Ancient Flying Machines aren’t the only interesting things you can find on the walls in Egypt. There is strong evidence that the land of the Pharaohs also had a thriving MP3 player market. PTTBT’s resident Egyptologist Dr. Rachel Landingham explains one of the most enduring mysteries of the Nile…
This hieroglyphic detail from the Temple of Horus depicts what modern scholars call “The Little Birdie’s Quest for Tunes”. It was carved in c.3500 BC by a scribe who appears to have had ADD, because he keeps changing subjects mid-column. Here is how the story goes:
The Little Birdie saw someone using a new iPhone in the market, and was intrigued.
He looked in his Best Buy catalogue at home and saw there was a sale going on that week, so he headed down to the Pyramid SuperStore to check them out.
There were many MP3 players, and he examined them all. He carefully examined the iPod line because all the other living gods had them.
The iPod: No wireless, less space than a Nomad… lame.
The Little Birdie settled on the Zune because it was the colour of the earth and he liked squirting things too.
But he was the only one.
The rest of the story is spread out across four more walls in the temple, and covers the story of how the Pharaoh discovered Little Birdie was using an ugly brown MP3 player and had him executed, and how the Birdie was not allowed into the afterlife with the thing because Anubis was an Apple fanboy.
Photo Credit: Original photograph courtesy of Dustin P Smith. Many apologies, Mr Smith.
When we read this morning that a girl from Texas opened her new iPod box to find rocks instead, we got a little mad. We’ve been labouring under this restrictive Apple NDA for close to four months now, and just as we’re about to release our exclusive, some fool at Target breaks the release embargo and screws us over. Whatever.
So here, for ALMOST the first time ever, is your inside look at the unboxing of the new iPebble touch:
Ooo, the anticipation!
There she is. Beautiful!
Out of the packaging… the iPebble is remarkably light. It fits into most pockets easily, and is more likely to scratch your keys than the other way around.
Notice how thin it is? Pebbles from Dell are usually five times as thick, and have sharp edges that cut your fingers. Also, they smell.
Only gripe: the standard Apple earbuds. Don’t know how to plug them into the iPebble OR our ears. Will have to find some good Sony replacements before we go jogging.
Specs-wise, the iPebble touch is a fantastic addition to the Apple line-up. Its UI is, naturally, very limited, but it shows the Jobsian minimalist streak in full force. Jonathan Ive deserves a Nobel Prize for the sheer genius of the design… it just seems so natural. So far, our tests indicate a 27-hour battery life, though it’s hard to say without visual feedback of any kind.
Tomorrow we’ll take our screwdrivers to the iPebble and see what’s inside. Stay tuned!
Update: Our “inside look” at the iPebble will have to wait a few days. Dan was taking a chisel to see if he could get root access for Jailbreak, and got some rock chips in his eye. This does not bode well for expandability… once again, Apple is stonewalling the modding community!
If you’re Canadian, you’re probably aware that we pay a large levy on all recordable media (like CDs, DVDs etc) due to the fact that those media can be used to pirate music and/or movies off the internet. The money raised gets split between Canadian artists and their companies in an effort to level the playing field. In effect, the government assumes you’re a rotten criminal, punishes you for it, and gives the money out to the people you’ll likely be hurting. It’s called pre-emptive justice, and it’s loads of fun.
However, one side effect of this policy is that it essentially makes P2P use legal, because in essence, you’ve already paid for songs (via the levy), so you should have the right to download them. That particular argument was obvious to quite a lot of people, but the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) apparently didn’t catch on until a judge ruled along those lines a little while ago.
The always-genius Michael Geist picks up from there in his latest post…
CRIA, which spent more than 15 years lobbying for the creation of the private copying levy, is now fighting to eliminate the application of the levy on the Apple iPod since it believes that the Copyright Board of Canada’s recent decision to allow a proposed tariff on iPods to proceed “broadens the scope of the private copying exception to avoid making illegal file sharers liable for infringement.”
I mean, you can’t blame them for trying, but still…
I actually find myself wanting the levy to be expanded, despite it meaning that I’d have to pay more for my next iPod, because I want to make CRIA cry. Really, they should just include coupons with all media purchases that say: “Good for $40 of P2P downloads! Have fun!”. That’d be a lot more honest.
I wonder if they can un-lobby this issue to get what they want, now that they’ve changed their minds…
