That doesn't explain the semi-ironic ones very well, and the individualized ones (the ones with the baby's name) not at all.
Maybe they are all gifts given by people who want to signal that they care but consider it too boring to give something that is actually useful.
And who either don't care or understand or who secretly enjoy that they are forcing the receivers' hands into making a fool of themselves out of politeness.
ffmpeg and mplayer support aalib and/or libcaca, so you can watch your favorite movie in ascii art, if you wish so (you can find lot of examples on youtube, though I couldn't fine one worth sharing)
You can only say that because of the astonishing improvements to MP3 encoding over the past fifteen years. Back in 2003 when Apple opened the iTunes Store, AAC was substantially better than MP3 at all bitrates, most particularly the 128 kbps rate Apple initially used.
In fact the decision would have been made back in 2001 or earlier, given that the original iPod released in 2001 supported AAC decoding.
(The music labels also forced Apple to encrypt everything, therefore there was no incentive to use an open format. Had they used encrypted Vorbis, that would have been seen as a giant middle finger to open source.)
I don't think the iPod supported AAC at its initial release. Virtually no software supported it at that time -- that didn't really come until 2003, when iTunes 3.0 added support for AAC (including encoding). The Music Store was introduced in the same release, so there would have been a required software update for iPods at the same time, to add support for Fairplay encrypted files.
Aac is higher quality on all bitrates, it's a much more modern codec utilizing techniques not available in mp3. Using MP3 should be discouraged, it kills hihat clarity and low bass for example.
There is no chicken-and-egg problem because the OS already does color management to map your source color space (sRGB, mostly) to your target monitor's color space. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to view sRGB content correctly on wide-gamut monitors, for example.
The real challenge is in developing display backlight and phosphor technology to reproduce colors outside of the standard gamuts.
No, there’s a very serious chicken-and-egg problem. The gamut of RGB displays (televisions, projectors, computer and smartphone displays, etc.) has some parts which are very wide and other parts which are very limited. All content produced in the past 20 years expects to be displayed on such displays. If you increase the intensity of the existing “RGB” (orangish-red R, yellowish-green G, purplish-blue B) primaries, you get a display with a substantially similar gamut to existing displays, but with an ability to make certain colors marginally more intense. This is easy for content authors to target using existing workflows, and even potentially possible to adapt existing content for without too much disruption.
If you invent a new type of display with a radically different color gamut, and then take existing content and amp up the intensity on hue/value regions with a newly wider gamut, you throw off all of the content creators intentions for color relationships. Total non-starter.
What you can do is show old content about the same as it was on past displays, but then there’s not really any advantage to going with the new technology, which is typically going to be more difficult and expensive to produce. A new display needs new content in order to work differently from past displays.
(Believe me: I have spent years studying human vision and color reproduction technologies. I’m not just making this up.)
If you’re curious about the topic of gamut mapping in general, I recommend this 300-page book, http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047003032... The gamut mapping algorithms used in most common software systems (e.g. Adobe Photoshop) are actually quite poor.
Or I can have the candidate code with me for an hour during the interview, and save $100. They get to ask me questions about the problem directly, and I can see where they are struggling, and how they debug (trial and error? Google/SO?)
