"Backwater" does not begin to describe eMusic's library. I was able to satisfy my more eclectic and obscure tastes in music for a few months while it was a novelty, but that's about it. I'm not going to subscribe to an effectively static content base like eMusic when Apple's is around. Check out the top downloaded albums on each service. 'Nuff said. If you want to make money with music (remember, these are businesses, not public services) then you'd better get the largest number of the most popular songs out there. To each his own, there's a place for both, the market will decide in the long run.
And in general, now that the dust has settled, Apple did a great thing in the way of free markets. They have one solution that is legal, cheap, easy, and sensory-satisfying. You can still go to the record store. You can still use p2p (in between the big brother IMs being sent to the users the last few days... what direction do you think THAT's going in...) You can still rip/mix/burn. The constitution is not in tatters and definitely Hilary Rosen and probably the EFF and I'd wager even the gang at 2600 are sleeping soundly this week. Not a bad accomplishment for a guy and his shop who's been presumed dead and buried so many times there's a revolving door on their gravesite.
I'll spend money here. Likely more than CDNOW^H^H^H^H^H Amazon, because I don't have to wait for or pay for shipping. BTW - I got my invoice for 15 songs - $14.85 and 0.00 tax - anyone else see that?
And as one of the promos mentioned, this forces better music - no more 1 hit track and 11 fillers - you'd better make every track count or you'll be selling 1/12 of your previous sales in short time. Are you listening, Mr. Mathers? Miss Spears? Damn. Sure glad I bought TMBG's Apollo 18 as a CD...
That we're going to have another wave of people gnutella-ing songs even with this in place, this time the protester's battle cry is "it's not ogg!"
What's next, they fold in ogg, but they used blue bits instead of red bits, therefore the whole thing is crap?
If you don;t like it, don't use it. Go to the record store and buy stuff until you make a better solution. But remember, when you steal the artists get zero, so please don't waltz out the poor artists argumentto boycott paid music. Free music starves them even faster.
Let's see... no artists in hip-hop, none in easy listening, none in popo, none in... hey, HEY!!!
Ain't nobody home!
Is this a bad joke by a sniggering Hilary Rosen? Is this her plan to give artists 100% of.... NOTHING? I thought eMusic was the height of marginality, but these guys have them beat.
As for Chuck, I'd LOVE to see the pitch for this business model:
1. pay for lotsa hosting & bandwidth 2. 100% to artist = no margin 3. ??? 4. profit!!!
"I don't think the price of software and the price of hardware have some inextricable link." Are you really that naive? Is your focus group made up of vested MS employees and department heads?
Yes they are linked, Steve. Perception is tantamount to reality. It might as well be a physical link, because everyone who goes thru it gets steamed. That link is quite obviously in the mind of everyone who buys a computer (e.g., iBook) for $999 thinking that it will do all their computing. Then they find out that you have to spend half of that ($499) to equip it with industry-standard software. *Then* they go find out that AppleWorks or something else can do 95% of the job for free-with-the-machine. I cover web, email, chat, PIM, WP, SS, DB, paint, draw, music, movies and photos with what shipped on the drive, and pay reasonable ($50-100) for other such things as PS(LE), HomePage, Keynote and eFax.
But $500 for a productivity suite? Not my first choice.
We get a campus full of people who believe that combo boxes and flipping ranks of tabs are good ideas? Not to mention "I want to stop now." "OK - then click 'Start'."
Maybe we should feed them rabbit turds in the interview.
"What are these?" "Smart pills." "They taste like shit." "See - you're getting smarter already."
Jeez, with things this bad, you'd think they'd stop trying to URGENT!!!! ship THE SUM OF $US 25 MILLION DOLLARS!!!!! out of six countries from a hundred SON | WIFE OF MURDERED FORMER LEADER!!!! twenty times a day to my mailbox alone. BTW I already tried telling them to call (202) 324-3000 (FBI HQ) - they don't get it.
Making Christie Todd Whitman head of the EPA was a tough act to follow... they had to do something to top it.
What, everyone at the EFF has the grip? I know JP wouldn't be caught dead as a government agent, but there's gotta be SOMEONE who could at least bridge the sides...
We forget how amazing this was...
on
Implementing VisiCalc
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
We had a PDP-11/40 with six 20mA current loop connections pluggable to any of 22 campus jacks (five years ago the contractors for our UTP retrofit on the 1978 building spent most of a day scratching their heads about this bunch of wires). Apple ][s with cassette interfaces and plain old TVs were a godsend for teaching programming. A spreadsheet was manna. BeagleBrothers were gods. And in 1991 I was still able to communicte with a class in Sofia by a deuling banjos style interchange on their Pravetz clones in Apple graphics (PLOT and HPLOT and HPLOTTO on "GR" or "HGR" or "HGR2" were a universal language - like the Close Encounters scene...) i think the commands and such from Apple ][ are in my DNA now... I still have my HHGG from Infocom and a//c+ to run it on!
It's not an Apple competitor; Apple didn't make them say this; It would not enable Apple clones... Did I miss something or is it a black helicopter day?
If the design gets smaller than I can see or handle, then we're out. Thumboards are neat, but not an everyday solution. The subnotebook is still usable enough on its own, wonderful when married to a large display and full peripherals at home, and maintain the groundwork for serious ink and voice interfaces.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.ht ml
google is so much not like ms that it'd be hard to imagine them being assimilated, unless they just bought them a'la webtv - but them a look at the numbers and a possible ipo and i doubt ms money could compete with the pride and reasonable money to be made from doing what they do well...
someone mentironed the iraqis prolly don't have gps weapons - and that's irrelevant.
if you hand me your lat/lon within 100m, i can find you - maybe with a missile, maybe with a truck, maybe with a lot of stuff. and i can do it with a $100 gps, close enough to kill you. i don't want this happening to our troops so that some media diva can be avant garde.
truth is the npr story mentioned some whiney reporters having to use a plain old sat phone and dictate stories to a copy desk and pitching a fit. they need to understand they are just barely able to do this period, they do not have a god given right to be ther, and that there is a more than acceptable risk of becoming pink mist on no notice.
suck it up, do your job, and listen to the professional warriors.
I surfed away from Mothers Against Boomerangs for this?
Seriously, I didn't care about primes when I had to, I really can't see a compelling reason to look for really big numbers that don't factor except for sheer curiosity. To me this is like trainspotting for dollars.
Wake me when there's an application.
Don't wake me for troll modding. I know it's coming.
And erm, proving that there's an infinite number of them? How will you know when you're done?
And hunting for primes? I'm calling People for the Ethical Treatment of Numbers.
jd has officially not only run out of new ideas, but has run out of ways to run out of new ideas. the boy needs to go vanilla sky in an alternate reality where apple is a footnote, if only to shut him the hell up. it's like limbaugh - if the dems went belly up tomorrow he'd have to revert to baby talk, having nothing left to say (sic).
look, remember when with an even bigger market share, apple couldn't support two brand names, never mind two processor families.
next month he'll be reporting that bmw is going to switch to using ford focus engines.
if you have a garmin unit (the one without the goofy cartoon guy planting flags) the EPE (estimated positioning error) is right on the satellite page.
Garmin is a bit generous with the calculation for this number (for a discussion, you could check out gpsy.com) but in a clear area the SA changes it from about 20 ft to about 100 feet.
Here's a graph of when SA got turned off two years ago -
http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/FGCS/info/sans_SA/world/ am mn.gif
Look for that to reverse.
And they prolly need to turn it off globally - because they think there's a good chance bad people will target things all over the world now that we'll be fighting. Plus the last thing they need right now is a bunch of people making sure the army works and your lexus dongles work.
War is hell. Buy a map. Your GPS will still get you close enough to throw a line to someone if they need rescue.
the rows of tabs that flip and change position are the single most unnerving UI element ever conceived. you click one element and the entire geography of the context you're in flips. what was stable a millisecond ago is now reorded.
it's like a battle axe poised against the very wiring of your short term memory.
jeezus. all of a sudden these fat slobs go luddite when the same technology they depend on gets better.
evolve or die has always been the way the world works - they need to go re-read every decent history book ever penned.
they are fast becoming irrelevant, and need to realize they are fast approaching the point where you can always find a awy to keep music out there - right now it's a detent, but push a little harder and i'll bet the rest of the world spends their spare time undercutting their model in a way that will make napster look like marconi.
it just pushes the payment to my debit/credit card. yes there's an audit trail. a new implementation could change that, but for non-trivial purchases, don't you want that? choose one: a: "i swear I paid for that - see - it's right here on this statement" b: "i swear i paid for that - see? it's right here on the record you have that shows that anyone on the planet might have deposited those funds. trust me."
the MYOB argument about who spent what is a juicy libertarian tidbit, but the reality of using money and proving payments is above and beyond that nicety.
just like you rarely would choose to put cash in a night deposit box, you want proof and trust on payments. a small price to pay for accountability.
also - starbucks is essentially a cash card - you push an amount it up then anyone can use it - but i keep mine on a very short leash - autoloading a very small amount - then if i do lose it, i may be out the difference between that very small amount and the limit until i discover it's gone - at which point i ditch it.
why use these (speedpass / sbucks)? on their part, it's all about loyalty. on my part? no service fees piling up on my checking account, immediate debiting, ease of use, one less receipt to stuff into my george castanza style wallet, accountability, relative safety, and ok the watch is cool. in the past weeks even the mobil employees at a half dozen stations (guess they didn't get the memo) were dropping their jaws.
yes, we all know it only works at the contracted vendors.
the others could set up their own proprietary systems.
for mobil this is a lioyalty thing, not a technology thing.
it's like ron popeil on the pocket fisherman when someone pointed out it was a sub-par solution - "so? it's not for fishing - it's for buying and giving"
as for the cost - not true in all places - any mobil station (and virtually all mobils are speedpass now) that share a street corner with any other station are competitive - two stations that i frequent are as low as any in the area because they can't afford to jack the price with competitors across the street. price pressure at gas stations pushes upward for the moment, but pushes downward in the longer run.
Just got my speedpass timex watch - no more key tag - I'll prolly give that to my wife - the windw tage never did work on my dodge neon's back window, so that was out.
I like the idea of speedpass being used at gas and other small place - mcd's, dunkin's - for the most part if I lose it, the money is safe (so they say so far) and what's the worst someone could do - buy a tank of gas, drive for a day then buy another - i'd figure it out by then.
Plus anyone who has a debit card and uses it for purchases AND atms - it wears out about halfway thru it's expiration date from people treating it like a sanding tool at the checkout.
Negroponte told a neat story a few years back - about the ski pass rfid's in switzerland - he went to pull out cash at a small store to buy some chocolate, and was fishing for change and the cashier saw his spent ski pass - he offered to take it for the payment - nn asked why, and the guy said they're worth 5 francs deposit when you turn them back - when pressed, the cashier said he piles them up and pays the bread vendor - the bread vendor piles up piles from the stores he delivers to , one of which was the ski resort, and turns them in en masse!
it was nn's arguement for how micropayments are easier than we think. speedpass isn't exactly micropayments given the price of petrol, but it's close, easy, cheaper for the shop (debit vs credit) and certainly easy for me.
Well, wish any of them luck in building a house without a well-engineered wall system - vapor barrier and permable wrap - Tyvek is not airtight - it is a liquid barrier bus allows moisture to migrate back out of the insualted wall, while a sealed barrier makes sure the moisture stays out of the house interior. Leave these two out and good luck fighting off the mold that will be inside the walls in short time. Short of straw-bale adobe, it's pretty necessary. Also - don't seal the ground with a well-engineered basement or barrier or vent system, and you're blind to radon infiltration, which is not a syndrome - it is a proven and measurable health risk.
Slashdot Mirror
"Backwater" does not begin to describe eMusic's library. I was able to satisfy my more eclectic and obscure tastes in music for a few months while it was a novelty, but that's about it. I'm not going to subscribe to an effectively static content base like eMusic when Apple's is around. Check out the top downloaded albums on each service. 'Nuff said. If you want to make money with music (remember, these are businesses, not public services) then you'd better get the largest number of the most popular songs out there. To each his own, there's a place for both, the market will decide in the long run.
And in general, now that the dust has settled, Apple did a great thing in the way of free markets. They have one solution that is legal, cheap, easy, and sensory-satisfying. You can still go to the record store. You can still use p2p (in between the big brother IMs being sent to the users the last few days... what direction do you think THAT's going in...) You can still rip/mix/burn. The constitution is not in tatters and definitely Hilary Rosen and probably the EFF and I'd wager even the gang at 2600 are sleeping soundly this week. Not a bad accomplishment for a guy and his shop who's been presumed dead and buried so many times there's a revolving door on their gravesite.
I'll spend money here. Likely more than CDNOW^H^H^H^H^H Amazon, because I don't have to wait for or pay for shipping. BTW - I got my invoice for 15 songs - $14.85 and 0.00 tax - anyone else see that?
And as one of the promos mentioned, this forces better music - no more 1 hit track and 11 fillers - you'd better make every track count or you'll be selling 1/12 of your previous sales in short time. Are you listening, Mr. Mathers? Miss Spears? Damn. Sure glad I bought TMBG's Apollo 18 as a CD...
That we're going to have another wave of people gnutella-ing songs even with this in place, this time the protester's battle cry is "it's not ogg!"
What's next, they fold in ogg, but they used blue bits instead of red bits, therefore the whole thing is crap?
If you don;t like it, don't use it. Go to the record store and buy stuff until you make a better solution. But remember, when you steal the artists get zero, so please don't waltz out the poor artists argumentto boycott paid music. Free music starves them even faster.
Let's see... no artists in hip-hop, none in easy listening, none in popo, none in... hey, HEY!!!
Ain't nobody home!
Is this a bad joke by a sniggering Hilary Rosen? Is this her plan to give artists 100% of.... NOTHING?
I thought eMusic was the height of marginality, but these guys have them beat.
As for Chuck, I'd LOVE to see the pitch for this business model:
1. pay for lotsa hosting & bandwidth
2. 100% to artist = no margin
3. ???
4. profit!!!
Now I can't wait til monday...
again a story that gets posted while the one about the GCI characters in the Two Towers imbued with AI goes begging...
And the moist towelettes are a godsend to cyclists - they take the place of a water bottle in my kit bag.
"I don't think the price of software and the price of hardware have some inextricable link." Are you really that naive? Is your focus group made up of vested MS employees and department heads?
Yes they are linked, Steve. Perception is tantamount to reality. It might as well be a physical link, because everyone who goes thru it gets steamed. That link is quite obviously in the mind of everyone who buys a computer (e.g., iBook) for $999 thinking that it will do all their computing. Then they find out that you have to spend half of that ($499) to equip it with industry-standard software. *Then* they go find out that AppleWorks or something else can do 95% of the job for free-with-the-machine. I cover web, email, chat, PIM, WP, SS, DB, paint, draw, music, movies and photos with what shipped on the drive, and pay reasonable ($50-100) for other such things as PS(LE), HomePage, Keynote and eFax.
But $500 for a productivity suite? Not my first choice.
We get a campus full of people who believe that combo boxes and flipping ranks of tabs are good ideas? Not to mention "I want to stop now." "OK - then click 'Start'."
Maybe we should feed them rabbit turds in the interview.
"What are these?"
"Smart pills."
"They taste like shit."
"See - you're getting smarter already."
Jeez, with things this bad, you'd think they'd stop trying to URGENT!!!! ship THE SUM OF $US 25 MILLION DOLLARS!!!!! out of six countries from a hundred SON | WIFE OF MURDERED FORMER LEADER!!!! twenty times a day to my mailbox alone. BTW I already tried telling them to call (202) 324-3000 (FBI HQ) - they don't get it.
Making Christie Todd Whitman head of the EPA was a tough act to follow... they had to do something to top it.
What, everyone at the EFF has the grip? I know JP wouldn't be caught dead as a government agent, but there's gotta be SOMEONE who could at least bridge the sides...
We had a PDP-11/40 with six 20mA current loop connections pluggable to any of 22 campus jacks (five years ago the contractors for our UTP retrofit on the 1978 building spent most of a day scratching their heads about this bunch of wires). Apple ][s with cassette interfaces and plain old TVs were a godsend for teaching programming. A spreadsheet was manna. BeagleBrothers were gods. And in 1991 I was still able to communicte with a class in Sofia by a deuling banjos style interchange on their Pravetz clones in Apple graphics (PLOT and HPLOT and HPLOTTO on "GR" or "HGR" or "HGR2" were a universal language - like the Close Encounters scene...) i think the commands and such from Apple ][ are in my DNA now... I still have my HHGG from Infocom and a //c+ to run it on!
It's not an Apple competitor;
Apple didn't make them say this;
It would not enable Apple clones...
Did I miss something or is it a black helicopter day?
Seriously, power and signal are paramount.
If the design gets smaller than I can see or handle, then we're out. Thumboards are neat, but not an everyday solution. The subnotebook is still usable enough on its own, wonderful when married to a large display and full peripherals at home, and maintain the groundwork for serious ink and voice interfaces.
OK and pivot the display so I can have a tablet.
The earth's orientation has shifted at east once - it was cold somewhere, just wasn't there.
go read the april 2003 fast company story
t ml
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.h
google is so much not like ms that it'd be hard to imagine them being assimilated, unless they just bought them a'la webtv - but them a look at the numbers and a possible ipo and i doubt ms money could compete with the pride and reasonable money to be made from doing what they do well...
someone mentironed the iraqis prolly don't have gps weapons - and that's irrelevant.
if you hand me your lat/lon within 100m, i can find you - maybe with a missile, maybe with a truck, maybe with a lot of stuff. and i can do it with a $100 gps, close enough to kill you. i don't want this happening to our troops so that some media diva can be avant garde.
truth is the npr story mentioned some whiney reporters having to use a plain old sat phone and dictate stories to a copy desk and pitching a fit. they need to understand they are just barely able to do this period, they do not have a god given right to be ther, and that there is a more than acceptable risk of becoming pink mist on no notice.
suck it up, do your job, and listen to the professional warriors.
I surfed away from Mothers Against Boomerangs for this?
Seriously, I didn't care about primes when I had to, I really can't see a compelling reason to look for really big numbers that don't factor except for sheer curiosity. To me this is like trainspotting for dollars.
Wake me when there's an application.
Don't wake me for troll modding. I know it's coming.
And erm, proving that there's an infinite number of them? How will you know when you're done?
And hunting for primes? I'm calling People for the Ethical Treatment of Numbers.
Local Hero - 1 big star, 0 explosions great performances.
Breaking Away - 1 future star, great story, bikes.
There's more, but when people say "whatchawannawatch?" I suggest these. They likely haven't seen them, and they come away with a smile.
jd has officially not only run out of new ideas, but has run out of ways to run out of new ideas. the boy needs to go vanilla sky in an alternate reality where apple is a footnote, if only to shut him the hell up. it's like limbaugh - if the dems went belly up tomorrow he'd have to revert to baby talk, having nothing left to say (sic).
look, remember when with an even bigger market share, apple couldn't support two brand names, never mind two processor families.
next month he'll be reporting that bmw is going to switch to using ford focus engines.
if you have a garmin unit (the one without the goofy cartoon guy planting flags) the EPE (estimated positioning error) is right on the satellite page.
/ am mn.gif
Garmin is a bit generous with the calculation for this number (for a discussion, you could check out gpsy.com) but in a clear area the SA changes it from about 20 ft to about 100 feet.
Here's a graph of when SA got turned off two years ago -
http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/FGCS/info/sans_SA/world
Look for that to reverse.
And they prolly need to turn it off globally - because they think there's a good chance bad people will target things all over the world now that we'll be fighting. Plus the last thing they need right now is a bunch of people making sure the army works and your lexus dongles work.
War is hell. Buy a map. Your GPS will still get you close enough to throw a line to someone if they need rescue.
what's up with them in windows?
combo boxes STILL suck.
the rows of tabs that flip and change position are the single most unnerving UI element ever conceived. you click one element and the entire geography of the context you're in flips. what was stable a millisecond ago is now reorded.
it's like a battle axe poised against the very wiring of your short term memory.
Didn't Carnegie Mellon's robot car already do a lap of america except for on/off ramps? I know it used to tool around Pittsburgh...
jeezus. all of a sudden these fat slobs go luddite when the same technology they depend on gets better.
evolve or die has always been the way the world works - they need to go re-read every decent history book ever penned.
they are fast becoming irrelevant, and need to realize they are fast approaching the point where you can always find a awy to keep music out there - right now it's a detent, but push a little harder and i'll bet the rest of the world spends their spare time undercutting their model in a way that will make napster look like marconi.
it just pushes the payment to my debit/credit card.
yes there's an audit trail.
a new implementation could change that, but for non-trivial purchases, don't you want that? choose one:
a: "i swear I paid for that - see - it's right here on this statement"
b: "i swear i paid for that - see? it's right here on the record you have that shows that anyone on the planet might have deposited those funds. trust me."
the MYOB argument about who spent what is a juicy libertarian tidbit, but the reality of using money and proving payments is above and beyond that nicety.
just like you rarely would choose to put cash in a night deposit box, you want proof and trust on payments. a small price to pay for accountability.
also - starbucks is essentially a cash card - you push an amount it up then anyone can use it - but i keep mine on a very short leash - autoloading a very small amount - then if i do lose it, i may be out the difference between that very small amount and the limit until i discover it's gone - at which point i ditch it.
why use these (speedpass / sbucks)? on their part, it's all about loyalty. on my part? no service fees piling up on my checking account, immediate debiting, ease of use, one less receipt to stuff into my george castanza style wallet, accountability, relative safety, and ok the watch is cool. in the past weeks even the mobil employees at a half dozen stations (guess they didn't get the memo) were dropping their jaws.
yes, we all know it only works at the contracted vendors.
the others could set up their own proprietary systems.
for mobil this is a lioyalty thing, not a technology thing.
it's like ron popeil on the pocket fisherman when someone pointed out it was a sub-par solution - "so? it's not for fishing - it's for buying and giving"
as for the cost - not true in all places - any mobil station (and virtually all mobils are speedpass now) that share a street corner with any other station are competitive - two stations that i frequent are as low as any in the area because they can't afford to jack the price with competitors across the street. price pressure at gas stations pushes upward for the moment, but pushes downward in the longer run.
Just got my speedpass timex watch - no more key tag - I'll prolly give that to my wife - the windw tage never did work on my dodge neon's back window, so that was out.
I like the idea of speedpass being used at gas and other small place - mcd's, dunkin's - for the most part if I lose it, the money is safe (so they say so far) and what's the worst someone could do - buy a tank of gas, drive for a day then buy another - i'd figure it out by then.
Plus anyone who has a debit card and uses it for purchases AND atms - it wears out about halfway thru it's expiration date from people treating it like a sanding tool at the checkout.
Negroponte told a neat story a few years back - about the ski pass rfid's in switzerland - he went to pull out cash at a small store to buy some chocolate, and was fishing for change and the cashier saw his spent ski pass - he offered to take it for the payment - nn asked why, and the guy said they're worth 5 francs deposit when you turn them back - when pressed, the cashier said he piles them up and pays the bread vendor - the bread vendor piles up piles from the stores he delivers to , one of which was the ski resort, and turns them in en masse!
it was nn's arguement for how micropayments are easier than we think. speedpass isn't exactly micropayments given the price of petrol, but it's close, easy, cheaper for the shop (debit vs credit) and certainly easy for me.
Well, wish any of them luck in building a house without a well-engineered wall system - vapor barrier and permable wrap - Tyvek is not airtight - it is a liquid barrier bus allows moisture to migrate back out of the insualted wall, while a sealed barrier makes sure the moisture stays out of the house interior. Leave these two out and good luck fighting off the mold that will be inside the walls in short time. Short of straw-bale adobe, it's pretty necessary. Also - don't seal the ground with a well-engineered basement or barrier or vent system, and you're blind to radon infiltration, which is not a syndrome - it is a proven and measurable health risk.