You only listen to a song once? You listen to 50 songs an hour? Speed them up much?
Over the last three years I've listened to "Everybody wants to rule the world" 85 times, "Linus and Lucy" 75 times, "Going to California" 70 times, "Steam" 62 times, various versions of Pachelbel's Canon maybe a couple hundred times, various pieces by Bach almost 1500 times... and prolific as he was I don't have anything like that many works of his in my library. Yellow Submarine just started to play... let's see... the Beatles only rack up 422 plays total, beaten by Vangelis and Synergy but handily ahead of Pink Floyd and Gerschwin...
I don't feel like I'm missing anything by being limited to the 8000 tracks in my library.
Ah, right, they meant you to use the iTunes 7 "Back up to disc" option back before there was an iTunes 7. How could I have imagined anything else?
Yes, I've got my tongue firmly in my cheek here, but I'm not the only one who saw the karmic connection between Apple's "RIP MIX BURN" campaign and the iTunes store:
I've built large and small towers and upgraded one box 10 years and more. I must have spent a huge percentage of my free time and money tinkering, buying bigger desks, etc. I don't have time for that anymore, and it isn't worth my money-making time anyway.
That's a false dichotomy. The alternative to an all-in-one isn't a monster frankenputer, and there have been Macs that have turned into frankenputers and there's been solid and reliable hardware made by people other than Apple. There's been all-in-ones that have been monsters, and headless computers that have been angels.
I need something fairly powerful that takes up very little space in/on my already crowded desk, produces no audible fan/disk whine, and just lets me work in peace and quiet.
I've got a couple of Mini-ITX boxes like that. The iMac, however, is too wide for my desk... if I replaced my monitor with an iMac I'd have to get a new desk that had room to let me get to the CDROM drive, or I'd have to pivot it to the side to reach the opening. So my desktop Mac is a Mini, and I really wish Apple would sell a "Mini Pro" with a 3.5" drive and more space. But, no, they made the Intel Mini worse and charged more for it.
My computer has finally become a tool rather than an end in itself.
I think you're mistaking what the OS is doing for you for what the hardware is doing for you. If that iMac was running Windows, would you have paid that much for it? Would you have considered it for a minute?
But do you really listen to 30 year old recordings much?
Sure. Older than that, even... I think the oldest recordings in my library are more like 80 years old.
Maybe I've been a heavier music consumer than you, but if I live for another 50 years, I couldn't spend as much buying music as I did from 18-30.
If you used Zune for those 12 years you'd have paid four and a half grand and have nothing to show for it.
I'm really not interested in having to keep my act together to keep a digital archive together for 30 years, without any backup failures, etcetera.
I expect it'll be easier than keeping the analog archive together has been. And, in any case, if I lose half the tracks I'll still be better off than if I threw my money down the Zune.
...and the above is an excellent argument for a music subscription service, so you don't need to deal with the mechanics of preserving files.
That seems rather an odd bit of logic there.
Here I am with a music library collected over the past 30 years, containing quite a bit of music that's no longer in distribution, some of which will never be republished until it goes out of copyright, and the solution to backing it up is to prevent me from having acquired a permanent copy in the first place. Well, I suppose if you don't actually care about being able to listen to a song you like after your subscription expires or the company goes out of business, that might work.
Nice way to sample stuff without having to pay hundreds of dollars.
$15 per month, times twelve months per year, that comes to $180 per year. Let's see, my oldest iTunes purchases are from mid-2004. There's 261 tracks there, including the 15 I got for free with my iPod and a couple of dozen free downloads... oh, what the hell, call it $260. Add in about $60 worth of music from eMusic, and that's $320. Plus a hundred bucks worth of CDs... ok, $420. That's "hundreds of dollars".
But wait: if I'd been using the Zune service I'd have paid $450 and I'd still have to fork over another $15 if I wanted to keep listening to that music in January.
Throw in all the ripped CDs and tapes from the past 30 years, and the total's probably a few thousand bucks... but then 30 years of Zune would add up pretty quickly too.
Subscription music isn't cheaper unless you're using it like an FM radio. But then that's pretty pricey for FM. That's even more expensive than Sirius.
The biggest problem I see with it is that Quicktime on Windows, well, it's got reliability problems and it's got performance problems. My wife downloaded some episodes of one of her TV shows and had to borrow my first gen Mac mini to watch them, because her *much* faster and more up-to-date Wintel box couldn't play them without cutouts... no matter what I did in upgrading drivers and reinstalling Quicktime and the rest of the Wintendo voodoo games.
Nobody needs to crack it, because iTunes DRM is "honor system": iTunes will happily make a perfect digital unencrypted copy of an audio track for you any time you want, without QTFairUse, by burning to an audio CD.
Which I routinely do every time I buy a track from iTunes, because I took their advice about making backups of all my music to heart. Good thing too, when a couple of reinstalls on a bad system drive took me over the limit of authorizations... it was the only way I could play my music while waiting for them to remove my authorizations manually. If you (any of you out there) haven't made audio CD backups of your iTunes music, I heartily encourage you to start.
Yes, re-ripping will introduce some distortion if you don't re-rip to lossless... but I can't detect any on anything but classical music, and I haven't bought classical music on iTunes in years. I mean, really, if you care about quality why aren't you buying and ripping CDs, or at least sticking to iTunes Plus tracks (which are, incidentally, DRM-free).
And the fact that there's not an easy equivalent for video is one reason I've only bought a few TV shows from iTunes, to fill in series I've missed. The video side of iTunes seems like a sideshow, really, music is where it's at.
On the other hand, the current iTunes DRM works pretty well, and most people don't seem to bother with breaking it. Why?
The current iTunes DRM works because Apple makes it trivial to bypass it. They even tell you how to do it without finding or downloading any new apps: MIX, BURN, RIP. Many people don't bother until the first time they run into a problem with Fairplay, but making an audio CD backup of iTunes tracks as you buy them is not only sensible but encouraged (and necessary for you to retain fair use rights anyway).
Yes, you're going to lose some quality when you rip it, but if you cared you'd have bought the CD and ripped it to lossless, or at least restricted your purchases to iTunes Plus (which is DRM-free anyway).
No, DRM can't work, Jobs knows this, he said as much... which is why the iTunes music DRM is basically "honor system" quality. The movie DRM is stronger, but just as fundamentally doomed.
Dells are not noticeably more expensive than comparable generic white or beige boxes, and are definitely cheaper than comparable Macs. For example, I just compared the closest equivalent Inspiron and Macbook, and the Inspiron was not only $250 cheaper than the Macbook it included an nVidia GPU with 128M of real VRAM instead of the appalling Intel integrated GPU in the Macbook.
They're getting a license, under the treaty, to sell a certain amount of US-copyrighted goods as compensation for the US refusing to abide by WTO rules. It's not unlimited, and it's perfectly legal.
Or could it be that the "full" version of OS X costs more than the "full" version of Windows?
Of course it does. That's why you pay the high margin on a laptop to get OS X on it.
For example, you can get a Thinkpad with the same chipset and features as a Macbook for between $800 and $900, so you're paying $200 more for the copy of OS X on the Macbook than you would the copy of Vista on that Thinkpad.
I'm not saying that the "Mac Tax" to get OS X isn't worth it. I'm just saying it's there.
About the only difference between this and existing schemes that I can see is that it's using a point to point connection between the Starbucks kit and the iPhone, instead of going off to some webserver off in the Internet.
Apple's hardware has never been price-competitive with generic equivalents purely on a hardware basis. Apple's margins are significantly higher than Dell's, and since they don't have any magic margin fairy that just means they're charging more for the same components, or shipping lower performance hardware for the same money. And Apple's designs are often wildly overrated... I'd happily have paid more for a Thinkpad running OS X than my Macbook Pro with its fragile design, insecure power connector, insecure lid latch, lousy keyboard, lousy single-button trackpad, poor user interface (no, a slowly throbing light is a crappy sleep indicator: I want to know if the thing's sleeping at a glance), connectors on the side where they get in the way (the only connectors I want on the sides or front are a USB port and the earphone jack), sealed-in hard drive, no docking station (at least once a week I forget to plug in something when I move my laptop to my desk) and so on...
On the iMac: connectors on the back: good. ALL connectors on the back, so you have to feel around for them: bad. Keyboard: may be the worst ever. All on one design: great if you need it, unacceptable if you need an external monitor.
You don't get a Mac because you're looking for the best computer you can get, you get a Mac because of the software, and put up with it. I guess if you're lucky you'll get a case of Stockholm Syndrome and flame me for pointing out what you've been repressing all these years.
The original article, The Digital Dilemma, is all about licensing, redistribution rights, things like whether reformatting to avoid obsolescence is equivalent to making a derived work and thus require license fees and royalties (an issue even for the studios, depending on the artist's contracts). I've only briefly browsed it, but given that background I suspect that they're factoring guesstimates of this kind of thing into the costs... at any rate, it's more information to argue about.
I could have used that about, oh, fifteen or so years ago when some reporter decided to make it sound like this newfangled Internet thing was just for porn, and used a drive-by quoting to make it sound like I agreed. Of course the fact that people care about what refutations someone might post vie Google News is answer enough.:)
Bulk magnesium doesn't burn very well, and it's pretty soft, so you shouldn't get sparks.
The resulting ground magnesium dust, though, burns quite well indeed. Do be careful with it. For example, don't grind tutanium immediately after grinding magnesium.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than a sign that Apple/Netflix rolled over Walmart, it may be a sign that online movies are simply not the hot item that online music is.
You only listen to a song once? You listen to 50 songs an hour? Speed them up much?
Over the last three years I've listened to "Everybody wants to rule the world" 85 times, "Linus and Lucy" 75 times, "Going to California" 70 times, "Steam" 62 times, various versions of Pachelbel's Canon maybe a couple hundred times, various pieces by Bach almost 1500 times... and prolific as he was I don't have anything like that many works of his in my library. Yellow Submarine just started to play... let's see... the Beatles only rack up 422 plays total, beaten by Vangelis and Synergy but handily ahead of Pink Floyd and Gerschwin...
I don't feel like I'm missing anything by being limited to the 8000 tracks in my library.
Ah, right, they meant you to use the iTunes 7 "Back up to disc" option back before there was an iTunes 7. How could I have imagined anything else?
Yes, I've got my tongue firmly in my cheek here, but I'm not the only one who saw the karmic connection between Apple's "RIP MIX BURN" campaign and the iTunes store:
http://epeus.blogspot.com/2006/07/rip-mix-burn.html
This is not Machiavellian levels of subtlety, folks.
I've been the other way for a very long time.
What "other way"?
I've built large and small towers and upgraded one box 10 years and more. I must have spent a huge percentage of my free time and money tinkering, buying bigger desks, etc. I don't have time for that anymore, and it isn't worth my money-making time anyway.
That's a false dichotomy. The alternative to an all-in-one isn't a monster frankenputer, and there have been Macs that have turned into frankenputers and there's been solid and reliable hardware made by people other than Apple. There's been all-in-ones that have been monsters, and headless computers that have been angels.
I need something fairly powerful that takes up very little space in/on my already crowded desk, produces no audible fan/disk whine, and just lets me work in peace and quiet.
I've got a couple of Mini-ITX boxes like that. The iMac, however, is too wide for my desk... if I replaced my monitor with an iMac I'd have to get a new desk that had room to let me get to the CDROM drive, or I'd have to pivot it to the side to reach the opening. So my desktop Mac is a Mini, and I really wish Apple would sell a "Mini Pro" with a 3.5" drive and more space. But, no, they made the Intel Mini worse and charged more for it.
My computer has finally become a tool rather than an end in itself.
I think you're mistaking what the OS is doing for you for what the hardware is doing for you. If that iMac was running Windows, would you have paid that much for it? Would you have considered it for a minute?
But do you really listen to 30 year old recordings much?
Sure. Older than that, even... I think the oldest recordings in my library are more like 80 years old.
Maybe I've been a heavier music consumer than you, but if I live for another 50 years, I couldn't spend as much buying music as I did from 18-30.
If you used Zune for those 12 years you'd have paid four and a half grand and have nothing to show for it.
I'm really not interested in having to keep my act together to keep a digital archive together for 30 years, without any backup failures, etcetera.
I expect it'll be easier than keeping the analog archive together has been. And, in any case, if I lose half the tracks I'll still be better off than if I threw my money down the Zune.
That an iMac is the best space-saving, quiet, all-in-one computer ever.
Why would I be jealous because you've bought into the idea that an all-in-one computer is a great idea?
Been there, done that, learned better.
Oh, right, yes, you *can* pay for but not actually use the built-in monitor on your iMac, if you want to use an external monitor instead.
What?
Oh, man, if I had enough desk space for two monitors, I'd just use two monitors, not one monitor and a KVM switch.
...and the above is an excellent argument for a music subscription service, so you don't need to deal with the mechanics of preserving files.
That seems rather an odd bit of logic there.
Here I am with a music library collected over the past 30 years, containing quite a bit of music that's no longer in distribution, some of which will never be republished until it goes out of copyright, and the solution to backing it up is to prevent me from having acquired a permanent copy in the first place. Well, I suppose if you don't actually care about being able to listen to a song you like after your subscription expires or the company goes out of business, that might work.
Nice way to sample stuff without having to pay hundreds of dollars.
$15 per month, times twelve months per year, that comes to $180 per year. Let's see, my oldest iTunes purchases are from mid-2004. There's 261 tracks there, including the 15 I got for free with my iPod and a couple of dozen free downloads... oh, what the hell, call it $260. Add in about $60 worth of music from eMusic, and that's $320. Plus a hundred bucks worth of CDs... ok, $420. That's "hundreds of dollars".
But wait: if I'd been using the Zune service I'd have paid $450 and I'd still have to fork over another $15 if I wanted to keep listening to that music in January.
Throw in all the ripped CDs and tapes from the past 30 years, and the total's probably a few thousand bucks... but then 30 years of Zune would add up pretty quickly too.
Subscription music isn't cheaper unless you're using it like an FM radio. But then that's pretty pricey for FM. That's even more expensive than Sirius.
I suppose if by "works pretty well" you mean "doesn't actually work", we're in agreement.
Oh, one more thing...
The biggest problem I see with it is that Quicktime on Windows, well, it's got reliability problems and it's got performance problems. My wife downloaded some episodes of one of her TV shows and had to borrow my first gen Mac mini to watch them, because her *much* faster and more up-to-date Wintel box couldn't play them without cutouts... no matter what I did in upgrading drivers and reinstalling Quicktime and the rest of the Wintendo voodoo games.
It plays WMV and RM just fine.
I mean, Jobs keeps saying DRM can't work, and now this scheme which actually depends on DRM working.
iTunes DRM has not been cracked in ages.
Nobody needs to crack it, because iTunes DRM is "honor system": iTunes will happily make a perfect digital unencrypted copy of an audio track for you any time you want, without QTFairUse, by burning to an audio CD.
Which I routinely do every time I buy a track from iTunes, because I took their advice about making backups of all my music to heart. Good thing too, when a couple of reinstalls on a bad system drive took me over the limit of authorizations... it was the only way I could play my music while waiting for them to remove my authorizations manually. If you (any of you out there) haven't made audio CD backups of your iTunes music, I heartily encourage you to start.
Yes, re-ripping will introduce some distortion if you don't re-rip to lossless... but I can't detect any on anything but classical music, and I haven't bought classical music on iTunes in years. I mean, really, if you care about quality why aren't you buying and ripping CDs, or at least sticking to iTunes Plus tracks (which are, incidentally, DRM-free).
And the fact that there's not an easy equivalent for video is one reason I've only bought a few TV shows from iTunes, to fill in series I've missed. The video side of iTunes seems like a sideshow, really, music is where it's at.
Short answer: "No".
Long answer:
On the other hand, the current iTunes DRM works pretty well, and most people don't seem to bother with breaking it. Why?
The current iTunes DRM works because Apple makes it trivial to bypass it. They even tell you how to do it without finding or downloading any new apps: MIX, BURN, RIP. Many people don't bother until the first time they run into a problem with Fairplay, but making an audio CD backup of iTunes tracks as you buy them is not only sensible but encouraged (and necessary for you to retain fair use rights anyway).
Yes, you're going to lose some quality when you rip it, but if you cared you'd have bought the CD and ripped it to lossless, or at least restricted your purchases to iTunes Plus (which is DRM-free anyway).
No, DRM can't work, Jobs knows this, he said as much... which is why the iTunes music DRM is basically "honor system" quality. The movie DRM is stronger, but just as fundamentally doomed.
What am I jealous of? The ability to delude myself that my Macbook Pro is as good as or as cheap as the Thinkpad I'd much rather be running OS X on?
Dells are not noticeably more expensive than comparable generic white or beige boxes, and are definitely cheaper than comparable Macs. For example, I just compared the closest equivalent Inspiron and Macbook, and the Inspiron was not only $250 cheaper than the Macbook it included an nVidia GPU with 128M of real VRAM instead of the appalling Intel integrated GPU in the Macbook.
Sheesh.
They're getting a license, under the treaty, to sell a certain amount of US-copyrighted goods as compensation for the US refusing to abide by WTO rules. It's not unlimited, and it's perfectly legal.
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
Or could it be that the "full" version of OS X costs more than the "full" version of Windows?
Of course it does. That's why you pay the high margin on a laptop to get OS X on it.
For example, you can get a Thinkpad with the same chipset and features as a Macbook for between $800 and $900, so you're paying $200 more for the copy of OS X on the Macbook than you would the copy of Vista on that Thinkpad.
I'm not saying that the "Mac Tax" to get OS X isn't worth it. I'm just saying it's there.
About the only difference between this and existing schemes that I can see is that it's using a point to point connection between the Starbucks kit and the iPhone, instead of going off to some webserver off in the Internet.
Apple's hardware has never been price-competitive with generic equivalents purely on a hardware basis. Apple's margins are significantly higher than Dell's, and since they don't have any magic margin fairy that just means they're charging more for the same components, or shipping lower performance hardware for the same money. And Apple's designs are often wildly overrated... I'd happily have paid more for a Thinkpad running OS X than my Macbook Pro with its fragile design, insecure power connector, insecure lid latch, lousy keyboard, lousy single-button trackpad, poor user interface (no, a slowly throbing light is a crappy sleep indicator: I want to know if the thing's sleeping at a glance), connectors on the side where they get in the way (the only connectors I want on the sides or front are a USB port and the earphone jack), sealed-in hard drive, no docking station (at least once a week I forget to plug in something when I move my laptop to my desk) and so on...
On the iMac: connectors on the back: good. ALL connectors on the back, so you have to feel around for them: bad. Keyboard: may be the worst ever. All on one design: great if you need it, unacceptable if you need an external monitor.
You don't get a Mac because you're looking for the best computer you can get, you get a Mac because of the software, and put up with it. I guess if you're lucky you'll get a case of Stockholm Syndrome and flame me for pointing out what you've been repressing all these years.
The original article, The Digital Dilemma, is all about licensing, redistribution rights, things like whether reformatting to avoid obsolescence is equivalent to making a derived work and thus require license fees and royalties (an issue even for the studios, depending on the artist's contracts). I've only briefly browsed it, but given that background I suspect that they're factoring guesstimates of this kind of thing into the costs... at any rate, it's more information to argue about.
I could have used that about, oh, fifteen or so years ago when some reporter decided to make it sound like this newfangled Internet thing was just for porn, and used a drive-by quoting to make it sound like I agreed. Of course the fact that people care about what refutations someone might post vie Google News is answer enough. :)
Bulk magnesium doesn't burn very well, and it's pretty soft, so you shouldn't get sparks.
:)
The resulting ground magnesium dust, though, burns quite well indeed. Do be careful with it. For example, don't grind tutanium immediately after grinding magnesium.
Because the plastic sensor layer on top of the glass won't be protected.
According to the article the problem is not that the data was being shared with "friends", but Google changed the definition of "friends".