What most helps the success of the iTunes Music Store is how cleanly it integrates with iTunes and how cleanly iTunes works with the iPod. All of which doesn't mean much if the iPod ends up a high-end niche product in the portable digital music player market.
Adding WMA support broadens the appeal of the iPod and lowers the barrier to entry among those many windows users who have already ripped CDs into WMA files. (Just as adding support for at least reading competitors file formats was so important to Microsoft, among others, back when there was still a competitive market for word processors and spreadsheets).
Of course, the other argument is that the iTMS only exists to sell iPods, so Apple doesn't really mind if people aren't buying from iTMS. I personally don't buy that argument though. iTMS may not be a profitable business now, but you can bet Apple intends it to be, and the best way for them to get it there is to sell more iPods
technology standards in the same lineage are often in competition with eachother.
Just because ACC has come along doesn't mean that everyone whose been using MP3 is going to stop, nor does it mean that those who do stop will start using ACC instead of an alternative.
Don't beleive me? Well, consider the people who are now questioning whether IPv6, the annointed succesor to IPv4, is going to be widely adopted.
Consider how long Intel has been trying to get out from under the x86 architecture (the Itanium is just the latest in a line of general purpose CPUs Intel has created from the ground up).
Don't believe me? Why is does Microsoft try so damn hard to get people to upgrade to the latest version of Office or Windows?
I've seen a few of these things that claim to support a variety of formats, but when it comes right down to it, they rely on the PC to decode most of them and pump them to the player.
Can this thing decode the Divx (and hopefully MPEG4) all by itself, allowing the use of a lightweight machine for the media storage/serving?
PART 411 -- COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS OF UNITED STATES CURRENCY
Authority: 18 U.S.C. 504; Treasury Directive Number 15-56, 58 FR 48539 (September 16, 1993)
411.1 Color illustrations authorized.
(a) Notwithstanding any provision of chapter 25 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, authority is hereby given for the printing, publishing or importation, or the making or importation of the necessary plates or items for such printing or publishing, of color illustrations of U.S. currency provided that:
(1) The illustration be of a size less than three-fourths or more than one and one-half, in linear dimension, of each part of any matter so illustrated;
(2) The illustration be one-sided; and
(3) All negatives, plates, positives, digitized storage medium, graphic files, magnetic medium, optical storage devices, and any other thing used in the making of the illustration that contain an image of the illustration or any part thereof shall be destroyed and/or deleted or erased after their final use in accordance with this section.
(b) [Reserved].
Well, for one thing, it is legal to reproduce images of US currency, provided you obeyed certain rules (the printed reproduction had to be a certain percentage larger or smaller than the real currency). At least it was last I checked (which was more than a few years ago).
I think your typical corporate IT project is rather larger now that it was 10 years ago. Software or not, most large projects bring with them increacing amounts of overhead.
The trick, of course, it to be smart about it, and I have no doubt that many organizations have far more overhead than they need.
Part of "marketing" is understanding what people want, another part is giving it to them, and yet another part of it is making sure the right people know you have what they want for sale.
It sounds trivial, but consider that until the iPod came along, MP3 players either couldn't hold more than an hour or two of music, or they were freaking huge.
Info about the future of stock markets or sports books in Vegas may be more immediately monetizable than info about the future of the oceans.
But...
The future of the oceans is a lot more financially valuable than either of them. Trends in the Oceans could have major economic impacts that send stockmarkets spiraling to their deaths.
Consoles are often subsidized at launch, but as hardware costs go down over the lifetime of the design, and R&D costs are recouped, the hardware starts to break even, or even turn a profit.
I would take Jobs statements about the profitability of i-tunes with a grain of salt. He has lots of good reasons to "poor-talk."
1st he has a good cover story for Apple shareholders, namely that iTunes is going to help bring in a lot of hardware revenue, with resulting profits.
2nd he undermines iTunes competitors (and potential creditors) by sowing doubt among their investors and creditors. This reduces their wherewithal to ride out the uncertain early years of this new industry.
3rd by undermining iTunes competitors, he strengthens Apple's position in the long run. As competitors falter, Apple can either acquire them, or scoop up their former customers.
4th by undermining iTunes competitors, he strengthens Apple's hand against the recording industry. You have to believe that they want someone who can figure out how to get paid for on-line music distribution. And they haven't figured out how to do it themselves. It is in their interests for someone to succeed.
5th he actually has the wherewithal to ride out the early days of the industry -- they are, in fact, making money on iPods, and the Apple Music store will probably help them sell more of them. As long as he's making a decent return on the hardware business, he can aford to keep the on-line music distribution business unprofitable. Once he's got it tied up, he can squeeze the recording companies.
6th. Just as with console hardware, the economics of selling on-line music is bound to change. Apple has already done a lot of the R&D (and legal wrangling) to get this up and running. Those fixed costs will be paid off. Incremental costs will decline -- Moore's law will make the ongoing operation of the infrastructure cheaper as CPU and memory prices continue to drop. Storage and bandwidth prices will also drop. The market will grow, which means new investments can be amortized over a larger number of customers/transactions.
Also in the nightshade family: Jimson Weed Digitalis Foxglove Beladona
Tomatos were not well regarding as a food plant because of this lineage. I remember reading that european colonists in the New World wouldn't eat them until they had gained a foothold back in the old world.
The same book had a story of a guy who tried to create a hearty tomato plant he could transplant in the early spring by grafting a tomato stalk onto a jimson weed rootstock. It did marvelously and they had nice juicy tomatos at a record early date. They didn't eat many of them, after the first one caused the whole family to hallucinate.
it is pretty easy for consumers to substitute another search engine for google
e-bay is different, it isn't merely that its a large centralized system. its that it is a centralized system supporting a vast network of buyers and sellers. switching from e-bay is not easy. A seller will find fewer buyers, a buyer will find fewer sellers and a smaller selection
Sure, google has people paying it for ad placements, so it is superficially like e-bay, but those ad spots are only valuable because some fraction of the people using google's search are using it to shop at any given time. Most of them are there to use the basic search functionality. On the otherhand, there is scarcely any reason to go to e-bay, other than to buy or sell.
I realize that a fused multiply+add is a common instruction pairing in scientific computing, hence IBMs implementation of it as a single-cycle instruction early in the life of the PowerPC, or perhaps even the Power architecture, but does anyone have a sense for just how common it is in a typical FP workload. 10%, 25%, 50%?
Varadarajan said that a lot of people get the math wrong when calculating the performance of the machines. Each G5 processor has two, double-precision, floating-point units. Each is capable of a fused, multiple-add operation per cycle, so you get 2 flops per cycle. This means that 2GHz corresponds to 8 GFlops, so each dual G5 can deliver a peak of 16 GFlops of double-precision performance.
16Gflops?
2 FPUs/ CPU * 1 floating point operation per cycle per FPU = 2 flop per CPU per cycle 2 flops per CPU per cycle * 2 Gcycles per second = 4 Gflops per second per CPU 4 Gflops/s per CPU * 2 CPU per machine = 8 Gflops/s per machine where does the extra 2x come from?
Does anyone even rember those guys? They could have been dominant, real long term players. Instead they went the IPO route, did god knows what with the cash they raised, and disappeared into the trash-bin of history. Totally forgotten.
Speaking of hindsight, the author of the register article could do with a little more of it.
He says that all Apple had in the late 80s was the brand, not the volume or the logistics. Perhaps this is true, but in the late 80s, Apple had more volume than Dell.
As for his assertion that Intel x86 wasn't a compelling alternative to Moto 68K in that time frame, it's clearly false. The reason Apple did the port to x86 (aka Star Trek) is that Moto was late, late, late with the 68030 amd Apple was preparing for the possibility that the 020 was last in the line(in partdue to litigation, if I remember correctly). This lateness cost Moto the performance lead that they had previously held over Intel. Things just got worse with the 040, where the extreme CISCness of the 68k (double indirection in hardware) made things even worse.
As to the rest of his argument, it is itself dependant on hindsight, like the worry that Apple would have been squashed by a dominant Microsoft. In the late 80s, it was clear that Microsoft was a force to be reckoned with, but its not clear their dominance was assured.
For something as expensive and computer dependant as the segway, they should have an easy an inexpensive way to distribute customer-installable "patches"
Slashdot Mirror
What most helps the success of the iTunes Music Store is how cleanly it integrates with iTunes and how cleanly iTunes works with the iPod. All of which doesn't mean much if the iPod ends up a high-end niche product in the portable digital music player market.
Adding WMA support broadens the appeal of the iPod and lowers the barrier to entry among those many windows users who have already ripped CDs into WMA files. (Just as adding support for at least reading competitors file formats was so important to Microsoft, among others, back when there was still a competitive market for word processors and spreadsheets).
Of course, the other argument is that the iTMS only exists to sell iPods, so Apple doesn't really mind if people aren't buying from iTMS. I personally don't buy that argument though. iTMS may not be a profitable business now, but you can bet Apple intends it to be, and the best way for them to get it there is to sell more iPods
I thought margins were pretty small on the iPod.
Actually, Microsoft is licensing a version of WinCE (or whatever they call it now) designed for personal media players.
you don't know much about technology, do you?
technology standards in the same lineage are often in competition with eachother.
Just because ACC has come along doesn't mean that everyone whose been using MP3 is going to stop, nor does it mean that those who do stop will start using ACC instead of an alternative.
Don't beleive me? Well, consider the people who are now questioning whether IPv6, the annointed succesor to IPv4, is going to be widely adopted.
Consider how long Intel has been trying to get out from under the x86 architecture (the Itanium is just the latest in a line of general purpose CPUs Intel has created from the ground up).
Don't believe me? Why is does Microsoft try so damn hard to get people to upgrade to the latest version of Office or Windows?
I've seen a few of these things that claim to support a variety of formats, but when it comes right down to it, they rely on the PC to decode most of them and pump them to the player.
Can this thing decode the Divx (and hopefully MPEG4) all by itself, allowing the use of a lightweight machine for the media storage/serving?
http://www.moneyfactory.com/newmoney/main.cfm/cur
(this is actually a US Govt website)
Well, for one thing, it is legal to reproduce images of US currency, provided you obeyed certain rules (the printed reproduction had to be a certain percentage larger or smaller than the real currency). At least it was last I checked (which was more than a few years ago).
Before you smear him, perhaps you should figure out whether he was the CSO during the period you cite.
Much of your own weight is water. Why would garbage, with all its organic matter, be any different?
I think your typical corporate IT project is rather larger now that it was 10 years ago. Software or not, most large projects bring with them increacing amounts of overhead.
The trick, of course, it to be smart about it, and I have no doubt that many organizations have far more overhead than they need.
Resources are limited. How much does it cost to buy and run computers, not to mention train teachers on using them effectively?
In a lot of schools, there isn't even enough money for basics, like teachers.
Part of "marketing" is understanding what people want, another part is giving it to them, and yet another part of it is making sure the right people know you have what they want for sale.
It sounds trivial, but consider that until the iPod came along, MP3 players either couldn't hold more than an hour or two of music, or they were freaking huge.
Of course, since an iPod is a lot more compact (pocket-sized, even), one might be less likely to leave it out where it could get taken.
Info about the future of stock markets or sports books in Vegas may be more immediately monetizable than info about the future of the oceans.
But...
The future of the oceans is a lot more financially valuable than either of them. Trends in the Oceans could have major economic impacts that send stockmarkets spiraling to their deaths.
You gotta admit, the iPod is a pretty clever way to mark-up the price of a HDD.
Consoles are often subsidized at launch, but as hardware costs go down over the lifetime of the design, and R&D costs are recouped, the hardware starts to break even, or even turn a profit.
I would take Jobs statements about the profitability of i-tunes with a grain of salt. He has lots of good reasons to "poor-talk."
1st he has a good cover story for Apple shareholders, namely that iTunes is going to help bring in a lot of hardware revenue, with resulting profits.
2nd he undermines iTunes competitors (and potential creditors) by sowing doubt among their investors and creditors. This reduces their wherewithal to ride out the uncertain early years of this new industry.
3rd by undermining iTunes competitors, he strengthens Apple's position in the long run. As competitors falter, Apple can either acquire them, or scoop up their former customers.
4th by undermining iTunes competitors, he strengthens Apple's hand against the recording industry. You have to believe that they want someone who can figure out how to get paid for on-line music distribution. And they haven't figured out how to do it themselves. It is in their interests for someone to succeed.
5th he actually has the wherewithal to ride out the early days of the industry -- they are, in fact, making money on iPods, and the Apple Music store will probably help them sell more of them. As long as he's making a decent return on the hardware business, he can aford to keep the on-line music distribution business unprofitable. Once he's got it tied up, he can squeeze the recording companies.
6th. Just as with console hardware, the economics of selling on-line music is bound to change. Apple has already done a lot of the R&D (and legal wrangling) to get this up and running. Those fixed costs will be paid off. Incremental costs will decline -- Moore's law will make the ongoing operation of the infrastructure cheaper as CPU and memory prices continue to drop. Storage and bandwidth prices will also drop. The market will grow, which means new investments can be amortized over a larger number of customers/transactions.
Also in the nightshade family:
Jimson Weed
Digitalis
Foxglove
Beladona
Tomatos were not well regarding as a food plant because of this lineage. I remember reading that european colonists in the New World wouldn't eat them until they had gained a foothold back in the old world.
The same book had a story of a guy who tried to create a hearty tomato plant he could transplant in the early spring by grafting a tomato stalk onto a jimson weed rootstock. It did marvelously and they had nice juicy tomatos at a record early date. They didn't eat many of them, after the first one caused the whole family to hallucinate.
it is pretty easy for consumers to substitute another search engine for google
e-bay is different, it isn't merely that its a large centralized system. its that it is a centralized system supporting a vast network of buyers and sellers. switching from e-bay is not easy. A seller will find fewer buyers, a buyer will find fewer sellers and a smaller selection
Sure, google has people paying it for ad placements, so it is superficially like e-bay, but those ad spots are only valuable because some fraction of the people using google's search are using it to shop at any given time. Most of them are there to use the basic search functionality. On the otherhand, there is scarcely any reason to go to e-bay, other than to buy or sell.
silly me!
I realize that a fused multiply+add is a common instruction pairing in scientific computing, hence IBMs implementation of it as a single-cycle instruction early in the life of the PowerPC, or perhaps even the Power architecture, but does anyone have a sense for just how common it is in a typical FP workload. 10%, 25%, 50%?
2 FPUs/ CPU * 1 floating point operation per cycle per FPU = 2 flop per CPU per cycle
2 flops per CPU per cycle * 2 Gcycles per second = 4 Gflops per second per CPU
4 Gflops/s per CPU * 2 CPU per machine = 8 Gflops/s per machine
where does the extra 2x come from?
Yeah, Microsoft's IPO sure killed the company.
Does anyone even rember those guys? They could have been dominant, real long term players. Instead they went the IPO route, did god knows what with the cash they raised, and disappeared into the trash-bin of history. Totally forgotten.
Or filemaker pro. And wasn't the claris suite once available on Windows?
Why shouldn't people donating to whatever know the true cost of their donation?
And without being aware of the costs, how can we decide how to most effectively contribute our resources.
Speaking of hindsight, the author of the register article could do with a little more of it.
He says that all Apple had in the late 80s was the brand, not the volume or the logistics. Perhaps this is true, but in the late 80s, Apple had more volume than Dell.
As for his assertion that Intel x86 wasn't a compelling alternative to Moto 68K in that time frame, it's clearly false. The reason Apple did the port to x86 (aka Star Trek) is that Moto was late, late, late with the 68030 amd Apple was preparing for the possibility that the 020 was last in the line(in partdue to litigation, if I remember correctly). This lateness cost Moto the performance lead that they had previously held over Intel. Things just got worse with the 040, where the extreme CISCness of the 68k (double indirection in hardware) made things even worse.
As to the rest of his argument, it is itself dependant on hindsight, like the worry that Apple would have been squashed by a dominant Microsoft. In the late 80s, it was clear that Microsoft was a force to be reckoned with, but its not clear their dominance was assured.
For something as expensive and computer dependant as the segway, they should have an easy an inexpensive way to distribute customer-installable "patches"