Reviews by scottmage

scottmage says "Proprietary format - Just won't play on every device" about Apple iTunes

scottmage — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 10:04:11 GMT

My daughter called on Christmas day since she and her nephews that she nannies had received MP3 players for Christmas. They had also received iTunes Gift cards which is nice to have to download songs they like.

The problem my daughter was experiencing was in order to use the gift card they had to install iTunes.

iTunes is produced by Apple and like Microsoft seems to belive they are the only format on th planet.

The default format that the songs wants to download into is M4P a proprietary format that only works in iTunes or on an iPod.

So that she did not have to purchase an expensive format converter, I had my daughter burn the songs to CD using iTunes and choose the option to convert the format to MP3. I then had her copy the CD onto her hard drive. I told her to put the CD on the shelf as a backup.

Since iPods will play MP3 format, it would make sense that the default format should be MP3 and then if by some stretch of the imagination someone just had to have M4P format, they could......

scottmage says "5 Year warranty and all this space - how can you not love it?" about Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 500 GB USB External Hard Drive

scottmage — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:41:42 GMT

I have recommended these professionally to numerous customers of mine. Prior to Seagate the best warranty was a year. They build a very reliable product so you may never need to use the warranty.

At these prices I can purchase another for redundancy. Most people don't have a redundant disk in the first place on their computer, this would become their redundant disk.

One a gamer note: these can be plugged right into a PS3 for Plug and Play upgrade.
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scottmage says "So good Microsoft is using it" about Mozilla Firefox 2.0

scottmage — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:32:34 GMT

I don't know how many times I have been saved using this browser that I hit some infected web site and get an error "Unable to load Pornbot" or something equally bad.

With IE Tabs Add-on you can run web pages built by Microslaves with the security of Firefox.

I recommend it to anyone that I work on their computer.

IE7 is just a poor shadow until all those people MS hired from the Firefox crew get it up to speed.

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scottmage says "Now that HD DVD format is dead, prices wil rise on Media" about Sony - DVP-NS55P DVD Player

scottmage — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:26:03 GMT

Now that Warner Brothers has signed on with Blue Ray, Toshiba has thrown in the towel and wil stop producing HD DVD.

Without the competition that HD DVD brought, prices will begin rising back to where they were - AND since you are not legally able to make a copy of a Blue Ray disk will get very expensive if you scratch them.

With a regular DVD you are legally able to make a copy for yourself. I have been doing that for years with first my kids and now grandkids. I don't stress out that they get a scratch on a DVD because prices have dropped for blanks to as little as $.08 per DVD. On a $29 Blue Ray DVD (current prices with $25 HD DVD or as low as $15) that will be a different story.

For the price of these players, I would rather get a game console of some kind like a Sony PS3. I can then donate the CPUs to folding.stanford.edu for protien folding to fix diseases when I am not at home at least.
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scottmage says "Easy to fall asleep on - Till you wake up sweating" about Tempurpedic Classic Mattress

scottmage — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:06:48 GMT

I work 2 full time jobs so my sleep comfort is important. Tried one of these and it traps body heat too much.

I am now sleeping on a gel mattress from http://www.mycomfortmyway.com/ that sits on top of a Tempurpedic mattress. This give me the best of both worlds. The gel keeps the body heat from building up....