Which MP3 music store carries singles by bands on major labels that haven't yet released a best-of album? And what if Fraunhofer and RCA step up enforcement of the MP3 patents?
What-if this, what-if that. What if the world is smacked by a comet?
Apple has very little, if any, motivation to break compatibility between the older iPods and the iTunes Music Store. Anything that supports AAC and says iPod on it *should* work just fine, yes? Regardless of how old it is? The only way they can really break the functionality is to somehow make iTunes stop talking to older iPods. There's not much point in them doing that, and even if they did, folks with older iPods could just not upgrade to the new broken version of iTunes.
As far as Fraunhofer and RCA go... have you looked at the "About iTunes" window lately? What do you think this sentence means:
MPEG Layer-3 audio coding technology licensed from Fraunhofer IIS and THOMSON multimedia.
Hmmm. Looks to me like if Fraunhofer and RCA (or VoiceAge, or Dolby, or Gracenote, or Audible, or Amazon, or Whitecap) decide to step up enforcement of their patents, iTunes will be one of the products that isn't affected, since of course Apple licenses patented technologies from their owners correctly, all the time. Any iTunes user out there can rip all the MP3's they choose, et cetera.
Or maybe you were talking about downloading MP3's that were made using software that isn't properly licensed from Fraunhofer and RCA? Now we're getting into the question about what "stores" offer MP3's, and... well, they're not "stores," are they? They're P2P networks and band websites and... so on and so forth. Not sure I have an answer for you there. Not sure I need an answer for you there. Not sure what this has to do with batteries.:)
Ever since I was a teenager and my sister used to get into shouting matches with my mom, I've really hated yelling, especially between rooms or floors. I don't have a really loud voice anyway, and since my "office" is currently a corner of the basement where it's hard to hear (or be heard by) people in other rooms if the washer's running, the neighbor's hunting dogs are barking, etc., being able to use IM as a backup is nice.
It's particularly useful for sharing URLs (who wants to shout those?) and interesting little snippets of articles, etc.
There are some weaknesses, of course - mainly that my wife tends to have a bunch of windows open, and chat windows (particularly mine) get lost in the clutter.:)
Owning an iPod player comes with a $50 per year maintenance cost of replacing the lithium polymer battery,
AppleCare for iPod costs $59 for 2 years of coverage, or (rounding up) $30 a year, which covers the battery and just about everything else. Beyond that, Apple will replace the battery for $99, but you can get replacements for $49
elsewhere (if following self-installation instructions doesn't scare you... and this is Slashdot...) and aside from certain highly-publicized gripers, most folks I'm aware of think the batteries last at least a couple years.
while the other players take a slight form-factor hit in exchange for the convenience of replacing rechargeable AA-size or AAA-size NiMH cells.
...and a slight convenience hit, due to choosing battery technology that doesn't hold a charge very well when left for a while, has lower power density, isn't really that great a choice for portable music players that tend to be on a lot of the time, and probably has to be replaced more often than lithium-ion ones...
Oh, and the Dell digital jukebox and Samsung/Napster player (the two that are most clearly aimed at competing with the iPod) use... Lithium-Ion Polymer batteries.
Oh, and of course Belkin offers a little external pack that sticks onto an iPod and holds 4 AA batteries... but that's a form-factor hit.
In addition, the threat of planned obsolescence should Apple discontinue the iTunes Music Store's compatibility with older iPod hardware.
Buh? Forgetting that iPods play MP3's just fine, and always have? Not sure what your point is here.
Is there a legal download service (for people that don't have an iPod) that just works?
Or:
Is there a legal download service for people that don't have (an iPod that just works)?
Simply, is it the service, or the player, that has to "just work?" Why not both?
The fact that many of the other players don't "just work" (the second intepretation) in the same sense that an iPod does (insert remarks about AAPL actually grokking the ideas of "design" and "integration") might actually contribute to the more likely interpretation (the first one) being harder to attain. Hmm.
I agree with other posters that this is certainly not the week to be making purchasing decisions in the digital music space (or the computer space). One of the biggest players in the space has an expo with likely new product announcements (or at the very least improvements or price drops or something). Wait until next Wednesday, after the "Stevenote."
I live in Hilo, where most of the Mauna Kea observatories have their base facilities (Keck is an exception, its are located in Kamuela aka Waimea) and yes... there are some issues.
In particular, there seems to have been an agreement made some years ago between whatever entity handles the summit for astronomy (probably the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy) and some native groups (mountaintops are sacred places) under which the astronomy folks got permission to build a certain number (int) of telescopes.
That many have now been built. The astronomy folks would like to build more. And... various folks (natives and others) are noting that um, no, that's not what they agreed to. So there's been a lot of paperwork, environmental impact statements, and so on.
In some cases, things are a little grey-area-ish. They want to build "outriggers" on the sides of the Keck scopes, for example. And the Smithsonian-Sinica.tw-Harvard submillimetre array - does that count as 8 scopes, since there are 8 dishes, or 1, since it's an interferometer?
As it now stands, though, Mauna Kea wins lots of astronomy pissing matches.:) It has the 2 largest optical scopes in the world (Keck and Keck II), plus the 4th largest (Subaru) and another in the top 10 (Gemini North), the largest single submillimeter telescope (James Clerk Maxwell) and I think the largest dedicated infrared telescope (UKIRT).
If someone wanted to build a truly monster scope on Mauna Kea, they could simply remove one of the small ones, it would seem. University of Hawaii has an 0.6-metre one and a 2.2-metre one. (Yes, those are "small," all you backyard astronomers who are now drooling.;) Take out the 0.6 and replace it with a 30-metre one, and you haven't changed the number of telescopes, right?
Yeah. Turkey is a dish best served cold. Sure, it might suck more than most people's - when I stopped drinking Mt. Dew, my withdrawal was pretty incapacitating and lasted at least 2-3 weeks. (I had $39 in late fees at the library when I finally made it back...)
Of course since Apple is positioning the G5 as a "desktop" it would seem to make MORE sense to compare it to the Athlon 64, which is AMD's "desktop" 64-bit chip, as opposed to the Opteron, which is their "server" 64-bit chip. Oh well.
My wife and I both got t-shirts from the Sagemore grand opening from my folks, who live near there, and my sister sent me one from the Short Pump grand opening near her, too. So when I finally get over to Ala Moana (200 miles away, and $150+ for a round-trip air ticket), I guess I'll wear one of those for the trip.
Weirdest present I gave has to be the Xena refrigerator magnets I found for a buck at the drugstore (last sheet they had left, it appears). My wife was happily surprised.
You forgot "Would you like to buy AppleCare for 59 dollars sir?" That lasts for 3 years, so thsoe "iPod battery only last 18 months" folks (must have used it as a flashlight or something) would've been covered.
In my half-awake state, squinting at a little laptop screen, I read "SCO has its fiscal earnings call scheduled..." (and uh, what other kinds of earnings are there, department of redundancy?) as "SCO has its final earnings call scheduled..."
There are separate updates for 10.2.8 and 10.3.2. The 10.3.x update requires 10.3.2 and will not appear in Software Update unless/until 10.3.2 is installed.
I and a few other Dual G5 users are havingproblemswith 10.3.2 and/or some other very recent updates (say, QuickTime 6.5 or XCode 1.1), and are thus unable to apply this particular security update. Grumble.
Apparently the XCode 1.1 update (which I had also installed at the same time as QuickTime 6.5) has been (according to several people - I'm only back up to 10.3.0 thus far and haven't checked for it yet) may have been pulled -- which would indicate some kind of problem.
I'm one of them. I know of one other, so far. The symptoms, after installing QuickTime 6.5 and iTunes 4.2 (in the 2 cases I'm aware of thus far; iTunes may not actually be implicated since there have been other complaints from people who only installed QuickTime 6.5) are:
Several apps - iTunes, iChat, DVD Player, QuickTime Broadcaster - don't appear when launched, leaving only a "not responding" icon in the dock.
Several menubar-accessible functions, like Force Quit, Restart, Log Out, and fast user switching, stop functioning.
System Preferences launches and displays its main window, but is unresponsive.
System performance drops precipitously (my Xbench scores were down over 25%) and things like ejecting optical disks, sleeping, etc. either are very slow or don't work at all.
In my case, I reset everything in Open Firmware (reset-nvram and reset-all), booted from the system DVD, checked the disks, checked permissions, rebooted and checked them again from userspace with Cocktail - no dice. Called AppleCare and they suggested an "archive and restore" back to the 10.2.7 "Smeagol" the machine came with. That fixed things; I'm currently re-upgrading to Panther, but will stick with lower numbered versions of iTunes and QuickTime until I hear this has been resolved.
Do you have to (insert label here) every few months to ensure that you can still use your (insert your type of cd here) CDs?
If you've made the mistake of buying a CD from one of the labels that's using "protection" on them now, checking every few months won't help. Whazzat? Won't play in your CD-ROM drive? Pity, that. Oh, and of course the big consumer electronics people are always prattling about what new "improved" version of the CD they're going to come out with, that will have DRM and won't be backward-compatible with your old CD player.
Does your CD have the ability to contact anyone?
No, but if you pop it into a CD-ROM drive, your jukebox probably queries Gracenote's CDDB. Gracenote, you'll remember, built the CDDB using data freely contributed by people all over the Internet (thus the occasional typos!)... and turned it into a commercial product. That doesn't exactly make me want to trust them to not be compiling data on what IP address inserted what CD, et cetera.
Maybe, just maybe, you need to consider different analogies.;)
The dictionary describes a Golem as "an artificially created human supernaturally endowed with life" in Jewish folklore. Golems of the mud and rock varieties also appear prominently in WarCraft III, of course - what would the Jewish folklorists think of all this? Anyway, Gollum is, of course, nothing of the sort.
-Dan
You can't spell "pedantic" without "dan"
A lot of people carry around at least one major credit card, at least one debit card issued by their bank that's VISA or MasterCard branded and can be used anywhere a credit card can, and at least one store credit card -- some of which (Macy's for example) are also now VISA or MasterCard branded and can be used anywhere.
Exactly how this system is going to magically know which card to use is... beyond me. Of course, MasterCard and Amex don't need to worry about that, because of course you're just going to have one card, with their brand on it, right?
Presuming you spend 8 hours a day sleeping, you've got about 57,600 seconds per day to be awake. If you're exceptionally fast, you might be able to delete individual messages at a rate of one per second. But you're probably not fast enough to determine whether things are spam and delete them at that rate. Probably more like one every 3-5 seconds. So your capacity on a daily basis is perhaps somewhere between 11,000 and 20,000 messages.
That, of course, presumes that you do nothing but scan messages and hit delete. All day. What percentage of mail you receive is spam? If you're relatively fortunate and it's only about 50%, and it takes you an exceptionally fast 55-57 seconds to read and possibly respond to each non-spam message, that means one spam plus one non-spam takes you about a minute. Now you're down to 1,920 messages a day, maximum.
Of course, you don't want to spend 16 hours a day in email. You'll probably spend several hours working, at least an hour total eating, some time in the bathroom, maybe time going places, maybe time just having a life. That all probably leaves you with only 1-4 hours of time to spend on e-mail, if you're a bad case (no one should have to spend that much time every day IMO).
So... 60-480 messages per day that you can probably handle. How much spam do you get?:)
If you think the success rate for bands signed to major labels is pretty low, you should see the success rate for indie artists.
Ah, but this depends on how you define "success." If you define it as "selling ten million records over the course of a career" then yes, it's beyond the grasp of most, if not all, indie artists. If you define it as "making a reasonable profit off your own music," then it might be a little different.
Acts signed to major labels appear to either make vast sums or go broke (or in some cases, both, in no particular order, sometimes more than once). Indie bands get much less promotion, so their "top end" revenue is a lot lower - but there are less people "taking a cut" from that, so they might come out a little more ahead.
Of course, being an indie band is usually something you do in addition to your day jobs; if you're a major label "star" they probably wouldn't let you hold down a "real job" even if you had the skills and wanted to...
Actually, having browsed iTMS pretty extensively once, I discovered that the most extensively iTMS-ed act out there (at that time), with something over 2,000 tracks available on iTMS, was... an indie band!
Granted, it wasn't just any indie band. It was Pearl Jam. Not so long ago, they told their then label in no uncertain terms exactly what it could shove exactly where. They've been selling recordings of their concerts for a few years now, largely through their web site... hit http://www.pearljam.com/downloads/ and they've got links to iTunes all over it. All the studio albums and every track they played at every show they played from February through July of this year. Want 36 different live versions of your favorite Pearl Jam song? No problem!
However, I think Apple forming an artist-friendly label is MUCH more likely (or at least advantageous) than artists doing it themselves because artists haven't got the money to start it and Apple could split the money gained by muscling out the RIAA (if it somehow could) between themselves and the artists.
...except that it's largely a crock of you-know-what.:)
The one valid point I've seen on that site is that iTMS is helping the major record labels stay alive, and without it, the labels might have a harder time of doing so. Lots of hypothetical there, and considering that iTMS's 20 million songs sold is still nothing more than a tiny blip in the overall annual U.S. music market of some billions of songs, it warrants skepticism.
As far as the artists not getting much money out of the deal... exactly how is that any worse than what they already had? The labels were screwing them before, and they're contractually obligated to the labels, so it's not like they can just sell direct to iTMS (or anyone else) and make an "end run" around the labels. If artists sign contracts that suck, that may be their fault, it may be the label's fault, but it's certainly not Apple's or anyone else's fault.
And of course it almost completely ignores indie labels that are now getting people's music on iTMS. People who go through those labels are taking home as much as 55-60% of that 99 cents a song. That's a pretty damn good cut of the money.
Basically, it strikes me as the same sort of shrill our minds are made up, don't bother us with mitigating facts rant as that put forth by those guys who decided that just because their iPod battery wore out, all iPod batteries must suck, and it was perfectly okay to go commit acts of vandalism as a result.:)
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Apple has very little, if any, motivation to break compatibility between the older iPods and the iTunes Music Store. Anything that supports AAC and says iPod on it *should* work just fine, yes? Regardless of how old it is? The only way they can really break the functionality is to somehow make iTunes stop talking to older iPods. There's not much point in them doing that, and even if they did, folks with older iPods could just not upgrade to the new broken version of iTunes.
As far as Fraunhofer and RCA go... have you looked at the "About iTunes" window lately? What do you think this sentence means:
Hmmm. Looks to me like if Fraunhofer and RCA (or VoiceAge, or Dolby, or Gracenote, or Audible, or Amazon, or Whitecap) decide to step up enforcement of their patents, iTunes will be one of the products that isn't affected, since of course Apple licenses patented technologies from their owners correctly, all the time. Any iTunes user out there can rip all the MP3's they choose, et cetera.Or maybe you were talking about downloading MP3's that were made using software that isn't properly licensed from Fraunhofer and RCA? Now we're getting into the question about what "stores" offer MP3's, and... well, they're not "stores," are they? They're P2P networks and band websites and... so on and so forth. Not sure I have an answer for you there. Not sure I need an answer for you there. Not sure what this has to do with batteries. :)
It's particularly useful for sharing URLs (who wants to shout those?) and interesting little snippets of articles, etc.
There are some weaknesses, of course - mainly that my wife tends to have a bunch of windows open, and chat windows (particularly mine) get lost in the clutter. :)
Oh, and the Dell digital jukebox and Samsung/Napster player (the two that are most clearly aimed at competing with the iPod) use... Lithium-Ion Polymer batteries.
Oh, and of course Belkin offers a little external pack that sticks onto an iPod and holds 4 AA batteries... but that's a form-factor hit.
Buh? Forgetting that iPods play MP3's just fine, and always have? Not sure what your point is here.Is it:
Or: Simply, is it the service, or the player, that has to "just work?" Why not both?The fact that many of the other players don't "just work" (the second intepretation) in the same sense that an iPod does (insert remarks about AAPL actually grokking the ideas of "design" and "integration") might actually contribute to the more likely interpretation (the first one) being harder to attain. Hmm.
I agree with other posters that this is certainly not the week to be making purchasing decisions in the digital music space (or the computer space). One of the biggest players in the space has an expo with likely new product announcements (or at the very least improvements or price drops or something). Wait until next Wednesday, after the "Stevenote."
In particular, there seems to have been an agreement made some years ago between whatever entity handles the summit for astronomy (probably the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy) and some native groups (mountaintops are sacred places) under which the astronomy folks got permission to build a certain number (int) of telescopes.
That many have now been built. The astronomy folks would like to build more. And... various folks (natives and others) are noting that um, no, that's not what they agreed to. So there's been a lot of paperwork, environmental impact statements, and so on.
In some cases, things are a little grey-area-ish. They want to build "outriggers" on the sides of the Keck scopes, for example. And the Smithsonian-Sinica.tw-Harvard submillimetre array - does that count as 8 scopes, since there are 8 dishes, or 1, since it's an interferometer?
As it now stands, though, Mauna Kea wins lots of astronomy pissing matches. :) It has the 2 largest optical scopes in the world (Keck and Keck II), plus the 4th largest (Subaru) and another in the top 10 (Gemini North), the largest single submillimeter telescope (James Clerk Maxwell) and I think the largest dedicated infrared telescope (UKIRT).
If someone wanted to build a truly monster scope on Mauna Kea, they could simply remove one of the small ones, it would seem. University of Hawaii has an 0.6-metre one and a 2.2-metre one. (Yes, those are "small," all you backyard astronomers who are now drooling. ;) Take out the 0.6 and replace it with a 30-metre one, and you haven't changed the number of telescopes, right?
Yeah. Turkey is a dish best served cold. Sure, it might suck more than most people's - when I stopped drinking Mt. Dew, my withdrawal was pretty incapacitating and lasted at least 2-3 weeks. (I had $39 in late fees at the library when I finally made it back...)
Of course since Apple is positioning the G5 as a "desktop" it would seem to make MORE sense to compare it to the Athlon 64, which is AMD's "desktop" 64-bit chip, as opposed to the Opteron, which is their "server" 64-bit chip. Oh well.
Weirdest present I gave has to be the Xena refrigerator magnets I found for a buck at the drugstore (last sheet they had left, it appears). My wife was happily surprised.
Since this is a "weird gifts" thing, the doll should have two heads or something.
You forgot "Would you like to buy AppleCare for 59 dollars sir?" That lasts for 3 years, so thsoe "iPod battery only last 18 months" folks (must have used it as a flashlight or something) would've been covered.
Oh well. A guy can dream, can't he?
I and a few other Dual G5 users are having problems with 10.3.2 and/or some other very recent updates (say, QuickTime 6.5 or XCode 1.1), and are thus unable to apply this particular security update. Grumble.
Apparently the XCode 1.1 update (which I had also installed at the same time as QuickTime 6.5) has been (according to several people - I'm only back up to 10.3.0 thus far and haven't checked for it yet) may have been pulled -- which would indicate some kind of problem.
- Several apps - iTunes, iChat, DVD Player, QuickTime Broadcaster - don't appear when launched, leaving only a "not responding" icon in the dock.
- Several menubar-accessible functions, like Force Quit, Restart, Log Out, and fast user switching, stop functioning.
- System Preferences launches and displays its main window, but is unresponsive.
- System performance drops precipitously (my Xbench scores were down over 25%) and things like ejecting optical disks, sleeping, etc. either are very slow or don't work at all.
In my case, I reset everything in Open Firmware (reset-nvram and reset-all), booted from the system DVD, checked the disks, checked permissions, rebooted and checked them again from userspace with Cocktail - no dice. Called AppleCare and they suggested an "archive and restore" back to the 10.2.7 "Smeagol" the machine came with. That fixed things; I'm currently re-upgrading to Panther, but will stick with lower numbered versions of iTunes and QuickTime until I hear this has been resolved.I shudder to think how many things I could run at once on my dual G5... :)
Maybe, just maybe, you need to consider different analogies. ;)
(I've still gotta get the bluetooth peripherals, laser pointer, iPod and thumbdrive, though...)
All that L glass on a Rebel? Blasphemy! ;)
The dictionary describes a Golem as "an artificially created human supernaturally endowed with life" in Jewish folklore. Golems of the mud and rock varieties also appear prominently in WarCraft III, of course - what would the Jewish folklorists think of all this? Anyway, Gollum is, of course, nothing of the sort. -Dan You can't spell "pedantic" without "dan"
Exactly how this system is going to magically know which card to use is... beyond me. Of course, MasterCard and Amex don't need to worry about that, because of course you're just going to have one card, with their brand on it, right?
Presuming you spend 8 hours a day sleeping, you've got about 57,600 seconds per day to be awake. If you're exceptionally fast, you might be able to delete individual messages at a rate of one per second. But you're probably not fast enough to determine whether things are spam and delete them at that rate. Probably more like one every 3-5 seconds. So your capacity on a daily basis is perhaps somewhere between 11,000 and 20,000 messages.
That, of course, presumes that you do nothing but scan messages and hit delete. All day. What percentage of mail you receive is spam? If you're relatively fortunate and it's only about 50%, and it takes you an exceptionally fast 55-57 seconds to read and possibly respond to each non-spam message, that means one spam plus one non-spam takes you about a minute. Now you're down to 1,920 messages a day, maximum.
Of course, you don't want to spend 16 hours a day in email. You'll probably spend several hours working, at least an hour total eating, some time in the bathroom, maybe time going places, maybe time just having a life. That all probably leaves you with only 1-4 hours of time to spend on e-mail, if you're a bad case (no one should have to spend that much time every day IMO).
So... 60-480 messages per day that you can probably handle. How much spam do you get? :)
Acts signed to major labels appear to either make vast sums or go broke (or in some cases, both, in no particular order, sometimes more than once). Indie bands get much less promotion, so their "top end" revenue is a lot lower - but there are less people "taking a cut" from that, so they might come out a little more ahead.
Of course, being an indie band is usually something you do in addition to your day jobs; if you're a major label "star" they probably wouldn't let you hold down a "real job" even if you had the skills and wanted to...
Granted, it wasn't just any indie band. It was Pearl Jam. Not so long ago, they told their then label in no uncertain terms exactly what it could shove exactly where. They've been selling recordings of their concerts for a few years now, largely through their web site... hit http://www.pearljam.com/downloads/ and they've got links to iTunes all over it. All the studio albums and every track they played at every show they played from February through July of this year. Want 36 different live versions of your favorite Pearl Jam song? No problem!
The one valid point I've seen on that site is that iTMS is helping the major record labels stay alive, and without it, the labels might have a harder time of doing so. Lots of hypothetical there, and considering that iTMS's 20 million songs sold is still nothing more than a tiny blip in the overall annual U.S. music market of some billions of songs, it warrants skepticism.
As far as the artists not getting much money out of the deal... exactly how is that any worse than what they already had? The labels were screwing them before, and they're contractually obligated to the labels, so it's not like they can just sell direct to iTMS (or anyone else) and make an "end run" around the labels. If artists sign contracts that suck, that may be their fault, it may be the label's fault, but it's certainly not Apple's or anyone else's fault.
And of course it almost completely ignores indie labels that are now getting people's music on iTMS. People who go through those labels are taking home as much as 55-60% of that 99 cents a song. That's a pretty damn good cut of the money.
Basically, it strikes me as the same sort of shrill our minds are made up, don't bother us with mitigating facts rant as that put forth by those guys who decided that just because their iPod battery wore out, all iPod batteries must suck, and it was perfectly okay to go commit acts of vandalism as a result. :)