You are right. The handset is 50% of the network. But what apple is (potentially) doing is creating a handset that might actually be worth 200$.
Let's think about it. I don't want to go anywhere without my ipod. I can't go anywhere without my cellphone. (It's just not practical. I'd throw it away if I could.)
What if...my cellphone didn't suck?
What if...I didn't have to wonder if that 200$ cellphone wasn't going to be compatible with someone else's network when I move/the plan expires.
What if...I DIDN'T HAVE TO PAY FOR RINGTONES!!!!!!
Dude, I still use Office 97. (On win98SE.) Why? Because newer versions of either product are nothing like the old ones.
I hate the extra crappy stuff that got added in subsequent versions, and it's still adaquate for opening and creating.doc and.xls files that show up from work.
(Win98 is too flakey and slow to mess with installing anything else, so no open office/abiword stuff for me.)
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, my primary machine runs XP for the sake of games and I run manly programs like notepad* to do my word processing.
And I have a linux box running Knoppix from the hd, solely so I could play with apache.conf files. And I bought my grandmother a mac mini. So there! I are l33t!
*Okay, sometimes I have to fire up wordpad. But I only use.rtf files.
er...
This is most likely due to how video buffers are rendered on your laptop. Try setting the video out line as your "primary monitor". (If you are using win 98se/xp sp2)
Many video cards "put together" the video stream as a "last step" before sending it to the screen. The desktop is rendered at a "higher level" by the OS, the video in low level machine language by the card. The two are composited together using that blue area as the chroma key. (You know, like they do in digital special efects work.)
Most video cards are too anemic to do this complex operation on two outputs simultaneously. (And usually, the manufacturer didn't think of it anyway.) So as a result, you get to see the chroma key instead.
Imagine listening to the radio and being able to influence what kind of stuff you hear. Imagine hearing all kinds of things that you've never heard of before. Imagine no "...buffering..."
iRate does this.
Oh, and:
Open source? Check!
Supports Creative Commons? Check!
Legal Downloads? Check!
Runs on Linux? Check!
Free as in Beer? Check!
Did I mention no streaming?
The other reason is that timing when to buy is as important as what to buy.
In the article, the president of the chocolate covered strawberry company [0]couldn't figure out why the "average waiting time for customers to return for a purchase is 15 hours"
Well doi! Like I'm going to order chocolate covered anything in mid-June and not wonder if it's going to be a puddle of goo by the time I pick it up. What he's probably seeing is people waiting to place orders so the delivery lands on a different day (or time) of the week.
I can't count the times I've dropped the shopping cart because the final shipping estimate put delivery while I was on vacation/at a conference/at work.
If I could pick "deliver it after the 17th, but before the 20th" or "next available weekend", that would be great. Especially since I don't want to pay for the privelege of getting it sooner. [1] Sometimes sooner doesn't help. Sometimes expedited shipping is a bug not a feature.
As another poster noted, Amazon recovers gracefully from that kind of thing: you don't lose your stuff. (Remember how Newegg used to have the cart on some kind of wacky timer? It's fixed now.)
R.
[0]"The report certainly piqued my curiosity as it was not what I expected," Beresford told the E-Commerce Times. "I have to dig deeper. I want more data on how many people are buying on first visit. I need to understand why they come back and why they didn't buy the first time." (president and CEO of Shari's Berries) from http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/ebiz/42761.htm l
[1]Nobody really wants to pay extra for any of this. That's why Amazon's "free shipping if you order over n$" thing works so well. And why I hate the stores that use Amazon as a reseller, since those discounts don't seem to apply.
I hate to ask, but......even though the post, and the article is dated March 31, isn't this a bit suspicious...? I mean, I know that it was "last updated at 10:42 GMT (Yes, I RT*A), but you know those Brit news organizations love to pull people's legs.
On Topic:
That said, I think I know why Jobs hasn't pursued the hand-held media player thingy. Remember Sony's (former)[0] President standing next to him at the launch of the imac? [1] What do you bet that those two know very well what the other is up to?
Sony gets to try be the iTMS of the movie biz, without jumping through the hoops that Apple would to convince movie studios to go along. (The are a move studio!) Apple gets to watch Sony take all the risks. (Dead pixels , anyone?) Meanwhile, they can continue to focus on the minaturization tech they've got going for the ipod. Why would Jobs want to produce an ipod for watching movies on a tiny little screen, when he could make an ipod in a year or two that lets you watch High Def movies on any screen in your house? Sounds like this could fit rather well with the miniMac as a home entertainment PC.
Okay, stop reading. I'm going to relentlessly connect the dots now, and I know you've probably heard all this before.
You know the drill: the miniMac plus a broadband connection plus a computer monitor becomes a platform for watching downloaded movies...particularly HD movies, since Jobs has a thing for them, and people who can afford really good broadband tend to have HD tv's anyway. So, you get the miniMac as a user-friendly Tivo-iTMS combination.
But wait! There's more! Now, for a low, low, price, (heh) you can get a iPod-Video! Take your rental movies, and play them on any screen, anywhere! Show grandma your home movies by just hooking up the (included) rf adaptor to her 30 year old TV! Show your boss footage of the latest progress on the big engineering project! Keep your kids occupied in the SUV with an endless loop of Barney! (And no pesky DVD's in the van to get lost or scratched!) If you are really bored on that 20 hour plane ride to Japan, you can squint at the small OLED screen that covers the entire surface of the ipod. (No ipod tatoos for you! One year!)
oh, and if that doesn't blow your mind, think about the kind of PDA Apple could make with an ipod covered in a high resolution OLED skin.
____________
[0] President Kunitake Ando, replaced by Ryoji Chubachi. Not to be confused with the new Chairman-CEO, Howard Stringer. AP press release here.
A licensed operator running an illegal amplifier is going to get in trouble with the FCC even if he does not interfere with a consumer device. (Other Amateur radio operators, and the FCC's Official Observer Corps tend to track them down. People get fined BigNum$, lose their licenses, etc.)
Please note, however, that the license (called "part 15" for short) that all consumer grade equipment carries is inferior to higher class licenses. You are permitted to operate your TV, for instance, so long as it does not create harmful interference for others. (Like, say, for instance, accidentally imitating a distress beacon, see http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/19/014122 0&tid=133) You are not protected from interference from higher class licenseees, provided they are operating within their ruleset.
In practical terms, this means that the cheap, mass-produced-in-China TV, or telephone simply isn't going to be effectivly sheilded against RF interference. I mean, that would require adding more layers of design testing, plus adding metal sheilding, extra capacitors, ferrite chokes, etc. And then your stuff wouldn't be so cheap anymore! [insert generic remark about market pressures here]
(Note also, that most Amateur Radio Operators would be more than happy to help someone shield their equipment using bypass capacitors, rf chokes, etc. But chances are that's the kind of help the grandparent poster was being offered by the FCC, anyway.)
Heh. I don't mind this answer.
I totally agree...the management does have an obligation to watch out for the shareholders. (Of course...being one does taint my point of view.)
Let me rephrase my intial thought: Any individual, no matter what organization they are embedded in, is caught in a web of loyalties. The manager is in the middle; they have an obligation to look out for their employees, as well as an obligation to faithfully serve their shareholders. My thought is that the concern over the real, tangible, personal effects on people that you know and personally trust you, trumps concerns over the abstract, distant, and nonpersonal entity that is the collective shareholders. (Naturally it gets a bit more sticky if you are working for one or a few people that you know, personally trust you, etc.) I will note that historically, people have been willing to behave quite badly for the sake of impersonal entities, despite the real, near term, acute suffering of their peers. I think the question here might be how much profit are the shareholders entitled to at what personal cost, and which person should pay that cost? I think I also would cite the potential to hidden personal costs to the manager making the decisions; that you risk damaging your ability to care for others.
Of course real life is even more complex than that...a theoretical savings of some unknown amount offset by training costs, security concerns etc., is a bit different than "if we don't do this, there won't BE a company!" And if we want to make it really complicated, we could examine questions like does it serve the shareholders more to focus on the longevity of the company, or growth, or short term profits, or long term profits, or market share, etc.
"Management" may have a moral obligation to "shareholders" (or stakeholders) but that pales in comparison to the moral obligation of individual managers to their real, actual people who work for them!
The truth is, that we live in a society based on reciprocity: I will give you my loyalty and labor, and in return you will give me trust and physical security. (Where physical security=money.)
I doubt you really believe that your first obligation is not to the people who depend on you for their daily bread.
Thank you for listening to my rant.
--Rhandir
p.s. I think that network security mavens would probably agree that if you violate the expectation of reciprocity of concern, (that you trust your employees and fail to show concern for their lives), then you are screwed, no matter how l33t your security policies are.
p.p.s. The one logical consequence of this line of reasoning is, however, if you do choose to outsource, you now have a moral obligation to look out for them too...which is somewhat tricky.
Slashdot Mirror
You crashed mine too. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
Let's think about it. I don't want to go anywhere without my ipod. I can't go anywhere without my cellphone. (It's just not practical. I'd throw it away if I could.)
I hate the extra crappy stuff that got added in subsequent versions, and it's still adaquate for opening and creating .doc and .xls files that show up from work.
(Win98 is too flakey and slow to mess with installing anything else, so no open office/abiword stuff for me.)
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, my primary machine runs XP for the sake of games and I run manly programs like notepad* to do my word processing.
And I have a linux box running Knoppix from the hd, solely so I could play with apache .conf files. And I bought my grandmother a mac mini. So there! I are l33t!
*Okay, sometimes I have to fire up wordpad. But I only use .rtf files.
______
*recursion error.
This is most likely due to how video buffers are rendered on your laptop. Try setting the video out line as your "primary monitor". (If you are using win 98se/xp sp2)
Many video cards "put together" the video stream as a "last step" before sending it to the screen. The desktop is rendered at a "higher level" by the OS, the video in low level machine language by the card. The two are composited together using that blue area as the chroma key. (You know, like they do in digital special efects work.)
Most video cards are too anemic to do this complex operation on two outputs simultaneously. (And usually, the manufacturer didn't think of it anyway.) So as a result, you get to see the chroma key instead.
Imagine listening to the radio and being able to influence what kind of stuff you hear. Imagine hearing all kinds of things that you've never heard of before. Imagine no "...buffering..."
iRate does this.
Oh, and:
Open source? Check!
Supports Creative Commons? Check!
Legal Downloads? Check!
Runs on Linux? Check!
Free as in Beer? Check!
Did I mention no streaming?
More detail:
Technical explanation with easy to understand diagram here:
http://irate.sourceforge.net/
Site you can send the non-technically inclined to here:
http://www.irateradio.com/
"Just click on the executable. No, really, it's safe this time."
Oh and the guy's name is "ajones". He's a kiwi. Mad props to kiwis.
Quote:
"$20 says that the system won't support playing games on that media, just movies."
Now that's insightful!
I found your comment very hard to read. Please use capital letters at the beginning of sentences.
Alternatively, please use line breaks between sentences.
Thanks.
In the article, the president of the chocolate covered strawberry company [0]couldn't figure out why the "average waiting time for customers to return for a purchase is 15 hours"
Well doi! Like I'm going to order chocolate covered anything in mid-June and not wonder if it's going to be a puddle of goo by the time I pick it up. What he's probably seeing is people waiting to place orders so the delivery lands on a different day (or time) of the week.
I can't count the times I've dropped the shopping cart because the final shipping estimate put delivery while I was on vacation/at a conference/at work.
If I could pick "deliver it after the 17th, but before the 20th" or "next available weekend", that would be great. Especially since I don't want to pay for the privelege of getting it sooner. [1] Sometimes sooner doesn't help. Sometimes expedited shipping is a bug not a feature.
As another poster noted, Amazon recovers gracefully from that kind of thing: you don't lose your stuff. (Remember how Newegg used to have the cart on some kind of wacky timer? It's fixed now.)
R.
[0]"The report certainly piqued my curiosity as it was not what I expected," Beresford told the E-Commerce Times. "I have to dig deeper. I want more data on how many people are buying on first visit. I need to understand why they come back and why they didn't buy the first time." (president and CEO of Shari's Berries) from http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/ebiz/42761.htm l
[1]Nobody really wants to pay extra for any of this. That's why Amazon's "free shipping if you order over n$" thing works so well. And why I hate the stores that use Amazon as a reseller, since those discounts don't seem to apply.
On Topic:
That said, I think I know why Jobs hasn't pursued the hand-held media player thingy. Remember Sony's (former)[0] President standing next to him at the launch of the imac? [1] What do you bet that those two know very well what the other is up to?
Sony gets to try be the iTMS of the movie biz, without jumping through the hoops that Apple would to convince movie studios to go along. (The are a move studio!) Apple gets to watch Sony take all the risks. (Dead pixels , anyone?) Meanwhile, they can continue to focus on the minaturization tech they've got going for the ipod. Why would Jobs want to produce an ipod for watching movies on a tiny little screen, when he could make an ipod in a year or two that lets you watch High Def movies on any screen in your house? Sounds like this could fit rather well with the miniMac as a home entertainment PC.
Okay, stop reading. I'm going to relentlessly connect the dots now, and I know you've probably heard all this before.
You know the drill: the miniMac plus a broadband connection plus a computer monitor becomes a platform for watching downloaded movies...particularly HD movies, since Jobs has a thing for them, and people who can afford really good broadband tend to have HD tv's anyway. So, you get the miniMac as a user-friendly Tivo-iTMS combination.
But wait! There's more! Now, for a low, low, price, (heh) you can get a iPod-Video! Take your rental movies, and play them on any screen, anywhere! Show grandma your home movies by just hooking up the (included) rf adaptor to her 30 year old TV! Show your boss footage of the latest progress on the big engineering project! Keep your kids occupied in the SUV with an endless loop of Barney! (And no pesky DVD's in the van to get lost or scratched!) If you are really bored on that 20 hour plane ride to Japan, you can squint at the small OLED screen that covers the entire surface of the ipod. (No ipod tatoos for you! One year!)
oh, and if that doesn't blow your mind, think about the kind of PDA Apple could make with an ipod covered in a high resolution OLED skin.
____________
[0] President Kunitake Ando, replaced by Ryoji Chubachi. Not to be confused with the new Chairman-CEO, Howard Stringer. AP press release here.
[1]see this Ars Technica article.
If you'd like something more recent, I can't help you. But if you check http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=C0_15_1 you should be able to find somtething.
Please note, however, that the license (called "part 15" for short) that all consumer grade equipment carries is inferior to higher class licenses. You are permitted to operate your TV, for instance, so long as it does not create harmful interference for others. (Like, say, for instance, accidentally imitating a distress beacon, see http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/19/014122 0&tid=133) You are not protected from interference from higher class licenseees, provided they are operating within their ruleset.
In practical terms, this means that the cheap, mass-produced-in-China TV, or telephone simply isn't going to be effectivly sheilded against RF interference. I mean, that would require adding more layers of design testing, plus adding metal sheilding, extra capacitors, ferrite chokes, etc. And then your stuff wouldn't be so cheap anymore! [insert generic remark about market pressures here]
(Note also, that most Amateur Radio Operators would be more than happy to help someone shield their equipment using bypass capacitors, rf chokes, etc. But chances are that's the kind of help the grandparent poster was being offered by the FCC, anyway.)
I totally agree...the management does have an obligation to watch out for the shareholders. (Of course...being one does taint my point of view.)
Let me rephrase my intial thought: Any individual, no matter what organization they are embedded in, is caught in a web of loyalties. The manager is in the middle; they have an obligation to look out for their employees, as well as an obligation to faithfully serve their shareholders. My thought is that the concern over the real, tangible, personal effects on people that you know and personally trust you, trumps concerns over the abstract, distant, and nonpersonal entity that is the collective shareholders. (Naturally it gets a bit more sticky if you are working for one or a few people that you know, personally trust you, etc.) I will note that historically, people have been willing to behave quite badly for the sake of impersonal entities, despite the real, near term, acute suffering of their peers. I think the question here might be how much profit are the shareholders entitled to at what personal cost, and which person should pay that cost? I think I also would cite the potential to hidden personal costs to the manager making the decisions; that you risk damaging your ability to care for others.
Of course real life is even more complex than that...a theoretical savings of some unknown amount offset by training costs, security concerns etc., is a bit different than "if we don't do this, there won't BE a company!" And if we want to make it really complicated, we could examine questions like does it serve the shareholders more to focus on the longevity of the company, or growth, or short term profits, or long term profits, or market share, etc.
Thanks.
Rhandir
"Management" may have a moral obligation to "shareholders" (or stakeholders) but that pales in comparison to the moral obligation of individual managers to their real, actual people who work for them!
The truth is, that we live in a society based on reciprocity: I will give you my loyalty and labor, and in return you will give me trust and physical security. (Where physical security=money.)
I doubt you really believe that your first obligation is not to the people who depend on you for their daily bread.
Thank you for listening to my rant.
--Rhandir
p.s. I think that network security mavens would probably agree that if you violate the expectation of reciprocity of concern, (that you trust your employees and fail to show concern for their lives), then you are screwed, no matter how l33t your security policies are.
p.p.s. The one logical consequence of this line of reasoning is, however, if you do choose to outsource, you now have a moral obligation to look out for them too...which is somewhat tricky.