Apparently, though, the original poster was also dumb...he didn't realize that he had to spell out every detail for you.
Actually, the original poster was trying to be incendiary. I think it is crucial to distinguish between the music companies and their trade organization, *precisely* because there are labels (mostly small ones) that don't have much to do with the RIAA, but who would get money if their music were sold by Apple or anybody else. The only money the RIAA ever sees is (I believe) the dues that come from members. Nothing from non-members, and nothing directly from royalty money. Sorry if this was unclear.
And even among "the majors" there are some interesting distinctions to make. Sony is a major label, and a major hardware manufacturer. Hardware Sony would really like to a more reasonable music distribution system, while Label Sony is a strong RIAA supporter.
However, until I see otherwise, I'm going to assume it's packed with Britney and the Dave Matthews Band and the like.
Now, why would they do that? Seriously, think of the people who own Macs, have enough income to blow on this, and what they might be listening to. It sure ain't Britney, dude. OK, so here's the top twenty songs overall
at this moment:
OK, so there's way too much Sheryl Crow and Sting in the current mix and some other issues, but that will undoubtedly change.:-) Meanwhile, the top-10 "alternative list would be:
Like a Stone Audioslave
Cochise Audioslave
Blister in the Sun Violent Femmes
Istanbul (Not Constantinople) They Might Be Giants
Criminal Fiona Apple
Birdhouse in Your Soul They Might Be Giants
Short Skirt/Long Jacket Cake
Show Me How to Live Audioslave
Particle Man They Might Be Giants
Whip It Devo
OK, so we have the usual definitional issues of what the heck alternative is, but these are definitely the picks of the SLOG (Slightly Older Geek) generation. Man, somebody should tell TMBG that they have 3 of the top 10 songs on this list.:-)
If Apple can keep this up, or even grow the business, it could soon account for the bulk of their profits: if we extrapolate 100,000 in 18 hours to a year, we get almost 50 million dollars net profit, compared to their current $65M/year net profit.
Well, you can extrapolate, but it won't do you too much good. You could have extrapolated "The Cube" into the hardware hit of the year with this logic. I would not be surprised to see the music store business be worth something substantial down the road, but right now they are still so underwater with it that it isn't really funny.
This was *not* your average two-day website.:-)
Also, the current $65 million net profit is that low because of the tech slow-down. Apple's $4+ billion in cash was not earned over 70+ years...
Of the $1, the RIAA gets 2/3's. Of that's 2/3's, the writer gets the mechnical royalty which is probably less than 5 cents.
OK, so unless something has really changed, the RIAA gets nothing. Some music companies get something. And this, I think, is the key point: the labels that have the most to gain from this are the small ones that you are less likely to find on your local store's shelves. And, moving beyond that, a viable buy-online system *not* run by a label will make it far more likely that unsigned acts can get a better deal.
And I really do think this will help bands in a major way.
While you're listening to the song you'll probably buy, you can't help look at the box on the right that says "people who bought 'Ana Ng' also bought 'Funky Périphérique' by Les Sans Culottes". [Disclaimer: neither song is currently available at the site although they certainly should be.] To be completely honest, a working online music buying system will really be the end of the big labels as we know them.
Let's see. Last year after a lot of shopping around I put together my current desktop box. It's a dual (yes, dual) PIII 1.0GHz with 1GB (yes, GB) of RAM, an nVidia GFx something card with 64MB or RAM, and two 40GB disks. All under $1,300.
Emphasis (strength?) is mine. OK, so, for me, this is the scoop.
If the shopping is fun, then I don't mind people quoting me a price that prices that time at $0 per hour. In my life, though, that won't work. If it took you 20 hours to price this out, then
that's the same as real money. If it took you time to figure out why (say) the video card RAM wasn't being recognized by X11, the meter was running for me. And so on, down the line.
I am the first to admit that I won't be getting "that type of rig" from Apple. I'll get something that works out of the box with an excellent OS, strong included software, and things that save me time and money. For a home machine that I'm using on my time, doing anything else would be silly. I'll leave the RAID configuration issues at work, thanks.
...is just sick. It took a total of four mouse clicks (and walking
between two computers) to share music over the wireless network in the
house, open the folder, and get "Purple Toupée" through my earphones on
the notebook. Geek that I am, I assumed it would choke and die if I went
back to the first computer and demanded to hear "Funky Peripherique"
shared from the notebook to the desktop at the same time.
OK, stop laughing. It *might* not have worked perfectly the first time, right?
Words fail me here. I think when this sinks in with other people, that Apple could sell a couple million Macs *just* for this one feature alone. Oh, I'm sure the new codec is nice, and I might even buy a track or three from the Music store, but transparent wireless music sharing is just so much more than that.
We're talking about Terminal.app geeks. Who in that group uses the finder?:-)
More seriously, the Finder has some issues, but the ones that people like Siracusa harps on turn out not to affect me very much. Not nearly as much, say, as the weird case-insensitivity of the HFS+ file system...
As for the second part - have you used AppleWorks on OS X? It's totally horrible, and virtually hasn't seen an upgrade since 10.0 was released!
AppleWorks is...fairly weak. But the "draw" component has saved my backside on a couple of occasions. If memory serves, the AppleWorks folks were originally the MacDraw people, and I think that's about the only thing that I like about the current package.
I'm happy that I get an OS X terminal window that's fast and doesn't screw up the text when you resize the window. I didn't have to research and buy a better terminal app or download and build 4 or 5 packages just to find one that doesn't mess up on remote telnet sessions and runs fast.
Warning: OS X Terminal bashing to follow.
OK, so I will admit that the version of Terminal included in the latest Jaguar is usable, but please don't try to tell me that the versions shipping with (say) 10.0.anything were. They had *exactly* the kinds of problems you complain about. Even now, I think Terminal gets more negative comments than any other frequently used portion of the OS. Doing a decent terminal (emulator) is surprisingly tough, which is why there have always been so many different ones running around.
While in Cocoa-based apps such as Safari -- where I type this -- I can use emacs-style keys like ctrl-a, ctrl-e, ctrl-k, ctrl-y in this comment field. And I was finally free of the registry.
This is the kind of thing that completely (re)-sold me on Macs recently. The new interface is getting *exceptionally* keyboard-expert friendly. And installation of almost anything is embarrassingly easy. And then Safari came out...
Basically, Apple is a software company that makes some nicely designed hardware. For some applications, you'd like to see better raw performance numbers, but that should happen by late this year. In the mean time, OS X has again really moved miles ahead of anything else I've seen recently, and people have always (in the past) bought the hardware that runs the software they want to run. I think this bodes well for them.
At best, they are treading water. At worst, sales are slipping on everything except for PowerBooks, due to new models being released. Apple sold 102 thousand less units than Q2 of 2002. That is bad.
What you miss is that treading water is relatively better than drowning, and there's a whole lot of *that* going on these days.
I myself was a bit disturbed by the drop in non-notebook sales numbers, but the increase in sales of the PowerBook line (and increases in gross margin) were beyond my expectations.
On the other hand, my expectations probably should have been different. At the moment, there is very little reason to buy any Apple non-notebook except for for the best value deals in the iMac and eMac line, so the fact that they have any sales there is
striking. By the end of Q4, I think we will see a significantly enhanced contribution to Apple's profits from the new line of 970-based Macs and the new version of the OS, but I think that Q3 could get very rough. As in: lose $100 million. That said, those numbers won't look too horrible compared to other hardware vendors. The hint that Windows hardware vendors will be hurt is in Microsoft's statements about their expectations. They are "very cautious" and sentiments anything like that are basically unheard of in Redmond.
So, why the excitment about this later Perelman paper? Has the Dunwoody paper been debunked?
A gap or three in the proof were found within days, and a mathematician friend of mine reported that it didn't look like solutions to these problems were immediately forthcoming.
The excitement about this paper comes from the fact that the guy who did the work has come up with impressive results in the past, builds on important and cutting edge work, and seems to have a really thorough command of the potential difficulties. (In other words, when he is asked questions about the tricky points, he immediately responds with what look like strong and well-thought-out answers.)
For that matter, his work claims to prove a more general conjecture of which Poincare is a special case, and so this work could have more general significance to many other problems, even if there turns out to be a glitch or two in this iteration of the proof.
It's a very hard problem, and this answer could be wrong, too. But there's a big difference between tossing a paper up on a preprint server and giving a lecture at MIT where nobody can (yet) touch you.:-)
This sounds like a Field of Dreams mentality, the same mentality that plagued countless dot-com startups -- if you build it, they will come. Yeah. I used to live not far from Wilkes-Barre, and commute through it on my way to my dot-com job down in Philly. The place is, by no means, a gem on the map that is Pennsylvania. Furthermore, the place may have scorching fast bandwidth by the time the project is done, but it doesn't have the social or economic infrastructure to support the companies they're trying to attract to the area -- ie.: no mall, no Starbucks, no CompUSA or Fry's or whatever, no IKEA, etc.
Ooh, you're close to being insightful until you get to that last couple of sentences.:-) First of all, you can check and find out that Wilkes-Barre does indeed have malls and Starbucks, Best Buy and probably most of the trappings you think are important. But, to quote Richard Feynman, they are missing something essential because the [hi-tech] planes don't land. For whatever reason, nobody thinks to locate (or re-locate) facilities there. Worse than that, it apparently just does not happen that two people having lunch over a novel idea ever decide to make it happen in Wilkes-Barre and succeed. And, to be brutally honest, this hypotheical lunch would have to occur spontaneously in Wilkes-Barre for anything to happen, because it isn't going to happen anywhere else. Having a mall
or a Starbucks or a couple of minor league teams frankly doesn't mean anything for relocation, because, well, everybody has those. What many places *don't* have are a strong university or two and a city that is sufficiently cool so that people in their 20s hang around long enough to make things happen.
So, if you think about it long enough, the prototypical "missing" high tech center in the US is in fact Pittsburgh, PA. Two world-class universities, cleaned up from its steel days, interesting and attractive housing, some high cultural advantages...and people
can't seem to leave the place fast enough, let alone make tech start-ups work. I don't completely accept his analysis, but Richard Florida does seem to be onto something in his analsysis of how the creative class affords economic development.
So among non-major metros, Austin and Madison and Burlington, Vermont end up being hot, Portland Maine and Gainesville have a future, and Wilkes-Barre...is like 150 places down the list and without a plausible story of how it rises up to challenge even Fort Wayne, Indiana (which isn't exactly on people's short lists, either). If Florida is right, the root cause
of Wilkes-Barre's funk is neither a lack of optical fiber nor upscale shopping per se, but rather the fact that the young and the hip and the gay and the smart don't live there and won't move there.
Which brings me to my current home town: Columbia, Missouri.
Yes, the major state research university campus is here, and the population is growing about as fast as they can put up houses, but at the end of the day, you're still in central MIssouri surrounded by soybeans. Is there any hope for the future? I am now cautiously optimistic. So one of the big issues of the day is whether or not we should cover the downtown with a wireless cloud. Superficially, it's the same kind of question being faced
by Wilkes-Barre now, except that there it's about business infrastructure, while here it's about helping people hang out.
This Tuesday, there is a ballot question that seeks to put all small-time marijuana possession offenses into the municipal court (i.e., just pay the fine); you can argue about whether or not this is a good idea, but the question is actually being asked. Similarly, a few years ago, some movie buffs were annoyed at the fact that many indie films were making it to Columbia very late if at all, so they said "hey; we could project them ourselves" and
Yeah, exactly, because, you know I have infinite amounts of money. So I can afford to buy ten CDs of which I'll like one, and sell the other nine back at a 50% loss. Also I live next to this magical used CD store that has every CD from every artist on their shelves.
Yeah, and you live in a place where you have no friends who can recommend specific CDs to you, have no access to websites where anybody talks about music, there is no decent college radio station in your area (note: that tragically enough *could* happen, so move!) and you never take chances, and the store you go to will never play cuts
off of CDs in stock or throw a used disc on a player for you...
Sure, I suppose it's the case that you could be like that. But most of the undergrads I know who steal music have no such excuses. And so, alas, your freedoms are restricted on account of their larceny.
I have a legal right to borrow a CD from a friend. In fact, as I understand fair use, my friend can make me a tape or a copy of the CD too.
Uh...no. Fair use in this case is to make backup copies for personal backup or archival purposes. It's pretty much the opposite of making a copy to share with a friend.
The specs are indeed impressive. A 20 inch display running at 25 watts is wonderful. Not only are these going to be good for desktops but think about laptop uses.
*Thank you* for pointing out that the real bonus here is the low power draw. While I am sure that every kind of computing device will continue to show increased performance in a raw sense, there are other things that are rapidly going to become more important.
How long is this thing going to run on batteries?
How quiet is this device?
How small or light can I make it?
So, my wife has an iBook and I have an iBook made just
one year later. Mine is quieter, lighter, smaller, and runs
longer on a charge. It's also somewhat faster, but this is hardly the first thing you would notice. I think I can, for the first time, claim that if it were only twice as fast as it is, I would never care if it got any faster. Any faster than that, and it's just as reasonable to go to some cycle-serving behemoth kept in its own room, possibly hundreds of miles away. The computer I want to use up close and personal only has to provide the ultimate in user
interfaces and enough storage to keep around the stuff that I really don't want to reach out to the network for. We are getting so close, and stuff like low-power ultra-bright OLED
screens are getting us even closer.
This is true, but they could do so much more. Imagine a first-rate SVG implementation that maps directly to their Quartz display server. Maybe we can expect something like that? Or would it go against the lean-and-mean promises they've already made?
I would think that SVG to Quartz might well be something
that you could see from Apple. Note that the way Safari is currently structured, you have webcore and javascript core services; if SVG were reusable in a similar fashion, I would give it a high likelihood of even soon-ish appearance from
Apple, since it's a standard that is nicely aligned with their target market.
Intelligent Design says that a Designer is behind the behavior of the universe, but makes no scientific statements, and can not be falsified observationally, so it is not science: it is Religion, **not science**.
That sounds right in principle, but ID proponents do also like to make arguments on the basis of scientific hypotheses. You could argue that these are more like rhetorical flourishes.
So, for example, the whole imbroglio over "irreducible complexity" is an attempt to propose a scientific hypothesis (specifically, that certain structures or biochemical processes cannot be simpler than some form X which could not have arisen by chance and the usual scientific laws alone). The problem, of course, is
that an argument like this has a powerful tendency to be an argument from ignorance. As a matter of history (and not science), similar kinds of arguments have basically always gone down in flames when they were testable.
Myth 1) Population rules all, which is why China (#1 population) and India (#2 population) should have the most powerful economies in the world.
Reality) China's GDP ranks 7th, behind that of the US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, and Italy. India's is 12th.
I agree with you that the previous analysis was too simplistic. Alas, so is yours.:-) And so will be mine.
First off, there's GDP, which is one thing, and GDP per capita which is quite another.
In that race, China and India are nowhere to be seen among the leaders, while the US (in 2000) had a spectacular lead over almost all nations (yeah, there's Bermuda and Luxemborg, but those have caveats attached, too). But that's not quite the real story, either, since the distribution of income among individuals is a big deal, too. Denmark has a per capita GDP that is smaller than the US, but a rather more even distribution among households, to the point where may US residents would be thrilled to switch places.
On the other hand, even GDP per capita misses something absolutely huge here, namely the growth rate of GDP (per capita or not). In that race, you find that the US is not especially close to first place. China is growing on the order of twice as quickly as the US, and that kind of advantage catches up with you pretty quickly.
Myth 2) The United States, because of all of those damned immigrants and teenage mothers, is increasing its population at a staggering rate.
Reality) The predicted population ranking in 2015 will still be in order of size: China, India, the United States. The annual population growth rates of these nations between 1995 and 2000 are.90%, 1.69%, and 1.05% respectively.
A point to make here is that the US numbers include a big contribution from immigration while China and India have
essentially negligible rates of immigration (but noticeable rates of emmigration). To the extent that they (and Mexico) can grow rapidly relative to the US, we might see
either increased immigration to these countries (repatriation at least), or reduced immigration from them to the US. Economic growth also still has room to reduce fertility rates in India and China (and many other places) as well. Forecasting population growth, as you mention, is an utter crapshoot in even the medium run.
In my more optimistic moments, I see a future where growth outside of the US is sufficient to raise standards of living for most, which will tend to increase the chances for peace and stability. When I'm pessimistic, I just look to differences in ideology, and imagine what will happen when some countries are wealthy enough to have armies that can really do damage...
This is also why capitalism is butt-useless for information, as artificial friction must be introduced into the system (in the form of copyright and patent law). These laws worked when capitalism was based more on physical objects (books, records, films), but now that the information has become more important than the distribution method, capitalism in its current form fails miserably.
Now that's ridiculous. Capitalism only suggests that we should recognize property rights and allow people to profit from their efforts. There is nothing there that suggests that you can't make a buck off of information.
It's true that the physicality of most goods and strong cultural disapproval of violence and stealing have made
it seem like capitalism only works when you have physical objects, but that doesn't follow. Intellectual property can
and could be recognized, and social pressures not to steal in situations where theft is otherwise very tempting can develop. There's already some of that now. People do get upset when somebody just takes somebody else's idea and presents it as their own invention; nothing physical there.
Moreover, we know perfectly well how to make information not freely available. You either encrypt it or tax the storage devices. In the latter case, it then makes perfect sense to pay for a decryption key, which is not a physical object either. I think where the big problem
has come is that current "DRM" proposals are simultaneously over-restrictive of what uses are allowable
for a piece of information and usually even insist on the
sale of privacy. The real way to go is to find a way to
align people's privacy rights with DRM. Give people absolute privacy for legal activities that depends on an identity key, and make theft of the key or its use to produce works readable by others a serious felony.
Actually, most of it has been poured into capital-works types of projects - lots of infrastructure improvements, that kind of thing. The fact that their economy is still in the crapper is just more empirical evidence that that sort of Keynesian pump-priming simply doesn't work in the real world.
I disagree. The problem in Japan, as most economists have noted, is that they are in a shockingly long-lived
deflationary spiral after the bursting of the bubble economy. In other words, when prices keep going down
(or never go up), there is great incentive *not* to spend money today, so domestic demand is stagnant or shrinking, which is really bad news in the long run. This was true both at the consumer and the corporate level;
note that many corporations were also so heavily indebted
that they would use any available cash just to pay off debts. The banks had tons of bad loans, but no incentive to recognize them, because doing so would guarantee that they would be found insolvent and then be out of business.
So, what could be done? The government somehow needed to get domestic demand kick-started. The usual ways to do that are to increase government spending in a big way, or play with interest rates. Spending puts more money into people's hands, while lowering interest rates
makes it easier for companies to invest. The problem, of course, is that everybody was in debt up to their eyeballs,
or afraid of going into debt and hoarding cash. So putting more money out there didn't help, while interest rates actually went down to zero and *that* didn't help. I think academics are still arguing about what *would* have helped, but the situation in Japan was a legitimate surprise, since nobody thought massive deflation could happen in a modern economy. Obviously, they just have
to close a lot of banks (and therefore effectively cancel a lot of debt). But they also need to get demand increasing
again, and that might be tough. Japan is a rapidly aging
country that will be showing negative population growth
in the future because widespread immigration is currently almost unthinkable to the Japanese while fertility rates are
sub-European. Cash-hoarding could probably be solved
by having the government announce that they are going
to print money like there's no tomorrow and intentionally cause inflation until the savings rate
rate goes to something more supportable. Fat chance of *that* happening, either.
The one thing we know that *won't* work is just to wait
for something to happen, or have the government spend money in ways that don't lead to increases in consumption.
Another example: HyperTalk and AppleTalk. Reading these languages is easy. They read almost like natural english sentences. Very easy to follow. Drawback? Writing the code.
Uh, I think you mean "AppleScript" back there. Moreover, I think you kind of have it sideways.:-) Reading these
languages had its own pain-in-the-neck aspects, too.
Back in my hypertalking days, i was always having to write stuff like:
put word 3 of line 4 of field "foo" into baz
when what I *wanted* to say and read was more like:
baz = foo[4][3]
The real horror of hypertalk was the lack of decent
datatypes and the inavailability of really any decent
syntax. The *glory* of hypertalk was that it was a
delegation-based event-driven object-oriented language
*without* inheritance. Those are suprisingly powerful and it's really a shame that a de-uglified version of HyperTalk
never really happened, or anything like it.
In a sense, all the w3c work in DOM and standardized events and event-bubbling is really just getting us back
to where you could have been in 1990 with HyperCard.
Now I might be able to do similar things in Javascript in
2005; I guess that's sort of progress in a way, but...
An anonymous slashdot post was the first good description of this whole rumor. No one thought it was reliable, but the fact that it didn't sound like it was written by a two year old helped its credibility.
Boy, that was a pretty good description of this. More interesting was the immediate anonymous reply from "Steve", which said that while "Steve" would not look up the offending poster, that they Really Should Not Have Posted That, since rumors lead to exaggerated expectations. That sounded *very* Apple, and while I severely doubt that "Steve" was "Steve Jobs", I'm pretty
sure the pseudonym was chosen to make the poster
know that this really was somebody at Apple, and to cut it out.
Hmm...industry intrigue at Slashdot; who would have guessed?:-)
I think that the price is right. In fact, if I were doing it, I'd set the pricing as a range, from 75 for the "moldy oldies" to $1.25 for the latest stuff.
A-yup! Really, I think the big deal we'll start to see with
these kinds of services is more rational pricing schemes.
These days, you either buy a CD new, on some special
sale, cut-out, or used, and that is just not enough price points for an efficient market. Frankly, it *should* be the case that tracks that are less in demand should cost
less, hits should cost more, bulk discounts should apply,
all that kind of stuff. This is actually not that easy to do with the current physical distribution methods, but really
easy to do over the net. Hey, they could even try this as
a "name your price" system. You sign in, tell them you'll
buy all of "Faux Realism" by Les Sans Culottes for $.60 per track, and find out if they'll bite. Maybe somebody has to push this through a clearinghouse or something so you won't get instant service. But later on, you log on again and find your tracks are wating for you.
Really, the only hitch I see so far is that they haven't answered the question of DRM. If there is DRM technology built into this, then yes, you're right that the cost is way too much. I wouldn't be willing to pay more than 25 for songs with DRM, if that.
Apple will apparently use AAC, which has some nice features including the *possibility* of DRM, but I can't
see Apple doing that since their motto is rip/mix/BURN.
It's an interesting question, though.
~12 bucks for the music, and you have to provide the bandwith, physical media, and case. oh, and no liner notes.
Thanks, but I'll go to my local indie store, where they have the media, case, and liner notes all for 12 bucks.
Now, I'm not going to tell you *not* to got to your
local indie store, of course, but there's some stuff
you left out here.
Unless they're *really* stupid, you will see discounts
for pulling down all of the tracks. If I buy one apple (to use a grocery reference), and pick the one I want, I pay
more than if I buy 'em by the pre-packaged bag.
Bandwidth does cost, but so does hauling off to the store, and then finding out that they don't stock "Faux Realism" by Les Sans Culottes. That said, it's probably true that
this Apple service won't, either, at least at first...
They can keep the case; I have waaay too many of those
to shuffle through these days.
Getting the liner notes is an obvious and trivial no-brainer
for them to provide. Heck, they could give you a nice PDF of the liner notes so you could actually read the thing rather than have to squint and/or damage the notes trying to get them out of the #$!@# case.
Now, they *could* mess up and not provide any of this stuff, which would be lame, but Apple is the only outfit I can imagine that might possibly get this part basically
right on the first try. We'll have to see.
On a related note, the expected debut of this new service could well be what is holding up the introduction of the long-overdue updated iPod line.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the original poster was trying to be incendiary. I think it is crucial to distinguish between the music companies and their trade organization, *precisely* because there are labels (mostly small ones) that don't have much to do with the RIAA, but who would get money if their music were sold by Apple or anybody else. The only money the RIAA ever sees is (I believe) the dues that come from members. Nothing from non-members, and nothing directly from royalty money. Sorry if this was unclear.
And even among "the majors" there are some interesting distinctions to make. Sony is a major label, and a major hardware manufacturer. Hardware Sony would really like to a more reasonable music distribution system, while Label Sony is a strong RIAA supporter.
Now, why would they do that? Seriously, think of the people who own Macs, have enough income to blow on this, and what they might be listening to. It sure ain't Britney, dude. OK, so here's the top twenty songs overall at this moment:
OK, so there's way too much Sheryl Crow and Sting in the current mix and some other issues, but that will undoubtedly change. :-) Meanwhile, the top-10 "alternative list would be:
OK, so we have the usual definitional issues of what the heck alternative is, but these are definitely the picks of the SLOG (Slightly Older Geek) generation. Man, somebody should tell TMBG that they have 3 of the top 10 songs on this list. :-)
Well, you can extrapolate, but it won't do you too much good. You could have extrapolated "The Cube" into the hardware hit of the year with this logic. I would not be surprised to see the music store business be worth something substantial down the road, but right now they are still so underwater with it that it isn't really funny. This was *not* your average two-day website. :-)
Also, the current $65 million net profit is that low because of the tech slow-down. Apple's $4+ billion in cash was not earned over 70+ years...
OK, so unless something has really changed, the RIAA gets nothing. Some music companies get something. And this, I think, is the key point: the labels that have the most to gain from this are the small ones that you are less likely to find on your local store's shelves. And, moving beyond that, a viable buy-online system *not* run by a label will make it far more likely that unsigned acts can get a better deal.
And I really do think this will help bands in a major way. While you're listening to the song you'll probably buy, you can't help look at the box on the right that says "people who bought 'Ana Ng' also bought 'Funky Périphérique' by Les Sans Culottes". [Disclaimer: neither song is currently available at the site although they certainly should be.] To be completely honest, a working online music buying system will really be the end of the big labels as we know them.
Emphasis (strength?) is mine. OK, so, for me, this is the scoop. If the shopping is fun, then I don't mind people quoting me a price that prices that time at $0 per hour. In my life, though, that won't work. If it took you 20 hours to price this out, then that's the same as real money. If it took you time to figure out why (say) the video card RAM wasn't being recognized by X11, the meter was running for me. And so on, down the line.
I am the first to admit that I won't be getting "that type of rig" from Apple. I'll get something that works out of the box with an excellent OS, strong included software, and things that save me time and money. For a home machine that I'm using on my time, doing anything else would be silly. I'll leave the RAID configuration issues at work, thanks.
OK, stop laughing. It *might* not have worked perfectly the first time, right?
Words fail me here. I think when this sinks in with other people, that Apple could sell a couple million Macs *just* for this one feature alone. Oh, I'm sure the new codec is nice, and I might even buy a track or three from the Music store, but transparent wireless music sharing is just so much more than that.
We're talking about Terminal.app geeks. Who in that group uses the finder? :-)
More seriously, the Finder has some issues, but the ones that people like Siracusa harps on turn out not to affect me very much. Not nearly as much, say, as the weird case-insensitivity of the HFS+ file system...
AppleWorks is...fairly weak. But the "draw" component has saved my backside on a couple of occasions. If memory serves, the AppleWorks folks were originally the MacDraw people, and I think that's about the only thing that I like about the current package.
Warning: OS X Terminal bashing to follow.
OK, so I will admit that the version of Terminal included in the latest Jaguar is usable, but please don't try to tell me that the versions shipping with (say) 10.0.anything were. They had *exactly* the kinds of problems you complain about. Even now, I think Terminal gets more negative comments than any other frequently used portion of the OS. Doing a decent terminal (emulator) is surprisingly tough, which is why there have always been so many different ones running around.
This is the kind of thing that completely (re)-sold me on Macs recently. The new interface is getting *exceptionally* keyboard-expert friendly. And installation of almost anything is embarrassingly easy. And then Safari came out...
Basically, Apple is a software company that makes some nicely designed hardware. For some applications, you'd like to see better raw performance numbers, but that should happen by late this year. In the mean time, OS X has again really moved miles ahead of anything else I've seen recently, and people have always (in the past) bought the hardware that runs the software they want to run. I think this bodes well for them.
What you miss is that treading water is relatively better than drowning, and there's a whole lot of *that* going on these days. I myself was a bit disturbed by the drop in non-notebook sales numbers, but the increase in sales of the PowerBook line (and increases in gross margin) were beyond my expectations.
On the other hand, my expectations probably should have been different. At the moment, there is very little reason to buy any Apple non-notebook except for for the best value deals in the iMac and eMac line, so the fact that they have any sales there is striking. By the end of Q4, I think we will see a significantly enhanced contribution to Apple's profits from the new line of 970-based Macs and the new version of the OS, but I think that Q3 could get very rough. As in: lose $100 million. That said, those numbers won't look too horrible compared to other hardware vendors. The hint that Windows hardware vendors will be hurt is in Microsoft's statements about their expectations. They are "very cautious" and sentiments anything like that are basically unheard of in Redmond.
A gap or three in the proof were found within days, and a mathematician friend of mine reported that it didn't look like solutions to these problems were immediately forthcoming.
The excitement about this paper comes from the fact that the guy who did the work has come up with impressive results in the past, builds on important and cutting edge work, and seems to have a really thorough command of the potential difficulties. (In other words, when he is asked questions about the tricky points, he immediately responds with what look like strong and well-thought-out answers.) For that matter, his work claims to prove a more general conjecture of which Poincare is a special case, and so this work could have more general significance to many other problems, even if there turns out to be a glitch or two in this iteration of the proof.
It's a very hard problem, and this answer could be wrong, too. But there's a big difference between tossing a paper up on a preprint server and giving a lecture at MIT where nobody can (yet) touch you. :-)
Ooh, you're close to being insightful until you get to that last couple of sentences. :-) First of all, you can check and find out that Wilkes-Barre does indeed have malls and Starbucks, Best Buy and probably most of the trappings you think are important. But, to quote Richard Feynman, they are missing something essential because the [hi-tech] planes don't land. For whatever reason, nobody thinks to locate (or re-locate) facilities there. Worse than that, it apparently just does not happen that two people having lunch over a novel idea ever decide to make it happen in Wilkes-Barre and succeed. And, to be brutally honest, this hypotheical lunch would have to occur spontaneously in Wilkes-Barre for anything to happen, because it isn't going to happen anywhere else. Having a mall
or a Starbucks or a couple of minor league teams frankly doesn't mean anything for relocation, because, well, everybody has those. What many places *don't* have are a strong university or two and a city that is sufficiently cool so that people in their 20s hang around long enough to make things happen.
So, if you think about it long enough, the prototypical "missing" high tech center in the US is in fact Pittsburgh, PA. Two world-class universities, cleaned up from its steel days, interesting and attractive housing, some high cultural advantages...and people can't seem to leave the place fast enough, let alone make tech start-ups work. I don't completely accept his analysis, but Richard Florida does seem to be onto something in his analsysis of how the creative class affords economic development.
So among non-major metros, Austin and Madison and Burlington, Vermont end up being hot, Portland Maine and Gainesville have a future, and Wilkes-Barre...is like 150 places down the list and without a plausible story of how it rises up to challenge even Fort Wayne, Indiana (which isn't exactly on people's short lists, either). If Florida is right, the root cause of Wilkes-Barre's funk is neither a lack of optical fiber nor upscale shopping per se, but rather the fact that the young and the hip and the gay and the smart don't live there and won't move there.
Which brings me to my current home town: Columbia, Missouri. Yes, the major state research university campus is here, and the population is growing about as fast as they can put up houses, but at the end of the day, you're still in central MIssouri surrounded by soybeans. Is there any hope for the future? I am now cautiously optimistic. So one of the big issues of the day is whether or not we should cover the downtown with a wireless cloud. Superficially, it's the same kind of question being faced by Wilkes-Barre now, except that there it's about business infrastructure, while here it's about helping people hang out.
This Tuesday, there is a ballot question that seeks to put all small-time marijuana possession offenses into the municipal court (i.e., just pay the fine); you can argue about whether or not this is a good idea, but the question is actually being asked. Similarly, a few years ago, some movie buffs were annoyed at the fact that many indie films were making it to Columbia very late if at all, so they said "hey; we could project them ourselves" and
Yeah, and you live in a place where you have no friends who can recommend specific CDs to you, have no access to websites where anybody talks about music, there is no decent college radio station in your area (note: that tragically enough *could* happen, so move!) and you never take chances, and the store you go to will never play cuts off of CDs in stock or throw a used disc on a player for you...
Sure, I suppose it's the case that you could be like that. But most of the undergrads I know who steal music have no such excuses. And so, alas, your freedoms are restricted on account of their larceny.
Deal with it.
Uh...no. Fair use in this case is to make backup copies for personal backup or archival purposes. It's pretty much the opposite of making a copy to share with a friend.
*Thank you* for pointing out that the real bonus here is the low power draw. While I am sure that every kind of computing device will continue to show increased performance in a raw sense, there are other things that are rapidly going to become more important.
So, my wife has an iBook and I have an iBook made just one year later. Mine is quieter, lighter, smaller, and runs longer on a charge. It's also somewhat faster, but this is hardly the first thing you would notice. I think I can, for the first time, claim that if it were only twice as fast as it is, I would never care if it got any faster. Any faster than that, and it's just as reasonable to go to some cycle-serving behemoth kept in its own room, possibly hundreds of miles away. The computer I want to use up close and personal only has to provide the ultimate in user interfaces and enough storage to keep around the stuff that I really don't want to reach out to the network for. We are getting so close, and stuff like low-power ultra-bright OLED screens are getting us even closer.
I would think that SVG to Quartz might well be something that you could see from Apple. Note that the way Safari is currently structured, you have webcore and javascript core services; if SVG were reusable in a similar fashion, I would give it a high likelihood of even soon-ish appearance from Apple, since it's a standard that is nicely aligned with their target market.
That sounds right in principle, but ID proponents do also like to make arguments on the basis of scientific hypotheses. You could argue that these are more like rhetorical flourishes.
So, for example, the whole imbroglio over "irreducible complexity" is an attempt to propose a scientific hypothesis (specifically, that certain structures or biochemical processes cannot be simpler than some form X which could not have arisen by chance and the usual scientific laws alone). The problem, of course, is that an argument like this has a powerful tendency to be an argument from ignorance. As a matter of history (and not science), similar kinds of arguments have basically always gone down in flames when they were testable.
I agree with you that the previous analysis was too simplistic. Alas, so is yours. :-) And so will be mine.
First off, there's GDP, which is one thing, and GDP per capita which is quite another. In that race, China and India are nowhere to be seen among the leaders, while the US (in 2000) had a spectacular lead over almost all nations (yeah, there's Bermuda and Luxemborg, but those have caveats attached, too). But that's not quite the real story, either, since the distribution of income among individuals is a big deal, too. Denmark has a per capita GDP that is smaller than the US, but a rather more even distribution among households, to the point where may US residents would be thrilled to switch places.
On the other hand, even GDP per capita misses something absolutely huge here, namely the growth rate of GDP (per capita or not). In that race, you find that the US is not especially close to first place. China is growing on the order of twice as quickly as the US, and that kind of advantage catches up with you pretty quickly.
A point to make here is that the US numbers include a big contribution from immigration while China and India have essentially negligible rates of immigration (but noticeable rates of emmigration). To the extent that they (and Mexico) can grow rapidly relative to the US, we might see either increased immigration to these countries (repatriation at least), or reduced immigration from them to the US. Economic growth also still has room to reduce fertility rates in India and China (and many other places) as well. Forecasting population growth, as you mention, is an utter crapshoot in even the medium run.
In my more optimistic moments, I see a future where growth outside of the US is sufficient to raise standards of living for most, which will tend to increase the chances for peace and stability. When I'm pessimistic, I just look to differences in ideology, and imagine what will happen when some countries are wealthy enough to have armies that can really do damage...
Now that's ridiculous. Capitalism only suggests that we should recognize property rights and allow people to profit from their efforts. There is nothing there that suggests that you can't make a buck off of information. It's true that the physicality of most goods and strong cultural disapproval of violence and stealing have made it seem like capitalism only works when you have physical objects, but that doesn't follow. Intellectual property can and could be recognized, and social pressures not to steal in situations where theft is otherwise very tempting can develop. There's already some of that now. People do get upset when somebody just takes somebody else's idea and presents it as their own invention; nothing physical there.
Moreover, we know perfectly well how to make information not freely available. You either encrypt it or tax the storage devices. In the latter case, it then makes perfect sense to pay for a decryption key, which is not a physical object either. I think where the big problem has come is that current "DRM" proposals are simultaneously over-restrictive of what uses are allowable for a piece of information and usually even insist on the sale of privacy. The real way to go is to find a way to align people's privacy rights with DRM. Give people absolute privacy for legal activities that depends on an identity key, and make theft of the key or its use to produce works readable by others a serious felony.
I disagree. The problem in Japan, as most economists have noted, is that they are in a shockingly long-lived deflationary spiral after the bursting of the bubble economy. In other words, when prices keep going down (or never go up), there is great incentive *not* to spend money today, so domestic demand is stagnant or shrinking, which is really bad news in the long run. This was true both at the consumer and the corporate level; note that many corporations were also so heavily indebted that they would use any available cash just to pay off debts. The banks had tons of bad loans, but no incentive to recognize them, because doing so would guarantee that they would be found insolvent and then be out of business.
So, what could be done? The government somehow needed to get domestic demand kick-started. The usual ways to do that are to increase government spending in a big way, or play with interest rates. Spending puts more money into people's hands, while lowering interest rates makes it easier for companies to invest. The problem, of course, is that everybody was in debt up to their eyeballs, or afraid of going into debt and hoarding cash. So putting more money out there didn't help, while interest rates actually went down to zero and *that* didn't help. I think academics are still arguing about what *would* have helped, but the situation in Japan was a legitimate surprise, since nobody thought massive deflation could happen in a modern economy. Obviously, they just have to close a lot of banks (and therefore effectively cancel a lot of debt). But they also need to get demand increasing again, and that might be tough. Japan is a rapidly aging country that will be showing negative population growth in the future because widespread immigration is currently almost unthinkable to the Japanese while fertility rates are sub-European. Cash-hoarding could probably be solved by having the government announce that they are going to print money like there's no tomorrow and intentionally cause inflation until the savings rate rate goes to something more supportable. Fat chance of *that* happening, either.
The one thing we know that *won't* work is just to wait for something to happen, or have the government spend money in ways that don't lead to increases in consumption.
Uh, I think you mean "AppleScript" back there. Moreover, I think you kind of have it sideways. :-) Reading these
languages had its own pain-in-the-neck aspects, too.
Back in my hypertalking days, i was always having to write stuff like:
when what I *wanted* to say and read was more like: The real horror of hypertalk was the lack of decent datatypes and the inavailability of really any decent syntax. The *glory* of hypertalk was that it was a delegation-based event-driven object-oriented language *without* inheritance. Those are suprisingly powerful and it's really a shame that a de-uglified version of HyperTalk never really happened, or anything like it.In a sense, all the w3c work in DOM and standardized events and event-bubbling is really just getting us back to where you could have been in 1990 with HyperCard. Now I might be able to do similar things in Javascript in 2005; I guess that's sort of progress in a way, but...
Boy, that was a pretty good description of this. More interesting was the immediate anonymous reply from "Steve", which said that while "Steve" would not look up the offending poster, that they Really Should Not Have Posted That, since rumors lead to exaggerated expectations. That sounded *very* Apple, and while I severely doubt that "Steve" was "Steve Jobs", I'm pretty sure the pseudonym was chosen to make the poster know that this really was somebody at Apple, and to cut it out.
Hmm...industry intrigue at Slashdot; who would have guessed? :-)
A-yup! Really, I think the big deal we'll start to see with these kinds of services is more rational pricing schemes. These days, you either buy a CD new, on some special sale, cut-out, or used, and that is just not enough price points for an efficient market. Frankly, it *should* be the case that tracks that are less in demand should cost less, hits should cost more, bulk discounts should apply, all that kind of stuff. This is actually not that easy to do with the current physical distribution methods, but really easy to do over the net. Hey, they could even try this as a "name your price" system. You sign in, tell them you'll buy all of "Faux Realism" by Les Sans Culottes for $.60 per track, and find out if they'll bite. Maybe somebody has to push this through a clearinghouse or something so you won't get instant service. But later on, you log on again and find your tracks are wating for you.
Apple will apparently use AAC, which has some nice features including the *possibility* of DRM, but I can't see Apple doing that since their motto is rip/mix/BURN. It's an interesting question, though.
Now, I'm not going to tell you *not* to got to your local indie store, of course, but there's some stuff you left out here.
Now, they *could* mess up and not provide any of this stuff, which would be lame, but Apple is the only outfit I can imagine that might possibly get this part basically right on the first try. We'll have to see.
On a related note, the expected debut of this new service could well be what is holding up the introduction of the long-overdue updated iPod line.