Lets ask the free market (even if calling it free is a joke in a market where every product is granted a government enforced monoploy): Blockbuster online and Netflix subscriptions put the per-disc rental cost in the $1-$2 range. So, that's how much a movie rental is worth.
I might be willing to pay a little more for the convenience and low latency of an online system, but not double or more what a discs-in-the-mail subscription would cost me for the same content.
This isn't even Apple's fault, everyone else doing online delivery has similar drawbacks, it's the movie industry trying to raise prices and tighten controls as people shift from physical media to online delivery. They want to make all online delivery conform to the terms of old fashioned pay-per-view or on-demand cable: lousy selection because titles are only available in a limited window (from a month after DVD release until they find a cable or TV network willing to pay for an exclusive airing, and then maybe again later once the movie is a catalog title), high prices to capitalize on convenience and milk early adopters and those with money to spend, restrictive terms because the industry has individual control of every viewing rather than just the first sale of the disc (you have to finish watching within 24 hours of starting, you can only have the movie on one device at a time, etc), etc...
The thing is, in the end, I expect Apple to be pretty successful selling video and video devices despite all of this; they're damn good at selling users that extra little bit of convenience and simplicity. In the long run, it's the movie industry itself that's going to suffer for their efforts to keep the customer from getting what they want (convenient access to high quality video, immediately available anywhere and any time, for no more than they're paying now), when physical media sales start falling off, and online sales don't pick up quickly enough to make up the difference (much like they did in the music industry, for similar reasons).
The MacBook Air is one sexy, thin piece of hardware. But I'm not nearly as interested as I would been a year or two ago.
It seems to me that Apple has preemptively undercut themselves here. The MacBook Air seems built on the premise that people will have two computers: a powerful desktop and an extremely svelte portable. And that's a premise I can definitely get behind. I just think the definition of "an extremely svelte portable" has changed recently; and Apple has even played a large role in changing it.
The iPhone, and to a lesser degree the iPod Touch, are very nearly laptop replacements for those who don't ask too much of their laptops, and they will rapidly grow even further into the realm of portable computing in February (presuming their upcoming SDK is not heinously crippled).
There's only really one hardware feature I'd like to see in my ultra-portable that the MacBook Air provides but the iPhone lacks, and that is an easy way to hook it up to a VGA or DVI projector and display presentations (Ironically, this is a feature that the iPhone already had on stage when is was first introduced; Steve Jobs had a special custom interface set up to mirror his iPhone's interface onto the giant projection system he uses at keynotes. Steve just decided to keep that particular toy to himself for some reason.).
Now, obviously, it's going to be a while before many people use a phone to replace a desktop or laptop as their primary computer. And even those with another system at home may demand more than a phone sized device can provide in the near future if they do a lot of work on the road. So fully featured independent laptops have a long and profitable future ahead of them. And some people will undoubtedly love the MacBook Air, either alone or as a second computer supplementing a heftier machine. But I suspect, in this case, Apple has "skated to where the puck is going to be" with the iPhone, and then turned around and skated right back towards where it was with the MacBook Air.
So seriously, you may well be right with the first two issues but this third concept is foreign to me and I'm sure many lawyers would be interested in how you 'revoked?' a license. What the?
I think a lot of these issues would be resolved by making it "no backsies, all derivatives must be CC, tough if you want to use them no lawsuits plz k thanx bye." And that's the best legalese I know.
IANAL, but as I understand it, under US law, you can revoke most kinds of licenses for your work after a certain number of years (35 or more, depending on when the license was made), whether the license itself says it allows termination or not.
The Creative Commons' Labs even has a tool and FAQ on their website to help people break their old licenses (presumably so that their old works can then be released under a CC license). So some of their people obviously know that this is possible.
The entire movement to free music from DRM's shackles has had stunning success in 2007 after years in which such widespead moves to MP3 looked impossible. Could movies be next?
Unfortunately, no.
There's one reason we're seeing DRM-free music: Apple. Every internet whiner and hazmat-suited protester put together didn't make a noticeable fraction of the impact against DRM that Apple did via their refusal to buy into Microsoft's DRM or license their own to others. They turned the labels tools to control customers into a distributor's tool to control the labels, and now the labels are caught in their own trap, and desperately thrashing and gnawing at their limbs to get away (by selling DRM-free to everyone but Apple).
But, since Apple haven't had the industry-crushing success they had with music in the video market thus far, and no one else looks likely to repeat Apple's feat, we may be stuck with DRM in the video market for a while.
OS X.. it's polished, integrated, (UNIX) powerful, and easy to use (stays out of my way). But if you have a problem... start hunting for preference files and deleting them.
In Soviet Linux, if you have a problem... start hunting for missing prefrence files and creating them!
(seriously, the last time I installed MPlayer on linux (several years ago) it segfaulted on start every time, until I dug through the docs, found references to a file for font preferences that wasn't created properly during the install for some odd reason, and created one of my own with some sample entries copied from the docs)
You know, if we'd been buying Apples crap all this time instead of PCs, Linux never would have had a chance. Apple are much more ruthless about locking down their hardware and software than Microsoft ever were.
You're kidding right?
Back in the early days of PPC, Apple used to fund and contribute developer time to their own linux distro (MkLinux). It's not even a matter of not caring, they actively wanted linux to run on their hardware, to the point that they paid for it's development. And even after that era ended (after the death of NuBus) they had special deals set up with third parties to sell macs with LinuxPPC or Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed.
You know, it never ceases to amaze me is how consistently non-mac-users skip right over Apple's actual screw ups to bitch about missteps that only exist in their fevered imaginations.
DVH-H, like most mobile targeted digital video systems afaik, is not an always-on signal. It's divided into time slices, and only uses something like one in ten slices for any particular channel. This is primarily to allow power savings by leaving the receiver powered off 90% of the time, but it might also allow you to use the same radio for TV and WiFI/WIMAX effectively at the same time.
Can you transfer documents straight to the device? In our testing, we only got MP3s to show up when we transferred them via USB. PDFs, RTFs, and JPEGs did not appear when we copied them to the Documents folder on the Kindle. But according to the online manual, you should be able to transfer any Kindle-compatiable file via USB.
...but the manual says only.AZW,.PRC,.MOBI,.MP3,.AA and.TXT files are supported, so I guess you're right. The file format support is just so lousy that successful testing looks a lot like failure.
So as long as you don't mind either emailing all your private data to amazon, or reading it as unformatted plain.txt files, you should be ok.
That's not as bad as I'd imagined, but I'm still somewhat unimpressed.
You can move content wherever you like, but the Kindle won't recognize or display it (unless it's an MP3).
If you want to put your own text documents (or.doc or.pdf or what not) on the Kindle in a form that it will read, you have to email them to amazon and pay $.10 each to have them converted to.azw and loaded on your Kindle.
I expect that the ebook reader of the future will look a whole lot more like the iPhone than the Kindle. A keyboard is only used a tiny tiny fraction of the time on a ebook reader, letting one account for that much of the device's size is just bad engineering. E-paper should look as much like normal paper as is technically possible. Normal paper does not have a bezel, and can be printed upon all the way to it's edge.
I do like the Kindle's free EVDO "whispernet" model, but I think they're way to aggressive in trying to get that money back (Amazon won't even let you load your own documents onto the Kindle without paying them a $.10 fee for each one you load, and they charge even more to access otherwise free content like blogs and public domain books from Project Gutenberg and such. And while Kindle offers "experimental basic web browsing" at the moment, they have made no commitment to continue offering access to anything but their paid download store.) If they expect me to pay $399 for one of those gadgets they're going to have to let me do a good bit more without sending them all my money and private data.
Eventually I look forward to a tablet with all of the advantages of LCD, OLED and EP displays, a cheap optional mobile broadband plan (possibly with free access to online stores), and decent local connectivity. But for now there are a lot of compromises to be made no matter which device you choose. Given my presonal mix of phone use, web browsing, music listening, video watching, reading of free online content, and reading of bought or borrowed printed content, I'm probably going to go with an iPod Touch when they release the SDK. Someone who spends less time reading things online, or more time on the phone (enough to justify buying $40 a month worth of minutes) might be better off with something else.
Downloading and installing a plug-in ahead of time is a surprisingly heavy burden for users, so for now there's still a significant barrier. A lot of what Google Gears provides really ought to be standardized and built into the browser imho.
I'm hoping that once that bit of HTML5 gets finalized and built into mainstream browsers, a lot more web apps will be built to automatically fall back to cached local data when they can't reach their servers.
But that's likely to take a while, and at least for now there's a simple HTML5-GoogleGears bridge for people who want to write their local storage code for HTML5 and have it work on most platforms and browsers, even if it requires a plug-in.
* I don't buy your argument that this is "at the expense of the environment". If the environment suffers because of an absense of highly effective, pro-active effort, then your post just hurt the environment. That's silly. Greenpeace is niether the sole entity for environmental action, therefore a lack of action on their part does not imply damage to the environment. Give us normal activists some credit!:) * given that they use whatever money they receieve to fund their initiatives, what exactly do you mean by profit? I'm guessing you mean "squander" or "embezzle". Money is power, thats why *every* political action group seeks it. If this made them hypocrites, then every political action group is hypocritical. * you're leaving out the most important part of what I've already said: their plan is to raise awareness through these stunts, not (just) money. They think it's doing good. I think that's debatable, but it *is* their stated intention.
I am not a non-profit organization supported by donations given with the understanding that they will be used to help the environment, Greenpeace is. Some actions which I could take with negligible impact on the environment would be strongly negative if taken by Greenpeace because of the resources earmarked for the environment which they instead would spend for other purposes. But, in any case, they are not simply misusing resources or failing to apply their efforts where they might be appropriate; they are actively undermining their own potential to influence industry by attacking highly popular companies rather than highly polluting companies (thus, as I said, eliminating the pressure to improve environmental policies to avoid media attacks by eliminating the causal relationship between pollution output and media attacks).
Seeking money is not inherently hypocritical (unless you've been demanding your friends and neighbors take vows of poverty). Seeking money at the expense of the environment, when your group focuses on condemning people who seek money at the expense of the environment, is hypocritical.
People seeking money, power, and fame often believe that they would use them better than those who have them now. I care less about that confidence in their own righteousness than I do about their actual actions and the consequences thereof.
Ok, first things first: you don't seem to know the meaning of the word hypocrisy. They are hypocrites because they do something that they condemn in others, not because they do something they claim they don't or won't (that would make them liars, but not necessarily hypocrites).
In this case Greenpeace are hypocrites because they are profiting at the expense of the environment. (By attacking companies based on how much publicity (and therefore donation money) they can gain, rather than how much pollution said company is responsible for relative to it's peers, Greenpeace not only lets heavier polluters go relatively unchallenged, they also send a message to all companies that their wrath cannot be abated by a better environmental policy, giving companies even less reason to bother cleaning up their act.)
I suppose they might also be hypocrites because they are indulging in the type of media manipulation that I suspect they have complained about their targets using in the past, but that is clearly secondary to the "profiting at the expense of the environment" thing imho.
The homebrew computer club was pretty close to the current Open Hardware movement.
Quoth Woz in the the article you refrenced: "There's always a group of people that wants to undo the forces of industry that have given us so much in terms of wealth, and there's always people who want things to be free,"... "The open-source movement starts with those sort of people. But it still has such good points that have nothing to do with whether it's free or not. The idea of developing something and then making your solution known. Spread the information so the world can grow from it."
It sounds to me like he loves the idea of open source itself, and just takes issue with a lot of the other ideologies that are lumped in with it these days (anti-capitalism, the "free" software movement, etc). That sounds pretty reasonable to me, and certainly isn't "totally trashing [open source]".
Radiohead refused to release their music anywhere but their own web site. None of the major stores, physical or digital have access to it yet. And the 800lb gorilla of digital sales, iTunes, will never have access to it as long as Apple demands customers be allowed to download at least some tracks ala carte while Radiohead demands their music be sold only in full albums.
On the other hand, their music was presumably available as usual at all the normal pirate hang outs.
This isn't rocket science folks.
On another note, I do have to wonder about the context of the sensationalized claim that "more copies of the album were pirated than [legally] downloaded". Isn't that true for practically _every_ album released in the last decade?
Actually, I read quite a bit, including many full novels, and I do at least half of that reading these days on a computer display of one sort or another. In point of fact, I've been actively avoiding buying new paper books for a while now simply because all of my bookshelves are full and I have no space for more (I'm looking at giving them away and getting taller ones at the moment).
And, having played with a Sony Reader (the 500 model) for a while, I can definitely say that it does not have a "much higher contrast ratio" than current emissive displays in a normal indoor environment; it's display can hardly even be called black and white, more like light gray and darker gray (like newsprint when compared to a magazine, it's readable but not gorgeous). I do very little of my reading "in full, direct sunlight", as that can be hard on the eyes even with plain old printed paper, and when I'm outdoors I tend to be on the move anyway.
E-paper has it's advantages, and is just fine for reading lots a plain static text on a dedicated device in a well lit area. I just don't think that is sufficient to give them mass market appeal when other devices are getting pretty damn good at displaying text, and >3-bit graphics, and color, and video, and interactive webpages and programs, etc... all at once.
I'm actually not sure that stable-image type displays (what I would generically consider e-paper) are going to be the first widespread paper-replacement. As nice as their low power consumption is, their bit depth, color, contrast, and refresh rate are all horrible at the moment. And while they are certainly improving in those areas, things like LCDs and OLEDs are improving in power consumption and form factor as well.
I came to this realization when I looked at the new 505 revision of the Sony Reader's marketing, and it occurred to me that I'd rather get an iPod touch. Recharging every few days instead of every few months is a sacrifice I'd be willing to make for real web content and video (while Sony could probably put some sort of basic very-static web browser on it's reader despite the display's low refresh rate if they wanted to support HTML, video and quick interactivity are going to be out of the question until there are fairly major changes in the display technology). And, as more and more content moves online, from static paper to dynamic computer screens, moving content is only getting more prevalent (rollovers, pull-down menus, AJAX widgets of all sorts, and even content in flash and other plug-ins)...
I kind of suspect that e-paper has missed the window where it could have widely succeeded with a refresh rate measured in seconds rather than milliseconds. Stable-image type displays may have to get their refresh rates down into the low-double-digit milliseconds (and coincidentally gain high bit depth color and decent contrast) before they can take on to the mainstream.
Actually, the iPhone or the iPod Touch might be a closer comparison imho. The 5watt PC is a good deal less powerful (in both senses of the word) than the mac mini.
Of course, I know which one I'd take, if given the choice. For my money, getting a 5w computer is kinda pointless when I'm expected to hook it up to a desktop LCD which could easily use more than 10 times that much power.
Just for giggles, here's a point by point comparison: 5 watt PC vs iPhone/iPod Touch $285 and up vs $299 and up AMD Geode LX800 CPU @ 500 MHz vs ARM @ ~620Mhz 256 MB DDR (non expandable) vs 128MB? (non expandable) 40 GB 2.5" Hard disk vs 4,8 or 16 GB flash drive Dual 100 Mbps Ethernet vs 802.11b/g, plus GSM/EDGE on iPhone SXGA controller, 640x480 to 1920x1440 vs 320x480 built in multi-touch display and 480i or 576i video out Two USB 2.0 high speed ports vs iPod dock port Speaker and microphone interface vs Speaker and microphone built i on iPhone, plus headphone/mic jack RS-232 serial port via RJ11 connector vs none Single 5V supply, 3-5 watt, fanless vs battery operated, fanless? 120 x 116 x 40 mm, 450 gram vs 115 x 61 x 11.6mm 135g iPhone or 110 x 61.8 x 8mm 120g iPod
And even if someone did, it'd be some fly by night company from a country like China with little intellectual property enforcement, not a huge American or European corporation like Intel or Nokia.
Obviously the iPhone is not only unrivaled, but unrival-able, and thus Apple's monopoly on iPhones must be restricted!
True. But taken to extremes, it also means a monoculture. Having everyone susceptible to the the same brain-bugs is a dangerous situation.
Ideally, as with computers, we might use a common format, but lots of radically different independently developed systems to process that format. I'm not sure how well that model maps to human beings though...
way beyond just the smart phone market: games, vertical business apps, voip, home controller, etc
I hate to break it to you, but those apps are all part of the smartphone market. But in any case, it seems to me that Apple is going "way beyond just the smart phone market" in an entirely different fashion that you're advocating.
Apple is pursuing a less-is-more strategy here imho... Geeks online have flame wars about weather of not the iPhone is a "real smartphone", with the implied presumption that smartphone status is, or ought to be, a goal Apple is trying to achieve. On the contrary, I suspect that Apple is actively trying to avoid having people perceive the iPhone as a smartphone. Smartphones are either toys for geeks or corporate tethers keeping us chained to work; the iPhone is targeted at the mainstream consumer, not a corporate IT department or the individual geeks working in it.
Apple doesn't want to compete in the "smartphone space", it wants to invent the "iPhone space" and grow it by consuming the mainstream featurephone (and, almost coincidentally, smartphone) markets.
I suspect that Apple will eventually allow some form of native apps for the iPhone, just as they eventually added a bunch of random functionality to the iPod (photos, notes, calendar, video, games, stopwatch, etc...). However, it seems to me that they find it essential to their strategy that the iPhone be initially perceived as a simple, easily understandable, and rock solid device (like an iPod that can make calls, rather than like a complicated programmable smartphone).
Personally, as a programmer and potential customer, I was mad as hell when I heard that the iPhone wouldn't let me write my own native apps; I was overflowing with ideas for that gadget the instant Steve started mentioning all of it's sensors in it's introductory keynote. But if I were speaking as a shareholder, as you claim to be, I would be hesitant to criticize Apple's initial direction for the iPhone here. While their strategy has yet to prove itself in the cell phone space, and replicating the iPod's crushing success in the semi-mature cellphone market is a very tall order indeed, I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if "no user apps, less features than an N95, lame" is 2009's version of "no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame."
Yeah, don't buy from the outlet that sells exclusively DRM-free tracks encoded at a reasonable bit-rate with no embedded user information. Much better to buy from the one who offers a smaller selection of DRM-free tracks, charges a premium for them and embeds data about you in every track. They're the ones who are really standing up to the labels. And continuing to buy DRM laden tracks will send a clear message to the labels that consumers want DRM-free music.
The grandparent never said to "buy DRM laden tracks", Mr. McStrawman. And you have only Amazon's word that the watermarks Amazon admit are in many of their tracks don't contain personally identifying information; whereas with Apple's watermark-free music you can trivially read or remove any information in the tags.
I think grandparent is wrong about the labels being able to take back the DRM-freeness (DRM will remain dead for the same reason it is dying now: the iPod), but I do expect them to raise prices, as the grandparent suggests. By allowing variable pricing, Amazon has made themselves much more vulnerable to gradually increasing prices (both by the labels and by themselves), when compared to Apple's fixed pricing.
People taking the Amazon MP3 store as some sort of victory against Apple have things almost entirely backwards. Apple has just won the online music wars far more permanently than they could by simply owning ~80% of the market; the Amazon MP3 store is the Big labels' terms of surrender (well, 2 of them, Sony and Warner are still holding out). Those terms say the labels will let people sell cheap, convenient, DRM-free music that isn't locked down to only Microsoft-approved systems, and Apple will continue to make ludicrous amounts of money selling such systems.
The only real downsides for Apple here are: 1) This comes at a time when Apple is in the middle of trying to grab two new markets with the iPhone/iPod (video and mobile telephony), and you can tell from their product lineup's limitations that they're already having a lot of trouble getting the kind of decent terms that allowed the iPod&iTunes combo to work so well for music. Anything that the movie/TV/mobile-network companies can interpret as a sign of Apple's weakness (real of imagined) is going to somewhat undermine Apple's ability to do for other industries what they did for music. And 2) Universal has basically said that, at least for the next several months, they will sell DRM-free music to anyone but Apple. Basically they've decided that a free market where consumers can pick the store they like is too dangerous, so they're going to use their monopoly on certain music to artificially undermine their most popular distributor rather than just selling DRM-free music to anyone who will pay and letting the market decide. This is probably a temporary situation imho, as Universal can't throw away income from their largest online distributor forever, and it really doesn't do Apple much harm since they make their real money on iPods anyway and Amazon MP3 works just fine there, but this kind of discriminatory sales policy sets an ugly precedent.
I think that Amazon MP3 may be the best online music store out there right now. It beats iTunes on price most of the time (if you only count iTunes-Plus), and it's DRM-free selection is better (due largely Universal's inclusion). But it does have it's warts:
The Semi-required Downloader. Amazon allows users to download single tracks via plain old http, but requires the use of their download-manager to buy albums (which are generally cheaper then buying the individual tracks, and are the only way to purchase some items such as Radiohead's works). This sucks for anyone on an alternative platform (mainstream x86-linux users will supposedly get a port of the downloader eventually, but the rest of us will remain out of luck).
Watermarking. Amazon has admitted that some of their MP3s are watermarked (with the company it was purchased from and the the time of purchase). They claim that there is no personally identifying information in the file, but if the watermark is encrypted or the watermarking scheme is unknown that claim cannot be verified. (for comparison, iTunes-Plus DRM-free songs are not watermarked, but do contain the purchaser's Apple-id (generally an email address) in a plain-text tag (which, unlike a watermark, can be easily examined or removed and does not affect sound quality)).
Universal's anticompetitive tactics. Universal has basically said that, at least for the next several months, they will sell DRM-free music to anyone but Apple. Basically they've decided that a free market where consumers can pick the store they like is too dangerous, so they're going to use their monopoly on certain music to artificially undermine their most popular distributor rather than just selling DRM-free music to anyone who will pay and letting the market decide.
And one thing that isn't really a problem at the moment, but seems likely to become one eventually is:
Variable Pricing. Prices range from good (45cents), to standard (89-99cents), to insane ($14.51 for one 2minute track). Searching for all songs and sorting by price, you can see that only about ~15000 of their tracks are more than $1.35 and only about ~7500 track are less than $.88, so most of their 2.3 million songs fall near the 'standard' range. And searching for some random nonsense and sampling the results makes it look like roughly half of the store is $.99 or more, while the other half is less. So for right now, variable pricing doesn't seem too onerous, but if the big labels do manage to take a real bite out of Apple's market share with DRM-free sales through stores other than iTunes, and no longer feel the need to undercut Apple's fixed pricing, I expect those variable prices to rise gradually, almost imperceptibly given the confusion of multiple price points, and unstoppably.
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There is a little bit of storage on a SIM card (32-256KB iirc). So any GSM or UMTS phone might be vulnerable on that count.
And just think, once you unlock your iPhone to accept 3rd party SIM cards, you can upgrade it from 8.000064GB all the way to 8.000256GB!
Andrea Jung joined Apple's board of directors a couple of weeks ago.
She's also on GE's board of directors.
GE owns 80% of NBC Universal.
(and since Kevin Bacon has no doubt worked for NBC Universal, I can connect Steve Jobs to Kevin Bacon in four steps)
How much is a movie rental worth?
Lets ask the free market (even if calling it free is a joke in a market where every product is granted a government enforced monoploy):
Blockbuster online and Netflix subscriptions put the per-disc rental cost in the $1-$2 range.
So, that's how much a movie rental is worth.
I might be willing to pay a little more for the convenience and low latency of an online system, but not double or more what a discs-in-the-mail subscription would cost me for the same content.
This isn't even Apple's fault, everyone else doing online delivery has similar drawbacks, it's the movie industry trying to raise prices and tighten controls as people shift from physical media to online delivery. They want to make all online delivery conform to the terms of old fashioned pay-per-view or on-demand cable: lousy selection because titles are only available in a limited window (from a month after DVD release until they find a cable or TV network willing to pay for an exclusive airing, and then maybe again later once the movie is a catalog title), high prices to capitalize on convenience and milk early adopters and those with money to spend, restrictive terms because the industry has individual control of every viewing rather than just the first sale of the disc (you have to finish watching within 24 hours of starting, you can only have the movie on one device at a time, etc), etc...
The thing is, in the end, I expect Apple to be pretty successful selling video and video devices despite all of this; they're damn good at selling users that extra little bit of convenience and simplicity. In the long run, it's the movie industry itself that's going to suffer for their efforts to keep the customer from getting what they want (convenient access to high quality video, immediately available anywhere and any time, for no more than they're paying now), when physical media sales start falling off, and online sales don't pick up quickly enough to make up the difference (much like they did in the music industry, for similar reasons).
The MacBook Air is one sexy, thin piece of hardware. But I'm not nearly as interested as I would been a year or two ago.
It seems to me that Apple has preemptively undercut themselves here.
The MacBook Air seems built on the premise that people will have two computers: a powerful desktop and an extremely svelte portable. And that's a premise I can definitely get behind. I just think the definition of "an extremely svelte portable" has changed recently; and Apple has even played a large role in changing it.
The iPhone, and to a lesser degree the iPod Touch, are very nearly laptop replacements for those who don't ask too much of their laptops, and they will rapidly grow even further into the realm of portable computing in February (presuming their upcoming SDK is not heinously crippled).
There's only really one hardware feature I'd like to see in my ultra-portable that the MacBook Air provides but the iPhone lacks, and that is an easy way to hook it up to a VGA or DVI projector and display presentations (Ironically, this is a feature that the iPhone already had on stage when is was first introduced; Steve Jobs had a special custom interface set up to mirror his iPhone's interface onto the giant projection system he uses at keynotes. Steve just decided to keep that particular toy to himself for some reason.).
Now, obviously, it's going to be a while before many people use a phone to replace a desktop or laptop as their primary computer. And even those with another system at home may demand more than a phone sized device can provide in the near future if they do a lot of work on the road. So fully featured independent laptops have a long and profitable future ahead of them. And some people will undoubtedly love the MacBook Air, either alone or as a second computer supplementing a heftier machine.
But I suspect, in this case, Apple has "skated to where the puck is going to be" with the iPhone, and then turned around and skated right back towards where it was with the MacBook Air.
IANAL, but as I understand it, under US law, you can revoke most kinds of licenses for your work after a certain number of years (35 or more, depending on when the license was made), whether the license itself says it allows termination or not.
The Creative Commons' Labs even has a tool and FAQ on their website to help people break their old licenses (presumably so that their old works can then be released under a CC license). So some of their people obviously know that this is possible.
There's one reason we're seeing DRM-free music: Apple.
Every internet whiner and hazmat-suited protester put together didn't make a noticeable fraction of the impact against DRM that Apple did via their refusal to buy into Microsoft's DRM or license their own to others. They turned the labels tools to control customers into a distributor's tool to control the labels, and now the labels are caught in their own trap, and desperately thrashing and gnawing at their limbs to get away (by selling DRM-free to everyone but Apple).
But, since Apple haven't had the industry-crushing success they had with music in the video market thus far, and no one else looks likely to repeat Apple's feat, we may be stuck with DRM in the video market for a while.
In Soviet Linux, if you have a problem... start hunting for missing prefrence files and creating them!
(seriously, the last time I installed MPlayer on linux (several years ago) it segfaulted on start every time, until I dug through the docs, found references to a file for font preferences that wasn't created properly during the install for some odd reason, and created one of my own with some sample entries copied from the docs)
You're kidding right?
Back in the early days of PPC, Apple used to fund and contribute developer time to their own linux distro (MkLinux). It's not even a matter of not caring, they actively wanted linux to run on their hardware, to the point that they paid for it's development. And even after that era ended (after the death of NuBus) they had special deals set up with third parties to sell macs with LinuxPPC or Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed.
You know, it never ceases to amaze me is how consistently non-mac-users skip right over Apple's actual screw ups to bitch about missteps that only exist in their fevered imaginations.
DVH-H, like most mobile targeted digital video systems afaik, is not an always-on signal. It's divided into time slices, and only uses something like one in ten slices for any particular channel. This is primarily to allow power savings by leaving the receiver powered off 90% of the time, but it might also allow you to use the same radio for TV and WiFI/WIMAX effectively at the same time.
So as long as you don't mind either emailing all your private data to amazon, or reading it as unformatted plain
That's not as bad as I'd imagined, but I'm still somewhat unimpressed.
You can move content wherever you like, but the Kindle won't recognize or display it (unless it's an MP3).
.doc or .pdf or what not) on the Kindle in a form that it will read, you have to email them to amazon and pay $.10 each to have them converted to .azw and loaded on your Kindle.
If you want to put your own text documents (or
I expect that the ebook reader of the future will look a whole lot more like the iPhone than the Kindle.
A keyboard is only used a tiny tiny fraction of the time on a ebook reader, letting one account for that much of the device's size is just bad engineering.
E-paper should look as much like normal paper as is technically possible. Normal paper does not have a bezel, and can be printed upon all the way to it's edge.
I do like the Kindle's free EVDO "whispernet" model, but I think they're way to aggressive in trying to get that money back (Amazon won't even let you load your own documents onto the Kindle without paying them a $.10 fee for each one you load, and they charge even more to access otherwise free content like blogs and public domain books from Project Gutenberg and such. And while Kindle offers "experimental basic web browsing" at the moment, they have made no commitment to continue offering access to anything but their paid download store.) If they expect me to pay $399 for one of those gadgets they're going to have to let me do a good bit more without sending them all my money and private data.
Eventually I look forward to a tablet with all of the advantages of LCD, OLED and EP displays, a cheap optional mobile broadband plan (possibly with free access to online stores), and decent local connectivity. But for now there are a lot of compromises to be made no matter which device you choose. Given my presonal mix of phone use, web browsing, music listening, video watching, reading of free online content, and reading of bought or borrowed printed content, I'm probably going to go with an iPod Touch when they release the SDK. Someone who spends less time reading things online, or more time on the phone (enough to justify buying $40 a month worth of minutes) might be better off with something else.
Downloading and installing a plug-in ahead of time is a surprisingly heavy burden for users, so for now there's still a significant barrier. A lot of what Google Gears provides really ought to be standardized and built into the browser imho.
WHATWG's HTML5 working draft includes a specification for a client-side SQL database. Webkit's feature branch already has it implemented, and it works a lot like the local-storage part of Google Gears.
I'm hoping that once that bit of HTML5 gets finalized and built into mainstream browsers, a lot more web apps will be built to automatically fall back to cached local data when they can't reach their servers.
But that's likely to take a while, and at least for now there's a simple HTML5-GoogleGears bridge for people who want to write their local storage code for HTML5 and have it work on most platforms and browsers, even if it requires a plug-in.
Ok, first things first: you don't seem to know the meaning of the word hypocrisy. They are hypocrites because they do something that they condemn in others, not because they do something they claim they don't or won't (that would make them liars, but not necessarily hypocrites).
In this case Greenpeace are hypocrites because they are profiting at the expense of the environment. (By attacking companies based on how much publicity (and therefore donation money) they can gain, rather than how much pollution said company is responsible for relative to it's peers, Greenpeace not only lets heavier polluters go relatively unchallenged, they also send a message to all companies that their wrath cannot be abated by a better environmental policy, giving companies even less reason to bother cleaning up their act.)
I suppose they might also be hypocrites because they are indulging in the type of media manipulation that I suspect they have complained about their targets using in the past, but that is clearly secondary to the "profiting at the expense of the environment" thing imho.
Quoth Woz in the the article you refrenced:
"There's always a group of people that wants to undo the forces of industry that have given us so much in terms of wealth, and there's always people who want things to be free,"
It sounds to me like he loves the idea of open source itself, and just takes issue with a lot of the other ideologies that are lumped in with it these days (anti-capitalism, the "free" software movement, etc). That sounds pretty reasonable to me, and certainly isn't "totally trashing [open source]".
Radiohead refused to release their music anywhere but their own web site. None of the major stores, physical or digital have access to it yet. And the 800lb gorilla of digital sales, iTunes, will never have access to it as long as Apple demands customers be allowed to download at least some tracks ala carte while Radiohead demands their music be sold only in full albums.
On the other hand, their music was presumably available as usual at all the normal pirate hang outs.
This isn't rocket science folks.
On another note, I do have to wonder about the context of the sensationalized claim that "more copies of the album were pirated than [legally] downloaded". Isn't that true for practically _every_ album released in the last decade?
Actually, I read quite a bit, including many full novels, and I do at least half of that reading these days on a computer display of one sort or another. In point of fact, I've been actively avoiding buying new paper books for a while now simply because all of my bookshelves are full and I have no space for more (I'm looking at giving them away and getting taller ones at the moment).
And, having played with a Sony Reader (the 500 model) for a while, I can definitely say that it does not have a "much higher contrast ratio" than current emissive displays in a normal indoor environment; it's display can hardly even be called black and white, more like light gray and darker gray (like newsprint when compared to a magazine, it's readable but not gorgeous). I do very little of my reading "in full, direct sunlight", as that can be hard on the eyes even with plain old printed paper, and when I'm outdoors I tend to be on the move anyway.
E-paper has it's advantages, and is just fine for reading lots a plain static text on a dedicated device in a well lit area. I just don't think that is sufficient to give them mass market appeal when other devices are getting pretty damn good at displaying text, and >3-bit graphics, and color, and video, and interactive webpages and programs, etc... all at once.
I'm actually not sure that stable-image type displays (what I would generically consider e-paper) are going to be the first widespread paper-replacement. As nice as their low power consumption is, their bit depth, color, contrast, and refresh rate are all horrible at the moment. And while they are certainly improving in those areas, things like LCDs and OLEDs are improving in power consumption and form factor as well.
I came to this realization when I looked at the new 505 revision of the Sony Reader's marketing, and it occurred to me that I'd rather get an iPod touch. Recharging every few days instead of every few months is a sacrifice I'd be willing to make for real web content and video (while Sony could probably put some sort of basic very-static web browser on it's reader despite the display's low refresh rate if they wanted to support HTML, video and quick interactivity are going to be out of the question until there are fairly major changes in the display technology). And, as more and more content moves online, from static paper to dynamic computer screens, moving content is only getting more prevalent (rollovers, pull-down menus, AJAX widgets of all sorts, and even content in flash and other plug-ins)...
I kind of suspect that e-paper has missed the window where it could have widely succeeded with a refresh rate measured in seconds rather than milliseconds. Stable-image type displays may have to get their refresh rates down into the low-double-digit milliseconds (and coincidentally gain high bit depth color and decent contrast) before they can take on to the mainstream.
Actually, the iPhone or the iPod Touch might be a closer comparison imho. The 5watt PC is a good deal less powerful (in both senses of the word) than the mac mini.
Of course, I know which one I'd take, if given the choice. For my money, getting a 5w computer is kinda pointless when I'm expected to hook it up to a desktop LCD which could easily use more than 10 times that much power.
Just for giggles, here's a point by point comparison:
5 watt PC vs iPhone/iPod Touch
$285 and up vs $299 and up
AMD Geode LX800 CPU @ 500 MHz vs ARM @ ~620Mhz
256 MB DDR (non expandable) vs 128MB? (non expandable)
40 GB 2.5" Hard disk vs 4,8 or 16 GB flash drive
Dual 100 Mbps Ethernet vs 802.11b/g, plus GSM/EDGE on iPhone
SXGA controller, 640x480 to 1920x1440 vs 320x480 built in multi-touch display and 480i or 576i video out
Two USB 2.0 high speed ports vs iPod dock port
Speaker and microphone interface vs Speaker and microphone built i on iPhone, plus headphone/mic jack
RS-232 serial port via RJ11 connector vs none
Single 5V supply, 3-5 watt, fanless vs battery operated, fanless?
120 x 116 x 40 mm, 450 gram vs 115 x 61 x 11.6mm 135g iPhone or 110 x 61.8 x 8mm 120g iPod
Yeah, because you know no one is going to clone the iPhone regardless of Apple's wishes.
And even if someone did, it'd be some fly by night company from a country like China with little intellectual property enforcement, not a huge American or European corporation like Intel or Nokia.
Obviously the iPhone is not only unrivaled, but unrival-able, and thus Apple's monopoly on iPhones must be restricted!
</sarcasm>
True. But taken to extremes, it also means a monoculture. Having everyone susceptible to the the same brain-bugs is a dangerous situation.
Ideally, as with computers, we might use a common format, but lots of radically different independently developed systems to process that format. I'm not sure how well that model maps to human beings though...
I hate to break it to you, but those apps are all part of the smartphone market.
But in any case, it seems to me that Apple is going "way beyond just the smart phone market" in an entirely different fashion that you're advocating.
Apple is pursuing a less-is-more strategy here imho...
Geeks online have flame wars about weather of not the iPhone is a "real smartphone", with the implied presumption that smartphone status is, or ought to be, a goal Apple is trying to achieve. On the contrary, I suspect that Apple is actively trying to avoid having people perceive the iPhone as a smartphone. Smartphones are either toys for geeks or corporate tethers keeping us chained to work; the iPhone is targeted at the mainstream consumer, not a corporate IT department or the individual geeks working in it.
Apple doesn't want to compete in the "smartphone space", it wants to invent the "iPhone space" and grow it by consuming the mainstream featurephone (and, almost coincidentally, smartphone) markets.
I suspect that Apple will eventually allow some form of native apps for the iPhone, just as they eventually added a bunch of random functionality to the iPod (photos, notes, calendar, video, games, stopwatch, etc...). However, it seems to me that they find it essential to their strategy that the iPhone be initially perceived as a simple, easily understandable, and rock solid device (like an iPod that can make calls, rather than like a complicated programmable smartphone).
Personally, as a programmer and potential customer, I was mad as hell when I heard that the iPhone wouldn't let me write my own native apps; I was overflowing with ideas for that gadget the instant Steve started mentioning all of it's sensors in it's introductory keynote.
But if I were speaking as a shareholder, as you claim to be, I would be hesitant to criticize Apple's initial direction for the iPhone here. While their strategy has yet to prove itself in the cell phone space, and replicating the iPod's crushing success in the semi-mature cellphone market is a very tall order indeed, I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if "no user apps, less features than an N95, lame" is 2009's version of "no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame."
The grandparent never said to "buy DRM laden tracks", Mr. McStrawman. And you have only Amazon's word that the watermarks Amazon admit are in many of their tracks don't contain personally identifying information; whereas with Apple's watermark-free music you can trivially read or remove any information in the tags.
I think grandparent is wrong about the labels being able to take back the DRM-freeness (DRM will remain dead for the same reason it is dying now: the iPod), but I do expect them to raise prices, as the grandparent suggests. By allowing variable pricing, Amazon has made themselves much more vulnerable to gradually increasing prices (both by the labels and by themselves), when compared to Apple's fixed pricing.
People taking the Amazon MP3 store as some sort of victory against Apple have things almost entirely backwards.
Apple has just won the online music wars far more permanently than they could by simply owning ~80% of the market; the Amazon MP3 store is the Big labels' terms of surrender (well, 2 of them, Sony and Warner are still holding out). Those terms say the labels will let people sell cheap, convenient, DRM-free music that isn't locked down to only Microsoft-approved systems, and Apple will continue to make ludicrous amounts of money selling such systems.
The only real downsides for Apple here are:
1) This comes at a time when Apple is in the middle of trying to grab two new markets with the iPhone/iPod (video and mobile telephony), and you can tell from their product lineup's limitations that they're already having a lot of trouble getting the kind of decent terms that allowed the iPod&iTunes combo to work so well for music. Anything that the movie/TV/mobile-network companies can interpret as a sign of Apple's weakness (real of imagined) is going to somewhat undermine Apple's ability to do for other industries what they did for music.
And
2) Universal has basically said that, at least for the next several months, they will sell DRM-free music to anyone but Apple. Basically they've decided that a free market where consumers can pick the store they like is too dangerous, so they're going to use their monopoly on certain music to artificially undermine their most popular distributor rather than just selling DRM-free music to anyone who will pay and letting the market decide. This is probably a temporary situation imho, as Universal can't throw away income from their largest online distributor forever, and it really doesn't do Apple much harm since they make their real money on iPods anyway and Amazon MP3 works just fine there, but this kind of discriminatory sales policy sets an ugly precedent.
I think that Amazon MP3 may be the best online music store out there right now. It beats iTunes on price most of the time (if you only count iTunes-Plus), and it's DRM-free selection is better (due largely Universal's inclusion). But it does have it's warts:
The Semi-required Downloader. Amazon allows users to download single tracks via plain old http, but requires the use of their download-manager to buy albums (which are generally cheaper then buying the individual tracks, and are the only way to purchase some items such as Radiohead's works). This sucks for anyone on an alternative platform (mainstream x86-linux users will supposedly get a port of the downloader eventually, but the rest of us will remain out of luck).
Watermarking. Amazon has admitted that some of their MP3s are watermarked (with the company it was purchased from and the the time of purchase). They claim that there is no personally identifying information in the file, but if the watermark is encrypted or the watermarking scheme is unknown that claim cannot be verified. (for comparison, iTunes-Plus DRM-free songs are not watermarked, but do contain the purchaser's Apple-id (generally an email address) in a plain-text tag (which, unlike a watermark, can be easily examined or removed and does not affect sound quality)).
Universal's anticompetitive tactics. Universal has basically said that, at least for the next several months, they will sell DRM-free music to anyone but Apple. Basically they've decided that a free market where consumers can pick the store they like is too dangerous, so they're going to use their monopoly on certain music to artificially undermine their most popular distributor rather than just selling DRM-free music to anyone who will pay and letting the market decide.
And one thing that isn't really a problem at the moment, but seems likely to become one eventually is:
Variable Pricing. Prices range from good (45cents), to standard (89-99cents), to insane ($14.51 for one 2minute track).
Searching for all songs and sorting by price, you can see that only about ~15000 of their tracks are more than $1.35 and only about ~7500 track are less than $.88, so most of their 2.3 million songs fall near the 'standard' range. And searching for some random nonsense and sampling the results makes it look like roughly half of the store is $.99 or more, while the other half is less. So for right now, variable pricing doesn't seem too onerous, but if the big labels do manage to take a real bite out of Apple's market share with DRM-free sales through stores other than iTunes, and no longer feel the need to undercut Apple's fixed pricing, I expect those variable prices to rise gradually, almost imperceptibly given the confusion of multiple price points, and unstoppably.