You know, those are good, valid questions. In response, I would argue that the iPod has far more societal reach than you give it credit for.
The iPod isn't just a portable music player. It's a way to make ALL your music portable. Even the most avid CD collector could have room left over on a 60 GB iPod. And with a few A/V cables or a dock, you can play any song in that collection through your home system, the car stereo, wherever. Box up the CDs, you don't need them any more. There are clubs in Manhattan where people use two fully-loaded iPods to create DJ sets. Rather tough to do with a Walkman.
I would also argue that the iPod and iTunes have the potential to change the way we buy music. Seriously, how many times have you bought an album on the strength of maybe one or two songs heard on the radio, only to find the rest of the album sucked? Via iTunes, you can buy those songs individually for 99 cents and preview other songs to see whether they suck or not. And again, no CDs to clutter up the living room.
And at 99 cents a pop, I'm betting iTunes puts a decent sized dent in music piracy. Yeah, you can download a file-sharing program, surf through, and download "free" music of unknown quality. But considering all the hassle and potential liability, 99 cents at iTunes isn't all that bad, and the artists involved actually get paid for their hard work and creativity.
That's not even considering the TV clip downloads, which could be yet another way in which TV viewership is changing.
You know, it wasn't the first hard-drive MP3 player to come out -- if I recall, that honor went to Nomad or somesuch company. But because of the desgin of the product and the iTunes backing it up, it caught on. I think they sold something like 14 million units in the fourth quarter. That's 14 million people who are going to think differently about how they buy their music, how they play it, and what they'll buy in the future. Why get a six-CD changer stereo when you can just get some excellent speakers and dock the iPod? Why buy the album in the store when you can pick up a few tracks online?
All right, heck, it's an overly expensive toy. I don't even own one, because I can't justify the $300-$400 price tag for the models I consider worthy of buying. (Why go nano when you can get the big kahuna?) But I seriously believe that the iPod does represent a bigger change. It ain't the printing press or the light bulb, but it's more than just a music player.
From my exposure to broadcast technology, I've found that latency can add up to a second, up to two in real heavy traffic -- hence those ugly pauses in broadcast signals from Afghanistan. That's fine for most Internet uses, but forget any true interactivity -- no fragging anyone in Quake III with this. On the other hand, anybody paying those satellite rates won't be playing Quake.
As for size, take a look at the antennae from the Iridium phones -- those took two years to get down to a manageable size. For this sucker, though, probably three or four.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Set your flamethrowers for "crispy" and have at it.
I really hope Palm does do something good, and soon. There hasn't been a reason to buy a Palm produced device since the original Palm V and Palm VII. Most of the innovation on the platform has come from Handspring and Sony, while Palm has sat relatively still (and don't give me that m500 stuff...that was a complete stopgap upgrade just so they could have product in the pipleline).
And as for Apple, I tend to doubt it. Makes no sense for them to get into PDAs when Palm, Handspring, Microsoft and Sony are all spending millions and slugging it out -- unless Apple can really, REALLY add value to a PDA device, like it did with music players via the iPod. And I have no idea how Apple would do that.
Unless Jobs & Co. bought Palm...hmmm...:)
The economics of monopolies
on
Broadband Obstacles
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Some of these comments were very interesting, others were hype of the higest order.
Can a fair market include a monopoly? Absolutely. A monopoly simply means that a company has essentially an entire market segment to itself. That doesn't mean, however, that other companies can't try to compete in the same space. It's harder, to be sure, but in the end, consumers will vote with their dollars. If a product is better in the eyes of consumers, then it will eventually win against the established monopoly, as long as the monopoly is acting legally.
Now, has Microsoft, for example, used untoward means to maintain its monopoly? The courts have unequivocally said yes. However, bear in mind that, in general, it achieved it's OS monopoly fair and square. If Apple hadn't stumbled after Jobs left in the 80s, well, we might be bellyaching about the Beast from Cupertino instead of the Beast from Redmond.
My point is, monopolies are not bad, nor do they innately destabilize fair and free markets. It's when the company that has the monopoly takes illegal means to maintain it does the market suffer.
And one thing that, I think, most/. users don't recognize -- the market leader is almost NEVER the best technology available. Market leading products are the best marketed, relatively easy to use, and nearly always appeal to the broadest segment of consumers, also known as the least common denominator.
Of course, that's my opinion. You may now set your flamethrowers to "high burn" and have at me.
(Full disclosure: I'm a journalist working for the AP. Take with grain of salt to taste.) Interesting and insightful post, but a few things I have to disagree with. There are some very, very good online reporters out there. CNET, which sends its people out and about all the time, is practically a tech wire service all its own. They even have a distribution deal with The Associated Press. Most of the highest-traffic sites have dedicated reporting staffs, including CNN, MSNBC, ABCNEWS.com (more disclosure: I used to work there) and others.
Now if you're talking about general news wire services, that market is pretty well sewn up by the AP and the other guys like Reuters and Bloomberg. Our stuff appears online all the time. I don't honestly see a reason to create a strictly online service. Plus the financial overhead in creating such a broad service is just killer.
But if you're talking about original local reporting online, then I'd have to agree wholeheartedly. The Internet would be really great for alternatives to daily newspapers and local TV, but I can't think of anybody who's doing good local online journalism, and that's a shame.
Part of it is the financial model, of course. I think that one can survive as a strictly-content site, but just like traditional media startups, the burn rate is intense. You have to be willing to go at least four or five years, often longer, without profits. That happens with new magazines, newspapers and TV outlets all the time, and is not unique to the Internet.
And finally, I completely agree that there needs to be less press release journalism. But again, that's not a New Media problem. That's a problem for the whole news biz.
Gotta agree here. Microsoft has been pretty open with any and all who ask about the Freedom to Innovate Network. The PR line, of course, is that it's a channel for the public to let their feelings on the antitrust case be known. But I don't think they've ever disguised it as something independent from the company.
Before I start, here's some Full Disclosure: I work for a 151-year-old non-profit news wire service. Though personally still a relative youngin', and despite having been at an online news site in the past, I now personify old-school journalism.
Now, fully realizing I'm defending my livelihood, there is still a place for true journalism -- stories hunted down by actual reporters. Yes, the Internet is the greatest repository of information ever built. Heck, I use it every day in my work. But quite frankly, the Internet doesn't have everything.
The data on the Internet is generated by people. People are the true sources of information, and they don't always spill absolutely everything online. For example, I cover a certain large sofware company here in Seattle. Said company does not provide the public with every tidbit of information that it has. Public records and competitors' info helps, but that's not the entire story, either. The true story about that company rests with the people who run it and work there. To get the best information on that company, you have to go and talk to them, pick their brains, and do a bit of analysis to put the pieces together. That's what I do.
Plus, not everyone can go and ask Larry Ellison just what the &#*@! he was thinking when he had people root through other people's garbage. They pay reporters, via their subscription dollars or ad revenues, to ask for them.
In fact, the story about Oracle's garbage-tripping adventures (to sum up, they hired private investigators to go through the trash of a pro-Microsoft trade group in Washington among other things) didn't come from aggregation of data online, but from a very good reporter who caught wind of something, hit the streets, and tracked the sucker down. He did a damn fine job, and his story and Oracle's subsequent admission -- caused by that very story -- started an intelligent debate on corporate spying and ethics.
Yes, the media needs to do a far better job of data aggregation and "sensemaking." But in the end, I fervently believe that the public is best served by having reporters out there finding out the stuff that's NOT on the Internet.
One more thing, since I'm on the soapbox. I agree with the previous posts that, when it comes right down to it, you have to trust the reporters who bring you the news. Yes, there are reporters out there who break that trust, just as there are software coders who may violate the GPL by altering Linux and not providing their changes to the rest of the community at large. But for the most part, no matter who they work for, I have found that most reporters would rather have their limbs hacked off with butter knives than succumb to any sort of corporate spoon-feeding of news. I know of reporters who have quit in disgust when asked to play down stories, and they're usually quickly snapped up by other news agenices with more scruples.
Bottom line, individuals just can't do everything. There's just not enough hours in the day. So just as you elect representatives to make laws on your behalf, you pay newspapers and other news organizations to go find stuff out on your behalf, and you vote on the quality of that information with your wallet.
Whoa, now. If you ("you" being a nasty evil cracker and not you personally) hack into a hospital and access patient systems, and can recognize what you've hacked into, then you have knowledge of what you're doing. If patients die because you messed something up, you're liable for their deaths. You knew full well that such a result was possible, and a good prosecutor can pin murder on you.
The NASA thing is a little different. If the cracker recognized that the system he accessed had to do with astronauts' health, and his actions then later caused their deaths, you could probably jack it up to murder one, same as the hospital. Deaths while committing a crime, under many state and federal statutes, gets you at least murder 2, if not murder 1.
If the cracker didn't realize the full extent of his penetration or recognize what systems he accessed, then manslaughter or reckless homicide would probably be called for.
Of course, there's jurisdictional issues as well. Actions against U.S. astronauts would likely fall within federal jurisdiction. Actions against a hospital's patients, on the other hand, would likely result in two separate state charges _ one for the hospital and one for wherever the cracker was _ plus federal charges for interstate crimes.
Now, a cracker may not get the chair for these kind of crimes, but geez...if a cracker kills a ward full of people, there's got to be something more than a few years in prison for simple stupidity, no? We're talking about lives here.
Given PC Expo's current leanings toward corporate and high-end users, it would make more sense for Transmeta to go with Crusoe-powered laptops and leave the Webpads for another time. Besides, the appliance market is still somewhat unproven, while pretty much everybody (myself included) is salivating for a laptop that can last for more than two hours. The laptops are potentially a much better market for Transmeta.
What about spidering-on-demand? You type in your query, come back in a day or two, and get highly detailed, highly relevant results? You might use a standard search engine to get the initial results, then use your AI engine to really drill down and see which ones are relevant and which ones aren't? So, for example, the "Alexandrian Wicca" search wouldn't come up with ancient libraries and cheap lawn furniture, but would instead dig up interesting dissertations on the different branches of modern Wicca.
Of course, there might be something out there already that I just don't know about. Just a thought to provoke discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, those are good, valid questions. In response, I would argue that the iPod has far more societal reach than you give it credit for.
The iPod isn't just a portable music player. It's a way to make ALL your music portable. Even the most avid CD collector could have room left over on a 60 GB iPod. And with a few A/V cables or a dock, you can play any song in that collection through your home system, the car stereo, wherever. Box up the CDs, you don't need them any more. There are clubs in Manhattan where people use two fully-loaded iPods to create DJ sets. Rather tough to do with a Walkman.
I would also argue that the iPod and iTunes have the potential to change the way we buy music. Seriously, how many times have you bought an album on the strength of maybe one or two songs heard on the radio, only to find the rest of the album sucked? Via iTunes, you can buy those songs individually for 99 cents and preview other songs to see whether they suck or not. And again, no CDs to clutter up the living room.
And at 99 cents a pop, I'm betting iTunes puts a decent sized dent in music piracy. Yeah, you can download a file-sharing program, surf through, and download "free" music of unknown quality. But considering all the hassle and potential liability, 99 cents at iTunes isn't all that bad, and the artists involved actually get paid for their hard work and creativity.
That's not even considering the TV clip downloads, which could be yet another way in which TV viewership is changing.
You know, it wasn't the first hard-drive MP3 player to come out -- if I recall, that honor went to Nomad or somesuch company. But because of the desgin of the product and the iTunes backing it up, it caught on. I think they sold something like 14 million units in the fourth quarter. That's 14 million people who are going to think differently about how they buy their music, how they play it, and what they'll buy in the future. Why get a six-CD changer stereo when you can just get some excellent speakers and dock the iPod? Why buy the album in the store when you can pick up a few tracks online?
All right, heck, it's an overly expensive toy. I don't even own one, because I can't justify the $300-$400 price tag for the models I consider worthy of buying. (Why go nano when you can get the big kahuna?) But I seriously believe that the iPod does represent a bigger change. It ain't the printing press or the light bulb, but it's more than just a music player.
From my exposure to broadcast technology, I've found that latency can add up to a second, up to two in real heavy traffic -- hence those ugly pauses in broadcast signals from Afghanistan. That's fine for most Internet uses, but forget any true interactivity -- no fragging anyone in Quake III with this. On the other hand, anybody paying those satellite rates won't be playing Quake.
As for size, take a look at the antennae from the Iridium phones -- those took two years to get down to a manageable size. For this sucker, though, probably three or four.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Set your flamethrowers for "crispy" and have at it.
I really hope Palm does do something good, and soon. There hasn't been a reason to buy a Palm produced device since the original Palm V and Palm VII. Most of the innovation on the platform has come from Handspring and Sony, while Palm has sat relatively still (and don't give me that m500 stuff...that was a complete stopgap upgrade just so they could have product in the pipleline).
:)
And as for Apple, I tend to doubt it. Makes no sense for them to get into PDAs when Palm, Handspring, Microsoft and Sony are all spending millions and slugging it out -- unless Apple can really, REALLY add value to a PDA device, like it did with music players via the iPod. And I have no idea how Apple would do that.
Unless Jobs & Co. bought Palm...hmmm...
Some of these comments were very interesting, others were hype of the higest order.
/. users don't recognize -- the market leader is almost NEVER the best technology available. Market leading products are the best marketed, relatively easy to use, and nearly always appeal to the broadest segment of consumers, also known as the least common denominator.
Can a fair market include a monopoly? Absolutely. A monopoly simply means that a company has essentially an entire market segment to itself. That doesn't mean, however, that other companies can't try to compete in the same space. It's harder, to be sure, but in the end, consumers will vote with their dollars. If a product is better in the eyes of consumers, then it will eventually win against the established monopoly, as long as the monopoly is acting legally.
Now, has Microsoft, for example, used untoward means to maintain its monopoly? The courts have unequivocally said yes. However, bear in mind that, in general, it achieved it's OS monopoly fair and square. If Apple hadn't stumbled after Jobs left in the 80s, well, we might be bellyaching about the Beast from Cupertino instead of the Beast from Redmond.
My point is, monopolies are not bad, nor do they innately destabilize fair and free markets. It's when the company that has the monopoly takes illegal means to maintain it does the market suffer.
And one thing that, I think, most
Of course, that's my opinion. You may now set your flamethrowers to "high burn" and have at me.
(Full disclosure: I'm a journalist working for the AP. Take with grain of salt to taste.) Interesting and insightful post, but a few things I have to disagree with. There are some very, very good online reporters out there. CNET, which sends its people out and about all the time, is practically a tech wire service all its own. They even have a distribution deal with The Associated Press. Most of the highest-traffic sites have dedicated reporting staffs, including CNN, MSNBC, ABCNEWS.com (more disclosure: I used to work there) and others.
Now if you're talking about general news wire services, that market is pretty well sewn up by the AP and the other guys like Reuters and Bloomberg. Our stuff appears online all the time. I don't honestly see a reason to create a strictly online service. Plus the financial overhead in creating such a broad service is just killer.
But if you're talking about original local reporting online, then I'd have to agree wholeheartedly. The Internet would be really great for alternatives to daily newspapers and local TV, but I can't think of anybody who's doing good local online journalism, and that's a shame.
Part of it is the financial model, of course. I think that one can survive as a strictly-content site, but just like traditional media startups, the burn rate is intense. You have to be willing to go at least four or five years, often longer, without profits. That happens with new magazines, newspapers and TV outlets all the time, and is not unique to the Internet.
And finally, I completely agree that there needs to be less press release journalism. But again, that's not a New Media problem. That's a problem for the whole news biz.
Gotta agree here. Microsoft has been pretty open with any and all who ask about the Freedom to Innovate Network. The PR line, of course, is that it's a channel for the public to let their feelings on the antitrust case be known. But I don't think they've ever disguised it as something independent from the company.
Before I start, here's some Full Disclosure: I work for a 151-year-old non-profit news wire service. Though personally still a relative youngin', and despite having been at an online news site in the past, I now personify old-school journalism.
Now, fully realizing I'm defending my livelihood, there is still a place for true journalism -- stories hunted down by actual reporters. Yes, the Internet is the greatest repository of information ever built. Heck, I use it every day in my work. But quite frankly, the Internet doesn't have everything.
The data on the Internet is generated by people. People are the true sources of information, and they don't always spill absolutely everything online. For example, I cover a certain large sofware company here in Seattle. Said company does not provide the public with every tidbit of information that it has. Public records and competitors' info helps, but that's not the entire story, either. The true story about that company rests with the people who run it and work there. To get the best information on that company, you have to go and talk to them, pick their brains, and do a bit of analysis to put the pieces together. That's what I do.
Plus, not everyone can go and ask Larry Ellison just what the &#*@! he was thinking when he had people root through other people's garbage. They pay reporters, via their subscription dollars or ad revenues, to ask for them.
In fact, the story about Oracle's garbage-tripping adventures (to sum up, they hired private investigators to go through the trash of a pro-Microsoft trade group in Washington among other things) didn't come from aggregation of data online, but from a very good reporter who caught wind of something, hit the streets, and tracked the sucker down. He did a damn fine job, and his story and Oracle's subsequent admission -- caused by that very story -- started an intelligent debate on corporate spying and ethics.
Yes, the media needs to do a far better job of data aggregation and "sensemaking." But in the end, I fervently believe that the public is best served by having reporters out there finding out the stuff that's NOT on the Internet.
One more thing, since I'm on the soapbox. I agree with the previous posts that, when it comes right down to it, you have to trust the reporters who bring you the news. Yes, there are reporters out there who break that trust, just as there are software coders who may violate the GPL by altering Linux and not providing their changes to the rest of the community at large. But for the most part, no matter who they work for, I have found that most reporters would rather have their limbs hacked off with butter knives than succumb to any sort of corporate spoon-feeding of news. I know of reporters who have quit in disgust when asked to play down stories, and they're usually quickly snapped up by other news agenices with more scruples.
Bottom line, individuals just can't do everything. There's just not enough hours in the day. So just as you elect representatives to make laws on your behalf, you pay newspapers and other news organizations to go find stuff out on your behalf, and you vote on the quality of that information with your wallet.
OK, that's it. Thanks for listening.
Whoa, now. If you ("you" being a nasty evil cracker and not you personally) hack into a hospital and access patient systems, and can recognize what you've hacked into, then you have knowledge of what you're doing. If patients die because you messed something up, you're liable for their deaths. You knew full well that such a result was possible, and a good prosecutor can pin murder on you.
The NASA thing is a little different. If the cracker recognized that the system he accessed had to do with astronauts' health, and his actions then later caused their deaths, you could probably jack it up to murder one, same as the hospital. Deaths while committing a crime, under many state and federal statutes, gets you at least murder 2, if not murder 1.
If the cracker didn't realize the full extent of his penetration or recognize what systems he accessed, then manslaughter or reckless homicide would probably be called for.
Of course, there's jurisdictional issues as well. Actions against U.S. astronauts would likely fall within federal jurisdiction. Actions against a hospital's patients, on the other hand, would likely result in two separate state charges _ one for the hospital and one for wherever the cracker was _ plus federal charges for interstate crimes.
Now, a cracker may not get the chair for these kind of crimes, but geez...if a cracker kills a ward full of people, there's got to be something more than a few years in prison for simple stupidity, no? We're talking about lives here.
Given PC Expo's current leanings toward corporate and high-end users, it would make more sense for Transmeta to go with Crusoe-powered laptops and leave the Webpads for another time. Besides, the appliance market is still somewhat unproven, while pretty much everybody (myself included) is salivating for a laptop that can last for more than two hours. The laptops are potentially a much better market for Transmeta.
What about spidering-on-demand? You type in your query, come back in a day or two, and get highly detailed, highly relevant results? You might use a standard search engine to get the initial results, then use your AI engine to really drill down and see which ones are relevant and which ones aren't? So, for example, the "Alexandrian Wicca" search wouldn't come up with ancient libraries and cheap lawn furniture, but would instead dig up interesting dissertations on the different branches of modern Wicca.
Of course, there might be something out there already that I just don't know about. Just a thought to provoke discussion.
Actually, far as I know, Salon is independent. I do believe you're thinking of Slate, which is a part of MSN.