Doesnt' surprise me. There is a whole eco-system of iPod accessory manufacturers. Just think about anyone who has bought an iPod and has all this associated stuff they spent good money on (cases, FM transmitters, chargers, cables, socks) and how none of that stuff is made for the Zune.

Zune has to give a really compelling reason to switch... right now I've seen a lot of "competitive" with iPod but it needs to blow iPod away before people will ditch their iPods. Myself definitely included.

My iPod's file system has been corrupted a few times. You should be able to reformat and have it reload your iTunes library. Just plug it in and select the device when it appears on the left pane in iTunes. While looking at the device details there should be an option, I think it's second from the top, to "restore" it, which just wipes the file system block and allows you to reload it. HTH.

You might have to hard-reset your iPod if it's really messed up, you just hold certain buttons or something (I forget which ones, easy enough to look-up online).

Oh and rebooting the computer with the iPod attached isn't going to do anything to do anything bad to it...

The first time I saw an iPod vending machine was this past summer at the Las Vegas Hilton. It surprised me, but also made sense. With the rise in popularity of Casino poker, many people bring their iPod with them to listen at the table. Still though, what songs are you going to put on it? You don't have your computer with you!

"The Zune is definitely going to have an uphill battle for mindshare. It's from the same folks who brought us XBox so they've gone up against a deeply entrenched incumbent in the personal electronics game before. "

And...uh...taken second place...

I'm curious to see how Zune does. I have a 1GB Creative MuVo Slim that I'm reasonably happy with. Happy enough that I probably won't buy another DAP until it breaks. I chose it over the far more popular iPod primarily because I didn't want to be locked into iTunes for purchasing music and I wanted to be reasonably sure that my purchased music library would be transferrable to other devices (potentially from other manufacturers) when I changed devices. Zune has these exact same issues so I'm really not sure what I'm going to do when my Slim fails, hopefully I have a good deal of time yet to figure that out.

As for the Xbox experience they still haven't gotten to number one there (even now, prior to the PS3 release, I believe the PS2 still outsells the Xbox360 and it WAY too early to call a winner vs. the PS3 though they have a good start.) I'm not entirely confident that there will be an Xbox360 + 2 whereas unless Sony goes bankrupt I'm far more certain that there will be a PS5+. Similarly I'm not entirely confident there will be a Zune + 2 and MS just dropping the MSN Music store shows their strong devotion to the formats where they don't win outright. Locking myself into a proprietary DRM from a company that doesn't continue to support it's products doesn't seem like a good idea to me at the moment.