Last year I bought an iPad and within a month gave my 15" MacBook Pro to a new hire (programmer). The iPad did pretty much everything I needed for office work and I bought a docking station for the office and one for home. The major problem was lack of printing at first, but now with AirPrint or whatever the feature is called, that's no longer a problem.
This year we decided that non-technical (i.e. programmers/creative folks) will have their laptops replaced by iPads w/3G built in. We've had a couple people wish the screen sizes were larger, but it's easier to travel with. Most of our women can fit it in their purses and are glad not to have to lug around a laptop bag.
The big X-factor was we had to redo our intranet site using jQTouch to make it more mobile friendly, but once that was done it was pretty smooth sailing.
I saw where netflix's stock closed at an all time high the other day. I would be selling because they are getting out the optical media business (DVD/Blu-Ray are both dead technologies as far as I'm concerned.) and concentrating on the streaming business. Problem is that the cable companies can do the streaming business too. That's pretty much what on demand is.
So what is going to happen is we'll get our two teired internet business where either you or netflix or both has to pony up a bunch of money to stream their service. So if you want the "streaming package" that will be an extra $20 per month. Oh, but that INCLUDES "COMCAST's Online streaming" in which they inject a 5 minute ad before each movie or something. If you want netflix, then you're paying $20 + $10 for the netflix fee. If (insert cable company here) has just as good of a selection, how many people are going to pay for the netflix subscription?
I have charter. I pay $150 per month for Cable with DVR, HDTV, HBO/Showtime/Cinemax/Starz/TMC, 8/3 internet, and home phone service. One reason I get Cable TV is because I like sports, especially Cardinals Baseball and Blues Hockey I probably watch 100 out of 163 games a year on TV and about 40 - 50 Blues games a year. You can't get that streaming. I seriously thought about going down to just internet. Well, that would have been $80/month for the same internet package. And then about $25 per month for Xbox Live (needed for Netflix since I use my 360), Netflix, and Hulu Plus. That would have been $105 per month with no local sports. For another $45 per month I got the cable and home phone. And going to a sports bar to watch the games costs a lot more than $45 per month.
Plus having the local channels can be useful. I woke up new years eve to tornado sirens going off. Went down stairs and tuned into the NBC Weather Plus channel to see what was going on in less than a minute. Could I have looked it up online? Yes, but then I would have had to think, "Where did I set my iPad/phone/laptop last. Was it in my bedroom? Was it in the den? Maybe the kitchen?" And if there is a tornado, you don't have the time to think sometimes.
I foresee the next generation Xbox/PS having no optical drive, just a HDD and requiring an Xbox Live subscription. All game purchases will be made either by pre-paid card sold at stores or directly from their market place and downloaded to the device. Then if you get a new console, just download again using the same XBL account.
The company I left last year (I got an offer from a old consulting client I couldn't pass up) built their entire platform on a number of opensource technologies including linux, FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, and Perl. We had grown and had a couple perl hackers and a decent DBA, but I was the systems guy (I was a little bit of everything at the start). It was extremely hard in that area to find a replacement because all the other shops were pretty much all Microsoft/.Net environments and a couple Java/DB2 shops. If they were a windows shop, they could have found a dozen good candidates locally, paid them about 80% what I was making and gone on. But I think it took them about 4 months to find a replacement. The amount of time and money they had to spend to bring someone new into the fold probably would have covered those software licensing costs a couple times over.
So if we had it to do over again, we may not have gone with the OSS stack.
Or how about the US, Israel, Russia, China, the UK and several other countries. If the US knew the Russians were behind it, do you think the CIA is going to announce it to the world, or just do as much damage by keeping their mouth shut. Probably several intelligence agencies knew what what was going on, but sometimes you can do more by knowing when to keep your mouth shut.
Really? Because in 5 years I don't see myself owning a computer at home. When I'm at home now I primarily use my Xbox for streaming Netflix and my iPad for checking facebook, email, and general "surfing". I still have an iMac at the office I use for a little bit of coding I'm still required to do. But that is getting less and less these days. I'm sure in another year or two, the iMac will be replaced by a laptop at the office, but I'm not going to be buying another laptop for the home.
And I imagine more households will be going the way I am. An iPad with a docking station will pretty much handle 99% of what most home users do.
Mod this guy up, but he forgot to list the fact that H.264 support are on a number of set top boxes, built into DVD and blu-ray players, and even now supported directly by many TV's. WebM may get in to TV eventually, but the one I just bought has support for H.264. I encoded a movie yesterday from iMovie, plugged it into the TV's SD slot and it played. I'm not planning on buying a new TV for a while so...
I still have a number of friends who are videographers and WebM hasn't even hit their radar yet. If it's youtube, they just shrug since they'll make their videos in H.264 and upload letting Google's CPU cycles do the conversion. But as it stands right now, they've spent the last 5 years building their entire workflow around H.264 including buying licenses. Which compared to the ASCAP and other license fees they pay is somewhat trivial.
With SEO....yeah most of the consultants are playing off ignorance, but from past experience, there are some out there that are worth their weight. Once you've done all the technical things with mod_rewrite/etc. the rest becomes content and making sure the keywords in the meta match what is in the body and that is an art. On one e-commerce site, we went from page 6 on google to the bottom of page 1 within weeks after a gal came in and rewrote all the website text. This was after 3 months of those of us in the technical area trying to do it. We paid her $15k for about 2 weeks worth work, which I thought was highway robbery. But the result was going from ~$15k month in sales from the website to ~$35k a month.
...especially if someone takes an OSS app that is compilable and adds few backdoors etc. and puts it up on mirrors. Yeah, check the checksums. I do, but how many non-tech geeks know even how to do that? Last company I worked for we provided service contracts for an OSS app and got it PA-DSS certified, fixed a bunch of problems, added features, and most importantly signed our binaries. Most OSS project don't and a lot of times are in a format where that is difficult.
Not in my case. My Xbox 360 without XBox live would be pretty useless to me. Why? Netflix. I maybe use the 360 to play 5 - 6 hours worth of gaming a month if that. It easily gets used 5 - 6 hours a week streaming TV shows and movies. If it wasn't for the fact that cable internet alone is only $20 cheaper a month than the phone/internet/TV bundle I would have ditched the TV and home phone parts.
They problem is that for most videographers, the internet is still a small part of their business if anything. And H.264 plays pretty much everywhere. They can send a file to a client and it will play on a Mac, or a PC, or a set top box, or a mobile phone or a game console, or even on many TV's. Plug in an SD card with H.264 video and it will play on the TV. I remember what it was like during the days of codec hell and trying to get clients to view a video only for them to see "You need to download XYZ Codec" or "ABC Player" to view this video.
In this situation, Microsoft has nothing to do with H.264 other than licensing it. Apple is part of the patent pool. But H.264 became the defacto standard because it was...well technically a lot better with good licensing terms. As someone who worked in video production in the early days of web video when you had to encode videos to at least 3 different formats, I welcomed the day H.264. Most of the pros I know that are still in the business are frankly a little peeved at seeing yet another format war, and as far as their concerned, for no good reason. Especially when they've had a settled standard for the past 5 years: H.264. The last thing they want to see happen is the internet once again require video in 3 different formats.
And to them H.264 is much bigger than just the internet because H.264 is everywhere. It's in their cameras, editing software, DVD players, mobile media players, mobile phones, set top boxes, TV's etc..
If suddenly they did that, everyone would be bitching at google because suddenly they broke YouTube. Especially the mobile market because of the millions of mobile devices out there that currently support H.264 hardware decoding. WebM won't be on those devices anytime soon and even if it was, it would be software decoding...aka kiss your battery life good bye.
I worked in video production for several years and H.264 is a freaking god-send. Finally we had a good codec choice that was pretty much universally adopted. You could encode a video once, play anywhere. I remember what it was like before having to reencode a video in Quicktime, then WMV, and then Real Player as your "fall back". That ate up a lot of CPU cycles. Talking with many of my friends still in the video business and right now WebM isn't even on their radar to be honest.
I asked a couple of them why and their answers summed up were:
1) It's not in any of their hardware. All their hardware pretty much shoots/plays H.264. So does the hardware their clients use. 2) Not supported in Avid, FCP, or Premiere. (I don't know any one using Vegas professionally at the moment) 3) Offers no clear technical advantages over H.264 at this point. (at least that they can see) 4) Already have H.264 commercial licenses. 5) If Google switches youtube over, then they can upload their H.264 video and let google's servers to the conversion.
A couple grumbled about Why Yet Another Format War when they felt everyone had finally settled on H.264. And when I brought up the issue of licensing most shrugged as they buy content licenses all the time for music, sound effects, 3D models, and the cost of H.264 was pennies compared to what some were paying ASCAP, etc..
I consulted with a small medical equipment business 5 years ago when they were replacing a DOS based system they bought in 1993 with new software that met all the HIPPA compliance plus their state requirements. It was a pretty big deal back then since 80% of their business was either Medicare or Medicad. It took about six months to write out all the contingency plans and make sure they were doing proper back ups, could restore backs ups, had secure off-site storage of tapes, etc..
I do remember the big hang up was the fact their database server and terminals had have an airgap between them and the Internet, or at least that was the easist and cheapest way to meet the standards they had to and In fact the only line out was a dial up modem to submit billing to the state. It only took about a month to back up all their records to hard copy (just incase), get the new systems and transfer all the old data to the new system.
It took another five months to write all the damn documentation the government required for their certification/accrediation/inspection or whatever it was they had to pass.
When social security started, your SSN was supposed to only be for them. It was never "meant" to be a national ID, at least that's what the folks in government said at the time. Yet that's what it has become....funny how that happens.
My big question is what is the payout rules? Do they deposit the money in my checking account automatically? Or do you have to have a minimum sales amount before they'll cut a check?
I write mobile apps as a hobby. I make enough from the apps that it pays for itself, but not enough to quit the day job. I've been releasing mobile apps for both Android and iOS for a little over a year now. I spent the start of this week actually looking at the sales data to get ready for taxes this year and I've come to the conclusion that Android users don't buy apps. iOS users do.
I do the classic "Lite" version of my apps that are free with ads and then offer a "Full" version for either $0.99 or $1.99 with no ads and usually has a few extra features that didn't make the cut into the lite version.
The lite version of my flagship app has about 15k iOS downloads and 22k from Google Marketplace.
I've sold a little over 900 of the "full" versions of the app for iOS but only about 350 for Droid phones @ $1.99 in both marketplaces.
The problem is, I spend probably 2.5x the time on the Android platform vs. iOS. working out issues between devices/OS versions. Well if you add having to submit to multiple app stores, each with their own submission rules and payout rules, and Android becomes even less and less attractive for people like me.
My TV went kaput on Xmas eve so I bought a new one last week. I found a good deal on a 58" Plasma without the bells and whistles like Netflix built in for $1100. 5 years ago I used a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV to watch TV & Movies I purchased over iTunes.
Now I use my XBox360 mostly for streaming Netflix in HD.
I didn't spend $2000 or $3000 on a new TV because I figured it's only another 2 - 3 years to where the XBox services are built into the TV and it's all "cloud" based or whatever. I figured I'd save the money now and wait and see what is out in another couple years.
I'm pretty sure that by 2015, I won't have a computer in my house like I do now. Already it doesn't get much use these days. I do my surfing and facebooking on my iPad. I have a docking station for writing long emails for the iPad. But even then I answer more emails on my phone than anything these days.
As far as I can tell the only thing they did right was make it idiot proof with the lack of software to put music on and a huge marketing campaign.
Which is what most people wanted to be "right"...and let's not forget the other ace in the whole: the iTunes Music Store. Apple was the first to get both the player and ability to buy music cheaply and easily for just about anyone to use. Before iTMS it was buy a $15 CD even if you only wanted a couple tracks or pirate the music via Napster/Limewire/etc.. With the iTMS they allowed people the ability to purchase only a track or two at $.99 each if that was all we wanted. The two proved to be a good combination of the right technologies at the right price.
I know I spent about the same amount on music on iTMS as before iTMS, only it seemed like I was getting a lot more for my money. I probably spent about $150 a year before on music, probably for 50 - 60 tracks I really wanted. Now that $150 bought me 150 tracks that I wanted to listen to and it did for a lot of other people was well.
If this device doesn't have a music store that rivals iTunes, it may satisfy a few geeks here on slashdot, but it's going to be a fail to the average consumer.
Slashdot Mirror
Last year I bought an iPad and within a month gave my 15" MacBook Pro to a new hire (programmer). The iPad did pretty much everything I needed for office work and I bought a docking station for the office and one for home. The major problem was lack of printing at first, but now with AirPrint or whatever the feature is called, that's no longer a problem.
This year we decided that non-technical (i.e. programmers/creative folks) will have their laptops replaced by iPads w/3G built in. We've had a couple people wish the screen sizes were larger, but it's easier to travel with. Most of our women can fit it in their purses and are glad not to have to lug around a laptop bag.
The big X-factor was we had to redo our intranet site using jQTouch to make it more mobile friendly, but once that was done it was pretty smooth sailing.
I saw where netflix's stock closed at an all time high the other day. I would be selling because they are getting out the optical media business (DVD/Blu-Ray are both dead technologies as far as I'm concerned.) and concentrating on the streaming business. Problem is that the cable companies can do the streaming business too. That's pretty much what on demand is.
So what is going to happen is we'll get our two teired internet business where either you or netflix or both has to pony up a bunch of money to stream their service. So if you want the "streaming package" that will be an extra $20 per month. Oh, but that INCLUDES "COMCAST's Online streaming" in which they inject a 5 minute ad before each movie or something. If you want netflix, then you're paying $20 + $10 for the netflix fee. If (insert cable company here) has just as good of a selection, how many people are going to pay for the netflix subscription?
I have charter. I pay $150 per month for Cable with DVR, HDTV, HBO/Showtime/Cinemax/Starz/TMC, 8/3 internet, and home phone service. One reason I get Cable TV is because I like sports, especially Cardinals Baseball and Blues Hockey I probably watch 100 out of 163 games a year on TV and about 40 - 50 Blues games a year. You can't get that streaming. I seriously thought about going down to just internet. Well, that would have been $80/month for the same internet package. And then about $25 per month for Xbox Live (needed for Netflix since I use my 360), Netflix, and Hulu Plus. That would have been $105 per month with no local sports. For another $45 per month I got the cable and home phone. And going to a sports bar to watch the games costs a lot more than $45 per month.
Plus having the local channels can be useful. I woke up new years eve to tornado sirens going off. Went down stairs and tuned into the NBC Weather Plus channel to see what was going on in less than a minute. Could I have looked it up online? Yes, but then I would have had to think, "Where did I set my iPad/phone/laptop last. Was it in my bedroom? Was it in the den? Maybe the kitchen?" And if there is a tornado, you don't have the time to think sometimes.
I foresee the next generation Xbox/PS having no optical drive, just a HDD and requiring an Xbox Live subscription. All game purchases will be made either by pre-paid card sold at stores or directly from their market place and downloaded to the device. Then if you get a new console, just download again using the same XBL account.
...a smart company with plenty of resources like Blizzard/Activation should be saying: "Hey, you guys want a job?"
The company I left last year (I got an offer from a old consulting client I couldn't pass up) built their entire platform on a number of opensource technologies including linux, FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, and Perl. We had grown and had a couple perl hackers and a decent DBA, but I was the systems guy (I was a little bit of everything at the start). It was extremely hard in that area to find a replacement because all the other shops were pretty much all Microsoft/.Net environments and a couple Java/DB2 shops. If they were a windows shop, they could have found a dozen good candidates locally, paid them about 80% what I was making and gone on. But I think it took them about 4 months to find a replacement. The amount of time and money they had to spend to bring someone new into the fold probably would have covered those software licensing costs a couple times over.
So if we had it to do over again, we may not have gone with the OSS stack.
aircraft in the 1930's.... ...also seems like it didn't end well for some of them.
Or how about the US, Israel, Russia, China, the UK and several other countries. If the US knew the Russians were behind it, do you think the CIA is going to announce it to the world, or just do as much damage by keeping their mouth shut. Probably several intelligence agencies knew what what was going on, but sometimes you can do more by knowing when to keep your mouth shut.
Really? Because in 5 years I don't see myself owning a computer at home. When I'm at home now I primarily use my Xbox for streaming Netflix and my iPad for checking facebook, email, and general "surfing". I still have an iMac at the office I use for a little bit of coding I'm still required to do. But that is getting less and less these days. I'm sure in another year or two, the iMac will be replaced by a laptop at the office, but I'm not going to be buying another laptop for the home.
And I imagine more households will be going the way I am. An iPad with a docking station will pretty much handle 99% of what most home users do.
Mod this guy up, but he forgot to list the fact that H.264 support are on a number of set top boxes, built into DVD and blu-ray players, and even now supported directly by many TV's. WebM may get in to TV eventually, but the one I just bought has support for H.264. I encoded a movie yesterday from iMovie, plugged it into the TV's SD slot and it played. I'm not planning on buying a new TV for a while so...
I still have a number of friends who are videographers and WebM hasn't even hit their radar yet. If it's youtube, they just shrug since they'll make their videos in H.264 and upload letting Google's CPU cycles do the conversion. But as it stands right now, they've spent the last 5 years building their entire workflow around H.264 including buying licenses. Which compared to the ASCAP and other license fees they pay is somewhat trivial.
Let's be honest, there is Chicago and then the rest of the state of Illinois. And the rest of the state wishes Chicago would just succeed already.
With SEO....yeah most of the consultants are playing off ignorance, but from past experience, there are some out there that are worth their weight. Once you've done all the technical things with mod_rewrite/etc. the rest becomes content and making sure the keywords in the meta match what is in the body and that is an art. On one e-commerce site, we went from page 6 on google to the bottom of page 1 within weeks after a gal came in and rewrote all the website text. This was after 3 months of those of us in the technical area trying to do it. We paid her $15k for about 2 weeks worth work, which I thought was highway robbery. But the result was going from ~$15k month in sales from the website to ~$35k a month.
...especially if someone takes an OSS app that is compilable and adds few backdoors etc. and puts it up on mirrors. Yeah, check the checksums. I do, but how many non-tech geeks know even how to do that? Last company I worked for we provided service contracts for an OSS app and got it PA-DSS certified, fixed a bunch of problems, added features, and most importantly signed our binaries. Most OSS project don't and a lot of times are in a format where that is difficult.
Not in my case. My Xbox 360 without XBox live would be pretty useless to me. Why? Netflix. I maybe use the 360 to play 5 - 6 hours worth of gaming a month if that. It easily gets used 5 - 6 hours a week streaming TV shows and movies. If it wasn't for the fact that cable internet alone is only $20 cheaper a month than the phone/internet/TV bundle I would have ditched the TV and home phone parts.
They problem is that for most videographers, the internet is still a small part of their business if anything. And H.264 plays pretty much everywhere. They can send a file to a client and it will play on a Mac, or a PC, or a set top box, or a mobile phone or a game console, or even on many TV's. Plug in an SD card with H.264 video and it will play on the TV. I remember what it was like during the days of codec hell and trying to get clients to view a video only for them to see "You need to download XYZ Codec" or "ABC Player" to view this video.
In this situation, Microsoft has nothing to do with H.264 other than licensing it. Apple is part of the patent pool. But H.264 became the defacto standard because it was...well technically a lot better with good licensing terms. As someone who worked in video production in the early days of web video when you had to encode videos to at least 3 different formats, I welcomed the day H.264. Most of the pros I know that are still in the business are frankly a little peeved at seeing yet another format war, and as far as their concerned, for no good reason. Especially when they've had a settled standard for the past 5 years: H.264. The last thing they want to see happen is the internet once again require video in 3 different formats.
And to them H.264 is much bigger than just the internet because H.264 is everywhere. It's in their cameras, editing software, DVD players, mobile media players, mobile phones, set top boxes, TV's etc..
If suddenly they did that, everyone would be bitching at google because suddenly they broke YouTube. Especially the mobile market because of the millions of mobile devices out there that currently support H.264 hardware decoding. WebM won't be on those devices anytime soon and even if it was, it would be software decoding...aka kiss your battery life good bye.
I worked in video production for several years and H.264 is a freaking god-send. Finally we had a good codec choice that was pretty much universally adopted. You could encode a video once, play anywhere. I remember what it was like before having to reencode a video in Quicktime, then WMV, and then Real Player as your "fall back". That ate up a lot of CPU cycles. Talking with many of my friends still in the video business and right now WebM isn't even on their radar to be honest.
I asked a couple of them why and their answers summed up were:
1) It's not in any of their hardware. All their hardware pretty much shoots/plays H.264. So does the hardware their clients use.
2) Not supported in Avid, FCP, or Premiere. (I don't know any one using Vegas professionally at the moment)
3) Offers no clear technical advantages over H.264 at this point. (at least that they can see)
4) Already have H.264 commercial licenses.
5) If Google switches youtube over, then they can upload their H.264 video and let google's servers to the conversion.
A couple grumbled about Why Yet Another Format War when they felt everyone had finally settled on H.264. And when I brought up the issue of licensing most shrugged as they buy content licenses all the time for music, sound effects, 3D models, and the cost of H.264 was pennies compared to what some were paying ASCAP, etc..
Netflix ain't going anywhere near WebM until WebM has DRM technology built into it. Until that happens, the studios won't let them.
I consulted with a small medical equipment business 5 years ago when they were replacing a DOS based system they bought in 1993 with new software that met all the HIPPA compliance plus their state requirements. It was a pretty big deal back then since 80% of their business was either Medicare or Medicad. It took about six months to write out all the contingency plans and make sure they were doing proper back ups, could restore backs ups, had secure off-site storage of tapes, etc..
I do remember the big hang up was the fact their database server and terminals had have an airgap between them and the Internet, or at least that was the easist and cheapest way to meet the standards they had to and In fact the only line out was a dial up modem to submit billing to the state. It only took about a month to back up all their records to hard copy (just incase), get the new systems and transfer all the old data to the new system.
It took another five months to write all the damn documentation the government required for their certification/accrediation/inspection or whatever it was they had to pass.
Diplomats or CIA agents with official cover? Sometimes it's hard to tell a difference...
When social security started, your SSN was supposed to only be for them. It was never "meant" to be a national ID, at least that's what the folks in government said at the time. Yet that's what it has become....funny how that happens.
Bigger question then: Is Amazon going to decide what to sell my app for or am I the developer going to set the price?
My big question is what is the payout rules? Do they deposit the money in my checking account automatically? Or do you have to have a minimum sales amount before they'll cut a check?
I write mobile apps as a hobby. I make enough from the apps that it pays for itself, but not enough to quit the day job. I've been releasing mobile apps for both Android and iOS for a little over a year now.
I spent the start of this week actually looking at the sales data to get ready for taxes this year and I've come to the conclusion that Android users don't buy apps. iOS users do.
I do the classic "Lite" version of my apps that are free with ads and then offer a "Full" version for either $0.99 or $1.99 with no ads and usually has a few extra features that didn't make the cut into the lite version.
The lite version of my flagship app has about 15k iOS downloads and 22k from Google Marketplace.
I've sold a little over 900 of the "full" versions of the app for iOS but only about 350 for Droid phones @ $1.99 in both marketplaces.
The problem is, I spend probably 2.5x the time on the Android platform vs. iOS. working out issues between devices/OS versions. Well if you add having to submit to multiple app stores, each with their own submission rules and payout rules, and Android becomes even less and less attractive for people like me.
My TV went kaput on Xmas eve so I bought a new one last week. I found a good deal on a 58" Plasma without the bells and whistles like Netflix built in for $1100. 5 years ago I used a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV to watch TV & Movies I purchased over iTunes.
Now I use my XBox360 mostly for streaming Netflix in HD.
I didn't spend $2000 or $3000 on a new TV because I figured it's only another 2 - 3 years to where the XBox services are built into the TV and it's all "cloud" based or whatever. I figured I'd save the money now and wait and see what is out in another couple years.
I'm pretty sure that by 2015, I won't have a computer in my house like I do now. Already it doesn't get much use these days. I do my surfing and facebooking on my iPad. I have a docking station for writing long emails for the iPad. But even then I answer more emails on my phone than anything these days.
As far as I can tell the only thing they did right was make it idiot proof with the lack of software to put music on and a huge marketing campaign.
Which is what most people wanted to be "right"...and let's not forget the other ace in the whole: the iTunes Music Store. Apple was the first to get both the player and ability to buy music cheaply and easily for just about anyone to use. Before iTMS it was buy a $15 CD even if you only wanted a couple tracks or pirate the music via Napster/Limewire/etc.. With the iTMS they allowed people the ability to purchase only a track or two at $.99 each if that was all we wanted. The two proved to be a good combination of the right technologies at the right price. I know I spent about the same amount on music on iTMS as before iTMS, only it seemed like I was getting a lot more for my money. I probably spent about $150 a year before on music, probably for 50 - 60 tracks I really wanted. Now that $150 bought me 150 tracks that I wanted to listen to and it did for a lot of other people was well. If this device doesn't have a music store that rivals iTunes, it may satisfy a few geeks here on slashdot, but it's going to be a fail to the average consumer.
Mod this guy up, wish I had points.