It bears mentioning that nothing in his message indicates that he had a real change of heart or fully understands the reasons why people were upset. As you said, he had to flip off someone. When flipping off the users seemed more likely to threaten the livelihood of his business than flipping off the HD-DVD folks, he switched sides. It shows he has no concern for the principle involved, he is simply yielding to the side that exerts more pressure.
That revelation makes it particularly hard to trust him from now on, since it's quite unlikely that a user protest on this scale will be repeated for every boneheaded thing Digg does.
The contract costs you money. It is as much a part of the purchase price of the iPhone as the $500 is. It doesn't matter if you pay it now or later, you still end up paying more than $500 for that phone.
Ahh, yes it is. Selling items below cost has nothing to do with subsidizing the purchase price. The phone is subsidized if it sells for less than it would without the contract.
I would assume that any such device worth buying will have a mechanism for sensing chargeable devices and turning itself on automatically. It could be as simple as a pressure sensor to know that something it sitting on top or as complicated as a Bluetooth signal.
In any event, this doesn't seem all that different than current solutions involving a device-specific dock, except that there's no physical contact between connectors. I think we're all used to cordless house phones, where much attention has been paid to the design of the charging dock. It doesn't seem that far-fetched to design a laptop or cell phone charging dock that's just as easy.
In the US the Department of the Interior is something wholly different, mostly concerned with managing natural resources owned by the government for the public good. The US analog would be more along the lines of the Department of Justice, prior to the separation of the Department of Homeland Security.
More to the point, it seems like John Reid has been getting a lot of attention lately stateside. Every few days there's some terrorist development that's just important enough to get the media's attention over here.
Now that Google owns them, we will learn just how slimy they were. It's in Google's best interest to expose manipulation of their business model and show how they can fight it, preferably using the very same fraudsters. I agree that it's in Google's interest to study them and learn how to fight it, but why is it in their interest to release that information publicly? If Google is going to turn it into an internal white-hat organization (which assumes that Google doesn't already have such a thing), I doubt they want to broadcast that research to their competitors or other SEOs. If they're going to sell it, releasing the information publicly undercuts the value of Performics to potential buyers.
The real decision is how much money can they make from selling Performics vs. how much is it worth to rid the world of another SEO operation. You'll know if Performics really did have some unique and particularly effective tactics if Google just quietly shuts them down without a peep about it publicly.
You mean if they replaced an 80gb iPod with a 4gb widescreen iPod, it would sell at $350? Uh.. I guess if you say so. Again, the big sellers for Apple have been the cheaper Mini and Nano. Relatively few people have sprung for the high-end models, but those that do want the extra space. High price and small size is a tough sell.
Anyway, no one in the market for a 80gb iPod is going to consider the 4gb iPhone as a replacement. If all you care about is 4gb, then the comparison is with the 4gb Nano, currently $200. So really, it's a $300 smart phone (after ~$200 contract discount) integrated with a $200 iPod. That's almost reasonable if you personally think the iPhone is really wonderful as a smart phone. Although, I also find myself stumbling over the integration, since I have to chuck the $200 iPod along with the phone if I want to upgrade in two years.
You can't have it both ways. Either the iPhone is so innovative and different that there's no predicting what will happen or it's just like X, so that means it will likely sell as well as X did. Even though both the iPod and RAZR started out at high prices, neither sold en masse until prices dropped considerably.
No one would buy something like that! But they did. Nope, they didn't. I hear this a lot, so I'm responding pretty much by rote at this point. The 1G and 2G iPods didn't sell very well at all. It took two years and the cheaper iPod Mini before Apple broke a million units sold. Nanos and Minis still account for the vast majority of units sold, with the most expensive iPods accounting for the smallest proportion. In contrast, Jobs expects to sell 10 million iPhones in the first year. That's just not going to happen.
If we were talking about an "iPhone Mini" for half the price, the iPod comparison would make sense. On the contrary, if it tells us anything, the forecast for the iPhone looks very bleak indeed.
The business market is much more feature-focused than value-focused. Since you're spending someone else's money, you're more interested in getting the product that works the way you want it than getting it for a good price. It's a natural consequence that companies offering a unique feature set to business can and do charge outrageous prices with huge profit margins. And when they do land a sale, it's typically in the hundreds or thousands. It's much more lucrative than you give it credit for.
The consumer market on the other hand is more fickle and price-conscious. However, there is plenty of money to be made there. Apple's built a brand in the consumer space (another thing that matters less in the business market) which has thus far enabled them to get away with hefty margins. I agree with you that they're probably fully aware that the iPhone won't sell too well to businesses and they're fine with it. Whether that plan works out for them remains to be seen. Personally, I don't believe Joe Public wants to pay $500 for a phone, but we'll see.
As for Microsoft's role in all this... Apple's latest product bringing about Microsoft's undoing is an idea as old as the rivalry between them. You're thinking a bit too hard.
Dividing commercial and non-commercial copying is a tricky issue, though, and I'm sure people will find a way to take advantage of it.
Imagine an internet radio station that transmits a playlist instructing clients to automatically download the next song over legal P2P. Or companies that sell access to private trackers, even though users are still technically downloading from each other. Or a company that sells a cheap TiVo knockoff with Step 1 in the instruction manual: "Download TiVo Software".
The one thing I will grant you is the radical reduction of the lifetime of copyright. A lot of us wouldn't particularly mind being left out of the loop when it comes to modern music.
The ARIA knows exactly which songs you've downloaded, so they're not going to pinch you unless it's something from their catalog. I think they'd know if there were a legitimate retailer selling Justin Timberlake via LimeWire. The article also mentions that there will be three warning letters before the account is suspended, so you should have some opportunity to raise hell if there's been a false positive.
I've heard that the #1 consumer of bandwidth these days is YouTube and the second is BitTorrent. When Napster went offline, the aggregate traffic online dropped by half. It was a bad day for service providers everywhere.
Sigh. This is really a rather unfortunate way to expose people to MMFA, because they're not at all the PC police.
The thing is, there is this vast network of conservative media outlets (like Limbaugh, O'Reilly, etc.) that most people will never listen to. So what happens is these guys end up preaching to the choir practically exclusively. When the listeners are all toting the same line, they get away with perpetuating a lot of myths that go completely unchallenged, leading a certain segment of the population to believe they're true. Like the 33% of Fox news viewers who believe we actually did find WMDs in Iraq.
MMFA exists to open up these conservative media channels to wider public scrutiny, to say that they are a part of the public sphere and they do have to play by all the same rules as everyone else. There's a tit-for-tat going on here too: The Media Research Center supposedly has a similar mission for liberal media, but their only reliable sources of material seem to be Keith Olbermann and MMFA itself.
That's right, when the OP criticized MMFA for not respecting freedom of speech, he was raising a red herring that had nothing to do with Imus or the matter at hand. I'm glad we cleared that up.
How many reputable online stores sell music over BitTorrent? Even if they did, it's probably easier to whitelist the non-infringing trackers and assume everyone else is pirating.
It bears mentioning that ISPs have long had the ability to shut down the overwhelming majority of P2P traffic. Every time they do, there's a big public outcry until they stop.
The beauty of an inter-network is that the devices don't all have to speak the same language. As long as you have devices on the edge to translate, networks of different types can still communicate. It's like switching to a right- or left-hand drive car every five miles, except that it doesn't really slow you down. There's no real need to make this massive change all at once.
I can see the banks wanting a private network as well as diplomats, and the military, there is no reason why this couldn't be done. This has already been done, many times over. In the dense financial areas, banks connect to other banks with dedicated lines. Remember the Internet was all about bridging many of these smaller private networks. (Thus the term internetworking.) And when you're trying to connect sites that are physically distant, you can leverage the existing internet infrastructure to connect them without having to run dedicated lines, creating a Virtual Private Network.
All in all the physical core of the internet is pretty much agnostic to the type of data that goes through it. The Internet as we experience it could change quite radically without much impact on the way the core operates. Even if you create a "new" capital-I Internet, chances are it's going to have to be routed through the lowercase-i internet at some point, though you'll probably never notice.
And what's wrong with that? Politicians and businessmen frequently host events at restaurants. Does it surprise you that the food of choice in Oklahoma is pork BBQ?
I don't agree that it's acceptable ever. (Well.. maybe if I had individual control over how my traffic is handled.) I pay my ISP to convey my data from point A to point B. I never specified that I want some types of data to be conveyed faster than others.
Service providers naturally oversubscribe their lines. Traffic shaping just enables them to choke protocols that you won't readily notice being choked so customers don't complain that they don't have enough bandwidth. Why that's acceptable to you I don't know. In my view, if they want to increase QoS, the best way to do it is to get more bandwidth.
I'm not sure, but I think there are hacks to get it to play other formats. If not, you can always transcode the video.
Personally, I've been using my SD TiVo and tivoserver on the PC to handle this sort of stuff fairly seamlessly for quite a while. Tivoserver emulates another networked TiVo, transcoding videos on the fly into TiVo's format at a little better than real-time speed. I'm sure there will be a comparable program for Apple TV soon enough.
All I know is I went into the Apple store, on the actual Apple TV hardware, in a arrangement designed to show off the capabilities of the Apple TV, and played the trailer the salesman told me to play. It sucked. I can't speak to why it sucked, but it did. If there is an Apple store near you, I suggest you check it out for yourself.
When playing high def content (that you rip yourself from DVD or from HDTV), it's not half bad. I'm really gonna have to question the "rip yourself" part of that equation. Certainly for a DVD, there's no reason to rip it on your computer, transcode it into Apple's format (removing the menus and extras), then transfer it to the Apple TV when it sits two inches away from the device purpose-built to play DVDs. Very few people have PC HDTV tuners to rip HD content on top of that.
That being said, I'm pretty sure you're really talking about illegally downloaded videos. Since I doubt Apple wants to market this device as a BitTorrent set top box*, it's only natural to judge the product on the way it is supposed to be used. And by that measure, it sucks. I have no doubt that soon enough you'll see some real HD content on iTMS, but not having it ready for the launch is a serious mis-step.
* Even so, I doubt many customers will have the ability or interest to turn it into one.
No. The "HD" trailers also look like crap on a real HDTV.
I checked out the Apple TV at an Apple store and immediately commented that "everything looks like shiat!" The salesman informed me that more HD content was coming, but currently the only stuff currently available were movie trailers. Dutifully, the next thing I played was one of these movie trailers. It sucked too. They may be HD resolution, but they're compressed so much it looks terrible.
Slashdot Mirror
It bears mentioning that nothing in his message indicates that he had a real change of heart or fully understands the reasons why people were upset. As you said, he had to flip off someone. When flipping off the users seemed more likely to threaten the livelihood of his business than flipping off the HD-DVD folks, he switched sides. It shows he has no concern for the principle involved, he is simply yielding to the side that exerts more pressure.
That revelation makes it particularly hard to trust him from now on, since it's quite unlikely that a user protest on this scale will be repeated for every boneheaded thing Digg does.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=232987&cid=189 48347
The contract costs you money. It is as much a part of the purchase price of the iPhone as the $500 is. It doesn't matter if you pay it now or later, you still end up paying more than $500 for that phone.
Ahh, yes it is. Selling items below cost has nothing to do with subsidizing the purchase price. The phone is subsidized if it sells for less than it would without the contract.
I would assume that any such device worth buying will have a mechanism for sensing chargeable devices and turning itself on automatically. It could be as simple as a pressure sensor to know that something it sitting on top or as complicated as a Bluetooth signal.
In any event, this doesn't seem all that different than current solutions involving a device-specific dock, except that there's no physical contact between connectors. I think we're all used to cordless house phones, where much attention has been paid to the design of the charging dock. It doesn't seem that far-fetched to design a laptop or cell phone charging dock that's just as easy.
In the US the Department of the Interior is something wholly different, mostly concerned with managing natural resources owned by the government for the public good. The US analog would be more along the lines of the Department of Justice, prior to the separation of the Department of Homeland Security.
More to the point, it seems like John Reid has been getting a lot of attention lately stateside. Every few days there's some terrorist development that's just important enough to get the media's attention over here.
The real decision is how much money can they make from selling Performics vs. how much is it worth to rid the world of another SEO operation. You'll know if Performics really did have some unique and particularly effective tactics if Google just quietly shuts them down without a peep about it publicly.
It's called Redirect Remover.
You mean if they replaced an 80gb iPod with a 4gb widescreen iPod, it would sell at $350? Uh.. I guess if you say so. Again, the big sellers for Apple have been the cheaper Mini and Nano. Relatively few people have sprung for the high-end models, but those that do want the extra space. High price and small size is a tough sell.
Anyway, no one in the market for a 80gb iPod is going to consider the 4gb iPhone as a replacement. If all you care about is 4gb, then the comparison is with the 4gb Nano, currently $200. So really, it's a $300 smart phone (after ~$200 contract discount) integrated with a $200 iPod. That's almost reasonable if you personally think the iPhone is really wonderful as a smart phone. Although, I also find myself stumbling over the integration, since I have to chuck the $200 iPod along with the phone if I want to upgrade in two years.
You can't have it both ways. Either the iPhone is so innovative and different that there's no predicting what will happen or it's just like X, so that means it will likely sell as well as X did. Even though both the iPod and RAZR started out at high prices, neither sold en masse until prices dropped considerably.
If we were talking about an "iPhone Mini" for half the price, the iPod comparison would make sense. On the contrary, if it tells us anything, the forecast for the iPhone looks very bleak indeed.
The business market is much more feature-focused than value-focused. Since you're spending someone else's money, you're more interested in getting the product that works the way you want it than getting it for a good price. It's a natural consequence that companies offering a unique feature set to business can and do charge outrageous prices with huge profit margins. And when they do land a sale, it's typically in the hundreds or thousands. It's much more lucrative than you give it credit for.
The consumer market on the other hand is more fickle and price-conscious. However, there is plenty of money to be made there. Apple's built a brand in the consumer space (another thing that matters less in the business market) which has thus far enabled them to get away with hefty margins. I agree with you that they're probably fully aware that the iPhone won't sell too well to businesses and they're fine with it. Whether that plan works out for them remains to be seen. Personally, I don't believe Joe Public wants to pay $500 for a phone, but we'll see.
As for Microsoft's role in all this... Apple's latest product bringing about Microsoft's undoing is an idea as old as the rivalry between them. You're thinking a bit too hard.
Dividing commercial and non-commercial copying is a tricky issue, though, and I'm sure people will find a way to take advantage of it.
Imagine an internet radio station that transmits a playlist instructing clients to automatically download the next song over legal P2P. Or companies that sell access to private trackers, even though users are still technically downloading from each other. Or a company that sells a cheap TiVo knockoff with Step 1 in the instruction manual: "Download TiVo Software".
The one thing I will grant you is the radical reduction of the lifetime of copyright. A lot of us wouldn't particularly mind being left out of the loop when it comes to modern music.
The ARIA knows exactly which songs you've downloaded, so they're not going to pinch you unless it's something from their catalog. I think they'd know if there were a legitimate retailer selling Justin Timberlake via LimeWire. The article also mentions that there will be three warning letters before the account is suspended, so you should have some opportunity to raise hell if there's been a false positive.
I've heard that the #1 consumer of bandwidth these days is YouTube and the second is BitTorrent. When Napster went offline, the aggregate traffic online dropped by half. It was a bad day for service providers everywhere.
Sigh. This is really a rather unfortunate way to expose people to MMFA, because they're not at all the PC police.
The thing is, there is this vast network of conservative media outlets (like Limbaugh, O'Reilly, etc.) that most people will never listen to. So what happens is these guys end up preaching to the choir practically exclusively. When the listeners are all toting the same line, they get away with perpetuating a lot of myths that go completely unchallenged, leading a certain segment of the population to believe they're true. Like the 33% of Fox news viewers who believe we actually did find WMDs in Iraq.
MMFA exists to open up these conservative media channels to wider public scrutiny, to say that they are a part of the public sphere and they do have to play by all the same rules as everyone else. There's a tit-for-tat going on here too: The Media Research Center supposedly has a similar mission for liberal media, but their only reliable sources of material seem to be Keith Olbermann and MMFA itself.
That's right, when the OP criticized MMFA for not respecting freedom of speech, he was raising a red herring that had nothing to do with Imus or the matter at hand. I'm glad we cleared that up.
How many reputable online stores sell music over BitTorrent? Even if they did, it's probably easier to whitelist the non-infringing trackers and assume everyone else is pirating.
It bears mentioning that ISPs have long had the ability to shut down the overwhelming majority of P2P traffic. Every time they do, there's a big public outcry until they stop.
The beauty of an inter-network is that the devices don't all have to speak the same language. As long as you have devices on the edge to translate, networks of different types can still communicate. It's like switching to a right- or left-hand drive car every five miles, except that it doesn't really slow you down. There's no real need to make this massive change all at once.
All in all the physical core of the internet is pretty much agnostic to the type of data that goes through it. The Internet as we experience it could change quite radically without much impact on the way the core operates. Even if you create a "new" capital-I Internet, chances are it's going to have to be routed through the lowercase-i internet at some point, though you'll probably never notice.
And what's wrong with that? Politicians and businessmen frequently host events at restaurants. Does it surprise you that the food of choice in Oklahoma is pork BBQ?
I don't agree that it's acceptable ever. (Well.. maybe if I had individual control over how my traffic is handled.) I pay my ISP to convey my data from point A to point B. I never specified that I want some types of data to be conveyed faster than others.
Service providers naturally oversubscribe their lines. Traffic shaping just enables them to choke protocols that you won't readily notice being choked so customers don't complain that they don't have enough bandwidth. Why that's acceptable to you I don't know. In my view, if they want to increase QoS, the best way to do it is to get more bandwidth.
I'm not sure, but I think there are hacks to get it to play other formats. If not, you can always transcode the video.
Personally, I've been using my SD TiVo and tivoserver on the PC to handle this sort of stuff fairly seamlessly for quite a while. Tivoserver emulates another networked TiVo, transcoding videos on the fly into TiVo's format at a little better than real-time speed. I'm sure there will be a comparable program for Apple TV soon enough.
All I know is I went into the Apple store, on the actual Apple TV hardware, in a arrangement designed to show off the capabilities of the Apple TV, and played the trailer the salesman told me to play. It sucked. I can't speak to why it sucked, but it did. If there is an Apple store near you, I suggest you check it out for yourself.
That being said, I'm pretty sure you're really talking about illegally downloaded videos. Since I doubt Apple wants to market this device as a BitTorrent set top box*, it's only natural to judge the product on the way it is supposed to be used. And by that measure, it sucks. I have no doubt that soon enough you'll see some real HD content on iTMS, but not having it ready for the launch is a serious mis-step.
* Even so, I doubt many customers will have the ability or interest to turn it into one.
No. The "HD" trailers also look like crap on a real HDTV.
I checked out the Apple TV at an Apple store and immediately commented that "everything looks like shiat!" The salesman informed me that more HD content was coming, but currently the only stuff currently available were movie trailers. Dutifully, the next thing I played was one of these movie trailers. It sucked too. They may be HD resolution, but they're compressed so much it looks terrible.