A few refurb SanDisk Sansa Fuze or Clip players and an assortment of 2GB to 8GB uSD cards fills the need to enjoy FLAC based CD-quality music on-the-go. No, you don't need Rockbox (alternative firmware). Native vendor firmware plays 44KHz/16-bit/2-channel FLAC without issue. Labeling uSD cards is a little tricky, and for that task I'll cut an Avery 6737 label in half and write using an ultra-fine (0.5mm) tip pen. After a few insertion cycles of the storage card, the label settles enough that it does not bind on the socket. All of my music is stored and labeled this way and fits in an Altoids tin. Duplicity encrypted backups are stored offline on 1TB or 2TB rotational platter drives. The upfront cost of this setup is about equal or less than what I paid in the 1990's for a used portable CD player, NiCad batteries, and CD case storage.

What I would like to see (as a consumer) is the wider adoption of 96KHz/24-bit FLAC playback capability on portable devices. CD quality isn't good enough for me to justify paying more than the cost of a local live show for it. I can barely notice the difference between CD-quality and a higher resolution signal, but I -do- notice the difference. I.e most people do not notice when they crank up the volume of a player beyond the line input level of a stereo system, and I do know this, it is grating to my hearing and detrimental to enjoying music. Worst yet about our economy today of buying and selling music, most of this music is damaged by the compression methods to the point where not many people can tell the difference anymore. It all sounds like shit at playback no matter what you do to it.

Try:

The Gathering
Mono (instrumental group from Japan)
Captain Beefheart
Frank Zappa
Nathan Fake
Mew / And the glass handed kites (album)
Muse
Radiohead
ELP

and there's always Brian Eno / Mike Oldfield, but honestly I haven't got the patience for it.

To be fair you should probably give Sonic Youth a listen; Musically brilliant and "recent", though not anything similar to Pink Floyd.

I've heard Coldplay is similar to Pink Floyd, just kidding.

[x] Apply memes

A) ...as the prince of Bel-Air.

B) I see what you did there.

C) It's over 9000

Mod parent up!

When I travel nowadays I'm increasingly worried that some effect of mine will not pass muster at a security checkpoint. My options would be:
1. Do not take that flight
2. Hand over the item to TSA douchebags
3. Pay extra to check the item

It's enough to discourage me from plane travel.

I do work at a cinema. Your "friend" is talking fantasy. The standard for years past and years to come is and will continue to be Film. Who would have access to a full color movie-capable scanning laser projection system? I can find no evidence to support the claim that any audience in cinematic history has had their faces BURNED from laser projection, not even to say that this has ever existed in a cinema.
For those curious about what the !@#$ top poster is going on about and how the Microvision scanning laser projection technology relates to cinema...
Maintaining a cinema projector lamp house light source is MUCH LESS expensive for equal hours in operation than the light source for a consumer LCD or DLP projector. It's also much more incredibly bright than anything on the consumer market. Theaters will not be interested in the Microvision technology for showing their movies, because it will not be bright enough and you would inherit all the annoying problems of having a digital print anyways.
Film is preferred over Digital because you can pick up a film in a multiplex and move it between booths and platter systems quite readily. Being able to readily move a print around is how you maximize profits... are there really any kids awake at a 9pm showing to go see the latest Disney movie about talking cats and superhero hamsters? Adding lasers into the picture doesn't offer anything lucrative even at a Theater set up for digital projection.
Theaters using film projectors often use a consumer projector for on-screen advertising, and so the Microvision technology looks pretty good for this if it is bright enough to fill the screen (from a pretty long throw distance). It doesn't have to be high definition or anything, just watchable and cost less than the existing gear to maintain. Digital equipped theaters would still use their cinema projectors to display advertising because it is cheaper to do so.
The Microvision technology will primarily appeal to the home theater market segment, where enthusiasts are paying much higher costs than real cinemas to maintain their projection system light source. After the SHOW WX gains momentum as a first generation product, expect to see this technology compete with consumer projection systems, and to become invasive just as the camera has on cell phones and media devices.

With a simple firmware update to the latest and greatest from SanDisk, your Sansa Fuze and/or Sansa Clip get manufacturer sanctioned support for ReplayGain-capable FLAC and Vorbis.

I've owned a Clip, and now a Fuze. These are my "go to" devices, I confidently recommend them for the minority of portable media player consumers who don't want an iPod.

If you don't like the firmware on the Clip or Fuze, you can be a nerd and compile and use a work-in-progress version of Rockbox alternative firmware. It works quite well on the Fuze, and I'm not sure about the Clip. I think the SanDisk firmware is equivalent-or-better than a mostly-functioning Rockbox build. Fanatics insist that Rockbox will work on their portable media player purchase... okay choice is nice, but I am happy with the vendor firmware support of FLAC and Ogg Vorbis.

I consider Vorbis to be dead-on-arrival codec for music sales. The way storage prices go, and Sansa player compatibility, I've shifted toward buying CDs for archival as FLAC/cue. What's the point of buying music in Vorbis format?

The real strength of Vorbis is in games development. Avoiding a license fee by using a free format like Vorbis is a huge win for Rockstar Games in example, where Ogg Vorbis is used for all the game music... or at least that's how I remember it.

The "win" for the FLAC format is driven not by it being the most efficient. Its popularity is driven by being good enough, nearly first in availability, being stable and having few restrictions to implement (leading to wider user base). You can't say it sounds better than the competitors, it was in the right place at the right time.

Theora is late to the scene as a general video storage format. The encoder is not (yet) fine-tuned, and so it isn't good enough. There are few restrictions but development is on-going, which loses out to existing and stable "good enough" implementations of other standards (xvid, x264, flv container). There is no on-going format war because whatever DRM-free format Apple (as a consumer acceptance monopoly) chooses will be the new de facto portable media format. The only door that can be left open is if Apple rejects ALL non-DRM format playback, which hasn't happened yet.

Vorbis and Theora share the fate of being ignored or unwanted by the majority iPod-using crowd.

Behind the scenes, Dirac (a freely licensed non-Xiph video codec) is posing a huge win as a video archival format. Its use offers clear advantages to broadcasting operations. The demand is there for support on big-ticket editing equipment.

I observe that FLAC and Dirac are to be successful, while Vorbis and Theora reap gradual improvements along the way. Improvements in Theora encoding alone are not enough to make it a competitor to h264. You're just going to have to cheer along with everyone else who want a low to medium bandwidth video codec that is simply "good enough", but without the irksome licensing restrictions.

Embedded streaming audio and video playback on the "web" do offer opportunity for Theora and Vorbis ubiquity. It's the only market cornered by a standards body (W3C) that might actually enable player acceptance comparable to the size of the iPod user base.