But wildly inaccurate for mine. I have just over 20k miles on my Camry Hybrid, and I've never seen results as low as these new figures. I've gotten 40 MPG on longer trips, and 38-39 in my usual mix of highway and around-town driving.
The credit card fee is only significant if you buy a single song. From what I remember reading back at the opening of the iTMS, Apple bundles all your purchases over a certain period (24 hours?) into a single credit card charge. Or maybe it's just single tracks they handle that way. But the point is that they take a hit on people who buy only one track and make up for it on those who buy several tracks over the course of a day. It offers both convenience for us and economy for them, unlike Microsoft's approach.
One small point: the pyrotechnic pickup incident was neither CBS nor 20/20, which is in any event an ABC program. That particular event occurred on Dateline NBC, coincidentally enough an NBC program. It was a very early episode of that program and was apologized for by the producers who claim that it was done entirely without their knowledge or consent.
Which is not to say that 60 Minutes gets everything right every time or that it doesn't choose stories for their "gotcha" entertainment value. But they have done and continue to do good journalism alongside their puff pieces. And that mix of hard and soft stories has been a component of the show from the beginning.
Actually, it goes back a little further. The first incarnation was Pizzatool, a NeWS (Postscript GUI) application that did a graphical display of the toppings as you selected them and then placed an order with Tony & Alba.
"The Sci Fi Channel has decided to continue the Farscape series in the form of a miniseries,
Uh, no. Henson and Hallmark decided to continue the series and got funding to produce the miniseries. That all happened last November, or at least that's when word began to leak out and was later confirmed (unofficially but with plenty of nods and winks) at the Farscape convention in Burbank. What's new is that Sci Fi will be the broadcaster for the mini, which is already in post production. The quoted line makes it sound like Sci Fi reconsidered its decision to cancel the series, which gives them way more credit than the facts warrant.
Legal? You mean because it's in Russia and possibly beyond the reach of American and European law? Something isn't legal just because it hasn't been caught yet.
When something sounds too good to be true, it's likely because it is in fact too good to be true. $.86 an album may pay for bandwidth; it certainly isn't paying for the musicians. And much (most?) of the content they're offering is owned by the major labels, who are surely not receiving what they've contracted to receive.
After a quick look around allofmp3.com I can only conclude that they're hoping to make their pile before somebody manages to shut them down. And then they can pop up somewhere else.
The only differences between these guys and P2P are that they're better organized. And they charge you. But legal? Don't make me laugh.
Exactly. A lot of comments here and in related articles about "this store will win!" based on its policies and (lack of) DRM ignore this important fact: it's about the product as well as the shopping experience. I went to Magnatune and spent a lot of time listening. But the only disc I bought was a Lara St. John classical. There was a fair amount of interesting music but nothing else that grabbed me enough to get my hardly earned dollars. Whereas I've been buying two albums a week at iTMS.
Magnatune has a nice model and a fine implementation. Now they just need more content I like.
is that it's cheaper than the normal iPod, and 4gig is enough disk space for most people
Don't underestimate the size and weight. After shlepping an original iPod around for the past two years, I really appreciate the Mini. And I'm willing to bet I'm not alone.
I wouldn't say the response was universally negative. Yeah, there was a vocal bunch who were upset at the price, especially after all the rumors had it cheaper by at least $50. And others who didn't like the $ per GB calculation. Me, I thought it was an interesting product. And I wanted to see one for real before I knew what I thought.
When I did get to see, touch and listen to a Mini, I wanted it. And that's in spite of having a mostly full 20 GB generation two model. So when I couldn't get one at an Apple Store, I put my order in.
My iPod Mini (blue) arrived a week ago. It's been with me ever since. So here's one Slashdotter who thinks Apple's done it again. Not that I won't be happy with a little more storage...
The "limited" supply is because no one, not even Apple, wants overstock on a cool product that no one will buy.
Well, not exactly. If Apple and Hitachi are to be believed, the limited supply is because Hitachi is still ramping up production on the 4GB drives. Apple's using every one they can get. Apple could probably find contract manufacturing space for every component of the Mini but that one.
As the old saying goes, "For want of a nail the horse was lost..."
I stopped carrying my 20GB iPod the moment my Mini arrived. Smart Playlists make it easy to have hours of songs I haven't listened to recently and to update the mix every time I'm back at my computer. And much as I might like having access to my entire collection, the size and weight of the Mini are big advantages. I'll carry the big one on trips. But for day to day, the Mini's more than good enough.
First, it is platform-neutral for browsing. I was able to look at the selection and search from Linux. iTMS rquires iTunes, which is only for Mac and Windows. BuyMusic.com is brower-based, but stupidly checks specifically for IE.
Great. So Mac and Linux people can browse. Can we buy, should we be so inclined? And most importantly, can we actually use what we've purchased? For that last, I'm pretty sure the answer is no. That DRMed WMA music requires a version of WMP that doesn't exist on Linux. And I'm not certain it'll work on the Mac version of WMP.
I think I'll stick with iTMS, thank you very much. Oh, and Magnitune, if they have music I like. No DRM at all; how civilized is that!
Actually that brings up an interesting question, must you pay sales tax if you live in a state which has an Apple Computer Store?
No. At least Apple hasn't charged sales tax on any of my iTMS purchases. I'm guessing this qualfies as as service rather than a product for tax purposes.
Not me. Even if they were the only outlet that had it. (And when is that ever the truth?) I don't go back to stores that have service policies that offend me. And when a case this blatant comes up, how can you even consider doing business with them? Especially knowing that if you were the victim of burglary, they would be happy to help the burglar fence your property?
Given all the outlets that carry the same products as EB, it's no effort at all to avoid them. And even if it did cost me something, I'd feel the same way.
Your mistake is in thinking of a watch as a delivery engine for a service: the time. Or perhaps I should say that your mistake is in thinking that your friend does or should see it that way. A $3000 watch is a piece of jewelry. And like any other piece of jewelry, its value is in its rarity, its beauty, the sense of style it imparts on the wearer and, yes, its cost.
Just because it has a practical function doesn't mean it's all about its function. An expensive mechanical watch is likely less accurate than a much less costly quartz watch. But the fact that so much effort goes into it is part of the appeal of a mechanical watch. The same applies to a beautiful fountain pen. Some of us think that artistry and craftmanship elevate functional art into their own league.
I'm not much for Rolexes. But I'll gladly pay more for a Movado or a Raymond Weil or a Tag instead of a cheap digital.
Groucho also said, when told that he couldn't use a club's swimming pool because the club was restricted, that his daughter was only half Jewish, so could she go in up to her knees?
not a good idea. you forget that Bush's interests are very much on the "for-profit" side of things.
Yeah, we can't expect Bush & co. to pay any attention to the needs of socialist gangs like IBM or HP.
Let's face it: this isn't just SCO vs. a bunch of counterculture coders. It's SCO against some of the biggest names in the business world.
Re:iPod mini will be available next month
on
No WMA for HP iPod
·
· Score: 1
Sure, that's two months. This month and next month; that's two.
Believe it or not, I knew a Marketing VP who claimed that an Engineering veep had taken two months to get some data he needed. In fact, it had taken two weeks. But he tried to justify his remark the way I did above. The only difference is that he was serious.
As others have said, AAC with Fairplay is no more closed a standard than WMV. Apple controls one, Microsoft controls the other. Unless you buy the argument that "Microsoft = standard = open", which I don't. Besides, there's the issue of what each format allows you to do. Apple's approach is far less restrictive than WMV. And far more consistent; every track has the same restrictions. That's not true of WMV, where each label seems to have a different set of rules.
But there's something else driving the success of iTMS vs. Walmart and all the other guys: convenience. Having the interface of iTMS embedded into iTunes allows Apple to provide a simple and elegant way to choose, purchase and download tracks. No web interface can be half as good. As I understand it (being a Mac user, I can't very this), to buy an album on Walmart's store requires downloading each track individually. Sure makes you want to load up, doesn't it?
Interesting typo; you mean "per capita". But I suspect you're right. India's problem is that it has plenty of Doctorates but not a lot of capital. Kind of a problem when you try to tackle projects of this magnitude.
Ah, but it's consistent as hell. The AP is every bit as arrogant as he accuses his former coworkers of being. The difference is that he's also blind.
I worked at Sun for a bunch of years. And I'd hire a Sun employee in a minute if he or she demonstrated the right skills and the right attitude for the role. I've known folks who were hard working, cooperative and capable. I've also known egomaniacs who were way too busy kissing management behind to worry about anything else. And maybe a few too many of the latter made their way up the hierarchy for the company's good.
I think you're confusing two issues here. The issue in the 2000 Florida election was one of improperly marked ballots: punches in the wrong place, in too many places or only partly in place (the dimpled and hanging chads from punches that didn't go all the way through). So the reason to lose the punch cards for voting is that they were complicated, leading to votes not being counted or ballots being rejected due to multiple votes for the same office.
So let's accept for the moment the idea that punch card ballots are bad. I do accept this, but if you don't, pretend you do for the moment. Now consider the problem with their replacement: the touch screen system.
In a touch screen system, you touch to indicate your choices and then touch again to indicate that your choices are the ones you meant to make. You register on the machine that it accepted your vote precisely the way you intended.
What happens then? Without a paper trail, you are taking it completely on faith that the machine transferred your instructions accurately into its memory, that the votes for that machine were transferred accurately to the machine that collects up the votes from the local machines and so on down the line. At any point from the voting machine to the final tally, you have no confidence that somebody didn't play with the software or with the numbers. And if there's belief that there's a problem, there is absolutely no way to determine whether or not the final tally reflects the actions of the voters.
The idea of a paper trail is to have each individual vote written to a paper receipt. The receipt drops into a window, so the individual voter can examine it and verify that it reports their vote accurately (i.e. matches what the machine said they did). Once the voter has said that yes, the receipt is accurate, the machine drops it into a locked box, just as the punch cards are kept in a locked box today. And if there's any question about the vote, all these paper receipts can be collected and tallied, whether by hand or by some kind of optical scanner. And we can have some confidence that the numbers reported by the machines are in sync with what the individual voters saw on their paper receipts.
My point again is that the problems with the paper ballots in the past were with the methods of marking those ballots and their layouts. (Remember Palm County's butterfly ballots?) Those problems go away with a well designed voting machine. But now we have a lack of a paper trail of any kind.
As an aside, I'm sure the lack of a paper trail in the new voting machines was a way for the manufacturers to save money/offer local governments a lower bid. The paper trail should have been in the original RFP. That it wasn't shows the incompetence of those who set up the bid process.
Slashdot Mirror
But wildly inaccurate for mine. I have just over 20k miles on my Camry Hybrid, and I've never seen results as low as these new figures. I've gotten 40 MPG on longer trips, and 38-39 in my usual mix of highway and around-town driving.
The credit card fee is only significant if you buy a single song. From what I remember reading back at the opening of the iTMS, Apple bundles all your purchases over a certain period (24 hours?) into a single credit card charge. Or maybe it's just single tracks they handle that way. But the point is that they take a hit on people who buy only one track and make up for it on those who buy several tracks over the course of a day. It offers both convenience for us and economy for them, unlike Microsoft's approach.
As usual Americans expect all their laws to be applied to all countries....
I assume that the Disability Discrimination Act is British. We Americans have the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act.
One small point: the pyrotechnic pickup incident was neither CBS nor 20/20, which is in any event an ABC program. That particular event occurred on Dateline NBC, coincidentally enough an NBC program. It was a very early episode of that program and was apologized for by the producers who claim that it was done entirely without their knowledge or consent.
Which is not to say that 60 Minutes gets everything right every time or that it doesn't choose stories for their "gotcha" entertainment value. But they have done and continue to do good journalism alongside their puff pieces. And that mix of hard and soft stories has been a component of the show from the beginning.
Actually, it goes back a little further. The first incarnation was Pizzatool, a NeWS (Postscript GUI) application that did a graphical display of the toppings as you selected them and then placed an order with Tony & Alba.
"The Sci Fi Channel has decided to continue the Farscape series in the form of a miniseries,
Uh, no. Henson and Hallmark decided to continue the series and got funding to produce the miniseries. That all happened last November, or at least that's when word began to leak out and was later confirmed (unofficially but with plenty of nods and winks) at the Farscape convention in Burbank. What's new is that Sci Fi will be the broadcaster for the mini, which is already in post production. The quoted line makes it sound like Sci Fi reconsidered its decision to cancel the series, which gives them way more credit than the facts warrant.
Legal? You mean because it's in Russia and possibly beyond the reach of American and European law? Something isn't legal just because it hasn't been caught yet.
When something sounds too good to be true, it's likely because it is in fact too good to be true. $.86 an album may pay for bandwidth; it certainly isn't paying for the musicians. And much (most?) of the content they're offering is owned by the major labels, who are surely not receiving what they've contracted to receive.
After a quick look around allofmp3.com I can only conclude that they're hoping to make their pile before somebody manages to shut them down. And then they can pop up somewhere else.
The only differences between these guys and P2P are that they're better organized. And they charge you. But legal? Don't make me laugh.
Exactly. A lot of comments here and in related articles about "this store will win!" based on its policies and (lack of) DRM ignore this important fact: it's about the product as well as the shopping experience. I went to Magnatune and spent a lot of time listening. But the only disc I bought was a Lara St. John classical. There was a fair amount of interesting music but nothing else that grabbed me enough to get my hardly earned dollars. Whereas I've been buying two albums a week at iTMS.
Magnatune has a nice model and a fine implementation. Now they just need more content I like.
is that it's cheaper than the normal iPod, and 4gig is enough disk space for most people
Don't underestimate the size and weight. After shlepping an original iPod around for the past two years, I really appreciate the Mini. And I'm willing to bet I'm not alone.
I wouldn't say the response was universally negative. Yeah, there was a vocal bunch who were upset at the price, especially after all the rumors had it cheaper by at least $50. And others who didn't like the $ per GB calculation. Me, I thought it was an interesting product. And I wanted to see one for real before I knew what I thought.
When I did get to see, touch and listen to a Mini, I wanted it. And that's in spite of having a mostly full 20 GB generation two model. So when I couldn't get one at an Apple Store, I put my order in.
My iPod Mini (blue) arrived a week ago. It's been with me ever since. So here's one Slashdotter who thinks Apple's done it again. Not that I won't be happy with a little more storage...
The "limited" supply is because no one, not even Apple, wants overstock on a cool product that no one will buy.
Well, not exactly. If Apple and Hitachi are to be believed, the limited supply is because Hitachi is still ramping up production on the 4GB drives. Apple's using every one they can get. Apple could probably find contract manufacturing space for every component of the Mini but that one.
As the old saying goes, "For want of a nail the horse was lost..."
I stopped carrying my 20GB iPod the moment my Mini arrived. Smart Playlists make it easy to have hours of songs I haven't listened to recently and to update the mix every time I'm back at my computer. And much as I might like having access to my entire collection, the size and weight of the Mini are big advantages. I'll carry the big one on trips. But for day to day, the Mini's more than good enough.
First, it is platform-neutral for browsing. I was able to look at the selection and search from Linux. iTMS rquires iTunes, which is only for Mac and Windows. BuyMusic.com is brower-based, but stupidly checks specifically for IE.
Great. So Mac and Linux people can browse. Can we buy, should we be so inclined? And most importantly, can we actually use what we've purchased? For that last, I'm pretty sure the answer is no. That DRMed WMA music requires a version of WMP that doesn't exist on Linux. And I'm not certain it'll work on the Mac version of WMP.
I think I'll stick with iTMS, thank you very much. Oh, and Magnitune, if they have music I like. No DRM at all; how civilized is that!
Actually that brings up an interesting question, must you pay sales tax if you live in a state which has an Apple Computer Store?
No. At least Apple hasn't charged sales tax on any of my iTMS purchases. I'm guessing this qualfies as as service rather than a product for tax purposes.
But this is actually old news. Reading the article carefully reveals that these particular letters were sent back in December.
Not me. Even if they were the only outlet that had it. (And when is that ever the truth?) I don't go back to stores that have service policies that offend me. And when a case this blatant comes up, how can you even consider doing business with them? Especially knowing that if you were the victim of burglary, they would be happy to help the burglar fence your property?
Given all the outlets that carry the same products as EB, it's no effort at all to avoid them. And even if it did cost me something, I'd feel the same way.
Your mistake is in thinking of a watch as a delivery engine for a service: the time. Or perhaps I should say that your mistake is in thinking that your friend does or should see it that way. A $3000 watch is a piece of jewelry. And like any other piece of jewelry, its value is in its rarity, its beauty, the sense of style it imparts on the wearer and, yes, its cost.
Just because it has a practical function doesn't mean it's all about its function. An expensive mechanical watch is likely less accurate than a much less costly quartz watch. But the fact that so much effort goes into it is part of the appeal of a mechanical watch. The same applies to a beautiful fountain pen. Some of us think that artistry and craftmanship elevate functional art into their own league.
I'm not much for Rolexes. But I'll gladly pay more for a Movado or a Raymond Weil or a Tag instead of a cheap digital.
Groucho also said, when told that he couldn't use a club's swimming pool because the club was restricted, that his daughter was only half Jewish, so could she go in up to her knees?
not a good idea. you forget that Bush's interests are very much on the "for-profit" side of things.
Yeah, we can't expect Bush & co. to pay any attention to the needs of socialist gangs like IBM or HP.
Let's face it: this isn't just SCO vs. a bunch of counterculture coders. It's SCO against some of the biggest names in the business world.
Sure, that's two months. This month and next month; that's two.
Believe it or not, I knew a Marketing VP who claimed that an Engineering veep had taken two months to get some data he needed. In fact, it had taken two weeks. But he tried to justify his remark the way I did above. The only difference is that he was serious.
As others have said, AAC with Fairplay is no more closed a standard than WMV. Apple controls one, Microsoft controls the other. Unless you buy the argument that "Microsoft = standard = open", which I don't. Besides, there's the issue of what each format allows you to do. Apple's approach is far less restrictive than WMV. And far more consistent; every track has the same restrictions. That's not true of WMV, where each label seems to have a different set of rules.
But there's something else driving the success of iTMS vs. Walmart and all the other guys: convenience. Having the interface of iTMS embedded into iTunes allows Apple to provide a simple and elegant way to choose, purchase and download tracks. No web interface can be half as good. As I understand it (being a Mac user, I can't very this), to buy an album on Walmart's store requires downloading each track individually. Sure makes you want to load up, doesn't it?
Interesting typo; you mean "per capita". But I suspect you're right. India's problem is that it has plenty of Doctorates but not a lot of capital. Kind of a problem when you try to tackle projects of this magnitude.
Ah, but it's consistent as hell. The AP is every bit as arrogant as he accuses his former coworkers of being. The difference is that he's also blind.
I worked at Sun for a bunch of years. And I'd hire a Sun employee in a minute if he or she demonstrated the right skills and the right attitude for the role. I've known folks who were hard working, cooperative and capable. I've also known egomaniacs who were way too busy kissing management behind to worry about anything else. And maybe a few too many of the latter made their way up the hierarchy for the company's good.
In sum, Sun's like most places.
The first movie I've seen in years that didn't feel like a movie. It felt like I was eavesdropping on real people living their real lives.
I think you're confusing two issues here. The issue in the 2000 Florida election was one of improperly marked ballots: punches in the wrong place, in too many places or only partly in place (the dimpled and hanging chads from punches that didn't go all the way through). So the reason to lose the punch cards for voting is that they were complicated, leading to votes not being counted or ballots being rejected due to multiple votes for the same office.
So let's accept for the moment the idea that punch card ballots are bad. I do accept this, but if you don't, pretend you do for the moment. Now consider the problem with their replacement: the touch screen system.
In a touch screen system, you touch to indicate your choices and then touch again to indicate that your choices are the ones you meant to make. You register on the machine that it accepted your vote precisely the way you intended.
What happens then? Without a paper trail, you are taking it completely on faith that the machine transferred your instructions accurately into its memory, that the votes for that machine were transferred accurately to the machine that collects up the votes from the local machines and so on down the line. At any point from the voting machine to the final tally, you have no confidence that somebody didn't play with the software or with the numbers. And if there's belief that there's a problem, there is absolutely no way to determine whether or not the final tally reflects the actions of the voters.
The idea of a paper trail is to have each individual vote written to a paper receipt. The receipt drops into a window, so the individual voter can examine it and verify that it reports their vote accurately (i.e. matches what the machine said they did). Once the voter has said that yes, the receipt is accurate, the machine drops it into a locked box, just as the punch cards are kept in a locked box today. And if there's any question about the vote, all these paper receipts can be collected and tallied, whether by hand or by some kind of optical scanner. And we can have some confidence that the numbers reported by the machines are in sync with what the individual voters saw on their paper receipts.
My point again is that the problems with the paper ballots in the past were with the methods of marking those ballots and their layouts. (Remember Palm County's butterfly ballots?) Those problems go away with a well designed voting machine. But now we have a lack of a paper trail of any kind.
As an aside, I'm sure the lack of a paper trail in the new voting machines was a way for the manufacturers to save money/offer local governments a lower bid. The paper trail should have been in the original RFP. That it wasn't shows the incompetence of those who set up the bid process.