Slashdot Mirror
iTMS Named Fortune's Product Of The Year
Demolition writes "To go along with Time Magazine calling the iTunes Music Store the Invention Of The Year, Fortune Magazine has come along and proclaimed iTunes Music Store as the Product Of The Year. As it says in the article, 'With the success of its iTunes Music Store, Apple is almost single-handedly dragging the music industry, kicking and screaming, toward a better future.'" Also, Fortune named the G5 one of the 25 Best Products of the Year for Design.
It's a damn fine product... spawned almost as many ripoffs as the iPod itself. Plus, it has the opportunity to make money if the RIAA is cut out. I mean, there's no reason that iTMS can't offer indie music as well, and then they'd be getting higher margins on the indie music, so Apple'd push it more than the RIAA tained sh**. In short, iTMS is a great product. Stable, visually attractive, functional, not DRM crippled (I'll accept iTMS's level of DRM), wide variety of music available... need I go on?
#define DRM chmod 000
Apparently some artists don't agree. Many are arguing that people will pay one or two dollars for only one or two songs from an album, instead of buying the whole thing. But then again, why should we go to a store and pay for an entire album when we only want a few?
Bullshit. Napster didn't prove they weren't inclined to pay for it, even if people wanted to legitimately purchase music downloads, they couldn't.
Napster proved the demand for downloadable music exists. I like iTMS. I use iTMS. I give jobs credit for convincing the suits, not for a prodcust or invention of the year.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I think Napster must be sinking. I received spams from them offering several free tracks if I were to sign back up with them.
...
I tried out napster for a few days. I felt it was a pathetic attempt at copying the iTMS. Things were sorted incorrectly and information was scattered around making it almost impossible to find anything I really wanted. And to top it off they're spamming me
dude, there's shitloads of great music for free, legally.
.mod/.xm/.s3m/.sid/.stm/.it all day long and enjoying it. if rips of commercial songs weren't available i would listen to the free ones, i would not go out and buy just more cd's. i don't NEED music industrys songs, in fact i wish they would crack down with some magic(that doesn't exist) and stopped distribution of commercial music on internet as it would give the independent artists doing it for the fun of it much more exposure than what they get now.
there were before mp3's as well, if there weren't mp3's i'd still be listening to
that's what pisses me off about the "but without money from records nobody would create music!!" comments, it's proven to be false. you don't need to be doing it full time, and if you do you're much more probable to be better off doing gigs(as most are). maybe there wouldn't be ghetto dreams about stardom and fast cars and drive by shooting rivaling labels artists, but that would just be an added _bonus_. riaa(that is, recording companies and local equivalents in other regions) act like you couldn't live without them. if you want a living from music, go get some music education and become a music teacher(that's the most probable way you end up really living off from music).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
there is just something about iTMS, that i like.
it's seems very integrated, easy and hassle-free!
sure, i haven't actually purchased a song through it, since it is currently not available in canada.
but, i have browsed though it and taken advantage of the preview feature a few times.
i hope the doors open in canada for iTMS soon... before i have to pay a levy on my digital media too!! see
Cant wait to see how they will deal with international expansion of this great "invention". After all, if 99c per track is a good deal in the US, it is a lousy deal in countries with a weak currency and lower income, such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, etc...
In general recorded audio and video material will be price adjusted to reflect differences in local purchasing power. For example, the Lion King Special Edition VHS goes for US$ 20.99 in the US. In Brazil the same *legit* product goes for about one third of that price (R$ 24.60 which is worth US$ 8.40 in today's exchange rate).
This difference in pricing has to be done in order to "milk" different local markets, each with a different pricing point requirement. This is, after all, the motivation behing the DVD region coding scheme (not realease dates, mind you).
Now, it will be interesting to see an internet site selling buckets of bits for different prices depending on where (it thinks) you physically are, won't it. Of course they could leave the third world to be served solely by that most efficient institution, the pirate market.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Then how did I buy Rhapsody In Blue (13:44 long) individually?
I'm posting this anonymously, sorry.
I got a band I will not mention listed in Itunes. The parent poster is morose for the wrong reasons.
Try it. Apple, surprisingly, is not all that horrible to deal with. Only moderately horrible.
That is convienience, not time overall.
Most Americans are horrible at "time and efficiency" analysis of their own lives, generally "saving" seconds at the cost of later hours and for no particular purpose.
Much as they the gambler thinks he "won" ten bucks on the lottery the other night and ignores the five hundred he spent to become a "winner."
People who sell convienience make a good living off of this tendency. You spend money to avoid irritation, not save time, and don't even count the time you have spend to earn that money into the equation.
It does not take you only two minutes to download a song. You are not counting your losses, such as the time to fire up the app and find the song.
Your milage may vary, of course, but in my case (and in the case of most Americans I would posit)even if I have to make a special trip to the store (open 24/7) for music I'm there inside of ten minutes by bicycle and can do my grocery shopping in the same store while I'm at it, thus saving the time I would have otherwise spent on the special trip to the grocery store.
Or, conversely, I can go do my grocery shopping and pick up several CDs of music at no more expense in time than it takes to toss them into my cart and the additional time it takes to ring them up while ringing up my groceries.
No, I'm afraid that, overall, what you save isn't so much time as it is saving having to move your butt out of your chair. Which is a different issue, and which, in all likelyhood, you have to move anyway to earn the money, so just stop at the music store you pass on your way home from work.
Saving irritation ( and needing to have it now is an issue of irritation, not time)is not the same thing as saving time and/or money, and more often than not must be payed for with greater irritation and money later.
KFG
Artists haven't got the money? Bullshit! Madonna could start one herself (and this is not an endoresment of the bitch, just pointing out that she's got a lot of money).
MC Hammer (associating this name with the word "artist" is admittedly a reach) could have done it easily except his dumb ass felt that he needed an "entourage", several houses, enough jewelry to tip the planet out of it's orbit, and a car collection first.
They're just two of many who've had the chance to start something like this but instead they get the bucks and say (mostly) "fuck the ones that didn't". Their stories can be seen weekly on VH1's "Behind the Music".
Many successful artists could do this and should do this long before it becomes Apple's responsibility. Let the relative handful who actually made more bank than they can spend start an artist friendly label that gets more money to the person who created the work. Apple will be doing fine to sell the product and get it's (more than fair) share.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I've set up two of these in a very quiet conference room. When running normally, they barely make a peep. When the monitor is asleep, you wouldn't even be able to tell it was on without the power light on the front panel.
When the G5 is in target disk mode, however, the fan control software does not load. The fans start faster than normal and rather quickly ramp up to full speed-- presumably that is a fail-safe in the hardware. When those fans are going full blast, you can feel the air moving for quite an impressive distance behind the G5.
As for whether that many fans is overkill or not, look at it this way: Apple's previous Power Mac case form factor was in use since 1999 (about 4.5 years). With the G5 enclosure, I think it appears overengineered to us now but was designed with an eye toward housing future CPUs in years to come-- CPUs that will really need all that cooling capability.
~Philly
Partially correct. The record companies don't 'give' tons of money to potential bands. They lend it to them against future sales. So if your band gets signed and puts out an album that doesn't sell, you are on the hook for the money that they lent you to produce the album and tour to support it. The sad part is that some times great albums get put out but never pushed by the label. So the artist ends up worse off then when they started and no one really gets to hear the music.
The design of the G5 is to use two fans in each zone, one gently blowing, one gently sucking. The result is that you're never slamming air against a wall, which is actually where a lot of the fan noise come from.
The 2.0ghz G5 chip consumes97 watts of power
From a cursory investigation, a Pentium IV seems to take between 60 and 100 watts
As to whether its revolutionary, I doubt it - its just solid engineering without concern with having to fit old form factor bits into the box. (PeeCees have much more homogenous designs, since Macs always come from a single vendor.)
how are you finding the noise level? Do you find that the fans ramp up very often, and if they do, do you notice a big difference in volume?
The G5 is dramatically less noisy than the G4 (mirrored doors). The fans on my single-processor 1.8GHz model almost never run fast enough to notice, or even hear, during use. When the machine wakes from sleep, the fans do spin up for a moment to the point that they sound like, well, fans. But then they slow down again and get plenty quiet. And the fans also run quite a lot when the machine is in FireWire disk mode (for those that don't know, most Macs can start up in a mode where they function as external FireWire disk drives). In disk mode, the fans start off fairly quiet and eventually increase to what must be their maximum speed (and noise level). Other than waking from sleep and disk mode, though, I hardly hear the G5. Same goes for my buddy's dual processor 2.0GHz G5.
Are we likely to see the "multiple zone" principle copied into cheap Wintel enclosures?
The three zone cooling system seems to work really well. As described above, the fans don't seem to need to spin very fast to move enough air through the machine to cool the processor(s) withouth making much noise. I'd guess that the G5 processor produces less heat than a Pentium, as I've always understood that the Pentium is a significantly larger chip than any of the PPC chips. But I could be wrong. Take a look at the power consumption figures for each to get a better idea.
As for whether you'll see this sort of cooling system in Wintel machines, I'd say it's a definite maybe. As soon as you pop the side panel off a G5, you realize that machine is one very carefully designed unit. The entire front and rear panels serve as air intake and exhaust panels, respectively, and the processors and their very large heat sinks are placed at the constriction in the middle, so that air flows quickly over them. To make this work, a manufacturer has to be able to control the case design, placement of components, heat sink design, fans, etc. You can't just design a case with mesh front and back panels and slap in any motherboard. I don't think most Wintel buyers are willing to pay for that much design. A few desktop makers like maybe Sony could probably pull it off. More likely, I think you might see this sort of design appear in higher end machines like servers.
There's a lot more about the G5 design that's elegant than just the case. For example, the top hard disk drive mounts up inside the case in a position where it can't slide straight out. It looks at first like it could be a problem to get that drive out, but in fact the guide rails that hold the drive just drop the drive down, and it pops out with no problem. You can remove most of the components without tools. The side panel makes an incredibly satisfying 'click' when you press it into place. The case can be locked closed with a padlock, but the hasp for the lock folds down under the latch when you're not using it, so that it doesn't spoil the clean, flat look of the back. The power button is significantly improved over the G4.
In short, the G5 is probably the best designed machine Apple has produced in years, maybe ever. I wish Apple would get the G5 design team to build a car!