Verizon says... OBEX... doesn't fit their business model--greedy bastards.
In the 80's I worked for a company that sold stock market data, only we thought we were selling "time-shared" mainframe computer cycles--which we billed for--while the data--which was provided without charge--was a nifty value-add.
My customers bitched that one month's bill could buy a PC. I hated being treated as evil and feared for the business. But I learned to love it when I realized they were bitching because there was nothing else they could do. We were supplying a product that they couldn't get elsewhere. (We were just pricing the wrong thing.)
Same thing here: it's hard for me to imagine that Verizon is greedier than the 8 other comm services I've used (special exception for AT&T, which is enjoying its comeuppance). The poster is whining because he likes the overall package that Verizon offers enough that he won't put his money where his mouth is, and switch over to Cingular, T-Mo, or whomever.
Betcha it's because Verizon has better coverage. VZ customers pay a "premium" in that they have to buy custom ringtones and photo transfers (that aren't worth 2 cents), but get superior (expensive) coverage at a competitive price because VZ gets those $$$ enough to rent new tower space & eqpt.
OTOH, I buy BlueTooth and GPRS data ($20 all-you-can-eat) with indifferent coverage: T-Mo drops my calls if I walk between the kitchen and my study.
The most obvious difference is that I made my bed and now lie in it. VZ could be smarter and say, "we're trying to emphasize full-service packages to ensure highest-quality service" or some such more friendly BS than "business model" mumbo-jumbo. But it'd still be the same ole same old.
"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."
Having only used an iPod, I'm disadvantaged here... but I'm surprised that nobody has commented how utterly easy and fast it is to rip music in iTunes, or buy it from Apple, and have exactly the selections I want (play lists, individual songs, albums) on my iPod.
Every few days I end up with a couple or three more CD's I've acquired (uhhh, licensed) and it's trivial to get the tags, rip them while listening to something else, and then update (possibly "unchecking" items I don't currently want on the 'pod) my choices on the portable. I wouldn't call drag'n'drop anywhere near as good, given the thousands of tracks (hundreds of albums) I have.
Are MusicMatch or the Real jukebox really on par? Or are these things that require above-average skills and patience?
It's not as if these little gizmos work in isolation, there's a whole ecosystem here. Why doesn't anybody mention the quality of the PC support?
So this person will be selected sometime in the next 2 months, and start working on a whole range of issues that might get used in future products...
IIRC, Apple split off an iPod division from their Mac lines to concentrate on consumer entertainment devices, and this person's capabilities could go into a whole range of potential devices that have nothing to do with a video iPod... they could just be covering their bases. And in any case, I wouldn't look for a product to result a few months after they hire somebody with kitchen sink skills.
even Wall Street realizes... that SCO is worthless.
No, Wall Street believes SCO is worth its "market capitalization" of about $56 MM. If this is "worthless," perhaps you would be so kind as to issue me a check for a small fraction of that amount to prove it.
For on-the-brink companies, stock analysts use a range of methods to do valuation. Break-up (fire sale) value is one way; probably about zero for an IP company which has just gone to a lot of work to prove how worthless its IP is. Another is to figure they still have a slim (one-in-100?) chance of hitting the jackpot and the value is about 1/100 of the jackpot.
In this territory, stocks are a "call option" on future good luck. If the cash flow increases, you get it. If the value of the company all bleeds away, you only lose your investment and the creditors and bondholders make up the difference. The stock price can rationally be quite a bit higher than the rational expected future value of the enterprise.
Well, the same way that Sodium and Chlorine are the two constituents (US spelling) of table salt. "Is contained in" doesn't mean the properties are the same. Sodium and Chlorine are both still poisonous.
The iPod was a godsend: it put my briefcase full of CD's into my pocket. Not only that, the full package with iTunes was twice as good as the subsequent competition. No surprise that it became an instant hit for mobile lifestyle types who could afford it, and that soon became almost everybody.
Now there are other good jukeboxes, other good portables and the download store genie is sorta out of the bottle. As long as Apple can keep critical mass with its store (which only sells music that iPods can play), iPods will continue to have the lion's share of the player marketplace. As soon as there are stores selling a good selection of music that works on WMA players, WMA players become more attractive. Apple is not about to subsidize the high-margin player marketplace by encouraging a competitor into the already low-margin store business. There's absolutely no business sense for Apple to break up the empire into little pieces that can be picked off one by one.
And the idea that I, a Mac user, would endorse making the iTunes music store unprofitable, in the hopes that Real would pick up the baton, is laughable.
The fact that... makes this a good buy for anybody...
Well, any iPod user who (1) has built their music collection in Windows and (2) never wants to use iTunes or the iTunes Music Store in the future.
'Cuz the next time you plug your iPod into your WinPC, iTunes will update the 'pod by adding any new songs & playlists, and removing any that are not on the iTunes list... just like it was originally designed to, way before the Real issue arose. As a result, you erase your Harmony tracks every time you use that marvelously easy/fast update. Then, you will need to either (a) manually re-copy all those tracks to your iPod, or (b) stop using iTunes and switch permanently to the Real jukebox, losing any iTMS music you got from Pepsi caps, free downloads of the week, or your hard-earned $$$.
And Real wants to claim they're offering a superior alternative?
Real justifies this lock-in with fine print as to "why you want to use the Real jukebox." Either all the songs you bought from iTMS or from Real, will become useless on an iPod, or you become a low-paid servant to that little tune player that you used to love.
The big deal with the iPod -- for me, and I think I'm typical with this -- is that it lets me just listen to music without all those techno-horrors. Not that it's cool, or sexy white, or Apple®. Real is offering a techno-horror of gotchas.
No wonder there's outrage. Mine is directed at Real's bait-and-switch, false sanctimony and their phony Dot-ORG marketing BS.
A universal DRM format? It'll probably have to be imposed on the hardware and software types by our friends the "music industry." Real, MS and Apple all have vested interests in promoting their kits. The only twist is that Apple actually has the upper hand here. And while it may look like the labels would benefit from selling the same program many times because of Balkanization, sooner or later they'll realize that commoditizing the players and stores leaves more money for them.
While traveling in China recently, I saw an article claiming that each Chinese DVD player includes something like $14 in royalties to the MPEG consortium and other royalty holders. That means LOTS of royalties going to US residents; we benefit from each one of those zillions of imports that would NEVER be made in the USA.
Imagine if Chinese engineers were to come up with a decent replacement for those standards, and consumers had the choice of $79 DVD's or $59 CV's. Hollywood would immediately assume that was another $20 that consumers could spend on content. Why WOULDN'T they release all the content in both formats?
So how do Slashdotters feel about IP being such a big part of the purchase price for a favorite technology? (PS: The work is well underway for an efficient, IP-lite or IP-free format.)
The fact that Microsoft initiated this project is a significant negative to me (risk of having the rug pulled out) but the only negative against the opportunity to have a multi-language (I'm a sucker for the strong type- and functionality assertion checking that Pascal first brought, and Eiffel now offers), multi-platform environment.
That means that when the NAG releases their intricate math routines in.Net, I could use them without worrying about FORTRAN vs. C vs VB etc... develop anywhere (?) for implementation many years into the future on unknown platforms. Mix'n'match developer familiarity with 3rd party libraries.
This is just my perspective as a business person who doesn't code nearly as much as I used to, but wants to leave a legacy that others can build on (and wants to freeload on the best & brightest of what came before)..Net is a slam-dunk only-way-to-do-it choice if the Mono guys are only half as good as they seem to be, and if MS is only twice as evil as it seems to be.
Of course, red tinting limits little, if any, red. It could make it harder to distinguish red from white. BLUE light is attenuated; green might look kinda dull yellowish.
OTOH, A sharp blue tint could make red and yellow (emergency) lights difficult to see... up to invisible if one got legalistic about the wording I saw on a Kansas website. If I were to ban any color for safety reasons, it'd surely be blue.
Perhaps Kansas's lawmakers reasoned that we'd evolve our way around their apparent stupidity. =^>
What I think we are saying is "...could we do this a little less personally - after all you can't do this in print..."
Ah, the naivete of youth (?)!
Certainly, my print edition of the NYT includes SF Bay Area - targeted ads, including Sunday's "San Francisco Arts" supplement. (Heaven forfend! The delivery guy knows where I live!) D'ya think that sponsors of the SF Crafts Festival would be buying an ad at National rates?
Ditto for your Star Trib purchases and subscriptions. A quick check of their web page for advertisers finds,
"Want to reach consumers throughout the Twin Cities? Would you
prefer to target a specific geographic area or a specific demographic group?
Whatever your preference, Star Tribune has a solution for you.
Classifieds, display ads, supplements, special sections and geographic zoning are just a few examples of the newspaper advertising options we offer marketers.
There's more - including online advertising, direct marketing, promotional events and products devoted to special topics.
We even have people who can help you develop a marketing plan. Just call us at 612-XXX-XXXX for more information."
In an industry oversaturated with pretenders, Sony might have thought their only hope was to redefine the industry with a new feature set. It could even be that they thought it was a long shot, perhaps depending on Orrin Hatch to help, or whatever. But trying to put a premium-price, same-as-everybody-else product out there obviously wouldn't cut it.
So you're the engineer tasked with producing the best possible DRM-only box. You have a long history with ATRAC in its several incarnations, even have custom "low power" decoding chips (Plus #1: superior battery life; lowered engineering costs). You figure, anybody who converts from their legit CD collection to ATRAC will have "arguably better; at least as good" music as MP3 would've given. That's Plus #2: claimable tech superiority. Finally, you work your other magic to make it small, light and sexy looking (Plus #3). The software ain't quite there yet? It's not as if memories of Windows 1.0, or the lack of WinXX on Apple's 5%? market share, terribly hurts MSFT. Time will heal.
The only problem is that these little plusses don't seem enough to "redefine" the category from Apple's approach, at least not until DRM 3.0 automatically erases Mossberg's and everybody else's MP3 files. Maybe this release is just a placeholder until then.
Gotta look at one's whole music ecosystem, from discovering new music all the way thru to repeat rapture with music that is deeply meaningful / beautiful / etc.
Apple's Music Store, iTunes and the iPod will never replace friends' advice, Global Rhythm mag, WEMU.ORG, SF's Opera & Symphony, KCSM FM, etc., for finding "new" music. (Your tastes may vary.) But together with a decent set of phones like the Etymotic 4S's or a great stereo, the Apple kit covers the rest of the bases superbly. Especially for somebody who wants to spend time listening closely to great music, but has a lifestyle that seldom calls for sitting still in the Living Room.
15 minutes after seeing the iTunes RSS feed about having recently added Patricia Barber's albums, I'd sampled enough tracks to choose 2 albums and had the music, in quite good fidelity, on both my hard disk and my iPod. (Decent price, too.) Yes, the experience of ripping CD's is also excellent, and almost as fast, thanks to the well-thought-out UI in iTunes and GraceNote.
But "it's the UI" misses the point. Because it's so easy and portable, my music is now more than twice as accessible, for a measly few hundred dollars (a small part of what it cost me to get all that music in the first place). No stacks of CD's on my frequent business travel, or choosing at 6AM what music I want to hear at the Y after work. Makes ya feel good every time you switch it on.
Not a flame to me. The linked article ought to convince (both of?) the Undecideds that most of current Subjectivism is merely part of a sad history of Fooled By Randomness. [1]
But it also shows that the most widely quoted measurements don't characterize sound as well as we'd like. Total Harmonic Distortion, for example, has very different effect on the listener when it's 2nd vs 3rd vs 4th... Harmonic that is produced. And it mentions crossover distortion, a very audible problem on low signal levels, as well, for which I'm not aware of a standard measurement approach.
Also not mentioned, if there ARE pumping effects from a sudden surge of output temporarily drawing down the amp's supply voltage, shifting the amp into a different bias situation, you'd expect steady-state measurements to miss any result; simple impedance in the power circuits could cause something sorta like crossover distortion that could make lower-level signals sound odd. However, you won't hear me claim that amps require some exotic technology or else they're crap, since I don't have any measurements of this potential effect.
I'm reminded of Moneyball, wherein Batting Average, a widely-followed indicator of a hitter's skill, is replaced, very advantageously, by a formula that includes Walks and multiple-base hits. Gave a better indication of how well a player was contributing to Wins, versus Losses. (Yeah, baseball has that ultimate objectivity that Audio Engineering lacks, but you can still go into the bars and talk about "class," "style" or whatever.)
The article also cites Lysenko and (new to me) the sad story of Blondot, who worked himself into a frenzy about unmeasurable effects that regrettably didn't exist. But I think we ought to be open to previously-unconsidered ways that equipment is unfaithful to us; it's part of the scientific tradition that also produces Quantum Mechanics and superconducting, and that gave us gravity and the heliocentric view (even if it also gives us Cold Fusion for a while). As the Structure of Scientific Revolutions shows, even those with a high commitment to non-subjectivity have a hard time dealing with conflicting facts and opinions. Expertise needs to be supplemented with objective, large-sample tests. Those should put us on pretty solid ground, but are hard, and costly to do. They're also unnecessary when the purpose is to get a sound that helps convince you that your position on sound reproduction is correct, or to justify charging extra for a box that incorporates some cutting edge features.
I'm curious about the example of the cutting head. I kinda thought that Op Amps were intially developed to emulate the physical properties of such devices, and that it's pretty simple in both the domains of electronics and partial differential equations, to precompensate for the inertia... you'd send the appropriate magnitude of negative voltage when you wanted to put a hard limit on the positive inertia. But of course, even if you COULD perfectly flatten the top of a loud spike, it'd splatter the listener with all those nasty odd-order harmonics, and your listener would regret that you did so. Woudln't most listeners prefer some softer limiting that'd produce a lower distortion level? And don't current digital analyzers allow pre-leveling every little scrap of music so that no waveform actually needs be hacked up?
The article also mentioned how many tube designs produce lots of 2nd (1 octave) and other even harmonics that produce a "choral" or warm sound. I don't know exactly how producers/engineers cut the cake on this, but I'd mix for a pretty dry sound on vinyl, so the tube school didn't get soupy wet ringing, the SACD crowd got their ultra-crispiness, and yes, I'd probably compress the CD format because it'll most likely be heard in higher ambient-noise situations, where a constant loudness trumps the occasional squawk. I thought the DSotM reference was fascinating because it showed the engineers had apparently done just that: tried
On a day when the real-world news is rife with examples of how faulty information processing has lead to multiple thousands of deaths, Slashdot dredges up issues with studios' technology from the 70's and claims they apply to consumer choices of today. Of course, in the fine print, NONE of the boundary conditions that are pushed, accidentally or intentionally, are similar.
Clueless, disingenuous or manipulative? I couldn't tell. But it's not exactly helpful in forming a well-considered mindset about audio design.
Here's my 3-bullet take on the weird juxtaposition:
* The older paper (as well as others quickly linked to) talks about how studios risked distortion by pushing amplifiers past design limits in order to escape tiresome, easily-heard tape hiss. In the 30 years since, the dynamic range of amplifiers has improved (less likelihood for over-the-edge conditions); metering and sound checks have gotten easier and faster, leading to fewer mistakes; and (analog) tape hiss, when it's an issue at all, has also dropped further down the list of concerns. Why is this archive paper relevant without those differences mentioned?
* The second-linked article vents frustrations that even live music is intentionally garbaged up by the creators. The sound is intentionally manipulated to sound "louder" which also makes it SOUND AS IF it was produced by over-driven equipment. That's the artists' prerogative, and the critic's job to carp about. Nothing to see here, folks, except that it interestingly links to...
* a previous in-depth analysis of the Dark Side of the Moon SACD that details differences between formats that must have been driven by perceived preferences of listeners, not the formats themselves. Implicitly, some engineers seem to believe that CD listeners prefer LOUD while SACD listeners like "clean," because that's how they manipulated the two formats differently. For CD listeners, they clipped the sound INTENTIONALLY, and differently from any faults of the electronics, in a way that's unnecessary for the CD format. Clipping produces ugly noise on loud spots, but makes the recording sound "louder."
One might guess that engineers aim for the "cleaner" effect on vinyl, too. (Not too many vinyl fanatics risk installing their systems in cars, so they can groove while cruising along I-5, and probably not very many SACD systems, either.) And it's also not too much of a guess to assume that vinyl listeners are about 10X to 100X more likely to use tube equipment, which the owners have selected because it sounds (to them) more the way THEY prefer.
So this attempt at stoking flames under the War of the Formats (Audio Division) can be seen as having nothing to do with "Tubes vs Transistors," as titled. Rather, it oughta be, "my format Rools and yours Sux" or something more appropriate to the information that it provides to the topic. Absent the 2+2=17 faulty logic, the articles actually seem to show that engineering allows whatever "sound" the seller wants to feed the consumer, without any objective "quality" standard at all.
I propose "Troll of the Week" balloting to allow us to heap opprobrium on such posts. This shouldn't even make it on a slow news day. I'm all for vigorous discussion on "stuff that matters" but articles that encourage senseless flame wars don't exactly further that goal.
> The point being made is that it's advertised as CD quality,
On Apple's site, the only mention of CD parity was when YOU rip CD's with their new lossless format. And even that was rather conservatively claimed as "sound quality indistinguishable from the original."
For contrast, check the sleaze from Sony (press release on their forthcoming Walkman) and Dell (comparison between their DJ20 and the 20GB iPod), who claim 2X or more the tunes by using 64kbit/sec or stingier assumptions against Apple's implicit 128kbit/sec AAC. Anybody want to claim 64kbit/sec stands up to close listening at all?
This article points out that the marketing for downloadable music is getting desperate for the also-rans, so they are making bait-and-switch type claims. Too bad the writer seemed to have bought in to the FUD. Uggh.
It ain't just Apple's disk space that is the premium item... spoze you bought a 10GB 'Pod and it only held 30 albums? How many people would that excite?
The original column is either intentionally deceptive or ignorant about economics. People with good ears buy iTunes Music because it's convenient, economical and sounds pretty good. The best possible? As in lugging your 200 CD collection, and your monster speakers along on all your travels?
Earth to NYT: this is a portable music system for wide market use. There are lots of tradeoffs to make it hit a broad public's sweet spot. And Apple seems to have done pretty damn well on just about all counts.
If all I cared about was platform independence, Mono wouldn't matter. (Java covers that very well.)
But.Net and Mono further promise language interoperability. That means I'll be able to blend 3rd parties' libraries without caring what the source language is, and take a serious foray into Eiffel without the expense of backing out, if it doesn't really deliver what I want, or if it threatens to become orphaned. With luck, 3rd party compilers for the.Net CLI will work fine to the Mono CLI. Sweet!
And still not worry whether it's OSX, WinXX or *nix.
For me, this is all about choice, (minimizing the risk of a little fling) and leverage.
rapid-fire traders would seem unlikely to care about anything more than 6 weeks down the road. And private equity, which can NOT be easily bought and sold, is an unlikely venue for them.
Although individual investors may want to make independent assessments of the value of private firms' options, there are obvious advantages to having the firm provide a reputable estimate from a consultant or the firm's auditor, making the information fairly, and inexpensively, available to all investors.
Privately held companies have insufficient common stock pricing events for such a volatility estimate.
It's not hard to make an informed guess about the fair value of options. Yes, the Black-Scholes formula forecasts the stock's volatility by looking at the recent past volatility, but there are several consulting firms able to make a good swag. Wall Street is also quite happy to take a shot.
If I were a holder of private equity (I'm not), I'd want to see those guesstimates. They can be better than using the simple historical values.
Nobody is FORCED to take their company public; they do so to obtain cash from outside investors. Naturally, no investor wants to put cash into something that won't pay back, and our country has established some "fair play rules" that boil down to 1) management's acknowledgement that they work for the new owners, as exemplified by accountability to a Board of Directors that is meant to protect the owners' interests, and 2) management will prepare honest and accurate accounting of what's happening to the company that they're running.
Options are only recently a significant part of a company's total financial picture, and so only recently have become important for investors to understand. After investors take a stab at whether, say, Palm One is going to make it or not -- neat ideas, good engineering, rapidly changing market and uncertain prospects -- they also have to consider that if the firm is financially successful, they mightn't get much to show for risking their funds.
My clients have a few billion dollars, mostly middle-class retirement funds, at stake. They expect reasonable risks and a fair chance at a good result. The elementary math of investing is that many investments are losers, or have a very modest payback. It's the relatively few that succeed that make stocks good investments. If those few don't actually pay you -- unknown options give half of it to employees -- then the whole deal turns sour.
As many posters have mentioned, expensing options doesn't change the CURRENT working status. As an investor, I'm happy to see creative carrots for important employees, but I absolutely MUST have a good feel for what fraction of the company's success is committed to somebody other than me. The challenge is for me to make a decent swag at the company's future earnings that my clients will get. (My clients own about.03% of the 3000 largest companies in the country.) Inconsistent, hidden, or buried-in-footnotes numbers just are humanly impossible to work with. And they're against the spirit of public ownership of companies.
I strongly support using options as an incentive to employees, but I also strongly support a standard, consistent way of accounting for them. If firms don't want to provide investors with a consistent, "generally accepted" picture of what they are doing, they shouldn't be offering stock to the general public.
I regularly use my cellphone's GPRS data capability to put my laptop online... over 100MB per month, according to my bills, even at sub-dialup data rates. It's good for quick access when traveling, and it doesn't keep my cellphone from being available to receive calls.
I don't have any difficulty reading its 15" screen, nor am I aware of a competitive technology that now offers as broad a coverage as cellular. A higher-speed version would be very welcome.
As a longtime Mac user, I'm used to hearing that my machine is slow. But 2 minutes for a browser to swap back in?!? I can't imagine ANY program taking that long to load AND initialize, let alone merely shuffle back into memory.
I routinely have a couple gigs of apps running, necessarily overflowing available RAM, so my Powerbook swaps to a (not ultrafast) laptop drive. I maybe see 2 or 3 seconds, tops, of wait time, ever. Is your swap area on a tape drive?
This thread seems to be rife with all sorts of speculation about optimizations and very little data other than examples that suggest the problem is severely mis-identified. Seems that gross exaggeration is suggesting, wrongly, that a generally useful swap mechanism is awful when it is less than optimal. Dedicated-use servers might perform a little better with hand-tuning, but general-use machines, where usage patterns are highly unpredictable, seem very unlikely to benefit from extreme variances from a generally-useful approach.
Then there are people like me who have collections mostly of classics, etc., and never know when I get on the plane what will suit my fancy a couple of hours later. Davis, Dead Can Dance, Debussy, Dvorák,...
Versus the mini, the extra space does cost size/weight, but otherwise, having a 40gigger just requires a couple hundred more dollars out of a total CD collection cost of maybe $3K. That's not a bad tradeoff for me to have that choice w/o spending lots of time fiddling.
Slashdot Mirror
Verizon says ... OBEX ... doesn't fit their business model--greedy bastards.
In the 80's I worked for a company that sold stock market data, only we thought we were selling "time-shared" mainframe computer cycles--which we billed for--while the data--which was provided without charge--was a nifty value-add.
My customers bitched that one month's bill could buy a PC. I hated being treated as evil and feared for the business. But I learned to love it when I realized they were bitching because there was nothing else they could do. We were supplying a product that they couldn't get elsewhere. (We were just pricing the wrong thing.)
Same thing here: it's hard for me to imagine that Verizon is greedier than the 8 other comm services I've used (special exception for AT&T, which is enjoying its comeuppance). The poster is whining because he likes the overall package that Verizon offers enough that he won't put his money where his mouth is, and switch over to Cingular, T-Mo, or whomever.
Betcha it's because Verizon has better coverage. VZ customers pay a "premium" in that they have to buy custom ringtones and photo transfers (that aren't worth 2 cents), but get superior (expensive) coverage at a competitive price because VZ gets those $$$ enough to rent new tower space & eqpt.
OTOH, I buy BlueTooth and GPRS data ($20 all-you-can-eat) with indifferent coverage: T-Mo drops my calls if I walk between the kitchen and my study.
The most obvious difference is that I made my bed and now lie in it. VZ could be smarter and say, "we're trying to emphasize full-service packages to ensure highest-quality service" or some such more friendly BS than "business model" mumbo-jumbo. But it'd still be the same ole same old.
"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."
Having only used an iPod, I'm disadvantaged here... but I'm surprised that nobody has commented how utterly easy and fast it is to rip music in iTunes, or buy it from Apple, and have exactly the selections I want (play lists, individual songs, albums) on my iPod.
Every few days I end up with a couple or three more CD's I've acquired (uhhh, licensed) and it's trivial to get the tags, rip them while listening to something else, and then update (possibly "unchecking" items I don't currently want on the 'pod) my choices on the portable. I wouldn't call drag'n'drop anywhere near as good, given the thousands of tracks (hundreds of albums) I have.
Are MusicMatch or the Real jukebox really on par? Or are these things that require above-average skills and patience?
It's not as if these little gizmos work in isolation, there's a whole ecosystem here. Why doesn't anybody mention the quality of the PC support?
So this person will be selected sometime in the next 2 months, and start working on a whole range of issues that might get used in future products...
IIRC, Apple split off an iPod division from their Mac lines to concentrate on consumer entertainment devices, and this person's capabilities could go into a whole range of potential devices that have nothing to do with a video iPod... they could just be covering their bases. And in any case, I wouldn't look for a product to result a few months after they hire somebody with kitchen sink skills.
even Wall Street realizes ... that SCO is worthless.
No, Wall Street believes SCO is worth its "market capitalization" of about $56 MM. If this is "worthless," perhaps you would be so kind as to issue me a check for a small fraction of that amount to prove it.
For on-the-brink companies, stock analysts use a range of methods to do valuation. Break-up (fire sale) value is one way; probably about zero for an IP company which has just gone to a lot of work to prove how worthless its IP is. Another is to figure they still have a slim (one-in-100?) chance of hitting the jackpot and the value is about 1/100 of the jackpot.
In this territory, stocks are a "call option" on future good luck. If the cash flow increases, you get it. If the value of the company all bleeds away, you only lose your investment and the creditors and bondholders make up the difference. The stock price can rationally be quite a bit higher than the rational expected future value of the enterprise.
Well, the same way that Sodium and Chlorine are the two constituents (US spelling) of table salt. "Is contained in" doesn't mean the properties are the same. Sodium and Chlorine are both still poisonous.
The iPod was a godsend: it put my briefcase full of CD's into my pocket. Not only that, the full package with iTunes was twice as good as the subsequent competition. No surprise that it became an instant hit for mobile lifestyle types who could afford it, and that soon became almost everybody.
Now there are other good jukeboxes, other good portables and the download store genie is sorta out of the bottle. As long as Apple can keep critical mass with its store (which only sells music that iPods can play), iPods will continue to have the lion's share of the player marketplace. As soon as there are stores selling a good selection of music that works on WMA players, WMA players become more attractive. Apple is not about to subsidize the high-margin player marketplace by encouraging a competitor into the already low-margin store business. There's absolutely no business sense for Apple to break up the empire into little pieces that can be picked off one by one.
And the idea that I, a Mac user, would endorse making the iTunes music store unprofitable, in the hopes that Real would pick up the baton, is laughable.
The fact that ... makes this a good buy for anybody...
Well, any iPod user who (1) has built their music collection in Windows and (2) never wants to use iTunes or the iTunes Music Store in the future.
'Cuz the next time you plug your iPod into your WinPC, iTunes will update the 'pod by adding any new songs & playlists, and removing any that are not on the iTunes list... just like it was originally designed to, way before the Real issue arose. As a result, you erase your Harmony tracks every time you use that marvelously easy/fast update. Then, you will need to either (a) manually re-copy all those tracks to your iPod, or (b) stop using iTunes and switch permanently to the Real jukebox, losing any iTMS music you got from Pepsi caps, free downloads of the week, or your hard-earned $$$.
And Real wants to claim they're offering a superior alternative?
Real justifies this lock-in with fine print as to "why you want to use the Real jukebox." Either all the songs you bought from iTMS or from Real, will become useless on an iPod, or you become a low-paid servant to that little tune player that you used to love.
The big deal with the iPod -- for me, and I think I'm typical with this -- is that it lets me just listen to music without all those techno-horrors. Not that it's cool, or sexy white, or Apple®. Real is offering a techno-horror of gotchas.
No wonder there's outrage. Mine is directed at Real's bait-and-switch, false sanctimony and their phony Dot-ORG marketing BS.
A universal DRM format? It'll probably have to be imposed on the hardware and software types by our friends the "music industry." Real, MS and Apple all have vested interests in promoting their kits. The only twist is that Apple actually has the upper hand here. And while it may look like the labels would benefit from selling the same program many times because of Balkanization, sooner or later they'll realize that commoditizing the players and stores leaves more money for them.
While traveling in China recently, I saw an article claiming that each Chinese DVD player includes something like $14 in royalties to the MPEG consortium and other royalty holders. That means LOTS of royalties going to US residents; we benefit from each one of those zillions of imports that would NEVER be made in the USA.
Imagine if Chinese engineers were to come up with a decent replacement for those standards, and consumers had the choice of $79 DVD's or $59 CV's. Hollywood would immediately assume that was another $20 that consumers could spend on content. Why WOULDN'T they release all the content in both formats?
So how do Slashdotters feel about IP being such a big part of the purchase price for a favorite technology? (PS: The work is well underway for an efficient, IP-lite or IP-free format.)
The fact that Microsoft initiated this project is a significant negative to me (risk of having the rug pulled out) but the only negative against the opportunity to have a multi-language (I'm a sucker for the strong type- and functionality assertion checking that Pascal first brought, and Eiffel now offers), multi-platform environment.
.Net, I could use them without worrying about FORTRAN vs. C vs VB etc... develop anywhere (?) for implementation many years into the future on unknown platforms. Mix'n'match developer familiarity with 3rd party libraries.
.Net is a slam-dunk only-way-to-do-it choice if the Mono guys are only half as good as they seem to be, and if MS is only twice as evil as it seems to be.
That means that when the NAG releases their intricate math routines in
This is just my perspective as a business person who doesn't code nearly as much as I used to, but wants to leave a legacy that others can build on (and wants to freeload on the best & brightest of what came before).
Of course, red tinting limits little, if any, red. It could make it harder to distinguish red from white. BLUE light is attenuated; green might look kinda dull yellowish.
OTOH, A sharp blue tint could make red and yellow (emergency) lights difficult to see... up to invisible if one got legalistic about the wording I saw on a Kansas website. If I were to ban any color for safety reasons, it'd surely be blue.
Perhaps Kansas's lawmakers reasoned that we'd evolve our way around their apparent stupidity. =^>
Ah, the naivete of youth (?)!
Certainly, my print edition of the NYT includes SF Bay Area - targeted ads, including Sunday's "San Francisco Arts" supplement. (Heaven forfend! The delivery guy knows where I live!) D'ya think that sponsors of the SF Crafts Festival would be buying an ad at National rates?
Ditto for your Star Trib purchases and subscriptions. A quick check of their web page for advertisers finds,
[Emphasis added & Phone # struck]
In an industry oversaturated with pretenders, Sony might have thought their only hope was to redefine the industry with a new feature set. It could even be that they thought it was a long shot, perhaps depending on Orrin Hatch to help, or whatever. But trying to put a premium-price, same-as-everybody-else product out there obviously wouldn't cut it.
So you're the engineer tasked with producing the best possible DRM-only box. You have a long history with ATRAC in its several incarnations, even have custom "low power" decoding chips (Plus #1: superior battery life; lowered engineering costs). You figure, anybody who converts from their legit CD collection to ATRAC will have "arguably better; at least as good" music as MP3 would've given. That's Plus #2: claimable tech superiority. Finally, you work your other magic to make it small, light and sexy looking (Plus #3). The software ain't quite there yet? It's not as if memories of Windows 1.0, or the lack of WinXX on Apple's 5%? market share, terribly hurts MSFT. Time will heal.
The only problem is that these little plusses don't seem enough to "redefine" the category from Apple's approach, at least not until DRM 3.0 automatically erases Mossberg's and everybody else's MP3 files. Maybe this release is just a placeholder until then.
Gotta look at one's whole music ecosystem, from discovering new music all the way thru to repeat rapture with music that is deeply meaningful / beautiful / etc.
Apple's Music Store, iTunes and the iPod will never replace friends' advice, Global Rhythm mag, WEMU.ORG, SF's Opera & Symphony, KCSM FM, etc., for finding "new" music. (Your tastes may vary.) But together with a decent set of phones like the Etymotic 4S's or a great stereo, the Apple kit covers the rest of the bases superbly. Especially for somebody who wants to spend time listening closely to great music, but has a lifestyle that seldom calls for sitting still in the Living Room.
15 minutes after seeing the iTunes RSS feed about having recently added Patricia Barber's albums, I'd sampled enough tracks to choose 2 albums and had the music, in quite good fidelity, on both my hard disk and my iPod. (Decent price, too.) Yes, the experience of ripping CD's is also excellent, and almost as fast, thanks to the well-thought-out UI in iTunes and GraceNote.
But "it's the UI" misses the point. Because it's so easy and portable, my music is now more than twice as accessible, for a measly few hundred dollars (a small part of what it cost me to get all that music in the first place). No stacks of CD's on my frequent business travel, or choosing at 6AM what music I want to hear at the Y after work. Makes ya feel good every time you switch it on.
Not a flame to me. The linked article ought to convince (both of?) the Undecideds that most of current Subjectivism is merely part of a sad history of Fooled By Randomness. [1]
... Harmonic that is produced. And it mentions crossover distortion, a very audible problem on low signal levels, as well, for which I'm not aware of a standard measurement approach.
But it also shows that the most widely quoted measurements don't characterize sound as well as we'd like. Total Harmonic Distortion, for example, has very different effect on the listener when it's 2nd vs 3rd vs 4th
Also not mentioned, if there ARE pumping effects from a sudden surge of output temporarily drawing down the amp's supply voltage, shifting the amp into a different bias situation, you'd expect steady-state measurements to miss any result; simple impedance in the power circuits could cause something sorta like crossover distortion that could make lower-level signals sound odd. However, you won't hear me claim that amps require some exotic technology or else they're crap, since I don't have any measurements of this potential effect.
I'm reminded of Moneyball, wherein Batting Average, a widely-followed indicator of a hitter's skill, is replaced, very advantageously, by a formula that includes Walks and multiple-base hits. Gave a better indication of how well a player was contributing to Wins, versus Losses. (Yeah, baseball has that ultimate objectivity that Audio Engineering lacks, but you can still go into the bars and talk about "class," "style" or whatever.)
The article also cites Lysenko and (new to me) the sad story of Blondot, who worked himself into a frenzy about unmeasurable effects that regrettably didn't exist. But I think we ought to be open to previously-unconsidered ways that equipment is unfaithful to us; it's part of the scientific tradition that also produces Quantum Mechanics and superconducting, and that gave us gravity and the heliocentric view (even if it also gives us Cold Fusion for a while). As the Structure of Scientific Revolutions shows, even those with a high commitment to non-subjectivity have a hard time dealing with conflicting facts and opinions. Expertise needs to be supplemented with objective, large-sample tests. Those should put us on pretty solid ground, but are hard, and costly to do. They're also unnecessary when the purpose is to get a sound that helps convince you that your position on sound reproduction is correct, or to justify charging extra for a box that incorporates some cutting edge features.
I'm curious about the example of the cutting head. I kinda thought that Op Amps were intially developed to emulate the physical properties of such devices, and that it's pretty simple in both the domains of electronics and partial differential equations, to precompensate for the inertia... you'd send the appropriate magnitude of negative voltage when you wanted to put a hard limit on the positive inertia. But of course, even if you COULD perfectly flatten the top of a loud spike, it'd splatter the listener with all those nasty odd-order harmonics, and your listener would regret that you did so. Woudln't most listeners prefer some softer limiting that'd produce a lower distortion level? And don't current digital analyzers allow pre-leveling every little scrap of music so that no waveform actually needs be hacked up?
The article also mentioned how many tube designs produce lots of 2nd (1 octave) and other even harmonics that produce a "choral" or warm sound. I don't know exactly how producers/engineers cut the cake on this, but I'd mix for a pretty dry sound on vinyl, so the tube school didn't get soupy wet ringing, the SACD crowd got their ultra-crispiness, and yes, I'd probably compress the CD format because it'll most likely be heard in higher ambient-noise situations, where a constant loudness trumps the occasional squawk. I thought the DSotM reference was fascinating because it showed the engineers had apparently done just that: tried
On a day when the real-world news is rife with examples of how faulty information processing has lead to multiple thousands of deaths, Slashdot dredges up issues with studios' technology from the 70's and claims they apply to consumer choices of today. Of course, in the fine print, NONE of the boundary conditions that are pushed, accidentally or intentionally, are similar.
...
Clueless, disingenuous or manipulative? I couldn't tell. But it's not exactly helpful in forming a well-considered mindset about audio design.
Here's my 3-bullet take on the weird juxtaposition:
* The older paper (as well as others quickly linked to) talks about how studios risked distortion by pushing amplifiers past design limits in order to escape tiresome, easily-heard tape hiss. In the 30 years since, the dynamic range of amplifiers has improved (less likelihood for over-the-edge conditions); metering and sound checks have gotten easier and faster, leading to fewer mistakes; and (analog) tape hiss, when it's an issue at all, has also dropped further down the list of concerns. Why is this archive paper relevant without those differences mentioned?
* The second-linked article vents frustrations that even live music is intentionally garbaged up by the creators. The sound is intentionally manipulated to sound "louder" which also makes it SOUND AS IF it was produced by over-driven equipment. That's the artists' prerogative, and the critic's job to carp about. Nothing to see here, folks, except that it interestingly links to
* a previous in-depth analysis of the Dark Side of the Moon SACD that details differences between formats that must have been driven by perceived preferences of listeners, not the formats themselves. Implicitly, some engineers seem to believe that CD listeners prefer LOUD while SACD listeners like "clean," because that's how they manipulated the two formats differently. For CD listeners, they clipped the sound INTENTIONALLY, and differently from any faults of the electronics, in a way that's unnecessary for the CD format. Clipping produces ugly noise on loud spots, but makes the recording sound "louder."
One might guess that engineers aim for the "cleaner" effect on vinyl, too. (Not too many vinyl fanatics risk installing their systems in cars, so they can groove while cruising along I-5, and probably not very many SACD systems, either.) And it's also not too much of a guess to assume that vinyl listeners are about 10X to 100X more likely to use tube equipment, which the owners have selected because it sounds (to them) more the way THEY prefer.
So this attempt at stoking flames under the War of the Formats (Audio Division) can be seen as having nothing to do with "Tubes vs Transistors," as titled. Rather, it oughta be, "my format Rools and yours Sux" or something more appropriate to the information that it provides to the topic. Absent the 2+2=17 faulty logic, the articles actually seem to show that engineering allows whatever "sound" the seller wants to feed the consumer, without any objective "quality" standard at all.
I propose "Troll of the Week" balloting to allow us to heap opprobrium on such posts. This shouldn't even make it on a slow news day. I'm all for vigorous discussion on "stuff that matters" but articles that encourage senseless flame wars don't exactly further that goal.
> The point being made is that it's advertised as CD quality,
On Apple's site, the only mention of CD parity was when YOU rip CD's with their new lossless format. And even that was rather conservatively claimed as "sound quality indistinguishable from the original."
For contrast, check the sleaze from Sony (press release on their forthcoming Walkman) and Dell (comparison between their DJ20 and the 20GB iPod), who claim 2X or more the tunes by using 64kbit/sec or stingier assumptions against Apple's implicit 128kbit/sec AAC. Anybody want to claim 64kbit/sec stands up to close listening at all?
This article points out that the marketing for downloadable music is getting desperate for the also-rans, so they are making bait-and-switch type claims. Too bad the writer seemed to have bought in to the FUD. Uggh.
It ain't just Apple's disk space that is the premium item... spoze you bought a 10GB 'Pod and it only held 30 albums? How many people would that excite?
The original column is either intentionally deceptive or ignorant about economics. People with good ears buy iTunes Music because it's convenient, economical and sounds pretty good. The best possible? As in lugging your 200 CD collection, and your monster speakers along on all your travels?
Earth to NYT: this is a portable music system for wide market use. There are lots of tradeoffs to make it hit a broad public's sweet spot. And Apple seems to have done pretty damn well on just about all counts.
If all I cared about was platform independence, Mono wouldn't matter. (Java covers that very well.)
.Net and Mono further promise language interoperability. That means I'll be able to blend 3rd parties' libraries without caring what the source language is, and take a serious foray into Eiffel without the expense of backing out, if it doesn't really deliver what I want, or if it threatens to become orphaned. With luck, 3rd party compilers for the .Net CLI will work fine to the Mono CLI. Sweet!
But
And still not worry whether it's OSX, WinXX or *nix.
For me, this is all about choice, (minimizing the risk of a little fling) and leverage.
rapid-fire traders would seem unlikely to care about anything more than 6 weeks down the road. And private equity, which can NOT be easily bought and sold, is an unlikely venue for them.
Although individual investors may want to make independent assessments of the value of private firms' options, there are obvious advantages to having the firm provide a reputable estimate from a consultant or the firm's auditor, making the information fairly, and inexpensively, available to all investors.
Privately held companies have insufficient common stock pricing events for such a volatility estimate.
It's not hard to make an informed guess about the fair value of options. Yes, the Black-Scholes formula forecasts the stock's volatility by looking at the recent past volatility, but there are several consulting firms able to make a good swag. Wall Street is also quite happy to take a shot.
If I were a holder of private equity (I'm not), I'd want to see those guesstimates. They can be better than using the simple historical values.
Companies properly keep multiple sets of books -- tax rules are often quite different than economic impacts.
Expensing options has to do with presenting investors with a clear picture about the company's position, and nothing to do with taxes.
Nobody is FORCED to take their company public; they do so to obtain cash from outside investors. Naturally, no investor wants to put cash into something that won't pay back, and our country has established some "fair play rules" that boil down to
.03% of the 3000 largest companies in the country.) Inconsistent, hidden, or buried-in-footnotes numbers just are humanly impossible to work with. And they're against the spirit of public ownership of companies.
1) management's acknowledgement that they work for the new owners, as exemplified by accountability to a Board of Directors that is meant to protect the owners' interests, and
2) management will prepare honest and accurate accounting of what's happening to the company that they're running.
Options are only recently a significant part of a company's total financial picture, and so only recently have become important for investors to understand. After investors take a stab at whether, say, Palm One is going to make it or not -- neat ideas, good engineering, rapidly changing market and uncertain prospects -- they also have to consider that if the firm is financially successful, they mightn't get much to show for risking their funds.
My clients have a few billion dollars, mostly middle-class retirement funds, at stake. They expect reasonable risks and a fair chance at a good result. The elementary math of investing is that many investments are losers, or have a very modest payback. It's the relatively few that succeed that make stocks good investments. If those few don't actually pay you -- unknown options give half of it to employees -- then the whole deal turns sour.
As many posters have mentioned, expensing options doesn't change the CURRENT working status. As an investor, I'm happy to see creative carrots for important employees, but I absolutely MUST have a good feel for what fraction of the company's success is committed to somebody other than me. The challenge is for me to make a decent swag at the company's future earnings that my clients will get. (My clients own about
I strongly support using options as an incentive to employees, but I also strongly support a standard, consistent way of accounting for them. If firms don't want to provide investors with a consistent, "generally accepted" picture of what they are doing, they shouldn't be offering stock to the general public.
I regularly use my cellphone's GPRS data capability to put my laptop online... over 100MB per month, according to my bills, even at sub-dialup data rates. It's good for quick access when traveling, and it doesn't keep my cellphone from being available to receive calls.
/.ers can be.
I don't have any difficulty reading its 15" screen, nor am I aware of a competitive technology that now offers as broad a coverage as cellular. A higher-speed version would be very welcome.
Amazing how short-sighted some
As a longtime Mac user, I'm used to hearing that my machine is slow. But 2 minutes for a browser to swap back in?!? I can't imagine ANY program taking that long to load AND initialize, let alone merely shuffle back into memory.
I routinely have a couple gigs of apps running, necessarily overflowing available RAM, so my Powerbook swaps to a (not ultrafast) laptop drive. I maybe see 2 or 3 seconds, tops, of wait time, ever. Is your swap area on a tape drive?
This thread seems to be rife with all sorts of speculation about optimizations and very little data other than examples that suggest the problem is severely mis-identified. Seems that gross exaggeration is suggesting, wrongly, that a generally useful swap mechanism is awful when it is less than optimal. Dedicated-use servers might perform a little better with hand-tuning, but general-use machines, where usage patterns are highly unpredictable, seem very unlikely to benefit from extreme variances from a generally-useful approach.
Then there are people like me who have collections mostly of classics, etc., and never know when I get on the plane what will suit my fancy a couple of hours later. Davis, Dead Can Dance, Debussy, Dvorák, ...
Versus the mini, the extra space does cost size/weight, but otherwise, having a 40gigger just requires a couple hundred more dollars out of a total CD collection cost of maybe $3K. That's not a bad tradeoff for me to have that choice w/o spending lots of time fiddling.