With some competition Microsoft would be forced to write more secure software faster, so in a way monopoly is to blame.
There's that evolutionary aspect to it in the long term (less desirable species die off), but more importantly diversity leads to resistance. If, for example, your web site runs on both Windows and Linux servers, and an exploit against either one cannot take down your entire site.
Hate to break it to you, but your arguments are pathetic. There's little to no risk. [...] you're going to have a hard time proving your case.
My case, just because you've completely missed it, isn't about the Sojourner or nuclear power. It's about the way advocates argue using only partial elements of an entire equation. The point I claim you proved is not that the Sojourner is risky, but that you again emphasized the minimal risk without addressing the benefits.
Now, I appreciate you finally accepting my equation in argument. I'll leave it to somebody else to challenge why you assign 100 to the utility of a working transmitter, etc. At least now we're arguing a more complete picture, no?
Let me rephrase for you. There is a zero point zero zero zero chance that an RTG will destroy the earth
Calm down, drop your preconceptions on what you think I might be, and consider for a moment that I wasn't talking about RTGs when I wrote "destroy the earth". I was exhibiting a principle that even very minimal odds (which is what you had stated) can be a high risk if the consequences are very large (which is what you did not really address initially).
I didn't say RTGs can destroy the earth. It was a hyperbole to get you or another responder to address the consequence portion of the risk equation. And then hopefully, move on to address the benefit portion of the risk-benefit analysis.
What risk?
RTGs are as safe as any other rocket system.
You prove my point again. What benefit? The Sojourner is a test rover with very minimal capabilities. Why keep it running for years?
I don't actually have an opinion on many of the things discussed here. It's just irritating to read advocates on either side stress only the elements of the full equation and lose the big picture.
As I said, our action should be determined by Benefit - (Odds * Consequence). For the Sojourner, why risk it?
What the hell? Destroy the entire earth? Are you just trolling, or do you actually believe this?
"Destroy the earth" is a hyperbole used to illustrate the concept of Risk = Odds * Consequence (which, in particular, is still big if the consequences are "destroys the earth" even if the odds are small), and that our actions should be determined by Benefit - Risk. I'm merely observing that many in the discussion only touch elements of the equation, not the whole equation.
No, even a catastropic leak from a nuclear fuel source will not destroy the earth. Obviously.
The odds that one would burst are about as close to zero as they get. The RTG itself is sealed inside a "black box" type of shielding. The stuff is strong enough to survive reentry from orbit! An explosion of the rocket wouldn't even phase it (as past launch failures have shown).
So what exactly are the odds?
And while we're at it, let's discuss the consequences as well. A one-in-a-million chance is small, but if it destroys the entire earth, it's probably too risky to offset almost any benefit.
Point is, most of the discussion I'm seeing lack the basic grasp of risk and benefit. Folks either just talk about the benefits (and then blame "stupid environmentalists"), or just the risk. In your case, just one element of risk.
Risk, as you probably known, is a combination of the odds and the consequences.
What if the launch did fail, and scattered radioactive material all over your house? Then it wouldn't really be so stupid now, would it?
Point is, environmentalism, as with any other human endeavor, should be a matter of risk versus benefit, not a matter of fundamentalism. In this particular case, equipping a small rover with a long life is certainly far less important than equipping a large capable rover with a long life.
NASA's failure rates are well known and undeniable. Using dangerous fuel in only the most necessary projects decreases the risk to humans on earth without adversely affecting scientific study.
Now, I'm not denying that environmentalists can be stupid. I'm saying that they're not always wrong, either. The little rover had very little capabilities, so keeping it alive for years is probably not worth the risks.
Vegetarians in most part, avoid animal foods for health concerns, and you would find many, who often consume eggs and milk. Humane animal treatment comes in distant second.
Outside the US, the rationale for vegetarianism is more often religious or quasi-religious, and in terms of sheer number probably dwarf US vegetarians. Buddhism and Hinduism are two major religions that urge vegetarianism.
I'm all for trade restrictions, no matter how unPC that is to say in our ubercapitalist/globalist society. If some random developing country offers a good education, and cheaper service, let them develop their own companies, then let them compete in the global market.
You'll also need to restrict American capital (a lot of which are already out of the country) from investing in that developing country, and to restrict their products (protective tariffs) from competing in the US market. While foreign products cannot compete in the US (not being any cheaper due to tariffs), American products would then not be able to compete internationally because your prices would be ridiculously high.
In other words, what you are proposing is to divide the world into two trade zones: the US, and the rest of the world. Because nobody really trades with the US anymore, nobody else would really care about US intellectual property. Any useful US-developed drug, for example, would simply be smuggled out and produced outside the US.
The problem of outsourcing does not even end there, because US corporations simply move to cheaper states and counties that offer them tax incentives at public expense.
Yet, in their enthusiasm for cost savings, several US technology companies have done precisely that-- outsourcing their core technology and key strategic differentiator.
Many tech companies don't have strategic differentiators. HP computers have the same features and failure rates and service as all its competitors, and aside from price (the main differentiator) you're really only left with the design of the case and a little bit of brand name recognition.
Whether or not these jobs are "America's God-given right" is besides the point, Carly, you miserable bitch. Of course they aren't a "God-given right". Nothing is. The real question here is whether the U.S. will act in its own self-interest, or continue to throw its labor force into a low wage bidding war with the Third World.
No, the real question is whether US consumers (who still have very significant purchasing power and therefore sway over the corporations) will continue to buy just the cheapest item. If not, what would the US really have to complain about?
can you imagine any CEO contributing as much to a company as 2290 rank and file workers?
Actually, yes. The proof is in simply reversing the scenario. Can you imagine a lousy CEO driving a 2,290-employee company into the ground? If a wrong CEO decision can negate the collective efforts of 2,290, then certainly a good CEO can make the right decisions that keeps everybody employed.
The problem is that the executives are not held accountable when they make the wrong decisions. The lousy CEO in the above example will probably still leave the company with millions, as stipulated in his or her contract.
OSX however only has Apple people working on it, and so it is limited to what apple wants you to do. Don't like that, too bad, it doesn't matter if you can code or not, you can't do anything about it.
This is true for many other Apple software, but not entirely so for MacOS X. If you put something really cool into Darwin, there's a good chance that Apple will take it. Similarly, if you put something really cool into KHTML, then it may show up in Safari. There's no guarantee, of course, but Apple's limited embrace of open source at least enables that.
Hire someone to make the changes? Forget it. Unless you can find a way of preassuring Apple into following your ideas instead of their own, you can't do anything.
Sure, but that doesn't mean the free software world is entirely different. While you can always hack your own copy of the code (an important advantage I do not mean to minimize), getting it "upstream" into the core distribution often requires "pressuring" the maintainers into "following your ideas instead of their own". If your changes are rejected, then you're stuck endlessly patching every new release, which is much less than ideal. In most cases, the maintainers have no financial incentive to listen to you, so complaining to Apple (you're $130 worth of customer if you buy OS X, and many hundreds more because of the Mac you run it on) may actually be more effective for a certain class of issues. In many other cases, maintainers can be quite opinionated.
Point is, yes, there is a clear difference, but it's not night versus day.
Great theory..except the majority of those guardsmen were carrying guns that weren't loaded
I was talking about "armed soldiers" at "airports", not any specific deployment of National Guards at any specific US airport after any specific terrorist attack on any specific US building. If you go through the expense of posting soldiers at airports to deal with paramilitary terrorist threats, they should most likely be actually armed.
By this logic we should put armed soldiers at banks, government offices, and possibly all public places.
No, security is never that absolutist. One question we must coldly ask first is how many will die if 10 well-armed terrorists attack a bank, compared to an airport. If they manage to hijack a plane on the ground, they may kill thousands. Therefore, an airport might be worth protecting with armed troops while a bank might not. The next question, as you mentioned, is whether their presence creates a greater public risk than their absence.
I'm not arguing that soldiers at airports is a good idea. I was just pointing out that they deal with a separate threat vector than existing security measures do. Whether that threat is even realistic is a separate question entirely.
How about troops vs. 19 hijackers quietly sneaking a few boxcutters
They are ineffectual against that threat, which is why you don't see the normal airport security personnel being laid off. My point was that armed soldiers do protect against a different threat than police, not that they replace police.
Sure, but with 800$ for a desktop or 1100$ for a laptop you can have a much, much better x86 computer
The question is not whether you can buy a better Mac or PC at any particular price. The question was whether the Mac is priced beyond the reach of the middle class.
But, just for fun, let's take a look at the $800 Dell, which is the Dimension 4600. It comes with a 2.66 GHz Pentium 4, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive, CD-RW, 17" CRT, integrated sound and graphics, ethernet, modem, speakers, Windows XP Home, WordPerfect, Money, Dell Jukebox, Dell Picture Studio, Photo Album Starter Edition, and RealOne player. Oh, and 6 months of AOL.
The $800 eMac, thanks to aging G4 technology, probably lags in CPU and has only 128 MB RAM. However, it has the same hard drive, CRT, modem, ethernet, and built-in speakers. It also comes with a combo drive, a 32 MB ATI Radeon 7500, and two FireWire ports that the Dell doesn't have. More importantly, it comes with MacOS X, which is almost certainly superior to XP Home, the well-integrated iApps (that are probably superior to Dell's bundle). It also bundles Quicken 2004 Deluxe, World Book 2003, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, and some others.
In other words, it is clearly inferior if you only dwell on the CPU and memory. The entire $800 package has other important attractions that make it competitive to the cheap Dell box for those who would use them. That's not even the end of the story. Three years from purchase, you will most likely (based on historical trends of the used Apple computer market) be able to sell the eMac at a higher price than the Dell box.
I don't get the confusion one. After all, any decent media player treats Ogg and MP3 files identically interface-wise
I wasn't referring to the playing interface. I was referring to the "preferences" option where one selects the default format to rip a CD into, for example. It typically already wants you to select a bit-rate (huh?) and a format (acronyms!), which are trade-offs that novice users may not easily grasp.
Let me be clear: it's not an important issue at all. After all, Apple added AACs to the list. The point is that the small possibility of confusion is still bigger than the number of people who really care about Ogg Vorbis. Thus, Ogg Vorbis may not even be worth the potential confusion, and is almost certainly not worth the development and testing costs.
I'm sure I'm in a pretty common situation - want apple - don't want to spend that much money on computer stuff.
That's exactly my point. Often, if there's a point you want to make (i.e., Apple is doing good work), there's a significant cost to put your money where your mouth is. Your best course of action is to wait for another Apple-like company who sells at the price you like. If that doesn't happen (there's really no player like that in the industry right now), and you choose a cheaper x86 box instead, then you've just voted with your dollars against Apple and all it has done.
I'm not saying it's easy or cheap. Principles usually aren't either. I'm also not saying that you have to do it. I'm just reminding that praise alone won't encourage Apple enough for them to survive.
On the other hand, if Apple proves that innovation does translate to sales, then your hypothetical innovative but affordable company may in fact appear. Vote the other way, and perhaps it won't.
And what's this you say about not outsourcing to India? Is Apple 100% American made?
Apple outsources extensively. What I cited was an example of a moral issue you might care about. The point is that if you want to avoid outsourced products, be prepared to pay a lot more.
Sure you could get a decent looking, slightly larger Jukebox Xtra that has 7,5 times the capacity of the Mini iPod and replaceable batteries for exactly the same amount of money but it's "just no iPod". And, at that point - as every man knows - there's no reasoning with it.
Reason? I'm not a woman, but it's not that hard to understand. When I spend money, I want the widget I buy to delight me, and Apple stuff frequently delight me. I don't want to buy a cheaper alternative, or one with additional features I may or may not need, that doesn't delight me. Too many geeks see specs as the end-all and be-all of a product, but I bought my Corolla not because it had a 1.8L engine (compared to the Civic's 1.6L), despite the Civic having better horsepower, partly because the shape of the Civic's headlights irritated me. I don't want to be irritated, even a little bit, when I spend money.
Just because it's not quantifiable doesn't mean it's not reasonable. Geeks, by definition, like the former, but frequently confuse it with the latter.
she couldn't explain the difference between a Megabyte or a Gigabyte for the life of her.
Apple advertises its players as "1,000 songs" and such. I think it can be assumed that most people understand what that means.
So it's another instance of 'one button mouse' stubbornness
The two issues aren't nearly of the same scale. I would expect more than 95% of the mice out there to have 2 or more buttons, so it's a good bet that most computer users have at least seen them.
Ogg Vorbis is the reverse case. I would expect much less than 5% of users have even heard of it, and even fewer who actually demand it (in the actually buying something else sense).
Thus, even if the one-button mouse is "a lame excuse", it doesn't necessarily apply to Ogg Vorbis on iPods.
More importantly, you snipped away the first and more important reason I cited: increased development and testing costs. Perhaps you would address why Apple should incur significant additional costs for little or no demand, before you accuse me of bias.
Let me put it simply. The only thing that matters to Apple is how many people would buy an iPod and not a competitor (or just not buy) if they add feature X. No sane company is going to throw in features just because somebody on Slashdot asked "why not", even if they have oodles of space left over.
you could have said the same thing about Honda, Toyota, Nissan, or even Dell. But if/when you start selling a superior product and a better price you often times will gain mind share and market share.
Wonderfully optimistic, but this is not reality. The small guys almost never make it, despite stellar examples like Apple itself. Consider Netscape, for instance, which could not be cheaper and was technically superior to IE. How many contemporaries of Apple from the budding personal computer market of 1979 are still around in a meaningful form today?
the general populace isn't aware of AAC's existance either and there's still plenty of room on the iPod's firmware, so why not?
Commercial engineering ventures are not driven by "why not" questions, but "why" questions. Everything you put in an iPod gets an Apple brand name, and therefore requires costly testing lest you embarrass yourself. You also give your user one more potentially confusing option. It's much more than just a question of code space.
Slashdot Mirror
There's that evolutionary aspect to it in the long term (less desirable species die off), but more importantly diversity leads to resistance. If, for example, your web site runs on both Windows and Linux servers, and an exploit against either one cannot take down your entire site.
My case, just because you've completely missed it, isn't about the Sojourner or nuclear power. It's about the way advocates argue using only partial elements of an entire equation. The point I claim you proved is not that the Sojourner is risky, but that you again emphasized the minimal risk without addressing the benefits.
Now, I appreciate you finally accepting my equation in argument. I'll leave it to somebody else to challenge why you assign 100 to the utility of a working transmitter, etc. At least now we're arguing a more complete picture, no?
Calm down, drop your preconceptions on what you think I might be, and consider for a moment that I wasn't talking about RTGs when I wrote "destroy the earth". I was exhibiting a principle that even very minimal odds (which is what you had stated) can be a high risk if the consequences are very large (which is what you did not really address initially).
I didn't say RTGs can destroy the earth. It was a hyperbole to get you or another responder to address the consequence portion of the risk equation. And then hopefully, move on to address the benefit portion of the risk-benefit analysis.
That way, we move towards a bigger picture, no?
You prove my point again. What benefit? The Sojourner is a test rover with very minimal capabilities. Why keep it running for years?
I don't actually have an opinion on many of the things discussed here. It's just irritating to read advocates on either side stress only the elements of the full equation and lose the big picture.
As I said, our action should be determined by Benefit - (Odds * Consequence). For the Sojourner, why risk it?
"Destroy the earth" is a hyperbole used to illustrate the concept of Risk = Odds * Consequence (which, in particular, is still big if the consequences are "destroys the earth" even if the odds are small), and that our actions should be determined by Benefit - Risk. I'm merely observing that many in the discussion only touch elements of the equation, not the whole equation.
No, even a catastropic leak from a nuclear fuel source will not destroy the earth. Obviously.
Did you know that "destroys the entire earth" is a hyperbole to show that even minimal odds of great consequence can equal great risk?
So what exactly are the odds?
And while we're at it, let's discuss the consequences as well. A one-in-a-million chance is small, but if it destroys the entire earth, it's probably too risky to offset almost any benefit.
Point is, most of the discussion I'm seeing lack the basic grasp of risk and benefit. Folks either just talk about the benefits (and then blame "stupid environmentalists"), or just the risk. In your case, just one element of risk.
Risk, as you probably known, is a combination of the odds and the consequences.
What if the launch did fail, and scattered radioactive material all over your house? Then it wouldn't really be so stupid now, would it?
Point is, environmentalism, as with any other human endeavor, should be a matter of risk versus benefit, not a matter of fundamentalism. In this particular case, equipping a small rover with a long life is certainly far less important than equipping a large capable rover with a long life.
NASA's failure rates are well known and undeniable. Using dangerous fuel in only the most necessary projects decreases the risk to humans on earth without adversely affecting scientific study.
Now, I'm not denying that environmentalists can be stupid. I'm saying that they're not always wrong, either. The little rover had very little capabilities, so keeping it alive for years is probably not worth the risks.
Outside the US, the rationale for vegetarianism is more often religious or quasi-religious, and in terms of sheer number probably dwarf US vegetarians. Buddhism and Hinduism are two major religions that urge vegetarianism.
IOW, use US taxpayer money to supplement the income of US taxpayers. Where's the money going to come from?
You'll also need to restrict American capital (a lot of which are already out of the country) from investing in that developing country, and to restrict their products (protective tariffs) from competing in the US market. While foreign products cannot compete in the US (not being any cheaper due to tariffs), American products would then not be able to compete internationally because your prices would be ridiculously high.
In other words, what you are proposing is to divide the world into two trade zones: the US, and the rest of the world. Because nobody really trades with the US anymore, nobody else would really care about US intellectual property. Any useful US-developed drug, for example, would simply be smuggled out and produced outside the US.
The problem of outsourcing does not even end there, because US corporations simply move to cheaper states and counties that offer them tax incentives at public expense.
Many tech companies don't have strategic differentiators. HP computers have the same features and failure rates and service as all its competitors, and aside from price (the main differentiator) you're really only left with the design of the case and a little bit of brand name recognition.
No, the real question is whether US consumers (who still have very significant purchasing power and therefore sway over the corporations) will continue to buy just the cheapest item. If not, what would the US really have to complain about?
Actually, yes. The proof is in simply reversing the scenario. Can you imagine a lousy CEO driving a 2,290-employee company into the ground? If a wrong CEO decision can negate the collective efforts of 2,290, then certainly a good CEO can make the right decisions that keeps everybody employed.
The problem is that the executives are not held accountable when they make the wrong decisions. The lousy CEO in the above example will probably still leave the company with millions, as stipulated in his or her contract.
This is true for many other Apple software, but not entirely so for MacOS X. If you put something really cool into Darwin, there's a good chance that Apple will take it. Similarly, if you put something really cool into KHTML, then it may show up in Safari. There's no guarantee, of course, but Apple's limited embrace of open source at least enables that.
Hire someone to make the changes? Forget it. Unless you can find a way of preassuring Apple into following your ideas instead of their own, you can't do anything.
Sure, but that doesn't mean the free software world is entirely different. While you can always hack your own copy of the code (an important advantage I do not mean to minimize), getting it "upstream" into the core distribution often requires "pressuring" the maintainers into "following your ideas instead of their own". If your changes are rejected, then you're stuck endlessly patching every new release, which is much less than ideal. In most cases, the maintainers have no financial incentive to listen to you, so complaining to Apple (you're $130 worth of customer if you buy OS X, and many hundreds more because of the Mac you run it on) may actually be more effective for a certain class of issues. In many other cases, maintainers can be quite opinionated.
Point is, yes, there is a clear difference, but it's not night versus day.
I was talking about "armed soldiers" at "airports", not any specific deployment of National Guards at any specific US airport after any specific terrorist attack on any specific US building. If you go through the expense of posting soldiers at airports to deal with paramilitary terrorist threats, they should most likely be actually armed.
No, security is never that absolutist. One question we must coldly ask first is how many will die if 10 well-armed terrorists attack a bank, compared to an airport. If they manage to hijack a plane on the ground, they may kill thousands. Therefore, an airport might be worth protecting with armed troops while a bank might not. The next question, as you mentioned, is whether their presence creates a greater public risk than their absence.
I'm not arguing that soldiers at airports is a good idea. I was just pointing out that they deal with a separate threat vector than existing security measures do. Whether that threat is even realistic is a separate question entirely.
They are ineffectual against that threat, which is why you don't see the normal airport security personnel being laid off. My point was that armed soldiers do protect against a different threat than police, not that they replace police.
The question is not whether you can buy a better Mac or PC at any particular price. The question was whether the Mac is priced beyond the reach of the middle class.
But, just for fun, let's take a look at the $800 Dell, which is the Dimension 4600. It comes with a 2.66 GHz Pentium 4, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive, CD-RW, 17" CRT, integrated sound and graphics, ethernet, modem, speakers, Windows XP Home, WordPerfect, Money, Dell Jukebox, Dell Picture Studio, Photo Album Starter Edition, and RealOne player. Oh, and 6 months of AOL.
The $800 eMac, thanks to aging G4 technology, probably lags in CPU and has only 128 MB RAM. However, it has the same hard drive, CRT, modem, ethernet, and built-in speakers. It also comes with a combo drive, a 32 MB ATI Radeon 7500, and two FireWire ports that the Dell doesn't have. More importantly, it comes with MacOS X, which is almost certainly superior to XP Home, the well-integrated iApps (that are probably superior to Dell's bundle). It also bundles Quicken 2004 Deluxe, World Book 2003, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, and some others.
In other words, it is clearly inferior if you only dwell on the CPU and memory. The entire $800 package has other important attractions that make it competitive to the cheap Dell box for those who would use them. That's not even the end of the story. Three years from purchase, you will most likely (based on historical trends of the used Apple computer market) be able to sell the eMac at a higher price than the Dell box.
I wasn't referring to the playing interface. I was referring to the "preferences" option where one selects the default format to rip a CD into, for example. It typically already wants you to select a bit-rate (huh?) and a format (acronyms!), which are trade-offs that novice users may not easily grasp.
Let me be clear: it's not an important issue at all. After all, Apple added AACs to the list. The point is that the small possibility of confusion is still bigger than the number of people who really care about Ogg Vorbis. Thus, Ogg Vorbis may not even be worth the potential confusion, and is almost certainly not worth the development and testing costs.
That's exactly my point. Often, if there's a point you want to make (i.e., Apple is doing good work), there's a significant cost to put your money where your mouth is. Your best course of action is to wait for another Apple-like company who sells at the price you like. If that doesn't happen (there's really no player like that in the industry right now), and you choose a cheaper x86 box instead, then you've just voted with your dollars against Apple and all it has done.
I'm not saying it's easy or cheap. Principles usually aren't either. I'm also not saying that you have to do it. I'm just reminding that praise alone won't encourage Apple enough for them to survive.
On the other hand, if Apple proves that innovation does translate to sales, then your hypothetical innovative but affordable company may in fact appear. Vote the other way, and perhaps it won't.
And what's this you say about not outsourcing to India? Is Apple 100% American made?
Apple outsources extensively. What I cited was an example of a moral issue you might care about. The point is that if you want to avoid outsourced products, be prepared to pay a lot more.
Reason? I'm not a woman, but it's not that hard to understand. When I spend money, I want the widget I buy to delight me, and Apple stuff frequently delight me. I don't want to buy a cheaper alternative, or one with additional features I may or may not need, that doesn't delight me. Too many geeks see specs as the end-all and be-all of a product, but I bought my Corolla not because it had a 1.8L engine (compared to the Civic's 1.6L), despite the Civic having better horsepower, partly because the shape of the Civic's headlights irritated me. I don't want to be irritated, even a little bit, when I spend money.
Just because it's not quantifiable doesn't mean it's not reasonable. Geeks, by definition, like the former, but frequently confuse it with the latter.
she couldn't explain the difference between a Megabyte or a Gigabyte for the life of her.
Apple advertises its players as "1,000 songs" and such. I think it can be assumed that most people understand what that means.
The two issues aren't nearly of the same scale. I would expect more than 95% of the mice out there to have 2 or more buttons, so it's a good bet that most computer users have at least seen them. Ogg Vorbis is the reverse case. I would expect much less than 5% of users have even heard of it, and even fewer who actually demand it (in the actually buying something else sense). Thus, even if the one-button mouse is "a lame excuse", it doesn't necessarily apply to Ogg Vorbis on iPods.
More importantly, you snipped away the first and more important reason I cited: increased development and testing costs. Perhaps you would address why Apple should incur significant additional costs for little or no demand, before you accuse me of bias.
Let me put it simply. The only thing that matters to Apple is how many people would buy an iPod and not a competitor (or just not buy) if they add feature X. No sane company is going to throw in features just because somebody on Slashdot asked "why not", even if they have oodles of space left over.
Wonderfully optimistic, but this is not reality. The small guys almost never make it, despite stellar examples like Apple itself. Consider Netscape, for instance, which could not be cheaper and was technically superior to IE. How many contemporaries of Apple from the budding personal computer market of 1979 are still around in a meaningful form today?
Commercial engineering ventures are not driven by "why not" questions, but "why" questions. Everything you put in an iPod gets an Apple brand name, and therefore requires costly testing lest you embarrass yourself. You also give your user one more potentially confusing option. It's much more than just a question of code space.