wbwither

If it burns out, there's no reason why you couldn't just crack it back open and swap in a new LED. That's probably easier than the hack in the first place!

The problem here is that music is not something that can be consistently monetized. Any new music medium (whether cassette tape, CD, iTunes, Future Google Music Medium, etc.) will start off with a huge back catalog of music to sell. Albums going all the way back to the beginning of music recording. So people who had a whole collection of Beatles LP's went back and bought the entire Beatles catalog on CD when they came out. This kind of thing inflated CD sales for the initial period of CD adoption. After that, sales slowly started to trickle down. The same thing should be expected of any new music medium, including iTunes. There's no way that the current pace of iTunes music sales can be sustained indefinitely. There's simply not that much new music being recorded. Eventually most people going to have pretty much all the music they want, and buy maybe 5 albums' worth of new music per year.

Two side notes:

1) Physical media (LP, cassette tape, CD) can be re-sold. Digital media (iTunes et al) cannot. The secondary market for iTunes Music is 0. In the CD age, we had a lot of "music nuts" being able to sustain large levels of music purchases by continually selling back their old CD's. This is impossible with iTunes or other purely-digital music, so (unless music becomes substantially cheaper) I don't think the digital "churn rate" will be nearly as high as it was for CD's.

2) In the past, there were very limited means to transfer music from one medium to the next. You could copy tape-to-tape but it lost quality. Burning CD's took time and a bit of money. Copying a digital music file takes little time and no money (aside from the hard drive space, which is renewable -- just delete the file). At the moment, a CD is close enough to being a "perfect master" that can be morphed with little effort and minimal loss of quality into any other medium, analog or digital.

Lastly, I doubt that music companies could make a profit based solely off of their current artists. Back catalog sales make or break the industry. The thing that everybody's realized, but that nobody talks about, is that the cat's out of the bag with respect to the back catalog. CD's were DRM-free, and you can find pretty much any recording on CD, rip it to a digital audio file, and then share it with the entire world. Therefore, the "cash cow" for music labels is on its way to the slaughterhouse. The iTunes explosion was probably the last chance the labels had to monetize it effectively. Moving forward, NOBODY will buy the same music over again.

The same thing is going to happen with video too, but it won't be as drastic, as there are still improvements to be made to video quality etc. Also, I don't think that the film industry is as reliant on the back catalog as the music industry, although I have no numbers to back that up.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that monetizing music is going to be increasingly difficult, regardless of whether it's Google or Apple or Microsoft that's doing it. I really don't see where MS is going with the Zune. It's obvious to me and most others that the iPod is Apple's Trojan Horse to get into people's houses, heads and hearts. And it's working. The music biz is just a means to an end for Apple. That's why I'm scratching my head over the Zune.

As for Google? Actually, what you say does make sense, and it may be the only money-making avenue left for music. "Making all music free (except for advertising)" is heading in the right direction, trend-wise. Eventually music will be free outright -- really, it already is among those willing to break the law.

@valtheWU: As noted above, I use a 20" Dell (LMAO @ McDreamy BTW) @ 1600x1200 with my MacBook and have had no noticable graphics problems except for the aforementioned bit of jerkiness when using Exposé's "show all windows" function when I've got 20 or so windows open. But as a caveat, I have not tried any sort of gaming, especially not 3D-accelerated gaming. As a further caveat, I have it set up as a single-monitor setup with the MacBook closed and sitting below my desk on top of my PC.

And to whoever asked, yes, if you unplug the monitor to take your lappy on the road, then everything goes back to normal. And it goes immediately back to the changed settings when you plug the monitor back in.

@Mark2000: What are you talking about? I've got a MacBook (2.0GHz CD Superdrive) hooked up to a Dell 20" LCD @ 1200x1600 and have no problems. Ok, maybe Exposé is a bit less-than-perfectly-smooth when I've got 20+ windows open, but other than that, it works fine.

It doesn't *really* matter as long as everybody is comparing apples to apples. As to your podcast example -- a download counts as a "listen." Even if only (say) 50% of those downloads are actually listened to all the way through, it's still an apples-to-apples comparison. Maybe there's a range there. Maybe for some podcasts, 70% actually listen and for others only 30% listen. But I would think that (on average) the listen to not-listen ratio is pretty similar across all podcasts, and therefore it's just a scaling factor across all podcasts. So call it 50%. So if I'm comparing two podcasts' popularity (say one gets 20k downloads and the other gets 10k downloads) then the actual "listens" are only 10k and 5k -- but #1 still has twice the audience of #2. It's still apples to apples.

I don't get it either. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when Yahoo! bought Flickr and "forced" Flickr users to get a Yahoo! ID (see URL below, where I evidently got "verbally owned" in the comments). I didn't understand it then, and I don't understand it now.

http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2005/08/29/flickr-and-yahoo-please-support-open-identity-standards/

Personally, I disliked Yahoo! for a long time. I used it in the early days of the "Online Directory/Portal" and found it to be, usually, quite lacking. Once the Internet matured somewhat (and I started using a graphical browser) I hated the cluttered homepage and generally found no use for Yahoo! once I started using Google. But over time, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Mail, Fantasy Sports and other services have made me into a Yahoo! fan. I still don't visit the front page or use Yahoo! for search, though.

I think a lot of people want to see more movies than they actually do. I know that's the case for me. I'll see a trailer on TV and think "Hey! I want to see that!" but I never get around to it, and before I know it it's not in the theaters any more (and then I think "Hey! I need to rent that DVD!" and I usually don't do that either). The main problem is inertia. My tendency is to stay at home. It's kind of a hassle to look what's playing where and when, and then set up plans with my friends or significant other to go and actually see the movie. It usually requires some spur-of-the-moment planning, which is always more difficult. Either that or it's so low-key ("Hey, we could see a movie tonight." "Yeah, we could do that." "Let's look into it" and we both go back to watching TV) so we end up wasting time until it's 9:00 and the only movies left won't end till after midnight. On the other hand, if I'm planning something for next week, it's easy to look things up and get it all set up. But if it's 7:30 and I'm looking for a movie between now and 9:00 within 10 miles of me, I've got to scrounge around for the paper or navigate different websites and see what's going on. No thanks. But planning my movie nights a week in advance is ridiculous too. Nobody does that. And therein lies the opportunity: Give people a way to do just that, and I think they will. My idea is simple: Sell subscriptions. Every week, the same time, the same place, there will be a movie to watch that is tailored to my preferences. I'll buy the tickets as a package for 10 weeks in a row and say to my significant other, "Thursday night at 7:00PM is now Movie Night and we're going for the next 10 weeks." All in one package, X number of movies, at the same time, same location, every week or every two weeks or every month. The key is just to have a regular schedule, and give people a slight discount and convince them that the films will be something they want to see. Maybe it's a mix of old films and new films. Maybe they all share a theme or a genre. Maybe each week there's actually several choices (sell it as a "Marital Bliss Pack": each week there's a guy action movie, a goofy comedy, a girly romantic comedy, and a high-concept drama to choose from, so the guy gets his pick one week, and the woman gets her pick the next) -- but all the movies start at the same time and are being shown in the same multiplex, week after week after week. Maybe even have post-film coffee and discussions so that people with the same subscriptions can get to know each other over time, so it becomes a social event as well.

I think you're right in one way, wrong in another. Commercials are going "back to the future," but not in exactly the way you predict. Back when TV was a new medium, every show had a sponsor. The sponsor's products were sprinkled throughout the show, and the whole show was basically a long commercial. That idea is coming back with shows like "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." The show is an hour-long feel-good commercial for Sears. Craftsman tools, Kenmore appliances, furniture, bedding, you name it. Sears always has a minute-long "actual commercial" near the end of the show, but the show itself usually has a segment where they go to Sears to pick out furniture or whatnot. Plus Kenmore, Craftsman, etc. are mentioned throughout. I really don't think Sears could ask for a better "commercial."

I don't really have a philosophical problem with tiered service, but I guess I'm just wondering how it would actually work. It takes about 25 hops from me to blogmaverick.com, across at least 5 networks. My connection to blogmaverick is only as fast as the slowest network or router along the way. Given routing algorithms which were designed in the 70's for nuclear-proof reliability and re-routability rather than optimal speed, I just don't understand how such a thing would work. It would require a very high level of cooperation across all ISP's along the chain. What if I pay for this service from my ISP, but the blogmaverick.com network doesn't pay for access to the same nets? Kind of wastes my money, doesn't it? I really just don't know how such technical leaps can be taken without fundamentally screwing with the fundamental IP-routing fabric of the Internet. It'd be great if it could happen, but we're talking about at least a decade before it can all be well-designed and finally trickle down to all Internet users. Think about it: Cisco and other companies will have to come out with new routers and other equipment, at all levels of the network (from fiberoptic backbone to home WiFi). Operating systems programmers would have to rewrite their network stacks. IP devices such as phones, televisions and anything else would have to be upgraded. If you've got a link or some explanation of how it can happen, or current plans to make it happen, I'd be happy to read it.

No idea why they opened this one where they did. It's less than 4 miles from an existing Apple Store, and this new store is only the 3rd one in the Dallas area. They chould have put it in Fort Worth, Irving, Grapevine, anywhere but there. It's practically right on top of the original Dallas Apple Store (in Highland Park).

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=8687+North+Central+Expressway+dallas+tx&daddr=3101+Knox+St,+Dallas,+TX+75205&ll=32.843106,-96.777878&spn=0.065477,0.105228