NYT: "Tunes, a Hard Drive and (Just Maybe) a Brain"

Someone felt that there is a conspiracy in the iPods shuffle. I wonder if he wears aluminum foil on his head when he sleeps at night too.

many times, the psuedo-random numbers generated by conputers are offset in favor of the low-end of the spectrum; a side-effect of the psuedo- nature of the "randomness"

Depending on how the algorythm identifies the artists/songs for randomising, there certainly could be some artists/songs which end up being favored.

In truth, the idea that shuffle is truely random is crap - no computer generates truely grandom numbers - hense the word "generates." It's deterministic.

this makes the New York Times sound like USA Today. Or as my friends and I call it: "McNews, fast food for news"

If the iPod's shuffle is truly random, then the person who wrote the algorithm is truly an idiot.

Anyone who uses the "random" shuffle knows damn well, that once it picks an artists, the probability of that artist being played again in the near future skyrockets. I have hundreds of songs from some groups and those won't be played for hours, while 3 of the 8 songs from another group will be played on my drive to work. I should pull out my Stats book from college and calculate the probability some time.

It is a sad day when USA Today has become a better paper than the New York Times, or what I like to call it now, the New Pravda.

Do they really expect the ipod to "read their mood"?? That is what the GENRE category is for. Pick the genre you feel like listening to...THEN SHUFFLE.


morons.

Does this by any chance remind anyone of "I, Robot"?

I had 3700 songs on my ipod, 15 songs by The Guess Who. Every 45mim i heard the same two guess who songs.

We all know that the iPod Shuffle REALLY ISN'T completely random, no matter what the guy at Apple Computer says. I've had my shuffle feature end up playing 4 or 5 songs in a row from the same two artists, before moving onto any other artists. In a TRUE random world, this would NEVER happen. It would be almost impossible for the same artist (out of my 900 artists) to come up within even the same HOUR as itself again.

...but sometimes it *is* a little freaky.

Like Monday night. I got in my car after a Prince concert, put on my standard 1200+ song playlist of 4- and 5-star rated stuff, and before I got out of the stadium parking lot the iPod played two Prince songs in succession. I've got maybe 7-10 Prince songs in my collection.

A rather impressive coincidence, IMHO.