What Apple is going to release are Apple Computers, which just happen to have processors made by Intel. You'd be a fool to think that means you can just plug in a PC video card. It's still going to be a "Macintosh computer," and to users that means that you need to buy Mac-compatible hardware if you want it to work correctly.
In other words, when you want a video card, you go to ATI and pick from the one or two 'Mac' video card versions they sell, or the same from nVidia. Nowhere has Apple done anything to suggest to anyone that this situation will change.
I think people here on Slashdot are making a bigger deal out of the processor change than average Mac users will. They'll still be buying and using those big silver metal boxes with the Apple on the front, and buying hardware that's compatible with it. The advantage of the new processors is increased speed, not wider hardware compatibility.
I think this is very true. I was going to make a point like this earlier in the thread: Apple won't release an OS for commodity hardware because they would put them in direct competition with Microsoft.
As much as we like to imagine MS and Apple as die-hard rivals, they really aren't. Microsoft makes important software for the Mac OS (MS Office suite), and basically lets Apple do whatever it wants in its little corner of the market. Apple does a lot of saber-rattling to please the Mac faithful who like to see themselves as partisans fighting the Evil Gates Empire, but doesn't really affect MS's sales.
If Apple ever introduced an OS for commodity hardware, I think you'd see Microsoft's Bad Business Machine rolling like never before. Every contract with every hardware vendor would be used to keep the Mac OS off of mass-market systems. Companies that adopted Macs would probably get threatened with software license audits and junk lawsuits. Every school district in the country would get a special 'one time offer' if they agreed never to buy Apple.
We've all seen the sort of FUD that MS spreads regarding Linux, and I think everyone can agree that Linux is not yet, from a usability standpoint, a direct competitor to Windows XP. If Apple actually brought out an x86 OS that was, you'd see these sort of tactics times a thousand.
Or it could backfire horribly, like the "experiment" with clones/CHRP did: Apple's overall market share didn't change, but users who previously had bought Apple hardware migrated to Power Computing and Motorola and UMax boxes, giving Apple only a licensing fee instead of the 20% margin they previously did.
If Mac OS ran on commodity hardware, perhaps they'd pick up a few disgruntled Windows users, and Linux users who want something easier to use, but I suspect any positive movement would be greatly offset by the number of current Mac users who would switch to cheaper hardware and deny Apple profit.
I'm sure there are some potential Mac users waiting in the wings, held off by the high cost of Apple hardware, but this is not a market that I suspect Apple really cares about. Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel because they wanted to get faster processors into their current lineup and maintain and increase the number of people buying Apple boxes, not decimate their hardware division's sales overnight.
Actually, your comment about drivers is not true on the Mac.
Apple builds most of the generic drivers (USB Mass Storage, the input device drivers, even generic SCSI card drivers) for commonly available hardware. They do this because they realize their marketshare is too small to rely on aftermarket hardware providers to put the time in to make drivers that are reliable and would maintain a satisfactory user experience.
I have a lot of hardware attached to my Macs, and I can't think of anything that I've actually installed a manufacturer-supplied driver for. Perhaps the printer. But other than that, everything else runs using the default, Apple supplied generic drivers.
Apple doesn't have the market or mind-share to piss away customer goodwill by having them call up and get told that they're SOL because their hardware isn't supported. Better to just make the OS not run on unsupported systems at all, than to run poorly and give Apple and the Mac OS a bad reputation.
While you may be true in the narrow sense of "one more copy" doesn't cost very much, if Apple bought into this line of thinking, it'd be the last version of the Mac OS they ever sold.
They have to recoup the cost of the R&D that went into developing the system, and continually updating it, and producing the next version. These are costs which need to be somehow made up by either OS sales, or (as I suspect they are now) subsidized by hardware sales.
Up until recently, when Apple started charging $200 or whatever it is for a new version of the OS every year or two, and perhaps even now, I'm sure the software side of things ran at a loss. The Mac OS exists principally as a selling point to get people to buy Apple hardware, which is where the profit is.
Similarly, the iTMS, which might be the lifeblood of some other company, exists to Apple almost solely as a way to market iPods, which they make a large profit on.
This is an excellent point. I've stated before that I think it's also the reason why we've never had to deal with serialization or activation in the Mac OS until this point.
Apple knows that you can take a OS X install DVD and pop it into as many computers as you want and pirate like hell, but they've never chosen to do anything about it. Why? Because you can only install it on Apple computers, so they know they've made some money off of you anyway.
Microsoft would never allow Dell or any of the other major manufacturers to sell their boxes with an Apple OS.
They give Dell, et al, huge discounts on Windows, which I'm sure would disappear the moment Dell started considering an alternative OS. Dell wouldn't be willing to risk the majority of its sales on the off chance of this new alternative OS taking off.
And I'll restate the point others have made: Apple's superiority in terms of user experience is directly attributable to the tight integration between and control of the hardware. There are far less hardware configurations in any Apple system than a commodity x86 box. Go look for Mac video cards and you'll see what I mean. Apple would be gambling with their one real advantage if they actually marketed their OS for commodity hardware, as opposed to just letting a few hackers here and there play with it.
While you may be right in your overall point, I think you give "the unwashed masses" too little credit regarding the whole PSX mod phenomenon.
Sure, very few people were willing to actually do the soldering themselves, but given that the install only takes a few minutes for an experienced person to do, it was always cheap and relatively easy to get one put in. As other people have attested to in this forum, in certain communities the percentage of PSX units that were modded approaches if not 100% than at least majority.
Very few people actually downloaded game images, correct. At the time, broadband wasn't that popular and 650MB was a vast amount of data. (It still is, if you're on dialup...) I suspect that most games which were copied were done the same way as audio CDs before the MP3 revolution: someone goes out and buys or rents a game, then copies it for their friends. I know this is how it worked in my experience.
Just because people can't use a soldering iron and didn't have broadband by no means put them out of the pirated games scene back at the height of the PSX. While I'm not sure that it was really responsible for the success of the format or the failure (relatively) of the N64, it was a lot more common than I think you're leading people to believe.
As many other people have pointed out, the difference between the iPod and the Blu-Ray system is that while the iPod SUPPORTS an implementation of DRM (the so-called "FairPlay" system), it doesn't require it.
These new DVD players, I believe, will only play DRMed content. Sort of like the Sony music players that would only play music once you ripped it from the CD into Sony's proprietary format.
I wonder if they hired a lot of unemployed programmers from the old "Divx" (the playback device, not the video format) project...
This sort of reminds me of that scheme. Sure, it's not pay-per-view, but it's almost as onerous and invasive.
Just remember what happened to all those people who had Divx players and moves when the company finally bit the dust: they turned off the activation machinery at the head end, and after a few months all the players were just hunks of plastic.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not going to be standing in line at midnight of whenever Sony releases their new machine just to plunk down my hard earned cash for something that can be remotely killed.
I know I'll probably get flamed for this, but yesterday I happened to drive by one of the biggest section of housing projects in the city where I live (and no, I wasn't out cruising for dope or hookers), and couldn't believe the number of mini-dish satellite TV antennas stuck on the porches and verandas. It was ridiculous: at least 50% of the apartments had them.
And where a few years ago you'd see lots of people just standing out in front of the buildings or sitting on the steps, now they're almost all using cellphones.
Anyway, just food for thought. My on-topic point is this: cellphones as a technology have already trickled down to all echelons of society here in the U.S., at their current price point. If they price of individual units was to drop to $20 tomorrow, I doubt we'd see any immediate change as consumers, because there's no reason to decrease the price. They've already saturated the market! Especially considering that the market is dominated by a few major players (who I bet have no problem colluding with each other if it kept prices high), I can see the price differential resulting from development in the field going straight into the cell companies' profit margins.
I'm absolutely no fan of government regulation, but my recent experience in buying a cellphone and service agreement have convinced me that something is very wrong with the state of that particular market right now.
First, let me say I agree with your point concerning the levy in general: it's a stupid idea, and as you said, "a greedy money grab by people that generally don't deserve it." Well put.
(Furthermore, if they imposed such a levy on bullets, I probably would consider myself absolved if I went and shot the person who thought said levy was a good idea, with their very expensive bullets. But that's a different issue.)
The crux of your argument is that downloading music is immoral, regardless of whether there is a levy or not. I disagree -- the imposition of the levy indicates that the government not only believes you to be, but has convicted and fined you as, a criminal! And that you have been fined an amount equal to the 'damage' which your behavior will do. This, in my opinion, earns you a sort of legal and moral 'credit,' which you can then exercise -- guilt free! -- if you choose to.
After all, you've already 'done the time,' so no shame in 'doing the crime.'
As long as your government is going to treat you like a criminal, you might as well enjoy it as best you can. Unless not acting like a criminal might in some way help (e.g. by pirating, are you in some way proving the argument of those in favor of the levy, conversely, by not pirating might the levy be lifted).
If you want, there's an add-on pack for the iPod (not sure of the mfr, but I'm sure you could google it) that allows you to power it from 4 AA batteries, your choice of rechargable or alkaline.
Seems like a great solution to me: people who want to use an iPod in which the internal Li-ion cell has died, or just want more flexibility can buy and use the pack, but the rest of the world who wants something small and light isn't burdened with the additional size and weight.
Seriously, if Apple had built the iPod to run on AAs, I don't think it would have been nearly the phenomenon that it was and is. I know I probably wouldn't have bought one: the weight alone probably would have doubled, and the thickness increased by at least a third to a half. Part of what makes the iPod sell is it's very small size, and a big part of that size is the custom lithium battery.
I don't think Apple went out of their way to use a battery that's hard to replace, I'm sure that if there was an off-the-shelf battery that satisfied the design criteria they would have used it (those custom batteries cost big money vs standard sizes, which could otherwise have been profit). Do I wish they had made the back door a little easier to pop open? Sure. But everything considered, it's still a good design, a compromise between energy storage capacity and physical dimensions.
As to the number of charge cycles before the battery dies... I think perhaps Apple should have been more clear about this from the beginning. But anyone who's ever used Lithium cells knows they eventually go bad after a certain number of cycles (I fly R/C aircraft off of Li-Poly cells and they die eventually too) so that shouldn't be a surprise. It's just unfortunate they weren't more upfront about this. I've never seen anything though that suggests they misrepresented the cells' life, however.
Regardless of what the Slashdot summary suggested, I don't think that this product is designed for a mass-market audience. It's really attempting to cater to a niche market for people who want to keep a large library of un-compresed music at their fingertips.
However, what this machine lacks, and what would really justify its price, would be if it was able to read and rip high-resolution audio formats. (Nonwithstanding that would probably be a DMCA violation.)
In the U.S., all that "junk mail" actually subsidizes the cost of carrying letters and packages.
The cost to transport a letter from one end of the country to the other is actually significantly more than 37, but the difference is made up by presorted bulk mail, which is billed at a slightly higher rate than the actual cost of carriage and sorting. Basically the Post Office gives a discount for presorted mail, which is slightly LESS than the actual cost savings to the Post Office (because of employee time saved, I suppose) as a result of the presorting.
If all the junk mail sent via the USPS just stopped flowing tomorrow, the system would run out of money pretty quickly. People don't send enough letters and packages to keep the system going by themselves.
I have no idea how the postal system in Finland works, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it probably involves a large injection of public tax-derived funds. In the U.S., the Post Office is entirely self-funded, and has been since 1982 (cite). One exception to this might be the security measures put in place after the 2001 anthrax scares, but I'm not sure.
Actually there is a sizable market for classical music playback equipment, in the ultra-ultra-high-end. Many audiophiles (who really are just people with lots of disposable income and who think they have better hearing than anyone else) like classical music and jazz. Whether they become audiophiles out of an actual appreciation of classical and jazz music, or whether they like classical and jazz music because they're some of the only recordings which really sound much better on a serious high-end audio system, I'm not sure. If you read Stereophile or some of the other mags like it, it becomes clear that the tail wags the dog in a lot of areas... people spend thousands of dollars on a stereo, and then go out and hunt for discs that actually have enough detail in the recording to sound better on them.
But the audiophile market is incredible fickle, and I'm not sure whether a product like this would do well or not. (Although Stereophile did pick the iPod as one of its components of the year a while back...) Maybe if it was designed to work with huge volumes of uncompressed high-resolution music data, they could carve out a niche for it. But otherwise, and until somebody comes up with a way to rip SACDs and DVD-As, who cares. Also, the lack of a digital-out for use with an outboard DAC will probably lose them points in a review.
Anyway, just my thoughts. The hifi audio world is a pretty strange, sometimes twisted place (where else can you spend $500 on a 3-pin IEC power cord?), and I don't think these guys are entering it correctly if they want to succeed there.
Actually at least in my state, you don't need to carry your driver's license in order to drive. You just need to have one.
Of course, if you get pulled over and can't produce it immediately, then you have to actually show up in person at the courthouse within some set time limit (I think 24 or 48 hours) to prove that you have one. So it's really an issue of "you don't have to carry it, but we'll make it easier on you if you do."
The chip thing is somewhat disturbing to me, and frankly I can't see the benefit of it. If you're allergic to aspirin/peanuts/penicillin, get yourself a medical bracelet that says so. It's even indirectly readable: all you have to do is bounce some light waves off the reflective surface and into these funny receptor cells conveniently installed in our heads, and you can tell what they say!
If I had some complicated medical condition which made it likely that I'd be rendered unconscious, and where a common hospital treatment could kill me, I'd be thinking of getting a tattoo long before some sort of implanted chip. At least with the tattoo, you don't need a specialized piece of equipment to read it back, so EMTs as well as ED personnel can benefit by it. And it's a whole lot less creepy (Holocaust references aside).
Why don't you give us an update on how you feel, when you move out of your parents' basement?
Seriously, with the exception of some agricultural jobs (the ones where they typically hire illegals anyway) and are willing to pay you in cash, it's nearly impossible to make a living without disclosing your SSN. I've tried, because I hate giving the damn thing out, but in order to get a job or a bank account or line of credit, you need to give it up. I understand how you could live without the last two items, but being permanently unemployed doesn't appeal to me too much.
And as a private enterprise, they don't have to rent you a room. So go ahead and point that out to them, as well.
Of course they can't discriminate against you based on race, age, sex, religion, etc.... so maybe you could tell them that credit cards are against your religion?
I can only assume based on his comment and assumed musical tastes (NPR, etc.) that when he spoke of "big radio," talk radio probably didn't even occur to him. Just a theory.
But anyway, you're correct, talk radio is huge and doesn't show any signs of weakness. Also, by nature it doesn't lend itself to recording and later playback: who wants to listen to Rush rail about last week's issues?
I have this vague feeling that as commercial music radio has sickened in the past few years (decades perhaps, although I can't say I was paying attention for more than a few years) that it's driven more technologically literate and affluent listeners to iPods. internet radio, and satellite, while listeners less comfortable with new media tune in to their choice of NPR or talk radio, and keep the dials fixed.
I'm not surprised that the iTunes top 20 is mostly taken up by commercially-produced shows, and really anyone who is, is a bit naive. But the important thing is that 20th show, which isn't commercially-produced, and is up there too.
This technology gives people choice, and levels the playing field between independent and corporate radio. Which one people pick is their own business, but the point is that they have a choice.
Furthermore, the integration into iTunes of Podcasting in general (say what you will of the name) is good because it brings a slew of content -- independent and commercial -- to users who probably wouldn't want to go to the bother of downloading a separate 'Podcasting Receiver' program to troll RSS feeds and download them to their Library. This isn't to say that those programs shouldn't be kept going (because we always want to have an alternative, in case Apple started doing something evil) but it's silly to whine because a company is trying to capitalize on a technological movement and make it easier for users to access at the same time.
Probably it has something to do with ease of purchase.
You can go to any number of vendors and watch people fall over themselves and fight with each other to sell you hardware -- and good hardware, too, if you can afford it -- but if you want to hire a really good sysadmin, you have to work for it. You can't just call down to central casting and order up one administrator, please. (Choose carefully, too: because many school districts are unionized, getting rid of people can be a long and arduous process.)
Also, staff is a continual cost, while hardware is a one-time purchase. It's always easier to get a chunk of money to spend now, than a commitment to receive a continual stream of funding indefinitely. Plus, staff costs more than just what their salaries would lend you to think: you also have to factor in benefits and future raises.
I've heard this argument before. Honestly, the platform that your kid's elementary school uses is not going to influence their chances of landing a tech job later in life. Firstly, chances are the platform will be obsolete by the time they enter the market. (Anyone out here still programming for the IIe? For MS DOS 3.0?) Secondly, they're not likely to learn any really serious, salable skills at that point in their lives anyway. The things they'll probably learn, typing, using a mouse, basic word processing, are platform independent.
The point of having computers in the classroom is to assist conventional learning, and secondly to instill an appreciation and understanding of how computers work generally. If you're so daft that you can't make the transition from Macs that you used in school to a Windows system in your office by the time you're looking for a job, then you have no place in a technology company.
If schools were interested in teaching their students a worthwhile lesson about computers, it wouldn't be platform-specific skillset but general science and mathematics, and fostering an actual understanding of the technology, instead of using it as a sort of "magic box" with no idea of what goes on inside.
You make a good point about leaving 'roll on' room on the tape at the beginning, but the explanation is one I've never heard.
The reason I leave space is actually for postproduction: some VTR decks need several seconds of space before the marked cut in point where you want to begin transferring data. You mark the in point, and the deck then automatically backs up, starts playing, and begins transferring at the exact point marked. If you've ever tried to get video off the very beginning of a tape and into FCP or Avid (from a tape where somebody didn't leave any room for roll on), it's a huge pain.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh....no.
What Apple is going to release are Apple Computers, which just happen to have processors made by Intel. You'd be a fool to think that means you can just plug in a PC video card. It's still going to be a "Macintosh computer," and to users that means that you need to buy Mac-compatible hardware if you want it to work correctly.
In other words, when you want a video card, you go to ATI and pick from the one or two 'Mac' video card versions they sell, or the same from nVidia. Nowhere has Apple done anything to suggest to anyone that this situation will change.
I think people here on Slashdot are making a bigger deal out of the processor change than average Mac users will. They'll still be buying and using those big silver metal boxes with the Apple on the front, and buying hardware that's compatible with it. The advantage of the new processors is increased speed, not wider hardware compatibility.
I think this is very true. I was going to make a point like this earlier in the thread: Apple won't release an OS for commodity hardware because they would put them in direct competition with Microsoft.
As much as we like to imagine MS and Apple as die-hard rivals, they really aren't. Microsoft makes important software for the Mac OS (MS Office suite), and basically lets Apple do whatever it wants in its little corner of the market. Apple does a lot of saber-rattling to please the Mac faithful who like to see themselves as partisans fighting the Evil Gates Empire, but doesn't really affect MS's sales.
If Apple ever introduced an OS for commodity hardware, I think you'd see Microsoft's Bad Business Machine rolling like never before. Every contract with every hardware vendor would be used to keep the Mac OS off of mass-market systems. Companies that adopted Macs would probably get threatened with software license audits and junk lawsuits. Every school district in the country would get a special 'one time offer' if they agreed never to buy Apple.
We've all seen the sort of FUD that MS spreads regarding Linux, and I think everyone can agree that Linux is not yet, from a usability standpoint, a direct competitor to Windows XP. If Apple actually brought out an x86 OS that was, you'd see these sort of tactics times a thousand.
Or it could backfire horribly, like the "experiment" with clones/CHRP did: Apple's overall market share didn't change, but users who previously had bought Apple hardware migrated to Power Computing and Motorola and UMax boxes, giving Apple only a licensing fee instead of the 20% margin they previously did.
If Mac OS ran on commodity hardware, perhaps they'd pick up a few disgruntled Windows users, and Linux users who want something easier to use, but I suspect any positive movement would be greatly offset by the number of current Mac users who would switch to cheaper hardware and deny Apple profit.
I'm sure there are some potential Mac users waiting in the wings, held off by the high cost of Apple hardware, but this is not a market that I suspect Apple really cares about. Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel because they wanted to get faster processors into their current lineup and maintain and increase the number of people buying Apple boxes, not decimate their hardware division's sales overnight.
Actually, your comment about drivers is not true on the Mac.
Apple builds most of the generic drivers (USB Mass Storage, the input device drivers, even generic SCSI card drivers) for commonly available hardware. They do this because they realize their marketshare is too small to rely on aftermarket hardware providers to put the time in to make drivers that are reliable and would maintain a satisfactory user experience.
I have a lot of hardware attached to my Macs, and I can't think of anything that I've actually installed a manufacturer-supplied driver for. Perhaps the printer. But other than that, everything else runs using the default, Apple supplied generic drivers.
Apple doesn't have the market or mind-share to piss away customer goodwill by having them call up and get told that they're SOL because their hardware isn't supported. Better to just make the OS not run on unsupported systems at all, than to run poorly and give Apple and the Mac OS a bad reputation.
While you may be true in the narrow sense of "one more copy" doesn't cost very much, if Apple bought into this line of thinking, it'd be the last version of the Mac OS they ever sold.
They have to recoup the cost of the R&D that went into developing the system, and continually updating it, and producing the next version. These are costs which need to be somehow made up by either OS sales, or (as I suspect they are now) subsidized by hardware sales.
Up until recently, when Apple started charging $200 or whatever it is for a new version of the OS every year or two, and perhaps even now, I'm sure the software side of things ran at a loss. The Mac OS exists principally as a selling point to get people to buy Apple hardware, which is where the profit is.
Similarly, the iTMS, which might be the lifeblood of some other company, exists to Apple almost solely as a way to market iPods, which they make a large profit on.
This is an excellent point. I've stated before that I think it's also the reason why we've never had to deal with serialization or activation in the Mac OS until this point.
Apple knows that you can take a OS X install DVD and pop it into as many computers as you want and pirate like hell, but they've never chosen to do anything about it. Why? Because you can only install it on Apple computers, so they know they've made some money off of you anyway.
Microsoft would never allow Dell or any of the other major manufacturers to sell their boxes with an Apple OS.
They give Dell, et al, huge discounts on Windows, which I'm sure would disappear the moment Dell started considering an alternative OS. Dell wouldn't be willing to risk the majority of its sales on the off chance of this new alternative OS taking off.
And I'll restate the point others have made: Apple's superiority in terms of user experience is directly attributable to the tight integration between and control of the hardware. There are far less hardware configurations in any Apple system than a commodity x86 box. Go look for Mac video cards and you'll see what I mean. Apple would be gambling with their one real advantage if they actually marketed their OS for commodity hardware, as opposed to just letting a few hackers here and there play with it.
While you may be right in your overall point, I think you give "the unwashed masses" too little credit regarding the whole PSX mod phenomenon.
Sure, very few people were willing to actually do the soldering themselves, but given that the install only takes a few minutes for an experienced person to do, it was always cheap and relatively easy to get one put in. As other people have attested to in this forum, in certain communities the percentage of PSX units that were modded approaches if not 100% than at least majority.
Very few people actually downloaded game images, correct. At the time, broadband wasn't that popular and 650MB was a vast amount of data. (It still is, if you're on dialup...) I suspect that most games which were copied were done the same way as audio CDs before the MP3 revolution: someone goes out and buys or rents a game, then copies it for their friends. I know this is how it worked in my experience.
Just because people can't use a soldering iron and didn't have broadband by no means put them out of the pirated games scene back at the height of the PSX. While I'm not sure that it was really responsible for the success of the format or the failure (relatively) of the N64, it was a lot more common than I think you're leading people to believe.
As many other people have pointed out, the difference between the iPod and the Blu-Ray system is that while the iPod SUPPORTS an implementation of DRM (the so-called "FairPlay" system), it doesn't require it.
These new DVD players, I believe, will only play DRMed content. Sort of like the Sony music players that would only play music once you ripped it from the CD into Sony's proprietary format.
Kinda funny how they keep trying that, huh?
I wonder if they hired a lot of unemployed programmers from the old "Divx" (the playback device, not the video format) project...
This sort of reminds me of that scheme. Sure, it's not pay-per-view, but it's almost as onerous and invasive.
Just remember what happened to all those people who had Divx players and moves when the company finally bit the dust: they turned off the activation machinery at the head end, and after a few months all the players were just hunks of plastic.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not going to be standing in line at midnight of whenever Sony releases their new machine just to plunk down my hard earned cash for something that can be remotely killed.
I know I'll probably get flamed for this, but yesterday I happened to drive by one of the biggest section of housing projects in the city where I live (and no, I wasn't out cruising for dope or hookers), and couldn't believe the number of mini-dish satellite TV antennas stuck on the porches and verandas. It was ridiculous: at least 50% of the apartments had them.
And where a few years ago you'd see lots of people just standing out in front of the buildings or sitting on the steps, now they're almost all using cellphones.
Anyway, just food for thought. My on-topic point is this: cellphones as a technology have already trickled down to all echelons of society here in the U.S., at their current price point. If they price of individual units was to drop to $20 tomorrow, I doubt we'd see any immediate change as consumers, because there's no reason to decrease the price. They've already saturated the market! Especially considering that the market is dominated by a few major players (who I bet have no problem colluding with each other if it kept prices high), I can see the price differential resulting from development in the field going straight into the cell companies' profit margins.
I'm absolutely no fan of government regulation, but my recent experience in buying a cellphone and service agreement have convinced me that something is very wrong with the state of that particular market right now.
First, let me say I agree with your point concerning the levy in general: it's a stupid idea, and as you said, "a greedy money grab by people that generally don't deserve it." Well put.
(Furthermore, if they imposed such a levy on bullets, I probably would consider myself absolved if I went and shot the person who thought said levy was a good idea, with their very expensive bullets. But that's a different issue.)
The crux of your argument is that downloading music is immoral, regardless of whether there is a levy or not. I disagree -- the imposition of the levy indicates that the government not only believes you to be, but has convicted and fined you as, a criminal! And that you have been fined an amount equal to the 'damage' which your behavior will do. This, in my opinion, earns you a sort of legal and moral 'credit,' which you can then exercise -- guilt free! -- if you choose to.
After all, you've already 'done the time,' so no shame in 'doing the crime.'
As long as your government is going to treat you like a criminal, you might as well enjoy it as best you can. Unless not acting like a criminal might in some way help (e.g. by pirating, are you in some way proving the argument of those in favor of the levy, conversely, by not pirating might the levy be lifted).
If you want, there's an add-on pack for the iPod (not sure of the mfr, but I'm sure you could google it) that allows you to power it from 4 AA batteries, your choice of rechargable or alkaline.
... I think perhaps Apple should have been more clear about this from the beginning. But anyone who's ever used Lithium cells knows they eventually go bad after a certain number of cycles (I fly R/C aircraft off of Li-Poly cells and they die eventually too) so that shouldn't be a surprise. It's just unfortunate they weren't more upfront about this. I've never seen anything though that suggests they misrepresented the cells' life, however.
Seems like a great solution to me: people who want to use an iPod in which the internal Li-ion cell has died, or just want more flexibility can buy and use the pack, but the rest of the world who wants something small and light isn't burdened with the additional size and weight.
Seriously, if Apple had built the iPod to run on AAs, I don't think it would have been nearly the phenomenon that it was and is. I know I probably wouldn't have bought one: the weight alone probably would have doubled, and the thickness increased by at least a third to a half. Part of what makes the iPod sell is it's very small size, and a big part of that size is the custom lithium battery.
I don't think Apple went out of their way to use a battery that's hard to replace, I'm sure that if there was an off-the-shelf battery that satisfied the design criteria they would have used it (those custom batteries cost big money vs standard sizes, which could otherwise have been profit). Do I wish they had made the back door a little easier to pop open? Sure. But everything considered, it's still a good design, a compromise between energy storage capacity and physical dimensions.
As to the number of charge cycles before the battery dies
Regardless of what the Slashdot summary suggested, I don't think that this product is designed for a mass-market audience. It's really attempting to cater to a niche market for people who want to keep a large library of un-compresed music at their fingertips.
However, what this machine lacks, and what would really justify its price, would be if it was able to read and rip high-resolution audio formats. (Nonwithstanding that would probably be a DMCA violation.)
In the U.S., all that "junk mail" actually subsidizes the cost of carrying letters and packages.
The cost to transport a letter from one end of the country to the other is actually significantly more than 37, but the difference is made up by presorted bulk mail, which is billed at a slightly higher rate than the actual cost of carriage and sorting. Basically the Post Office gives a discount for presorted mail, which is slightly LESS than the actual cost savings to the Post Office (because of employee time saved, I suppose) as a result of the presorting.
If all the junk mail sent via the USPS just stopped flowing tomorrow, the system would run out of money pretty quickly. People don't send enough letters and packages to keep the system going by themselves.
I have no idea how the postal system in Finland works, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it probably involves a large injection of public tax-derived funds. In the U.S., the Post Office is entirely self-funded, and has been since 1982 (cite). One exception to this might be the security measures put in place after the 2001 anthrax scares, but I'm not sure.
Actually there is a sizable market for classical music playback equipment, in the ultra-ultra-high-end. Many audiophiles (who really are just people with lots of disposable income and who think they have better hearing than anyone else) like classical music and jazz. Whether they become audiophiles out of an actual appreciation of classical and jazz music, or whether they like classical and jazz music because they're some of the only recordings which really sound much better on a serious high-end audio system, I'm not sure. If you read Stereophile or some of the other mags like it, it becomes clear that the tail wags the dog in a lot of areas ... people spend thousands of dollars on a stereo, and then go out and hunt for discs that actually have enough detail in the recording to sound better on them.
But the audiophile market is incredible fickle, and I'm not sure whether a product like this would do well or not. (Although Stereophile did pick the iPod as one of its components of the year a while back...) Maybe if it was designed to work with huge volumes of uncompressed high-resolution music data, they could carve out a niche for it. But otherwise, and until somebody comes up with a way to rip SACDs and DVD-As, who cares. Also, the lack of a digital-out for use with an outboard DAC will probably lose them points in a review.
Anyway, just my thoughts. The hifi audio world is a pretty strange, sometimes twisted place (where else can you spend $500 on a 3-pin IEC power cord?), and I don't think these guys are entering it correctly if they want to succeed there.
Actually at least in my state, you don't need to carry your driver's license in order to drive. You just need to have one.
Of course, if you get pulled over and can't produce it immediately, then you have to actually show up in person at the courthouse within some set time limit (I think 24 or 48 hours) to prove that you have one. So it's really an issue of "you don't have to carry it, but we'll make it easier on you if you do."
The chip thing is somewhat disturbing to me, and frankly I can't see the benefit of it. If you're allergic to aspirin/peanuts/penicillin, get yourself a medical bracelet that says so. It's even indirectly readable: all you have to do is bounce some light waves off the reflective surface and into these funny receptor cells conveniently installed in our heads, and you can tell what they say!
If I had some complicated medical condition which made it likely that I'd be rendered unconscious, and where a common hospital treatment could kill me, I'd be thinking of getting a tattoo long before some sort of implanted chip. At least with the tattoo, you don't need a specialized piece of equipment to read it back, so EMTs as well as ED personnel can benefit by it. And it's a whole lot less creepy (Holocaust references aside).
Why don't you give us an update on how you feel, when you move out of your parents' basement?
Seriously, with the exception of some agricultural jobs (the ones where they typically hire illegals anyway) and are willing to pay you in cash, it's nearly impossible to make a living without disclosing your SSN. I've tried, because I hate giving the damn thing out, but in order to get a job or a bank account or line of credit, you need to give it up. I understand how you could live without the last two items, but being permanently unemployed doesn't appeal to me too much.
And as a private enterprise, they don't have to rent you a room. So go ahead and point that out to them, as well.
... so maybe you could tell them that credit cards are against your religion?
Of course they can't discriminate against you based on race, age, sex, religion, etc.
I can only assume based on his comment and assumed musical tastes (NPR, etc.) that when he spoke of "big radio," talk radio probably didn't even occur to him. Just a theory.
But anyway, you're correct, talk radio is huge and doesn't show any signs of weakness. Also, by nature it doesn't lend itself to recording and later playback: who wants to listen to Rush rail about last week's issues?
I have this vague feeling that as commercial music radio has sickened in the past few years (decades perhaps, although I can't say I was paying attention for more than a few years) that it's driven more technologically literate and affluent listeners to iPods. internet radio, and satellite, while listeners less comfortable with new media tune in to their choice of NPR or talk radio, and keep the dials fixed.
If I had any mod points, you'd be gettin' em.
I'm not surprised that the iTunes top 20 is mostly taken up by commercially-produced shows, and really anyone who is, is a bit naive. But the important thing is that 20th show, which isn't commercially-produced, and is up there too.
This technology gives people choice, and levels the playing field between independent and corporate radio. Which one people pick is their own business, but the point is that they have a choice.
Furthermore, the integration into iTunes of Podcasting in general (say what you will of the name) is good because it brings a slew of content -- independent and commercial -- to users who probably wouldn't want to go to the bother of downloading a separate 'Podcasting Receiver' program to troll RSS feeds and download them to their Library. This isn't to say that those programs shouldn't be kept going (because we always want to have an alternative, in case Apple started doing something evil) but it's silly to whine because a company is trying to capitalize on a technological movement and make it easier for users to access at the same time.
Probably it has something to do with ease of purchase.
You can go to any number of vendors and watch people fall over themselves and fight with each other to sell you hardware -- and good hardware, too, if you can afford it -- but if you want to hire a really good sysadmin, you have to work for it. You can't just call down to central casting and order up one administrator, please. (Choose carefully, too: because many school districts are unionized, getting rid of people can be a long and arduous process.)
Also, staff is a continual cost, while hardware is a one-time purchase. It's always easier to get a chunk of money to spend now, than a commitment to receive a continual stream of funding indefinitely. Plus, staff costs more than just what their salaries would lend you to think: you also have to factor in benefits and future raises.
I've heard this argument before. Honestly, the platform that your kid's elementary school uses is not going to influence their chances of landing a tech job later in life. Firstly, chances are the platform will be obsolete by the time they enter the market. (Anyone out here still programming for the IIe? For MS DOS 3.0?) Secondly, they're not likely to learn any really serious, salable skills at that point in their lives anyway. The things they'll probably learn, typing, using a mouse, basic word processing, are platform independent.
The point of having computers in the classroom is to assist conventional learning, and secondly to instill an appreciation and understanding of how computers work generally. If you're so daft that you can't make the transition from Macs that you used in school to a Windows system in your office by the time you're looking for a job, then you have no place in a technology company.
If schools were interested in teaching their students a worthwhile lesson about computers, it wouldn't be platform-specific skillset but general science and mathematics, and fostering an actual understanding of the technology, instead of using it as a sort of "magic box" with no idea of what goes on inside.
This is the first time I've heard anyone mention that program since the fourth grade -- any idea what it was called?
:)
Man, I wish I knew about that bug back then.
You make a good point about leaving 'roll on' room on the tape at the beginning, but the explanation is one I've never heard.
The reason I leave space is actually for postproduction: some VTR decks need several seconds of space before the marked cut in point where you want to begin transferring data. You mark the in point, and the deck then automatically backs up, starts playing, and begins transferring at the exact point marked. If you've ever tried to get video off the very beginning of a tape and into FCP or Avid (from a tape where somebody didn't leave any room for roll on), it's a huge pain.