Recent Comments:
Microsoft hints at a free-with-subscription flash Zune {Engadget}
Apr 5th 2007 3:05PM [I'm a Microsoft employee but not on anything Zune related]
> Eventually you'll want to buy a new player, and the one you really want then might not use the same subscription service (if it uses any at all), and so any organization and rating systems you put a lot of work into will not transfer. <
You will be so much more screwed if you paid for a lot of DRMed tracks and those don't transfer. Now you've lost organization and rating systems AND THE MUSIC TOO.
> I listen to a lot of new music through alternative means such as pandora and others, but I doubt I hear more than 18 albums or 180 songs per year that are really worth listening to more than a couple of times. <
You might be surprised how signing up for a subscription service changes your listening habits. I listen to whole new genres of music that I never would have tried before.
> If you never listen to the same thing twice, then a subscription service makes sense. <
I'm sure you meant that as hyperbole but I wanted to point it out for the benefit of other readers. The music that I listen to tends to have a halflife of 3-6 months. So of those 54 albums over 3 years, I'd still be interested in... well, I don't have time to do the math but it's a small subset. If your interest in any given piece of music is likely to decrease over time (and whose musical tastes don't change as the years go by? Think back to where you were five years ago, do you listen to all of those same songs?) then depending on the shape and slope of that curve, subscription music might be for you. From my experience, way more people would benefit from subscription music if they only thought rationally about it.
But even if I had to pay a slight price premium for subscription music, I would do it; the freedom from having to make a purchasing decision each time I think about downloading a song is very powerful. It's like the difference between shooting with a digital camera versus a film one.
Apple Mac Pros: now with 8-cores {Engadget}
Apr 4th 2007 2:34PM The problem with this argument is the 8-core 3.0GHz Mac Pro is the very best value in that lineup while the 8-core 2.66GHz Dell is the very worst value in its lineup. For 4-core 2.66GHz, the equivalent Dell (Precision 390 QX6700) is $300 cheaper. Or you can spend $500 less on the exact same machine with 2 cores instead of 4--that's $1678 for performance that will be very close to the megabuck 8-core 2.66GHz model for most people, most of the time. Better yet, apply some of that difference to more RAM, better graphics card, and get a better balanced computer for a lot less. Hell, get two!
Mac Pros are expensive in the way that high end Porsches are expensive. They're a great value because comparable Ferraris cost a lot more. But what if all you wanted was a BMW?
