Slashback: Drives, Pods, OEMs 392
Drive-n to strong drink and harsh words. Kenneth Yu writes: "You might recall the overwhelming response to a recent 'Ask Slashdot' regarding the abnormally high failure rates of IBM 75GXP Hard drives, and the pulling of all 75GXP from Pair Networks' Servers. A class action lawsuit has been filed by Michael Granido, Jr., on behalf of himself and all others similarly situated. You can view the complaint in PDF format at http://www.sheller.com/IBM_complaint.pdf. This story was initially reported by Tech Report (http://www.tech-report.com)."
Apropos that, jriskin writes: "Storagereview.com has its new reliability database up and running. I have no affiliation with the site, but it only benifits the community to have as many people contribute as possible. The database is a listing of hard drives and whether or not they have failed, when they were purchased, etc. So get over there and put in all your HD data!" Things like this could help eliminate the anecdotal-only nature of many of hardware complaints, especially if people who are happy with their hardware bother to report it.
Falling far from a tree has nothing to do with it. Majik writes "A quick correction - the iPod has *10* gigs of storage, not 5 (or 6 like the Nomad). And with the Firewire interface you can move an entire CD in under a minute. Although I admit I was hoping for more out of the product announcement, it's still pretty darn cool ... "
On the other hand, jchristopher writes: "Love it or hate it, Apple's new iPod digital music player is here. Yesterday, many people commented that "at least it has no copy protection" and praised Apple's attitude toward digital music. Unfortunately, this may not be the case - according to this New York Times article, the iPod does indeed have copy protection - MP3 files copied to the iPod from one Mac to the iPod CAN'T be offloaded onto a different computer. Ouch!" That means (at least without further hacking) it can't be used as a transfer medium between the G3 and work and the iMac kept hidden in your darkest closet, which is sort of a shame considering that it has all the right things built in to be even better than the several portable firewire drives on the market.
Unorginal Equipment Makers. An Anonymous Coward writes: "This is a follow-up on a previous story posted to Slashdot about Microsoft's anti-competitive OEM contracts." It's a report by German journalist Erik Möller (hi, Erik!), who too an extremely thorough look at the details of OEM bundling deals, and what they mean to customers. Möller's conclusion: "No operating system will ever be able to compete with Microsoft Windows on the desktop market as long as OEMs cannot legally install it besides Windows without losing their license."
'Technical meaures' covers a pretty broad swath. Robotech_Master writes "The RIAA has responded to the 'license to virus' story, calling it a false Internet rumor and explaining their side of the story." So the RIAA officially does not want a license to hack, at least on paper.
Will MS get away with this one? (Score:3, Insightful)
The government can, and does, impose anti-competitive tariffs and have it still be legal. Congressmen can, and do, give targeted anti-competitive breaks to companies and it is still legal. Patents are legal, 17-year, permits to be anti-competitive. Max, you have yet to define what "anti-competitive" means other than to say it is illegal and it is what Microsoft does.
That, my friend, is exactly what you would expect in a low transactional cost market. This is a market where the Cost of Goods sold is less than 0.1% of the product price. For sake of argument, zero transactional cost. Assume three potential companies start with equal shares of the market. Natural perturbations will cause them to become unequal. The one with the larger share will then have more money for advertising, research, etc. This will cause the share to increase even more. It is a positive feed-back loop.
You may not like anti-competitive effects of Marketing but it is very effective and it is legal. It is especially effective on the herd mentality that was brain-washed by a generation of TV commercials telling them that expensive Brand Name products are much better than low-cost alternatives.
Yes, it is very possible for a new, low transactional cost market to become dominated through legal means. Call it FUD, call it Vaporware, call it Marketing. In the United States, call it legal.
Did Microsoft violate Section 2? I think it did. It is virtually impossible to be a monopoly and not be guilty of maintaining a monopoly. But it may be possible monopolization is inevitable in this market. Even the DoJ lawyer didn't answer the Appellate Court question "We are going to replace one monopoly with another if you're right; right?"
Portable firewire HD... (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.archos.com/us/products/product_50004
Archos has a 20 GB model, it is larger, but I would assume it would be faster- (I can't see having a 7200 RPM drive on an mp3 player, but IMBR), and $100 cheaper (search the net for a better price) for 2x the storage.
Also, it IS five gigabytes, unless apple.com's lying:
http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html
I would assume that the person who submitted the
Re:10 Gigs? (Score:1, Insightful)
My PowerBook G3 Firewire was advertised as having a 20GB hard drive. When it landed on my doorstep it had only 18.
Ditto with my other PowerBook G3, the original PowerBook G3, which was supposed to have 5GB but ended up with scarcely more than 4GB.
They always play around with hard drive capacities at Apple, and when you call them on it, they give you lame excuses like, a) your Desktop file takes up space and it's invisible so you can't tell (BS), or b) a gigabyte really means 1 billion bytes, the impression that it means 1024 * 1024 * 1024 is errorneous (more BS).
To be brutally honest, if you order a product from Apple, you're buying it cause it looks pretty. Be happy that if you order a bondi iMac you get something that is approximately blue.
Purple counts as blue by the way.
If you can do that, you'll be a happy Apple customer.
Juicy Rumors! (Score:3, Insightful)
What I have heard is that the drive in the iPod is none other than the Toshiba 5GB PC Card Hard Disk Drive [toshiba.com], which itself is worthy of GadgetLust. Yep, that iPod's got a Type II PC Card slot in there, just waiting to be upgraded when Toshiba releases a 10-gigger (which probably won't be more than 6 months). If it's not a PC card drive, it's certainly the embedded version of the same drive, and hopefully will be eminently hackable. Here's to rumors, rumours, and the Apple stock I bought after the WTC bombings
Transfer functions limited by music industry? (Score:2, Insightful)
In response to your post, I do hope that two-way transferring isn't a problem.
That said...
Thinking about the iPod, I can't help but realise that the use of FireWire is very understated -- basically, it is being used only as a conduit between your computer and the iPod. But wait a second -- FireWire is a device-to-device bus, unlike USB. So do we really need the computer?
Imagine -- being able to transfer music files, playlists, etc. to your buddies by simply attaching a FireWire cable between two iPods. Why not?
Technologically, this is probably a no-brainer. But being Apple, I would have to assume they would be all over this if it were a real feature. It seems that you can only transfer music to the iPod and back to your (or another) Mac. This seems to preclude transferring data and music between iPods, which would be truly a ground-breaking improvement over existing portable music devices.
So, why is this (most assuredly) artificial limitation in place? My guess is pressure on Apple from the music industry (RIAA et al). Thoughts?
-Lunatic