iTunes Music Store - 'Coolest Invention of 2003' 370
Pingsmoth writes "Time Magazine has just named the iTunes Music Store as their Top Coolest Invention of 2003. Also among this year's favorites are 'fish-skin bikinis, a new love drug, the car that parks itself, and the invisible man'."
What, not the Segway? (Score:4, Interesting)
iTunes integrates a music store with a music player. Ooh. Maybe I'm missing something because I'm only using it on Windows, but it doesn't exactly wow me the way I expected the 'Coolest Invention of 2003' to.
Frankly, I'm even disappointed with the Segway. They shouldn't be handing out this invention to anything that doesn't have wings at this point.
iTunes? (Score:5, Interesting)
Look, the absolutely coolest invention of 2003 is the USB wristwatch. My watch holds all the essential stuff I used to keep on a diskette. Nothing helps bonding like showing people that your watch can store porn. Or a PowerPoint presentation. Or your latest baby photos. Whatever they need: my watch has it.
But iTunes? I can't carry it on my wrist.
Spot the connection (Score:5, Interesting)
Fuck Yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
I am proceeding to rip all my 500+ CDs into iTunes. With one click.
Winamp has served me well for many, years, but it lacks the snazzy playlist/library editor, and the ability to transfer music from CD, to the hard drive, tag it, and add it to my playlist at the click of a button. Literally.
Sure, it's a little slow, but who cares. Its functionality is unmatched. The music store is snazzy, too.
Good move, Apple, with iTunes for Windows. You may see a future Mac / iPod customer soon...
Re:Apple records? (Score:2, Interesting)
he Fab Four's label, and - according to legend - the appleinspiration for the name Jobs and Woz gave their kit computer
I heard the apple of Apple came from the story of Alan Turing's suicide [turing.org.uk].
Re:What, not the Segway? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Invention? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Greed (Score:3, Interesting)
Good point, we are talking here about a 10% profit margin. Something most businesses would consider to be ample. This also says how dumb analysts are for considering 10% profit margins to be nothing and hyping up people who claim bigger, and less reliable, numbers.
Put it this way, iTunes hasn't bumped up the Apple Share price in any way like the SCO price hike, one has real profits... the other a near suicidal legal case.
Re:Hardly an Invention (Score:3, Interesting)
But i doubt that its worse than a lot of the crap that the major record companies throws out. A large and significant percentage of Wal-Bart brands are in-house or previously unknown brands.
Lidl, the largest grocery chain in Germany carries only their own brands.
90 % of the sucsessful artists on the market producees music that is commodity. What seperates those artists from the less succsessful is marketing. For those that don't succumb to the marketing hype Magnatuse is probably just as good. And it's cheaper.
Re:Greed (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple, like any corporation, is legally responsible to its shareholders (mostly private US citizens) to make as much money possible. To the extent that that they are deciding whether to invest $100m in some new business project (building an online music store, porting OSX to windows, selling flat panel TVs), they choose amongst those projects by determining which will yeild the highest return on their investment. Initiating an investment that is merely "somewhat" profitable can be an enormous mistake for ANY corporation if it means foregoing an investment that could be hugely profitable.
iTunes != iPod (once again) (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Again, wrong.
You can tell the author of this article never actally used iTunes or the iTunes music store. The iPod is completely optional.
I don't have an iPod and I've been using iTunes for years. I will probably never get an iPod. Still, I'm a daily user of iTunes.
It was my fault for reading this silly article. I mean, this is Time magazine. What do they know about technology? Just enough to write some copy. The harm here is that it really short-sells iTunes AND the iTunes Music Store by harping on an optional component.
--Richard
Water Purifiers (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a much simpler and just as effective way to purify water in tropical or desert countries: place it in a transparent plastic bottle in the sun for a day. The water heats to 80 degrees and after a few hours is totally sterilised. The mud and gunk settle to the bottom, and what's left is clean and drinkable.
I spent a few days on this once, trying to improve the process of separating the gunk from the water: the principle was to extract the gunk from the bottle which could then be closed and carried some distance. My design requires a straw and a bit of clay. But even that's not worth doing: to solve the problem of drinkable water in most of Africa, all one would need is to ship a billion or so used PET bottles.
Sigh. People like complex solutions to simple problems.
Your complaint is misdirected (Score:3, Interesting)
You think Apple doesn't want to sell you stuff because of some center-of-the-universe conceit or other? They would gladly sell you anything you wanted, anything they could convince you you wanted, if their deals with the labels allowed it. They don't -- and this isn't different from any traditional music licensing in that way.
The next company you run into that could make a bazillion dollars in a foreign market, but chooses not to because they're a bunch of arrogant Americans, that'll be a first. You post a story about that one then.
Greatest disappointment: the car that parks itself (Score:2, Interesting)
The "car that parks itself" was the biggest disappointment of 2003 for me. I sometimes drive around for 40 minutes searching for a parking space near my house in Amsterdam. I would love to have a car that finds itself a space after I get home.
Turns out it only manages the 2 second parallel parking routine. Now that helps. And it "senses kerbs": I wouldn't try this on the canalside parking spaces we have a lot of here. This system isn't even a good idea for tourist rental cars.
Re:Hardly an Invention (Score:3, Interesting)
What portable MP3/Music player will the ACC format play on other than the iPod?