I miss my old C-64. Eight bit computing was so simple. Want some data, LDA it from its register! Want to write something? STA it wherever you want! Asking the OS for resources is for WUSSIES! Damn it, if I want background processing, I'll write a raster interrupt routine to do it.
Life was easier when you only had a choice of 4 of 16 colors, and then only a 320x200 bitmap to put those colors on.
That's right! And I'm typing this out on a morse code key right now. I can't believe that anyone would suggest that a keyboard is a revolutionary improvement in communications!
I don't pretend to know everything, but I talk big a lot and rarely actually write down and date stuff. I've been saying for months that video podcasting is going to be the next big thing, and the iPod will go video to support it.
I was willing to bet that the vPod was going to be announced at the Nano announcement, but I was wrong. At least I put it in writing for once!
OK, did you ever use the first releases of Linux? If it had been a movie--even a free one--I would have asked for my money back.
It's a nice idea, but there are reasons that, overall, moviemaking (and other industries which do not involve making utilitarian tools) will not ever be likely to go open source...
Wow, Google's eliminating the competition! It's a good thing their credo is "do no evil".
I interviewed with them a few months ago, and most of the day went extremely well. However, things got icy when I started talking about their credo, and the sheer size of their service offering made it imperative that they move carefully as they extend into more and more aspects of the on-line world.
The difference between them and Wal-Mart is that I do believe that they mean well (and they're actually innovative), but that does not mean much to the people who have invested years of their lives into a technology which they suddenly can't give away because the might of Google offered something nearly identical for free...
I remember these diskless machines. Haven't thought of them in years. The diskless HP/Apollo workstations in the basement of Evans Hall at UCB, in the OCF. Hailstorm. Plague. Tempest. A few other natural disasters. You didn't want to get Tsunami, though. It was the file server for all 10 stations, and it was noisy and slow.
I'm giving away my age here, but I have fond memories of being amazed by what you could find on *gasp* the UseNet. No web then; gopher was the closest thing to an easy-to-use file browser. MUDs, MUCKs and IRC dominated many students' free time (including mine), and if you went there in the middle of the night, you could play Nettrek against other time-wasting students all over the country.
I remember when 14.4kbps modems came about, finally fast enough to support TCP/IP at a reasonable rate, and spending hours trying to get MacSLIP and MacPPP working on my system with zero support. When all that stuff got integrated into the MacOS (system 7.1?), it was awesome. Windows folks had to wade through things like Chameleon and WinDUST and other strange hacks until Gates admitted that the Internet was not just a passing fad.
...but the balance still tips towards digital for me.
Even with shutter lag, even with battery issues, even with the damn thing turning off at just the wrong moment, I switched to digital 5 years ago, and haven't looked back. In a couple of years, I might buy myself a nice digital SLR to resolve some of those problems, but in the mean time, my little Canon will do fine.
Why do I agree with all of your points and disagree with your position? The tipping point is the medium. The cost of good quality film, the cost of developing, the time it takes, and the likelihood that the film is going to sit on a shelf waiting for me to bring it to the developer is just enough for me to have to think about whether or not I really want to take that picture when it comes up.
With digital, I don't even think about it any more. Once you've gotten over the barrier to entry, the marginal cost per picture is essentially zero. I went to Belize with a 1MB card and pretty much filled it up with pretty fish pictures. A lot of them were not so pretty. If I had been using an underwater film camera, I would have had to either be sparing with my pictures or climb onto the boat every few minutes, dry off the camera, open it, change the film, re-oil the seals, close it up, and go back down.
With my digital in its case, I could just keep snapping and snapping. It did not matter that some of the pictures were bad. I could just throw them away.
For me, I guess its that I am sort of a shotgun photographer. I take a lot of pictures and find the good one, rather than waiting for the perfect one and grabbing it right then. It may not be the afficianado's way, but if it takes me 500 shots to get that one picture of a lobster defending its home, or a shark slumbering under a patch of coral, It's worth it to me.
I do miss long hours in the darkroom developing my own b/w pictures, but that, too, was an expensive habit, and while there's no digital replacement for the smell of the fixative, well, I have to admit that the end result I get with photoshop is a lot better than anything I was able to do in the darkroom.
So Ansel Adams I'm not. But us average joes need digital in order to churn out a good number of great pictures.
Actually, it's often the biggest bands who have the biggest problem with free file trading. Like the Metallicas of the world who are millionaires 100 times over, and who do not want to possibly lose a single dime they would make by someone having a copy of their song.
I'm a musician and I've been in orchestras, chamber groups, quartets, choruses and rock and roll bands. I've written music and played live in front of audiences of thousands and over the radio to audiences of, well, thousands. Classical over KPFA and Rock over KALX have limited reach:). Point is, I know how hard it is to make good music, perform it well, and put on a good show, coordinated with others. Never made a video, but I can imagine.
However, I've also heard Metallica, and I've seen them perform. They're retired because they're lucky and they've found a huge audience willing to make them rich $75 (for concerts) and $15 (for CDs) at a time. I'm sure they paid their dues, but *nobody* can convince me that they deserve to be retired in their 30s like landed gentry. And the fact that they are means that they shouldn't give a hoot about a few shared files. People are obviously buying their music.
On the flip side, a friend of mine was in a tiny little no-name band. The kind where a "tour" means buying a $500 van, going from town to town, calling ahead on Wednesday to get a Thursday night booking, etc. Last time I saw him, he told me that they had had some limited success in the states, and they put a few of their own songs up on Napster just to get them out there. Not getting much radio play, they figured that might be a way to get some PR.
Well, it worked. They did a European tour a couple of months later, and they said that they were amazed at two things: everywhere they went, the clubs they went to were packed, and as often as not, in the dark, beer-soaked underground clubs of Bavaria, people they'd never met, who maybe would never have found their music in a record store, obviously knew their music. People, he said, were singing along with their songs.
For the biggest bands, free trading is a threat to their established wealth. For the littlest ones, it's a foot in the door. For my friends, it meant that a tour which was really just meant as a break-even way to get to see Europe was immensely successful, and each of them came back to the states with bulging pockets. And I'm sure they're not alone.
Well, "forever" is a reality. Not only do I expect to live longer than 40 years, but I hope to be able to pass some things on to later generations. For example, I have a collection of 78rpm and 16rpm records that belonged to my parents when they were children. Since I have an appropriate player, I can play them for as long as they last.
Of course, over the next 40 years, the business model for music will change so many times that it's likely that people will laugh at the idea that anyone ever considered [insert current idea about music here] way back when. As I say, I could argue multiple options; iTMS is what works for me now. It's good enough, and that's what matters.
What they hope that people won't notice is that this means that if you stop paying, it all goes away. So let's say you spend $60.00 at iTMS, you (theoretically) can play your 60 favorite songs FOREVER. If you spend $60.00 at Yahoo, then stop paying, then your infinite songs go away.
It's not a matter of which one is better; I could probably argue for either one. It's a matter of which one is better *for me*, since it's only my money that I have any control over.
If it were up to me, there would be a hybrid model, with $0.99 songs, a $5.00 subscription option, and with the $5.00 subscription option, you get 25%-50% off of songs you purchase after hearing them.
Actually, if were really up to me, I would push artists to adopt creative commons licenses, and recommend that everyone allow free file trading. The people who love the artists still buy collections, still go see shows, still buy videos, etc. Anyone remember when Spinal Tap was coming out on DVD? They gave away their soundtrack album for free, with a site called "Tapster", as a promotional tool for the DVD. It worked for me...
So is "gesundheit", but people still use it as slang for "bless you". Language, as a means of expression, is more like a waterfall and less like a statue. Changes come and changes go, and while you might not like all of them, you need not castigate others for using them. Even if the changes sound like language up with which you will not put, all due respect to Churchill.
I finally figured out what market the Mini is for.
on
New iBook and Apple mini
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's not just for the entry-level market, and it's not just for switchers.
One of the great things about Macs is that they hold their value so well, historically. They just keep on performing as the years go by. I've sold three Macs (Quadra 650, PPC 7500 and B/W G3 (Yosemite)), all when they were about three years old, all for $500-$600, or about 1/3 of the price I paid for them, making it easier to move up to the new models.
I'm thinking about moving from my G4/867 to a G5 (not sure I want to wait until the MacTel boxen come out), and I was thinking about the sales prospects when I realized that nobody in their right mind would spend $600.00 on a 3-year old G4 when they could have a mini which is almost twice as fast for the same cost.
So they've really changed the whole profile of the Mac economy, if there is such a thing. If it's harder to sell them, will it make a big difference to those thinking about buying them? I know it does to me. I wonder if the advantages associated with getting into that market for Apple outweigh the disadvantages of the "upsell" market for people like me, who are interested in hopping to near the top of the scale every 3 or so years.
I feel the same way about movies. I actually like seeing a few trailers before a movie, and even the slides before the lights went down weren't too bad, but 30 minutes of ads for TV shows, candy and sodas after the lights go down just pisses me off.
Quothe CrazyPhilMan If they'd just charged five bucks for a CD in the first place, nobody would have given them a lick of trouble.
That's only partly true. I read an interesting article in Wired some time back which examined the phenomenon that, although CDs are cheaper to produce than vinyl, they are significantly more expensive than vinyl was in its heyday, and that CDs sales growth (after the initial adopter curve) have far outpaced LPs (again, in their heyday).
The reason they gave, and I'll buy it, is that the additional profit margin allowed them to take bigger risks on smaller groups. I used to see Green Day at parties and punk clubs, and I never thought they'd get a mainstream record deal; however, when a company can take a risk on a 10,000 CD printing instead of a 100,000 LP printing and have a pretty good chance of making a profit, they're more likely to do this.
With this lower barrier to entry, a greater variety of music became available, and while a lot of it was crap (would Britney have ever made that first album in the days of vinyl?) it did members of the music buying community to find stuff more closely matched to their own personal tastes, good or not.
So in short, the first part of your comment was right in that the market determines prices, and since people were still getting a 'thing' when they bought music, it didn't matter to them that it was cheaper than an LP. The added value was that the 'thing' contained music that they really, really liked.
The same paradigm shift happened again with the introduction of highly compressible, easily distributable files. The incremental cost per album (in this context, meaning a collection of songs) went down again by another factor of 10, possibly allowing for even more risks, and a wider variety of music. However, the RIAA got greedy and did not want to lower costs again. People rebelled because they were no longer getting a 'thing', and it was obvious to them that the incremental cost per song was fractions of a penny. Feeling that they had been ripped off, they began to steal.
So should they have just charged five bucks for a CD in the first place? That's arguable; my position is no, as I think that the wider variety of successful artists was worth the price. However, should they have cut prices in half and immediately embraced downloads to pre-empt napster-esque distribution which meant even less profit per song (I know that this is arguable, too... but that's another post, for another time)? Yes, absolutely.
The problem wasn't that CDs weren't too expensive during the CD's relativley brief (20 years?) heyday; the problem was that they did not adjust. Broadband exists. Highly compressed music files exist. Cheap distribution exists. The masses understand it. If you work with them, they'll happily pay; if you don't, comedy will ensue.
I'll be interested in seeing what happens with video. My 3 year old 10GB iPod is starting to show its age; I'm holding my breath, waiting to see if they come out with a video iPod...
Slashdot Mirror
Life was easier when you only had a choice of 4 of 16 colors, and then only a 320x200 bitmap to put those colors on.
I'll say it again: *sigh*
That's right! And I'm typing this out on a morse code key right now. I can't believe that anyone would suggest that a keyboard is a revolutionary improvement in communications!
I was willing to bet that the vPod was going to be announced at the Nano announcement, but I was wrong. At least I put it in writing for once!
Don't install Windows!
I'm just trying to imagine a beowolf cluster of these puppies!
- A handy-dandy carrying handle for a CD-Ripper-Player combo.
- A carrying case with belt loop for a CD-Ripper-Player combo.
- The use of stickers and/or paint to customize a CD-Ripper-Player combo for select market appeal.
- A wired means of connecting a for a CD-Ripper-Player combo to a stereo system.
- A wireless means of connecting for a CD-Ripper-Player combo to a stereo system.
- The ability to store data other than audio files on for a CD-Ripper-Player combo.
And I'm leaving out about a billion ideas which should at this point be obvious, but I'm sure someone will try to patent them. Oh, here's another one:Use of for a CD-Ripper-Player combo as a paperweight when said system's battery is dead.
It's a nice idea, but there are reasons that, overall, moviemaking (and other industries which do not involve making utilitarian tools) will not ever be likely to go open source...
It's really called "WinBLOWS"!
I interviewed with them a few months ago, and most of the day went extremely well. However, things got icy when I started talking about their credo, and the sheer size of their service offering made it imperative that they move carefully as they extend into more and more aspects of the on-line world.
The difference between them and Wal-Mart is that I do believe that they mean well (and they're actually innovative), but that does not mean much to the people who have invested years of their lives into a technology which they suddenly can't give away because the might of Google offered something nearly identical for free...
Imagine a beow
I'm giving away my age here, but I have fond memories of being amazed by what you could find on *gasp* the UseNet. No web then; gopher was the closest thing to an easy-to-use file browser. MUDs, MUCKs and IRC dominated many students' free time (including mine), and if you went there in the middle of the night, you could play Nettrek against other time-wasting students all over the country.
I remember when 14.4kbps modems came about, finally fast enough to support TCP/IP at a reasonable rate, and spending hours trying to get MacSLIP and MacPPP working on my system with zero support. When all that stuff got integrated into the MacOS (system 7.1?), it was awesome. Windows folks had to wade through things like Chameleon and WinDUST and other strange hacks until Gates admitted that the Internet was not just a passing fad.
But this old man does digress...
Even with shutter lag, even with battery issues, even with the damn thing turning off at just the wrong moment, I switched to digital 5 years ago, and haven't looked back. In a couple of years, I might buy myself a nice digital SLR to resolve some of those problems, but in the mean time, my little Canon will do fine.
Why do I agree with all of your points and disagree with your position? The tipping point is the medium. The cost of good quality film, the cost of developing, the time it takes, and the likelihood that the film is going to sit on a shelf waiting for me to bring it to the developer is just enough for me to have to think about whether or not I really want to take that picture when it comes up.
With digital, I don't even think about it any more. Once you've gotten over the barrier to entry, the marginal cost per picture is essentially zero. I went to Belize with a 1MB card and pretty much filled it up with pretty fish pictures. A lot of them were not so pretty. If I had been using an underwater film camera, I would have had to either be sparing with my pictures or climb onto the boat every few minutes, dry off the camera, open it, change the film, re-oil the seals, close it up, and go back down.
With my digital in its case, I could just keep snapping and snapping. It did not matter that some of the pictures were bad. I could just throw them away.
For me, I guess its that I am sort of a shotgun photographer. I take a lot of pictures and find the good one, rather than waiting for the perfect one and grabbing it right then. It may not be the afficianado's way, but if it takes me 500 shots to get that one picture of a lobster defending its home, or a shark slumbering under a patch of coral, It's worth it to me.
I do miss long hours in the darkroom developing my own b/w pictures, but that, too, was an expensive habit, and while there's no digital replacement for the smell of the fixative, well, I have to admit that the end result I get with photoshop is a lot better than anything I was able to do in the darkroom.
So Ansel Adams I'm not. But us average joes need digital in order to churn out a good number of great pictures.
Google uses Gmail exclusively for their email. Fast, easy, searchable, and they don't have to pay anyone else for it.
I'm a musician and I've been in orchestras, chamber groups, quartets, choruses and rock and roll bands. I've written music and played live in front of audiences of thousands and over the radio to audiences of, well, thousands. Classical over KPFA and Rock over KALX have limited reach :). Point is, I know how hard it is to make good music, perform it well, and put on a good show, coordinated with others. Never made a video, but I can imagine.
However, I've also heard Metallica, and I've seen them perform. They're retired because they're lucky and they've found a huge audience willing to make them rich $75 (for concerts) and $15 (for CDs) at a time. I'm sure they paid their dues, but *nobody* can convince me that they deserve to be retired in their 30s like landed gentry. And the fact that they are means that they shouldn't give a hoot about a few shared files. People are obviously buying their music.
On the flip side, a friend of mine was in a tiny little no-name band. The kind where a "tour" means buying a $500 van, going from town to town, calling ahead on Wednesday to get a Thursday night booking, etc. Last time I saw him, he told me that they had had some limited success in the states, and they put a few of their own songs up on Napster just to get them out there. Not getting much radio play, they figured that might be a way to get some PR.
Well, it worked. They did a European tour a couple of months later, and they said that they were amazed at two things: everywhere they went, the clubs they went to were packed, and as often as not, in the dark, beer-soaked underground clubs of Bavaria, people they'd never met, who maybe would never have found their music in a record store, obviously knew their music. People, he said, were singing along with their songs.
For the biggest bands, free trading is a threat to their established wealth. For the littlest ones, it's a foot in the door. For my friends, it meant that a tour which was really just meant as a break-even way to get to see Europe was immensely successful, and each of them came back to the states with bulging pockets. And I'm sure they're not alone.
Of course, over the next 40 years, the business model for music will change so many times that it's likely that people will laugh at the idea that anyone ever considered [insert current idea about music here] way back when. As I say, I could argue multiple options; iTMS is what works for me now. It's good enough, and that's what matters.
Didn't realize they had that... if only it worked on my Mac/iPod, I'd truly consider it.
10,000 songs @ $1.00 = $10,000.00.
infinite songs @ $5.00/mo = $5.00/mo.
What they hope that people won't notice is that this means that if you stop paying, it all goes away. So let's say you spend $60.00 at iTMS, you (theoretically) can play your 60 favorite songs FOREVER. If you spend $60.00 at Yahoo, then stop paying, then your infinite songs go away.
It's not a matter of which one is better; I could probably argue for either one. It's a matter of which one is better *for me*, since it's only my money that I have any control over.
If it were up to me, there would be a hybrid model, with $0.99 songs, a $5.00 subscription option, and with the $5.00 subscription option, you get 25%-50% off of songs you purchase after hearing them.
Actually, if were really up to me, I would push artists to adopt creative commons licenses, and recommend that everyone allow free file trading. The people who love the artists still buy collections, still go see shows, still buy videos, etc. Anyone remember when Spinal Tap was coming out on DVD? They gave away their soundtrack album for free, with a site called "Tapster", as a promotional tool for the DVD. It worked for me...
So is "gesundheit", but people still use it as slang for "bless you". Language, as a means of expression, is more like a waterfall and less like a statue. Changes come and changes go, and while you might not like all of them, you need not castigate others for using them. Even if the changes sound like language up with which you will not put, all due respect to Churchill.
It's called slang, homie.
One of the great things about Macs is that they hold their value so well, historically. They just keep on performing as the years go by. I've sold three Macs (Quadra 650, PPC 7500 and B/W G3 (Yosemite)), all when they were about three years old, all for $500-$600, or about 1/3 of the price I paid for them, making it easier to move up to the new models.
I'm thinking about moving from my G4/867 to a G5 (not sure I want to wait until the MacTel boxen come out), and I was thinking about the sales prospects when I realized that nobody in their right mind would spend $600.00 on a 3-year old G4 when they could have a mini which is almost twice as fast for the same cost.
So they've really changed the whole profile of the Mac economy, if there is such a thing. If it's harder to sell them, will it make a big difference to those thinking about buying them? I know it does to me. I wonder if the advantages associated with getting into that market for Apple outweigh the disadvantages of the "upsell" market for people like me, who are interested in hopping to near the top of the scale every 3 or so years.
I feel the same way about movies. I actually like seeing a few trailers before a movie, and even the slides before the lights went down weren't too bad, but 30 minutes of ads for TV shows, candy and sodas after the lights go down just pisses me off.
That's only partly true. I read an interesting article in Wired some time back which examined the phenomenon that, although CDs are cheaper to produce than vinyl, they are significantly more expensive than vinyl was in its heyday, and that CDs sales growth (after the initial adopter curve) have far outpaced LPs (again, in their heyday).
The reason they gave, and I'll buy it, is that the additional profit margin allowed them to take bigger risks on smaller groups. I used to see Green Day at parties and punk clubs, and I never thought they'd get a mainstream record deal; however, when a company can take a risk on a 10,000 CD printing instead of a 100,000 LP printing and have a pretty good chance of making a profit, they're more likely to do this.
With this lower barrier to entry, a greater variety of music became available, and while a lot of it was crap (would Britney have ever made that first album in the days of vinyl?) it did members of the music buying community to find stuff more closely matched to their own personal tastes, good or not.
So in short, the first part of your comment was right in that the market determines prices, and since people were still getting a 'thing' when they bought music, it didn't matter to them that it was cheaper than an LP. The added value was that the 'thing' contained music that they really, really liked.
The same paradigm shift happened again with the introduction of highly compressible, easily distributable files. The incremental cost per album (in this context, meaning a collection of songs) went down again by another factor of 10, possibly allowing for even more risks, and a wider variety of music. However, the RIAA got greedy and did not want to lower costs again. People rebelled because they were no longer getting a 'thing', and it was obvious to them that the incremental cost per song was fractions of a penny. Feeling that they had been ripped off, they began to steal.
So should they have just charged five bucks for a CD in the first place? That's arguable; my position is no, as I think that the wider variety of successful artists was worth the price. However, should they have cut prices in half and immediately embraced downloads to pre-empt napster-esque distribution which meant even less profit per song (I know that this is arguable, too... but that's another post, for another time)? Yes, absolutely.
The problem wasn't that CDs weren't too expensive during the CD's relativley brief (20 years?) heyday; the problem was that they did not adjust. Broadband exists. Highly compressed music files exist. Cheap distribution exists. The masses understand it. If you work with them, they'll happily pay; if you don't, comedy will ensue.
I'll be interested in seeing what happens with video. My 3 year old 10GB iPod is starting to show its age; I'm holding my breath, waiting to see if they come out with a video iPod...
Ciao for niao!