This could really put competitive pressure on telcos
My current Sprint phone (a HTC Hermes) gets 1 Mbps down and around 400K upload on a good day (sometimes half that on a bad day) using EVDO. It also tethers and works as a modem for the PC. Unlimited data for $30/month (includes voice). It works great with Skype, meaning I don't actually need the voice minutes at all if I choose. On the whole, I'd have to say I'm pleased with Sprint -- it seems that being the perpetual underdog has made it more eager to deliver good products.
Irony is difficult to project. We're using a metaphor here, not a literal parent-child relation. I was referencing the current media lionisation of Google. It's a nicer place to work than many, I know this because some of my friends and ex-colleagues have worked there for years now and they are, for the most part, happy. However, it's a long way from Nirvana, and it gets lots of stuff wrong (like, say, why make people wait five years for IMAP?). However, all the sycophantic portrayals of this idealised Google with its *zany* workplace remind me of similar Microsoft hagiography in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then MS was becoming the world's largest software company, was gaining an impressive monopoloy, and was beginning to use more and more of its power unscrupulously. However, you couldn't really hear any of that from the mainstream media because they were full of stories about MS as a fun place to work, an unstoppable brilliant idea factory, a new kind of campus for the smartest-of-the-smart college grads, and a machine for turning these wunderkinder into millionaires. As it happens, much the same way Apple from a few years earlier had been portrayed by, woah, Steven Levy.
Google's stated aversion to conspicuous consumption.
The day before Google went public in 2004, Wayne Rosing, then the vice president for engineering, stood on a stage during a companywide meeting and brandished a baseball bat. He threatened to use it on anyone's car in the Google parking lot that was anything flashier than a 3 Series BMW.
Did Markoff actually take a walk around Google's parking lot today? There are a lot of very nice cars there, and there have been for many years. He also somehow missed the ENORMOUS WIDE BODIED LUXURY FURNISHED PERSONAL JET parked a few miles up 101.
not being able to use those records anymore when you cancel the subscription, yes?
The fact that you, today, can reasonably easily archive broadcasted material for later, unlimited viewing is an accident of history and was bitterly opposed by the studios and the broadcasters (look up "Boston Strangler" and "Valenti" on Google). That's why today they want to mandate that all DVRs and so on obey their "record flags", which will limit the duration of your content retention unless, of course, you pay per viewing, or pay an increased subscription. Look for more of this stuff in the future.
iTMS is the successful one, and to me it comes down to the inherent value proposition it offers over the heavily DRM encumbered, continuous-pay-or-don't-play services.
Only someone who loves itunes could call it anything but heavily DRM-encumbered. I salute you sir.
Sirus had to buy XM because two companies in the sat. radio business was one too many. there just aren't enough people willing to pay for radio.
14 million people are paying subscriptions. The urge for these two companies to merge comes from their difficulty in servicing the huge debt associated with developing and launching their satellite fleet. Imagine if Apple had had to build out its own fibre net and install metro routers in every market where it wanted to sell itunes? It's unlikely it would have succeeded. In effect, Apple's relatively small dollar volume market has been subsidized by massive externalised investment from telcos, cable companies, and bandwidth wholsesalers, not to mention the monthly access fees consumers pay for internet service. That's why companies like Apple (and Google, Yahoo, ebay etc) want "net neutrality" to continue, because their business models are unfeasible otherwise. Not that I am complaining, I personally have benefitted greatly from the de-facto socialised mandates of net neutrality.
the fact is people don't like paying monthly fees for services
I am having trouble parsing your words "fail". The vast bulk of the media marketplace in the United States and even the world is based on subscription revenue. Compared with these, Apple's revenue from single-licence sales is a blip. It's big when considered against the declining revenues of the other single-charge retailers who usually package their content onto plastic disks, but it's still a very slow growing market, subject to random, huge discontinuities, and constrained in its scalability. Trace its growth over the past decade relative to the wider media marketplace and it's just a tragic flatline which, controlled for inflation, shows an even more rapid decline.
Even considering just the XM/Siriu marketplace, 14 million people are paying subscriptions. The urge for these two companies to merge comes from their difficulty in servicing the huge debt associated with developing and launching their satellite fleet. Imagine if Apple had had to build out its own fibre net and install metro routers in every market where it wanted to sell itunes? It's unlikely it would have succeeded. In effect, Apple's relatively small dollar volume market has been subsidized by massive externalised investment from telcos, cable companies, and bandwidth wholsesalers, not to mention the monthly access fees consumers pay for internet service. That's why companies like Apple (and Google, Yahoo, ebay etc) want "net neutrality" to continue, because their business models are unfeasible otherwise. Not that I am complaining, I personally have benefitted greatly from the de-facto socialised mandates of net neutrality.
Gee, do you really want to pay a monthly fee for limited (DRMed) access to music files, access which goes away if you terminate your service.
Yes, you're right. There's no way this could work. I predict that the delivery of media by subscription using satellite (Sirius/XM, Dish, DirectTV), cable (TV, PPV), cell (mobile TV) and fibre (FIOS TV, etc) will remin a tiny and marginal market, doomed to obscurity.
Or canny? The mobile music revenue market is 20x the size of the "legal download" music market currently dominated ~75% by Apple with itunes. It's even bigger if you factor in satellite delivery subscription models such as Sirius/XM. Why do you think Apple is so eager to sell you a ringtone for $2?
TDP on this is 65/85 Watts. TDP for the 1.5 GHz C7 is 12 Watts. Including the other power-eating components of the Newegg box (remember, the Walmart PC is Mini-ITX inside), if you buy these boxes and leave them on for a few hours a day for two years, you're talking about a huge difference in energy costs.
Sero dude, Sero. It's US-wide. Also, Sero brought my $550 smartphone down to $125 after special pricing and rebates, so it's pretty sweet. With unlimited data you can run Skype and Microsoft's video VOIP ("Portrait") so it works out pretty well.
In the US, I got my plan through Sprint, which has abysmal service but is by far the underdog when it comes to subscriber numbers so seems to be trying very hard. For US $30/month, you get 500 daytime minutes, unlimited nights+weekends, unlimited texts, and unlimited Evdo internet, which works out at anywhere from 600 Kbps to 2 Mbps/s download and around half that upload. I've regularly used the phone to download several multi-GB torrents *while* also streaming a movie. Works pretty well.
Add a 2.5" portable hard drive and you can take your entire (300Gb?) media collection with you too.
Who carries disks around anymore? Add a 3G phone with unlimited dataplan and tethering and you can stream/copy your entire media collection to your PC on demand.
An in the last ten years, Apple stock has been +4314%, vs Microsoft +89%.
Ten years ago Apple was in the extreme doldrums. Why not take a longer view?
For most of its public lifetime, Apple has underperformed S&P500 *and* NASDAQ. In fact, relative to the broad stock market averages, Aaple has regained the outperform level that it held back in 1992. That's progress, of a sort.
Okay, that's pretty cool, and the first time I've heard anything about Vista that's really impressed me. If Leopard does it as well then I guess regular backups have advanced significantly.
When you hookup an external hard drive, Vista should ask to turn on backups
I like having at least one backup no co-located with the original. Can Vista back up securely over TCP/IP to a remote store? Can Time Machine? I know I can do it with some tunnelling and SSH, but it would be nice (for my relatives) so have some sort of one-click alternative.
So aside from the usual Apple glitzy restore shell with the hypnotic new desktop with a deep-space background image, complete with moving stars and a spiral galaxy, does Time Machine actually do anything more than, say, Acronis True Image?
this completely distorts the market space for near future acquisition and startup activity.
Exactly! This pretty trivial investment (for MS) raises the cash barrier to entry for new startups and makes it several times more expensive for companies like Google/Yahoo/Ebay/Sun/Apple to buy new technolgies. MS isn't that concerned about crazy runups in Web2 bubble valuations because it's got its extraordinarily profitable Office business just ticking along.
I think Google has rolled this out in a hurry. This currently says Check 'Require logon using Secure Password Authentication (SPA).' but the screenshot shows the SPA box unchecked. It also omits mention of the need to "Use same settings as my incoming mail server" in the Outgoing Server tab. Of course, this will not stymie the average/. reader, but still...
Why such a hurry? Maybe this is a result of competition from Microsoft's new Live Mail (or whatever) which, after I went through a tedious upgrade process, actually seemed to have some very cool integration *and* 5GB of storage. And Yahoo's Go client for mobiles is very slick and way, way ahead of any Google's equivalent available offerings except, of course, the client-native Maps.
Despite Wozniak completing the standard 796 rounds of interviews and 14,327 pop quizzes and tedious logic puzzles filched from the back pages of Scientific American, a Google spokeswoman announced that the Internet advertising company had finally rejected him for being "Just this really, really, really ridiculously old geezer, you know?". Taking some time to look up from her playdoh, the spokeswoman added, "And he didn't go to Standford!"
Slashdot Mirror
This could really put competitive pressure on telcos
My current Sprint phone (a HTC Hermes) gets 1 Mbps down and around 400K upload on a good day (sometimes half that on a bad day) using EVDO. It also tethers and works as a modem for the PC. Unlimited data for $30/month (includes voice). It works great with Skype, meaning I don't actually need the voice minutes at all if I choose. On the whole, I'd have to say I'm pleased with Sprint -- it seems that being the perpetual underdog has made it more eager to deliver good products.
Irony is difficult to project. We're using a metaphor here, not a literal parent-child relation. I was referencing the current media lionisation of Google. It's a nicer place to work than many, I know this because some of my friends and ex-colleagues have worked there for years now and they are, for the most part, happy. However, it's a long way from Nirvana, and it gets lots of stuff wrong (like, say, why make people wait five years for IMAP?). However, all the sycophantic portrayals of this idealised Google with its *zany* workplace remind me of similar Microsoft hagiography in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then MS was becoming the world's largest software company, was gaining an impressive monopoloy, and was beginning to use more and more of its power unscrupulously. However, you couldn't really hear any of that from the mainstream media because they were full of stories about MS as a fun place to work, an unstoppable brilliant idea factory, a new kind of campus for the smartest-of-the-smart college grads, and a machine for turning these wunderkinder into millionaires. As it happens, much the same way Apple from a few years earlier had been portrayed by, woah, Steven Levy.
Is Copeland going to write a sequel to Microserfs?
Google's stated aversion to conspicuous consumption.
The day before Google went public in 2004, Wayne Rosing, then the vice president for engineering, stood on a stage during a companywide meeting and brandished a baseball bat. He threatened to use it on anyone's car in the Google parking lot that was anything flashier than a 3 Series BMW.
Did Markoff actually take a walk around Google's parking lot today? There are a lot of very nice cars there, and there have been for many years. He also somehow missed the ENORMOUS WIDE BODIED LUXURY FURNISHED PERSONAL JET parked a few miles up 101.
There were no real PDA phones in the 90s.
That's just not true.
IBM/Bellsouth Simon (1993)
Nokia Communicator (1996)
not being able to use those records anymore when you cancel the subscription, yes?
The fact that you, today, can reasonably easily archive broadcasted material for later, unlimited viewing is an accident of history and was bitterly opposed by the studios and the broadcasters (look up "Boston Strangler" and "Valenti" on Google). That's why today they want to mandate that all DVRs and so on obey their "record flags", which will limit the duration of your content retention unless, of course, you pay per viewing, or pay an increased subscription. Look for more of this stuff in the future.
video's aren't very useful while driving down the road.
You don't have kids, do you?
iTMS is the successful one, and to me it comes down to the inherent value proposition it offers over the heavily DRM encumbered, continuous-pay-or-don't-play services.
Only someone who loves itunes could call it anything but heavily DRM-encumbered. I salute you sir.
Sirus had to buy XM because two companies in the sat. radio business was one too many. there just aren't enough people willing to pay for radio.
14 million people are paying subscriptions. The urge for these two companies to merge comes from their difficulty in servicing the huge debt associated with developing and launching their satellite fleet. Imagine if Apple had had to build out its own fibre net and install metro routers in every market where it wanted to sell itunes? It's unlikely it would have succeeded. In effect, Apple's relatively small dollar volume market has been subsidized by massive externalised investment from telcos, cable companies, and bandwidth wholsesalers, not to mention the monthly access fees consumers pay for internet service. That's why companies like Apple (and Google, Yahoo, ebay etc) want "net neutrality" to continue, because their business models are unfeasible otherwise. Not that I am complaining, I personally have benefitted greatly from the de-facto socialised mandates of net neutrality.
the fact is people don't like paying monthly fees for services
I am having trouble parsing your words "fail". The vast bulk of the media marketplace in the United States and even the world is based on subscription revenue. Compared with these, Apple's revenue from single-licence sales is a blip. It's big when considered against the declining revenues of the other single-charge retailers who usually package their content onto plastic disks, but it's still a very slow growing market, subject to random, huge discontinuities, and constrained in its scalability. Trace its growth over the past decade relative to the wider media marketplace and it's just a tragic flatline which, controlled for inflation, shows an even more rapid decline.
Even considering just the XM/Siriu marketplace, 14 million people are paying subscriptions. The urge for these two companies to merge comes from their difficulty in servicing the huge debt associated with developing and launching their satellite fleet. Imagine if Apple had had to build out its own fibre net and install metro routers in every market where it wanted to sell itunes? It's unlikely it would have succeeded. In effect, Apple's relatively small dollar volume market has been subsidized by massive externalised investment from telcos, cable companies, and bandwidth wholsesalers, not to mention the monthly access fees consumers pay for internet service. That's why companies like Apple (and Google, Yahoo, ebay etc) want "net neutrality" to continue, because their business models are unfeasible otherwise. Not that I am complaining, I personally have benefitted greatly from the de-facto socialised mandates of net neutrality.
Gee, do you really want to pay a monthly fee for limited (DRMed) access to music files, access which goes away if you terminate your service.
Yes, you're right. There's no way this could work. I predict that the delivery of media by subscription using satellite (Sirius/XM, Dish, DirectTV), cable (TV, PPV), cell (mobile TV) and fibre (FIOS TV, etc) will remin a tiny and marginal market, doomed to obscurity.
It must be desperate.
Or canny? The mobile music revenue market is 20x the size of the "legal download" music market currently dominated ~75% by Apple with itunes. It's even bigger if you factor in satellite delivery subscription models such as Sirius/XM. Why do you think Apple is so eager to sell you a ringtone for $2?
Celeron D 356
TDP on this is 65/85 Watts. TDP for the 1.5 GHz C7 is 12 Watts. Including the other power-eating components of the Newegg box (remember, the Walmart PC is Mini-ITX inside), if you buy these boxes and leave them on for a few hours a day for two years, you're talking about a huge difference in energy costs.
Sero dude, Sero. It's US-wide. Also, Sero brought my $550 smartphone down to $125 after special pricing and rebates, so it's pretty sweet. With unlimited data you can run Skype and Microsoft's video VOIP ("Portrait") so it works out pretty well.
How much for? I (in Australia)
Ah, Australia, you have my deepest sympathies.
In the US, I got my plan through Sprint, which has abysmal service but is by far the underdog when it comes to subscriber numbers so seems to be trying very hard. For US $30/month, you get 500 daytime minutes, unlimited nights+weekends, unlimited texts, and unlimited Evdo internet, which works out at anywhere from 600 Kbps to 2 Mbps/s download and around half that upload. I've regularly used the phone to download several multi-GB torrents *while* also streaming a movie. Works pretty well.
Add a 2.5" portable hard drive and you can take your entire (300Gb?) media collection with you too.
Who carries disks around anymore? Add a 3G phone with unlimited dataplan and tethering and you can stream/copy your entire media collection to your PC on demand.
An in the last ten years, Apple stock has been +4314%, vs Microsoft +89%.
Ten years ago Apple was in the extreme doldrums. Why not take a longer view?
For most of its public lifetime, Apple has underperformed S&P500 *and* NASDAQ. In fact, relative to the broad stock market averages, Aaple has regained the outperform level that it held back in 1992. That's progress, of a sort.
I know for a fact Vista can
Okay, that's pretty cool, and the first time I've heard anything about Vista that's really impressed me. If Leopard does it as well then I guess regular backups have advanced significantly.
When you hookup an external hard drive, Vista should ask to turn on backups
I like having at least one backup no co-located with the original. Can Vista back up securely over TCP/IP to a remote store? Can Time Machine? I know I can do it with some tunnelling and SSH, but it would be nice (for my relatives) so have some sort of one-click alternative.
So aside from the usual Apple glitzy restore shell with the hypnotic new desktop with a deep-space background image, complete with moving stars and a spiral galaxy, does Time Machine actually do anything more than, say, Acronis True Image?
it seems pretty likely that Google could be the new "Facebook" if they really wanted to.
Really? Google tried with Orkut. It really did. What did it get? Brazil.
this completely distorts the market space for near future acquisition and startup activity.
Exactly! This pretty trivial investment (for MS) raises the cash barrier to entry for new startups and makes it several times more expensive for companies like Google/Yahoo/Ebay/Sun/Apple to buy new technolgies. MS isn't that concerned about crazy runups in Web2 bubble valuations because it's got its extraordinarily profitable Office business just ticking along.
I think Google has rolled this out in a hurry. This currently says Check 'Require logon using Secure Password Authentication (SPA).' but the screenshot shows the SPA box unchecked. It also omits mention of the need to "Use same settings as my incoming mail server" in the Outgoing Server tab. Of course, this will not stymie the average /. reader, but still...
Why such a hurry? Maybe this is a result of competition from Microsoft's new Live Mail (or whatever) which, after I went through a tedious upgrade process, actually seemed to have some very cool integration *and* 5GB of storage. And Yahoo's Go client for mobiles is very slick and way, way ahead of any Google's equivalent available offerings except, of course, the client-native Maps.
Yeah, it's worth updating those prices for inflation between 1982 and 2006:
Missile Command - $28 $59.89.
Zork I or II - $40 $85.55.
Castle Wolfenstein - $24 $51.33.
Wizardry - $45 $96.25.
Despite Wozniak completing the standard 796 rounds of interviews and 14,327 pop quizzes and tedious logic puzzles filched from the back pages of Scientific American, a Google spokeswoman announced that the Internet advertising company had finally rejected him for being "Just this really, really, really ridiculously old geezer, you know?". Taking some time to look up from her playdoh, the spokeswoman added, "And he didn't go to Standford!"