Category: Apple

In our IM conversation, Greg also pointed out that you can use the URL format suggested by What Do I Know, but fetch it with http:// instead of itms://. Why would you want to do that? Because you get the XML package that the server delivers, and you can pull out individual PlaylistIDs, so you can point even more directly to albums. Like: Why Is There Air? and Revenge, and even To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With. (Links only work with iTunes 4.)

Just got off a long IM conversation with Greg, in which he pointed me to, in no particular order:

• stevenf’s proposal for a standard way, called mtaste, to represent your musical tastes on a blog (more thoughts on this in a second)
• Jeremy Zawodny’s complaint that Apple’s music store doesn’t already know what he might like to listen to, through his iTunes file (more on this too)
• The assertion in Business Week that the Verizon piracy records ruling + the Grokster/Morpheus ruling = legislative ruling that piracy is behavioral, not technological. No more thoughts about this one, just thought it was interesting.
• Lessig’s thought that all the international and state DMCA maneuvers are a way to lock in the DMCA here makes a scary amount of sense. And it makes me wonder whose analysis of the law is right. Is BW right and all these laws are, courtesy the Grokster decision, obsolete? Or is Lessig right and the clawed hand of the RIAA is closing in on my iTunes? Or are both right, and the RIAA is betting that the forces of consumerism will get tired of getting all the laws struck down (or go broke doing so) by the time the RIAA sets them all up?

So, with that note… the mtaste thing. Comparing those files would be even more difficult than stephenf imagines. Basically, he’s describing something like what Amazon does, but decentralized.

The problem is, unless you have an exact match in your mtaste file with the other guy’s, you have to do the music match thing that Amazon does, which is a large clustering problem. To get a good match you need a good sample size—given the number of artists out there (428 in my limited library, probably a lot more in other places), probably thousands. Probably more. Because the record that you’re comparing to someone else’s is at least 428 artists long. By way of comparison, training data sets of around 1600 were needed to predict television show preferences, 5000 for a movie database, and over 32000 for movement around Microsoft.com in a 1998 Microsoft Research study by Breese, Heckerman, and Kadie.

So, it’s a hard problem. You’d need, oh, a large dataset from users and a database to process it, a collaborative filtering algorithm, and a lot of data. And you’d need a standard way to convert the mtaste file (which, as proposed, is an arbitrary flat file) to a standard data structure.

LazyWeb, anyone?

But if you could pull it off… it would disintermediate Amazon. Really. It would do away with one of their powerful competitive strengths.

Which is probably why Apple hasn’t done it. Anyone seen the licensing terms on which they got the rights to use the One Click business method from Amazon?

(Oh, and the traffic… thanks to MacNetJournal and MacSurfer for pointing to this morning’s article. For the record, it’s about 4:1 in favor of MacNetJournal at present.)

Some great discussion about how the iTunes store does its magic. From MacSlash, discussions of how iTunes does HTML, and some thoughts about how the information gets delivered from Apple’s servers. Bill Bumgarner identifies some nifty tricks you can do with search and music sharing. And Todd Dominey, at What Do I Know (an almost insanely well designed site, btw, though it appears to suffer when long unbroken URLs are in the content), reports on the format for creating links.

Details at MacInTouch (which is slammed): All five major labels, over 200,000 songs and growing, $0.99/song, AAC, burning allowed (but you have to change the playlist every 10 burns), browsable via iTunes (4), new iPods, new iPod dock with line out.

I’m getting ready for a presentation. More thoughts later.

Later: Details are now up on Apple’s site. Added to the above: only browsable via iTunes—so the service is Mac only. The service uses AAC, not MP3, which means higher fidelity music. You can “play your music on up to three computers, enjoy unlimited synching with your iPods, burn unlimited CDs of individual songs, and burn unchanged playlists up to 10 times each.” So of course the questions are:

• If I buy a new machine and move purchased files to that machine, and erase them from the old machine, does that count as using them on two computers?
• Do I have a separate license file to move with the media?
• I may not be able to browse the files on my PC, but can I play them there once I download them?

O’Reilly Network: Bringing Trash-Awareness to rm. Apple did a pretty good job of making Mac OS X feel like a Mac operating system despite its BSD core, but you can really feel like you’re in another world when you dive into the Terminal. The script described in the article acts as an alias for rm and moves files to the Trash instead of immediately deleting them as rm does. Pretty cool.

Following up last week’s non-denial denial of its plans to purchase Universal, it’s interesting to see the reports about next week’s unveiling of Apple “announcements that will be music to your ears.” Could this be Apple’s long awaited music service?

I hope so. I looked at Listen.com and a few others once and went away shaking my head. I can’t use the downloaded file on my iPod? Buh-bye.

CrazyAppleRumors has been having a field day with the Apple/Universal thing, starting Monday with “Apple Talks with Universal Not Substantive. Really Not Substantive,” and proceeding through Tuesday’s “Apple Considers Buying Telemundo.” But they’ve outdone themselves (or beat the joke into the ground) with yesterday’s “Apple Acquires Sandwich.” My favorite part (’cause it reminds me of me) is the analyst reaction section:

Marcus Gregory, Chief Investment Strategist for the State of California Teacher’s Pension Plan, said “Our holding in Apple is predicated on the company’s large cash reserves. I would hate to see those reserves frittered away on sandwich acquisitions.

“Now, granted, at the $5.75 purchase price of the tuna fish sandwich, Apple would need to acquire… five plus… carry the… well, a whole hell of a lot of sandwiches to make a dent in $5 billion, but it’s the principle of thing.”

The New York Times’ David Pogue was bullish on the move.

“I myself enjoyed a tuna fish sammich, I call ’em ‘sammiches,’ just the other day,” Pogue said.

“And, you know, they’re damn tasty.”

In more serious news, the balance sheet and statement of cash flows accompanying Apple’s latest quarterly earnings statement peg the company’s cash and short term investments at $4.53 billion, up from $4.4 billion at the end of the last quarter. But the company posted a $4 million operating loss, which turned into $14 million profit after interest income. Cutting it close, Fred.

Regarding the persisting rumors that, despite all fiscal evidence to the contrary, it is in talks to buy Universal Music: Apple broke its long standing policy of not commenting on rumors yesterday to offer this gem (annotated by yours truly):

“Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has never made any offer to invest in or acquire a major music company. The press statements this morning attributed to Vivendi board member Claude Bebear are untrue, as Mr. Bebear has confirmed in a later report,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Beyond these comments, we will abide by Apple’s policy of not commenting on rumors.”

In other words, yeah, guys, do your math next time. Reported via Macintouch, which has RSS but no permalinks, so you have to scroll down—and the information disappears tomorrow. One step at a time, I guess.

So the second public beta of Apple’s new browser, Safari, has been released. I was curious to see if any of the display glitches it showed on my site had been fixed.

As you can see from the adjoining image, the answer is “not quite.” Still outstanding: my date titles should render in small caps, and my post titles should render in a larger sans serif font. I’m starting to think that the post title problem is my fault, though, for using a misplaced DIV to trick Internet Explorer into rendering my page correctly. At least my page renders completely in Safari now.

Generally lots of positive follow up to the article I wrote Friday about Apple’s possible purchase of Universal. A few of the comments, and some of the other articles on the subject, touched on the one question I didn’t hit: digital rights management, or DRM.

DRM is technology intended to restrict access to digital content so that the rights of copyright holders are enforced. Unfortunately, most current implementations of DRM support the rights of the copyright owners to the detriment of the rights of the purchasers of the content. Apple, mercifully, has so far avoided the issue by implicitly encouraging the use of MP3 (a DRM-free music format) through products like iTunes and the iPod, rather than pushing a proprietary format which could be extended to restrict use of the content (e.g. Quicktime).

Emphasis on so far. If Apple purchases a major content provider, the temptation to go over to DRM may become too great to avoid. After all, it will have the bottom line of Universal to think about. Or will this be Apple’s opportunity to prove that a content business model without DRM can actually work?

God, I hope so.

The LA Times’s scoop on Apple’s reported negotiations to buy Universal Music Group had me shaking my head this morning as I drove in. What the heck is Jobs thinking, I wondered. So I ran down what I knew about Apple’s strategic situation:

• Item. Apple has “miniscule” market share, in the words of the LA Times (greater than the share of BMW in the auto industry, but who’s counting?).
• Item. Apple is betting that the future of the personal computer, its main product, is as the “digital hub,” the connected center for a set of digital media products including MP3 players, digital cameras (still and movie), and DVD burners.
• Item. All of the things that plug into the digital hub rely on content to make them useful. For digital cameras and DVD burners, the user creates his own content. For MP3 players, someone else creates the content.
• Item. The music industry is scared to death of what piracy will do to their bottom line and looks at MP3s as the instruments of their doom. They’re desperately trying to legislate digital media and space-shifting out of existence.
• Inference. Apple is as desperate as everyone else in the hardware business about finding a recurring revenue stream. .Mac, its online subscription service for email, web page space, online backup, and related services, has apparently done pretty well, but overall its segment, which also includes boxed sales of Mac OS X, QuickTime licenses, and other software and Internet services products, is still a small portion of Apple’s revenue streams. Everything else is in hardware.
• Scurrilous rumors. Apple has been rumored for months now to be in talks with the labels to start an online music service. Such a service would provide recurring revenue, assuming that people would actually pay for the content, and would theoretically drive demand for iPods and Mac hardware.
• Item. The music industry has been seen as unlikely to let Apple have access to its catalog (though the LA Times article thinks otherwise). The CEO of Disney has accused Apple of encouraging piracy with its “rip, mix, burn” slogan.

That’s the situation. So why might Apple buy Universal?

• Diversify away from hardware? If this is their only reason, it’s not a good one — not for shareholders with a basic understanding of portfolio theory and the poor history of conglomerates, anyway.
• Content for its hypothetical music service? Possibly. But why does it need to do an acquisition to get that? Wouldn’t a JV be a reasonable alternative? Maybe not. After all, the music labels would have all the holdup and might be able to learn enough from Apple in the partnership to start their own service. Look what’s happening with Travelocity and Orbitz.
• Leverage in the content creation space? Yeah, having a more direct relationship with artists and music producers would be a Good Thing. Why? Restoring credibility as the producer of the best hardware and software for audio creation. The Mac isn’t the only player in that game anymore, and I’m betting that getting XServes and Mac OS X into the music industry is potentially an important long term strategic move to keep one of the company’s historic core segments.
• Opportunism? Definitely. Vivendi paid $34 billion for Seagram, the parent company of Universal and Polygram, a while back, but is now cash poor. It’s conceivable that the reported $6 billion price discussed in the LA Times article is a bargain.

Which brings us to the reality check. Wouldn’t acquiring one of the big five music groups make it that much harder to do business with the other four??? And the price…. $6 billion??? Come on. Look at Apple’s balance sheet, for crying out loud. All of Apple’s assets together are only worth (accounting value) $6.26 billion, of which only $4.4 billion is in ready cash or cash equivalents. Apple doesn’t have a lot of long term debt, but I can’t see it levering up to a minimum 33% debt for an acquisition in this economic climate. Not even for a make or break strategic move, which acquiring Universal isn’t.

In the Stupid Geek Tricks department, USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under Mac OS X. His five floppies RAIDed together have a combined size of 4.22 MB (!) and seem to work faster together than a single floppy would separately: “I was able to transfer ‘DEVO Uncontrolable Urge.mp3’ which is 3.6 MB in 32 seconds. Which is pretty good I think.”

(Now I’ve done it. I’m going to get a lot of traffic from Google of people looking for mp3, devo mp3 (maybe not), and Wil Wheaton naked mp3 (shudder).)

Anyway, this guy has also RAIDed five Sony Memory Sticks together… I think he needs help.

I’ve heard the tired saw that Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet too many times, and heard it debunked almost as often. Greg points to (and quotes some lengthy excerpts from) an article at the Daily Howler providing a definitive debunking.

(Oh, and Greg, I think I’ve been reading too many warbloggers. After following the reaction to Doc’s statements yesterday, including Doc’s own follow-up, I had a dream last night that I got a righteous fisking for saying I wouldn’t stay silent about the war. I’m not even sure I know what a fisking is. Except that it has nothing to do with Ian. (Small inside joke.))

I seem to have obsessions with mechanical things in their late teens. My second car was a 1977 MGB that I drove from 1991 until 1996, when it turned 19 (and caught fire, but that’s another story). Now I’m working on this surplus old Mac.

It’s not a Fat Mac, as I originally reported (and was told by the donor), but it was free, and came with some goodies. An extra keyboard, in the original box. An external floppy drive. And a replacement motherboard, internal floppy, and back chassis. (The back chassis is the part that was signed by the original Mac development team; to look at it for the first time is kind of awe inspiring.)

It did not come with the tool needed to open it, which is a specialty long handled Torx 15 wrench only available from Sears these days. It also didn’t come with a replacement PRAM battery, which was originally an Eveready 523 but which can apparently be replaced by the Exell A123 4.5 volt battery.

Next steps: figure out how to get to the yoke on the CRT to fix the bad solder joint.

Congratulations to Brent for shipping the for-pay version of NetNewsWire. This little combination newsreader and blogging tool is as essential to me as Mail. I hope others will find it as cool as I do.