Every story I see about the "iTunes phone" is speculating "just what is Jobs up to???"
One possibility which hasn't seemed to have occurred to most folks is that this is actually a Motorola idea, not an Apple one.
It looks to me like a typical MOTO cell phone, except with iTunes bolted to the software.
Here's how I figure it went:
Motorola exects said, "we want a phone that plays music, but we have no clue where to start. Apple is making a ton of money in the digital music world... let's see if they will go in with us on making one which plays iTunes."
Then they dangle enough money in front of Jobs & Co. to make them say "what the hell?" and work together on a tacking iTunes to the phone interface. Apple gets to enter a new market, Motorola gets a phone that feeds on some of the iPod buzz, Cingular locks a bunch of new customers into two-year contracts... Everybody makes a few extra bucks. No "long term" strategy needed.
It's just a phone, not the launch point of a scheme to take over the world. No grand "long term" strategy is needed to explain what all concerned parties are up to here.
If the iPod is the only device connected to your computer (as is the case with many users), you are 100% correct. USB2 is more than good enough.
If, however, you have a lot of USB devices and a lot of Firewire devices in a computer room which looks like something out of Serial Experiments Lain then the more devices you can get on the Firewire bus and unplug from USB2 ports, the better.
So the short answer is USB2 is fine for most people, which is why it makes sense for Apple to ship their iPods that way. Some users are much better off with Firewire, but those people can probably afford to spring thirty bucks for the alternate cable.
With all that confusion, it's probably better to get firewire and not worry about it, or wait 5 more years until everything migrates to USB 2.0 High-Speed.
Except by then, all the real video pros will be using Macs with Firewire 1600 and doing everything in wide-screen high def.
So many scenes in that movie which stand out in my mind. A favorite for me was when he was trying to explain to his son the need to lock outlaws in his ice machine.
He swats a mosquito on his neck, and shows his son the blood. "Do you see that blood? That's MY blood."
That and the line, "DEAD THINGS go downstream! We're going upstream!"
Never has utter madness been made so rational and sympathetic in a motion picture. The existance of the Jim Jones cult (and others like it) suddenly made sense to me after watching that movie.
Seriously though. If you want to listen to the radio on the bus every morning, why not just buy a $20 Walkman?
Not that your example is really all that valid anyway. A bus is a huge metal box. You can forget about tuning in anything inside of them on a small hand-held unit unless you are close enough to the broadcast towers to pick up the signal on your dental implants.
American football is a commercial success because it just happens to be extremely television-friendly.
A TV broadcast has a hard time tracking hockey pucks, and often fails to catch all the action away from the ball in soccer. You really have to be in the arena, watching the game live, to take it all in properly... but football on TV often is even more entertaining than actually being at the game.
Add to that the fact that their "one game per week" schedule lends itself well to office pools and fantasy leagues, and it's easy to see why it is so popular as a spectator sport over here.
Likewise, the Madden empire is huge because football also happens to be a game which is very video-game friendly. It combines the tactical planning of the best turn-based combat sims with the high-speed action of a good racing game or shooter. It's both a thinking game and a "twitch" game, all rolled in one.
I enjoy listening to morning shows and getting updates on traffic, weather, and concert info.
The thing is, 90% of the people listening to radio do so while in traffic. From what you just said, it seems that this is the case for you, as well.
If you are in traffic, why would you need a tuner on your iPod? The car stereo your iPod is plugged into already has a much better tuner (with a much bigger antenna) than a tiny portable device could ever have.
So, Apple could make the iPod slightly more bulky and slightly more expensive in order to wedge in an FM tuner of a quality which is comparable to the old Sony Walkman of the 1980s... but why? Most of their customers are not really all that interested in it.
To put it another way: If I mainly wanted to listen to the radio, I would buy a $20 headset radio instead of a $300 iPod. Hell, I think I already have one lying around in the back of some "junk drawer" somewhere.
I bought the iPod specifically because I don't like much of what's on the radio.
Objective tests are great at telling you things like whether your equipment is functioning properly or at peak performance, or giving you hard metrics by which to compare two distant systems, but at the end of the day are irrelevant -- or at best secondary to the very subjective test of the output's effect on your ears, brain, and mind.
Which can vary not only from person to person, but from day to day.
This is why you should always buy hi-fi speakers from a vendor who offers a 1-month trial return period. Take them home for a month. Listen to them a lot. Double-blind test against your existing speakers like crazy. Buy three different sets at once and compare them all if you can afford the blip on your credit card. Then keep only a set of speakers which you know, after a few solid weeks of trying them out in your own listening room, you are going to be happy with for the next few years.
Apple recently (unwisely, IMHO) dipped their toe into the pool of "active" environments with the Dashboard, but in general, it's very difficult for an application to own anything on a Mac without the user explicitly allowing it to do so. This is in contrast to Windows where it is incredibly easy for malware to move in and set up shop, once it gets past the firewall.
Okay, the very fact that a music player could rate last in sound quality yet first overall tells me that these people have very different priorities than me.
I think I'll wait for Stereophile or The Absolute Sound or at the very least Audio Heritic to provide a review. I'm not really interested in the subjective audio opinions of a bunch of tin-eared computer geeks.
The results you linked to are a little disappointing. The shuffle's smaller capacity makes it unsuitable for lossless playback, which I consider essential to a device which would be plugged in to my main living room stereo.
AAC is fine for jogging and driving, but when I want to really sit and listen, I consider Uncompressed, FLAC, or Apple Lossless rips of CD's to be the minimum sound quality tollerable.
Fortunately, I now have a home theater system built around my Mac mini, using a USB-TOSLink adapter to carry the sound digitally to my amp... which finally made hi-fi use of my iPod a non-issue in my home.
The user reviews on that site are entirely a measure of fan-boyism. No double-blind tests, no testing at all, in fact. Just randome people saying "I think my Zen must sound better than the Rio... I'm going to give it a 9 for sound."
Furthermore, the actual editor review you linked to, done by people who did compare them, rated the iPod the highest of the bunch.
It was, however, very light on details about how they arrived at that evaluation.
The moral: Don't go to C|Net for your audio hardware reviews.
The portable audio world is long overdue for a serious evaluation of all the handheld players out there, with both subjective double-blind listening tests and electronically measured performance specs.
The ideal test would first compare all players using lossless playback (if available), and then compare them once again using the "suggested" compression format for each unit (128 AAC for the iPod, WMA for the Zen, etc.)
I've heard audio critics praise the lossless playback performance of various iPod models before, especially when using the line-out from the docking port instead of the headphone-out on the top, but to date I know of no serious audio magazine which has done the sort of comparison they would do when evaluating CD players or Tuners.
Has anybody seen anything like that, and if so, do you have a link?
Lighter power plant and no brakes means the car weighs less. Since the car weighs less you need less power and lighter wheels and suspension.
1. All fo the electric cars currently on the market are actually heavier if you don't count the body panels and frame. You could make a VW Bug with an aluminum frame and fiberglass panels and it would also be very light, but I would not want to ride in it. Hydrogen storage replacing batteries might change that... time will tell.
2. You would be freaking insane to drive a car with no friction brakes at all. The Ford Escape has disk breaks like every other car, it just doesn't use them when slowly decelerating.
You are correct that big power plants are more efficient than the little ones in cars, but then you lose a crapload of energy by sending down miles and miles of copper wire, and yet even more when you transmit that energy into whatever you will use to contain it (batteries, H2, whatever). Yet another wash, in the end.
All this talk of locating plants away from the city is great, if you live in Phoenix. Who cares about a little soot out in the desert? As a Minnesotan, I don't want our beautiful woods choked by massive coal plants any more than is absolutely needed for our basic electrical needs.
Also, until somebody comes up with electric jets, we will continue to need oil for both commercial travel and our military capacity, regardless of what people drive to work in. Oil availability is a national security issue, whether people want to face that fact or not. It's every bit as important as the bullets we supply our infantry with.
The Nano made me just stare in disbelief and I've got one on order. Why? Size and design. It's finally small enough to carry comfortably...
Woah woah woah!
Finally small enough to carry comfortably!?
Isn't pretty much every MP3 player on the market small enough to carry comfortably? My 20GB iPod is smaller than my wallet, and slips right into any jeans pocket. How feeble are you that such an item is a burden? Seriously.
Then again, this is Slashdot, where operating a mouse is considered a good workout. Never mind. I retract my question.
Okay, I hate Michael Moore as much as anybody, but you are looking for conspiracy where there are none.
Bowling for Columbine did extremely well, as documentary films go, which justified the wide release of F-911. Once released, the film was a huge draw (again, by documentary standards) and toally deserved the wide release.
He's a crap film director, but he's a popular crap film director. Saying that the wide release of F-911 is evidence of Hollywood liberal bias is like saying the wide release of "Armageddon" is evidence of meteors-hitting-the-Earth bias.
Yes, Hollywood is an industry which is thick with liberals, but it is first-and-foremost an industry (like any other) thick with people who like to make money.
Just look at all the positive buzz "The Passion" started to get once people in Hollywood started to notice how much money it was taking in. You simply can't get more "Red State" than that movie was. It was a movie which featured pretty much none of the things liberals really like about Jesus, and all of the things which hard-core evangelicals & Catholics consider to be the Main Point of the Gospels. When it hit number 1, Hollywood execs couldn't stop talking about how much they loved it. Greed knows no political boundries.
I'm thinking this will be an Electra but won't have the pull of Jennifer Garner, which, for many, was the only reason to see it.
Unless, of course, it's "Jennifer Garner as Ant Man!!!"
But seriously, the real crime here is that Marvel still seems to have no intention of doing a Silver Surfer movie anytime soon. If any superhero story really deserved to be told on the big screen in the age of CGI, that seems to me like it would be the one.
I always thought Noran Radd was just a little bit cooler than most flying superheroes, since he flies in a standing position.
The only advantage to electric vehicles is that they open up the possiblity of using alternate enery sources, such as Solar and nuclear power, which currently would not allow you to mount the original power plant on the car itself.
You don't gain any efficiency at all. Not everybody is aware of that fact.
Yep. Most likely there are kickbacks involved. Not much maybe, but enough to make it very difficult for "Two Guys and a Web Server" to have any real chance of up a rival ticket service in a garage.
They are evil because they are essentially legalized scalpers.
For the majority of events which Ticketmaster sells for (which, in my local market, is every goddamn thing in town), they secure an exclusive distribution contract, which means even if you walk to the box-office and buy your tickets directly from the venue, you must pay Ticketmaster's outrageous handling fees.
And when I say "outrageous", I mean that the various fees which Ticketmaster piles on frequently add up to about 20% of the ticket price. When we saw the White Stripes at the Orpheum last weekend, the actual "price" of the ticket was $42. After Ticketmaster took their cut, it was $52.
I didn't give a crap about the "convenience" of ordering through Ticketmaster. Let's be honest here, selling tickets online is CHEAPER than selling them via ticket windows. However, thanks to Ticketmaster, I don't have the option of just buying the ticket without paying their rake.
Were they not the only game in town, it would bother me less, however, there is no competitive bidding for ticket-handling contracts, because the barrier to entry is far too high now. Ticketmaster has bought their way in to every major venue, and they can freeze out any hall or performer in the excact way Microsoft treats OEMs who dare to offer rival OS's as a default installation.
Wow. Almost $14. Meanwhile, the lawyers who pressed the case made off with millions.
But hey, at least a great social wrong was corrected, right? I mean, go to any record store look at how much cheaper CD's are!
What's that? The prices are higher than ever, to the point that it's now often cheaper to buy a movie on DVD than it is to buy the soundtrack of the same filme on CD at the same store!?
Huh. Fuck. If I were a cynical person, I would almost think the whole thing was just another scheme to make scumbag lawyers rich while boning the consumer. Not wanting to be a cynic, I'm trying desperately to think of another explanation...
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Every story I see about the "iTunes phone" is speculating "just what is Jobs up to???"
One possibility which hasn't seemed to have occurred to most folks is that this is actually a Motorola idea, not an Apple one.
It looks to me like a typical MOTO cell phone, except with iTunes bolted to the software.
Here's how I figure it went:
Motorola exects said, "we want a phone that plays music, but we have no clue where to start. Apple is making a ton of money in the digital music world... let's see if they will go in with us on making one which plays iTunes."
Then they dangle enough money in front of Jobs & Co. to make them say "what the hell?" and work together on a tacking iTunes to the phone interface. Apple gets to enter a new market, Motorola gets a phone that feeds on some of the iPod buzz, Cingular locks a bunch of new customers into two-year contracts... Everybody makes a few extra bucks. No "long term" strategy needed.
It's just a phone, not the launch point of a scheme to take over the world. No grand "long term" strategy is needed to explain what all concerned parties are up to here.
If the iPod is the only device connected to your computer (as is the case with many users), you are 100% correct. USB2 is more than good enough.
If, however, you have a lot of USB devices and a lot of Firewire devices in a computer room which looks like something out of Serial Experiments Lain then the more devices you can get on the Firewire bus and unplug from USB2 ports, the better.
So the short answer is USB2 is fine for most people, which is why it makes sense for Apple to ship their iPods that way. Some users are much better off with Firewire, but those people can probably afford to spring thirty bucks for the alternate cable.
With all that confusion, it's probably better to get firewire and not worry about it, or wait 5 more years until everything migrates to USB 2.0 High-Speed.
Except by then, all the real video pros will be using Macs with Firewire 1600 and doing everything in wide-screen high def.
So many scenes in that movie which stand out in my mind. A favorite for me was when he was trying to explain to his son the need to lock outlaws in his ice machine.
He swats a mosquito on his neck, and shows his son the blood. "Do you see that blood? That's MY blood."
That and the line, "DEAD THINGS go downstream! We're going upstream!"
Never has utter madness been made so rational and sympathetic in a motion picture. The existance of the Jim Jones cult (and others like it) suddenly made sense to me after watching that movie.
Then buy a car like a Real American?
I keed, I keed!
Seriously though. If you want to listen to the radio on the bus every morning, why not just buy a $20 Walkman?
Not that your example is really all that valid anyway. A bus is a huge metal box. You can forget about tuning in anything inside of them on a small hand-held unit unless you are close enough to the broadcast towers to pick up the signal on your dental implants.
American football is a commercial success because it just happens to be extremely television-friendly.
A TV broadcast has a hard time tracking hockey pucks, and often fails to catch all the action away from the ball in soccer. You really have to be in the arena, watching the game live, to take it all in properly... but football on TV often is even more entertaining than actually being at the game.
Add to that the fact that their "one game per week" schedule lends itself well to office pools and fantasy leagues, and it's easy to see why it is so popular as a spectator sport over here.
Likewise, the Madden empire is huge because football also happens to be a game which is very video-game friendly. It combines the tactical planning of the best turn-based combat sims with the high-speed action of a good racing game or shooter. It's both a thinking game and a "twitch" game, all rolled in one.
I enjoy listening to morning shows and getting updates on traffic, weather, and concert info.
The thing is, 90% of the people listening to radio do so while in traffic. From what you just said, it seems that this is the case for you, as well.
If you are in traffic, why would you need a tuner on your iPod? The car stereo your iPod is plugged into already has a much better tuner (with a much bigger antenna) than a tiny portable device could ever have.
So, Apple could make the iPod slightly more bulky and slightly more expensive in order to wedge in an FM tuner of a quality which is comparable to the old Sony Walkman of the 1980s... but why? Most of their customers are not really all that interested in it.
To put it another way: If I mainly wanted to listen to the radio, I would buy a $20 headset radio instead of a $300 iPod. Hell, I think I already have one lying around in the back of some "junk drawer" somewhere.
I bought the iPod specifically because I don't like much of what's on the radio.
and not require user interaction past the original running
In other words, it would require user interaction.
Objective tests are great at telling you things like whether your equipment is functioning properly or at peak performance, or giving you hard metrics by which to compare two distant systems, but at the end of the day are irrelevant -- or at best secondary to the very subjective test of the output's effect on your ears, brain, and mind.
Which can vary not only from person to person, but from day to day.
This is why you should always buy hi-fi speakers from a vendor who offers a 1-month trial return period. Take them home for a month. Listen to them a lot. Double-blind test against your existing speakers like crazy. Buy three different sets at once and compare them all if you can afford the blip on your credit card. Then keep only a set of speakers which you know, after a few solid weeks of trying them out in your own listening room, you are going to be happy with for the next few years.
Scripting tools != automation.
Apple recently (unwisely, IMHO) dipped their toe into the pool of "active" environments with the Dashboard, but in general, it's very difficult for an application to own anything on a Mac without the user explicitly allowing it to do so. This is in contrast to Windows where it is incredibly easy for malware to move in and set up shop, once it gets past the firewall.
Nice one.
Just for the record, is there any company in America which is not rumored to be on the verge of buying Skype?
Okay, the very fact that a music player could rate last in sound quality yet first overall tells me that these people have very different priorities than me.
I think I'll wait for Stereophile or The Absolute Sound or at the very least Audio Heritic to provide a review. I'm not really interested in the subjective audio opinions of a bunch of tin-eared computer geeks.
The results you linked to are a little disappointing. The shuffle's smaller capacity makes it unsuitable for lossless playback, which I consider essential to a device which would be plugged in to my main living room stereo.
AAC is fine for jogging and driving, but when I want to really sit and listen, I consider Uncompressed, FLAC, or Apple Lossless rips of CD's to be the minimum sound quality tollerable.
Fortunately, I now have a home theater system built around my Mac mini, using a USB-TOSLink adapter to carry the sound digitally to my amp... which finally made hi-fi use of my iPod a non-issue in my home.
The user reviews on that site are entirely a measure of fan-boyism. No double-blind tests, no testing at all, in fact. Just randome people saying "I think my Zen must sound better than the Rio... I'm going to give it a 9 for sound."
Furthermore, the actual editor review you linked to, done by people who did compare them, rated the iPod the highest of the bunch.
It was, however, very light on details about how they arrived at that evaluation.
The moral: Don't go to C|Net for your audio hardware reviews.
define "better"
SNR/THD/A2D/SPL/HZ/BR ?
You actually have a very good point, AC.
The portable audio world is long overdue for a serious evaluation of all the handheld players out there, with both subjective double-blind listening tests and electronically measured performance specs.
The ideal test would first compare all players using lossless playback (if available), and then compare them once again using the "suggested" compression format for each unit (128 AAC for the iPod, WMA for the Zen, etc.)
I've heard audio critics praise the lossless playback performance of various iPod models before, especially when using the line-out from the docking port instead of the headphone-out on the top, but to date I know of no serious audio magazine which has done the sort of comparison they would do when evaluating CD players or Tuners.
Has anybody seen anything like that, and if so, do you have a link?
Lighter power plant and no brakes means the car weighs less. Since the car weighs less you need less power and lighter wheels and suspension.
1. All fo the electric cars currently on the market are actually heavier if you don't count the body panels and frame. You could make a VW Bug with an aluminum frame and fiberglass panels and it would also be very light, but I would not want to ride in it. Hydrogen storage replacing batteries might change that... time will tell.
2. You would be freaking insane to drive a car with no friction brakes at all. The Ford Escape has disk breaks like every other car, it just doesn't use them when slowly decelerating.
You are correct that big power plants are more efficient than the little ones in cars, but then you lose a crapload of energy by sending down miles and miles of copper wire, and yet even more when you transmit that energy into whatever you will use to contain it (batteries, H2, whatever). Yet another wash, in the end.
All this talk of locating plants away from the city is great, if you live in Phoenix. Who cares about a little soot out in the desert? As a Minnesotan, I don't want our beautiful woods choked by massive coal plants any more than is absolutely needed for our basic electrical needs.
Also, until somebody comes up with electric jets, we will continue to need oil for both commercial travel and our military capacity, regardless of what people drive to work in. Oil availability is a national security issue, whether people want to face that fact or not. It's every bit as important as the bullets we supply our infantry with.
The Nano made me just stare in disbelief and I've got one on order. Why? Size and design. It's finally small enough to carry comfortably...
Woah woah woah!
Finally small enough to carry comfortably!?
Isn't pretty much every MP3 player on the market small enough to carry comfortably? My 20GB iPod is smaller than my wallet, and slips right into any jeans pocket. How feeble are you that such an item is a burden? Seriously.
Then again, this is Slashdot, where operating a mouse is considered a good workout. Never mind. I retract my question.
Okay, I hate Michael Moore as much as anybody, but you are looking for conspiracy where there are none.
Bowling for Columbine did extremely well, as documentary films go, which justified the wide release of F-911. Once released, the film was a huge draw (again, by documentary standards) and toally deserved the wide release.
He's a crap film director, but he's a popular crap film director. Saying that the wide release of F-911 is evidence of Hollywood liberal bias is like saying the wide release of "Armageddon" is evidence of meteors-hitting-the-Earth bias.
Yes, Hollywood is an industry which is thick with liberals, but it is first-and-foremost an industry (like any other) thick with people who like to make money.
Just look at all the positive buzz "The Passion" started to get once people in Hollywood started to notice how much money it was taking in. You simply can't get more "Red State" than that movie was. It was a movie which featured pretty much none of the things liberals really like about Jesus, and all of the things which hard-core evangelicals & Catholics consider to be the Main Point of the Gospels. When it hit number 1, Hollywood execs couldn't stop talking about how much they loved it. Greed knows no political boundries.
I'm thinking this will be an Electra but won't have the pull of Jennifer Garner, which, for many, was the only reason to see it.
Unless, of course, it's "Jennifer Garner as Ant Man!!!"
But seriously, the real crime here is that Marvel still seems to have no intention of doing a Silver Surfer movie anytime soon. If any superhero story really deserved to be told on the big screen in the age of CGI, that seems to me like it would be the one.
I always thought Noran Radd was just a little bit cooler than most flying superheroes, since he flies in a standing position.
Very well put.
The only advantage to electric vehicles is that they open up the possiblity of using alternate enery sources, such as Solar and nuclear power, which currently would not allow you to mount the original power plant on the car itself.
You don't gain any efficiency at all. Not everybody is aware of that fact.
And it runs Longhorn!
And gets outstanding frame rates on Duke Nukem Forever.
Yep. Most likely there are kickbacks involved. Not much maybe, but enough to make it very difficult for "Two Guys and a Web Server" to have any real chance of up a rival ticket service in a garage.
They are evil because they are essentially legalized scalpers.
For the majority of events which Ticketmaster sells for (which, in my local market, is every goddamn thing in town), they secure an exclusive distribution contract, which means even if you walk to the box-office and buy your tickets directly from the venue, you must pay Ticketmaster's outrageous handling fees.
And when I say "outrageous", I mean that the various fees which Ticketmaster piles on frequently add up to about 20% of the ticket price. When we saw the White Stripes at the Orpheum last weekend, the actual "price" of the ticket was $42. After Ticketmaster took their cut, it was $52.
I didn't give a crap about the "convenience" of ordering through Ticketmaster. Let's be honest here, selling tickets online is CHEAPER than selling them via ticket windows. However, thanks to Ticketmaster, I don't have the option of just buying the ticket without paying their rake.
Were they not the only game in town, it would bother me less, however, there is no competitive bidding for ticket-handling contracts, because the barrier to entry is far too high now. Ticketmaster has bought their way in to every major venue, and they can freeze out any hall or performer in the excact way Microsoft treats OEMs who dare to offer rival OS's as a default installation.
Wow. Almost $14. Meanwhile, the lawyers who pressed the case made off with millions.
But hey, at least a great social wrong was corrected, right? I mean, go to any record store look at how much cheaper CD's are!
What's that? The prices are higher than ever, to the point that it's now often cheaper to buy a movie on DVD than it is to buy the soundtrack of the same filme on CD at the same store!?
Huh. Fuck. If I were a cynical person, I would almost think the whole thing was just another scheme to make scumbag lawyers rich while boning the consumer. Not wanting to be a cynic, I'm trying desperately to think of another explanation...