I'm the sys admin for a company that "switched" just about a year ago, and man the hardware has been AWFUL!
We have two approved vendors for laptops here, Apple and Lenovo. Both are rated near the top of the heap for hardware reliability and support by independent studies. We keep track of problems with both internally as well and Apple is ever so slightly winning. Your anecdotal evidence is just that, an anecdote. All the hard numbers refute the assertion that Apple hardware is even as unreliable as the average PC.
APPLE -- If you're listening, license your OS for other x86 hardware. Now.
Luckily, Apple does not listen to people who have no idea what they're talking about. Apple will license their OS for other hardware when MS's monopoly power in the desktop OS market is broken or sufficiently weakened. To do so before then would be to flush their computer business down the shitter. It is pretty obvious economics. Apple is taken the classic route of mitigating a monopoly by building a separate, vertical chain of supply. To abandon without the monopoly going away would be idiotic.
China is in the process of reverse engineering, embracing and extending, and using purchased technology to come up to par with the rest of the world.
I can't speak for all subjects, but have you seen China's internet backbone diagrams? It is a three-tiered full mesh out of a textbook. Would that the US would aspire to bring out communications infrastructure up to the same standard.
Come on, there's a HUGE difference between paid advertising and some video on YouTube.
Umm, some videos on YouTube are paid advertisements. Someone paid to create them. People with more money can create more of them and with better production values and with more celebrity endorsements or whatever. Access to YouTube for political statements still favors the wealthiest. A person with sufficient wealth can probably still out advertise and more importantly out smear their opponent.
That said, YouTube exists and there is not a lot that can be done about that. Trying to block it will not work and these people need to adjust to the realities of the internet era. The US limits spending on political advertisements too, and it too does not work. The people smearing Kerry over his service in Vietnam spent millions in advertising that was technically not counted as from the Republican party, and lo and behold just the other day Bush appointed the guy who paid for them to an ambassadorship to Belgium. I'm sure it was because he was the most qualified person for the job and not because this is a way of paying him, aren't you?
Put all the speeches on YouTube and let the public access them. That way the playing field is level.
That probably is the best solution, but I also understand the reasoning behind limiting the sources for political speech. Picture this, 8 hours before the election someone floods YouTube and other channels with a faked video showing the current runner up talking about how he is secretly a pedophile and has molested children. As a result he loses the election and the perpetrator may or may not ever be found.
By restricting access to a single channel there is the potential that whomever controls that channel will abuse it, but at the same time it prevents the scenario I described above. Last minute publication of outright lies on voting day has long been an issue.
That said, I'm not sure it is practical to control channels like YouTube or that they can shut things down quickly enough to be effective.
There is a difference between weight and bulk. A 12" laptop can go in my briefcase and fits in my lap in a normal chair in a restaurant. It fills the section of bar in front of me down at the pub. A 17" laptop means I need to buy a new, oversized bag of some sort, get a chair without arms on it, and fight for a seat at a table when the bar pub gets crowded.
Proven, next time do a little research before you call something illogical you seem to suffer from the false authority fallacy and the common belief fallacy.
Heh. Let me rephrase my request. Please read and understand the basics of logic and logical fallacies. Just incorrectly citing logical fallacies that sound like they might sort of apply, is not sufficient.
I agree with all your points and would add one more. Using two monitors, one of them can be a regular monitor and one can be the built in display on a laptop. This provides both a large amount of screen real estate as well as portability. A 17" laptop is not portable. A 12" laptop does not have a lot of screen to play with. A 12" laptop you also plug into a 17" monitor, together are portable and provide a lot of screen when you're at your desk.
AAC is NOT a open standard, unless you consider MP4 to be an "open standard", and it is NOT royalty-free.
AAC/Mpeg-4 is an open standard. You can go download it yourself. You're correct, however in that it is not a free standard and you have to pay royalties on hardware that encodes it, but not on each encoding, like MP3 or WMA.
This is why most portable audio players don't support AAC, because then they would have to pay double licensing fees (one of MP3, one for AAC) and MP3 is vastly more popular than AAC especially overseas.
Most portable audio players do support AAC. Heck Apple by themselves make most portable music players. Add to that Sony and MS and a few others and you're really looking at a large chunk of the hardware market.
Why do they include WMA? Because WMA really doesn't have any licensing fees, and it's as much of an "open standard" as AAC.
Umm, WMA does have license fees. Most players pay them because they are trying to reach the download market and Apple won't license them to play Fairplay protected AAC files. Now that Fairplay is moving out of the picture, a lot more hardware players will probably start supporting AAC as well.
Apple has no serious interest in promoting AAC as an independent codec. AAC/FairPlay is an important "feature" of iPods and licensing it...
Actually, Appe has a direct financial interest in promoting AAC, as an independent codec because it enables iPod sales, which is how they make their money. Apple runs their iTMS at about break even in order to sell iPods. More sources for music for iPods means even more iPod sales.
...would only cut into their lucrative iPod business. It's the same reason they'll never license MacOS.
Think about it. Apple won't license OS X because it is their differentiator without it, they are just selling off the shelf hardware. It is the real value for a Mac. For iPods, the real value is the hardware and interface. Most people don't ever put any DRM encoded AAC files on them. I think the figure is something like 2.5% for all music on iPods is fairplay protected. That is a pretty insignificant lock-in, not really worth protecting compared to the added sales Apple can get from having everyone using their standard and not using MS's. Apple cannot, however, license fairplay because MS could use it for an embrace and extend and almost certainly would.
Ogg and FLAC aren't widely supported, despite being royalty-free, because of lack of popularity. It just isn't worth it to support these formats. I own one of the very few players that does, the Rio Karma. And yeah, I use FLAC a lot.
Ogg and FLAC are not particularly well supported commercially. AAC is. Apple and Sony are both behind it. Assuming the move to DRMless music downloads actually happens and is successful, WMA will almost certainly be pushed out of the portable music scene and MP3 may slowly decline as well.
Regardless of legal/moral points, the (by far) most popular online music service is p2p download.
This is true, and ripping from CD also provides a large amount of the music that fills the average player. Nonetheless, there is some evidence that both of these market chunks can be partially taken by the legal, paid download market. Further, nothing ties the P2P market to the MP3 format and it will tend to mimic whatever formats appear elsewhere. Already there are a lot of WMA files on P2P networks and some AAC.
Luckily for Apple they got on that soon and appropriately enough to enjoy a huge cashflow from it, but if they expect that model to last in the long run (10+ years), I'm pretty sure they're in for a rude awakening.
The last I heard, Apple runs their service at about break even. Technically that is a cash flow, but one that is flexible and scales to usage. They aren't counting on it for profit. Apple would be even happier if all music was free to everyone because they view it only as a way to sell iPods.
Umm, first, wikipedia is not really a source. It is an encyclopedia. Second, I asked for a source for which chipsets currently in use for portable players support AAC and the relative costs of them. That link does not provide that information. It is still an open question as to whether buying a chipset that supports AAC is a significant increase in cost for player manufacturers. For all you know, most already use a chip that has support they are not utilizing.
AAC is patented, and requires a license to use. AAC content is free to distribute in, but codec makers (including hardware OEMs) must cough up royalties to use AAC legally. Obviously, this adds cost.
They are already paying such fees for WMA and for MP3, and in addition music sellers are paying fees for those codecs. If the cost of adding AAC support is the same as WMA, for example, what hardware manufacturer would not want to add it in order to gain access to the large part of the market that is current iPod/iTMS users currently inaccessible to them?
Companies like Creative, Archos, and others may do so, but unless people absolutely demand the feature, they just may not bother, because most people with AAC files are using iPods anyway.
Have you ever put together a market profile? Usually a large chunk of any market is already someone else's customer. You don't ignore that chunk, as it is a proven, paying market. You look for ways to convert that chunk of the market. Almost all those iPod users are going to buy a new device sometime in the next few years. The trick is to get them to consider something other than an iPod.
Yes, you are right, MP3 files are bigger, but as I stated previously, they work everywhere, in virtually every device. This is why eMusic and other stores offer downloads in this format.
Most stores, however, do not provide MP3 downloads. They provide either AAC (Apple) or WMA (almost everyone else). Apple is obviously sticking with AAC. WMA stores probably cannot ditch WMA outright so they will be looking at other options in addition, which means their store needs to be able to offer multiple formats. If they add MP3 (which many will) they have to pay a license fee for the format and the bandwidth cost higher than WMA for each song. If they add AAC they don't have to pay a license fee and the download cost is about the same as WMA. That means every AAC they can sell makes them more money than a WMA or an MP3. You don't think a lot of them are going to offer that format to try to make more on sales to the ~80% of the market that can play them?
AAC is not something Creative "can't afford not to make". It would be nice to have that functionality, but it won't be a make or break for any product. For example, the Zune has the ability to play any unprotected AAC files, and that has not noticably affected its sales either positively or negatively.
Sigh. Yes, that is true, today. This article is about what changes to the market will occur because of EMI's willingness to sell non-DRM'd files and Apple's agreement with them and the likelihood of other labels being forced to follow suit. Last week Creative had little incentive to add AAC. Today, Creative had better be considering it if they have a clue. In a year if the DRMless download thing becomes a functional reality, it may well be a feature they must have if they're going to stay in business.
I don't know if I believe that. I can believe it for new players being sold, but the existing installed base?
Apple has been in the 70% range for quite a while. Sony has been putting AAC support in all their players, including the Walkman, for some time as well. Even the Zune has support for it.
my car stereo has been working fine for 5 years, and I don't see a need to replace it anytime soon. It only plays MP3s (well, besides CDs). My DVD player plays MP3s.
Car stereos that play MP3s are still an insignificant chunk of the market at this point. Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 play AAC and while those numbers are not huge yet, they are growing.
I think a lot of posters are really underestimating the number of MP3-only devices out there.
There is no doubt that mp3 is a lot more common than AAC, but I'm not sure that difference will be sufficient to stop AAC from winning the market now that DRM is out of the picture. I suspect you'll have a hard time buying a portable player that does not support it in the next few years. You'll already have a hard time finding decent jukebox software that does not support it. I expect it to at least be an option from most download services in the next 2 years. Blue-ray players both include support for AAC because it is part of the spec. Realistically, the market for AAC is probably larger than the market for WMA, once the DRM is removed, and that is the point of this article. As to whether or not it will replace MP3, I think it probable, but we'll have to see.
Real estate is indeed cheaper in many places, but the problem is that the places real estate is cheap are also places that are less interesting to live in. Manhattan, San Francisco, Seattle, etc have culture, like theaters, bookstores, good and varied restaurants, libraries, symphonies, and so on.
I currently live just outside of Ann Arbor, MI. I'm between a large university and a huge one. My commute to work is 20 minutes. Ann Arbor has more bookstores per person than any other place in the eastern half of the US. There are literally dozens of small book stores within walking distance of me right now as well as the original Borders. There are probably 50-100 restaurants within walking distance of work. There is a huge county library with an amazing collection of historical documents and rare books and a university run library within walking distance. There is another library a few blocks from my house and yet another massive library a few minutes drive from my house. There is live theater in several places every weekend, a couple of improve comedy places, lots of live music everywhere. I might mention Google just started up their business here this last year and are committed to hiring on 5000 people in the next few years. We're always hiring experienced coders.
Well, there's the corn festival, but you get the idea.
This weekend is the "hash bash" festival where everyone goes downtown and smokes pot and people set up sales of artwork and bongs and things. I think it is a $50 fine for possession here. There are art exhibitions and festivals all the time. In the giant park a short walk from my home there are a dozen different festivals every summer including one of the largest beer tasting festivals in the country, an annual elvis impersonator event, and a antique car show devoted to cars from companies that no longer exist.
I'd rather be broke in an interesting place than rich in a boring place.
That is, of course, your choice. My point is people whining about the high cost of living driving work away should either quite their bitching or solve the problem. There is plently of middle ground in the US where things are happening and it is a fun place to live, but the housing prices are not crazy. (As I mentioned before, my medium sized house in the downtown of an outlying area cost ~$120K.)
But there still isn't that much to do in small town USA, and the mindset can be stifling if you're from a blue state way of thinking.
The only thing I think you might need pointed out to you, is your choice is not the middle of nowhere in Iowa or San Francisco. There is plenty of middle ground. Every state has a few college towns with some night life and interesting things happening and they are relatively inexpensive to live. You don't have to choose between poor and bored. You can be moderately amused and with cash in your pocket.
Note that if you are moving from a G4/G3 Mac to an Intel one, your FireWire backups HDD's wont simply work. They won't even boot! You'll have to make a new one using USB.
You completely misunderstood the feature. You boot the old G3/G4 machine in firewire mode, which basically makes it act like and external firewire drive. You plug it in to your new Intel machine and click a button in the installer to migrate everything over. It does not clone the the drive, it intelligently migrates everything. This means applications that are universal binaries work natively and applications that are PPC run transparently using the rosetta feature. This works more smoothly than any other migration system I've ever used, pulling over accounts, settings, security certs, data, applications, kernel extensions, and everything else that matters. If the Intel machine's install software includes new applications that is more up to date than your old applications, both are installed and functional when the Intel machine is finished.
It would seem more reasonable to me that stores already selling WMA-encoded audio with DRM will simply sell WMA-encoded audio without DRM, rather than switch to AAC, if for no other reason than their target audience already has players capable of playing WMA.
Consider this scenario. You sell WMA files, but as a result can only reach 25% of the music download market. Bob from engineering comes in and says, "hey we can finally start selling non-DRMed files now that the RIAA has come around. This means we can sell MP3 files and reach 100% of the market for the same cost per song in licensing+bandwidth. We can also sell AAC files which will reach 80% of the market for 15% less per song in licensing+bandwidth."
Do you:
A) ignore this potential new market and stick with WMP exclusively
B) start offering all 3 formats and try to push the one that makes you the most money (AAC)
C) switch over to just one other format
I think the onus lies on Apple, not the others, to adopt support for DRM-free WMA (and other formats) in their players.
So you expect Apple to start paying MS a fee for each iPod they sell in order to use the WMA format? And seeing as they have not done so up until now, why do you think this huge incentive for people to instead change to use AAC will convince Apple to change? Apple, Microsoft, and Sony currently all support AAC on their players, as well as numerous other hardware manufacturers. I don't see the player with 75% of the market share switching now and trying to conform to the 15% or so that supports WMA and not AAC.
I have two mp3 players neither one play AAC... how will this become the standard?
Statistically speaking, for each of your players, there are 7-8 players out there that do support AAC. You're in a minority. Since selling AAC files will make retailers more money (30% decreased bandwidth fees) I'm guessing a lot of retailers will start offering them as an option, if not as the only format for sale. Since most retailers will be offering them most hardware manufacturers will most likely soon start supporting AAC, thus your next player probably will support it. Even if hardware vendors don't care about what music retailers are selling and are concentrating mostly on the ripping CDs market (most people) how many of them do you think will ignore the opportunity to make it easier for them to steal customers from Apple by supporting the same format as the iPod?
no, thats only 75% - 80% of the HD music players, there are far more flash based MP3 players out there, of which apple has a much smaller share.
Well, last I saw Apple had approximately 75% of the total portable digital music player market. Add to that the Zune and various other players with support for AAC and you're still looking at greater than 75% of the total market retailers will be selling to.
Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Files and Settings Transfer Wizard
Have you ever used that? It works for some generic settings, for IE, and for Outlook. I don't think it works for migrating any other software you have installed. I don't think it copies over your security certs or registration info either and I'm not even sure it copies over your user accounts and user files. If id does any of those things, it did not work for me or I could not figure out how.
So selling DRM-free AAC files will dethrone DRM-free MP3 files as the industry standard? How, exactly?
It may actually do that. Think of it this way, if you're selling music what is the best format? MP3 costs a per song royalty and costs more in bandwidth and takes more time for your users, but is supported in all players. AAC does not cost a per song royalty costs less in bandwidth and downloads faster and is currently supported by 80% or so of players. Probably you will consider offering both, but it is entirely possible that you'll push the AAC since it saves you money. It is further possible that the remaining 20% of hardware vendors will also respond to you and to Apple's marketing power and switch to make it easier for them to steal customers from the incumbents.
I'm not saying it is a foregone conclusion, but it is certainly possible that the industry will finally move to the newer standard because of this (AAC is a newer version of the mpeg audio format, that mp3 was also part of).
The OEMs who make generic MP3/WMA players are not likely to pick up a new chip to decode AAC files unless there is high demand for it, because it will noticably affect cost.
Do you have a source to back that up or is it just a guess on your part. AAC is part of the mpeg standard and a lot of chipsets have support for that. I'd be interested to know if chips that support AAC are significantly more expensive than ones that don't.
With disk space being relatively cheap, the size difference of a MP3 file ripped in alt-preset-standard or alt-preset-extreme versus the size of a similar bitrate file in another format is less of an issue.
A lot of people can't fit their collection on their player and if the standard quality of files goes up to match Apple's offering, that effect will double. Also, it is not just disk space that is an issue. File size affects the cost of bandwidth to deliver the songs, which can add up for an online store and it affects how quickly users can download the songs, which might be a differentiator for a market that is such a commodity.
AAC is a good format, but its another "standard" in a crowded field of compressed music file formats.
If I were an MP3 player manufacturer, here is how I would look at it: the number one online store for music has been closed to me thus far, but it is just now opening up and becoming a resource I can capitalize on to sell players... if I support AAC with my player. 75% of current portable player owners (which make up most of the new purchaser market) currently have iPods. If they're looking at alternatives to the iPod and I can make a move to my player easier than a move to a different competitor's player by supporting the format they're already using, that may be a very big win for me.
Obviously each manufacturer will have to do a cost/value analysis for themselves to see if it makes sense, but I suspect players that support AAC are about to go from Apple and MS, to almost everyone within a few iterations. A week ago creative had basically no motivation to support AAC. Today, it may be a move they can't afford not to make.
In addition, if one reads EMI's announcement about them selling DRM-free music, it's clear that it's neither AAC nor iTunes exclusive. Other music stores will be selling EMI's songs in mp3 format soon, and nothing will have changed with respect to the popularity of mp3 vs AAC.
I disagree. This is likely to change the relative popularity of MP3 and AAC. There are several reasons for this. First, the iTunes store is currently the most popular of the online music services and likely will be the first one taking advantage of this offer. As a result, a lot of MP3 manufacturers are going to be looking to add AAC support to their player to capitalize upon Apple's work and to make transition easy for existing iPod users. This will expand the potential market for AAC files from iPods and Zune, to almost all portable players. With that change, a lot more music services will consider using the AAC format either instead of or in addition to MP3.
Second, right now almost all commercial services require DRM. That means such a service must choose to either use WMA, RealMedia, or roll their own solution. Support for Real is nonexistent among hardware vendors, so they target WMA as the easiest solution. Very few commercial services offer MP3. So how does this event change things? All those WMA offerings are now going to be looking for format for non-DRM'd files that targets the iPod. That rules out WMA. So they are probably going to be choosing AAC or MP3 or both. MP3 is probably a little cheaper for licensing and has wider support, but AAC allows for smaller files for the same level of audio quality, saving bandwidth costs and speeding up downloads. Further, record companies will have already converted masters to sampled AAC for Apple, possibly making that a preference from them.
I don't see that MP3 or AAC will immediately dominate for DRM free music sales, but I bet Apple is not the only major store selling AAC downloads by then end of 2008.
Save off your home directory, and any tweaks you may have to the OS (packages, configuration, etc) should be in your kickstart file. New machine? No problem. Works on servers, works on laptops.
This never worked 100% for me. I always ran into some configuration setting or kernel extension or a Web certificate or something that was not stored in my home dir. Also, I run a lot of commercial software that is not stored in any repository, and all of that needed to be reinstalled and re-registered. Fonts were often an issue as well, as I have a large collection for my work and like them to be accessible to multiple user accounts on my workstations.
These days Linux lives in a virtual machine image and OS X manages to migrate everything over from old machines to new ones, including Linux and Windows VMs.
Um... The only reason I've ever heard given for outsourcing was money. When the hell did they invent this other bullshit, spread it and have people buy into it, and then do a study debunking it?
In business, it's always about money. This study was debunking the fact that some businesses were claiming it was not about lower salaries, which is somewhat different. In truth, I've worked on a few projects that involved outsourcing both in the US and overseas and while it was always about money, relative salaries was a pretty small concern. We outsourced because we had trouble finding enough local talent and because we had short term needs that required expertise we did not have in house, but which would have cost a lot unnecessarily to do ourselves.
In contrast, I know of several cases where companies outsourced core parts of their business, resulting in a short term benefit on paper, but a long term loss. Once an outsourced company has expertise in what you do (on your dime) they will raise prices or they will stop working for you and start competing with you. Of course by then the executive who made the decision already took his big bonus home and moved on to another company to repeat the process.
Until we reduce the cost of living in this country companies will continue to outsource. It's all about money.
Actually more and more companies are looking not to outsourced Indian developers and support staff, but to outsourced and even satellite office US developers and supports staff. The problem is not that housing and cost of living is too high in the US. The problem is the housing and cost of living is too high in expensive areas of California and that is what most Slashdot readers pay attention to.
This is interesting because I was in a meeting this morning with our director of engineering where this exact issue was discussed. Some places in San Francisco a medium sized house costs you 5 million and 60K in taxes a year. My medium sized house in a normal part of the US cost about 120K and I pay a few grand in taxes on it a year. There are places in the midwest where amidst the corn fields you'll come upon an island formed by a university, a small town, and support facilities for a dozen major international corporations.
My advice to you, if you live in CA, move somewhere affordable. If you are looking to hire talent, look to a satellite office somewhere that is not crazily expensive. If you're looking to outsource development or support, there are cost competitive American companies with a lot smaller risk and cheaper travel expenses that Indian companies.
If you're setting up a Mac and you already have one Mac, try the firewire upgrade option. It will copy over all your data, applications, X11, updates, dev tools, MS Office, security certs, etc. while you go get lunch. It is so much easier than, well, anything else I've used.
You boot the old computer in Firewire mode by holding down a key. You plug in a firewire cable to the new computer. You click the install from old computer button. You go get some coffee and a bagel.
So basically, it takes me about 60 seconds and it takes the computer an hour or so. That includes pulling over my Windows and Linux desktop installs within a VM. Seriously, this is one of the main reasons OS X is my base workstation OS instead of Linux. Who wants to waste a bunch of time manually copying things over, only to find not all of it works anyway and you still have to reinstall a few things and tweak a few more?
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We have two approved vendors for laptops here, Apple and Lenovo. Both are rated near the top of the heap for hardware reliability and support by independent studies. We keep track of problems with both internally as well and Apple is ever so slightly winning. Your anecdotal evidence is just that, an anecdote. All the hard numbers refute the assertion that Apple hardware is even as unreliable as the average PC.
APPLE -- If you're listening, license your OS for other x86 hardware. Now.Luckily, Apple does not listen to people who have no idea what they're talking about. Apple will license their OS for other hardware when MS's monopoly power in the desktop OS market is broken or sufficiently weakened. To do so before then would be to flush their computer business down the shitter. It is pretty obvious economics. Apple is taken the classic route of mitigating a monopoly by building a separate, vertical chain of supply. To abandon without the monopoly going away would be idiotic.
I can't speak for all subjects, but have you seen China's internet backbone diagrams? It is a three-tiered full mesh out of a textbook. Would that the US would aspire to bring out communications infrastructure up to the same standard.
Umm, some videos on YouTube are paid advertisements. Someone paid to create them. People with more money can create more of them and with better production values and with more celebrity endorsements or whatever. Access to YouTube for political statements still favors the wealthiest. A person with sufficient wealth can probably still out advertise and more importantly out smear their opponent.
That said, YouTube exists and there is not a lot that can be done about that. Trying to block it will not work and these people need to adjust to the realities of the internet era. The US limits spending on political advertisements too, and it too does not work. The people smearing Kerry over his service in Vietnam spent millions in advertising that was technically not counted as from the Republican party, and lo and behold just the other day Bush appointed the guy who paid for them to an ambassadorship to Belgium. I'm sure it was because he was the most qualified person for the job and not because this is a way of paying him, aren't you?
That probably is the best solution, but I also understand the reasoning behind limiting the sources for political speech. Picture this, 8 hours before the election someone floods YouTube and other channels with a faked video showing the current runner up talking about how he is secretly a pedophile and has molested children. As a result he loses the election and the perpetrator may or may not ever be found.
By restricting access to a single channel there is the potential that whomever controls that channel will abuse it, but at the same time it prevents the scenario I described above. Last minute publication of outright lies on voting day has long been an issue.
That said, I'm not sure it is practical to control channels like YouTube or that they can shut things down quickly enough to be effective.
There is a difference between weight and bulk. A 12" laptop can go in my briefcase and fits in my lap in a normal chair in a restaurant. It fills the section of bar in front of me down at the pub. A 17" laptop means I need to buy a new, oversized bag of some sort, get a chair without arms on it, and fight for a seat at a table when the bar pub gets crowded.
Heh. Let me rephrase my request. Please read and understand the basics of logic and logical fallacies. Just incorrectly citing logical fallacies that sound like they might sort of apply, is not sufficient.
I agree with all your points and would add one more. Using two monitors, one of them can be a regular monitor and one can be the built in display on a laptop. This provides both a large amount of screen real estate as well as portability. A 17" laptop is not portable. A 12" laptop does not have a lot of screen to play with. A 12" laptop you also plug into a 17" monitor, together are portable and provide a lot of screen when you're at your desk.
AAC/Mpeg-4 is an open standard. You can go download it yourself. You're correct, however in that it is not a free standard and you have to pay royalties on hardware that encodes it, but not on each encoding, like MP3 or WMA.
This is why most portable audio players don't support AAC, because then they would have to pay double licensing fees (one of MP3, one for AAC) and MP3 is vastly more popular than AAC especially overseas.Most portable audio players do support AAC. Heck Apple by themselves make most portable music players. Add to that Sony and MS and a few others and you're really looking at a large chunk of the hardware market.
Why do they include WMA? Because WMA really doesn't have any licensing fees, and it's as much of an "open standard" as AAC.Umm, WMA does have license fees. Most players pay them because they are trying to reach the download market and Apple won't license them to play Fairplay protected AAC files. Now that Fairplay is moving out of the picture, a lot more hardware players will probably start supporting AAC as well.
Apple has no serious interest in promoting AAC as an independent codec. AAC/FairPlay is an important "feature" of iPods and licensing it...Actually, Appe has a direct financial interest in promoting AAC, as an independent codec because it enables iPod sales, which is how they make their money. Apple runs their iTMS at about break even in order to sell iPods. More sources for music for iPods means even more iPod sales.
...would only cut into their lucrative iPod business. It's the same reason they'll never license MacOS.Think about it. Apple won't license OS X because it is their differentiator without it, they are just selling off the shelf hardware. It is the real value for a Mac. For iPods, the real value is the hardware and interface. Most people don't ever put any DRM encoded AAC files on them. I think the figure is something like 2.5% for all music on iPods is fairplay protected. That is a pretty insignificant lock-in, not really worth protecting compared to the added sales Apple can get from having everyone using their standard and not using MS's. Apple cannot, however, license fairplay because MS could use it for an embrace and extend and almost certainly would.
Ogg and FLAC aren't widely supported, despite being royalty-free, because of lack of popularity. It just isn't worth it to support these formats. I own one of the very few players that does, the Rio Karma. And yeah, I use FLAC a lot.Ogg and FLAC are not particularly well supported commercially. AAC is. Apple and Sony are both behind it. Assuming the move to DRMless music downloads actually happens and is successful, WMA will almost certainly be pushed out of the portable music scene and MP3 may slowly decline as well.
This is true, and ripping from CD also provides a large amount of the music that fills the average player. Nonetheless, there is some evidence that both of these market chunks can be partially taken by the legal, paid download market. Further, nothing ties the P2P market to the MP3 format and it will tend to mimic whatever formats appear elsewhere. Already there are a lot of WMA files on P2P networks and some AAC.
Luckily for Apple they got on that soon and appropriately enough to enjoy a huge cashflow from it, but if they expect that model to last in the long run (10+ years), I'm pretty sure they're in for a rude awakening.The last I heard, Apple runs their service at about break even. Technically that is a cash flow, but one that is flexible and scales to usage. They aren't counting on it for profit. Apple would be even happier if all music was free to everyone because they view it only as a way to sell iPods.
Umm, first, wikipedia is not really a source. It is an encyclopedia. Second, I asked for a source for which chipsets currently in use for portable players support AAC and the relative costs of them. That link does not provide that information. It is still an open question as to whether buying a chipset that supports AAC is a significant increase in cost for player manufacturers. For all you know, most already use a chip that has support they are not utilizing.
AAC is patented, and requires a license to use. AAC content is free to distribute in, but codec makers (including hardware OEMs) must cough up royalties to use AAC legally. Obviously, this adds cost.They are already paying such fees for WMA and for MP3, and in addition music sellers are paying fees for those codecs. If the cost of adding AAC support is the same as WMA, for example, what hardware manufacturer would not want to add it in order to gain access to the large part of the market that is current iPod/iTMS users currently inaccessible to them?
Companies like Creative, Archos, and others may do so, but unless people absolutely demand the feature, they just may not bother, because most people with AAC files are using iPods anyway.Have you ever put together a market profile? Usually a large chunk of any market is already someone else's customer. You don't ignore that chunk, as it is a proven, paying market. You look for ways to convert that chunk of the market. Almost all those iPod users are going to buy a new device sometime in the next few years. The trick is to get them to consider something other than an iPod.
Yes, you are right, MP3 files are bigger, but as I stated previously, they work everywhere, in virtually every device. This is why eMusic and other stores offer downloads in this format.Most stores, however, do not provide MP3 downloads. They provide either AAC (Apple) or WMA (almost everyone else). Apple is obviously sticking with AAC. WMA stores probably cannot ditch WMA outright so they will be looking at other options in addition, which means their store needs to be able to offer multiple formats. If they add MP3 (which many will) they have to pay a license fee for the format and the bandwidth cost higher than WMA for each song. If they add AAC they don't have to pay a license fee and the download cost is about the same as WMA. That means every AAC they can sell makes them more money than a WMA or an MP3. You don't think a lot of them are going to offer that format to try to make more on sales to the ~80% of the market that can play them?
AAC is not something Creative "can't afford not to make". It would be nice to have that functionality, but it won't be a make or break for any product. For example, the Zune has the ability to play any unprotected AAC files, and that has not noticably affected its sales either positively or negatively.Sigh. Yes, that is true, today. This article is about what changes to the market will occur because of EMI's willingness to sell non-DRM'd files and Apple's agreement with them and the likelihood of other labels being forced to follow suit. Last week Creative had little incentive to add AAC. Today, Creative had better be considering it if they have a clue. In a year if the DRMless download thing becomes a functional reality, it may well be a feature they must have if they're going to stay in business.
Apple has been in the 70% range for quite a while. Sony has been putting AAC support in all their players, including the Walkman, for some time as well. Even the Zune has support for it.
my car stereo has been working fine for 5 years, and I don't see a need to replace it anytime soon. It only plays MP3s (well, besides CDs). My DVD player plays MP3s.Car stereos that play MP3s are still an insignificant chunk of the market at this point. Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 play AAC and while those numbers are not huge yet, they are growing.
I think a lot of posters are really underestimating the number of MP3-only devices out there.There is no doubt that mp3 is a lot more common than AAC, but I'm not sure that difference will be sufficient to stop AAC from winning the market now that DRM is out of the picture. I suspect you'll have a hard time buying a portable player that does not support it in the next few years. You'll already have a hard time finding decent jukebox software that does not support it. I expect it to at least be an option from most download services in the next 2 years. Blue-ray players both include support for AAC because it is part of the spec. Realistically, the market for AAC is probably larger than the market for WMA, once the DRM is removed, and that is the point of this article. As to whether or not it will replace MP3, I think it probable, but we'll have to see.
I currently live just outside of Ann Arbor, MI. I'm between a large university and a huge one. My commute to work is 20 minutes. Ann Arbor has more bookstores per person than any other place in the eastern half of the US. There are literally dozens of small book stores within walking distance of me right now as well as the original Borders. There are probably 50-100 restaurants within walking distance of work. There is a huge county library with an amazing collection of historical documents and rare books and a university run library within walking distance. There is another library a few blocks from my house and yet another massive library a few minutes drive from my house. There is live theater in several places every weekend, a couple of improve comedy places, lots of live music everywhere. I might mention Google just started up their business here this last year and are committed to hiring on 5000 people in the next few years. We're always hiring experienced coders.
Well, there's the corn festival, but you get the idea.This weekend is the "hash bash" festival where everyone goes downtown and smokes pot and people set up sales of artwork and bongs and things. I think it is a $50 fine for possession here. There are art exhibitions and festivals all the time. In the giant park a short walk from my home there are a dozen different festivals every summer including one of the largest beer tasting festivals in the country, an annual elvis impersonator event, and a antique car show devoted to cars from companies that no longer exist.
I'd rather be broke in an interesting place than rich in a boring place.That is, of course, your choice. My point is people whining about the high cost of living driving work away should either quite their bitching or solve the problem. There is plently of middle ground in the US where things are happening and it is a fun place to live, but the housing prices are not crazy. (As I mentioned before, my medium sized house in the downtown of an outlying area cost ~$120K.)
But there still isn't that much to do in small town USA, and the mindset can be stifling if you're from a blue state way of thinking.The only thing I think you might need pointed out to you, is your choice is not the middle of nowhere in Iowa or San Francisco. There is plenty of middle ground. Every state has a few college towns with some night life and interesting things happening and they are relatively inexpensive to live. You don't have to choose between poor and bored. You can be moderately amused and with cash in your pocket.
You completely misunderstood the feature. You boot the old G3/G4 machine in firewire mode, which basically makes it act like and external firewire drive. You plug it in to your new Intel machine and click a button in the installer to migrate everything over. It does not clone the the drive, it intelligently migrates everything. This means applications that are universal binaries work natively and applications that are PPC run transparently using the rosetta feature. This works more smoothly than any other migration system I've ever used, pulling over accounts, settings, security certs, data, applications, kernel extensions, and everything else that matters. If the Intel machine's install software includes new applications that is more up to date than your old applications, both are installed and functional when the Intel machine is finished.
Consider this scenario. You sell WMA files, but as a result can only reach 25% of the music download market. Bob from engineering comes in and says, "hey we can finally start selling non-DRMed files now that the RIAA has come around. This means we can sell MP3 files and reach 100% of the market for the same cost per song in licensing+bandwidth. We can also sell AAC files which will reach 80% of the market for 15% less per song in licensing+bandwidth."
Do you:
- A) ignore this potential new market and stick with WMP exclusively
- B) start offering all 3 formats and try to push the one that makes you the most money (AAC)
- C) switch over to just one other format
I think the onus lies on Apple, not the others, to adopt support for DRM-free WMA (and other formats) in their players.So you expect Apple to start paying MS a fee for each iPod they sell in order to use the WMA format? And seeing as they have not done so up until now, why do you think this huge incentive for people to instead change to use AAC will convince Apple to change? Apple, Microsoft, and Sony currently all support AAC on their players, as well as numerous other hardware manufacturers. I don't see the player with 75% of the market share switching now and trying to conform to the 15% or so that supports WMA and not AAC.
Statistically speaking, for each of your players, there are 7-8 players out there that do support AAC. You're in a minority. Since selling AAC files will make retailers more money (30% decreased bandwidth fees) I'm guessing a lot of retailers will start offering them as an option, if not as the only format for sale. Since most retailers will be offering them most hardware manufacturers will most likely soon start supporting AAC, thus your next player probably will support it. Even if hardware vendors don't care about what music retailers are selling and are concentrating mostly on the ripping CDs market (most people) how many of them do you think will ignore the opportunity to make it easier for them to steal customers from Apple by supporting the same format as the iPod?
Well, last I saw Apple had approximately 75% of the total portable digital music player market. Add to that the Zune and various other players with support for AAC and you're still looking at greater than 75% of the total market retailers will be selling to.
Have you ever used that? It works for some generic settings, for IE, and for Outlook. I don't think it works for migrating any other software you have installed. I don't think it copies over your security certs or registration info either and I'm not even sure it copies over your user accounts and user files. If id does any of those things, it did not work for me or I could not figure out how.
It may actually do that. Think of it this way, if you're selling music what is the best format? MP3 costs a per song royalty and costs more in bandwidth and takes more time for your users, but is supported in all players. AAC does not cost a per song royalty costs less in bandwidth and downloads faster and is currently supported by 80% or so of players. Probably you will consider offering both, but it is entirely possible that you'll push the AAC since it saves you money. It is further possible that the remaining 20% of hardware vendors will also respond to you and to Apple's marketing power and switch to make it easier for them to steal customers from the incumbents.
I'm not saying it is a foregone conclusion, but it is certainly possible that the industry will finally move to the newer standard because of this (AAC is a newer version of the mpeg audio format, that mp3 was also part of).
Do you have a source to back that up or is it just a guess on your part. AAC is part of the mpeg standard and a lot of chipsets have support for that. I'd be interested to know if chips that support AAC are significantly more expensive than ones that don't.
With disk space being relatively cheap, the size difference of a MP3 file ripped in alt-preset-standard or alt-preset-extreme versus the size of a similar bitrate file in another format is less of an issue.A lot of people can't fit their collection on their player and if the standard quality of files goes up to match Apple's offering, that effect will double. Also, it is not just disk space that is an issue. File size affects the cost of bandwidth to deliver the songs, which can add up for an online store and it affects how quickly users can download the songs, which might be a differentiator for a market that is such a commodity.
AAC is a good format, but its another "standard" in a crowded field of compressed music file formats.If I were an MP3 player manufacturer, here is how I would look at it: the number one online store for music has been closed to me thus far, but it is just now opening up and becoming a resource I can capitalize on to sell players... if I support AAC with my player. 75% of current portable player owners (which make up most of the new purchaser market) currently have iPods. If they're looking at alternatives to the iPod and I can make a move to my player easier than a move to a different competitor's player by supporting the format they're already using, that may be a very big win for me.
Obviously each manufacturer will have to do a cost/value analysis for themselves to see if it makes sense, but I suspect players that support AAC are about to go from Apple and MS, to almost everyone within a few iterations. A week ago creative had basically no motivation to support AAC. Today, it may be a move they can't afford not to make.
I disagree. This is likely to change the relative popularity of MP3 and AAC. There are several reasons for this. First, the iTunes store is currently the most popular of the online music services and likely will be the first one taking advantage of this offer. As a result, a lot of MP3 manufacturers are going to be looking to add AAC support to their player to capitalize upon Apple's work and to make transition easy for existing iPod users. This will expand the potential market for AAC files from iPods and Zune, to almost all portable players. With that change, a lot more music services will consider using the AAC format either instead of or in addition to MP3.
Second, right now almost all commercial services require DRM. That means such a service must choose to either use WMA, RealMedia, or roll their own solution. Support for Real is nonexistent among hardware vendors, so they target WMA as the easiest solution. Very few commercial services offer MP3. So how does this event change things? All those WMA offerings are now going to be looking for format for non-DRM'd files that targets the iPod. That rules out WMA. So they are probably going to be choosing AAC or MP3 or both. MP3 is probably a little cheaper for licensing and has wider support, but AAC allows for smaller files for the same level of audio quality, saving bandwidth costs and speeding up downloads. Further, record companies will have already converted masters to sampled AAC for Apple, possibly making that a preference from them.
I don't see that MP3 or AAC will immediately dominate for DRM free music sales, but I bet Apple is not the only major store selling AAC downloads by then end of 2008.
This never worked 100% for me. I always ran into some configuration setting or kernel extension or a Web certificate or something that was not stored in my home dir. Also, I run a lot of commercial software that is not stored in any repository, and all of that needed to be reinstalled and re-registered. Fonts were often an issue as well, as I have a large collection for my work and like them to be accessible to multiple user accounts on my workstations.
These days Linux lives in a virtual machine image and OS X manages to migrate everything over from old machines to new ones, including Linux and Windows VMs.
In business, it's always about money. This study was debunking the fact that some businesses were claiming it was not about lower salaries, which is somewhat different. In truth, I've worked on a few projects that involved outsourcing both in the US and overseas and while it was always about money, relative salaries was a pretty small concern. We outsourced because we had trouble finding enough local talent and because we had short term needs that required expertise we did not have in house, but which would have cost a lot unnecessarily to do ourselves.
In contrast, I know of several cases where companies outsourced core parts of their business, resulting in a short term benefit on paper, but a long term loss. Once an outsourced company has expertise in what you do (on your dime) they will raise prices or they will stop working for you and start competing with you. Of course by then the executive who made the decision already took his big bonus home and moved on to another company to repeat the process.
Actually more and more companies are looking not to outsourced Indian developers and support staff, but to outsourced and even satellite office US developers and supports staff. The problem is not that housing and cost of living is too high in the US. The problem is the housing and cost of living is too high in expensive areas of California and that is what most Slashdot readers pay attention to.
This is interesting because I was in a meeting this morning with our director of engineering where this exact issue was discussed. Some places in San Francisco a medium sized house costs you 5 million and 60K in taxes a year. My medium sized house in a normal part of the US cost about 120K and I pay a few grand in taxes on it a year. There are places in the midwest where amidst the corn fields you'll come upon an island formed by a university, a small town, and support facilities for a dozen major international corporations.
My advice to you, if you live in CA, move somewhere affordable. If you are looking to hire talent, look to a satellite office somewhere that is not crazily expensive. If you're looking to outsource development or support, there are cost competitive American companies with a lot smaller risk and cheaper travel expenses that Indian companies.
If you're setting up a Mac and you already have one Mac, try the firewire upgrade option. It will copy over all your data, applications, X11, updates, dev tools, MS Office, security certs, etc. while you go get lunch. It is so much easier than, well, anything else I've used.
You boot the old computer in Firewire mode by holding down a key. You plug in a firewire cable to the new computer. You click the install from old computer button. You go get some coffee and a bagel.
So basically, it takes me about 60 seconds and it takes the computer an hour or so. That includes pulling over my Windows and Linux desktop installs within a VM. Seriously, this is one of the main reasons OS X is my base workstation OS instead of Linux. Who wants to waste a bunch of time manually copying things over, only to find not all of it works anyway and you still have to reinstall a few things and tweak a few more?