atanok's dashboard

"Either way, I'd like to see more open devices supported first, but if time remains, I don't see any problem with adding Zune or iPod support personally."

First and foremost, exactly what you said there.
Delegate support for all these aggressors to after all the honest players have been dealt with.

About MTP, while it doesn't imply DRM, it does provide tools that help implement and enforce it, so I dislike it with a 'guilty by association' kind of reasoning. (this comes from what I've read so far; I don't know the specification personally)

Same as while technically OpenOfficeXML can be used for good purposes, it was really created to perpetuate an old format, under a different guise, while a better alternative already existed.

About the first issue, I'm not trying to ignore the legal implications of users syncing their iPods with other software, but one big difference is, for example, if those rules are ever made invalid (company bankruptcy, different legislation,...), iPod users will get to keep using what they have as they like, while Zune users get an expensive brick, at least until someone takes the effort to reverse engineer the user-useless "extended" protocol.

tl;dr: don't buy Zunes or iPods

btw, any idea on how would the iPod legal scenario look like if one's using Rockbox, for instance.

"Now, please tell me how the Zune is DEFECTIVE by design? MS had no obligation to conform to community-accepted standards. What is it about that you don't like?"

Not doing what almost every other portable media player has done to date: loading media files as a mass storage class device.
That alone is not necessarily being defective by design.
That's just plain being defective.
It's defective by design not only because the previous is true, but because they also implemented something much more complex, with the sole purpose of breaking functionality.

It's taking that extra step to make sure it won't work that makes this so bad.

And no, they have no legal obligation to abide by any sane standard.
The only kind of obligation is called common courtesy, which they so obviously lack.

"It's worth pointing out (because you clearly do not know this) that USB-IF MTP v1.0 was drafted by a chartered work group that was made up of 17 companies, and is chaired by Microsoft."

Why are you telling me unrelated things that I already know?
Besides, MTP is another annoying "standard" being pushed mainly to help enforce DRM.

You stopped caring about songbird, and I stopped turning a blind eye on products defective by design.

Just when did we stop giving merit where it is due, and instead favored whomever cornered us into the tightest spot?

If the general public hadn't been so gullible and forgiving, it'd never have come to this situation with incessant skirmishes of fruitless vendor lock-ins.

None of these problems are real technical difficulties.
They exist solely to torment you.
You should recognize something unacceptable when you see it, instead of pretending it's not there.

I'm personally unaffected by all this, but I can't stand seeing people being constantly treated like idiots.

Yes, I'm aware that Apple are also dicks, but even still they are not even close to Microsoft.

You certainly can't compare a service being locked in to a hardware device, to a hardware device being locked in to a service.

While iPods are 'the only way' to sync with iTunes, you can choose other software platforms to do that, effectively not attaching you to Apple's software or any operating system.

The Zune, however, locks you into using Windows and that particular piece of software, which is in turn locked into using a Zune for a portable player.

If Apple==evil then Microsoft=evil^2

This is what you get when you buy hardware from the monopolistic backstabbers at Microsoft.

Seriously, some of you are even saying you "didn't want to buy from Apple", only to go buy from a much more evil vendor.

Realize this: Microsoft is not your friend.