understand rape but few civil men will aprove of it.

quote:

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you cant understand where im coming from in my point of view since im from an entirely different school of philosophy.

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You are not from a entirely different school of philosophy, that is far too elitist to be the truth. I understand where you are coming from. Just because you believe something that I do not necessary belive myself, it does not mean I cannot understand it and vice versa.

I'm not attacking your beliefs and "philosophy" by saying they are wrong and capatilism is right, I'm stating that you contradict yourself by saying that buying software is immoral because information is free. Then you go and steal.

quote:

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understanding and aproving are two entirely different things. any man can understand rape but few civil men will aprove of it.

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I agree. However, in this case: Is stealing not immoral when there are free alternatives to stealing?

Any man can understand stealing but few civil men will aprove of it. Is this true?

Do not think I am unaware of my own immorality in this subject! I am a hipocrite in the same way for I am attacking you for your flaws that are also my own. The only reason I point this out so strongly is I get the impression that you think you have escaped the immorality of buying software by stealing it.

If my bullshit has offended you syphon, you are free to dislike me for it like any man is free to do so, but keep this in mind: My objective has not been to offend you or to tell you that you are stupid in your "school of philosophy".

i should point out as well, that i am not exactly questioning your use of warez (although i do think that it is wrong, and is not a practice that i participate in myself), but more your use of the words "aside from that i have a moral problem with paying for software."

you have a moral problem with paying for software, but not a moral problem with theft? its just too contradictory to make sense to me...

[This message has been edited by junglist (edited 10-13-2002).]

like i said to each his own.

it is contradictory if you consider it theft, which i dont. i understand what you are saying and why you feel its a contradition but in my eyes its not theft.

i decided to get the creative cd-mp3 player because its cheap, and it odes what i want. minidiscs are slightly pov.
http://australia.creative.com/products/portaudio/cd-mp3/

for syphon

umm.........

its a dog school, am i missing something or is this just amusingly obscure

Its for seeing eye dogs, he is playing on the thought that you are blind to other's beliefs (my interpretation).

Information should be free, down with books!

not to others beliefs, but to what constitutes stealing. just because one doesnt belive what they do is stealing doesnt mean that its not. is it determined by the law by which we live, or is it determined by each mans personal opinion? like your rape analogy, is rape not rape if the rapist believes its not?

i dont understand how you dont consider it theft when you take something that is not free... that is why i say youre blind. you cant ignore the fact that youre stealing, but you can ignore the fact that stealing is wrong.

its not that i disagree with your stance that information should be free, because i dont. but i disagree with the way you justify stealing to yourself by trying to elevate yourself above other men, or the principals of the law just because you think you have a belief system that is "radically different than other americans." i may not agree with the american principals of capitalism, etc; but that doesnt change the fact that i live here. that alone means that i must follow the law, or suffer the consequences whether or not i agree with it; or whether or not i chose to admit that what i did was wrong, by the standard of the law. you saying its part of your "morals" doesnt make sense either, if you can apply it only to software, and not to works of art, which in essence are intellectual property. neither are intangible, they both take up space, they both consist of matter. they are material. i can hold a piece of software, just as i can hold a novel, but the way i perceive the data in is not tangible, it is an idea. moreso even with a novel, because it is open to my interpretation, not just performing a specific task to amuse me or to do a job for me.

i could continue, but youve probably stopped reading anyway, and youre probably still going to say its your "morals;" when in my opinion, its your own unwillingness to admit what you do wrong, because of the general stereotype of theivery. you dont want to lower yourself to that level, and its understandable, but dont fool yourself. the law isnt something open to interpretation, no matter your personal feelings on the law itself. unless youre a damn good lawyer, anyway.

You're cool. I'd be you if I wasn't me. And you have a good point. But he still can't be expected to comply with anything at all- you can't expect anything of anyone, people are who they want to be, not what you say they are. That's why anarchy is partially cool. But who cares anyway. Not syphon as long as he doesn't get caught.

mmmmmmmmm............. creative cd-mp3 player............... gnarl..........

In case anyone's still interested in the actual topic here, check out the new Creative Zen jukebox. Very similar to the Nomad 3, but closer in size to an iPod. And I'm sure syphon won't mind stealing the third-party software that makes it work better.

As a matter of fact, I have taken a look at it, very nice. But the quick charge batteries wear much quicker than regular alkaline and since it does not use flash memory it transfers slower (a big problem if you are actualy transfering all 20gb). This however is one of the better harddrive players.

Slow? The Zen uses a hard drive. Hard drives are much faster than flash memory. The newest compactflash cards achieve a max throughput of 3.6Mbps, the same speed as a 24x CD burner. In comparison, the original ATA hard drive spec, now horribly obsolete, called for a throughput of 8.3 Megabytes per second. Solid state does not necessarily mean faster.

It's good if you have a spare bazillion dollars....

the difference is when you steal art such as a painting you rip it off the wall. what i do is the equivelent of taking a picture in the gallery and putting it on my desk. the programmer loses NOTHING MATERIAL. the intelectual right was never solely his in the first place.

and what gives the law authority greater than my own personal moral belief? just because a majority sides with it does not make it correct. by your logic you condone hitlers eradication of the jews because the majority of his country sided with him and the law allowed.

in response to the rape question then it depends on who you are talking about. sure society sees it as rape and it is rape to society but if the rapist does not genuinly see it as rape then it is not rape to him.

the supposed fact that im steal does not need to be ignored because its not a fact at all. is it just to charge money for air? of course not, so ask yourself if its just to charge for information.

and programs by the way do not take up space as does a painting or sculpture, it is an abstract concept in the physical form of code stored on a disk. by your logic my looking at a painting without buying it is stealing since i have taken that abstract concept into my mind without paying.

and of course the law is open to interpretation. otherwise we would have nothign more than the constitution and bill of rights as they were originally written. the whole point of law is to take standards and apply them to daily life through the courts interpretation.

quote:

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he programmer loses NOTHING MATERIAL.

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but he sobs at his desk, in front of his computer late at night... you don't want to make him cry do you syphon? What kind of a monster makes a skinny little programmer cry just so that he may use the crappy software for free?

only if the artist or gallery was charging admission.

its not your principal i have a question about, its your reasoning and primarily your use of the word "moral," which i think you use to try to elevate yourself above other theivery. the bottom line, is that taking something that costs money, is stealing. no matter your "moral" or "interpretation." you try to get around that by saying you have a belief system that is "radically different than other americans." you can not say that using pirated software isnt stealing, which is exactly what youre trying to do. when you take something that is for sale, but do not pay for it; its theft. you can justify it to yourself any way you like, but deep down, you have to know youre stealing, even if you dont think that its wrong. you must understand that its theivery; unless youre so self-absorbed that you have become ignorant to all things beside yourself. theres no way around it. you can try to argue why it shouldnt be stealing, why it shouldnt be illegal all you like, and i will hear your argument, and most likely agree with you. but until the bill passes, its theft. theres no 2 ways about it, one way street, dont pass go, dont give the poor soul who slaved over the code 200$.

but stealing implies taking which doesnt happen. it costs them nothign when i pirate software. it costs them something when you steal cd's. just because a person charges for something doesnt make that just and right nor does it make it their property. i think your missing the whole point of my argument, i dont view code which is knowledge as an ownable possesion. i dont believe anyone can own code.

when your talking about a person slaving over a computer writing code you are reffering to paying the person for his work and not his code. sadly under current licensing schemes you don not pay for a programers hard work, rather you pay for code or knowledge.

i have no issue with donating to a project i feel does some good so that the programer can upkeep his code and get a reward for his WORK but i have a serious problem with paying for the CODE itself. im not using moral as a way to elevate myself above anyone since i think we are all more or less equally worthless. all im saying is that it conflicts with my moral sensibility or value system (which by the way most dont share and i fully understand that and accept the reactions that come along with it)