i have a 32GB iphone. i have only 80GB of music. if i listened to music on my iphone 24x7 it would take me weeks to listen to everything once. who cares about having access to your entire music collection if it's going to take you 5 years to listen to it?
i don't even listen to full albums anymore. i have a bunch of smart playlists with different conditions and one with only my favorite songs from the entire collection. and my faves playlist is over 1000 songs and if i could i would cut it down to 100 or so to sync to my iphone but maybe in a future version of itunes.
as long as i can remember, the next generation has always looked worse than the previous generation. mostly because they did thing differently. generation X was said to be lazy 15 years ago because they sat around with their computers all the time instead of working in a factory
Reading the forums alot of the apple fans don't seem to like it. They can't figure out what to use it for or they don't like the restrictions. A lot of tablets are coming out this year that are more open.
Tens of millions of people play farmville or watch hulu and you can't do any of that on the ipad. You can only buy more content from apple. I'm wondering if apple did any market research before they crippled it.
Take Two the parent company is losing money for 2009. a lot of money. revenues are down and there is a big loss for the year. and the company is burning a lot of cash. at the current burn rate there is a good chance of Chapter 11 in 2010.
netbooks have crappy margins. building a tablet where you are forced to buy "content" just to use it is a stealth way of increasing average revenue per unit
in a library you have to wait for a new book or the one you want. i want to borrow some CD's but they are in a branch that's an hour away and i don't want to spend the time going there. all the kids want what they want NOW
if Courtney Love doesn't like it she can record in her garage like David Grohl and just release to iTunes with no promotion and hope someone finds her music. then she can save up to pay the upfront costs of the tour and risk her own money and property.
cry babies have people giving them millions of dollars up front with a lot of risk of the loss of investment and they think they deserve more but they don't want to risk their own money for their ventures.
if it's that easy why haven't banks pushed into lending to musicians before and instead poured money into RE? reason is that most music acts lose money and banks like stability with a lower interest rate than lending to 10 acts and losing money on 9 of them. banks also want something called collateral in a lot of cases. a lot of rich people like Annie Lebowitz who borrowed a lot of live in luxury put up a lot of their works and property as collateral. same with Michael Jackson. He signed over a lot of property to hedge funds and now everyone is monetizing his name to pay off his debts
this is where record companies come in who act like venture capitalists.
never had a Zune, but liked the Zune Pass idea. too much music out there to buy all the CD's i'd want to listen to. at some point it's wasted money having hundreds of CD's sitting around being listened to once a year or less often. I'd rather just pay $15 a month to rent the music. I wouldn't trust Real with it. Zune was just a crappy device compared to the iphone/touch. too much wasted potential of it being just a music player. Apple I would trust to pay for this service. Google is spyware.
being searched at any border crossing in almost any country is normal. if you want to enter a country you have to agree to a search if they ask. same applies in the free loving europe as well. when i was in the military and we would return to the US after a deployment, they would take every 10th person and tear apart their stuff looking for contraband.
one time i saw a stack of Nvidia brand servers delivered around here. how much data are you sending over the internet and back which is still slower than sending it to the next rack over. does EC2 support CUDA and other technologies to render via the "graphics" card which is faster than x86? i've noticed financial companies are using nvidia servers with CUDA. and these are small shops.
in the end it comes down to having a lot of expensive hardware sitting around not doing anything 90% of the time and crazy support costs being paid. the only question with the cloud nonsense is who has this hardware? the big companies like EMC, HP, Dell, Seagate and Cisco want Amazon to have it since they know Amazon will probably pay up the support costs and will always buy extra for growth. where a smaller shop will buy what they need and upgrade later. and not pay the insane precious metals support costs all the sales people like to push with contract clauses that say we don't really guarantee you this level of service if the parts aren't in stock.
G6 Proliant servers start at $2000 for the low end model and scale up to 144GB RAM. the hardware is so scalable today it's insane. we just buy a lot of RAM because the difference is only a few hundred $$$ and it saves me from a late night hardware upgrade. in fact what i do is max out using the least dense RAM we can afford. RAM is dropping in price by 50% a year so if we need more RAM we buy the more dense RAM next year at the same price and use the existing RAM in another server where we were really financially strapped to buy it as cheap as possible.
we even have a "crap" box of RAM lying around with 30GB or more in there now at any one time that we go to for a quick upgrade of a server from a few years ago when RAM was a lot more. i just upgraded a server from 8GB to 16GB RAM that was bought 2 years ago with a tight budget. RAM is cheap and there is a ton of extra always around.
and EC2 is a good solution for mom and pop. i even recommend it. but what if EC2 takes off and they have to add resources? what if PHB in charge at Amazon says no way because buying all this stuff and paying the ridiculous titanium level support costs will kill the ROI/ROE and every other financial acronym and wall street will hate us? Wall Street hates it when your Return on Assets ratio is too low and buying more assets to support EC2 is not good.
and we still have 10 year old servers doing low end things. unlike Amazon there isn't a monthly payment to keep them around. if you look at Amazon's pricing they charge you for backups, data transfered in an out, etc. they nickel and dime you and once you add it all up buying physical hardware isn't that bad. and the reason is all the "enterprise" level hardware companies are charging Amazon a fortune where in the real world you can get away with less hardware and still have a lot of room to grow without paying Cisco $20,000 a year in support for a WAN card
we have our own datacenter with a DR recovery site in another state via EMC SRDF and some other technologies. EC2 might be good for small companies and we rent out space in our datacenter to smaller companies but for larger ones it doesn't make sense. i work for a hosting company and i always see customers in their hardware cages. what happens if there is a problem with EC2? in typical new economy fashion do they tell you to go away and live with it? how long will it take them to add new resources if these latency issues are true? what do you tell customers in the meantime? our customers will just add a larger pipe. doesn't take that long.
i deal with EMC and other technologies. adding redundancy like EC2 has to have isn't cheap. EMC likes to charge $800 for a 500GB "cheap" hard drive for lower tier storage. of course you need at least 2 for RAID 1 and if you do DR and BCV's then the raw to usable storage ratio is 5 to 1. Of course Seagate execs are loving this along with EMC who jacks up their support costs once you go past a licensed storage amount in your SAN.
backup is more than just snapshots and we use a mix of disk and LTO-4. this year LTO-5 is going to ship. LTO-4 we get 800GB/1/6TB of data on a $50 tape. in reality i have a lot of tapes withi 3TB of data on them. LTO-5 will double that. and we store backups for years since sometime you get a lawsuit or some other financial dispute and need data from 5 years ago. one time we needed data from almost 10 years ago from another company we bought out a while ago. can EC2 do this level of backup? how much will it cost?
Intel and everyone is hyping SSD's and this year when i price out a few new servers i'm going to look at them since the power consumption is so low. at least for the servers where most of the storage backend is EMC SAN
the per hour plans are cheap. but the 24x7 hosting EC2 plans are a lot more expensive than physical hardware. and we're in a cycle where the hardware power is increasing at a very fast pace again. few years ago 4GB RAM was expensive on a server. today when we buy RAM for a newish server we just buy 32GB of RAM. the price difference is so small it doesn't make sense to buy less. $1200 or so for HP branded 32GB RAM. a few hundred $$$ less for 16GB or 8GB.
CPU's power is increasing and next year with Sandy Bridge the I/O rate which has almost always been the big bottleneck will make another huge leap and EC2 won't be able to match the performance increase since they spent obscene millions of $$$ on what is soon going to be obsolete hardware that you can barely sell on ebay.
from what i read a lot of people like to use it for testing. you can "create" a server with a loaded OS in seconds, test and and "destroy" it by lunch. I can do this on the free version of VMWare ESX but i don't know if i can copy a bare instance i set up to another instance. Otherwise we have a sort of old Proliant G5 server with the free version of ESX that we use for testing different things. in the past we used the crappiest server we had. if we needed multiple machines we were screwed. with Vmware and Hyper-V you can even create virtual Windows MCSC clusters easily.
it's aimed at smaller shops with less cash on hand. for larger organizations it doesn't make sense
i priced out a high memory config and it's like $6000 per year or more for 32GB RAM of memory and 8 CPU cores. In a few months Intel will ship server CPU's with 12 logical cores per socket. RAM prices are dirt cheap and at current prices a 36GB RAM HP Proliant DL 380 G6 will run around $13,000 and 72GB of RAM another $2000. and that includes 5 year 4 hour response time support, some of the other extras like advanced ilo, and i forgot what else i added since it's so cheap.
add in the increased bandwidth costs and the supposed cost savings vanish. it's like the ghetto people that lease a lexus or a Benz because they can't afford to buy or they like the lower monthly payments. it's like 2000 all over again. hardware is expensive to ASP's set up shop. hardware prices drop for the power you get and ASP's go out of business.
and i think this is a scam by the hardware companies. i buy an HP server i buy one machine and a few hard drives. to support me Amazon needs to buy a few servers and 5 times the raw space for DR purposes.
any app that requires a server for functionality the developers built in the ability to detect piracy. i've read it's pretty easy. in some instances there was a 4 to 1 ratio of devices hitting the server compared to the amount of purchases
Few months ago Apple changed the rules and they now allow in app purchasing from free apps. before you had to charge for an app to so in-app purchasing. This allows companies to give away stripped down demo type apps with limited functionality and charge for features, new levels, weapons or whatever. And from what i'm reading on the internet it's very easy to detect jailbroken iphones and not allow them to do in app purchasing. pretty much all the piracy that was out there was on jailbroken iphones because it was easy to rip out the app DRM. the solution is to not allow any jailbroken iphone to purchase in app content
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i have a 32GB iphone. i have only 80GB of music. if i listened to music on my iphone 24x7 it would take me weeks to listen to everything once. who cares about having access to your entire music collection if it's going to take you 5 years to listen to it?
i don't even listen to full albums anymore. i have a bunch of smart playlists with different conditions and one with only my favorite songs from the entire collection. and my faves playlist is over 1000 songs and if i could i would cut it down to 100 or so to sync to my iphone but maybe in a future version of itunes.
what is a CRT TV? is that some kind of new technology?
as long as i can remember, the next generation has always looked worse than the previous generation. mostly because they did thing differently. generation X was said to be lazy 15 years ago because they sat around with their computers all the time instead of working in a factory
Reading the forums alot of the apple fans don't seem to like it. They can't figure out what to use it for or they don't like the restrictions. A lot of tablets are coming out this year that are more open.
Tens of millions of people play farmville or watch hulu and you can't do any of that on the ipad. You can only buy more content from apple. I'm wondering if apple did any market research before they crippled it.
Take Two the parent company is losing money for 2009. a lot of money. revenues are down and there is a big loss for the year. and the company is burning a lot of cash. at the current burn rate there is a good chance of Chapter 11 in 2010.
netbooks have crappy margins. building a tablet where you are forced to buy "content" just to use it is a stealth way of increasing average revenue per unit
you just wait
they just ported the Unreal engine to the iphone. forgot which version. Kindle version is next
Madden 2011 in black and white? is it 3d accelerated like on the iphone?
so then hire a lawyer and fight it out in court or don't make music that sounds too much like someone else's music.
in a library you have to wait for a new book or the one you want. i want to borrow some CD's but they are in a branch that's an hour away and i don't want to spend the time going there. all the kids want what they want NOW
if Courtney Love doesn't like it she can record in her garage like David Grohl and just release to iTunes with no promotion and hope someone finds her music. then she can save up to pay the upfront costs of the tour and risk her own money and property.
cry babies have people giving them millions of dollars up front with a lot of risk of the loss of investment and they think they deserve more but they don't want to risk their own money for their ventures.
if it's that easy why haven't banks pushed into lending to musicians before and instead poured money into RE? reason is that most music acts lose money and banks like stability with a lower interest rate than lending to 10 acts and losing money on 9 of them. banks also want something called collateral in a lot of cases. a lot of rich people like Annie Lebowitz who borrowed a lot of live in luxury put up a lot of their works and property as collateral. same with Michael Jackson. He signed over a lot of property to hedge funds and now everyone is monetizing his name to pay off his debts
this is where record companies come in who act like venture capitalists.
never had a Zune, but liked the Zune Pass idea. too much music out there to buy all the CD's i'd want to listen to. at some point it's wasted money having hundreds of CD's sitting around being listened to once a year or less often. I'd rather just pay $15 a month to rent the music. I wouldn't trust Real with it. Zune was just a crappy device compared to the iphone/touch. too much wasted potential of it being just a music player. Apple I would trust to pay for this service. Google is spyware.
being searched at any border crossing in almost any country is normal. if you want to enter a country you have to agree to a search if they ask. same applies in the free loving europe as well. when i was in the military and we would return to the US after a deployment, they would take every 10th person and tear apart their stuff looking for contraband.
too bad a lot of modern cell phones receive email and texts via wifi
one time i saw a stack of Nvidia brand servers delivered around here. how much data are you sending over the internet and back which is still slower than sending it to the next rack over. does EC2 support CUDA and other technologies to render via the "graphics" card which is faster than x86? i've noticed financial companies are using nvidia servers with CUDA. and these are small shops.
in the end it comes down to having a lot of expensive hardware sitting around not doing anything 90% of the time and crazy support costs being paid. the only question with the cloud nonsense is who has this hardware? the big companies like EMC, HP, Dell, Seagate and Cisco want Amazon to have it since they know Amazon will probably pay up the support costs and will always buy extra for growth. where a smaller shop will buy what they need and upgrade later. and not pay the insane precious metals support costs all the sales people like to push with contract clauses that say we don't really guarantee you this level of service if the parts aren't in stock.
G6 Proliant servers start at $2000 for the low end model and scale up to 144GB RAM. the hardware is so scalable today it's insane. we just buy a lot of RAM because the difference is only a few hundred $$$ and it saves me from a late night hardware upgrade. in fact what i do is max out using the least dense RAM we can afford. RAM is dropping in price by 50% a year so if we need more RAM we buy the more dense RAM next year at the same price and use the existing RAM in another server where we were really financially strapped to buy it as cheap as possible.
we even have a "crap" box of RAM lying around with 30GB or more in there now at any one time that we go to for a quick upgrade of a server from a few years ago when RAM was a lot more. i just upgraded a server from 8GB to 16GB RAM that was bought 2 years ago with a tight budget. RAM is cheap and there is a ton of extra always around.
and EC2 is a good solution for mom and pop. i even recommend it. but what if EC2 takes off and they have to add resources? what if PHB in charge at Amazon says no way because buying all this stuff and paying the ridiculous titanium level support costs will kill the ROI/ROE and every other financial acronym and wall street will hate us? Wall Street hates it when your Return on Assets ratio is too low and buying more assets to support EC2 is not good.
and we still have 10 year old servers doing low end things. unlike Amazon there isn't a monthly payment to keep them around. if you look at Amazon's pricing they charge you for backups, data transfered in an out, etc. they nickel and dime you and once you add it all up buying physical hardware isn't that bad. and the reason is all the "enterprise" level hardware companies are charging Amazon a fortune where in the real world you can get away with less hardware and still have a lot of room to grow without paying Cisco $20,000 a year in support for a WAN card
we have our own datacenter with a DR recovery site in another state via EMC SRDF and some other technologies. EC2 might be good for small companies and we rent out space in our datacenter to smaller companies but for larger ones it doesn't make sense. i work for a hosting company and i always see customers in their hardware cages. what happens if there is a problem with EC2? in typical new economy fashion do they tell you to go away and live with it? how long will it take them to add new resources if these latency issues are true? what do you tell customers in the meantime? our customers will just add a larger pipe. doesn't take that long.
i deal with EMC and other technologies. adding redundancy like EC2 has to have isn't cheap. EMC likes to charge $800 for a 500GB "cheap" hard drive for lower tier storage. of course you need at least 2 for RAID 1 and if you do DR and BCV's then the raw to usable storage ratio is 5 to 1. Of course Seagate execs are loving this along with EMC who jacks up their support costs once you go past a licensed storage amount in your SAN.
backup is more than just snapshots and we use a mix of disk and LTO-4. this year LTO-5 is going to ship. LTO-4 we get 800GB/1/6TB of data on a $50 tape. in reality i have a lot of tapes withi 3TB of data on them. LTO-5 will double that. and we store backups for years since sometime you get a lawsuit or some other financial dispute and need data from 5 years ago. one time we needed data from almost 10 years ago from another company we bought out a while ago. can EC2 do this level of backup? how much will it cost?
Intel and everyone is hyping SSD's and this year when i price out a few new servers i'm going to look at them since the power consumption is so low. at least for the servers where most of the storage backend is EMC SAN
the per hour plans are cheap. but the 24x7 hosting EC2 plans are a lot more expensive than physical hardware. and we're in a cycle where the hardware power is increasing at a very fast pace again. few years ago 4GB RAM was expensive on a server. today when we buy RAM for a newish server we just buy 32GB of RAM. the price difference is so small it doesn't make sense to buy less. $1200 or so for HP branded 32GB RAM. a few hundred $$$ less for 16GB or 8GB.
CPU's power is increasing and next year with Sandy Bridge the I/O rate which has almost always been the big bottleneck will make another huge leap and EC2 won't be able to match the performance increase since they spent obscene millions of $$$ on what is soon going to be obsolete hardware that you can barely sell on ebay.
from what i read a lot of people like to use it for testing. you can "create" a server with a loaded OS in seconds, test and and "destroy" it by lunch. I can do this on the free version of VMWare ESX but i don't know if i can copy a bare instance i set up to another instance. Otherwise we have a sort of old Proliant G5 server with the free version of ESX that we use for testing different things. in the past we used the crappiest server we had. if we needed multiple machines we were screwed. with Vmware and Hyper-V you can even create virtual Windows MCSC clusters easily.
it's aimed at smaller shops with less cash on hand. for larger organizations it doesn't make sense
i priced out a high memory config and it's like $6000 per year or more for 32GB RAM of memory and 8 CPU cores. In a few months Intel will ship server CPU's with 12 logical cores per socket. RAM prices are dirt cheap and at current prices a 36GB RAM HP Proliant DL 380 G6 will run around $13,000 and 72GB of RAM another $2000. and that includes 5 year 4 hour response time support, some of the other extras like advanced ilo, and i forgot what else i added since it's so cheap.
add in the increased bandwidth costs and the supposed cost savings vanish. it's like the ghetto people that lease a lexus or a Benz because they can't afford to buy or they like the lower monthly payments. it's like 2000 all over again. hardware is expensive to ASP's set up shop. hardware prices drop for the power you get and ASP's go out of business.
and i think this is a scam by the hardware companies. i buy an HP server i buy one machine and a few hard drives. to support me Amazon needs to buy a few servers and 5 times the raw space for DR purposes.
any app that requires a server for functionality the developers built in the ability to detect piracy. i've read it's pretty easy. in some instances there was a 4 to 1 ratio of devices hitting the server compared to the amount of purchases
Few months ago Apple changed the rules and they now allow in app purchasing from free apps. before you had to charge for an app to so in-app purchasing. This allows companies to give away stripped down demo type apps with limited functionality and charge for features, new levels, weapons or whatever. And from what i'm reading on the internet it's very easy to detect jailbroken iphones and not allow them to do in app purchasing. pretty much all the piracy that was out there was on jailbroken iphones because it was easy to rip out the app DRM. the solution is to not allow any jailbroken iphone to purchase in app content