Yeah, don't buy from the outlet that sells exclusively DRM-free tracks encoded at a reasonable bit-rate with no embedded user information. Much better to buy from the one who offers a smaller selection of DRM-free tracks, charges a premium for them and embeds data about you in every track. They're the ones who are really standing up to the labels. And continuing to buy DRM laden tracks will send a clear message to the labels that consumers want DRM-free music.
The problem with that, and maybe with the whole amazon gig is the profit margin issue. My impression, perhaps I'm wrong, was that apple was pocketing less than a dime a song for itunes music store.
Current estimates are about a dime, with "wholesale cost" (i.e. the label's cut) being about $0.70 for majors and $0.60-65 for independents.
The rest of the cost is supposed to be comprosed of infrastructure, operational expenses, and transaction fees from the credit card companies. I'll eat my own shoes if Amazon's costs aren't lower. They're largely reusing a pre-existing retail infrastructure. And as a major retail operation, they doubtless have a ton of clout with the credit card companies (which are commonly cited as having the next biggest cut after the labels).
Presumably this is not too server lite either since I'm guessing the songs are watermarked with your ID and then MP3 compressed.
Nope. The songs are being provided encoded by the labels and the only watermarks identify the retailer, not the purchaser. Bandwidth would be the predominant cost here.
Congratulations. I think that this is the dumbest statement I've read all month, and given some of the idiocy I've been exposed to, that's quite an accomplishment on your end.
Even if they're cost competative in the market segments they choose to compete in doesn't mean that they don't require an expensive computer. Apple simply doesn't serve the low end market, period. You can't buy a desktop for them for under $599 or a laptop under $1099.
And their pricing isn't always particularly competitive. Let's take the Mac Mini as an example. For $599 You get a Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz, 1GB DDR2 SDRAM, 80GB 5400RPM SATA drive, 24x DVD/CDRW. Step over to tell. For about the same price ($629) you can get a Vostro 200 Slim Tower with a Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz, 1GB DDR2 SDRAM, 160GB 7200RPM SATA drive, 16x DVD/CDRW, keyboard, mouse and 19" LCD monitor. Not to mention that the Dell uses the newer G33 chipset, which boosts video bandwidth to 17.1GB (compared to 10.7GB on the Mac Mini). The only big advantage to the Apple solution is form factor, but that also comes with the trade-off of having no internal expansion and no video options (aside from the integrated shared memory Intel GMA solution).
Looking at an entry level notebook - $1099 gets you Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz, 1GB DDR2 SDRAM, 80GB 5400RPM SATA drive, 24x DVD/CDRW, 13.3" 1280x800 display. For $849 you can buy a Vostro 1400 with a Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz, 1GB DDR2 SDRAM, 80GB 5400RPM SATA drive, 24x DVD/CDRW, 14.1" 1440x900 display. Same deal with video - Dell is a generation ahead of Apple. Slight form factor penalty, due to the large screen, but only adds a couple ounces of weight, which many people would gladly trade for more screen real estate.
I definitely can't tell the difference personally, but I still archive in FLAC. Why? Transcoding without artifacts. I play local in native FLAC, convert to relatively low bitrate mp3 for travel (enough ambient noise that storage density outweighs fidelity), stream in vorbis so that I can decode in-browser with Cortado.
Proprietary music? Copyrighted, sure. But proprietary?
Technically I can use the service, since I have several licenced copies of Windows. I'm not particularly motivated to reboot or go through the trouble of setting up a VM either. My collection (about 11k tracks, all legally obtained) is large enough that I'm in no particular hurry.
Eh? You can download individual tracks just fine with eMusic and you don't need to use eMusic Remote to do it.
Yes, it's a subscription service. But you also pay $0.26-33 per track instead of $0.88. Seems a fair trade-off to me.
As for the UA string... I only see that behaviour from the browser embedded in the eMusic Remote. Why on earth would you use that to go anywhere but emusic.com?
Have you checked out Emusic Remote? It's the new replacement Mozilla-based replacement for the old Download Manager application. Poking around it seems a lot nicer, but I haven't used it extensively yet since I ran out of tracks for the month before it was released.
I gave up on EMusic/J since it was regularly failing downloads or saving partial tracks for me, so I had been downloading the tracks individually instead.
Never seen an iPod? They're about 75% of the market.:) A significant number of non-Apple devices also won't work as USB mass storage devices; typically they employ MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) instead.
I look at it another way - brand perception lagging as it does behind reality, used American cars can be a hell of a bargain. Our last vehicle was a Chevrolet Malibu - less than two years old, less than 30k on the odometer, GM certified $1200 under blue blook, $8875 under original MSRP, gave us over three years of service requiring no maintenance or repair aside from oil/filter changes and tire rotation.
Depending on the type of car, going for a fleet vehicle can be a good bet. When it comes to family-oriented vehicles clockwork regular maintenance and cleanings far outweigh any concerns. When it comes to a 'sporty' vehicle, eh... I'd have to consider it.
Warranty is certainly a consideration. Certified vehicles cover at least the powertrain, though (think Ford has the shortest coverage at 6 years/75k miles). General warranties can be extended (on our newest vehicle - a 2006 Mazda5 - it cost only $680 to have it extended to 5 year / 60k miles, which far exceeds the 3 year / 36k mile warranty that would have come with a brand new one).
I agree that the current pricing does a disservice to the American auto industry though and should act as a cautionary tale, though. It doesn't matter how good a product you put out, selling your product at massive discounts damages the perceived value of the product.
Looking at a ten second snippet to judge the actual transfer rate on the Treo, it looked to be about 117.6kbit/sec which puts it firmly in the neighborhood of a 1xRTT connection (peak speed 144kbit/sec) and not EV-DO (peak speed 2.4mbit/sec). In other words, they tested in an area with poor Sprint coverage.
But would you have paid $300 for an iPod with only 4GB or 8GB? If you're going to add up the value of the bundled features, a comparable model would be more apt. The flash players are $149 for 4GB or $199 for 8GB.
Yes, they are a popular device, so even if you don't want one, it's valuable.
No, really, it's not. The value of something you don't want and don't use is zero. If it was a seperate device you could sell, then it would have discrete value.
For you, it's a good deal. Great. Enjoy. For many other people it's grossly overpriced. For me a $50 phone which includes music capability, expandable storage, GPS, instant messaging, and EV-DO (up to 2.4 mbit/s compared to 236.8 kbit/s on EDGE).
Does that mean my choice of phone is "right"? No. It simply suits my needs and preferneces. The iPhone doesn't, especially at that price point.
ten years ago the internet was full of porn, definitely not an occasional image.
True, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* has always been chock full of porn. Should have said the web. Or mentioned it taking several minutes to download an image.
As for streaming video I still don't get any and that's actually good.
Hey, porn has to evolve somehow.
Editing text files isn't so bad as I still do.
Editing text is fine. Editing text is easy. Having to remember the location and format of a hundred different config files, mostly to do something as trivial as "stick a button here that launches a terminal" or "make my mouse a bit less sensitive so the cursor stops acting like a gnat on speed" is silly.
(I do more than enough text or command-line configuration. I've been administrating hundreds of headless servers for years.)
Most things in modern designs are hung directly off chip set rather than sitting on a peripheral bus. E.g. the upcoming AMD 790X north bridge integrates support for 41 PCI-e 2.0 lanes, HTX, and dual gigabit ethernet. The corresponding south bridge (AMD SB700 or SB750) integrates support for up to six SATA 3Gb/s devices, 12 USB 2.0 ports and 2 USB 1.1 ports. The interconnect between the the processor and north bridge and between the north bridge and south bridge is HyperTransport 3.0. I don't believe it's know how wide the bus on that implementation is, but the specification caps at 41.6GB/s aggregate bandwidth.
Even then, there's still plenty of bandwidth on the peripheral bus. 41 PCI-e 2.0 lanes should provide about 20GB/s of raw bandwidth. Even looking at a current 4x PCI-e 1.0 video card, you've got 1GB/s of bandwidth.
Hard drives are a typically the slowest component in a system but increased densities and aggressive caches are pushing transfer speeds fairly high. There are affordable SATA drives that push 100MB/sec sustained now and high end drives are pushing more like 160MB/sec. Not enough to saturate the theoretical bandwidth of a USB3 link with a single drive, but still more than a USB2 link provides today. Not to mention that multi-disk external enclosures are becoming fairly common.
No, he had it right. The initial speed of PCI-X (which debuted at 133MHz, not 66MHz) is 1064MB/sec (note: bytes, not bits) and the 2.0 spec does cap at 4.3GB/sec.
Where he seems confused is that the speed of USB is in megabits. A tenfold increase would bring it to 600MB/sec which would comfortable served by PCI-X 1.0, PCI-e 1.0 4x or PCI-e 2.0 2x. He also fails to take into account that USB is generally integrated directly into the chipset rather than being hung off the PCI* bus, so it's pretty irrelevent to the discussion.
Still, here's a run down of the various speeds offered by PCI, PCI-X and PCI-e. The 5Gb/sec variant of PCI-e isn't on the market yet but Intel, AMD and Nvidia have chipsets scheduled for Q4.
Ten years ago I had to manually edit a text file to configure the "wharf" on my window manager (original Afterstep 1.x line). Ten years ago my apps weren't internationalized. Ten years ago my apps weren't accessibly. Ten years ago the web was mostly text and the occasional image. Ten years ago streaming video was 160x120 at 15 frames per second.
One of the features of CFS is that the scheduler policy is pluggable. As per Ingo:
One goal behind the CFS changes was to remove the need for massive scheduler rewrites and to ease prototyping. Somehow there are lots of people who really love to hack the scheduler, those weirdos;-)
Roman wrote a poorly documented monolithic patch. Ingo requested that he split it into more manageable pieces isolating the various changes. Roman didn't, so Ingo did, crediting him in the description and on all the segments based on Roman's ideas. How is that wrong?
(On a side note, it was hardly a large patch. The bulk of it was removing dead code.)
Many things in the Linux kernel are optimized specifically to improve performance on "big iron", and most of those optimizations can't be fixed by just recompiling the kernel with different options.
What parts are optimized specifically for big iron at the expense of desktop, precisely? Linus has stated repeatedly that he believes that the major subsystems should perform reliabily under any workload.
He's also spoke at length about the perennial calls to fork the kernel:
"This is also, btw, why I think that people who argue for splitting desktop kernels from server kernels are total morons, and only show that they don't know what the hell they are talking about.
"The fact is, the work we've done on server loads has improved the desktop experience _immensely_, with all the scalability work (or the work on large memory configurations, etc etc) that went on there, and that used to be totally irrelevant for the desktop.
"And btw, the same is very much true in reverse: a lot of the stuff that was done for desktop reasons (hotplug etc) has been a _huge_ boon for the server side, and while there were certainly issues that had to be resolved (the sysfs stuff so central to the hotplug model used tons of memory when you had ten thousand disks, and server people were sometimes really unhappy), a lot of the big improvements actually happen because something totally _unrelated_ needed them, and then it just turns out that it's good for the desktop too, even if it started out as a server thing or vice versa.
"This is why the whole 'modal' mindset is stupid. It basically freezes a choice that shouldn't be frozen. It sets up an artificial barrier between two kinds of uses (whether they be about 'server' vs 'desktop' or '3D gaming' vs 'audio processing', or anything else), and that frozen choice actually ends up being a barrier to development in the long run.
"So 'modal' things are good for fixing behaviour in the short run. But they are a total disaster in the long run, and even in the short run they tend to have problems (simply because there will be cases that straddle the line, and show some of _both_ issues, and now *neither* mode is the right one)"
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Yeah, don't buy from the outlet that sells exclusively DRM-free tracks encoded at a reasonable bit-rate with no embedded user information. Much better to buy from the one who offers a smaller selection of DRM-free tracks, charges a premium for them and embeds data about you in every track. They're the ones who are really standing up to the labels. And continuing to buy DRM laden tracks will send a clear message to the labels that consumers want DRM-free music.
The problem with that, and maybe with the whole amazon gig is the profit margin issue. My impression, perhaps I'm wrong, was that apple was pocketing less than a dime a song for itunes music store.
Current estimates are about a dime, with "wholesale cost" (i.e. the label's cut) being about $0.70 for majors and $0.60-65 for independents.
The rest of the cost is supposed to be comprosed of infrastructure, operational expenses, and transaction fees from the credit card companies. I'll eat my own shoes if Amazon's costs aren't lower. They're largely reusing a pre-existing retail infrastructure. And as a major retail operation, they doubtless have a ton of clout with the credit card companies (which are commonly cited as having the next biggest cut after the labels).
Presumably this is not too server lite either since I'm guessing the songs are watermarked with your ID and then MP3 compressed.
Nope. The songs are being provided encoded by the labels and the only watermarks identify the retailer, not the purchaser. Bandwidth would be the predominant cost here.
Congratulations. I think that this is the dumbest statement I've read all month, and given some of the idiocy I've been exposed to, that's quite an accomplishment on your end.
Even if they're cost competative in the market segments they choose to compete in doesn't mean that they don't require an expensive computer. Apple simply doesn't serve the low end market, period. You can't buy a desktop for them for under $599 or a laptop under $1099.
And their pricing isn't always particularly competitive. Let's take the Mac Mini as an example. For $599 You get a Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz, 1GB DDR2 SDRAM, 80GB 5400RPM SATA drive, 24x DVD/CDRW. Step over to tell. For about the same price ($629) you can get a Vostro 200 Slim Tower with a Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz, 1GB DDR2 SDRAM, 160GB 7200RPM SATA drive, 16x DVD/CDRW, keyboard, mouse and 19" LCD monitor. Not to mention that the Dell uses the newer G33 chipset, which boosts video bandwidth to 17.1GB (compared to 10.7GB on the Mac Mini). The only big advantage to the Apple solution is form factor, but that also comes with the trade-off of having no internal expansion and no video options (aside from the integrated shared memory Intel GMA solution).
Looking at an entry level notebook - $1099 gets you Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz, 1GB DDR2 SDRAM, 80GB 5400RPM SATA drive, 24x DVD/CDRW, 13.3" 1280x800 display. For $849 you can buy a Vostro 1400 with a Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz, 1GB DDR2 SDRAM, 80GB 5400RPM SATA drive, 24x DVD/CDRW, 14.1" 1440x900 display. Same deal with video - Dell is a generation ahead of Apple. Slight form factor penalty, due to the large screen, but only adds a couple ounces of weight, which many people would gladly trade for more screen real estate.
I definitely can't tell the difference personally, but I still archive in FLAC. Why? Transcoding without artifacts. I play local in native FLAC, convert to relatively low bitrate mp3 for travel (enough ambient noise that storage density outweighs fidelity), stream in vorbis so that I can decode in-browser with Cortado.
There's a difference between proprietary and gratis. I have absolutely no issue with compensating people for creative works.
Proprietary music? Copyrighted, sure. But proprietary?
Technically I can use the service, since I have several licenced copies of Windows. I'm not particularly motivated to reboot or go through the trouble of setting up a VM either. My collection (about 11k tracks, all legally obtained) is large enough that I'm in no particular hurry.
I'm not paying 175% more because they don't have a downloader for my platform of choice.
Eh? You can download individual tracks just fine with eMusic and you don't need to use eMusic Remote to do it.
Yes, it's a subscription service. But you also pay $0.26-33 per track instead of $0.88. Seems a fair trade-off to me.
As for the UA string... I only see that behaviour from the browser embedded in the eMusic Remote. Why on earth would you use that to go anywhere but emusic.com?
Have you checked out Emusic Remote? It's the new replacement Mozilla-based replacement for the old Download Manager application. Poking around it seems a lot nicer, but I haven't used it extensively yet since I ran out of tracks for the month before it was released.
I gave up on EMusic/J since it was regularly failing downloads or saving partial tracks for me, so I had been downloading the tracks individually instead.
I've been an eMusic member since July 2000. I'll likely buy some albums through Amazon now, though, where I would have previously bought shiny discs.
Never seen an iPod? They're about 75% of the market. :) A significant number of non-Apple devices also won't work as USB mass storage devices; typically they employ MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) instead.
I look at it another way - brand perception lagging as it does behind reality, used American cars can be a hell of a bargain. Our last vehicle was a Chevrolet Malibu - less than two years old, less than 30k on the odometer, GM certified $1200 under blue blook, $8875 under original MSRP, gave us over three years of service requiring no maintenance or repair aside from oil/filter changes and tire rotation.
... I'd have to consider it.
Depending on the type of car, going for a fleet vehicle can be a good bet. When it comes to family-oriented vehicles clockwork regular maintenance and cleanings far outweigh any concerns. When it comes to a 'sporty' vehicle, eh
Warranty is certainly a consideration. Certified vehicles cover at least the powertrain, though (think Ford has the shortest coverage at 6 years/75k miles). General warranties can be extended (on our newest vehicle - a 2006 Mazda5 - it cost only $680 to have it extended to 5 year / 60k miles, which far exceeds the 3 year / 36k mile warranty that would have come with a brand new one).
I agree that the current pricing does a disservice to the American auto industry though and should act as a cautionary tale, though. It doesn't matter how good a product you put out, selling your product at massive discounts damages the perceived value of the product.
Looking at a ten second snippet to judge the actual transfer rate on the Treo, it looked to be about 117.6kbit/sec which puts it firmly in the neighborhood of a 1xRTT connection (peak speed 144kbit/sec) and not EV-DO (peak speed 2.4mbit/sec). In other words, they tested in an area with poor Sprint coverage.
I would have paid $300 for an iPod.
But would you have paid $300 for an iPod with only 4GB or 8GB? If you're going to add up the value of the bundled features, a comparable model would be more apt. The flash players are $149 for 4GB or $199 for 8GB.
Yes, they are a popular device, so even if you don't want one, it's valuable.
No, really, it's not. The value of something you don't want and don't use is zero. If it was a seperate device you could sell, then it would have discrete value.
For you, it's a good deal. Great. Enjoy. For many other people it's grossly overpriced. For me a $50 phone which includes music capability, expandable storage, GPS, instant messaging, and EV-DO (up to 2.4 mbit/s compared to 236.8 kbit/s on EDGE).
Does that mean my choice of phone is "right"? No. It simply suits my needs and preferneces. The iPhone doesn't, especially at that price point.
ten years ago the internet was full of porn, definitely not an occasional image.
True, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* has always been chock full of porn. Should have said the web. Or mentioned it taking several minutes to download an image.
As for streaming video I still don't get any and that's actually good.
Hey, porn has to evolve somehow.
Editing text files isn't so bad as I still do.
Editing text is fine. Editing text is easy. Having to remember the location and format of a hundred different config files, mostly to do something as trivial as "stick a button here that launches a terminal" or "make my mouse a bit less sensitive so the cursor stops acting like a gnat on speed" is silly.
(I do more than enough text or command-line configuration. I've been administrating hundreds of headless servers for years.)
Most things in modern designs are hung directly off chip set rather than sitting on a peripheral bus. E.g. the upcoming AMD 790X north bridge integrates support for 41 PCI-e 2.0 lanes, HTX, and dual gigabit ethernet. The corresponding south bridge (AMD SB700 or SB750) integrates support for up to six SATA 3Gb/s devices, 12 USB 2.0 ports and 2 USB 1.1 ports. The interconnect between the the processor and north bridge and between the north bridge and south bridge is HyperTransport 3.0. I don't believe it's know how wide the bus on that implementation is, but the specification caps at 41.6GB/s aggregate bandwidth.
Even then, there's still plenty of bandwidth on the peripheral bus. 41 PCI-e 2.0 lanes should provide about 20GB/s of raw bandwidth. Even looking at a current 4x PCI-e 1.0 video card, you've got 1GB/s of bandwidth.
Hard drives are a typically the slowest component in a system but increased densities and aggressive caches are pushing transfer speeds fairly high. There are affordable SATA drives that push 100MB/sec sustained now and high end drives are pushing more like 160MB/sec. Not enough to saturate the theoretical bandwidth of a USB3 link with a single drive, but still more than a USB2 link provides today. Not to mention that multi-disk external enclosures are becoming fairly common.
Neat. I thought knowing what you were talking about was an obsolete concept on the internet.
There are some 10GFC products on the market, just not HBAs. I believe Emulex and Qlogic will be shipping their 8GFC HBAs this quarter as well.
No, he had it right. The initial speed of PCI-X (which debuted at 133MHz, not 66MHz) is 1064MB/sec (note: bytes, not bits) and the 2.0 spec does cap at 4.3GB/sec.
Where he seems confused is that the speed of USB is in megabits. A tenfold increase would bring it to 600MB/sec which would comfortable served by PCI-X 1.0, PCI-e 1.0 4x or PCI-e 2.0 2x. He also fails to take into account that USB is generally integrated directly into the chipset rather than being hung off the PCI* bus, so it's pretty irrelevent to the discussion.
Still, here's a run down of the various speeds offered by PCI, PCI-X and PCI-e. The 5Gb/sec variant of PCI-e isn't on the market yet but Intel, AMD and Nvidia have chipsets scheduled for Q4.
PCI, 32-bit, 33MHz - 133MB/sec
PCI, 64-bit, 33MHz - 266MB/sec
PCI, 32-bit, 66MHz - 266MB/sec
PCI, 64-bit, 66MHz - 533MB/sec
PCI-X, 64-bit, 133MHz - 1064MB/sec
PCI-X, 64-bit, 266MHz - 2.15GB/sec
PCI-X, 64-bit, 533MHz - 4.3GB/sec
PCI-e, 2.5Gb/sec, 1x - 250MB/sec
PCI-e, 5.0Gb/sec, 1x - 500MB/sec
Ten years ago I had to manually edit a text file to configure the "wharf" on my window manager (original Afterstep 1.x line). Ten years ago my apps weren't internationalized. Ten years ago my apps weren't accessibly. Ten years ago the web was mostly text and the occasional image. Ten years ago streaming video was 160x120 at 15 frames per second.
Personally I'm happy with the "bloat".
Roman wrote a poorly documented monolithic patch. Ingo requested that he split it into more manageable pieces isolating the various changes. Roman didn't, so Ingo did, crediting him in the description and on all the segments based on Roman's ideas. How is that wrong?
(On a side note, it was hardly a large patch. The bulk of it was removing dead code.)
Userspace is a far far bigger issue there. Try pairing the kernel with uClibc and busybox and you'll find it runs fine with a tiny amount of memory.
A single codebase like the one OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFly, TrustedBSD, MirOS, etc share?
Many things in the Linux kernel are optimized specifically to improve performance on "big iron", and most of those optimizations can't be fixed by just recompiling the kernel with different options.
What parts are optimized specifically for big iron at the expense of desktop, precisely? Linus has stated repeatedly that he believes that the major subsystems should perform reliabily under any workload.
He's also spoke at length about the perennial calls to fork the kernel:
"This is also, btw, why I think that people who argue for splitting desktop kernels from server kernels are total morons, and only show that they don't know what the hell they are talking about.
"The fact is, the work we've done on server loads has improved the desktop experience _immensely_, with all the scalability work (or the work on large memory configurations, etc etc) that went on there, and that used to be totally irrelevant for the desktop.
"And btw, the same is very much true in reverse: a lot of the stuff that was done for desktop reasons (hotplug etc) has been a _huge_ boon for the server side, and while there were certainly issues that had to be resolved (the sysfs stuff so central to the hotplug model used tons of memory when you had ten thousand disks, and server people were sometimes really unhappy), a lot of the big improvements actually happen because something totally _unrelated_ needed them, and then it just turns out that it's good for the desktop too, even if it started out as a server thing or vice versa.
"This is why the whole 'modal' mindset is stupid. It basically freezes a choice that shouldn't be frozen. It sets up an artificial barrier between two kinds of uses (whether they be about 'server' vs 'desktop' or '3D gaming' vs 'audio processing', or anything else), and that frozen choice actually ends up being a barrier to development in the long run.
"So 'modal' things are good for fixing behaviour in the short run. But they are a total disaster in the long run, and even in the short run they tend to have problems (simply because there will be cases that straddle the line, and show some of _both_ issues, and now *neither* mode is the right one)"