i realize their margin on computers is greater than $50. i never said that the profit from sales of one copy of tiger would cover the loss of profit on one purchase of a mac. the point is that even a small percentage of the windows world equals a large percentage of the mac world. so their conversion rate wouldn't have to be too high to actually make up the difference. converting only 5% of the windows market would essentially double apple's markshare. since apple does fine on the profit margins from their current ~6%, they'd do even better with 10-12% of the overall market. the question is whether or not 1 out of 20 people who would use tiger on a non-apple computer would switch to the mac platform in the future. doesn't seem all that unlikely.
the support issue is the main kink in the plan. but they could just say for $50 you don't get support. they try to jam in more drivers for the greater variation in windows machine hardware. $50 is basically a shareware fee, so they could easily justify a diminished level of customer service. even if tiger didn't run well on a lot of those old machines the numbers probably still work out in their favor if they can convert a small percentage of people who like it.
I bought my Mac ~because~ I had played with the "free as in bittorrent" version last fall. It ran great on my Opteron desktop and my Intel based laptop. After a long weekend, I decided to switch.
OS X is a great OS. If more people could try it out, there'd be a lot more converts.
your post reminds me of this weird idea rattling around in my head of what apple will/could do to get a lot of marketshare quickly.
the long release time between xp and vista has put MS in a pretty precarious position with regards to user retention. since a lot of normal people wait to buy their computers until it comes pre-loaded with a new operating system, there are a lot of pretty old pc's out there right now. these folks have been waiting for vista for a while and are likely getting pretty tired of their current computer setups. in the meantime, mac os x has been getting good press here and there and many of those same people have broken their apple "cherry" with the ipod and itunes.
if apple can time the release of leopard fairly close to the release of vista, they could make a pretty serious maneuver that would strike right into the middle of the windows userbase. they could release Tiger 10.4 for generic x86 machines for a very low price (say $50). the people who want the latest and greatest of apple's operating system would still be buying macs and apple would still be enjoying their margins.
the people who are getting frustrated with their xp systems could either 1) buy vista for a fairly hefty sum, 2) buy a new computer with vista pre-loaded for a heftier sum or 3) buy mac os x 10.4 for a small fee just to see what it's like. if tiger works better on their aging hardware than xp did then apple makes microsoft look foolish. if it works just as well as vista, then microsoft looks pitiful. all of the r&d for tiger has already been covered and releasing it for other x86 computers would be pure profit (other than the expense of adding in some more drivers). users have nothing to lose by dropping $50 on their old computers to see if they could get more life out of them. apple has a lot to gain and could minimize the threat to their hardware margins.
there might even be people who would be willing to try it and still buy a new machine, in this case a new macintosh. even if they don't buy a new machine now, apple could gain a lot of markshare when the next wave of computer upgraders come through.
microsoft would likely try to hit apple where it hurts, which is microsoft office for mac. but since macs run on intel chips now and they're obviously amenable to the idea of running things in a virtualized environment, the loss of office for the mac platform isn't nearly as scary as it once was. if they let windows applications run natively in the os x environment, then microsoft basically can't stop developing microsoft office for macs because they could just run the windows version.
seems like the least dangerous way to convert a lot of people all at once. sure they might lose a little on hardware sales to people who would buy a dell and run the previous generation of os. but it would likely be offset because even if only a fraction of those switchers buy machines from apple they get a big chunk of profit from them. if 10 of 100 people who use this "generic" version of os x buy a mac next time, they probably more than make up for the cheap folks who would be willing to run an old version of os x to save on the hardware costs.
FUD. In my experience with the iTunes Store, Apple sends me an email RECEIPT each time a payment is drafted from my linked credit card, even if it just $.99
heck, apple sends me an email receipt even when my purchase is free (like the tuesday free song download or a free video download).
I hook it up to the puter because after my commute to work I want to charge it. It would be nice to be able to listen at the same time.
I have OTHER mp3 players that can accomplish just that task. One of them is a Nintendo DS:-)
did you eject it from the computer but keep the cable plugged in? works for me on my macs.
They have been selling clear man made diamonds for a year at least.
not diamonds. they're selling a diamond substitute. it's not cz but one of those other ones that looks supposedly better than cz. in any case, they're not selling gem quality diamons at diamonnexuslabs. they're very vague in their writing on that site.
I saw that and tried to buy one of these 'cultured' diamonds back then. The only man made diamonds you could buy were yellow, pink, etc. Sure, super rare, yada, yada, yada... but many months of looking you could not find the classic clear diamond. If folks are starting to sell the clear diamonds, this is big news.
exactly. i've been doing this research myself as i'm smack-dab in the middle of the process of buying a diamond. the other company i looked into is apollo diamonds. i wrote them an email asking about their current inventory and they only sell clear diamonds up to half a carat. once these sythetic diamonds reach a point where they can produce >1ct diamonds in white then they'll start selling in droves. personally i'm really looking for a 1.25 carat or greater so these diamonds, which was very nice, are not right for what i'm looking for. i bet within a year or so they'll be there. it'll be interesting to see what the debeer's monopoly will do in reaction to gem quality >1ct white diamonds hitting the market. i bet their ad budget goes through the roof.
And are we to assume that perpendicular recording will make its way into 10k/15k rpm SAS drives, 7200 rpm SATA desktop drives, and 5400 rpm notebook drives, but be left out of 7200 rpm notebook drives?
Besides, this ignores the reduced seeking latency of 7200 rpm drives.
well, video editing isn't as disk-intensive for small files. and whether or not the perpendicular technolony applies to the faster rpm drives is irrelevant since the poster was asking if these drives going at 5400rpm were significantly slower than our current 7200rpm drives. i'd assume that all of these drives will be slow compared to future technology. but we already have workflow for video editing using our current drive technology.
Is this something I should be concerned about? Would having a 5400rpm drive provide a noticeable detriment to performance, to such an extent that I'd be better off trying to quickly find some remaining stock of yesterday's older MBPs? Or will the enhanced capabilities of the new machine (faster proc, etc) help to offset this difference?
it's not something worth worrying over. the newer drives have much higher data density so they can do sustained read/writes as fast or faster than a 7200rpm drive. the rpm of a drive isn't an ultimate measure of how fast the drive will work on your computer. besides, you young'uns don't realize how fast computers are these days. only 4 years ago my friend edited together his short movie in final cut pro on my spare pismo powerbook (g3, 400Mhz). while it wasn't obviously fast, it worked just fine. this new macbookpro will still run fcp faster than my brothers dual g5/2.5Ghz machine that was top of the line only 2 years ago. i've run final cut pro on my aluminum powerbook g4/1.65Ghz with a 5400 rpm drive and it works fine.
funny, except that the macbook pro does have right-click functionality with the trackpad. if you change your system preferences you can invoke a right-click by clicking the button with two fingers held on the trackpad.
You know, last Friday I would have been excited about this news.
But Saturday I gave up waiting and ordered a 2.0GHz MBP 15", and paid for a RAM upgrade to 1GB. If I could have upgraded to Firewire 800, I would have paid for that, too.
you know, in situations like yours i've heard of people calling up apple and complaining about the instand update that they didn't receive and apple gave them a new model. worth a shot.
Sounds like a great way to get some free ideas for applications. A lot of companies have been doing this lately. Nothing like giving away your intellectual property for free!
except that you get a share of the revenues from shareware licenses. obviously on slashdot the idea seems completely daft since there's such a high percentage of coders here. but most people can't code an application. so if you can give up your idea (which costs you nothing in the form of labor or materials) and realize a possible profit from someone else's programming labor, then where's the bad deal? it's certainly easier than researching and hiring a programmer when you have no expertise in the field at all while taking a financial risk in the form of payment for that programmer. maybe you should look at it from the perspective of the people for whom the contest was designed. no decent programmer in their right might would submit an application to this process because they could do it themselves.
if there was a contest where you were asked to give up an idea for, say, a chance to win a year's worth of professional retouching, it would be a great idea for people who would value that service. for me, as a graphic designer and retoucher, it's obviously not worth it to give up IP to gain something i could easily do on my own to a higher standard. but i'd at least recognize that it's a useful prize to some people.
The fact that Apple now makes computers that run Windows is even more evidence that they are infact a hardware company first and foremost.
i don't know if it's easy to define one way or the other what apple does. i don't think macs running windows necessarily sways it towards them being a "hardware manufacturer." one way to look at it is that apple is a "solutions manufacturer". they make technology to solve problems. if it's in the best interests of the company and their users to allow windows to run on their machines, then it's a solution they explore and allow. the surge in mac marketshare recently is largely due to bootcamp/parallels. so in this case, running windows is a solution that serves their new customers and the company well. while booting windows might not have been requested by a large percentage of mac users before, it's definitely having an effect on platform adoption.
i don't think you can say apple is strictly a software developer or hardware manufacturer. the strength of their products is having control of both sides of the equation. i don't think they'd ever stop designing the hardware because they'd lose control over half of the experience. besides, they tried that with the clone initiative and it didn't work out great for the company and, dare i say, the customers. i had a mac clone because it was the fastest mac os machine at the time and it was a huge piece of crap. it crashed constantly (granted, this was in the os 7/8 days). a friend of mine bought a clone from a different manufacturer and it was dead out of the box. it took me hours and hours to get it running. even then, the "feel" of the machines was much cheaper than an apple-branded machine.
would i buy an apple clone now if it were just as fast and cheaper? maybe. i'm older now and have learned the benefit of quality over price. but if the price/performance ratio were completely out of whack compared to the clones i'd at least consider it.
Take Two lost millions due to the Hot Coffee mod (repackaging cost, recall cost, lost sales, etc).
Not all publicity is good.
does the "millions" figure include how many copies they sold specifically because people heard of that feature? or how their renegade status will affect their future products' sales? when people use the phrase "there's no such thing as bad publicity" they're implying the net effect. rockstar games probably gets some "street cred" for putting the hot coffee easter egg in the game to begin with. the more people that know about it, the more their image benefits from it for people who would find that funny or cool, namely heavy gamers.
Although you, as a Zune owner, can block particular Zunes from sending stuff to you, other Zunes start off in an unblocked state. Do you know what Microsoft have done? They've invented a new kind of spam. Companies will hack the standard and create a box which will automatically find every Zune in the vicinity and send their (audio/video) adverts to them.
except ms would have to sell enough zunes to even make it an attractive market. the chances of this are very very low. how many people are honestly going to buy a zune over an ipod in the real world? not enough to warrant spending any amount of money to beam them some crappy zune-ads.
Is there any portable audio device (preferably flash-based) that has a mic-level input? Support for OGG or FLAC is a plus of course.
for audio recording i bought an m-audio microtrack. a lot of musicians use it on the road and i've found the audio quality to be pretty amazing. it supports mp3 and also aiff (i believe, i don't have it with me at the moment). it has audio inputs and comes with a small stereo mic that actually has amazing noise cancellation and quality.
Imagine if mobile phones came with none changeable
batteries.
the t-mobile sidekick II came with non-changeable batteries. the case was completely sealed. doesn't seem to have hurt its popularity too much. same thing with the ipods. changeable batteries seems to be one of those things that people want philsophically, but if the product good enough/cool enough customers will easily overlook it.
Noise cancelation should work if the Zune could accurately determine the position of it's headphones with it's microphone, since it knows what the Zune is playing. Knowing that, it knows the distance of the headphones. With two microphones it would be able to triangulate the headphones in 3d space.
As for the volume level, it doesn't need to know the headphones if the built in microphone can hear/detect the music coming out of the headphones, limited by a maximum gain.
except you're missing the obvious problem that people tend to keep the player in a different environment then the headphones. how many people do you see who have their mp3 player bare and exposed to the elements while they're listening to music? as soon as you put the player in a case/pocket/backpack/hand (for jogging) it's exposed to significantly different and probably completely irrelevant noises as compared to the headphones. i don't need my headphone to perform active noise cancellation for the sounds in my backpack or pocket.
even if the player were left in the open, how does knowing the location of the noise matter if the player can't tell which direction the headphones are pointed? active noise cancellation has to be done at the headphone and as we've seen it's generally quite bulky. your idea for a "better player" would require so much extra space and hardware that it would inherently make it a worse portable music player.
Stylish PCs may be a big deal to some, but I lost that interest quite quickly.
Sure, your PC looks cool, but who really cares?
i think it all depends on what your concept of "stylish" is. i don't consider lucite windows, neon and leds on fans stylish myself but evidently a lot of case modders do. i like this initiative from intel. the main concern, of course, is anyone willing to pay a higher price for a nicer looking computer other than apple users? computers are a pretty significant part of whatever space they're in. doesn't seem too much to ask that they're not embarrassingly ugly.
Why would anybody want to spend money on a feature for their car so that they could listen to music from a single brand of MP3 player? Wouldn't it make more sense to get a stereo with an audio input jack that could attach to any audio player? I mean, sure the controls aren't integrated, but you have controls on you MP3 player. Use those if you want to switch songs. Besides, you should be focused on driving, not trying to find the next song you want to listen to.
because they have that brand of mp3 player? why wouldn't you get a car integration solution that did offer you controls from the headunit or steering wheel if you already own that music player? strange that you say people should be focused on driving yet encourage people to take a hand off the steering wheel to change the music on their tethered audio player.
So what does it mean for those of us that have used Napster's legitimate service if it evaporates? Do we lose access to our songs once we get a new MP3 player or computer?
Yes, I bought DRMed stuff that I was having no luck finding elsewhere. And no ITunes isn't suitable for my needs: I don't use or want an Ipod. (SanDisk Sansa if you must know)
pretty much what was predicted by everyone who questioned the subscription music service: you lose it all. when napster was "reborn" there were loads of people predicting the death of itunes because they could get unlimited music for $10/month from a subscription service. the main problem, obviously, is that strategy relies completely on that subscription service staying in business. but even that might not be enough since it appears microsoft's own zune won't play stuff from their many music service partners as they opt to screw over all those people and only support their own forthcoming store with the zune. and who wants to bet you can't access the zune marketplace with any of the old wmv devices?
They aren't far off that now. I regularly find shows that turn the volume up so loud during commercials that I'm pretty much forced to either fast forward through them or turn the sound off. I'm puzzled as to exactly what they think they are achieving.
i can speak from experience having been in over 50 final audio mixes for television commercials. i don't ever, once, recall anyone saying we need to crank up the volume of a spot to get the attention of the viewers. i think the more likely scenario is that tv shows aren't mixed to the same levels and with the same scrutiny as television commercials. commercials are probably the most expensive form of video on a per second basis. when a commercial is sent for final mix, everything is set to the highest acceptable volume according to broadcast specs. it's just a matter of using the full spectrum available to us.
tv shows, on the other hand, are probably mixed on a much more general level. i doubt there's anyone who sits there and audio mixes a whole one-hour show to the exact level of detail as a commercial. more than likely they set good levels for dialogue and music and take into account the hot spots. i think they're more concerned with the relative levels of their audio than the absolute levels of their audio because if they're a little low, people will just turn up the volume.
that's not to say that there aren't hacky and unscrupulous advertisers and studios that crank everything up to the point of clipping. obviously there are since we hear that on a fairly regular basis on tv. but i've never personally seen a sound engineer say that we needed to pump up the levels of our audio to get people's attention or compensate for them being out of the room. and i've worked with probably over 30 engineers.
my motorcycle has a minimal windscreen and yes i've flipped my visor open up to 100 mph. but i only know from popping my torso up from a tuck at 130 that the forces were considerably greater than i've experienced at 100.
Slashdot Mirror
it's a demo virus huh? well, i'll try it, but if i don't like it, i'm not paying the shareware fee for it.
i realize their margin on computers is greater than $50. i never said that the profit from sales of one copy of tiger would cover the loss of profit on one purchase of a mac. the point is that even a small percentage of the windows world equals a large percentage of the mac world. so their conversion rate wouldn't have to be too high to actually make up the difference. converting only 5% of the windows market would essentially double apple's markshare. since apple does fine on the profit margins from their current ~6%, they'd do even better with 10-12% of the overall market. the question is whether or not 1 out of 20 people who would use tiger on a non-apple computer would switch to the mac platform in the future. doesn't seem all that unlikely.
the support issue is the main kink in the plan. but they could just say for $50 you don't get support. they try to jam in more drivers for the greater variation in windows machine hardware. $50 is basically a shareware fee, so they could easily justify a diminished level of customer service. even if tiger didn't run well on a lot of those old machines the numbers probably still work out in their favor if they can convert a small percentage of people who like it.
the long release time between xp and vista has put MS in a pretty precarious position with regards to user retention. since a lot of normal people wait to buy their computers until it comes pre-loaded with a new operating system, there are a lot of pretty old pc's out there right now. these folks have been waiting for vista for a while and are likely getting pretty tired of their current computer setups. in the meantime, mac os x has been getting good press here and there and many of those same people have broken their apple "cherry" with the ipod and itunes.
if apple can time the release of leopard fairly close to the release of vista, they could make a pretty serious maneuver that would strike right into the middle of the windows userbase. they could release Tiger 10.4 for generic x86 machines for a very low price (say $50). the people who want the latest and greatest of apple's operating system would still be buying macs and apple would still be enjoying their margins.
the people who are getting frustrated with their xp systems could either 1) buy vista for a fairly hefty sum, 2) buy a new computer with vista pre-loaded for a heftier sum or 3) buy mac os x 10.4 for a small fee just to see what it's like. if tiger works better on their aging hardware than xp did then apple makes microsoft look foolish. if it works just as well as vista, then microsoft looks pitiful. all of the r&d for tiger has already been covered and releasing it for other x86 computers would be pure profit (other than the expense of adding in some more drivers). users have nothing to lose by dropping $50 on their old computers to see if they could get more life out of them. apple has a lot to gain and could minimize the threat to their hardware margins.
there might even be people who would be willing to try it and still buy a new machine, in this case a new macintosh. even if they don't buy a new machine now, apple could gain a lot of markshare when the next wave of computer upgraders come through.
microsoft would likely try to hit apple where it hurts, which is microsoft office for mac. but since macs run on intel chips now and they're obviously amenable to the idea of running things in a virtualized environment, the loss of office for the mac platform isn't nearly as scary as it once was. if they let windows applications run natively in the os x environment, then microsoft basically can't stop developing microsoft office for macs because they could just run the windows version.
seems like the least dangerous way to convert a lot of people all at once. sure they might lose a little on hardware sales to people who would buy a dell and run the previous generation of os. but it would likely be offset because even if only a fraction of those switchers buy machines from apple they get a big chunk of profit from them. if 10 of 100 people who use this "generic" version of os x buy a mac next time, they probably more than make up for the cheap folks who would be willing to run an old version of os x to save on the hardware costs.
if there was a contest where you were asked to give up an idea for, say, a chance to win a year's worth of professional retouching, it would be a great idea for people who would value that service. for me, as a graphic designer and retoucher, it's obviously not worth it to give up IP to gain something i could easily do on my own to a higher standard. but i'd at least recognize that it's a useful prize to some people.
i don't think you can say apple is strictly a software developer or hardware manufacturer. the strength of their products is having control of both sides of the equation. i don't think they'd ever stop designing the hardware because they'd lose control over half of the experience. besides, they tried that with the clone initiative and it didn't work out great for the company and, dare i say, the customers. i had a mac clone because it was the fastest mac os machine at the time and it was a huge piece of crap. it crashed constantly (granted, this was in the os 7/8 days). a friend of mine bought a clone from a different manufacturer and it was dead out of the box. it took me hours and hours to get it running. even then, the "feel" of the machines was much cheaper than an apple-branded machine.
would i buy an apple clone now if it were just as fast and cheaper? maybe. i'm older now and have learned the benefit of quality over price. but if the price/performance ratio were completely out of whack compared to the clones i'd at least consider it.
Falling trees would never again make a sound. So sad.
even if the player were left in the open, how does knowing the location of the noise matter if the player can't tell which direction the headphones are pointed? active noise cancellation has to be done at the headphone and as we've seen it's generally quite bulky. your idea for a "better player" would require so much extra space and hardware that it would inherently make it a worse portable music player.
tv shows, on the other hand, are probably mixed on a much more general level. i doubt there's anyone who sits there and audio mixes a whole one-hour show to the exact level of detail as a commercial. more than likely they set good levels for dialogue and music and take into account the hot spots. i think they're more concerned with the relative levels of their audio than the absolute levels of their audio because if they're a little low, people will just turn up the volume.
that's not to say that there aren't hacky and unscrupulous advertisers and studios that crank everything up to the point of clipping. obviously there are since we hear that on a fairly regular basis on tv. but i've never personally seen a sound engineer say that we needed to pump up the levels of our audio to get people's attention or compensate for them being out of the room. and i've worked with probably over 30 engineers.
my motorcycle has a minimal windscreen and yes i've flipped my visor open up to 100 mph. but i only know from popping my torso up from a tuck at 130 that the forces were considerably greater than i've experienced at 100.