I totally agree. I dont understand how people can hate microsoft, but then write their own ms-lookalike products and think they are somehow better.
If the goal of evolution is just to bring outlook-level functionality to unix people, then cool, it looks like they did a good job. If the goal is to design a superior mail client then this seems to indicate they feel outlook is a superior client?
It seems like it would be smarter for them to put the andrea VM into the 2.5.x tree and switch the 2.4.x tree to the current vm in the -ac kernels (which has since been patched and is sufficiently stable, from what i have heard).
Besides, i've read that the VM has been screwed for the majority of the 2.4 kernel, both before and after the AA VM was introduced.
Re:Mac-only ..... nobody seems to get it.
on
The Guts Of An iPod
·
· Score: 1
They outsorced the software development work, that was discussed earlier. So basically apple can take credit for picking the components, industrial design, and maybe the UI. When i say maybe the UI, there are industrial design firms that will do physical casings in addition to screen specs for products etc.
Someone else posted that supposedly Apple is barely cutting a profit with this, i can believe it. If they have a $250 bill of materials, factor in $10 profit, add 40-50% for retail channel costs, and you're right at $400. I would expect them to do a cost reduction on their design sometime in the next 6 months, or to introduce a new design with additional features, it's fairly standard.
Re:Mac-only ..... nobody seems to get it.
on
The Guts Of An iPod
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I posted this on another thread, but i'll explain more here.
Apple created iPod to make a profit on iPod. They did not create iPods to break even on iPod and proliferate the mac platform, nor did they create iPod to take a loss on iPod and proliferate the mac platform.
At the very worst, Apple is avoiding additional software costs on the iPod project by leaving it as Mac only and not worrying about other platforms. But the truth here is that Apple did not make a $400 MP3 player so they could sell more $800 desktop computers. That would be the most ludicrous marketing campaign ever, since any company could come out with a $500 MP3 player next month with superior features, support all platforms, and invalidate any need to purchase both a mac and a computer.
I really dont understand why people think this is unique to a Mac. If you look at what's really going on here, Apple outsourced a lot of the work on the iPod. Chances are, the companies that did this work retained some rights to the work they did. So, if any other company wants to make an MP3 player, they could easily come in with a similar offering to the iPod, at a similar price, with whatever customizations they want, by simply contacting the companies Apple outsourced the work to.
Really, honestly, wake up and smell the maple nut crunch.
USB can put out 500mA to power a device. A microdrive draws 300mA during a constant read, and i believe peaks at 500mA during spinup. So it would be fine to power it off USB.
Yeah, the ipaq has been able to use a microdrive through a sleeve for a while too. The difference is that you have to go out and spend $300 on the microdrive before you can use it, and you only get 1GB. With the iPod, it comes with the 5gb drive.
As was made by another poster, i think the only downside to the iPod is the UI, with a color touch screen you would have a CE class device with a built in 5gb drive, and you could almost certainly match the price point.
Hahaha, you have a definite point there. The iPod hardware was designed with a totally different user and UI in mind than the standard CE device, you are indeed correct. On that note though, considering the price difference between CE devices (an ipaq is $500 still) and the iPod ($400), it seems like you could get a pretty decent color touch screen.:)
Yeah, i'm aware that the arm7 line are slower clock speeds than the strongarm processors being used in CE devices. We've done work on both at my company. The difference is pretty minimal though, unless you are trying to do video most users wouldn't be able to tell.
The big thing about the iPod is that it's 32MB of ram _and_ a 5GB hard drive. PocketPC devices have large amounts of RAM but use flash for static storage, which is expensive (on a per MB scale) and requires a lot of board space. To get a hard drive into a pocket PC, you have to do something like the compaq piggyback system and use a IBM microdrive. kinda clunky.
It's not quite as ideal as i make it out to be - the battery life estimates on the iPod are 10 hours assuming you are playing 160kbps MP3 and you are using the disk in a predictable way - it prebuffers 32mb of data. If you used a real operating system on that thing, it would want to access the drive a lot more, and your battery life would sink significantly.
No, Apple is not subsidizing the cost of this player. That would be the most futile business plan ever, since people aren't going to buy a $700 macintosh so they can use a $400 MP3 player.
In terms of the components, the bill of materials on that player is probably $200, maybe $250 if they couldn't get a good price on the drives, but i doubt it.
It's also not a conspiracy. I've read quite a few things that indicate the iPod can show up as a standard firewire hard drive, which simplify the problem to just needing to support the macintosh filesystem (is it HFS? i dont use mac sorry) on other platforms.
Yeah, the trick about drives is that drive manufacturers are holding the prices high, unless you place bulk orders and embed the drives in some product. IBM has the same system going on with the microdrive, you could make an MP3 player with a 1GB microdrive for less than it costs to buy a 1GB microdrive on the street.
The iPod components probably aren't worth much without the hard drive:)
You'd be surprised at how few decent MP3 players are made in house. Outsourcing this kind of thing is actually pretty common now, since companies that have the money to manufacture dont have the interest in dirtying their hands with software guys to make the player. Also, portal player has a custom chip, that's no small achievement.
Besides design and desktop integration, Apple has a lot of cash. They have the ability to buy in bulk, like purchasing 50,000 toshiba hard drives all at once, which drives the cost down significantly. Other MP3 device manufacturers have to buy smaller quantities, and end up paying higher prices as a result. Lucky for you, these costs get factored into the final price. The fact that the iPod costs $400 is really amazing - it means the toshiba hard drives (which street for $400 themselves) probably cost apple $100 or less.
In terms of open-source on embedded devices, that's a tricky subject. Do you allow people to write plug ins? Do you have kernel/user mode seperation even? Most of these devices (except for rio/dell receiver and rio car) dont have any sort of userland protection on them, so you can do things like erase the flash parts from any executable code. So it introduces the subject of security, how do you stop a virus, do you have to implement certificates or keys on the device, etc. very messy subject.
SDMI is pretty much a joke at this point. I dont think anybody has implemented anything more than SDMI phase 1 compliance, which just required some sort of unique identifier on the device/media. So when they say SDMI compliant, it's almost certainly just a unique ID on the processor, which is nothing special in and of itself.
Re:It's great to have sites like this
on
The Guts Of An iPod
·
· Score: 4, Redundant
Linux is available for the arm7tdmi. This is different from the portal player processer, since portal player (iirc) has a dual core cpu. The second core lets them do mp3 encoding with, presumably, the standard ARM encoding library.
The funny part about "can it run linux" here is that the line is suddenly blurred. This device is $400, has a fast processor, 5gb hard drive, and 32mb of ram - much nicer features than your standard PDA. Additionally, it would be (relatively) straight forward to enable all the standard device features (read: mp3 playback) under linux.
Yep, an iPod will totally outclass any windows CE devices we are likely to see in the next few years.
By auto-upgrade i assume you are referring to the dialog box that says "There is a new version of media player available. Would you like to upgrade?" and has a "yes" and a "no" button.
I get that once a week or so and hit "no", just because i'm usually watching...a video, and can't be bothered to upgrade software.
Yeah, but 1000 cameras to generate the data wont be cheap either.
It seems like you could reduce the cost by distributing the load a bit more - find a solution for 50 cameras, then buy 20 of those solutions. This would allow you to use cheaper components and not be constrained by throughput performance. The calculated network throughput was 90MB/s, which puts it in the realm of gigabit ethernet if you try and push all the data to a single location.
You could probably divide things into tiers - you have 1000 cameras connected to 20 machines on 50 seperate 100baseT networks. The 20 machines operate as a pre-tape cache, so they should have fast disk access and a reasonable amount of space. On each of these machines, have a second interface to a gigabit backbone, where there are 2 or 3 machines that archive to tape.
It's not going to be cheap, but you're talking about 8TB/day of storage with 1000 cameras. There are no cheap solutions for that kind of problem.
That's cool, assuming you play straight through your playlist. That style of buffering assumes you aren't skipping tracks too often, since it has to look at the next 4-5 tracks in the queue and prebuffer them.
I'm sorry, but most MP3 players (such as the rio family (excluding the empeg), compaq family, nomad family) use a proprietary usb interface to transfer content, and most certainly do _not_ have a standard "music" folder. You have to use specific software to transfer the content down. They dont implement standard USB bulk storage, so you can only use them on platforms that the vendor chooses to support.
It would be pointless for microsoft to try things they didn't think they could get away with. i.e. yes, they will control the hardware and the software, they will control who can develop for it, and if you dont like it, well, open source is for you.:)
They have had prototypes for 10 months now. Manufacturing prototypes for 3.
Re:Useful floppy-disk or CD-RW replacement, maybe
on
Quarter-sized CD's?
·
· Score: 1
Indeed dataplay has been mismarketed. This is because their technological abilities fell behind their marketing machine. Last january at CES was supposed to be the big DataPlay coming out, where they would reveal a whole line of DataPlay enabled products, but they ended up having less than 5 hand manufactured read-only drives available. Some time later on they revamped the entire design and came out with second generation drives, still read only. Supposedly now they have another rev of the drives that support write-once.
The intended market is portable devices. Someone had mentioned using one of these in a pc card type 3 bay (double type2, IIRC), i dont know if it would actually fit. The drives themselves are bulky and relatively heavy. They also dont have basic things like manual eject.
Actually, with appropriate buffering and power management, spinning media based players average almost as little as flash or MMC based players.
The big hit on spinning media is the spinup, most drives draw a huge amount of power (up to 500mA) on spinup and a more reasonable amount (300mA or so) during a full transfer. On many devices spinup takes longer than the actual transfer, but the draw isn't peaked at 500mA the whole time.
Actually, bundling MP3 players with computers really hasn't worked out well. Dell and Apple have both tried it with SonicBlue's Rio whatever, and it hasn't done much for them.
It certainly wont be a cheap and highly portable player. DataPlay is the only company making these drives, it's not licensed technology to date. So you will have to pay their premium, plus bundle their media for their price. In terms of highly portable, getting skip free optics takes skill, and we're talking about a relatively new company on their first (actually, second, but who is counting) try. I have a feeling the product will deploy and people will find it's difficult to make true skip free players for jogging, etc.
In terms of 3, i firmly disbelieve in "you will have no choice" type issues. I will choose to do what i like - such as only listen to indy music that i can download for free, or purchase per song.
Except the media is not currently re-writeable. There is talk of doing this in the future.
One thing that nobody has mentioned is where DataPlay is getting its funding. They've gone through 4 rounds of fundraising and gotten over $100mil from electronics companies and major record labels.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually they have a partnership with harmon kardon to manufacture and release these devices under the HK label.
I totally agree. I dont understand how people can hate microsoft, but then write their own ms-lookalike products and think they are somehow better.
If the goal of evolution is just to bring outlook-level functionality to unix people, then cool, it looks like they did a good job. If the goal is to design a superior mail client then this seems to indicate they feel outlook is a superior client?
It seems like it would be smarter for them to put the andrea VM into the 2.5.x tree and switch the 2.4.x tree to the current vm in the -ac kernels (which has since been patched and is sufficiently stable, from what i have heard).
Besides, i've read that the VM has been screwed for the majority of the 2.4 kernel, both before and after the AA VM was introduced.
They outsorced the software development work, that was discussed earlier. So basically apple can take credit for picking the components, industrial design, and maybe the UI. When i say maybe the UI, there are industrial design firms that will do physical casings in addition to screen specs for products etc.
Someone else posted that supposedly Apple is barely cutting a profit with this, i can believe it. If they have a $250 bill of materials, factor in $10 profit, add 40-50% for retail channel costs, and you're right at $400. I would expect them to do a cost reduction on their design sometime in the next 6 months, or to introduce a new design with additional features, it's fairly standard.
I posted this on another thread, but i'll explain more here.
Apple created iPod to make a profit on iPod. They did not create iPods to break even on iPod and proliferate the mac platform, nor did they create iPod to take a loss on iPod and proliferate the mac platform.
At the very worst, Apple is avoiding additional software costs on the iPod project by leaving it as Mac only and not worrying about other platforms. But the truth here is that Apple did not make a $400 MP3 player so they could sell more $800 desktop computers. That would be the most ludicrous marketing campaign ever, since any company could come out with a $500 MP3 player next month with superior features, support all platforms, and invalidate any need to purchase both a mac and a computer.
I really dont understand why people think this is unique to a Mac. If you look at what's really going on here, Apple outsourced a lot of the work on the iPod. Chances are, the companies that did this work retained some rights to the work they did. So, if any other company wants to make an MP3 player, they could easily come in with a similar offering to the iPod, at a similar price, with whatever customizations they want, by simply contacting the companies Apple outsourced the work to.
Really, honestly, wake up and smell the maple nut crunch.
USB can put out 500mA to power a device. A microdrive draws 300mA during a constant read, and i believe peaks at 500mA during spinup. So it would be fine to power it off USB.
Yeah, the ipaq has been able to use a microdrive through a sleeve for a while too. The difference is that you have to go out and spend $300 on the microdrive before you can use it, and you only get 1GB. With the iPod, it comes with the 5gb drive.
As was made by another poster, i think the only downside to the iPod is the UI, with a color touch screen you would have a CE class device with a built in 5gb drive, and you could almost certainly match the price point.
Hahaha, you have a definite point there. The iPod hardware was designed with a totally different user and UI in mind than the standard CE device, you are indeed correct. On that note though, considering the price difference between CE devices (an ipaq is $500 still) and the iPod ($400), it seems like you could get a pretty decent color touch screen. :)
Yeah, i'm aware that the arm7 line are slower clock speeds than the strongarm processors being used in CE devices. We've done work on both at my company. The difference is pretty minimal though, unless you are trying to do video most users wouldn't be able to tell.
The big thing about the iPod is that it's 32MB of ram _and_ a 5GB hard drive. PocketPC devices have large amounts of RAM but use flash for static storage, which is expensive (on a per MB scale) and requires a lot of board space. To get a hard drive into a pocket PC, you have to do something like the compaq piggyback system and use a IBM microdrive. kinda clunky.
It's not quite as ideal as i make it out to be - the battery life estimates on the iPod are 10 hours assuming you are playing 160kbps MP3 and you are using the disk in a predictable way - it prebuffers 32mb of data. If you used a real operating system on that thing, it would want to access the drive a lot more, and your battery life would sink significantly.
No, Apple is not subsidizing the cost of this player. That would be the most futile business plan ever, since people aren't going to buy a $700 macintosh so they can use a $400 MP3 player.
In terms of the components, the bill of materials on that player is probably $200, maybe $250 if they couldn't get a good price on the drives, but i doubt it.
It's also not a conspiracy. I've read quite a few things that indicate the iPod can show up as a standard firewire hard drive, which simplify the problem to just needing to support the macintosh filesystem (is it HFS? i dont use mac sorry) on other platforms.
Yeah, the trick about drives is that drive manufacturers are holding the prices high, unless you place bulk orders and embed the drives in some product. IBM has the same system going on with the microdrive, you could make an MP3 player with a 1GB microdrive for less than it costs to buy a 1GB microdrive on the street.
:)
The iPod components probably aren't worth much without the hard drive
You'd be surprised at how few decent MP3 players are made in house. Outsourcing this kind of thing is actually pretty common now, since companies that have the money to manufacture dont have the interest in dirtying their hands with software guys to make the player. Also, portal player has a custom chip, that's no small achievement.
Besides design and desktop integration, Apple has a lot of cash. They have the ability to buy in bulk, like purchasing 50,000 toshiba hard drives all at once, which drives the cost down significantly. Other MP3 device manufacturers have to buy smaller quantities, and end up paying higher prices as a result. Lucky for you, these costs get factored into the final price. The fact that the iPod costs $400 is really amazing - it means the toshiba hard drives (which street for $400 themselves) probably cost apple $100 or less.
In terms of open-source on embedded devices, that's a tricky subject. Do you allow people to write plug ins? Do you have kernel/user mode seperation even? Most of these devices (except for rio/dell receiver and rio car) dont have any sort of userland protection on them, so you can do things like erase the flash parts from any executable code. So it introduces the subject of security, how do you stop a virus, do you have to implement certificates or keys on the device, etc. very messy subject.
SDMI is pretty much a joke at this point. I dont think anybody has implemented anything more than SDMI phase 1 compliance, which just required some sort of unique identifier on the device/media. So when they say SDMI compliant, it's almost certainly just a unique ID on the processor, which is nothing special in and of itself.
Linux is available for the arm7tdmi. This is different from the portal player processer, since portal player (iirc) has a dual core cpu. The second core lets them do mp3 encoding with, presumably, the standard ARM encoding library.
The funny part about "can it run linux" here is that the line is suddenly blurred. This device is $400, has a fast processor, 5gb hard drive, and 32mb of ram - much nicer features than your standard PDA. Additionally, it would be (relatively) straight forward to enable all the standard device features (read: mp3 playback) under linux.
Yep, an iPod will totally outclass any windows CE devices we are likely to see in the next few years.
By auto-upgrade i assume you are referring to the dialog box that says "There is a new version of media player available. Would you like to upgrade?" and has a "yes" and a "no" button.
I get that once a week or so and hit "no", just because i'm usually watching...a video, and can't be bothered to upgrade software.
Yeah, but 1000 cameras to generate the data wont be cheap either.
It seems like you could reduce the cost by distributing the load a bit more - find a solution for 50 cameras, then buy 20 of those solutions. This would allow you to use cheaper components and not be constrained by throughput performance. The calculated network throughput was 90MB/s, which puts it in the realm of gigabit ethernet if you try and push all the data to a single location.
You could probably divide things into tiers - you have 1000 cameras connected to 20 machines on 50 seperate 100baseT networks. The 20 machines operate as a pre-tape cache, so they should have fast disk access and a reasonable amount of space. On each of these machines, have a second interface to a gigabit backbone, where there are 2 or 3 machines that archive to tape.
It's not going to be cheap, but you're talking about 8TB/day of storage with 1000 cameras. There are no cheap solutions for that kind of problem.
That's cool, assuming you play straight through your playlist. That style of buffering assumes you aren't skipping tracks too often, since it has to look at the next 4-5 tracks in the queue and prebuffer them.
It's still pretty impressive though.
He also forgot to make the firmware crash frequently - i've been told this is a problem with the archos player. Also he forgot to make it ugly.
I'm sorry, but most MP3 players (such as the rio family (excluding the empeg), compaq family, nomad family) use a proprietary usb interface to transfer content, and most certainly do _not_ have a standard "music" folder. You have to use specific software to transfer the content down. They dont implement standard USB bulk storage, so you can only use them on platforms that the vendor chooses to support.
It would be pointless for microsoft to try things they didn't think they could get away with. i.e. yes, they will control the hardware and the software, they will control who can develop for it, and if you dont like it, well, open source is for you. :)
They have had prototypes for 10 months now. Manufacturing prototypes for 3.
Indeed dataplay has been mismarketed. This is because their technological abilities fell behind their marketing machine. Last january at CES was supposed to be the big DataPlay coming out, where they would reveal a whole line of DataPlay enabled products, but they ended up having less than 5 hand manufactured read-only drives available. Some time later on they revamped the entire design and came out with second generation drives, still read only. Supposedly now they have another rev of the drives that support write-once.
The intended market is portable devices. Someone had mentioned using one of these in a pc card type 3 bay (double type2, IIRC), i dont know if it would actually fit. The drives themselves are bulky and relatively heavy. They also dont have basic things like manual eject.
Actually, with appropriate buffering and power management, spinning media based players average almost as little as flash or MMC based players.
The big hit on spinning media is the spinup, most drives draw a huge amount of power (up to 500mA) on spinup and a more reasonable amount (300mA or so) during a full transfer. On many devices spinup takes longer than the actual transfer, but the draw isn't peaked at 500mA the whole time.
Actually, bundling MP3 players with computers really hasn't worked out well. Dell and Apple have both tried it with SonicBlue's Rio whatever, and it hasn't done much for them.
It certainly wont be a cheap and highly portable player. DataPlay is the only company making these drives, it's not licensed technology to date. So you will have to pay their premium, plus bundle their media for their price. In terms of highly portable, getting skip free optics takes skill, and we're talking about a relatively new company on their first (actually, second, but who is counting) try. I have a feeling the product will deploy and people will find it's difficult to make true skip free players for jogging, etc.
In terms of 3, i firmly disbelieve in "you will have no choice" type issues. I will choose to do what i like - such as only listen to indy music that i can download for free, or purchase per song.
Except the media is not currently re-writeable. There is talk of doing this in the future.
One thing that nobody has mentioned is where DataPlay is getting its funding. They've gone through 4 rounds of fundraising and gotten over $100mil from electronics companies and major record labels.