Nice try. Thinkpads are basically the same price as iBooks. In fact if you spec them out, the ThinkPads can be more expensive for about the same level of hardware.
The base-model iBook is $999, an equivalent ThinkPad is an R- or Z-series "Value" model, $1299 or $1499, respectively. The only way you can get a ThinkPad for less than the price of an iBook is with a crippled configuration (the R-series "Economy" model: XP Home Edition and only 256MB RAM with at least 64MB being used by the video controller).
Neither of the sites will let me deep-link to the configurations, but they're easy to find. Apple's is from the Apple Store, then click on iBook, the ThinkPads are from Lenovo's Products page and then click on ThinkPads.
Quality PC laptops are not necessarily cheaper than Apple. And I've used some of the "non quality" off-brand PC laptops, and I'd prefer never to go there again. Frankly they're so much trouble I'd say students would be better off with a spiral notebook and a #2 pencil.
Something's messed up with your system. That's not how it works; the auto-switching features of OS X are quite "smart" in my experience (assuming you have it set up to join any available network when no preferred ones are connected). I think the default is to prompt the user when connecting to a non-whitelisted, unencrypted network, however.
That said, my corporate laptop doesn't do a horrible job of WLAN management either, although I use a 3rd party program rather than the built-in Windows tools to manage different connection profiles (it also turns the VPN on if I'm not on the corporate subnet).
Good point. People forget that having a solid steel door doesn't do a damn bit of good if the latches and bolts are sunk into a wooden frame, or even just into the wooden trim... I've seen a lot of houses and apartments where the owner has tried to "secure" the front door by replacing the hollow-core door with a solid-wood or metal one, only to leave the frame in place. Guess what's going to go with a single kick? The frame and moulding.
I've got a better system, just charge his credit card for "licenses" which allow him to listen to music that he's statistically likely to hear during the rest of his day.
"Let's see, Mr Jones... you're a 30-year-old white male, you go to the mall once a month, you like to eat at Burrito Hut, and you wear a size 9-1/2 wide. Your Ambient Listening System license will be just $9.85 a month! But if you want to upgrade, for just $29.95 a month, you can get a license that allows for unlimited playback of Sony Music titles on your own Humming and Whistling Device. Can I sign you up for that?"
This has been brought up before, and I don't think that you'll ever see an "open" DRM system, because DRM is a fundamentally flawed and insecure concept, which relies on security through obscurity. 'Openness' of any sort is anathema to a DRM scheme, because it just means that it will be cracked more rapidly.
Of course, they always seem to get cracked anyway, but the closed, obscure, undocumented systems usually stay 'secure' long enough for the manufacturer to sell them to the music labels and other content providers, which is the really important part. If the labels/studios point out what's wrong with the DRM (like "hey, doesn't the user have both the file and the key to decrypt it, in order to make it work?") the manufacturer of the system can respond "sure, but nobody except us understands how the system works, and we're not telling, so it's secure." Then when it eventually gets broken, the companies can blame it on "hackers," and not on a basic problem in what they're trying to accomplish.
you'll be one of those who will be gone in the the next 12 to 24 months.
Hey, maybe that's what he meant? Napster going out of business would be a change in the competitive landscape, albeit a very small one (to anyone who doesn't use Napster). I think that's quite a bit more likely to come true than Apple losing any significant part of the market.
First thing you see: BUY MUSIC FROM THE iTUNES MUSIC STORE!
Actually this isn't precisely true, and I know because I just installed iTunes (on my work PC) for the first time in several years. The first thing you see once you get past the setup screens is a dialog asking "Do you want to go to the Music Store, or to your Library?"... if you go to the library, you're just presented with an empty window, if you don't have any music. (And there's a thing for the iTunes MiniStore at the bottom, asking you if you want to turn it on, but you can just disable it.)
I think the iTMS part of iTunes is somewhat overstated -- I'm willing to bet that most people don't use it for more than a small percentage of their music Libraries, with the possible exception of people who really made out during the Pepsi-cap promotions or won sweepstakes.
Hint: They both have a capital S in their names; and they've both used the SCO case to promote indemnification FUD to promote sales of their own software.
All right, I'll bite. I'm a bit tired and brain dead for riddles... any chance you can name names?
I think this is a pretty good analysis. Based on my personal recollection, most of my PC-using friends went from MusicMatch or WinAmp to iTunes as a music-management program, in many cases before they had iPods. The program itself was a massive selling feature; the iPod built on iTunes' reputation for ease-of-use.
If Samsung can't replicate this (and I haven't seen the state of other music players out there, but I'm not aware of many serious contenders to iTunes really) then they're probably screwed. The only thing I've played with is the new Napster music service client, and I can tell you it's worse than bad -- it gives me a headache.
The lack of a good library management app was what doomed several MP3 players that I investigated, pre-iPod. They all had fairly good hardware design, but it was obvious that the companies making them had decided that the software was an afterthought, something to be outsourced or bundled. Today, I think most of those companies are bankrupt and their pre-iPod footnotes will be nothing but footnotes because of their shortsightedness towards providing an integrated solution.
I don't really care whether Samsung succeeds or not, frankly as a Mac user I hope it and MS' DRM scheme both go down the tubes, but I hope that they have someone working on making some really good management software to run this whole thing. Otherwise, they might as well get comfortable with being Apple's memory supplier for the duration.
Kid: Mom, can I get a YP-Z5AB for Christmas? Mom: What? What is that? No, you can't have a car. Kid: It's this thing, that plays music. You know... Mom: Like an iPod? Kid: Yeah! Mom: We'll see.
Later...the kid gets an iPod, because nobody can remember what the hell the other thing is named, two days before Christmas when they're trying to buy one.
Apple isn't locking all iPod owners in, there's nothing about ripping a CD using iTunes that makes it impossible to put on another player. The only music that you can't transfer to another player is stuff purchased from the iTunes Music Store, which is a very, very small percentage of most people's music collections.
I seriously doubt that anyone (except the very, very rich) have thousands of dollars of iTMS music. Most people I know -- myself included -- have a handful of purchased songs, with the majority of music taken from other sources. There's nothing keeping me from switching to another player tomorrow, if I really wanted to... but I don't.
There's not any "vendor lock-in" inherent in using iTunes and an iPod, assuming you never use iTMS. And if you use iTMS, you probably know what you're buying (and it's not as though they've ever kept the fact that they only play on an iPod a secret). If you drop two grand on iPod-only songs, that's your decision. But virtually nobody does.
The special status of science is its utility, in that it gives predictions for how the universe actually works which are borne out in reality.
Science -- and when you get right down to it, all positivist epistemology, which is really the basis of science as most people practice it -- is better than just making up random explanations for everything (e.g. 'electricity comes from fairies') because the explanations are more useful. The key to science is its utility. The reason why my belief system, which says that the earth is round and things fall because of gravity and light moves at a certain known speed, is superior to one which says that the earth is flat and objects fall because a diety says so and light is instantenous, is because my system of belief allows me to make useful and accurate predictions of actual phenomena. Therefore, we say that it is probably "true." Truth is assumed to be useful, because through the greater understanding of how things in our world are going to behave, we can better ourselves.
Math is likewise a pretty arbitrary, abstract concept, but it's quite useful. With it you can do things that would be otherwise impossible (or greatly more difficult without it), such as building bridges and buildings that don't collapse, airplanes, and atomic bombs.
I don't think that it's possible to say that one abstract philosophical understanding of the world is inherently superior to any other, except in how it allows its adherents to live. If some philosophy is more useful, then it is probably worth buying into. Evolution is quite correctly understood to be more useful than creationism (you can predict future patterns, etc., but being a creationist doesn't get you anywhere), so there is a strong interest in making sure that it is taught as the truth.
IIRC, there was a time when the regular "Candy Colored" base-model iMac was below a grand. Granted, it was barely below (at $999 or something), but it was below the magic four-digit mark. Then of course the CRT iMac became the eMac, and the price for the new LCD iMac (the flexible one) was significantly higher.
It'll be interesting to see whether iMacs get back down below a grand at any point, or if they're going to keep them up around $1200-ish and use the Mini to capture the lower-end market.
The connector, as others have pointed out, is digital as well as analog.
Specifically it's called a "Mini Toslink" [1]. Basically it's the same form factor as a 1/8" stereo miniplug, but it's hollow and transmits the optical digital information out the very end. Or, a standard electrical analog stereo cable can be used. I think it's a Sony invention, the first place I ever saw it was on MiniDisc players.
It's actually a neat little connector, because you can squeeze it into devices without cluttering them up with separate digital and analog ones. It's not very widely used on higher-end equipment, though. They're usually either regular Toslink or (electrical) digital on coaxial cable, the latter of which means a $15 converter box from Radio Shack. For this reason I think, the big Power Mac G5s use the regular Toslink optical connectors instead of the minis on their DA ins and outs.
I'm actually quite disappointed that they didn't integrate the AirTunes functions into the iPod Hi-Fi. If they had, I'd probably be first in line to buy one at the Apple store tonight after work. Now that would be slick, just a sleek white box, controllable by either the iPod if it was attached, or an IR remote, or from the computer. As it is, it's just a very expensive boombox; they had the opportunity to create a "smart" product and decided not to. Too bad.
At any rate, in your eagerness to decry the iPod, I think you're missing my point entirely. Whether some other brand of MP3 player is slightly better than the iPod is completely irrelevant. If the iPod has a "quality surplus," and Player X sounds better than an iPod, it has even more of a surplus of quality. That's not going to be a selling point.
Most people don't get anywhere NEAR the quality limit of the iPod in the first place, because they're using it under very less-than-ideal conditions. So even if you did put some super-decoder chip in there, and made all the traces out of 24kt gold and marketed it as a "Audiophile iPod," the reason that most people would buy it would not be because of any increased audio quality, but because it would (if intelligently marketed) look different and have a certain cachet.
There may be other players that sound better than the iPod. I accept that (and never claimed anything else) -- but the fact that they all have negligable market share ought to show you that quality doesn't sell things by itself, especially when it's only a slight increase and it's above the "quality cieling" with regards to the way people are going to use it.
So to summarize: my point was that there's no market for an actual "high quality" device in the mass market, when most people are currently not even hitting the limits of a commonly used "regular quality" device. The only way you are going to upsell people is with something else: namely a brand image.
anglo-saxons are too stupid to learn other languages.
Clearly, it's not because "anglo-saxons" just don't give a damn, and would rather spend the time learning other things; clearly it's not because you can easily live your entire life in the U.S. without ever meeting someone who doesn't speak English; clearly it's not because English is the common language of aviation, business, medicine, and technology, and most people would never have a use for another language;
No, clearly it's because "anglo-saxons" are mentally retarded.
Your arrogance and racism (yes, it's racism when it's against white people too) don't help your argument much either. Actually it's a pity that more of America's flaming racists don't speak foreign languages -- they'd learn so much about pigheadedness outside our borders too.
If this is true, you should forward it, with complete headers, back to the domain's postmaster and to spam@uce.gov. That is unless you think it's coming from zombified Windows boxes, in which case it won't really do anything... but if you think you're actually getting spam from a large-scale commercial operation in the US, by all means send it to the FTC and their ISP.
I'm a US user, and almost all of the spam I get these days is from overseas, mostly from countries that I doubt really care about enforcing anti-spam laws (if they have them). I'd hate for people in other countries to be thinking the same thing about the US.
Actually all it's going to do is teach them a very interesting and hands-on lesson in how to defeat web filtering.
Much like how my university offered undergraduates a very popular evening course on bypassing P2P blocking.
These school web-filtering products are really, more than anything else I can think of, what are going to breed the next generation of hackers. (Or at least, the next generation of script kiddies; but somebody has to write those scripts!) It provides a social incentive to do something really nerdy with computers. You're never going to get a bunch of 8th graders to care about what an SSH tunnel or a HTTP proxy is, but if it's something you can use to get around some form of adult-imposed censorship, all of a sudden it looks much cooler.
And most importantly, now those young budding geeks out there can do something with computers that might actually impress a girl. They have it too easy, clearly.
If your kid is allowed to pilot a 2000+ lb pile of steel and glass down the road at 60 MPH but can't be trusted to be left alone with a computer, you've got some real problems.
Besides which, unless you intend to follow your son around everywhere, he is absolutely guaranteed to get whatever smut he wants off of the Internet -- at a friend's house, or at a library/school/university computer that doesn't censor its access. Or heck, if he's even reasonably intelligent and lives in an urban area, he'll probably be able to just go out and buy a WiFi-enabled laptop and use it to his heart's content in any park or coffeeshop. I expect in a few years a used one will be well within the range of 'saved-up allowance (or bottle return, or whatever) money,' if they aren't already. And then, the thrill of discovering something illicit will be much greater: it probably won't be Wikipedia that he'll be browsing. While everyone else will have gotten over the novelty of trolling for porn or deathpics by the time they go to college, someone raised in such a controlling atmosphere is going to be like 'Crocodile Dundee goes to Rotten.Com.'
I think the only way you'd ever enforce something like this, given how ubiquitous the Internet is (and given that it's not illegal for minors to purchase computers on their own), would be to become so overbearing that the personality damage you'd likely do as a result greatly outweighs the possible perils of the Internet -- which are highly exaggerated anyway.
I'm not saying you can't do it -- God knows you have a Constitutional right to fuck your kids up as bad as you see fit, provided you don't actually abuse them -- but that doesn't mean it's not a really bad idea.
Bingo. Couldn't have said it better myself. The "problem" that most people have with the Internet is less a real honest 'safety' issue, but because it threatens the walls of denial they've put up which prevent them from thinking of their children in anything approaching a sexualized context.
Guess what? Kids have always talked and thought like that, and I'm willing to bet that to a very great extent, they've always done many of the things they're doing now. Fourteen-year-olds shacking up with 25-year-olds ain't a new phenomenon. It's just that now it's more public, and thus people have to deal with it. Since they're not ever going to be able to change the actual behavior (whether it's cursing, or pornography, or teen sex) they attack the means which brought it to their attention instead.
I don't have any great amount of experience with their products, but you might want to check out a piece of software called SecuritySpy. It's for Mac OS X, supports multiple cameras (both locally connected and over IP) and it will do motion detection and automatic webserving/uploading. So you can use as the actual "security system" itself, or incorporate it into a greater system.
I do not think though that it will control the pan/tilt fuctions of the more sophisticated webcams, however. I could be wrong on that, it's worth checking, but I think in order to do that you need to connect to the camera's IP address with a web browser, there's not really any standard 'camera control interface' that you could write software for (or if there is, it doesn't seem like the manufacturers are using it).
The only place I've ever seen that comes close to this are repair manuals and parts directories. Sometimes if you look for a part that fits a certain device (say, a Realistic radio) it will also list that it fits some other brands' devices (Uniden). That's a good sign that the two may be identical and just rebranded.
Other than that, I've never seen any good centralized repository of information like that. Too bad, because it would be useful. Generally though, at least one of the parties involved in the rebranding doesn't really want it to become widely known.
For example, I can tell you that the Ritz Camera "house brand" film is just basic-grade Fujifilm in different cans and boxes, for about 2/3rds the price (IIRC it's Fuji Super G -- you can tell this if you look at the negatives when you get them back, because it's coded into the dashes in the sprocket areas). However, I doubt that Fuji would go out of their way to tell you this, or anything else about their OEM manufacturing agreements, because it might impact the perceived quality of their actual branded film.
Likewise, I doubt that most electronics manufacturers will tell you who they're making stuff for. Thus a database of equipment manufacturers would have to be built up pretty painstakingly by hand, or from user contributions.
You do realize that the "sound chip" in an iPod is ridiculously good, right? As in, it already is capable of better sound than most people will ever have the capability of appreciating, because of how it's used.
Even Sterophile -- and these are the guys who claim that they can hear the difference between various power cables plugged into their amplifiers -- thought it was good. [1] At least when it's playing AIFF files; MP3s throw away too much information to really ever sound good to people listening for that level of quality anyway. Their conclusion [2] was "The iPod's measured behavior is better than many CD players--ironic, considering that most of the time it will be used to play MP3 and AAC files, which will not immediately benefit from such good performance."
I agree with your point in general, but I think you used a bad example. Digital music players in general, and the iPod in particular (since it's the most common device in that category) have a rather large surplus of "quality," that most people never use. Either because they are using it to play back garbagy material that's encoded at 128kb/s, or listening using crummy earbuds, or in a noisy environment, or all three. Virtually no one actually uses the capabilities that most devices actually have; a "premium iPod" with some sort of super-high-end decoder would just be a status symbol: make it in a different exterior color and 50% higher price and people would buy it just so they can show their friends, but they'd never use the additional capabilities. That's what really drives sales of "premium" consumer stuff, it's not the quality per se, it's the cachet.
I could think of a few other markets where this same situation is also true (the quality of even the lowest-common-denominator device is greatly in excess of the quality actually experienced by most people that own it). So when you look at small brands that are catering to a "quality" market, it's important to look closely and see whether they're actually delivering quality, or are just selling an image. It's quite often the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice try. Thinkpads are basically the same price as iBooks. In fact if you spec them out, the ThinkPads can be more expensive for about the same level of hardware.
The base-model iBook is $999, an equivalent ThinkPad is an R- or Z-series "Value" model, $1299 or $1499, respectively. The only way you can get a ThinkPad for less than the price of an iBook is with a crippled configuration (the R-series "Economy" model: XP Home Edition and only 256MB RAM with at least 64MB being used by the video controller).
Neither of the sites will let me deep-link to the configurations, but they're easy to find. Apple's is from the Apple Store, then click on iBook, the ThinkPads are from Lenovo's Products page and then click on ThinkPads.
Quality PC laptops are not necessarily cheaper than Apple. And I've used some of the "non quality" off-brand PC laptops, and I'd prefer never to go there again. Frankly they're so much trouble I'd say students would be better off with a spiral notebook and a #2 pencil.
Something's messed up with your system. That's not how it works; the auto-switching features of OS X are quite "smart" in my experience (assuming you have it set up to join any available network when no preferred ones are connected). I think the default is to prompt the user when connecting to a non-whitelisted, unencrypted network, however.
That said, my corporate laptop doesn't do a horrible job of WLAN management either, although I use a 3rd party program rather than the built-in Windows tools to manage different connection profiles (it also turns the VPN on if I'm not on the corporate subnet).
Good point. People forget that having a solid steel door doesn't do a damn bit of good if the latches and bolts are sunk into a wooden frame, or even just into the wooden trim... I've seen a lot of houses and apartments where the owner has tried to "secure" the front door by replacing the hollow-core door with a solid-wood or metal one, only to leave the frame in place. Guess what's going to go with a single kick? The frame and moulding.
I've got a better system, just charge his credit card for "licenses" which allow him to listen to music that he's statistically likely to hear during the rest of his day.
... you're a 30-year-old white male, you go to the mall once a month, you like to eat at Burrito Hut, and you wear a size 9-1/2 wide. Your Ambient Listening System license will be just $9.85 a month! But if you want to upgrade, for just $29.95 a month, you can get a license that allows for unlimited playback of Sony Music titles on your own Humming and Whistling Device. Can I sign you up for that?"
"Let's see, Mr Jones
This has been brought up before, and I don't think that you'll ever see an "open" DRM system, because DRM is a fundamentally flawed and insecure concept, which relies on security through obscurity. 'Openness' of any sort is anathema to a DRM scheme, because it just means that it will be cracked more rapidly.
Of course, they always seem to get cracked anyway, but the closed, obscure, undocumented systems usually stay 'secure' long enough for the manufacturer to sell them to the music labels and other content providers, which is the really important part. If the labels/studios point out what's wrong with the DRM (like "hey, doesn't the user have both the file and the key to decrypt it, in order to make it work?") the manufacturer of the system can respond "sure, but nobody except us understands how the system works, and we're not telling, so it's secure." Then when it eventually gets broken, the companies can blame it on "hackers," and not on a basic problem in what they're trying to accomplish.
you'll be one of those who will be gone in the the next 12 to 24 months.
Hey, maybe that's what he meant? Napster going out of business would be a change in the competitive landscape, albeit a very small one (to anyone who doesn't use Napster). I think that's quite a bit more likely to come true than Apple losing any significant part of the market.
First thing you see: BUY MUSIC FROM THE iTUNES MUSIC STORE!
... if you go to the library, you're just presented with an empty window, if you don't have any music. (And there's a thing for the iTunes MiniStore at the bottom, asking you if you want to turn it on, but you can just disable it.)
Actually this isn't precisely true, and I know because I just installed iTunes (on my work PC) for the first time in several years. The first thing you see once you get past the setup screens is a dialog asking "Do you want to go to the Music Store, or to your Library?"
I think the iTMS part of iTunes is somewhat overstated -- I'm willing to bet that most people don't use it for more than a small percentage of their music Libraries, with the possible exception of people who really made out during the Pepsi-cap promotions or won sweepstakes.
Hint: They both have a capital S in their names; and they've both used the SCO case to promote indemnification FUD to promote sales of their own software.
... any chance you can name names?
All right, I'll bite. I'm a bit tired and brain dead for riddles
I think this is a pretty good analysis. Based on my personal recollection, most of my PC-using friends went from MusicMatch or WinAmp to iTunes as a music-management program, in many cases before they had iPods. The program itself was a massive selling feature; the iPod built on iTunes' reputation for ease-of-use.
If Samsung can't replicate this (and I haven't seen the state of other music players out there, but I'm not aware of many serious contenders to iTunes really) then they're probably screwed. The only thing I've played with is the new Napster music service client, and I can tell you it's worse than bad -- it gives me a headache.
The lack of a good library management app was what doomed several MP3 players that I investigated, pre-iPod. They all had fairly good hardware design, but it was obvious that the companies making them had decided that the software was an afterthought, something to be outsourced or bundled. Today, I think most of those companies are bankrupt and their pre-iPod footnotes will be nothing but footnotes because of their shortsightedness towards providing an integrated solution.
I don't really care whether Samsung succeeds or not, frankly as a Mac user I hope it and MS' DRM scheme both go down the tubes, but I hope that they have someone working on making some really good management software to run this whole thing. Otherwise, they might as well get comfortable with being Apple's memory supplier for the duration.
Kid: Mom, can I get a YP-Z5AB for Christmas?
Mom: What? What is that? No, you can't have a car.
Kid: It's this thing, that plays music. You know...
Mom: Like an iPod?
Kid: Yeah!
Mom: We'll see.
Later...the kid gets an iPod, because nobody can remember what the hell the other thing is named, two days before Christmas when they're trying to buy one.
You're all wrong -- stop spreading FUD.
... but I don't.
Apple isn't locking all iPod owners in, there's nothing about ripping a CD using iTunes that makes it impossible to put on another player. The only music that you can't transfer to another player is stuff purchased from the iTunes Music Store, which is a very, very small percentage of most people's music collections.
I seriously doubt that anyone (except the very, very rich) have thousands of dollars of iTMS music. Most people I know -- myself included -- have a handful of purchased songs, with the majority of music taken from other sources. There's nothing keeping me from switching to another player tomorrow, if I really wanted to
There's not any "vendor lock-in" inherent in using iTunes and an iPod, assuming you never use iTMS. And if you use iTMS, you probably know what you're buying (and it's not as though they've ever kept the fact that they only play on an iPod a secret). If you drop two grand on iPod-only songs, that's your decision. But virtually nobody does.
Well said.
The special status of science is its utility, in that it gives predictions for how the universe actually works which are borne out in reality.
Science -- and when you get right down to it, all positivist epistemology, which is really the basis of science as most people practice it -- is better than just making up random explanations for everything (e.g. 'electricity comes from fairies') because the explanations are more useful. The key to science is its utility. The reason why my belief system, which says that the earth is round and things fall because of gravity and light moves at a certain known speed, is superior to one which says that the earth is flat and objects fall because a diety says so and light is instantenous, is because my system of belief allows me to make useful and accurate predictions of actual phenomena. Therefore, we say that it is probably "true." Truth is assumed to be useful, because through the greater understanding of how things in our world are going to behave, we can better ourselves.
Math is likewise a pretty arbitrary, abstract concept, but it's quite useful. With it you can do things that would be otherwise impossible (or greatly more difficult without it), such as building bridges and buildings that don't collapse, airplanes, and atomic bombs.
I don't think that it's possible to say that one abstract philosophical understanding of the world is inherently superior to any other, except in how it allows its adherents to live. If some philosophy is more useful, then it is probably worth buying into. Evolution is quite correctly understood to be more useful than creationism (you can predict future patterns, etc., but being a creationist doesn't get you anywhere), so there is a strong interest in making sure that it is taught as the truth.
But Evolution Trolls aren't imaginary, I see them all the time! Right here on Slashdot!
IIRC, there was a time when the regular "Candy Colored" base-model iMac was below a grand. Granted, it was barely below (at $999 or something), but it was below the magic four-digit mark. Then of course the CRT iMac became the eMac, and the price for the new LCD iMac (the flexible one) was significantly higher.
It'll be interesting to see whether iMacs get back down below a grand at any point, or if they're going to keep them up around $1200-ish and use the Mini to capture the lower-end market.
The connector, as others have pointed out, is digital as well as analog.
c ables.html#mini
Specifically it's called a "Mini Toslink" [1]. Basically it's the same form factor as a 1/8" stereo miniplug, but it's hollow and transmits the optical digital information out the very end. Or, a standard electrical analog stereo cable can be used. I think it's a Sony invention, the first place I ever saw it was on MiniDisc players.
It's actually a neat little connector, because you can squeeze it into devices without cluttering them up with separate digital and analog ones. It's not very widely used on higher-end equipment, though. They're usually either regular Toslink or (electrical) digital on coaxial cable, the latter of which means a $15 converter box from Radio Shack. For this reason I think, the big Power Mac G5s use the regular Toslink optical connectors instead of the minis on their DA ins and outs.
I'm actually quite disappointed that they didn't integrate the AirTunes functions into the iPod Hi-Fi. If they had, I'd probably be first in line to buy one at the Apple store tonight after work. Now that would be slick, just a sleek white box, controllable by either the iPod if it was attached, or an IR remote, or from the computer. As it is, it's just a very expensive boombox; they had the opportunity to create a "smart" product and decided not to. Too bad.
[1] http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/audio_toslink_
One can only assume (hope?) that his boss' real name is not J. Smith.
At any rate, if it was his boss' email address, it won't be shortly.
Do you have a link on that?
At any rate, in your eagerness to decry the iPod, I think you're missing my point entirely. Whether some other brand of MP3 player is slightly better than the iPod is completely irrelevant. If the iPod has a "quality surplus," and Player X sounds better than an iPod, it has even more of a surplus of quality. That's not going to be a selling point.
Most people don't get anywhere NEAR the quality limit of the iPod in the first place, because they're using it under very less-than-ideal conditions. So even if you did put some super-decoder chip in there, and made all the traces out of 24kt gold and marketed it as a "Audiophile iPod," the reason that most people would buy it would not be because of any increased audio quality, but because it would (if intelligently marketed) look different and have a certain cachet.
There may be other players that sound better than the iPod. I accept that (and never claimed anything else) -- but the fact that they all have negligable market share ought to show you that quality doesn't sell things by itself, especially when it's only a slight increase and it's above the "quality cieling" with regards to the way people are going to use it.
So to summarize: my point was that there's no market for an actual "high quality" device in the mass market, when most people are currently not even hitting the limits of a commonly used "regular quality" device. The only way you are going to upsell people is with something else: namely a brand image.
anglo-saxons are too stupid to learn other languages.
Clearly, it's not because "anglo-saxons" just don't give a damn, and would rather spend the time learning other things; clearly it's not because you can easily live your entire life in the U.S. without ever meeting someone who doesn't speak English; clearly it's not because English is the common language of aviation, business, medicine, and technology, and most people would never have a use for another language;
No, clearly it's because "anglo-saxons" are mentally retarded.
Your arrogance and racism (yes, it's racism when it's against white people too) don't help your argument much either. Actually it's a pity that more of America's flaming racists don't speak foreign languages -- they'd learn so much about pigheadedness outside our borders too.
If this is true, you should forward it, with complete headers, back to the domain's postmaster and to spam@uce.gov. That is unless you think it's coming from zombified Windows boxes, in which case it won't really do anything ... but if you think you're actually getting spam from a large-scale commercial operation in the US, by all means send it to the FTC and their ISP.
I'm a US user, and almost all of the spam I get these days is from overseas, mostly from countries that I doubt really care about enforcing anti-spam laws (if they have them). I'd hate for people in other countries to be thinking the same thing about the US.
Actually all it's going to do is teach them a very interesting and hands-on lesson in how to defeat web filtering.
Much like how my university offered undergraduates a very popular evening course on bypassing P2P blocking.
These school web-filtering products are really, more than anything else I can think of, what are going to breed the next generation of hackers. (Or at least, the next generation of script kiddies; but somebody has to write those scripts!) It provides a social incentive to do something really nerdy with computers. You're never going to get a bunch of 8th graders to care about what an SSH tunnel or a HTTP proxy is, but if it's something you can use to get around some form of adult-imposed censorship, all of a sudden it looks much cooler.
And most importantly, now those young budding geeks out there can do something with computers that might actually impress a girl. They have it too easy, clearly.
If your kid is allowed to pilot a 2000+ lb pile of steel and glass down the road at 60 MPH but can't be trusted to be left alone with a computer, you've got some real problems.
Besides which, unless you intend to follow your son around everywhere, he is absolutely guaranteed to get whatever smut he wants off of the Internet -- at a friend's house, or at a library/school/university computer that doesn't censor its access. Or heck, if he's even reasonably intelligent and lives in an urban area, he'll probably be able to just go out and buy a WiFi-enabled laptop and use it to his heart's content in any park or coffeeshop. I expect in a few years a used one will be well within the range of 'saved-up allowance (or bottle return, or whatever) money,' if they aren't already. And then, the thrill of discovering something illicit will be much greater: it probably won't be Wikipedia that he'll be browsing. While everyone else will have gotten over the novelty of trolling for porn or deathpics by the time they go to college, someone raised in such a controlling atmosphere is going to be like 'Crocodile Dundee goes to Rotten.Com.'
I think the only way you'd ever enforce something like this, given how ubiquitous the Internet is (and given that it's not illegal for minors to purchase computers on their own), would be to become so overbearing that the personality damage you'd likely do as a result greatly outweighs the possible perils of the Internet -- which are highly exaggerated anyway.
I'm not saying you can't do it -- God knows you have a Constitutional right to fuck your kids up as bad as you see fit, provided you don't actually abuse them -- but that doesn't mean it's not a really bad idea.
Bingo. Couldn't have said it better myself. The "problem" that most people have with the Internet is less a real honest 'safety' issue, but because it threatens the walls of denial they've put up which prevent them from thinking of their children in anything approaching a sexualized context.
Guess what? Kids have always talked and thought like that, and I'm willing to bet that to a very great extent, they've always done many of the things they're doing now. Fourteen-year-olds shacking up with 25-year-olds ain't a new phenomenon. It's just that now it's more public, and thus people have to deal with it. Since they're not ever going to be able to change the actual behavior (whether it's cursing, or pornography, or teen sex) they attack the means which brought it to their attention instead.
I don't have any great amount of experience with their products, but you might want to check out a piece of software called SecuritySpy. It's for Mac OS X, supports multiple cameras (both locally connected and over IP) and it will do motion detection and automatic webserving/uploading. So you can use as the actual "security system" itself, or incorporate it into a greater system.
http://www.securityspy.com/
I do not think though that it will control the pan/tilt fuctions of the more sophisticated webcams, however. I could be wrong on that, it's worth checking, but I think in order to do that you need to connect to the camera's IP address with a web browser, there's not really any standard 'camera control interface' that you could write software for (or if there is, it doesn't seem like the manufacturers are using it).
The only place I've ever seen that comes close to this are repair manuals and parts directories. Sometimes if you look for a part that fits a certain device (say, a Realistic radio) it will also list that it fits some other brands' devices (Uniden). That's a good sign that the two may be identical and just rebranded.
Other than that, I've never seen any good centralized repository of information like that. Too bad, because it would be useful. Generally though, at least one of the parties involved in the rebranding doesn't really want it to become widely known.
For example, I can tell you that the Ritz Camera "house brand" film is just basic-grade Fujifilm in different cans and boxes, for about 2/3rds the price (IIRC it's Fuji Super G -- you can tell this if you look at the negatives when you get them back, because it's coded into the dashes in the sprocket areas). However, I doubt that Fuji would go out of their way to tell you this, or anything else about their OEM manufacturing agreements, because it might impact the perceived quality of their actual branded film.
Likewise, I doubt that most electronics manufacturers will tell you who they're making stuff for. Thus a database of equipment manufacturers would have to be built up pretty painstakingly by hand, or from user contributions.
You do realize that the "sound chip" in an iPod is ridiculously good, right? As in, it already is capable of better sound than most people will ever have the capability of appreciating, because of how it's used.
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Even Sterophile -- and these are the guys who claim that they can hear the difference between various power cables plugged into their amplifiers -- thought it was good. [1] At least when it's playing AIFF files; MP3s throw away too much information to really ever sound good to people listening for that level of quality anyway. Their conclusion [2] was "The iPod's measured behavior is better than many CD players--ironic, considering that most of the time it will be used to play MP3 and AAC files, which will not immediately benefit from such good performance."
I agree with your point in general, but I think you used a bad example. Digital music players in general, and the iPod in particular (since it's the most common device in that category) have a rather large surplus of "quality," that most people never use. Either because they are using it to play back garbagy material that's encoded at 128kb/s, or listening using crummy earbuds, or in a noisy environment, or all three. Virtually no one actually uses the capabilities that most devices actually have; a "premium iPod" with some sort of super-high-end decoder would just be a status symbol: make it in a different exterior color and 50% higher price and people would buy it just so they can show their friends, but they'd never use the additional capabilities. That's what really drives sales of "premium" consumer stuff, it's not the quality per se, it's the cachet.
I could think of a few other markets where this same situation is also true (the quality of even the lowest-common-denominator device is greatly in excess of the quality actually experienced by most people that own it). So when you look at small brands that are catering to a "quality" market, it's important to look closely and see whether they're actually delivering quality, or are just selling an image. It's quite often the latter.
[1] http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/9
[2] http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/9