We ran the Sveasoft software on three Linksys boxes for a year. This is a hacked-up Linux for Linksys WiFi units. Results were terrible. Packet drops, TCP connections hung, and latency as long as 500ms. We put a packet sniffer on the things, and discovered that, consistently, when the air link was bottlenecked, TCP packets were being clobbered, with bad checksums.
When used as an Internet "access point", it's unusual to bottleneck the air link, because the link to the Internet is slower than the air link. But if you have a local server, as we did, the air link was the bottleneck. CVS checkouts would hang every time.
We had three Linksys boxes, so we know it wasn't a single-point hardware problem. Probably botched buffer management. It wasn't an interference problem.
Would someone who has one please photograph the XBOX 360's data plate and post the image? And is the data plate a hologram? A few of these would be helpful, since there may be more than one maker of power supplies. I'd like to verify the UL certification numbers. Thanks.
They're right. Most acquisitions lose money
on
The Google Caste System
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's well-known that most major corporate acquisitions are not, in the end, successful. So why do they happen?
First, it's something for the CEO to do. Really. Acquisitions are something the CEO can actually do. If the CEO has a financial or legal background, acquisitions are something they understand. On the operational side, the CEO of a large company mostly has to just pick people and give them general direction. There are exceptions to this, but they're rare.
If you can't fix the company you're running, acquisition gives the illusion you're doing something.
Second, acquisitions are highly visible events for a CEO. They get you on the cover of Business Week. You can talk to other CEOs about them. You get better golf dates. Improving manufacturing productivity by 15% doesn't do this, even though it might triple profits.
Third, acquisitions usually result in increased CEO income. The company is bigger now, so the CEO should make more. Right? Don't underestimate this. Also, acquisitions tend to increase stock volatility, and if much of your pay is in options, volatility pays off, even if, on average, the trend is neutral or even down.
Now, it can actually make sense to acquire a company for its technology or its market share. In the first case, the acquired company is usually small, and you're buying technology, not a customer base or manufacturing capability. A successful example is Google buying Keyhole. Keyhole was small, had good technical assets, and wasn't too expensive. An unsuccessful example is SGI buying Cray. Cray had a large mainframe manufacturing operation and too many people, neither of which SGI needed. (SGI comes to mind because I was in a building yesterday I'd previously visited when SGI owned it. They don't own it any more.)
Buying market share makes sense if you buy something in the same business. You're reducing competition and can raise prices. You might even get economies of scale. Blockbuster, which bought out many other video store chains, is a successful example.
On the other hand, buying companies for "diversification" or to "expand into a new business area" usually doesn't work out too well. Buying for vertical integration, where you buy your supplier or customer, used to be popular half a century ago, but is now somewhat out of favor. It made sense to buy a coal mine when you had a steel mill. It make less sense to buy an ISP when you're a phone company.
I've watched these behaviors for years. See Downside's Deathwatch for the results. (When it says "Chart not available for this symbol, it's not because there's a bug. It's because the company died.)
The nCube, in the 1980s, was much like this. 64 to 1024 processors, each with 128KB and a link to neighboring processors, plus an underpowered control machine (an Intel 286, surprisingly.)
The Cell machines are about equally painful to program, but because they're cheaper, they have more potential applications than the nCube did. Cell phone sites, multichannel audio and video processing, and
similar easily-parallelized stream-type tasks fit well with the cell model. It's not yet clear what else does.
Recognize that the cell architecture is inherently less useful than a shared-memory multiprocessor. It's an attempt to get some reasonable fraction of the performance of an N-way shared memory multiprocessor without the expensive caches and interconnects needed to make that work. It's not yet clear if this is a price/performance win for general purpose computing. Historically, architectures like this have been more trouble than they're worth. But if Sony fields a few hundred million of them, putting up with the pain is cost-justified.
It's still not clear if the cell approach does much for graphics.
The PS3 is apparently going to have a relatively conventional nVidia part bolted on to do the back end of the graphics pipeline.
I'm glad that I don't have to write a distributed physics engine for this thing.
Here's the actual list, with last year's ranking in parentheses:
Wal-Mart (1)
Best Buy (2)
Target (3)
Amazon.com (4)
FYE (10)
Circuit City (Tied for 5)
Apple\iTunes (14)
Tower Records (Tied for 7)
Sam Goody (Tied for 5)
Borders (9)
This list has some tough implications for the RIAA and its members. None of the top four companies gets most of its revenue from music. They're all very strong companies used to telling their suppliers what prices they want to see. The classic "record store" chains, Tower and Sam Goody, are falling off the list.
Some of the changes just reflect consolidation in the record store industry.
FYE is a classic "record store" chain.
It's really Trans World Entertainment, the result of mergers between Wherehouse, Record Town, Camelot Music, and Strawberries. Stores in malls carry the FYE brand ("offering a consistent mall-based retailing experience"), while freestanding stores bear the names Wherehouse Music, Coconuts Music & Movies, Strawberries, Spec's, CD World, Streetside Records and Planet Music.
Also, don't forget that Wal-Mart sells music on-line. Even if the RIAA can bully Apple into raising the song price for iPods, that's not going to work with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart just won't tolerate suppliers increasing their prices. They'll find other suppliers. Note the growing list of "Wal-Mart exclusives".
The posting links to an ad-supported blog that links to the actual content.
When you get to the real site, it becomes clear that this is a project by someone who does paper models as a business and as an art. You don't get that impression at all from the "blog", which actually looks like something machine-generated by stealing copy from other sites.
Re:The author is Microsoft's lobbyist
on
The Demise of IP?
·
· Score: 1
She's also a registered lobbyist for the Computing Technology Industry Association. Her lobbying activities have included lobbing on (presumably against) "Technology Neutrality in Government and Procurement of IT Goods and Services" legislation, in an attempt to prevent the US Government from using more open source software.
The author is Microsoft's lobbyist
on
The Demise of IP?
·
· Score: 1
That's just a PR piece from Microsoft.
Melanie Wyne is head of the "Institute for Software Choice", one of Microsoft's lobbying organizations. She used to be a lobbyist for Bank of America.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board has a set of technical standards for gambling devices. Those are a good, practical reference for something that has to resist tampering. Voting machine standards need to be at least as strong.
A few excerpts:
A gaming device must exhibit total immunity to human body electrostatic discharges on all
player-exposed areas.... A gaming device may exhibit temporary disruption when subjected to electrostatic
discharges of 20,000 to 27,000 volts DC through a network with a series resistance of 150 to
1500 ohms shunted by a capacitance of 100 to 150 picofarads, but must exhibit a capacity to
recover and complete an interrupted play without loss or corruption of any stored or displayed
information and without component failure.
Physical security. A gaming device must resist forced illegal entry and must retain
evidence of any entry until properly cleared or until a new play is initiated. A gaming device must
have a protective cover over the circuit boards that contain programs and circuitry used in the
random selection process and control of the gaming device, including any electrically alterable
program storage media. The cover must be designed to permit installation of a security locking
mechanism by the manufacturer or end user of the gaming device.
Printer mechanisms on gaming devices must be designed to detect low paper,
paper out, and paper jam conditions. The device control program must monitor the printer
mechanism for these error conditions in all active game states that do not indicate error
conditions.
All gaming devices which have control programs residing in one or more Conventional ROM
Devices must employ a mechanism approved by the chairman to verify control programs and
data. The mechanism used must detect at least 99.99 percent of all possible media failures.
All gaming devices having control programs or data stored on memory devices other than
Conventional ROM Devices must:
(a) Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which verifies that all control program
components, including data and graphic information, are authentic copies of the approved
components. The chairman may require tests to verify that components used by Nevada
licensees are approved components. The verification mechanism must have an error rate of less
than 1 in 10 to the 38th power and must prevent the execution of any control program component
if any component is determined to be invalid. Any program component of the verification or
initialization mechanism must be stored on a Conventional ROM Device that must be capable of
being authenticated using a method approved by the chairman.
(b) Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which tests unused or unallocated areas
of any alterable media for unintended programs or data and tests the structure of the storage
media for integrity. The mechanism must prevent further play of the gaming device if unexpected
data or structural inconsistencies are found.
(c) Provide a mechanism for keeping a record, in a form approved by the chairman, anytime a
control program component is added, removed, or altered on any alterable media. The record
must contain a minimum of the last 10 modifications to the media and each record must contain
the date and time of the action, identification of the component affected, the reason for the
modification and any pertinent validation information.
(d) Provide, as a minimum, a two-stage mechanism for validating all program components on
demand via a communication port and protocol approved by the chairman. The first stage of this
mechanism must verify all control components. The second stage must be capable of completely
authenticating all program components, including graphics and data components in a maximum
of 20 minutes. The mechanism for extracting the authentication information must be stored on a
Conventional ROM Device that must be capable of being authenticated by a method approved by
the chairman.
Nevada asked the Gaming Control Board to take a look at voting machines. After that review, Nevada went to a paper trail in 2004.
what exactly makes you say the price is about to drop?
Press release about a consumer version.
There's another company making these "parametric loudspeakers" now. We're going to be seeing a lot of these things, since they offer a new, annoying way to deliver ads in public spaces.
This is a classic problem for a successful company in a high-margin business. If you expand into a lower-margin business, your margins decline and your stock goes down.
Game machines are not a high-margin business.
What Microsoft really does, as a business, is sell Office. That's the high margin product. Microsoft's business units are Client (i.e. desktop Windows),
Server, Information Worker (Office and some related products), Business Solutions (the Great Plains stuff), Mobile and Embedded, and Home and Entertainment. Only the Client and Information Worker units consistently make money. Home and Entertainment has been a money drain for years.
1)Sept 2003: I was down Pittsburgh, and I heard a voice that said,"Good News". It confused me, but I felt compeled to come home to my old church.
With the Holosonics Audio Spotlight, you can now make people think God is talking to them!
Range from 20 to 200 meters. And the speaker is just a flat black disk about a foot in diameter.
It's really clever. It works by projecting audio as two ultrasonic signals, which produces a very narrow beam. You can't hear the ultrasonic components, but the difference between them becomes audible some distance from the speaker, because air isn't entirely a linear medium. Some museums now use these things, so that the recorded message for a display is only audible in a small area. We're going to be seeing more of these very soon; the price is about to drop.
So if you hear voices in your head, start looking around for 1' diameter disks pointed in your direction. Move around a bit; the beams are very narrow.
That's not too surprising. The original xBox is, after all, an x86 PC, but sells for less than one. The PS2 is a low-end MIPS processor and some wierd vector units, hard to program but cheap to make. The xBox 360 is a new architecture, but not, apparently, a cheaper one.
In the end, Microsoft stockholders would be better off if Microsoft got out of the game console business. It's a money drain.
The next music format might be ROM cartridges, like Nintendo. This allows for even more elaborate DRM, since the cartridge can have protection circuitry and a CPU in it.
California Business and Professions Code:
17500. It is unlawful for any person, firm, corporation or
association, or any employee thereof with intent directly or
indirectly to dispose of real or personal property or to perform
services, professional or otherwise, or anything of any nature
whatsoever or to induce the public to enter into any obligation
relating thereto, to make or disseminate or cause to be made or
disseminated before the public in this state, or to make or
disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated from this state
before the public in any state, in any newspaper or other
publication, or any advertising device, or by public outcry or
proclamation, or in any other manner or means whatever, including
over the Internet, any statement, concerning that real or personal
property or those services, professional or otherwise, or concerning
any circumstance or matter of fact connected with the proposed
performance or disposition thereof, which is untrue or misleading,
and which is known, or which by the exercise of reasonable care
should be known, to be untrue or misleading, or for any person, firm,
or corporation to so make or disseminate or cause to be so made or
disseminated any such statement as part of a plan or scheme with the
intent not to sell that personal property or those services,
professional or otherwise, so advertised at the price stated therein,
or as so advertised. Any violation of the provisions of this
section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county
jail not exceeding six months, or by a fine not exceeding two
thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that imprisonment
and fine.
No, device drivers in QNX are in 100% in user space. I've written one, for FireWire cameras. Manual page here.
QNX device drivers can have the privilege of mapping device memory into their address space, but they're still user-level programs. I've developed hardware drivers on a running QNX system without rebooting.
No Heinlein. No George O. Smith. Neil Stephenson is overrepresented. "Dune" really isn't that good. Especially since we all now have a much better idea how wars in deserts really go.
QNX isn't a Linux derivative. It's not even a UNIX derivative. It's a POSIX-compliant microkernel, with a totally different underlying architecture than Linux. Latency is much better than Linux, because the kernel just handles message passing, CPU dispatching, and timing - everything else, like file systems, drivers, and networking, is in user space and preemptable. Overall performance is slightly worse than Linux.
The newer real-time Linux variants based on the 2.6 kernel are getting to be decent. 2.6 finally got most of the long interrupt lockouts out of the kernel, and allowed preemption of some kernel tasks. Look at the MonteVista or BlueCat variants. You still have to be careful not to load any drivers that contain long interrupt lockouts, or real-time latency will go way up.
The original "RT Linux" was a hack which basically allowed running your real-time application as a loadable kernel module, like a driver. That's basically a dead end at this point in time.
QNX, unfortunately, was acquired by a larger company, which has changed the business strategy from opening up QNX to raising prices and cutting functionality of the base package. The main architect of QNX died a few years ago, and things really haven't been the same since. It's sad.
Microsoft is launching in Palmdale? Palmdale?
on
Prepping For The 360
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Why Palmdale? It was always bleak, and when the aerospace industry tanked, it got much bleaker. At one point, a third of the houses were vacant, many of them abandoned.
Maybe Microsoft figures that, given how boring life is in Palmdale, people will show up for their event. If they held it in, say, Santa Monica, nobody would come.
A few years ago, the music industry's plan was to migrate audio from unprotected CDs to DVD-Audio, which has copy protection. A funny thing happened.
DVD-Audio didn't sell.
You can buy DVD-Audio discs, and most DVD video players will play them. You get more channels and more dynamic range. Finally, 24-bit audio.
But no digital outputs from the player, a tough copy protection system, and watermarking in the audio.
Nobody buys this stuff. Total worldwide sales of DVD-Audio disks are around 400,000 units. That number has been flat for years. There's some high-end audiophile interest, but it's a niche product.
So that was the industry's try #1 at moving customers from copyable CDs. It was an abject failure. Try #2 was hokey copy protection schemes for audio CDs. That backfired. Stay tuned for the next great idea from the music industry.
Slashdot Mirror
"Police Academy 8" is in development, if anybody cares.
When used as an Internet "access point", it's unusual to bottleneck the air link, because the link to the Internet is slower than the air link. But if you have a local server, as we did, the air link was the bottleneck. CVS checkouts would hang every time.
We had three Linksys boxes, so we know it wasn't a single-point hardware problem. Probably botched buffer management. It wasn't an interference problem.
Would someone who has one please photograph the XBOX 360's data plate and post the image? And is the data plate a hologram? A few of these would be helpful, since there may be more than one maker of power supplies. I'd like to verify the UL certification numbers. Thanks.
First, it's something for the CEO to do. Really. Acquisitions are something the CEO can actually do. If the CEO has a financial or legal background, acquisitions are something they understand. On the operational side, the CEO of a large company mostly has to just pick people and give them general direction. There are exceptions to this, but they're rare. If you can't fix the company you're running, acquisition gives the illusion you're doing something.
Second, acquisitions are highly visible events for a CEO. They get you on the cover of Business Week. You can talk to other CEOs about them. You get better golf dates. Improving manufacturing productivity by 15% doesn't do this, even though it might triple profits.
Third, acquisitions usually result in increased CEO income. The company is bigger now, so the CEO should make more. Right? Don't underestimate this. Also, acquisitions tend to increase stock volatility, and if much of your pay is in options, volatility pays off, even if, on average, the trend is neutral or even down.
Now, it can actually make sense to acquire a company for its technology or its market share. In the first case, the acquired company is usually small, and you're buying technology, not a customer base or manufacturing capability. A successful example is Google buying Keyhole. Keyhole was small, had good technical assets, and wasn't too expensive. An unsuccessful example is SGI buying Cray. Cray had a large mainframe manufacturing operation and too many people, neither of which SGI needed. (SGI comes to mind because I was in a building yesterday I'd previously visited when SGI owned it. They don't own it any more.)
Buying market share makes sense if you buy something in the same business. You're reducing competition and can raise prices. You might even get economies of scale. Blockbuster, which bought out many other video store chains, is a successful example.
On the other hand, buying companies for "diversification" or to "expand into a new business area" usually doesn't work out too well. Buying for vertical integration, where you buy your supplier or customer, used to be popular half a century ago, but is now somewhat out of favor. It made sense to buy a coal mine when you had a steel mill. It make less sense to buy an ISP when you're a phone company.
I've watched these behaviors for years. See Downside's Deathwatch for the results. (When it says "Chart not available for this symbol, it's not because there's a bug. It's because the company died.)
The Cell machines are about equally painful to program, but because they're cheaper, they have more potential applications than the nCube did. Cell phone sites, multichannel audio and video processing, and similar easily-parallelized stream-type tasks fit well with the cell model. It's not yet clear what else does.
Recognize that the cell architecture is inherently less useful than a shared-memory multiprocessor. It's an attempt to get some reasonable fraction of the performance of an N-way shared memory multiprocessor without the expensive caches and interconnects needed to make that work. It's not yet clear if this is a price/performance win for general purpose computing. Historically, architectures like this have been more trouble than they're worth. But if Sony fields a few hundred million of them, putting up with the pain is cost-justified.
It's still not clear if the cell approach does much for graphics. The PS3 is apparently going to have a relatively conventional nVidia part bolted on to do the back end of the graphics pipeline.
I'm glad that I don't have to write a distributed physics engine for this thing.
This list has some tough implications for the RIAA and its members. None of the top four companies gets most of its revenue from music. They're all very strong companies used to telling their suppliers what prices they want to see. The classic "record store" chains, Tower and Sam Goody, are falling off the list.
Some of the changes just reflect consolidation in the record store industry. FYE is a classic "record store" chain. It's really Trans World Entertainment, the result of mergers between Wherehouse, Record Town, Camelot Music, and Strawberries. Stores in malls carry the FYE brand ("offering a consistent mall-based retailing experience"), while freestanding stores bear the names Wherehouse Music, Coconuts Music & Movies, Strawberries, Spec's, CD World, Streetside Records and Planet Music.
Also, don't forget that Wal-Mart sells music on-line. Even if the RIAA can bully Apple into raising the song price for iPods, that's not going to work with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart just won't tolerate suppliers increasing their prices. They'll find other suppliers. Note the growing list of "Wal-Mart exclusives".
When you get to the real site, it becomes clear that this is a project by someone who does paper models as a business and as an art. You don't get that impression at all from the "blog", which actually looks like something machine-generated by stealing copy from other sites.
Left, Up, Left, Left, A, B, Y, Select, Start
She's also a registered lobbyist for the Computing Technology Industry Association. Her lobbying activities have included lobbing on (presumably against) "Technology Neutrality in Government and Procurement of IT Goods and Services" legislation, in an attempt to prevent the US Government from using more open source software.
That's just a PR piece from Microsoft. Melanie Wyne is head of the "Institute for Software Choice", one of Microsoft's lobbying organizations. She used to be a lobbyist for Bank of America.
A few excerpts:
Nevada asked the Gaming Control Board to take a look at voting machines. After that review, Nevada went to a paper trail in 2004.
You're complaining that you can't get people to come pay you to take your classes so they can work for free for somebody else. Right.
Press release about a consumer version.
There's another company making these "parametric loudspeakers" now. We're going to be seeing a lot of these things, since they offer a new, annoying way to deliver ads in public spaces.
This is a classic problem for a successful company in a high-margin business. If you expand into a lower-margin business, your margins decline and your stock goes down.
Game machines are not a high-margin business.
What Microsoft really does, as a business, is sell Office. That's the high margin product. Microsoft's business units are Client (i.e. desktop Windows), Server, Information Worker (Office and some related products), Business Solutions (the Great Plains stuff), Mobile and Embedded, and Home and Entertainment. Only the Client and Information Worker units consistently make money. Home and Entertainment has been a money drain for years.
With the Holosonics Audio Spotlight, you can now make people think God is talking to them! Range from 20 to 200 meters. And the speaker is just a flat black disk about a foot in diameter.
It's really clever. It works by projecting audio as two ultrasonic signals, which produces a very narrow beam. You can't hear the ultrasonic components, but the difference between them becomes audible some distance from the speaker, because air isn't entirely a linear medium. Some museums now use these things, so that the recorded message for a display is only audible in a small area. We're going to be seeing more of these very soon; the price is about to drop.
So if you hear voices in your head, start looking around for 1' diameter disks pointed in your direction. Move around a bit; the beams are very narrow.
Maybe we'll see sellers on eBay offering the xBox 300 with a 24-hour burn-in, with pictures of the unit still working after 24 hours.
That's not too surprising. The original xBox is, after all, an x86 PC, but sells for less than one. The PS2 is a low-end MIPS processor and some wierd vector units, hard to program but cheap to make. The xBox 360 is a new architecture, but not, apparently, a cheaper one.
In the end, Microsoft stockholders would be better off if Microsoft got out of the game console business. It's a money drain.
The next music format might be ROM cartridges, like Nintendo. This allows for even more elaborate DRM, since the cartridge can have protection circuitry and a CPU in it.
The big "first day demand" may just be resellers stocking up. There are over 5000 xBox 360 auctions on eBay right now. Prices are dropping rapidly.
Antigravity online
Shop Target.com
www.Target.com
What do you find there? Shower massagers.
California Business and Professions Code:
17500. It is unlawful for any person, firm, corporation or association, or any employee thereof with intent directly or indirectly to dispose of real or personal property or to perform services, professional or otherwise, or anything of any nature whatsoever or to induce the public to enter into any obligation relating thereto, to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated before the public in this state, or to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated from this state before the public in any state, in any newspaper or other publication, or any advertising device, or by public outcry or proclamation, or in any other manner or means whatever, including over the Internet, any statement, concerning that real or personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, or concerning any circumstance or matter of fact connected with the proposed performance or disposition thereof, which is untrue or misleading, and which is known, or which by the exercise of reasonable care should be known, to be untrue or misleading, or for any person, firm, or corporation to so make or disseminate or cause to be so made or disseminated any such statement as part of a plan or scheme with the intent not to sell that personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, so advertised at the price stated therein, or as so advertised. Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that imprisonment and fine.
No, device drivers in QNX are in 100% in user space. I've written one, for FireWire cameras. Manual page here.
QNX device drivers can have the privilege of mapping device memory into their address space, but they're still user-level programs. I've developed hardware drivers on a running QNX system without rebooting.
No Heinlein. No George O. Smith. Neil Stephenson is overrepresented. "Dune" really isn't that good. Especially since we all now have a much better idea how wars in deserts really go.
QNX isn't a Linux derivative. It's not even a UNIX derivative. It's a POSIX-compliant microkernel, with a totally different underlying architecture than Linux. Latency is much better than Linux, because the kernel just handles message passing, CPU dispatching, and timing - everything else, like file systems, drivers, and networking, is in user space and preemptable. Overall performance is slightly worse than Linux.
The newer real-time Linux variants based on the 2.6 kernel are getting to be decent. 2.6 finally got most of the long interrupt lockouts out of the kernel, and allowed preemption of some kernel tasks. Look at the MonteVista or BlueCat variants. You still have to be careful not to load any drivers that contain long interrupt lockouts, or real-time latency will go way up.
The original "RT Linux" was a hack which basically allowed running your real-time application as a loadable kernel module, like a driver. That's basically a dead end at this point in time.
QNX, unfortunately, was acquired by a larger company, which has changed the business strategy from opening up QNX to raising prices and cutting functionality of the base package. The main architect of QNX died a few years ago, and things really haven't been the same since. It's sad.
Maybe Microsoft figures that, given how boring life is in Palmdale, people will show up for their event. If they held it in, say, Santa Monica, nobody would come.
DVD-Audio didn't sell.
You can buy DVD-Audio discs, and most DVD video players will play them. You get more channels and more dynamic range. Finally, 24-bit audio. But no digital outputs from the player, a tough copy protection system, and watermarking in the audio.
Nobody buys this stuff. Total worldwide sales of DVD-Audio disks are around 400,000 units. That number has been flat for years. There's some high-end audiophile interest, but it's a niche product.
So that was the industry's try #1 at moving customers from copyable CDs. It was an abject failure. Try #2 was hokey copy protection schemes for audio CDs. That backfired. Stay tuned for the next great idea from the music industry.