Rockbox in Popular Science

[massiveH]

For those of you living in the US and getting the Popular Science monthly magazine, Rockbox is featured in the How 2.0 section.  It features some snazzy instructions to getting it on MP3 players, even mentions it running on the IPod!

[scorche]

We had an interesting little chat about it in IRC recently; check the logs.  (I have a copy of the magazine)  Let's just say the article gets the most inaccurate article of the month award, and I can't wait to see the letters...

[Mad Cow]

Why is it so inaccurate? I still want to read it though, just for kicks.

[scorche]

I posted a link in IRC.  You can find it if you look though the logs (still the current log).

[massiveH]

Posted the article for those of you not wanting to mess around in IRC logs and such.

[killsforpie]

I can get pacman from rockbox.org???!? Tell me where!! You must have gameboy roms then too? ;D

[nls]

No but you do need the pacman roms, see http://download.rockbox.org/manual/rockbox-h300/rockbox-buildch8.html#x11-1210008.1.8 for further instructions. And btw we do not provide those rom files, you'll have to dump them from your pacman arcade machine (or somehow get a legal copy elsewhere)

[robin0800]

Posted the article for those of you not wanting to mess around in IRC logs and such.

Where ?

[soap]

Posted the article for those of you not wanting to mess around in IRC logs and such.

Where ?

Scroll up.

[MCC]

Does it really matter if it's totally accurate? Rockbox did just get exposure to a potential 7.95 million PopSci readers for free after all.

[Llorean]

Yes, and those 7.95 million PopSci reader now think that Mpegplayer and Jpegviewer are both things you have to download.

We already get enough people asking "Where do I download (pluginX)" already.

Not to mention the download page the article links is the page for version 2.5 of Rockbox (archos-only).

Basically, expect a LOT more noise on the forums.

[MCC]

How about we take advantage of the traffic and post something for the incoming PopSci readers on the front page to correct these mistakes? Why not make some sort of strong indication that PopSci readers should go to the daily page instead?

[Llorean]

Correcting the mistakes in the article would probably take about 1/3 to 1/2 of the number of words already in the article. As well, incoming traffic is unlikely to read posted bulletins like that (how many people completely missed the large red text telling them that their iPod installation instructions are out of date and they should use the new ones, and how many people skipped the portion of the install guide entitled "Installing the firmware"?)

While it'd be possible to post something, it would by necessity have to be exceedingly hard to ignore. And having big, red, blinking "MPEGPLAYER DOES NOT NEED TO BE DOWNLOADED. IT IS INCLUDED" *might* get people to see it, I don't think that's a good idea.

The point of this is mostly that it'd be nice if there were some actual fact checking going on. The fact that not one of their links actually goes to a relevant location for what they're claiming, and that they say you need to download things that you don't, strongly suggests to me that at some point the article passed through the hands of someone who didn't know what was what and tried to trim for space by making assumptions like "plugin" meant "something that needs downloaded."

[Mad Cow]

Funny how they use a picture of a H10, even though that port is still far from complete and doesn't even have half the stuff they mentioned .

[Genre9mp3]

Funny how they use a picture of a H10, even though that port is still far from complete and doesn't even have half the stuff they mentioned .

Heh... what I find funny is that they use an H10 picture combined with the big sized title "ONE-UP THE iPOD" while the content of the article leaves the impression that Rockbox doesn't run on iPods! "Ever heard of Archos, iRiver or Cowon?"...

Let's hope that the publicity will outweight all these misleading inaccuracies...