Now you have Apple negotiating on your behalf for lower prices... If Apple's dominance in music distribution is ever broken, expect prices to double or triple as you'll have no one with any power negotiating on your behalf anymore.
As I read the article, it seems it was the labels that wanted "variable" pricing, and Apple that wanted to stick with $1/track.
I don;t think you are right about lower prices. All the other a la carte services have generally undercut Apple's pricing, usually $0.8 or so per track, except for the high quality lossless tracks that were often charged at over the $1 mark.
Furthermore, given Apple's historical aversion to low prices (its margins have generally been at least a generally reliable ~3x the industry average), I'd think that its premium prices for hardware would be reflected in its software licensing prices as well.
Let's face it, the original Macintosh, like the G1 iPhone, succeeded despite its many and manifest hardware limitations. If you ever tried to copy a floppy disc on the original Mac, you'll know what I mean. And if you tried to anything visually or sonically artistic then, well, the Mac was not the machine for you for a long, long time.
My original compact Mac from that era didn't have a video out. Did yours? With no video out, you were stuck with that 23 cm porthole/screen and you were screwed if the video flyback transformer crapped out. Which was pretty much almost always, eventually.
By comparison, the Amiga shipped with both composite and analog RGB outputs, so you could pick any screen size available.
The Mac was nice for 1984 but had that *tiny* screen and was a stunningly boring monochrome. Only a short year later the Amiga beamed in like a super-advanced visitor from the future, demonstrating what a technicolour, multimedia, multitasking world we'd end up living in. Next to the Amiga, the Macs of the 1980s behaved like overfed, pedigreed, retarded puppies. Early on, ironically, the only PC that could give the Amiga a run for the money was the Apple II GS, which Apple seemed to have hated with a passion.
I guess the thing that really tickled me about the Amiga was also its chameleon-like ability to perfectly emulate a Macintosh in a pinch. I recall in the late-80s/early90s actually buying an Amiga desktop publishing rig *and* a Mac hardware emulator dongle because together it was still cheaper than the equivalent Apple rig by around 50%. We met the design requirements, and got to play Populous as well...
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the 1985-07-24 anniversary, and remembering how one of the great tech advancement opportunities of recent history was so comprehensively fucked up.
I should have known there would be an invocation to iTunes somewhere in all this...
based upon a clumsy interface that's a liability when placed in a car.
I was dumbing it down for you. For driving I actually use the voice interface for the phone. I want to call someone, I can say "Call X". I want the radio, I can say "Play Radio". It just works. The voice command program came built in courtesy of HTC and it seems to work pretty well. I know there are more advanced voice control software programs but this one works fine.
And you missed the bit about Orb. I am not limited to only what other people choose to play. I can stream all my own content and playlists, or I can stream my Pandora or Last.FM lists.
You are in any case actually missing the main point entirely, which is that there are several different ways for people to get content delivered to moving vehicles. Every year brings another few. Which together none of these may amount to the same single domain penetration of satellite radio, together they represent in aggregate an alternative to satellite that will be "good enough" for a sufficient number of people so as to make the business model of satellite extremely problematic (with its massive capital requirements predicated on the idea of a virtual monopoly in content delivery to moving vehicles).
You're also missing also entirely the idea of a custom software radio. You see, one of the beauties of a bitmapped screen is that you can make the interface look like pretty much whatever you want. In this case, the Resco thingy looks like a hybrid between a 1970s-style AM/FM radio and an mp3 player. I like having big buttons on screen that I can mash with my finger. If I wanted something more like J River Media Center or iTunes, with fiddly little lists of things that I'd have to scroll or swoosh through, I would use CorePlayer.
And as for "expensive", well, I decided to get cellphone service. The fact that, on Sprint with SERO plan, the Internet effectively comes free with the $30/month voice plan works out very well. I get to make calls, and if my minutes go over, I can just switch to Skype on the phone and use broadband instead. I also get to tether the 3G connection and use the phone as an AP, also for free. All in all, it's far from what I would call a "desperate" service.
Thanks for the "geek" epithet. On/. that means a lot.
My "expensive" EVDO connection costs $30/month for unlimited internet access and texts, and includes voice minutes as well.
As regards your conflation of "uncommon" with unavailable, I dispute that. Most of the cheaper, consumer phones from Sprint now seem to come bundled with SprintTV (a rebranded MobiTV) and some sort of music streaming service. I gather it's similar with Verizon and the otherc arriers. Personally, I avoid those "value added" services because they incur an extra monthly fee.
how you do it is convoluted and unlikely to be considered user friendly
a streaming radio service using the wireless Internet, the vast majority of cellphones offer no such facility. Even when they do, you're going to have to find a streaming service worth listening to
Podcasts and streaming audio work fine on my Windows Mobile HTC Titan on Sprint as I drive. I personally like the Resco Radio application but there are at least five other mature media players that do streaming. I can also use Orb to stream my *own* audio (and video) from my home server over the net. And then of course there's Last.FM and Pandora.
Between all these options there are several thousand "channels" to choose from. Lack of choice is not a problem. How many channels does Sirius offer?
If you're writing in English, then the name of the country is Ireland. Only if you are writing in Irish is the name of the country "Eire".
You don't say, for example, "Well, Deutschland is a little bit west of Polska", or "Hey, I was born in the Estados Unidos de America.
Using "Eire" where it is incorrect and Ireland is correct is just ignorance masquerading as pretension.
There's also supposed to be a "fada", or accent over the E in Eire, but Slashdot's preview seems to screw that up because it apparently can't conceive that anyone might want such a thing. This also includes the accent over the e in America, en castellano.
If the voters in the USA had had to vote yes in each State under plebiscite to amend the US constitution *or* to agree to accept new member States then I doubt it would have grown much.
And the USA did not have European conservatives fronting the funding for proxy anti-Federalism parties within the USA.
If you want to be really precise, a "Whipple" is actually a pancreaticoduodenectomy. If he had his pylorus spared, weight loss might not be as high a concern.
Many Whipple survivors develop diabetes which, when uncontrolled, can lead to dramatic weight loss. Given Mr Jobs' peculiar aversion to allopathic medicine (he initially tried to combat his pancreatic cancer with herbs and diet), one can imagine a certain reluctance to engage with the entire paraphernalia of diabetes management, involving as it can, continuous invasive blood monitoring, an array of medications, and regular, periodic injections of insulin.
Mr Jobs had a "Whipple", an operation best described as a living autopsy. Most of his GI system has been removed. He is also a pancreatic cancer survivor (albeit a neuroendocrine-derived neoplasm). I'd call that more than a little "health thing"
Some of these new machines can cost several million dollars and offer amazing franchise opportunities... providing enough procedures can be scheduled on the machines during their operating lifetimes to amortise the cost and produce a profit.
The Last.FM brainfarts seem to persist no matter how many times yoy try to train the recommendation engine using the like/ban buttons and the only way to get them to "reset" to something vaguely approximating normality is to log out, log back in, and run the Library stream for a while.
Still, even with this weirdness it's still better than Pandora at finding new music I actually like.
And yet Sprint's data bandwidth on EVDO-A through my HTC Titan seems to be around 800 Kbps, and 1.2-2 Mbps when tethered (CPU seems to be limiting factor here). Using the WiFiRouter to share out SPrint's 3G connection to various laptops, I've downloaded torrents at ~DSL speeds. Maybe Sprint's fast network speed is a function of its unpopularity?
I agree. I installed SBP Mobile Shell and it added a bunch of finger gestures to the WM interface, along with eyecandy flips, slides, and other animations obviously a la mode now because of Apple's influence. I understand that HTC also added finger gestures with its Touchflo interface, along with apparently lots of rotating cubes. It's just not that difficult to add this stuff to a small, simple UI and the fact that MS is taking so long to do something that small ISVs have already accomplished shows that its priorities are elsewhere.
Apple's fondness for non-haptic-feedback touchscreens and zero-tactile-feedback panels with a distinct lack of buttons still means that using ipods and iphones without sight is a fraught experience. Rockbox can work on ipods, but it's a much better sightless experience on an older iRiver or Archos with lots of clicky, raised, mechanical buttons.
I had the pleasure once of logging into and working on an ancient PDP-11/73 running 4.2BSD hooked up to an actual line printer/teletype machine. The noise was deafening, and kind of sexy. This web page needs a sound effect option for maximum retro verisimilitude.
If you haven't heard of BOFH, then you're not a true geek, you're just a pretender dilettante.
I am so far from "shovelling" that your remark is amusing, but I am saddened to see you are still as fanatically rude as ever, especially considering the rather innocuous content of my earlier reply. Here's a clue: you're doing it wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting they didn't run any real crypto tests that actually, you know, *used* the Nano properly. The Nano comes with the Padlock engine built in, for hardware crypto. With Padlock-aware software running crypto, the Nano "spanks" Core 2 Quads with lots of welly and gives even Intel's i7 a run for its money.
Now you have Apple negotiating on your behalf for lower prices ... If Apple's dominance in music distribution is ever broken, expect prices to double or triple as you'll have no one with any power negotiating on your behalf anymore.
As I read the article, it seems it was the labels that wanted "variable" pricing, and Apple that wanted to stick with $1/track.
I don;t think you are right about lower prices. All the other a la carte services have generally undercut Apple's pricing, usually $0.8 or so per track, except for the high quality lossless tracks that were often charged at over the $1 mark.
Furthermore, given Apple's historical aversion to low prices (its margins have generally been at least a generally reliable ~3x the industry average), I'd think that its premium prices for hardware would be reflected in its software licensing prices as well.
If this is true, the only thing preventing me from having gesture support is software.
Truth. Synaptics recently upgraded many of its Windows trackpads to multitouch (works on a 3-year-old Acer)
I'd think that the availability of Microsoft Portrait (now at version 3.1) for Windows Mobile phones would count as prior art.
I wasn't aware you were playing a game?
Let's face it, the original Macintosh, like the G1 iPhone, succeeded despite its many and manifest hardware limitations. If you ever tried to copy a floppy disc on the original Mac, you'll know what I mean. And if you tried to anything visually or sonically artistic then, well, the Mac was not the machine for you for a long, long time.
My original compact Mac from that era didn't have a video out. Did yours? With no video out, you were stuck with that 23 cm porthole/screen and you were screwed if the video flyback transformer crapped out. Which was pretty much almost always, eventually.
By comparison, the Amiga shipped with both composite and analog RGB outputs, so you could pick any screen size available.
The Mac was nice for 1984 but had that *tiny* screen and was a stunningly boring monochrome. Only a short year later the Amiga beamed in like a super-advanced visitor from the future, demonstrating what a technicolour, multimedia, multitasking world we'd end up living in. Next to the Amiga, the Macs of the 1980s behaved like overfed, pedigreed, retarded puppies. Early on, ironically, the only PC that could give the Amiga a run for the money was the Apple II GS, which Apple seemed to have hated with a passion.
I guess the thing that really tickled me about the Amiga was also its chameleon-like ability to perfectly emulate a Macintosh in a pinch. I recall in the late-80s/early90s actually buying an Amiga desktop publishing rig *and* a Mac hardware emulator dongle because together it was still cheaper than the equivalent Apple rig by around 50%. We met the design requirements, and got to play Populous as well...
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the 1985-07-24 anniversary, and remembering how one of the great tech advancement opportunities of recent history was so comprehensively fucked up.
I should have known there would be an invocation to iTunes somewhere in all this...
based upon a clumsy interface that's a liability when placed in a car.
I was dumbing it down for you. For driving I actually use the voice interface for the phone. I want to call someone, I can say "Call X". I want the radio, I can say "Play Radio". It just works. The voice command program came built in courtesy of HTC and it seems to work pretty well. I know there are more advanced voice control software programs but this one works fine.
And you missed the bit about Orb. I am not limited to only what other people choose to play. I can stream all my own content and playlists, or I can stream my Pandora or Last.FM lists.
You are in any case actually missing the main point entirely, which is that there are several different ways for people to get content delivered to moving vehicles. Every year brings another few. Which together none of these may amount to the same single domain penetration of satellite radio, together they represent in aggregate an alternative to satellite that will be "good enough" for a sufficient number of people so as to make the business model of satellite extremely problematic (with its massive capital requirements predicated on the idea of a virtual monopoly in content delivery to moving vehicles).
You're also missing also entirely the idea of a custom software radio. You see, one of the beauties of a bitmapped screen is that you can make the interface look like pretty much whatever you want. In this case, the Resco thingy looks like a hybrid between a 1970s-style AM/FM radio and an mp3 player. I like having big buttons on screen that I can mash with my finger. If I wanted something more like J River Media Center or iTunes, with fiddly little lists of things that I'd have to scroll or swoosh through, I would use CorePlayer.
And as for "expensive", well, I decided to get cellphone service. The fact that, on Sprint with SERO plan, the Internet effectively comes free with the $30/month voice plan works out very well. I get to make calls, and if my minutes go over, I can just switch to Skype on the phone and use broadband instead. I also get to tether the 3G connection and use the phone as an AP, also for free. All in all, it's far from what I would call a "desperate" service.
Thanks for the "geek" epithet. On /. that means a lot.
stream radio over an expensive EVDO connection.
My "expensive" EVDO connection costs $30/month for unlimited internet access and texts, and includes voice minutes as well.
As regards your conflation of "uncommon" with unavailable, I dispute that. Most of the cheaper, consumer phones from Sprint now seem to come bundled with SprintTV (a rebranded MobiTV) and some sort of music streaming service. I gather it's similar with Verizon and the otherc arriers. Personally, I avoid those "value added" services because they incur an extra monthly fee.
how you do it is convoluted and unlikely to be considered user friendly
Hmm. Slide to unlock phone. Click "Radio". Click "Favourites". Click channel. Listen.
Yes, you're right. That's desperately convoluted. How could that ever "just work"?
a streaming radio service using the wireless Internet, the vast majority of cellphones offer no such facility. Even when they do, you're going to have to find a streaming service worth listening to
Podcasts and streaming audio work fine on my Windows Mobile HTC Titan on Sprint as I drive. I personally like the Resco Radio application but there are at least five other mature media players that do streaming. I can also use Orb to stream my *own* audio (and video) from my home server over the net. And then of course there's Last.FM and Pandora.
Between all these options there are several thousand "channels" to choose from. Lack of choice is not a problem. How many channels does Sirius offer?
If you're writing in English, then the name of the country is Ireland. Only if you are writing in Irish is the name of the country "Eire".
You don't say, for example, "Well, Deutschland is a little bit west of Polska", or "Hey, I was born in the Estados Unidos de America.
Using "Eire" where it is incorrect and Ireland is correct is just ignorance masquerading as pretension.
There's also supposed to be a "fada", or accent over the E in Eire, but Slashdot's preview seems to screw that up because it apparently can't conceive that anyone might want such a thing. This also includes the accent over the e in America, en castellano.
If the voters in the USA had had to vote yes in each State under plebiscite to amend the US constitution *or* to agree to accept new member States then I doubt it would have grown much.
And the USA did not have European conservatives fronting the funding for proxy anti-Federalism parties within the USA.
Where did you hear that he had a Whipple? Citation?
I'm going to do you a favour and introduce you to a very special friend of mine. I call him...
Mr Google.
If you want to be really precise, a "Whipple" is actually a pancreaticoduodenectomy. If he had his pylorus spared, weight loss might not be as high a concern.
Many Whipple survivors develop diabetes which, when uncontrolled, can lead to dramatic weight loss. Given Mr Jobs' peculiar aversion to allopathic medicine (he initially tried to combat his pancreatic cancer with herbs and diet), one can imagine a certain reluctance to engage with the entire paraphernalia of diabetes management, involving as it can, continuous invasive blood monitoring, an array of medications, and regular, periodic injections of insulin.
Mr Jobs had a "Whipple", an operation best described as a living autopsy. Most of his GI system has been removed. He is also a pancreatic cancer survivor (albeit a neuroendocrine-derived neoplasm). I'd call that more than a little "health thing"
it's been approved for use in England.
Ah, but what of Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland? Only one of the four national health insurance systems in the UK gave the go-ahead?
Evidence for Cyberknife's efficacy using lower dosages wrt convential treatments is still being gathered, especially for prostate cancer treatment.
One of the more remarkable twists governing medical devices in the USA is that, unlike pharmaceuticals licensed with health claims, medical devices do not have to demonstrate conclusively in clinical trials that they are of proven benefit or greater efficacy than existing treatments.
Some of these new machines can cost several million dollars and offer amazing franchise opportunities... providing enough procedures can be scheduled on the machines during their operating lifetimes to amortise the cost and produce a profit.
Metric or it's just make believe!
Then why the hell is it that when I run the "Recommendations" stream the algorithm occasionally freaks out and starts pushing one unlistenable noise attack after another at me with tags like brutal death metal, cybergrind, czech, death metal, deathgrind, goregrind, grind, grindcore, noisecore, porngrind, pornogrind, etc. No matter how many times I click the "Do Not Want" button the stuff just keeps coming. It's like a neighbour from hell. And then there's the days when I get nothing but lesbian deathcore vegan grind.
The Last.FM brainfarts seem to persist no matter how many times yoy try to train the recommendation engine using the like/ban buttons and the only way to get them to "reset" to something vaguely approximating normality is to log out, log back in, and run the Library stream for a while.
Still, even with this weirdness it's still better than Pandora at finding new music I actually like.
And yet Sprint's data bandwidth on EVDO-A through my HTC Titan seems to be around 800 Kbps, and 1.2-2 Mbps when tethered (CPU seems to be limiting factor here). Using the WiFiRouter to share out SPrint's 3G connection to various laptops, I've downloaded torrents at ~DSL speeds. Maybe Sprint's fast network speed is a function of its unpopularity?
I agree. I installed SBP Mobile Shell and it added a bunch of finger gestures to the WM interface, along with eyecandy flips, slides, and other animations obviously a la mode now because of Apple's influence. I understand that HTC also added finger gestures with its Touchflo interface, along with apparently lots of rotating cubes. It's just not that difficult to add this stuff to a small, simple UI and the fact that MS is taking so long to do something that small ISVs have already accomplished shows that its priorities are elsewhere.
Apple's fondness for non-haptic-feedback touchscreens and zero-tactile-feedback panels with a distinct lack of buttons still means that using ipods and iphones without sight is a fraught experience. Rockbox can work on ipods, but it's a much better sightless experience on an older iRiver or Archos with lots of clicky, raised, mechanical buttons.
I had the pleasure once of logging into and working on an ancient PDP-11/73 running 4.2BSD hooked up to an actual line printer/teletype machine. The noise was deafening, and kind of sexy. This web page needs a sound effect option for maximum retro verisimilitude.
"Firmware" updates have been occasionally uploaded to the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft when necessary.
Didn't have time to read your odd FanFic
If you haven't heard of BOFH, then you're not a true geek, you're just a pretender dilettante.
I am so far from "shovelling" that your remark is amusing, but I am saddened to see you are still as fanatically rude as ever, especially considering the rather innocuous content of my earlier reply. Here's a clue: you're doing it wrong.