PhatBoyG.com

By adding wireless to the iPod, Apple could enable a number of additional markets for the iTunes music store. Being able to use an iPod without a computer enables a large number of people that cannot afford to have a computer system or the bandwidth to download music to use the iPod for their music. However, trying to implement something like the graphical interface of iTunes on a small iPod screen seems unreasonable given the lackluster history of Internet surfing on the small screen (think Treo, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile).

The market for such a feature is not your regular computer user with a broadband connection. As such, the market cannot be addressed by something that complicated. So I propose the following solution: The iTunes Music Store within a store. Take your average shopper at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Circuit City, or whatever your local flavor happens to be in your town. A customer browsing the CD rack should be able to power up their iPod, enable wireless, and connect to the Wal-Mart kiosk network.

While connected, they can browse a remote library of music that is available on the CD rack (just like browsing a remote iTunes library with another instance of iTunes). If they decide they want to buy a track or two, they can do some magic on the iPod to indicate their purchase intentions, swipe their pre-paid iTunes music subscription card, and walla, the track is transferred to the iPod. Wal-Mart gets a small cut and the customer walks out happy without having to use a computer to rip and copy their music. They could easily offer the option of regular (128AAC) or lossless (ALC) for different price points (say the current $.99 for the AAC, and $1.29 for the ALC), or $9.99 for the entire disk ($12.99 for lossless).

There is a certain fear that such a change could impact the bottom line at Wal-Mart. However, for most users getting the tracks off their iPod is not likely and they still can’t burn it to CD or play it in their car (without buying more iPod accessories, and we know that is where the mark-up really exists). They have an unlimited virtual inventory of music on release date without having to stock an abundant supply of disks and loss-leader pricing. This could really change the marketplace for music, particularly as more folks more towards the iPod route.

Another great way to offer tracks would be enabled by allowing iPods to share their library just like iTunes on the desktop. If a bunch of us sitting at the coffee shop could listen to each other’s libraries, we could find a song we like (that was previously bought on the iTMS) and buy our own copy of it. This would eliminate the need to browse the entire iTMS on a small device, and eliminate the bandwidth of people listening to 30 second clips on their portable devices. It might even be possible to add the ability to buy a song with the same album name/artist name/song title (or the entire album), but there is some luck involved there since they aren’t able to directly link the actual track to an iTMS purchase.

There are likely a bunch of other marketing scenarios that come into play with a wireless-enabled iPod. I’ve offered the above as market-reasons why it should be added compared to the obvious “consumers want it so make it so” mentality. There are a ton of more consumer-oriented reasons to add wireless, which I’ll cover in another post.

My new flash drive showed up today, it’s so much faster than the old one. This one averages around 24 MB/second compared to the old one that was well under 10 MB/second. This one averages under 1ms for access time as well, compared to the very fluctuating values on the old one. I’m pretty happy with it.

PowerToGo sucks though. Not only does it crash under DEP (Data Execution Prevention), it seems to not play as nicely with Vista as it should. It worked fine on the AMD system, but crashed on both Core Duo, Pentium-M systems. So I removed it and replaced it with the open source PortableApps.com launcher and we’re 100% back in business. I just copied the install from my old drive and everything works great (and runs fast as hell too).

This past weekend, I took some time to download the newly released Vista Ultimate from the MSDN site. Once downloaded, I put a clean 80GB drive into my XPS Gen 2 laptop (single-core 2.0 Pentium M w/2GB DDR2 SDRAM) and booted the DVD.

I must say, I’ve installed Windows variants of every type since 1.0 on a ton of machines. Considering all the extra hardware this thing has on it (Bluetooth, Intel Wireless, Gigabit Ethernet, GeForce 6800 Ultra, etc.) this was absolutely without a doubt the cleanest installation of Windows I have ever done, period. That is to say that it automatically installed every piece of hardware in my system without me having to download any drivers. That’s a first in my book.

I’m not being some MS fanboy either, I can’t stand installing Windows. It’s like a pain that won’t go away. Tracking down drivers, dealing with initial load issues, setup errors, etc. We’ve all been there and we’ve all cried the whole way down that dreadful road. Vista Ultimate installed clean the first time and everything worked. I was shocked.

As for the operating system, it’s pretty complete out of the box. Web browsing, e-mail, calendaring, contact management, all the stuff an OS should do for you is there out of the box (well, except for Java VM support, which I’ll figure out later). The sidebar is nice (it’s not Leopard nice, but it is a decent first attempt), the interface is very pretty and functional. Overall I’m happy with the look and feel.

There are a few things that aren’t so nice. I installed iTunes (flawless, no errors, and no restarts required) and went to add my network folders to my library. For some reason, it will not browse the network. I can see the shares in Explorer, but nothing shows up in the iTunes Add Folder dialog. Bummer, hopefully that will work itself out. I did find that you can drag a folder from Explorer and iTunes will add it to the library, but it wasn’t real happy about it, the UI choked until it had finished the job.

Windows Media Center is pretty nice, a little cleaner than before, but a lot of the online services seem broken since there were no Internet radio stations or other remote content features enabled. Maybe that’s something that has yet to be patched in for home users by January. I don’t have a tuner on that machine, so I could not get a feel for TV reception (or HDTV support for that matter). But you can be I’ll be tracking down an OTA USB HDTV card at some point to give that feature a workout.

Windows by itself is pretty boring, so I installed Office 2007 Ultimate as well. Guess what? Yeah, it lets you create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. That’s about it. Nothing else to see here I suppose. It’s Office after all, not Quake VIX or anything.

Speaking of Quake, I haven’t loaded any games yet but you can bet that EQ2 is going to be loaded soon to see if it works. I’ll also be loading a variety of applications I use a lot to see how they roll. Since I’ve gone portable on all my mainstay applications such as email I’m not too concerned about Outlook at home. I’ll have to plug in the flash drive tonight and see how we prevail with my portable applications.

If I get time and patience, I may try to install Visual Studio 2005 and see how it runs on Vista. I know some problems were there with earlier releases, who knows if they still exist. I guess we shall see!

I nearly forgot where this way, so I figured i would mention it here and link it. When downloading from MSDN (to get Vista for instance), it seems that most of the time it starts off at around 75 KB/s. That’s just not acceptable for downloading large files.

This link talks about how to update your hosts file so that download speed uses the entire pipe.

In your hosts file (typically C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\HOSTS), add the following entry:

207.46.252.185 global.ds.microsoft.com

This will select a US-based mirror site and typically gives me around 1 MB/second download (I have nearly a 8-megabit pipe). Bringing down Vista Ultimate in under 45 minutes, priceless.

I’m seriously considering one of these to replace my slow ass molasses 2GB PNY Attache drive. The Lexar Lightning seems to run right at the top of the speed charts, and includes the cool application launch software as well. I was nervous at first, but after reading these benchmarks, I think the case is closed:

Flash Drive Benchmarks

I’ll let you know once I have it how well it performs, but I’m guessing it is a huge upgrade to what I have today.

This might just be the coolest web site for site color scheme generation.

ColorJack Studio

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working almost every night on a new project at work. Yes, it’s heavy JavaScript. Yes, it’s taking advantage of more and more that Atlas has to offer. It’s embracing all that the Enterprise Library Jan 2006 release has to offer and extending it to take advantage of some of our existing systems features. The server side is all based on web services and .NET 2.0. And it is designed to work in multiple browsers while still taking advantage of all the latest JavaScript application design paradigms (async everything).

But tonight, I just gotta have a break. Of course, I’ve said that several times over the past few days and always end up digging into something only to tweak and object, streamline a page component or somehow improve things in a way that doesn’t normally get addressed in the 9-5 timeline. It’s all for the good in the end, and since a lot of this stuff is a continuous iteration from one day to the next, it’s cool to see it all coming together.

So, on that note, new topic.

I listen to a lot of electronic music. I really get into artists like Shpongle, Ott, Entheogenic, Hallucinogen, Celtic Cross, and several others in the same genre. You can add Shulman to the list, and a few compilation discs. When I first got into electronic music, it was a long mix on DI.fm that got me hooked. An arrangement (oops, sorry, REMIX) by Morlack called “Ott Times” and it consisted of a number of Ott and Shpongle tracks, with a few other things mixed into the fold. It was awesome and I scrambled to setup a streaming recorder to catch it again. Over the next two weeks, I captured the entire Chillout channel until I managed to snag it and listen to it again. From that point on, mainstream music was not in my playlist.

After a lot more research, I hooked up with PsyShop and ordered a stack of discs to start listening. I found myself really enjoying the music and the ability to enjoy it at work without being distracted. I bought more and more and built up a pretty decent collection. I also started to realize that I really liked the sound and style of Shpongle more than the others. I began to immediately discount trance-style as annoying, dance style as not for me, and a variety of other noisy and distorted tracks as a waste of space on my computer. Yes, my computer. But more on that later.

I think my first experience with electronica was Kraftwerk in the 80′s. My best friend’s girlfriend got me hooked on it (Sparrow, you still alive?) and I quickly snatched up all the albums I could find. Yes, albums. I’ve recently completed my collection of Kraftwerk on CD through some eBay purchases and have the discs of those I find memorable. I also was a big fan of Styx, Thomas Dolby, and most of the synth bands of the 80′s. Bring on the late 90′s (I gave most of the mid 90′s to bands like Collective Soul, Pearl Jam, and a laundry list of others) and Crystal Method hit the scene. A solid electronic outfit with a hard driving rock sound. Electronic music was back with power and I was in it for the long haul.

So since probably late 2001 I’ve been mostly listening to electronica of the psytrance/chillout/ambient style. It’s great to enjoy at work and even in the car if you select from the more powerful stuff. The real enjoyment of personal music began in early 2002 when I got into building custom headphone amplifiers for high-end headphones like the Beyerdynamic DT880. I got a lot of enjoyment out of that set of cans before moving down to a pair of Shure e4c (and now the e500 is my daily setup driven by a 30G iPod photo).

Which brings me back to today and I’m starting to wonder what other good music in the style of Shpongle is available today. It’s hard to keep up with all the new releases and hearing something new on DI.fm got to be a very rare thing. In fact, I setup the streamer a couple of months ago and there was hardly anything new to be found. A real disappointment as I’m hoping to add a few new discs to my collection of great stuff. I still listen to a huge variety of music at times, but for heads-down coding a solid Shulman or Entheogenic album wins every time. Heck, today I even dug out the Fight Club soundtrack for some variety (those good old Dust Brothers).

So, if you happen to pick this up on a Google search or something, and can relate to the distinct lack of new material on your playlist, feel free to suggest a new disc (with a link to a preview if possible)!

The usual suspects have the play-by-play, but the big announcements on the first day are Leopard and the Mac Pro. Some serious workstation-class performance on the Mac Pro, with quad-core (2xDual Core Xeons) processing, tons of ram, full 64-bit, and the same design case as the current workstation box.

Nothing on the audio side yet, I’m sure that will come later in the week. No sense busting your whole nut in the first two hours.

On a side note, VMWare announced they are supporting OSX with their line of virtualization products. I’m a big fan of VMWare, so that’s a nice thing to hear, particularly if Apple starts making some nice servers running OSX for hosting VMs.