Did Wilco offer it as a download, or just as streaming audio? All the references I've found are to them streaming it. Streaming is basically DRM, though perhaps more easilly broken than most. It seeks to limit the users ability to listen to the music at the time and place of their choosing.
What's more, apple is using its design to upsell from a $100-300 (iPods) item to a $500-3000 item (Mac computers). Each upsell might be worth $100+ in profit to apple.
Dell, on the other hand, is using the device to enhance revenue on their sale of PCs and Laptops. Each upsell might be worth $50 in profit for dell.
Video may be more difficult, so there might be less of it, but that's probably fine because the opportunities for consuming video are far fewer than the opportunities for consuming audio.
First off, once they do release a video enabled iPod, I'd expect to see the features to quickly spread across most of their product line (at least the hard disk based devices) pretty quickly, much as the photo feature has. Apple needs a way to drive existing users to upgrade to larger capacities and at this point higher bitrate files probably isn't enough reason.
Next up, I hope they consider putting a decent speaker in it. It doesn't have to be great, but it should be decent for reproducing human speech. This is important because my bet is that one of the biggest uses of the video feature won't be watching 30 or 60 minute videos, or even 10 minute podcasts. It will be sharing 2-3 minute clips with friends. It could be a music video, or a section of John Stewart's monologue from the night before.
People used to talk about last night's tv shows around the watercooler. These days, the media is too fragmented for such conversations, but people still need cultural reference points. A video iPod would let them carry culture that they can share with friends and colleagues.
If your point in accepting the post in question was to spur discussion about how macromedia was drawing the line on flash licensing, it might have worked better to kick it back and say "Interesting, but I think the laptop bit is a stretch and that's all people will end up talking about. If you drop the laptop angle I'll be happy to run it."
Nice to take an anti-yahoo submission from a Google employee. I guess I should be happy they at least disclosed the conflict. It's more than you can say for someone like Bob "rove-puppet" Novak.
I don't think "$300 / seat for something proprietary" really matters that much. Even if they re-bought that license every single year, it is less than $1/day to match whatever they are paying the butt that sits in the seat.
I think you are missing a couple of things. First off, Google wasn't always a multibillion dollar company. They were a startup first, and when you are a startup with no revenue, capital is damn scarce. In that environment, avoiding the cost of software licenses is an obvious way to economize.
Fast forward to the day you start earning some revenue, and maybe even an operating profit. You have lots of demands for reinvesting the money for further growth. You could put some of it into software licenses for a commercial OS, and the costs of converting your infrastructure and porting your code, or you could put it into more hardware (for the cost of OS licenses, google could probably have bought 20-30% more capacity), to handle more customers, and more engineers, to improve your product, and marketing/sales to keep stoking your growth.
The biggest reason to go with a commercial vendor is that you can take advantage of the investment they are amortizing over a large sales volume. This can be a good thing if you have rather ordinary problems you are trying to solve, but someone like google (or amazon, etc) doesn't have ordinary problems, so they are forced to create their own solutions (which also gives them a competitive advantage). Overtime, the rest of the world might catch up to the point that commercial vendors now offer solutions, but again, the value you gain from replacing your existing solutions has to be weighed against the other things you could do with the money.
Smog != to greenhouse gases. Smog alerts are due to high levels of partially combusted hydrocarbons in the air. Fireplaces are a big source since they don't usually burn very efficiently.
One trick to use to get a cleaner burning and more efficient fire is to build it upside down. Rather than putting big logs on top and getting them burning with tinder and kindling underneath, put the biggest pieces of wood on the bottom, smaller pieces on top, etc. End with the tinder on top. This way the smoke that gets boiled out of the wood passes a nice hot fire which ignites most of it before it heads up the chimmney. A traditional bottom up fire tends to generate a lot of cool smoke which goes up the chimmney, lining the sides with creesote and poluting the air with smog.
Microsoft used to understand that actually shipping software is a really important feature. But in the post 9/11 world, I guess the figure fear, uncertainty and doubt are more important.
I've just built my first linux raid server for my home network (after using hardware and software RAID on WinNT/2k for years). I'm using mirroring for now to keep initial costs low, but as time goes on, I'll pick up cheep disksand move to raid 5.
I figured that at some point, I would go with a hardware RAID card, but it occured to me that one of the advantages of software RAID is that you can grow by buying the lowest-cost reliable hardware controllers and reconfigure things without regard for the vendors raid implementation.
Also, with Hardware RAID, if the controller dies, I'll need to get a controller from the same vendor if I want to drop in a replacement without tearing down and restoring from a backup.
I'm really amazed by how many people have said here that they think downloading stuff off the Internet is okay, that it's just like setting the VCR, that it's not stealing. That really blows my mind.
Well, one issue is that some representatives of the content industry have asserted that taping and then skipping commercials is stealing.
Many reasonable people think that's ridiculous, and as a result they deeply discount any argument from the content providers about what constitutes stealing of TV shows. They may be wrong to, but that's certainly part of the dynamic.
All I want is a standard format to purchase music in, that works on every player and that allows me to freaking do with the music I bought what I want.
You mean like a CD? Or maybe a casette tape? Perhaps an LP?
I'm going to dispute the notion that there would be a large market for portable video in an iPod-like form-factor any time soon.
I used to think exactly as you do. A lot of people have the radio on, or music playing all day in the background. If they have the TV on that much, it's mostly for the audio. They might look up at it when they hear something interesting, but that behavior isn't going to translate into demand for a video device.
Then I saw people with clips on their smartphones. It was a great conversation point. Initially for the novelty, but it was easy to imagine people continuing to pull out their portable and show their friends and co-workers a short video clip on a regular basis long after the novelty wore off.
People like having points of common experience. In our recent past, that was provided by things like network TV. These days though, the media landscape is increacingly fragmented. The chances of 3-4 people all having seen the same thing on TV the night before are much slimmer, but with a portable video device they have the ability to connect over a great segment on the Daily Show, or a great football play, etc.
No doubt it won't be HD quality content though. It doesn't even have to be NTSC quality, though the bigger the files, the better Apple's prospects of continuing to sell upgrades to the installed base by helping deliver demand for devices with larger and larger capacities.
I think a video device is inevitable. Hard disk capacities keep growing and growing, but people's music collections aren't keeping pace. Most people are going to have extra space on even the base model iPods. Apple needs some space hungry files to drive upgrades
Photo capabilities will help. But I have 5 years of high quality digital photos, and even with the crap ones I've included thrown in, I doubt they top 10GB.
Video, on the other hand, devours disk space like a thing that has a really really big appetite. More importantly, I think people will want it.
Movies and even TV shows aren't going to be very satisfying on a small screen (though they might be great for a lot of public transportation users in big cities).
Shorter form stuff though is going to be popular. People will pull it out to show their friends John Stewart's opening monologue, or the trailer for a cool movie, or a great new music video. In an age where the mass media is disintegrating, people still need something to talk about around the water cooler (or espresso machine). Rather than drawing on the mass media, they'll pull their private programming out of their pockets, and talk about that.
Codecs aren't the issue. Playingback HD content is. For pretty much any codec, the computation is going to scale with the resolution, and full HD res is pretty high. It'll probably take 4-6x to play back HD content.
... an f-ing makeover, because, you know, science is well served by people worrying about their popularity and image. It's all about faith, man, making people believe. I mean, if they don't that plane might crash because the engineer's couldn't mingle at parties. This computer might cease to function because the chip designers had trouble getting a date to the Jr High dance.
First: The WindowsNT line (WinNT, Win2k, Win2k3 and WinXP) isn't descended from DOS.
Second: WindowsNT had a rich file and process permissions and auditing model baked in at a low level that exceeded (and may still exceed) what Linux has today. The problem is that the default OS config was and is relatively permissive.
I mean, think about it, for 50 years cars were being made and the corporations that made them became big 800lb gorillas. But then look, here comes Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Geo, Saturn, Lexus, Kia and now Scion.
Geo = GM Saturn = GM Lexes = Toyota Scion = Toyota
On December 3, 1984, a chemical plant run by Union Carbide and located in Bhopal, India released about 40 tons of a toxic gas which was an intermediate chemical used in creating pesticides.
(That is, the plant was in the business of creating chemicals deadly to life.)
What, exactly is the point about saying that the plant was in the business of creating chemicals deady to life?
I don't see why it matters -- methyl isocyanate, the gas that was released, is a key reagent in number of industrial chemical syntheses, like the production of plastics, not just the production of "chemicals deadly to life."
While it may be true that the people responsible for the plant should have been extra careful because of the nature of their product (if that is what the parenthetical was supposed to convey), the fact is that the risks are much broader.
Slashdot Mirror
Did Wilco offer it as a download, or just as streaming audio? All the references I've found are to them streaming it. Streaming is basically DRM, though perhaps more easilly broken than most. It seeks to limit the users ability to listen to the music at the time and place of their choosing.
What's more, apple is using its design to upsell from a $100-300 (iPods) item to a $500-3000 item (Mac computers). Each upsell might be worth $100+ in profit to apple.
Dell, on the other hand, is using the device to enhance revenue on their sale of PCs and Laptops. Each upsell might be worth $50 in profit for dell.
Which is the more cunning business model?
Video may be more difficult, so there might be less of it, but that's probably fine because the opportunities for consuming video are far fewer than the opportunities for consuming audio.
First off, once they do release a video enabled iPod, I'd expect to see the features to quickly spread across most of their product line (at least the hard disk based devices) pretty quickly, much as the photo feature has. Apple needs a way to drive existing users to upgrade to larger capacities and at this point higher bitrate files probably isn't enough reason.
Next up, I hope they consider putting a decent speaker in it. It doesn't have to be great, but it should be decent for reproducing human speech. This is important because my bet is that one of the biggest uses of the video feature won't be watching 30 or 60 minute videos, or even 10 minute podcasts. It will be sharing 2-3 minute clips with friends. It could be a music video, or a section of John Stewart's monologue from the night before.
People used to talk about last night's tv shows around the watercooler. These days, the media is too fragmented for such conversations, but people still need cultural reference points. A video iPod would let them carry culture that they can share with friends and colleagues.
If your point in accepting the post in question was to spur discussion about how macromedia was drawing the line on flash licensing, it might have worked better to kick it back and say "Interesting, but I think the laptop bit is a stretch and that's all people will end up talking about. If you drop the laptop angle I'll be happy to run it."
US Patent law is "first to invent" not "first to file" and certainly not "first to ship product"
Nice to take an anti-yahoo submission from a Google employee. I guess I should be happy they at least disclosed the conflict. It's more than you can say for someone like Bob "rove-puppet" Novak.
I don't think "$300 / seat for something proprietary" really matters that much. Even if they re-bought that license every single year, it is less than $1/day to match whatever they are paying the butt that sits in the seat.
I think you are missing a couple of things. First off, Google wasn't always a multibillion dollar company. They were a startup first, and when you are a startup with no revenue, capital is damn scarce. In that environment, avoiding the cost of software licenses is an obvious way to economize.
Fast forward to the day you start earning some revenue, and maybe even an operating profit. You have lots of demands for reinvesting the money for further growth. You could put some of it into software licenses for a commercial OS, and the costs of converting your infrastructure and porting your code, or you could put it into more hardware (for the cost of OS licenses, google could probably have bought 20-30% more capacity), to handle more customers, and more engineers, to improve your product, and marketing/sales to keep stoking your growth.
The biggest reason to go with a commercial vendor is that you can take advantage of the investment they are amortizing over a large sales volume. This can be a good thing if you have rather ordinary problems you are trying to solve, but someone like google (or amazon, etc) doesn't have ordinary problems, so they are forced to create their own solutions (which also gives them a competitive advantage). Overtime, the rest of the world might catch up to the point that commercial vendors now offer solutions, but again, the value you gain from replacing your existing solutions has to be weighed against the other things you could do with the money.
Smog != to greenhouse gases. Smog alerts are due to high levels of partially combusted hydrocarbons in the air. Fireplaces are a big source since they don't usually burn very efficiently.
One trick to use to get a cleaner burning and more efficient fire is to build it upside down. Rather than putting big logs on top and getting them burning with tinder and kindling underneath, put the biggest pieces of wood on the bottom, smaller pieces on top, etc. End with the tinder on top. This way the smoke that gets boiled out of the wood passes a nice hot fire which ignites most of it before it heads up the chimmney. A traditional bottom up fire tends to generate a lot of cool smoke which goes up the chimmney, lining the sides with creesote and poluting the air with smog.
You do realize that simply fabricating a CPU takes a lot of energy? There are energy efficiencies in reducing the need to buy additional systems.
Microsoft used to understand that actually shipping software is a really important feature. But in the post 9/11 world, I guess the figure fear, uncertainty and doubt are more important.
As i suggested in my original post, there is a lot of video content in the world, not just DVD movies.
Some of it is quite suitable for a small portable device whose main purpose is audio.
I've just built my first linux raid server for my home network (after using hardware and software RAID on WinNT/2k for years). I'm using mirroring for now to keep initial costs low, but as time goes on, I'll pick up cheep disksand move to raid 5.
I figured that at some point, I would go with a hardware RAID card, but it occured to me that one of the advantages of software RAID is that you can grow by buying the lowest-cost reliable hardware controllers and reconfigure things without regard for the vendors raid implementation.
Also, with Hardware RAID, if the controller dies, I'll need to get a controller from the same vendor if I want to drop in a replacement without tearing down and restoring from a backup.
I'm really amazed by how many people have said here that they think downloading stuff off the Internet is okay, that it's just like setting the VCR, that it's not stealing. That really blows my mind.
Well, one issue is that some representatives of the content industry have asserted that taping and then skipping commercials is stealing.
Many reasonable people think that's ridiculous, and as a result they deeply discount any argument from the content providers about what constitutes stealing of TV shows. They may be wrong to, but that's certainly part of the dynamic.
All I want is a standard format to purchase music in, that works on every player and that allows me to freaking do with the music I bought what I want.
You mean like a CD? Or maybe a casette tape? Perhaps an LP?
It'll never happen (again).
Hmm, its kind of late. Does this mean I'll finally have a good controller for playing Tempest with MAME?
I'm going to dispute the notion that there would be a large market for portable video in an iPod-like form-factor any time soon.
I used to think exactly as you do. A lot of people have the radio on, or music playing all day in the background. If they have the TV on that much, it's mostly for the audio. They might look up at it when they hear something interesting, but that behavior isn't going to translate into demand for a video device.
Then I saw people with clips on their smartphones. It was a great conversation point. Initially for the novelty, but it was easy to imagine people continuing to pull out their portable and show their friends and co-workers a short video clip on a regular basis long after the novelty wore off.
People like having points of common experience. In our recent past, that was provided by things like network TV. These days though, the media landscape is increacingly fragmented. The chances of 3-4 people all having seen the same thing on TV the night before are much slimmer, but with a portable video device they have the ability to connect over a great segment on the Daily Show, or a great football play, etc.
No doubt it won't be HD quality content though. It doesn't even have to be NTSC quality, though the bigger the files, the better Apple's prospects of continuing to sell upgrades to the installed base by helping deliver demand for devices with larger and larger capacities.
I think a video device is inevitable. Hard disk capacities keep growing and growing, but people's music collections aren't keeping pace. Most people are going to have extra space on even the base model iPods. Apple needs some space hungry files to drive upgrades
Photo capabilities will help. But I have 5 years of high quality digital photos, and even with the crap ones I've included thrown in, I doubt they top 10GB.
Video, on the other hand, devours disk space like a thing that has a really really big appetite. More importantly, I think people will want it.
Movies and even TV shows aren't going to be very satisfying on a small screen (though they might be great for a lot of public transportation users in big cities).
Shorter form stuff though is going to be popular. People will pull it out to show their friends John Stewart's opening monologue, or the trailer for a cool movie, or a great new music video. In an age where the mass media is disintegrating, people still need something to talk about around the water cooler (or espresso machine). Rather than drawing on the mass media, they'll pull their private programming out of their pockets, and talk about that.
Then there is the fact that UPnP is disabled under XP2 for security reasons.
Really? Well I live in Seattle, work in Redmond, and it usually takes about ONE HOUR to travel between "the same place".
On the other hand, nuclear blasts don't really get held up by the crummy traffic on 520
Codecs aren't the issue. Playingback HD content is. For pretty much any codec, the computation is going to scale with the resolution, and full HD res is pretty high. It'll probably take 4-6x to play back HD content.
... an f-ing makeover, because, you know, science is well served by people worrying about their popularity and image. It's all about faith, man, making people believe. I mean, if they don't that plane might crash because the engineer's couldn't mingle at parties. This computer might cease to function because the chip designers had trouble getting a date to the Jr High dance.
This is a load of horseshit.
First: The WindowsNT line (WinNT, Win2k, Win2k3 and WinXP) isn't descended from DOS.
Second: WindowsNT had a rich file and process permissions and auditing model baked in at a low level that exceeded (and may still exceed) what Linux has today. The problem is that the default OS config was and is relatively permissive.
Geo = GM
Saturn = GM
Lexes = Toyota
Scion = Toyota
What, exactly is the point about saying that the plant was in the business of creating chemicals deady to life?
I don't see why it matters -- methyl isocyanate, the gas that was released, is a key reagent in number of industrial chemical syntheses, like the production of plastics, not just the production of "chemicals deadly to life."
While it may be true that the people responsible for the plant should have been extra careful because of the nature of their product (if that is what the parenthetical was supposed to convey), the fact is that the risks are much broader.