I think that the low revenues are the key. All these services have a certain fixed overhead, and of course Roxio's results also reflect startup costs.
Online music sales, however, are not necessarily an example of the old "I'm losing on every sale but I'll make it up in volume" joke. The iTunes store, for example, is making money, and Apple are expecting the margins to increase exponentially with growth, as they tell here. Considering that Apple have obviously spent way more on promotion than Roxio, it does appear that profits can follow if sales can be achieved.
You claim that their model doesn't generate revenue (and I think you may mean profits, not revenue)
They meant revenue. Napster's revenues are listed as US$3.6 million for its first three months of operation. By comparison, the iTunes store topped a million in its first week, without the benefit of a holiday rush to get new, empty players into people's hands.
The pod2man tool that comes with Perl makes the process relatively painless. POD isn't really Perl-specific, it works well to build standalone documentation.
Wouldn't that require a reverse engineered implementation of apple's APIs?
Well, Cocoa is really just a newer release of OpenStep, so the guts of it aren't anything altogether new or super secret. Actually it looks like the Zaurus thing is mostly a port of GNUstep, so it's not even entirely new stuff.
Personally, I'd be more intrested on being able to run OS X apps on desktop intel linux
You can sort of do that already. Obviously, you would want to avoid Mac-specific things in your program, but there should still be plenty of common ground.
These people have the display down to something resembling a reasonable price.
Have you played with the MiniVID cameras (dealers abound) that usually go into microscopes? They also come with a little fixed-focus lens that might work out pretty well for the types of things a magnifying glass would normally do. Worth a look anyway.
That all said, I think this kind of arrangment would still be awfully clunky, what with cables and batteries to deal with. Maybe it would be reasonable in a home or office setting though.
They're kind of like the plastic zippy wire ties with a slot to help hold the cables together, but being Velcro they're reusable. These work out really well if you need to tame the wires but still want to move stuff around a lot.
Guys, I have a little secret for you.... Women think gadget watches are totally gay.
You may have a point. Recently I started wearing an old watch I bought in the 80s, a stark black and white thingy with no features. Two female friends were very quick to notice this and make positive remarks.
But both of those women are totally gay, and so am I for that matter, so I guess it really doesn't have much at all to do with what you were writing about, so I'll just shut up and go away now.
SetsLower is a function that gets a lower bound in a set of sets
A counterargument is that both might be more clearly written as set_slower and sets_lower (add studlycaps to taste).
One place where I would miss case sensitivity is where FOO() is the macro version of function foo(). Admittedly that's fairly weak stuff and the world wouldn't end without the ability to do that.
A better argument for keeping sensitivity might be in programming languages that allow names with a larger character set than ASCII. In something like Unicode where different languages are sharing character codes, case insensitivity is bound to do something unexpected and weird sooner than later.
Huh? SIMD is nifty, but it's not magic. The 1GHz G4 that encodes my stuff using iTunes takes real live time to do it encoding, more than enough for the Superdrive to go idle and spin down between songs. If the encoding was even close to keeping up with the drive, that wouldn't have a chance to happen.
I also have a massive assortment of music CDs that I want to rip and catalog.
When you say "rip", are you also intending to encode these with MP3 or whatever? If so, you're pretty likely to be CPU bound, so ripping from multiple drives isn't going to buy you much.
If the idea is just to queue up multiple drives so you can wander away for longer, never mind.
OMG, this line of thought makes me really scared of my insurance company.
Insurers, HMOs and such are scary for somewhat different reasons. Their job is to hold onto as much of your premium as they can, and keep it away from drug/device/diagnostic producers and healthcare providers unless there's no way around it. [Some plans are much more aggressive about this than others.] The bad news is that tradeoffs are being made on your behalf, between the absolute best treatment for a given problem and the least expensive one; the good news is that at least sometimes, manufacturers are pushed into offering more bang for the buck for a given treatment, to keep it in the running. You (in the form of those preiums that get higher every year) and the insurer both lose when a patented treatment comes along for some condition when there aren't any suitable alternatives available.
Not quite. Once a drug is on the market, there is no need to get it approved for additional uses unless the manufacturer wants to promote or advertise those additional uses. It can be prescribed without all that.
Where drug companies can get into trouble is if an over-eager rep goes and starts touting the unapproved uses to clients. This information needs to be spread through independent channels only, or agencies like FDA get really, really pissed. Getting those agencies mad is a really poor idea.
Re:WMA support in iPod firmware?
on
No WMA for HP iPod
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yeah, it could be done as a firmware update, if Apple needed it. iPod is based around the PortalPlayer PP5002 controller chip, and WMA is one of the codecs that PP's reference firmware already supports. There are other questions, of course, like which iPod models would have enough available memory to make use of yet another codec and so on.
Tell that to the generic drug manufacturers, and the companies that have been cranking out the same public domain OTC remedies forever.
Really, drug manufacturers don't mind at all if you get better from disease A and live a bit longer, because they'll get to see you when you come down with disease B a few years later. See, the neat thing about the medical industry, from a financial standpoint, is that pretty much everyone manages to get real sick and even die sooner or later, so there's always going to be an opportunity to sell something.
why not just right-click on the file and choose "convert to MP3"?
Oh, so that's what the single mouse button is about, copy protection! It's all so clear to me now.
Really, if you try the "convert to MP3" thingy on a protected AAC file, you get a dialog box saying "'Foo' could not be converted because protected files cannot be converted to other formats."
The easiest way to convert is to burn the tracks to CDDA, then import to iTunes as MP3.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the low revenues are the key. All these services have a certain fixed overhead, and of course Roxio's results also reflect startup costs. Online music sales, however, are not necessarily an example of the old "I'm losing on every sale but I'll make it up in volume" joke. The iTunes store, for example, is making money, and Apple are expecting the margins to increase exponentially with growth, as they tell here. Considering that Apple have obviously spent way more on promotion than Roxio, it does appear that profits can follow if sales can be achieved.
Yes, they're sticking to their promises. You can get the source to WebCore v125 from this page.
That was a sequel to LeGorso, which really wasn't as good.
Will someone be cramming a G6 (or whatever they're on) board into a 5150 case?
The pod2man tool that comes with Perl makes the process relatively painless. POD isn't really Perl-specific, it works well to build standalone documentation.
Well, Cocoa is really just a newer release of OpenStep, so the guts of it aren't anything altogether new or super secret. Actually it looks like the Zaurus thing is mostly a port of GNUstep, so it's not even entirely new stuff.
You can sort of do that already. Obviously, you would want to avoid Mac-specific things in your program, but there should still be plenty of common ground.
Have you played with the MiniVID cameras (dealers abound) that usually go into microscopes? They also come with a little fixed-focus lens that might work out pretty well for the types of things a magnifying glass would normally do. Worth a look anyway.
That all said, I think this kind of arrangment would still be awfully clunky, what with cables and batteries to deal with. Maybe it would be reasonable in a home or office setting though.
They're kind of like the plastic zippy wire ties with a slot to help hold the cables together, but being Velcro they're reusable. These work out really well if you need to tame the wires but still want to move stuff around a lot.
Don't worry about it too much. Apple owns a big chunk of Akamai, and is also its largest customer.
A counterargument is that both might be more clearly written as set_slower and sets_lower (add studlycaps to taste).
One place where I would miss case sensitivity is where FOO() is the macro version of function foo(). Admittedly that's fairly weak stuff and the world wouldn't end without the ability to do that.
A better argument for keeping sensitivity might be in programming languages that allow names with a larger character set than ASCII. In something like Unicode where different languages are sharing character codes, case insensitivity is bound to do something unexpected and weird sooner than later.
Huh? SIMD is nifty, but it's not magic. The 1GHz G4 that encodes my stuff using iTunes takes real live time to do it encoding, more than enough for the Superdrive to go idle and spin down between songs. If the encoding was even close to keeping up with the drive, that wouldn't have a chance to happen.
....except that stuff like this can't really be measured too accurately?
Insurers, HMOs and such are scary for somewhat different reasons. Their job is to hold onto as much of your premium as they can, and keep it away from drug/device/diagnostic producers and healthcare providers unless there's no way around it. [Some plans are much more aggressive about this than others.] The bad news is that tradeoffs are being made on your behalf, between the absolute best treatment for a given problem and the least expensive one; the good news is that at least sometimes, manufacturers are pushed into offering more bang for the buck for a given treatment, to keep it in the running. You (in the form of those preiums that get higher every year) and the insurer both lose when a patented treatment comes along for some condition when there aren't any suitable alternatives available.
Where drug companies can get into trouble is if an over-eager rep goes and starts touting the unapproved uses to clients. This information needs to be spread through independent channels only, or agencies like FDA get really, really pissed. Getting those agencies mad is a really poor idea.
Yeah, it could be done as a firmware update, if Apple needed it. iPod is based around the PortalPlayer PP5002 controller chip, and WMA is one of the codecs that PP's reference firmware already supports. There are other questions, of course, like which iPod models would have enough available memory to make use of yet another codec and so on.
Tell that to the generic drug manufacturers, and the companies that have been cranking out the same public domain OTC remedies forever.
Really, drug manufacturers don't mind at all if you get better from disease A and live a bit longer, because they'll get to see you when you come down with disease B a few years later. See, the neat thing about the medical industry, from a financial standpoint, is that pretty much everyone manages to get real sick and even die sooner or later, so there's always going to be an opportunity to sell something.
Oh, so that's what the single mouse button is about, copy protection! It's all so clear to me now.
Really, if you try the "convert to MP3" thingy on a protected AAC file, you get a dialog box saying "'Foo' could not be converted because protected files cannot be converted to other formats."
The easiest way to convert is to burn the tracks to CDDA, then import to iTunes as MP3.
At any rate, it sure is amusing to watch all the "fight the man!" BS being tossed around here. Apple's view toward DRM is "we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content." -- they fully expected this.
Well, csh is the Berkeley shell, and with FreeBSD being based on BSD and all, it's just one of those things you kind of expect to see....
Well... the infamous burning PowerBook LiIon batteries were made by Sony, so make of it what you will...
36 bits was fairly common once upon a time, but no longer. Unisys still have a 36-bit series, but they're the last of the breed. See here.
Big scary IBM boxes are where you see the 31 bit weirdness.