the art of writing is discovering what you believe
With GarageBand, iTunes, iPhoto,iMovie and iDVD you have five superb tools in your creative hands.
Well, I already have three of them, so the iLife package is all about iDVD and GarageBand (not iJam or iRecord?).
And interestingly, this looks to be the beginning of a subscription plan. Not that that’s a bad thing . . . .
Howard Dean: Winning Back America
Better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity, than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
BW Online | January 7, 2004 | A maxiPrice for Apple’s miniPod
Yeah, I can see the argument here:
Here are the hard numbers. The new miniPod will cost $249. That’s about $100 more than the rumor sites had posited. It will offer 4 gigabytes of capacity on its hard drive. By comparison, the entry-level iPod now costs $299 and has 15 gigabytes of disk space. The miniPod’s cost per gigabyte is $62.50. In the entry-level iPod, it’s about $20.
So Apple is asking customers to pay three times as much per gigabyte. I have one word for that. Ouch.
But again, with Apple products, design — both look-and-feel and functionality — is the intangible that moves boxes. Not everyone prices the individual components of the stuff they buy and the iPod is more than just the storage it comes with.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, of course. I’m not sure a *smaller* iPod was what the market was clamoring for, but then if Apple is planning to make video a component of future devices, this may not be the only form factor variation we see.
As yesterday’s winter wonderland turns into a mushy mess, we find ourselves icebound. The roads are not clear enough yet (at least on the side streets) and the sledding potential has been washed away, literally.
As with Shackleton’s expedition, morale has to be maintained before it becomes a problem.
Posted with ecto
What’s so cool about GarageBand is that it exemplifies the market that Apple is going after. People who want to use their computers to make cool things. People who want to be producers, not just consumers. If it’s possible to distill into a single thought what it is that makes Apple Apple, and what has made the Macintosh so enduringly popular, that’s it.
That’s why Apple’s industry-wide PC market share numbers are nearly meaningless. The vast majority of Wintel PCs are used as little more than modern-day typewriters. They’re just office equipment.
PC pundits pound their heads against the wall, asking why, if Apple only sells a small percentage of computers, the company receives such a disproportionate amount of media attention. The answer is simply that they’re selling the best computers, to the most interesting people. Maybe it is only two percent of the total PC market, but it’s the most interesting two percent.
I have called PCs “typewriters with TV screens” for years: in my experience, most people use them as a terminal, rather than a computer. You don’t need 1+GHz of CPU to type correspondence or manage email, and the fees associated with meaningless software upgrades (does Office 2000 do a better job of “taking a letter” than Office 97 did?) make it a subscription that has to be maintained, whether you get anything out of it or not.
A friend writes:
This Saturday at 13:37:04 UTC (08:37:04 EST, 05:37:04 PST) is
the midpoint of the range of time representable as a signed 32-bit
time_t value.
Posted with ecto
As threatened/predicted, we got a good dumping of snow: four inches here at Thistle Dew and environs, so some sledding was on for this morning (two excursions before lunchtime).
Schools are closed and I’ll be surprised if they re-open tomorrow. The snow was supposed to turn to rain at midday, but instead it intensified, then just stopped, with no change in the temperature. So it’s just staying as it was.
Highs are projected for the mid-40s tomorrow, though, so rain or not, our winter wonderland may be down the drain by the weekend.
Everything you love about iPod just got tinier. iPod mini lets you bring along enough music for a three-day weekend getaway in a package so small you’ll forget you’re carrying it. Until people ask you about it, that is.
Cute little things, aren’t they?
Not as cheap as rumored (the sweet spot was supposed to be $200 or less), so I’m curious about the strategy there. If $50 is all that separates you from an additional 11 Gb (4 Gb to 15), what’s the point?
Posted with ecto
Current Watches, Warnings and Advisories for Washington Issued by the National Weather Service
TWO TO FOUR INCHES OF NEW SNOW ARE EXPECTED ALONG THE COAST…WITH 3 TO 6 INCHES JUST INLAND FROM THE COASTAL STRIP.
TWO TO FOUR INCHES ARE EXPECTED IN THE SEATTLE AREA … WITH 3 TO 6 INCHES EXPECTED NORTH AND EAST OF DOWNTOWN SEATTLE.
LIGHT SNOW OR FLURRIES WILL BEGIN FALLING ALONG THE COAST THIS EVENING … BECOMING STEADY AND HEAVY AT TIMES BY MIDNIGHT. THE SNOW WILL GRADUALLY SPREAD NORTH AND EAST THROUGH THE EVENING … BECOMING HEAVY AT TIMES OVER PUGET SOUND TOWARDS MORNING. SNOWFALL WILL BECOME HEAVY AT TIMES OVER THE NORTH INTERIOR AROUND SUNRISE.
Food? check
Hot cocoa fixings? check
Sled? check
OK, we’re ready
Electrolite: Nailing the “Information Please” fifth column.
They’re missing a bet though. If they think the stuff in almanacs is bad they should take a look at tourist guidebooks.
The important part, as I realized this morning, is that — like most English words begining with “al” — “almanac” is an Arabic word. “Encyclopedia,” “map,” and “tourist guidebook” are not.
So what’s a good english/american word we can use to refer to these books instead of an obviously dangerous Arabic one?