Wow, usually NDA's are released either when the info becomes public knowledge OR after three years (or whatever). Lawyers never let me sign any contract that doesn't have an expiration date, because it means that they'll have to worry about it forever...
"However when you can pick up Dell or Sun machines cheaper and more powerful than Xserve cluster nodes, it's more tempting to me to put a little effort into getting each one up & running as a node and enjoy the benefit of more power and a little effort, than simplicity and less power."
This might make sense except that Dell and Sun servers are slower and more expensive than Apple's. Unless you're talking about buying used servers on eBay or something, I suppose. But if you want scientific supercomputing floating point number crunching, the G5 is amazingly good...
"Microsoft gets a C+ for innovation. They get a C- for execution. But they get an A+ for knowing where the market is heading, before it does."
I'd go the other way around: C- for knowing where the market is heading, C- for innovation, and A+ for execution. MS may have completely missed out introducing any major technical innovation in the industry (LAN's, the internet, the web, print servers, file servers, pen-based computing, mice, windows/icons/menues, 3.5" drives, USB, SCSI, bitmapped displays, 3D graphics, word processors, spreadsheets, postscript, virtual machines (java/C#), compression, application servers, databases, compilers, IDE's, video, digital photography, speech recognition, speech synthesis, email, presentation packages, open standards, open source, cross-CPU portable software, etc.) but they've been very, very good at coming along later and usually out-executing the innovators in the marketplace. They did invent Bob and Spot, have started funding some real research, and are now active in industry standards, so there's hope that they might actually innovate in the future.:-) Seriously though, while MS has a ton of really sharp people, they're just too big and too bottom-line oriented to do anything interesting first -- they've gotten to where it makes more sense for smaller companies to innovate and prove the value of the innovation, and when they get big enough, MS can either buy or copy them. I have no idea how Apple, nearly uniquely in the industry, can be a large company and still innovate effectively. Everyone else is either large and dull, or tiny and cool... (or tiny and dull, I suppose, but why bother).
"When I was seriously thinking about replacing my Mac with a beige G3, Apple stopped making them. Apple decided to do away with SCSI and mini din serial, thus making all of my peripherals obsolete. I was NOT going to replace equipment that worked perfectly well just to get a new Mac."
I guess it's a little late to point out that you could have bought cheap PCI cards with SCSI, serial and ADB ports and kept using your old periperals...;-)
But if you like fiddling with hardware and playing games, it sounds like the PC is the right platform for you. Personally, I'd rather have great hardware and fiddle with software, and use a PS2 for games.;-)
'Why doesn't anybody just say, "If they take a loss on the iPod, they'll sell more at the Music Store. Also, give away 100,000 Junior iPods free to water their mouths!" Now that's a marketing plan I can get on board with.'
While I'd be thrilled if they did that, they've already said several times that they're losing money (right now) on iTMS in order to make money selling iPods. So they can't lose money selling cheap iPods in order to sell more music at the same time that they're losing money selling music in order to sell more iPods.
Wouldn't it be cool if the iTMS sales volumes were up enough that Apple actually made money selling music? Then they _could_ follow the "give away razors to sell blades" model, instead of the somewhat weird "give away razorblades in order to sell razors" model.
That's a shame -- after really being pretty dull for a couple of years, Apple hardware is really fantastic these days. Every tech conference I go to is dominated by Apple PowerBooks running MacOS X. The hardware is better and cheaper than PC laptops, and you get to run MacOS X, which is a thing of beauty.
"In all honesty, introducing a cheap iPod would be one of the smartest things that Apple has ever done."
I'm with you there. Apple sells more Windows iPods than Mac iPods, which means that they're showing lots of new people that there are better options than Microsoft. So even though they have over 50% of the MP3 player market now, as the market expands it'll grow down-market, and Apple needs to get there first, in order to keep their current dominance of the digital music business. It's amazing to me that Apple came from nowhere (in terms of consumer electronics) and has over 50% of the MP3 player market and 70% of the digital music market. Let's see if they can keep it going...
"I do, though, have an 'all request' icecast station and periodically run a script to dump a couple hundred of my most populare requests and another couple hundred of the globally most populare requests."
Wow, that's cool! How do you do it? I've been playing with NiceCast, which is pretty friendly, but isn't terribly scriptable -- I have to leave iTunes playing for it to broadcast anything, and then I (as the listener) have no control over what's being played. Hmm, I bet that I could control iTunes via AppleScript from web pages...
"Well... do you A.) expect to have a monitor that contains so much data that you need an electron microscope to read it or B.) expect to have a monitor that is 5x taller than your house?"
Pragmatically speaking, I suspect that your implication is correct -- the reason that display resolution isn't dramatically better is that it's "good enough". Also, screen resolution is a lot more expensive to improve than RAM capacity or disk space, for reasons that I don't understand, but I trust the guy who told me (who was a chip designer).
But think of another way to improve the display "resolution" -- wouldn't it be cool to have a screen with actual depth? So it's 1600x1024x1024 pixels -- that'd get those numbers in line!:-)
Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind having a screen that covered all of the walls in my house -- screen savers would be _amazing_!
My pleasure. What music program do you use? I haven't found any other than iTunes that has "smart playlists" and iTunes' only work automatically with the iPod. So if there's a music program that provides rules-based playlists to non-iPods, I bet that people here would love to know about it. I know I would...
Just to correct this, the RIAA sued the mom, because she was the one paying for the ISP account. The mom's defense was that it was her daughter downloading the music. But you're not entirely to blame, The Post's headlines got it wrong, too -- you had to actually read the article to figure out what really happened.:-)
"and before you mention solid state devices -- I want something that works with iTunes!"
There's no (technical) reason that Apple couldn't sell a cheap RAM-based iPod that would work with iTunes. I don't think they'll do it because it'd contradict their "a zillion songs in your pocket" marketing line, though I suppose "a couple of CD's on your wrist" might be cool, too...
"Why would anyone buy an iPod too small to hold their entire collection. One of the best features is that you only need to connect it to the PC when you buy a new CD or whatever."
I own a 5 GB iPod, and it works out wonderfully even though I have about 30 GB of audio files (audiobooks really suck up disk space). The trick is to set up intelligent playlists.
I use: - 1 GB of most recently added music - 1 GB of highest rated music - 1 GB of most frequently played music - 1 GB of 'random' music (different each time I synch). - Assorted special playlists (e.g. NY Times daily news in audio format, the audiobook I'm listening to right now, the soundtrack to Kill Bill,...).
So basically, anything new is in the iPod, and if I listen to it frequently, or rate it highly, it sticks around. The 'random' list is there so that I always hear a few surprises out of the 25 GB of stuff that I don't listen to more frequently, which can also get pulled into the more permanent lists if I decided that I like it enough to keep around all the time.
Yes, I do synch every day, but that's only to get the morning news into the iPod so that I can listen to it while I commute. Aside from that, a typical audiobook is around 25 hours, which fits in 360 MB (numbers from the book I'm listening to right now), so that can keep me going for a few weeks at least.
So while I wouldn't mind more space, I plug my iPod into the computer to charge every night anyway, and synching the music happens automagically.
"After finding out about this drive, I'm going to stick my neck out and say that I think a $99 iPod is not unlikely tomorrow."
I sure hope that you're right. but it'd mean that Apple's selling iPods at cost in order to sell music at cost, or vice versa. Hmm. Perhaps they strip down the display and controls a bit? Hrm. I guess we'll know more tomorrow.
"how the hard drive data density trend compares with Moore's Law"
I remember working this out a few years back -- the hard drive industry was cranking along at about Moore's Law, then IBM started really pushing, and blew past the competition, averaging 75% improvement annually. And for the last few years, the standard hard drive size in PC's has doubled annually. A few data points from digging on the web:
Summer 1999: IBM 340 MB Microdrive, 5 billion bits per square inch. Summer 2000: IBM 1 GB Microdrive, 15.2 billion bits per square inch. Summer 2002: IBM demonstrates 1 trillion bits per square inch. This is an 'in the lab' technology, so it'll be a few years until it's a product, but it makes pretty clear that there's some room to grow.
Years ago I made a graph of all of the computer's I'd owned, with CPU speed, display resolution, modem bandwidth, primary storage, and removable storage. It was amazing how they all improved dramatically, though in relative terms displays have improved slowly -- in the same time that a 1.77 MHz 8-bit TRS-80 Model 1 with 4K RAM and a cassette tape drive turned into a 733 MHz 32-bit PowerMac G4 with 1.5 GB or RAM, a DVD-R drive (i.e. improvements on the order of a factor of 1 million) the display went from 64x16 character text display (or 128x48 b/w pixels) to a 1600x1024 pixel, 24 bit deep color display, which is only 6,400x as much data on the screen, and the 300 bps modem became a 1 mbps cable modem, which is only 3,333x as fast. Pathetic compared to improvements in storage, RAM and CPU.:-)
Man, I have to buy a new computer. Same display and cable modem, but a 2 CPU 2 GHz G5 would make those curves so much prettier.:-)
"70/100k? So maybe apple buys 500k and gets it for $55.. Add in the electronics and case tooling... Probably costs apple $90 to make. That'd put the cost around $150-$180, unless they want to sell it at cost, but then its still pushing $125."
I think that even at $199 a 2 GB iPod could really excite people. $150 would be pretty amazing, but then Apple's margins would be pretty low (relative to the current iPods) so it'd have to be a volume play.
Perhaps Apple could bundle pre-paid music from iTMS, to make the effective price $100? For example, $199 bundled with $100 of music is kinda like a $100 iPod. Music companies do discounted promotional bundles all the time, so this wouldn't be far fetched. And for bundling with an iPod, it could be pre-loaded on the hard drive, or pre-paid (gift certificate) to download from iTMS, so there would be no physical costs, just licensing costs. Or perhaps each iPod comes with $100 of sode (which gives iTunes away)?:-)
"Why don't they just use flash memory? It's almost as small and has no moving parts."
Price and capacity. You can get a 2 GB hard drive for $70, and the largest, cheapest flash RAM card I can find is 1 GB for $290 (retail), making 2 GB at least that much wholesale, and probably more. It's very hard to profitably sell an MP3 player for $100 that contains $300 of flash storage.:-)
"The fact that the research is conducted during a time when the RIAA is efectively criminalizing file sharing will motivate people to answer dishonestly for fear of being "tagged" a copyright violator. When a survey relies on an honest answer to be an admission of criminal activity, people will not be as forthright with their answers."
Right -- they say in the report that for the telephone survey that people could be lying to them.
Of course, they also (comScore Media Metrix) measure what panelists do on their computers, so the drop in use of KaZaA, WinMX, etc., are all measured precisely.
"Filesharing becoming "old news" - basically the idea that everyone gets a TON of music when they first discover file sharing, then taper off as the previous 3 months of new music is no where near the volume of multiple decades of music people were grabbing at the outset"
True. The news isn't that any individual's p2p file sharing dropped, but that aggregate p2p file sharing dropped. Given that p2p file sharing grew dramatically through it's entire history, then dropped dramatically exactly when the lawsuits hit, is certainly suggestive. Unless you're arguing that in June everyone maxed out their music collections at the same time, and that for no particular reason nobody new joined the networks.:-)
It depends on what your goals are. I agree (strongly) that "absolute" DRM that is 100% effective at preventing anyone from doing anything illegal with music (etc.) is impossible, because, as you point out, it only takes one crack to break the dam, and there's no way to keep the hardcore "pirates" (I'll put quotes around it because I don't like the terminology, but it appears to be what people use) from cracking and sharing protected stuff. This is why (IMO) tactics such as Palladium will fail except in extremely specialized areas (banks? military?) where control is more important than usability, efficiency or flexibility.
On the other hand, if you believe that most people want to purchase legitimate music rather than steal it, the goal is simply to make a behavioral change, and all DRM has to do is place a "speed bump" to serve as a reminder. It's not meant to stop a determined "pirate" -- it's fairly trivial to bypass iTMS DRM, for example; just burn the music to a CD and re-RIP it.
Think of it as like the security tags at a local department store. They're there to discourage casual shoplifting, but it can't stop the Mission Impossible team breaking into the building in the middle of the night.
Does that mean that there's no point in tagging the clothes? Of course not -- mainstream, casual shoplifting costs stores a lot more than "professionals" so it makes sense to implement a simple security system that decreases shoplifting, not a military-grade security system that requires six-month background checks of all shoppers before they're allowed into the building, with key codes between aisles and RFID tags so that they can track shopper movement.:-)
"I believe that one might be forgiven if they were skeptical that the change in the data is due to 'lip service' rather than representing an actual change in downloading habits. It may be that RIAAs lawsuit strategy has not altered downloading behavior so much as it's influenced the respondents forthrightness in answering questions about downloading."
Regarding the overall drop in p2p usage, that's a telephone survey, and could have been affected by people lying about their behavior. That's probably why they said "Additionally, there may be a fraction of Internet users who are simply less likely to admit to either downloading music or sharing files due to the negative media portrayal of the activity." That being said, I'd guess that if millions of people are embarassed enough about p2p file sharing to lie about it, some fraction of them would probably stop.
Regarding the drops in usage of specific programs, comScore Media Metrix uses a piece of software that monitors panel member's computer usage, so those numbers are precise. I believe that the software only runs on Windows PC's, so that's a bit of a sample bias, relative to the Slashdot user base, anyway.:-)
"coffee is brewed at above 190 deg F at both Starbucks and Timothey's. Serving temp is lower, but the brewing temperature is required for proper quality"
McDonald's brews at 195 to 205 degrees, and serves at 180-190 degrees.
"As far as the coffee, I don't know what the boiling point of coffee is, but assuming it's rather close to water then the hottest it can be is 100 deg C, otherwise it would turn to steam. People should know hot coffee is well...hot. When I get hot coffee from a restaurant, or mother, or friend, I let it cool down before trying to chug it."
Actually, McDonalds coffee is brewed at around 200 degrees, and poured at around 180 degrees. That's 20 degrees hotter than any other restaurant tested, and hot enough to give third degree burns in 12-15 seconds.
I'll also point out that all the old lady asked for was $800 to cover her medical expensenses; McDondalds forced her to go to court, and turned down a whole series of settlement offers because they assumed that they would win.
"And people would still continue to buy them. McDonalds was selling that hot coffee for quite some time, at that 'unsafe' temp, and she had purchased the MickeyD's coffee before, so she knew it was that hot, but she kept buying it, then she got burned and sued... MickeyD's should have been fined, to protect the future innocents, that lady should have been tossed out of court."
Before expressing ill-informed opinions about this case, perhaps you should read the Wall Street Journal's coverage of the story, at http://www.vanfirm.com/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit.ht m. I'll copy it here for reference, and just point out at (1) McDonald's injured hundreds of people with their coffee, and decided that they made more money selling hotter coffee (which allows them to make more coffee with the same beans) than any other restaurant and paying off the hundreds of people that they seriously injured. Amazingly, they refused to settle for the $800 in medical expenses that she ask for to cover her serious, third-degree burns, and instead decided to take her to court. Greedy morons (IMO).
McDonald's Callousness Was Real Issue, Jurors Say, In Case of Burned Woman
How Hot Do You Like It?
by Andrea Gerlin Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal September 1, 1994 The Wall Street Journal ((C) 1994, Dow Jones & Co., Inc.)
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - When a law firm here found itself defending McDonald's Corp. in a suit last year that claimed the company served dangerously hot coffee, it hired a law student to take temperatures at other local restaurants for comparison.
After dutifully slipping a thermometer into steaming cups and mugs all over the city, Danny Jarrett found that none came closer than about 20 degrees to the temperature at which McDonald's coffee is poured, about 180 degrees.
It should have been a warning.
But McDonald's lawyers went on to dismiss several opportunities to settle out of court, apparently convinced that no jury would punish a company for serving coffee the way customers like it. After all, its coffee's temperature helps explain why McDonald's sells a billion cups a year.
But now - days after a jury here awarded $2.9 million to an 81-year-old woman scalded by McDonald's coffee - some observers say the defense was naive. "I drink McDonald's coffee because it's hot, the hottest coffee around," says Robert Gregg, a Dallas defense attorney who consumes it during morning drives to the office. "But I've predicted for years that someone's going to win a suit, because I've spilled it on myself. And unlike the coffee I make at home, it's really hot. I mean, man, it hurts."
McDonald's, known for its fastidious control over franchisees, requires that its coffee be prepared at very high temperatures, based on recommendations of coffee consultants and industry groups that say hot temperatures are necessary to fully extract the flavor during brewing.
Before trial, McDonald's gave the opposing lawyer its operations and training manual, which says its coffee must be brewed at 195 to 205 degrees and held at 180 to 190 degrees for optimal taste. Sine the verdict, McDonald's has declined to offer any comment, as have their attorneys. It is unclear if the company, whose coffee cups warn drinkers that the contents are hot, plans to change its preparation procedures.
Coffee temperature is suddenly a hot topic in the industry. The Specialty Coffee Association of America has put coffee safety on the agenda of its quarterly board meeting this month. And a spokesman for Dunkin' Donuts Inc., which sells about 500 million cups of coffee a year, says the company is looking at the verdict to see if it needs to make any changes to the way it makes coffee.
Others call it a tempest in a coffeepot. A spokesman for the National Coffee Association says McDonald's coffee conforms to industry temperature standards. And a spokesman for Mr. Coffee Inc., the coffee-machine maker, says that if customer complaints are any indicati
"It baffles the mind that we need so many laws nowadays to keep people from killing each other or from harming themselves. "Warning, coffee is hot." "
People keep getting this wrong. The McDonalds lawsuit (http://lawandhelp.com/q298-2.htm) went against them because they made coffee dangerously hot, injured hundreds of people, and refused the settlement that they were offered (the injured old lady just wanted them to cover her medical expenses (which they refused, betting that their lawyers would scare her off). She was ultimately paid just $480,000 (not the millions the jury awarded) due to the usual negotiations when the company appealed, threatening to tie the settlement up in years of legal wrestling. You know those $millions you read about -- companies never actually pay those settlements...
It's easy to complain about product liability lawsuits. But without them, companies would feel even more free to sell dangerous products.
"There will never be peace in the middle east. Why?
1) There can only be peace between equals. Israel is much stronger then palestine. Between unequals there can only be surrender. The palestenians are unwilling to surrender."
This is absurd; there's peace between the US and Canada, clearly not based on military parity or Canadian surrender.
If the Arab goal were simply peace, they'd have had peace decades ago -- they were given well over 1/2 of the land by the British (e.g. Jordan), and have launched a whole series of wars because they'd rather wipe out Israel than live in peace with them. They're so committed to not being at peace that they assassinate their own people for simply talking about peace.
"2) God is telling the israelis that a certain plot of land belongs to them. Once God tells you this all else is moot. There can be no peace as long as god is telling you to build houses on somebody elses property."
Leaving God out of this, when the British pulled out, they (and the UN) gave some land to the Jews, and a bunch to the Arabs. This is tricky, but far from unique.
All Israel is trying to do is to live in peace. The Arab goal is the elimination of Israel; they had peace, on several occasions, and threw it away repeatedly in failed attempts at "winning".
"3) Neither party wants peace. That ugly fact really is the most important one."
You're half right -- the Arabs don't want peace, they want to wipe out Israel. Actually, the Arab people apparently might be willing to live in peace (http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/transcripts/2003/ jul/030714.shikaki.html) but Arafat, etc., don't particularly care about that.
"IMO Israel should annex the lands it won fair and sqare in a war. It should then do what every other nation in history has done when they won terrotory in war and that is to make them full fledges citizens. I bet that a vast majority of palestenians would love to be first class citizens of a modern democracy."
Don't forget that there are many Arabs in Israel are citizens -- they can vote, work, go to school, have always been active in the Israeli knesset, etc. In fact, Arabs in Israel are, by most measures, better off than Arabs in any "Arab" country (economically, educationally, politically). Arabs in Israel aren't the majority, but they're treated better than, say, Japanese in the US during World War II.
Historically speaking, when countries conquer other countries, they don't immediately make the inhabitants first-class citizens -- look at Puerto Rico, for example. Or they stage mass migrations into the conquered territories (e.g. Texas) in order to ensure that the conquerers outnumber the conquered.
Slashdot Mirror
All around, very cool! Care to share? :-)
Wow, usually NDA's are released either when the info becomes public knowledge OR after three years (or whatever). Lawyers never let me sign any contract that doesn't have an expiration date, because it means that they'll have to worry about it forever...
"However when you can pick up Dell or Sun machines cheaper and more powerful than Xserve cluster nodes, it's more tempting to me to put a little effort into getting each one up & running as a node and enjoy the benefit of more power and a little effort, than simplicity and less power."
This might make sense except that Dell and Sun servers are slower and more expensive than Apple's. Unless you're talking about buying used servers on eBay or something, I suppose. But if you want scientific supercomputing floating point number crunching, the G5 is amazingly good...
"Microsoft gets a C+ for innovation. They get a C- for execution. But they get an A+ for knowing where the market is heading, before it does."
:-) Seriously though, while MS has a ton of really sharp people, they're just too big and too bottom-line oriented to do anything interesting first -- they've gotten to where it makes more sense for smaller companies to innovate and prove the value of the innovation, and when they get big enough, MS can either buy or copy them. I have no idea how Apple, nearly uniquely in the industry, can be a large company and still innovate effectively. Everyone else is either large and dull, or tiny and cool... (or tiny and dull, I suppose, but why bother).
;-)
;-)
I'd go the other way around: C- for knowing where the market is heading, C- for innovation, and A+ for execution. MS may have completely missed out introducing any major technical innovation in the industry (LAN's, the internet, the web, print servers, file servers, pen-based computing, mice, windows/icons/menues, 3.5" drives, USB, SCSI, bitmapped displays, 3D graphics, word processors, spreadsheets, postscript, virtual machines (java/C#), compression, application servers, databases, compilers, IDE's, video, digital photography, speech recognition, speech synthesis, email, presentation packages, open standards, open source, cross-CPU portable software, etc.) but they've been very, very good at coming along later and usually out-executing the innovators in the marketplace. They did invent Bob and Spot, have started funding some real research, and are now active in industry standards, so there's hope that they might actually innovate in the future.
"When I was seriously thinking about replacing my Mac with a beige G3, Apple stopped making them. Apple decided to do away with SCSI and mini din serial, thus making all of my peripherals obsolete. I was NOT going to replace equipment that worked perfectly well just to get a new Mac."
I guess it's a little late to point out that you could have bought cheap PCI cards with SCSI, serial and ADB ports and kept using your old periperals...
But if you like fiddling with hardware and playing games, it sounds like the PC is the right platform for you. Personally, I'd rather have great hardware and fiddle with software, and use a PS2 for games.
'Why doesn't anybody just say, "If they take a loss on the iPod, they'll sell more at the Music Store. Also, give away 100,000 Junior iPods free to water their mouths!" Now that's a marketing plan I can get on board with.'
While I'd be thrilled if they did that, they've already said several times that they're losing money (right now) on iTMS in order to make money selling iPods. So they can't lose money selling cheap iPods in order to sell more music at the same time that they're losing money selling music in order to sell more iPods.
Wouldn't it be cool if the iTMS sales volumes were up enough that Apple actually made money selling music? Then they _could_ follow the "give away razors to sell blades" model, instead of the somewhat weird "give away razorblades in order to sell razors" model.
"I have sworn off Apple hardware."
That's a shame -- after really being pretty dull for a couple of years, Apple hardware is really fantastic these days. Every tech conference I go to is dominated by Apple PowerBooks running MacOS X. The hardware is better and cheaper than PC laptops, and you get to run MacOS X, which is a thing of beauty.
"In all honesty, introducing a cheap iPod would be one of the smartest things that Apple has ever done."
I'm with you there. Apple sells more Windows iPods than Mac iPods, which means that they're showing lots of new people that there are better options than Microsoft. So even though they have over 50% of the MP3 player market now, as the market expands it'll grow down-market, and Apple needs to get there first, in order to keep their current dominance of the digital music business. It's amazing to me that Apple came from nowhere (in terms of consumer electronics) and has over 50% of the MP3 player market and 70% of the digital music market. Let's see if they can keep it going...
"I do, though, have an 'all request' icecast station and periodically run a script to dump a couple hundred of my most populare requests and another couple hundred of the globally most populare requests."
Wow, that's cool! How do you do it? I've been playing with NiceCast, which is pretty friendly, but isn't terribly scriptable -- I have to leave iTunes playing for it to broadcast anything, and then I (as the listener) have no control over what's being played. Hmm, I bet that I could control iTunes via AppleScript from web pages...
"Well... do you A.) expect to have a monitor that contains so much data that you need an electron microscope to read it or B.) expect to have a monitor that is 5x taller than your house?"
:-)
Pragmatically speaking, I suspect that your implication is correct -- the reason that display resolution isn't dramatically better is that it's "good enough". Also, screen resolution is a lot more expensive to improve than RAM capacity or disk space, for reasons that I don't understand, but I trust the guy who told me (who was a chip designer).
But think of another way to improve the display "resolution" -- wouldn't it be cool to have a screen with actual depth? So it's 1600x1024x1024 pixels -- that'd get those numbers in line!
Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind having a screen that covered all of the walls in my house -- screen savers would be _amazing_!
My pleasure. What music program do you use? I haven't found any other than iTunes that has "smart playlists" and iTunes' only work automatically with the iPod. So if there's a music program that provides rules-based playlists to non-iPods, I bet that people here would love to know about it. I know I would...
"Ever since the RIAA started suing little girls"
:-)
Just to correct this, the RIAA sued the mom, because she was the one paying for the ISP account. The mom's defense was that it was her daughter downloading the music. But you're not entirely to blame, The Post's headlines got it wrong, too -- you had to actually read the article to figure out what really happened.
"and before you mention solid state devices -- I want something that works with iTunes!"
There's no (technical) reason that Apple couldn't sell a cheap RAM-based iPod that would work with iTunes. I don't think they'll do it because it'd contradict their "a zillion songs in your pocket" marketing line, though I suppose "a couple of CD's on your wrist" might be cool, too...
"Why would anyone buy an iPod too small to hold their entire collection. One of the best features is that you only need to connect it to the PC when you buy a new CD or whatever."
...).
I own a 5 GB iPod, and it works out wonderfully even though I have about 30 GB of audio files (audiobooks really suck up disk space). The trick is to set up intelligent playlists.
I use:
- 1 GB of most recently added music
- 1 GB of highest rated music
- 1 GB of most frequently played music
- 1 GB of 'random' music (different each time I synch).
- Assorted special playlists (e.g. NY Times daily news in audio format, the audiobook I'm listening to right now, the soundtrack to Kill Bill,
So basically, anything new is in the iPod, and if I listen to it frequently, or rate it highly, it sticks around. The 'random' list is there so that I always hear a few surprises out of the 25 GB of stuff that I don't listen to more frequently, which can also get pulled into the more permanent lists if I decided that I like it enough to keep around all the time.
Yes, I do synch every day, but that's only to get the morning news into the iPod so that I can listen to it while I commute. Aside from that, a typical audiobook is around 25 hours, which fits in 360 MB (numbers from the book I'm listening to right now), so that can keep me going for a few weeks at least.
So while I wouldn't mind more space, I plug my iPod into the computer to charge every night anyway, and synching the music happens automagically.
"After finding out about this drive, I'm going to stick my neck out and say that I think a $99 iPod is not unlikely tomorrow."
I sure hope that you're right. but it'd mean that Apple's selling iPods at cost in order to sell music at cost, or vice versa. Hmm. Perhaps they strip down the display and controls a bit? Hrm. I guess we'll know more tomorrow.
"how the hard drive data density trend compares with Moore's Law"
:-)
:-)
I remember working this out a few years back -- the hard drive industry was cranking along at about Moore's Law, then IBM started really pushing, and blew past the competition, averaging 75% improvement annually. And for the last few years, the standard hard drive size in PC's has doubled annually. A few data points from digging on the web:
Summer 1999: IBM 340 MB Microdrive, 5 billion bits per square inch.
Summer 2000: IBM 1 GB Microdrive, 15.2 billion bits per square inch.
Summer 2002: IBM demonstrates 1 trillion bits per square inch. This is an 'in the lab' technology, so it'll be a few years until it's a product, but it makes pretty clear that there's some room to grow.
Years ago I made a graph of all of the computer's I'd owned, with CPU speed, display resolution, modem bandwidth, primary storage, and removable storage. It was amazing how they all improved dramatically, though in relative terms displays have improved slowly -- in the same time that a 1.77 MHz 8-bit TRS-80 Model 1 with 4K RAM and a cassette tape drive turned into a 733 MHz 32-bit PowerMac G4 with 1.5 GB or RAM, a DVD-R drive (i.e. improvements on the order of a factor of 1 million) the display went from 64x16 character text display (or 128x48 b/w pixels) to a 1600x1024 pixel, 24 bit deep color display, which is only 6,400x as much data on the screen, and the 300 bps modem became a 1 mbps cable modem, which is only 3,333x as fast. Pathetic compared to improvements in storage, RAM and CPU.
Man, I have to buy a new computer. Same display and cable modem, but a 2 CPU 2 GHz G5 would make those curves so much prettier.
"70/100k? So maybe apple buys 500k and gets it for $55.. Add in the electronics and case tooling... Probably costs apple $90 to make. That'd put the cost around $150-$180, unless they want to sell it at cost, but then its still pushing $125."
:-)
I think that even at $199 a 2 GB iPod could really excite people. $150 would be pretty amazing, but then Apple's margins would be pretty low (relative to the current iPods) so it'd have to be a volume play.
Perhaps Apple could bundle pre-paid music from iTMS, to make the effective price $100? For example, $199 bundled with $100 of music is kinda like a $100 iPod. Music companies do discounted promotional bundles all the time, so this wouldn't be far fetched. And for bundling with an iPod, it could be pre-loaded on the hard drive, or pre-paid (gift certificate) to download from iTMS, so there would be no physical costs, just licensing costs. Or perhaps each iPod comes with $100 of sode (which gives iTunes away)?
"Why don't they just use flash memory? It's almost as small and has no moving parts."
:-)
Price and capacity. You can get a 2 GB hard drive for $70, and the largest, cheapest flash RAM card I can find is 1 GB for $290 (retail), making 2 GB at least that much wholesale, and probably more. It's very hard to profitably sell an MP3 player for $100 that contains $300 of flash storage.
"The fact that the research is conducted during a time when the RIAA is efectively criminalizing file sharing will motivate people to answer dishonestly for fear of being "tagged" a copyright violator. When a survey relies on an honest answer to be an admission of criminal activity, people will not be as forthright with their answers."
:-)
Right -- they say in the report that for the telephone survey that people could be lying to them.
Of course, they also (comScore Media Metrix) measure what panelists do on their computers, so the drop in use of KaZaA, WinMX, etc., are all measured precisely.
"Filesharing becoming "old news" - basically the idea that everyone gets a TON of music when they first discover file sharing, then taper off as the previous 3 months of new music is no where near the volume of multiple decades of music people were grabbing at the outset"
True. The news isn't that any individual's p2p file sharing dropped, but that aggregate p2p file sharing dropped. Given that p2p file sharing grew dramatically through it's entire history, then dropped dramatically exactly when the lawsuits hit, is certainly suggestive. Unless you're arguing that in June everyone maxed out their music collections at the same time, and that for no particular reason nobody new joined the networks.
"DRM and copy protection are not possible"
:-)
It depends on what your goals are. I agree (strongly) that "absolute" DRM that is 100% effective at preventing anyone from doing anything illegal with music (etc.) is impossible, because, as you point out, it only takes one crack to break the dam, and there's no way to keep the hardcore "pirates" (I'll put quotes around it because I don't like the terminology, but it appears to be what people use) from cracking and sharing protected stuff. This is why (IMO) tactics such as Palladium will fail except in extremely specialized areas (banks? military?) where control is more important than usability, efficiency or flexibility.
On the other hand, if you believe that most people want to purchase legitimate music rather than steal it, the goal is simply to make a behavioral change, and all DRM has to do is place a "speed bump" to serve as a reminder. It's not meant to stop a determined "pirate" -- it's fairly trivial to bypass iTMS DRM, for example; just burn the music to a CD and re-RIP it.
Think of it as like the security tags at a local department store. They're there to discourage casual shoplifting, but it can't stop the Mission Impossible team breaking into the building in the middle of the night.
Does that mean that there's no point in tagging the clothes? Of course not -- mainstream, casual shoplifting costs stores a lot more than "professionals" so it makes sense to implement a simple security system that decreases shoplifting, not a military-grade security system that requires six-month background checks of all shoppers before they're allowed into the building, with key codes between aisles and RFID tags so that they can track shopper movement.
"I believe that one might be forgiven if they were skeptical that the change in the data is due to 'lip service' rather than representing an actual change in downloading habits. It may be that RIAAs lawsuit strategy has not altered downloading behavior so much as it's influenced the respondents forthrightness in answering questions about downloading."
:-)
Regarding the overall drop in p2p usage, that's a telephone survey, and could have been affected by people lying about their behavior. That's probably why they said "Additionally, there may be a fraction of Internet users who are simply less likely to admit to either downloading music or sharing files due to the negative media portrayal of the activity." That being said, I'd guess that if millions of people are embarassed enough about p2p file sharing to lie about it, some fraction of them would probably stop.
Regarding the drops in usage of specific programs, comScore Media Metrix uses a piece of software that monitors panel member's computer usage, so those numbers are precise. I believe that the software only runs on Windows PC's, so that's a bit of a sample bias, relative to the Slashdot user base, anyway.
"Everyone knows that 95% of all statistics are made up on the spot :)"
:-)
IANAL, but I read on Slashdot once that it was 97.25%...
"coffee is brewed at above 190 deg F at both Starbucks and Timothey's. Serving temp is lower, but the brewing temperature is required for proper quality"
McDonald's brews at 195 to 205 degrees, and serves at 180-190 degrees.
"As far as the coffee, I don't know what the boiling point of coffee is, but assuming it's rather close to water then the hottest it can be is 100 deg C, otherwise it would turn to steam. People should know hot coffee is well...hot. When I get hot coffee from a restaurant, or mother, or friend, I let it cool down before trying to chug it."
Actually, McDonalds coffee is brewed at around 200 degrees, and poured at around 180 degrees. That's 20 degrees hotter than any other restaurant tested, and hot enough to give third degree burns in 12-15 seconds.
I'll also point out that all the old lady asked for was $800 to cover her medical expensenses; McDondalds forced her to go to court, and turned down a whole series of settlement offers because they assumed that they would win.
"And people would still continue to buy them. McDonalds was selling that hot coffee for quite some time, at that 'unsafe' temp, and she had purchased the MickeyD's coffee before, so she knew it was that hot, but she kept buying it, then she got burned and sued... MickeyD's should have been fined, to protect the future innocents, that lady should have been tossed out of court."
Before expressing ill-informed opinions about this case, perhaps you should read the Wall Street Journal's coverage of the story, at http://www.vanfirm.com/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit.ht m. I'll copy it here for reference, and just point out at (1) McDonald's injured hundreds of people with their coffee, and decided that they made more money selling hotter coffee (which allows them to make more coffee with the same beans) than any other restaurant and paying off the hundreds of people that they seriously injured. Amazingly, they refused to settle for the $800 in medical expenses that she ask for to cover her serious, third-degree burns, and instead decided to take her to court. Greedy morons (IMO).
McDonald's Callousness Was Real Issue, Jurors Say, In Case of Burned Woman
How Hot Do You Like It?
by Andrea Gerlin
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
September 1, 1994
The Wall Street Journal
((C) 1994, Dow Jones & Co., Inc.)
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - When a law firm here found itself defending McDonald's Corp. in a suit last year that claimed the company served dangerously hot coffee, it hired a law student to take temperatures at other local restaurants for comparison.
After dutifully slipping a thermometer into steaming cups and mugs all over the city, Danny Jarrett found that none came closer than about 20 degrees to the temperature at which McDonald's coffee is poured, about 180 degrees.
It should have been a warning.
But McDonald's lawyers went on to dismiss several opportunities to settle out of court, apparently convinced that no jury would punish a company for serving coffee the way customers like it. After all, its coffee's temperature helps explain why McDonald's sells a billion cups a year.
But now - days after a jury here awarded $2.9 million to an 81-year-old woman scalded by McDonald's coffee - some observers say the defense was naive. "I drink McDonald's coffee because it's hot, the hottest coffee around," says Robert Gregg, a Dallas defense attorney who consumes it during morning drives to the office. "But I've predicted for years that someone's going to win a suit, because I've spilled it on myself. And unlike the coffee I make at home, it's really hot. I mean, man, it hurts."
McDonald's, known for its fastidious control over franchisees, requires that its coffee be prepared at very high temperatures, based on recommendations of coffee consultants and industry groups that say hot temperatures are necessary to fully extract the flavor during brewing.
Before trial, McDonald's gave the opposing lawyer its operations and training manual, which says its coffee must be brewed at 195 to 205 degrees and held at 180 to 190 degrees for optimal taste. Sine the verdict, McDonald's has declined to offer any comment, as have their attorneys. It is unclear if the company, whose coffee cups warn drinkers that the contents are hot, plans to change its preparation procedures.
Coffee temperature is suddenly a hot topic in the industry. The Specialty Coffee Association of America has put coffee safety on the agenda of its quarterly board meeting this month. And a spokesman for Dunkin' Donuts Inc., which sells about 500 million cups of coffee a year, says the company is looking at the verdict to see if it needs to make any changes to the way it makes coffee.
Others call it a tempest in a coffeepot. A spokesman for the National Coffee Association says McDonald's coffee conforms to industry temperature standards. And a spokesman for Mr. Coffee Inc., the coffee-machine maker, says that if customer complaints are any indicati
"It baffles the mind that we need so many laws nowadays to keep people from killing each other or from harming themselves. "Warning, coffee is hot." "
People keep getting this wrong. The McDonalds lawsuit (http://lawandhelp.com/q298-2.htm) went against them because they made coffee dangerously hot, injured hundreds of people, and refused the settlement that they were offered (the injured old lady just wanted them to cover her medical expenses (which they refused, betting that their lawyers would scare her off). She was ultimately paid just $480,000 (not the millions the jury awarded) due to the usual negotiations when the company appealed, threatening to tie the settlement up in years of legal wrestling. You know those $millions you read about -- companies never actually pay those settlements...
It's easy to complain about product liability lawsuits. But without them, companies would feel even more free to sell dangerous products.
"There will never be peace in the middle east. Why?
/ jul/030714.shikaki.html) but Arafat, etc., don't particularly care about that.
1) There can only be peace between equals. Israel is much stronger then palestine. Between unequals there can only be surrender. The palestenians are unwilling to surrender."
This is absurd; there's peace between the US and Canada, clearly not based on military parity or Canadian surrender.
If the Arab goal were simply peace, they'd have had peace decades ago -- they were given well over 1/2 of the land by the British (e.g. Jordan), and have launched a whole series of wars because they'd rather wipe out Israel than live in peace with them. They're so committed to not being at peace that they assassinate their own people for simply talking about peace.
"2) God is telling the israelis that a certain plot of land belongs to them. Once God tells you this all else is moot. There can be no peace as long as god is telling you to build houses on somebody elses property."
Leaving God out of this, when the British pulled out, they (and the UN) gave some land to the Jews, and a bunch to the Arabs. This is tricky, but far from unique.
All Israel is trying to do is to live in peace. The Arab goal is the elimination of Israel; they had peace, on several occasions, and threw it away repeatedly in failed attempts at "winning".
"3) Neither party wants peace. That ugly fact really is the most important one."
You're half right -- the Arabs don't want peace, they want to wipe out Israel. Actually, the Arab people apparently might be willing to live in peace (http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/transcripts/2003
"IMO Israel should annex the lands it won fair and sqare in a war. It should then do what every other nation in history has done when they won terrotory in war and that is to make them full fledges citizens. I bet that a vast majority of palestenians would love to be first class citizens of a modern democracy."
Don't forget that there are many Arabs in Israel are citizens -- they can vote, work, go to school, have always been active in the Israeli knesset, etc. In fact, Arabs in Israel are, by most measures, better off than Arabs in any "Arab" country (economically, educationally, politically). Arabs in Israel aren't the majority, but they're treated better than, say, Japanese in the US during World War II.
Historically speaking, when countries conquer other countries, they don't immediately make the inhabitants first-class citizens -- look at Puerto Rico, for example. Or they stage mass migrations into the conquered territories (e.g. Texas) in order to ensure that the conquerers outnumber the conquered.