it feels just like it did when armed national guardsment starting patrolling NYC and airports
Actually, armed soldiers on patrol do fill a real hole in airport security. While airport police can deal with most traditional threats, they are (by design) unable to fight off a real attack. Metal detectors and pistols are not really useful against, for example, 10 terrorists carrying automatic weapons and grenades. Such a force can plausibly fight through normal security and get to the airplanes literally within minutes.
Enough people are buying apple products right now to give them a nice profit.
It's not just profit I'm talking about. Ideally I'd like to see an Apple (doesn't have to be this Apple Corporation, just somebody who acts the way it is) with maybe 15% of the PC market share, with alternative x86 OSes taking another 15%. Combined, this represents one out of three customers you may be losing (not to mention that many Apple users have more money to spend) if your website only works on IE. This will promote the real adoption of standards.
Apple is simply the most viable company to get to that goal.
not everyone can afford their products - but are doing what they can to support Apple by verbally salivating
I don't mean to suggest that it's a bad thing to salivate, just that:
there's usually a real additional cost to put money where mouth is. Buying from a company that doesn't outsource to India (if you think that's a bad thing), for example, is likely going to cost you more money right now.
don't be discouraged by the top-end Apple products that you can't afford, because even their low end can run the software you want quite well.
Mac OS X is the uppermiddle class mans extra friendly UNIX. I'll take Linux cause I'm poor
I don't know how poor you are, but an $800 eMac or $1,100 iBook are not exclusively for the "upper middle class". They represent less than a month's rent in many cities. If your desire for MacOS X outweighs your reservations against refurbished equipment, then you can get an eMac for under $700, or a G3 iBook for about $800.
Apple also offers a loan program. The $800 eMac can be yours for $27 a month over 36 months. That's probably cheaper than DSL or your cable TV service. Any middle class US family can easily afford this.
Rio then announces a 4GB nitrus, with more battery life and a street price equal to the new iPod
Your original question was:
Exactly what category is the mini iPod in?
It seems you've answered your own question. It's in the category of the Rio Nitrus. Slashdot folk also need to remember that real customers compare more than feature lists.
(Take battery life, for example. The difference between 2 and 4 hours of battery life is much more important than the difference between 8 and 16 hours, even though the factor is the same. This is because 8 hours may be adequate, even though 16 hours is twice as long. Geeks tend to have a hard time seeing past the numbers.)
In other words, I find that you don't seem to have any other objective than to be negative. The iPod mini resembles the new Nitrus, is slightly bigger and heavier, doesn't run as long. However, it is compatible with iTunes and the Music Store, has a cool controller (played with it yesterday; it's a touch-wheel that can rock in four directions), and may be more attractive for some people. It also beat the Nitrus to market. A product doesn't have to beat its competition in every objective and subjective criteria to be viable. It only needs to offer a unique appeal.
So why do you ask what category the iPod mini is in?
When a company does such a good job, then the intelligent consumer would pay the company so it can improve. Apple does not survive by your applause, but by your purchasing dollars. Even your dollars spent on Microsoft Office for the Mac is partially a powerful vote for Apple.
Point is, if all we are going to do is to sit around and dish out glowing reviews, then we should not be surprised when (not if) a company we so approve of fails. Put your money where your mouth is.
i regret lacking the funds to buy myself a peachy powermac g5 cuz i'm quite tempted by os x panther and the ilife bundle (man garageband look awesome!)
GarageBand requires a G4 with DVD drive for full operations. The entry-level eMac satisfies this at $800 brand new, or under $700 refurbished. The $800 price, if you wait a few weeks, would include the $50 iLife.
Don't get me wrong. $800 is still real money, and is still more expensive than a Dell box. However, it's not $1,800, which is what an entry-level G5 would cost, and the Dell box won't have GarageBand, its big brother Soundtrack, or Final Cut Express and big brother Final Cut Pro.
If affordability is an issue at all, you will not be buying an ipod.
Consider the customer of the Rio Nitrus. It is 2.0 oz, 3" x 2.4" x 0.6", and holds 1.5 GB of storage for $199. The iPod mini is nearly the same size and heavier, but has more than twice the storage for $50 more. That's one product that is being targeted.
This player is a compromise. Not as small or cheap as a flash based player, but not really that much smaller and with much less capacity than the other HD players.
Every product is a compromise. Otherwise I should be getting a 200 GB iPod that fits inside my watch and costs $5. You simply choose to dwell on the negative. The positive side is, it's not much heavier than a flash-based player, but holds much more music.
I think many people who respond negatively believed the rumors and expected a $100 player, for which the iPod mini is naturally a disappointment. A $100 iPod mini would indeed be a killer, but do you know that Apple set out to build a player that would own the $100 market? It seems pretty clear now that their intention is to get somebody willing to spend $200 to put in another $50 for much more capacity.
Well flash based players are a different target audience. They have no moving parts. They have better battery life. Many times they have removable memory that can 1) be used in other devices and 2) allows you to carry multiple pieces with you on long trips.
You are assuming that customers of flash-based players need any or all of those features, just because they bought one. A good number of them simply want a portable music player, but cannot afford hard disk based alternatives.
for the same price I can get an HD mp3 player from a different manufacturer with much more storage.
The 15 GB Dell player is 4.1" x 2.7" x 0.86" and weighs 7.61 ounces. The iPod mini is 3.6" x 2.0" x 0.5" and weights 3.6 ounces. In other words, the Dell is 9.5 cubic inches compared to the iPod mini's 3.6 cubic inches, and more than twice as heavy. Just because the size difference doesn't matter to you doesn't mean it won't for somebody else. Can you really not imagine a percentage of customers who value the extra portability over raw capacity?
He's trying to play media that he legally purchased on Linux.
He is? The iTunes Music Store is available only in the United States, and I believe he's in Norway.
(Apple uses the credit card mailing address to ensure you are in the US, but don't confuse your ability to get a US credit card with Apple having a legal right to sell you that song if you really aren't a US resident.)
I'm unwilling to burn AACs to a CD and then re-encode them (with additional loss) into MP3s or Oggs.
Since you don't currently have an iTunes account, have you actually tried to do this and found the quality unacceptable? Are your audio equipment and environment actually good enough for you to hear the difference?
I just hope Apple gets the message and removes all DRM from their music
It's not "their music". Apple gets the message just fine, which is why you can copy the purchased song to two other computers, stream music in the local subnet, and burn a song any number of times (just not using the same playlist more than ten times to make it more tedious).
Millions of people jaywalk, and millions more drive their cars faster than the speed limit. What has that done to silly (in some places) jaywalking laws or absurd (in some places) speed limits? On most US roads, it's a well known rule of thumb that police would generally not bother drivers who speed by under 10 miles per hour over the limit.
On the other hand, a frail man deliberately picked up a handful of salt, which was at the time a monopoly product of the British Empire. He was arrested for it, but this and other actions that fly in the face of "common sense" eventually freed India from British colonization.
How about that woman who was arrested for sitting in the front of the bus, when everybody knows that black people need to sit in the back?
I'm not saying DVD-Jon is anybody resembling Gandhi or Parks, or that his cause is nearly as important. What I'm saying is that many changes come from a small number of people noisily breaking unjust laws, rather than a thousand people quietly breaking it.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
[feminists today] reject any restrictions on abortion out of hand, no matter how minor or abuse-proof
One problem is that abortion is not explicitly protected by law, only vaguely so via a Supreme Court decision on privacy. Allowing or endorsing even "minor or abuse-proof" limitations means acknowledging that the right to abortion is not absolute. Worse, if it's not an absolute right, then what stops the line from constantly moving? It's as if I would ask you to deny your God one day each year, because it's minor anyway. What stops me from asking for a month next time, if your right to worship was not absolutely protected?
(I'm not agreeing, just explaining.)
I'm sick of being told that I'm "anti-woman" because I think abortion is wrong.
A lot of legal things are wrong. Most American women do not cover their hair and fraternize with men who are not relatives, which is wrong by some standards. The question is whether it is wrong enough (like murder, rape, and ripping music to MP3) to be illegal. I don't agree with the label you're given, but it's important to separate disagreement - even condemnation - from a real need to legislate behavior.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
I think the main points here however are that our experience with feminism constitutes barely 0.000000001% of human existence
Recorded human history number about five thousand years, while feminism as we know it runs a few decades. I presume you are referring to the Homo Sapiens as a species, which goes back about 200,000 years ago. Therefore, feminism accounts for about 0.5% of recorded history, and about 0.01% of human existence. In other words, you don't have a good grasp of the numbers you throw around.
yet the preposition that men and women are equal in all things is treated as if it were absolute truth
There's a very big difference in accepting that women should be treated equally by law and society, and that women are indistinguishable from men. The former is generally accepted in the western-influenced world, while the latter characterizes hard-core feminists.
the ever escalating regulation of human behavior is the result of politicians pandering to the feminine need for safety above all else
This is not unique to feminism, but to a society's emphasis on protecting the ones least able to protect themselves. You'll notice that disability and minority rights are often present in societies debating women's issues. It would help if you are more specific with the "regulation" you describe. Would you rather marital rape not be a crime, for example?
it has destroyed, at least in part, the basic social unit that is the family.
I'm afraid you have to show causality at least in a specific example. The criminalization of marital rape, for example, may result in the overt destruction of a family unit, but I would strongly argue that the family had already been destroyed.
if "3.xGHz" is on the Mac's box, Apple just might win a few Joe Sixpacks and a few PC converts.
3 GHz G5s will be shipping in the summer of 2004, undoubtedly in the form of high end Power Macs. They will not be marketed to or be affordable to "Joe Sixpacks". Joe Sixpack will continue to spend $500 to $1,000 on a computer, and maybe buy an eMac. The 3 GHz Power Mac will be targeted at professionals who will spend $3,000 or more on a computer.
That's the way this has always worked. G4 computers have just recently broken the $1,000 mark.
I don't think it would affect the size all that much. Cellphones are fairly tiny and their batteries are replacable. spring contacts aren't all that bulky.
It's the location of the battery that's the problem. The iPod is basically three things: a hard disk, a LCD, and a battery. Think about their sizes for a moment, and design a box with the form factor of the iPod and a replaceable battery.
If you have trouble visualizing, check out the installation instructions at ipodbattery.com. On the current generation iPod, for example, you need to move the hard disk out of the way before you can get to the battery.
That's a load of crap. There are a huge number of companies that provide both closed and open source products for Linux, with support (and that list is just the tip of the iceberg).
How many of those support several distributions? If you look at Maya, for example, it requires "RedHat(TM) Linux(R) 7.3 or 8.0". SoftImage 3D requires "Red Hat Linux 7.1 or 7.2". Mathematica wants "Red Hat 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9.0, or equivalent." Some others simply list "Linux." An already small market is further fragmented by incompatible distributions.
Point is, if the "System Requirements" section of a product simply says "Linux", how likely is it to work on every major (feel free to define "major") current version Linux distribution? We're talking about a market that even Red Hat gave up on.
MacOS X, in comparison, has three major versions. There's little reason for anybody to stay at 10.0, because 10.1 is a free upgrade. 10.2 and 10.3 are both backward compatible to some degree, and despite Apple's nasty habit of breaking old software in new OS versions, updated applications usually can still work in older OS versions. Though the market is small, a developer can target the entire MacOS X share.
I've come to the conclusion that due to the diversity of Linux (which is one of its so called strengths), in terms of things like GUIs, DEs, distros, etc..., the lack of standardization makes it virtually impossible for a company to provide a product, along with support, for Linux users.
There is an exception to this. Workstations (which I define here as computers with a more or less dedicated purpose) can be well supported even on Linux. Basically, the vendor chooses a Linux distribution (and maybe even hardware), and because the software is so important to its users, you buy the right distribution and hardware. Examples of these would be artist workstations (audio, graphics, video), and possibly even software developer platforms. A general purpose application like StarOffice would have a much harder time dictating platform requirements to its users.
Right, credit card fees are a huge drain on a la carte download stores, and a big advantage of sub services is one charge per month.
If Apple has to pay 5 cents for every credit card transaction on average, their 4 million or so charges (from 6 million songs sold a month, 45% of which are albums) would come to $200,000. A small part of this is offset by using Apple hardware and parts.
Rhapsody, on its part, must charge 250,000 users, which if they get the same rate (which I doubt) would cost $12,500, or an advantage over Apple of some $180,000. So, in the best case estimate, they make a profit of about 7%. That's not a bad margin, but it's not insanely great. The 4 million charges is likely to be far too high, as many users undoubtedly buy multiple single songs in one session.
So, again, I don't see your "much better profit margins", unless Apple has to pay much more per transaction.
By the way, the 250K sub number is already a couple of months old (end of September), and the Apple numbers you cite are up to the minute. [...] I would think they're closing in on 400K subs about now.
That doesn't change the equation, because 400,000 users will require 400,000 users' worth of bandwidth. The business problem is still how to make money per download.
The currency in question is bandwidth. Rhapsody claims to have streamed 11 million songs in June, and Apple is claiming about 1.5 million songs a week, or 6 million songs a month. In addition, Apple says that the ratio of previews to purchases is about 10:1, presumably accounting for 60 million previews (30 seconds each, so about 10 million songs' worth).
Thus, it's reasonable to assume that Apple and Rhapsody have similar bandwidth expenditures.
Now, Apple makes $6M off the 6M songs, keeping $1.8M (30%) of it after the record label takes its share. Rhapsody has 250,000 members, making them $2.5M, of which they keep $1.25M (50%).
Since about 45% of iTMS sales are album sales, Apple needs to process around 4M (rather than 6M) credit card transactions. Rhapsody only has to handle 250K. Is this the "much better profit margin" you are referring to? Remember also that the iTMS probably uses Apple hardware, so its hardware costs don't all leave the house.
My interest in using iTMS is very high now - the only reason I don't use any of the online music stores is because I don't want to be locked into one store/one mp3 player (software)/one mp3 player (hardware). But once a standard is defined, I'll be there to buy.
I call BS. You can start using the iTMS with an investment of... one dollar. If you remain skeptical, then it's not that much trouble to burn one or five songs to CD, which is as standard as it gets.
I can understand not wanting to buy everything from iTMS or any other service. But not buying at all because you're waiting for a standard is pretty curious. What exactly do you have to lose?
At an average of $10 per month, that's about $7 million in revenue per month, with much better profit margins that iTunes. [...] For a flat fee, I can explore all kinds of new music & listen to old favorites as well.
Sorry, how can a flat-fee subscription model have better profit margins than iTunes? If they provide you more than 10 songs a month for $10, then they've given you more goods than Apple did for the same price. How can it both be a better value for you, and at the same time have "much better profit margins"? Where is the magic money coming from?
Do the record labels give the subscription services a better deal because of stricter DRM?
What would possibly motivate that benevolence?
Are the subscription services making money off people who don't "use up" the $10 fully each month? Like any shared service exploiting its casual users, expect your share of the cost to go up significantly when you lose them. Ten bucks is ten bucks.
DNA Sequencing ? As Homer Simpson would put it, "Boring !" I mean, "see kid, this barcode is different from this barcode, this is a black bean DNA and this is a green pea DNA", "dad, can't I go back to my playstation ?".
Most scientific experiments are boring until you understand the underlying principles. If you drop two balls of different weights from a tower, would they hit the ground at the same time? If you don't understand the point of the experiment, then you're just dropping balls from a building.
Few things are as intrinsically interesting as video games. That's why children need parents and teachers, not just games.
More likely, they were picking up the signals diagonally through windows, rather than from directly below through roofs. One of the reasons satellite phones perform poorly indoors is because signals have difficulty passing through the roof. (Cellular towers are at much lower altitude, and their signals reach you mainly through windows.)
You won't find any apple products for less than they sell for at the apple store.
No, it does happen. I bought a 15 GB iPod around September for about $325 out of pocket, after reading a
tip. That's about 20% off the Apple store price. This is shortly before Apple came out with the new line-up, but the Apple Store was still selling the same unit at $399 when I bought mine.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, armed soldiers on patrol do fill a real hole in airport security. While airport police can deal with most traditional threats, they are (by design) unable to fight off a real attack. Metal detectors and pistols are not really useful against, for example, 10 terrorists carrying automatic weapons and grenades. Such a force can plausibly fight through normal security and get to the airplanes literally within minutes.
It's not just profit I'm talking about. Ideally I'd like to see an Apple (doesn't have to be this Apple Corporation, just somebody who acts the way it is) with maybe 15% of the PC market share, with alternative x86 OSes taking another 15%. Combined, this represents one out of three customers you may be losing (not to mention that many Apple users have more money to spend) if your website only works on IE. This will promote the real adoption of standards.
Apple is simply the most viable company to get to that goal.
not everyone can afford their products - but are doing what they can to support Apple by verbally salivating
I don't mean to suggest that it's a bad thing to salivate, just that:
I don't know how poor you are, but an $800 eMac or $1,100 iBook are not exclusively for the "upper middle class". They represent less than a month's rent in many cities. If your desire for MacOS X outweighs your reservations against refurbished equipment, then you can get an eMac for under $700, or a G3 iBook for about $800.
Apple also offers a loan program. The $800 eMac can be yours for $27 a month over 36 months. That's probably cheaper than DSL or your cable TV service. Any middle class US family can easily afford this.
Your original question was:
Exactly what category is the mini iPod in?
It seems you've answered your own question. It's in the category of the Rio Nitrus. Slashdot folk also need to remember that real customers compare more than feature lists.
(Take battery life, for example. The difference between 2 and 4 hours of battery life is much more important than the difference between 8 and 16 hours, even though the factor is the same. This is because 8 hours may be adequate, even though 16 hours is twice as long. Geeks tend to have a hard time seeing past the numbers.)
In other words, I find that you don't seem to have any other objective than to be negative. The iPod mini resembles the new Nitrus, is slightly bigger and heavier, doesn't run as long. However, it is compatible with iTunes and the Music Store, has a cool controller (played with it yesterday; it's a touch-wheel that can rock in four directions), and may be more attractive for some people. It also beat the Nitrus to market. A product doesn't have to beat its competition in every objective and subjective criteria to be viable. It only needs to offer a unique appeal.
So why do you ask what category the iPod mini is in?
When a company does such a good job, then the intelligent consumer would pay the company so it can improve. Apple does not survive by your applause, but by your purchasing dollars. Even your dollars spent on Microsoft Office for the Mac is partially a powerful vote for Apple.
Point is, if all we are going to do is to sit around and dish out glowing reviews, then we should not be surprised when (not if) a company we so approve of fails. Put your money where your mouth is.
i regret lacking the funds to buy myself a peachy powermac g5 cuz i'm quite tempted by os x panther and the ilife bundle (man garageband look awesome!)
GarageBand requires a G4 with DVD drive for full operations. The entry-level eMac satisfies this at $800 brand new, or under $700 refurbished. The $800 price, if you wait a few weeks, would include the $50 iLife.
Don't get me wrong. $800 is still real money, and is still more expensive than a Dell box. However, it's not $1,800, which is what an entry-level G5 would cost, and the Dell box won't have GarageBand, its big brother Soundtrack, or Final Cut Express and big brother Final Cut Pro.
Consider the customer of the Rio Nitrus. It is 2.0 oz, 3" x 2.4" x 0.6", and holds 1.5 GB of storage for $199. The iPod mini is nearly the same size and heavier, but has more than twice the storage for $50 more. That's one product that is being targeted.
This player is a compromise. Not as small or cheap as a flash based player, but not really that much smaller and with much less capacity than the other HD players.
Every product is a compromise. Otherwise I should be getting a 200 GB iPod that fits inside my watch and costs $5. You simply choose to dwell on the negative. The positive side is, it's not much heavier than a flash-based player, but holds much more music.
I think many people who respond negatively believed the rumors and expected a $100 player, for which the iPod mini is naturally a disappointment. A $100 iPod mini would indeed be a killer, but do you know that Apple set out to build a player that would own the $100 market? It seems pretty clear now that their intention is to get somebody willing to spend $200 to put in another $50 for much more capacity.
You are assuming that customers of flash-based players need any or all of those features, just because they bought one. A good number of them simply want a portable music player, but cannot afford hard disk based alternatives.
for the same price I can get an HD mp3 player from a different manufacturer with much more storage.
The 15 GB Dell player is 4.1" x 2.7" x 0.86" and weighs 7.61 ounces. The iPod mini is 3.6" x 2.0" x 0.5" and weights 3.6 ounces. In other words, the Dell is 9.5 cubic inches compared to the iPod mini's 3.6 cubic inches, and more than twice as heavy. Just because the size difference doesn't matter to you doesn't mean it won't for somebody else. Can you really not imagine a percentage of customers who value the extra portability over raw capacity?
He is? The iTunes Music Store is available only in the United States, and I believe he's in Norway.
(Apple uses the credit card mailing address to ensure you are in the US, but don't confuse your ability to get a US credit card with Apple having a legal right to sell you that song if you really aren't a US resident.)
Since you don't currently have an iTunes account, have you actually tried to do this and found the quality unacceptable? Are your audio equipment and environment actually good enough for you to hear the difference?
I just hope Apple gets the message and removes all DRM from their music
It's not "their music". Apple gets the message just fine, which is why you can copy the purchased song to two other computers, stream music in the local subnet, and burn a song any number of times (just not using the same playlist more than ten times to make it more tedious).
On the other hand, a frail man deliberately picked up a handful of salt, which was at the time a monopoly product of the British Empire. He was arrested for it, but this and other actions that fly in the face of "common sense" eventually freed India from British colonization.
How about that woman who was arrested for sitting in the front of the bus, when everybody knows that black people need to sit in the back?
I'm not saying DVD-Jon is anybody resembling Gandhi or Parks, or that his cause is nearly as important. What I'm saying is that many changes come from a small number of people noisily breaking unjust laws, rather than a thousand people quietly breaking it.
One problem is that abortion is not explicitly protected by law, only vaguely so via a Supreme Court decision on privacy. Allowing or endorsing even "minor or abuse-proof" limitations means acknowledging that the right to abortion is not absolute. Worse, if it's not an absolute right, then what stops the line from constantly moving? It's as if I would ask you to deny your God one day each year, because it's minor anyway. What stops me from asking for a month next time, if your right to worship was not absolutely protected?
(I'm not agreeing, just explaining.)
I'm sick of being told that I'm "anti-woman" because I think abortion is wrong.
A lot of legal things are wrong. Most American women do not cover their hair and fraternize with men who are not relatives, which is wrong by some standards. The question is whether it is wrong enough (like murder, rape, and ripping music to MP3) to be illegal. I don't agree with the label you're given, but it's important to separate disagreement - even condemnation - from a real need to legislate behavior.
Recorded human history number about five thousand years, while feminism as we know it runs a few decades. I presume you are referring to the Homo Sapiens as a species, which goes back about 200,000 years ago. Therefore, feminism accounts for about 0.5% of recorded history, and about 0.01% of human existence. In other words, you don't have a good grasp of the numbers you throw around.
yet the preposition that men and women are equal in all things is treated as if it were absolute truth
There's a very big difference in accepting that women should be treated equally by law and society, and that women are indistinguishable from men. The former is generally accepted in the western-influenced world, while the latter characterizes hard-core feminists.
the ever escalating regulation of human behavior is the result of politicians pandering to the feminine need for safety above all else
This is not unique to feminism, but to a society's emphasis on protecting the ones least able to protect themselves. You'll notice that disability and minority rights are often present in societies debating women's issues. It would help if you are more specific with the "regulation" you describe. Would you rather marital rape not be a crime, for example?
it has destroyed, at least in part, the basic social unit that is the family.
I'm afraid you have to show causality at least in a specific example. The criminalization of marital rape, for example, may result in the overt destruction of a family unit, but I would strongly argue that the family had already been destroyed.
3 GHz G5s will be shipping in the summer of 2004, undoubtedly in the form of high end Power Macs. They will not be marketed to or be affordable to "Joe Sixpacks". Joe Sixpack will continue to spend $500 to $1,000 on a computer, and maybe buy an eMac. The 3 GHz Power Mac will be targeted at professionals who will spend $3,000 or more on a computer.
That's the way this has always worked. G4 computers have just recently broken the $1,000 mark.
It's the location of the battery that's the problem. The iPod is basically three things: a hard disk, a LCD, and a battery. Think about their sizes for a moment, and design a box with the form factor of the iPod and a replaceable battery.
If you have trouble visualizing, check out the installation instructions at ipodbattery.com. On the current generation iPod, for example, you need to move the hard disk out of the way before you can get to the battery.
How many of those support several distributions? If you look at Maya, for example, it requires "RedHat(TM) Linux(R) 7.3 or 8.0". SoftImage 3D requires "Red Hat Linux 7.1 or 7.2". Mathematica wants "Red Hat 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9.0, or equivalent." Some others simply list "Linux." An already small market is further fragmented by incompatible distributions.
Point is, if the "System Requirements" section of a product simply says "Linux", how likely is it to work on every major (feel free to define "major") current version Linux distribution? We're talking about a market that even Red Hat gave up on.
MacOS X, in comparison, has three major versions. There's little reason for anybody to stay at 10.0, because 10.1 is a free upgrade. 10.2 and 10.3 are both backward compatible to some degree, and despite Apple's nasty habit of breaking old software in new OS versions, updated applications usually can still work in older OS versions. Though the market is small, a developer can target the entire MacOS X share.
There is an exception to this. Workstations (which I define here as computers with a more or less dedicated purpose) can be well supported even on Linux. Basically, the vendor chooses a Linux distribution (and maybe even hardware), and because the software is so important to its users, you buy the right distribution and hardware. Examples of these would be artist workstations (audio, graphics, video), and possibly even software developer platforms. A general purpose application like StarOffice would have a much harder time dictating platform requirements to its users.
If Apple has to pay 5 cents for every credit card transaction on average, their 4 million or so charges (from 6 million songs sold a month, 45% of which are albums) would come to $200,000. A small part of this is offset by using Apple hardware and parts.
Rhapsody, on its part, must charge 250,000 users, which if they get the same rate (which I doubt) would cost $12,500, or an advantage over Apple of some $180,000. So, in the best case estimate, they make a profit of about 7%. That's not a bad margin, but it's not insanely great. The 4 million charges is likely to be far too high, as many users undoubtedly buy multiple single songs in one session.
So, again, I don't see your "much better profit margins", unless Apple has to pay much more per transaction.
By the way, the 250K sub number is already a couple of months old (end of September), and the Apple numbers you cite are up to the minute. [...] I would think they're closing in on 400K subs about now.
That doesn't change the equation, because 400,000 users will require 400,000 users' worth of bandwidth. The business problem is still how to make money per download.
Now, Apple makes $6M off the 6M songs, keeping $1.8M (30%) of it after the record label takes its share. Rhapsody has 250,000 members, making them $2.5M, of which they keep $1.25M (50%).
Since about 45% of iTMS sales are album sales, Apple needs to process around 4M (rather than 6M) credit card transactions. Rhapsody only has to handle 250K. Is this the "much better profit margin" you are referring to? Remember also that the iTMS probably uses Apple hardware, so its hardware costs don't all leave the house.
As I asked, where's the money coming from?
I call BS. You can start using the iTMS with an investment of... one dollar. If you remain skeptical, then it's not that much trouble to burn one or five songs to CD, which is as standard as it gets.
I can understand not wanting to buy everything from iTMS or any other service. But not buying at all because you're waiting for a standard is pretty curious. What exactly do you have to lose?
Sorry, how can a flat-fee subscription model have better profit margins than iTunes? If they provide you more than 10 songs a month for $10, then they've given you more goods than Apple did for the same price. How can it both be a better value for you, and at the same time have "much better profit margins"? Where is the magic money coming from?
Do the record labels give the subscription services a better deal because of stricter DRM? What would possibly motivate that benevolence?
Are the subscription services making money off people who don't "use up" the $10 fully each month? Like any shared service exploiting its casual users, expect your share of the cost to go up significantly when you lose them. Ten bucks is ten bucks.
Most scientific experiments are boring until you understand the underlying principles. If you drop two balls of different weights from a tower, would they hit the ground at the same time? If you don't understand the point of the experiment, then you're just dropping balls from a building.
Few things are as intrinsically interesting as video games. That's why children need parents and teachers, not just games.
...and what sort of fanatic switches before the tide even turns?
More likely, they were picking up the signals diagonally through windows, rather than from directly below through roofs. One of the reasons satellite phones perform poorly indoors is because signals have difficulty passing through the roof. (Cellular towers are at much lower altitude, and their signals reach you mainly through windows.)
You are right, but have you tried putting that on a resume?
That's the unfortunate fact of life graduates will have to cope with, so every school must cater to the Real World as well, to some degree.No, it does happen. I bought a 15 GB iPod around September for about $325 out of pocket, after reading a tip. That's about 20% off the Apple store price. This is shortly before Apple came out with the new line-up, but the Apple Store was still selling the same unit at $399 when I bought mine.