MP3 For The Rest Of Us

From the San Francisco Chronicle –

The Sansa SlotRadio, which is being introduced this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, comes preloaded with 1,000 songs organized into popular genres on a companion SlotRadio music card.

It’s akin to an iPod Shuffle, only users don’t have to go through the process of transferring music from their computer. They simply turn on the $99.99 player just like a radio and enjoy music – though without commercials.

Executives at the Milpitas flash memory storage maker believe the new players, which also come equipped with an FM radio, fill a hole in the media player landscape for music lovers who are slow to embrace the model used by Apple’s iPods and some of SanDisk’s Sansa music players, which require users to download music to their PC and then transfer it to a device.

“That’s a big friction point with that model,” said Daniel Schreiber, senior vice president and general manager. “Either people are not downloading and transferring, or they’re getting someone else to do it. That offers a huge opportunity to bring music to people for whom this model is not ideal.”

The article goes on to say that the plan is to have collections (e.g. 80’s music) of 1000 songs per card sell for $40, or people can buy the equivalent of a CD on micro-SD.

Seems the Senior VP apparently thinks that the MP3 revolution is bypassing a certain market segment. It is, sort of. He also sort of implies that this segment is technophobic or doesn’t quite get it.

People in my age bracket (adult, but not quite AARP material) tend to not want to have to sit through hours of sifting through old record collections and CD’s to pull the 2 or 3 songs per record worth listening to and translate these to MP3 format. Alternately one can browse iTunes or other other stores online. Still takes a lot of time. And that would be a lot of time that frankly we simply don’t have.

Hey, Senior VP Schreiber: It’s not that we don’t know how or can’t learn. We’re not stupid. We’re simply apathetic.

On top of this the idea of 1000 top 80’s songs or 1000 hits of the 60’s for $40 is rather appealing: I don’t have to go and look for these. I don’t have to spend hours that I don’t have chasing these things down. Moreover, it’s not like I define my life in terms of music. I’m happy to listen to 80’s stuff, but frankly I’m not willing to chase down all of these songs. I’m certainly not willing to spend the std iTunes price of $1 to hear Boy George, either. It’s not that I don’t like Boy. It’s that I’m not willing to spend $5 of my time and then another $1 in my wallet to chase him down. But if something he sings pops up on the Sansa player, why, that’s OK. I’ll probably like it just fine.

You people at Sandisk crack me up. You came up with a brilliant, million dollar idea, but how you got there was wierd. I’ll repeat — it’s not that we don’t know how or can’t learn. We’re not stupid. We’re simply apathetic.

Either way, as technology improves it opens up more opportunity for all. And that’s the memo.

The Second Wave

The computer revolution was slow to take off. Obviously computers made for a better typewriter, but the price was high. Bang for the buck was not good. What propelled the revolution was the killer app VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. For the first time, the average user could plug numbers and formulae into rows/columns and easily play “what if?” This was valuable; prior to this, “what if?” was time consuming. This was when computers became worth spending the big $$ on.

The First Wave of applications was simply transferring existing tasks into computers and having some control of it via software. Databases, dental billing, desktop publishing, all of these things were merely transfer of exiting methodologies to new equipment. This included the web. Much of the web is like a magazine, really, but with a sprinkling of some interactive thought process (e.g. database-centric data, like Amazon) which, if you think about it, is merely the online version of a catalogue.

In the midst of the first wave, Java was invented. It was noticed that a number of the methodologies transferred didn’t need to be realtime. e.g. With workers typing names and phone numbers into a billing database, the CPU was going to spend 99% of the time idling in a loop waiting for keystrokes regardless. Ditto for looking at online catalogues.

Java is too slow to do anything in a hurry. On the other hand, much of the first wave was concerned with asynchronous transfer. Pressing the “search catalogue” button was going to result in the database churning for a few seconds, so if the language responded in 3 mSec or 300 mSec was a non-issue. Java is suitable for such tasks, but not much else. It’s noticeably far too slow for anything requiring immediate response.

The Second Wave

In my job I work with constructing buildings via software. In the construction business, the way things were done before computers involved lots of notebooks and drafters laboring into the wee hours. The first wave allowed for estimates to be sorta/kinda guesstimated via spreadsheets. AutCAD allowed drafters to be able to more easily update or change drawings, store them, and so on. The process of estimating a building went from many weeks to many days.

“Second verse, same as the first”
— Herman’s Hermits “Henry the VIII”

My company set about creating a tool that was faster and more reliable. But something funny happened along the way. We noticed that our method, as implemented in lightning fast C++, allowed our users to create virtual buildings and get the PERFECT right answers as well as AutoCAD compatible drawings in seconds. Yes. I said seconds. Suddenly it became apparent that what we had was second wave; the ability to apply hundreds of lookup layers along with algorithms to play “what if?”, but this time on a scale that would melt a first wave spreadsheet. In other words, we stumbled into a primitive mixture of AI and expert system that was devoted to a specific task.

So what is “what if?” in this context? Let’s look at the first wave again.

The ability to do CAD drawings doesn’t translate to a part list, part prices, generate purchase orders, or much else. AutoCAD, for all it’s strength, is still just a drawing tool. Spreadsheets used for estimating don’t really have the ability to do much with complex algorithms looking for situational conditions. They also don’t draw, calculate labor, and so on. In the first wave, there wasn’t a tool that could combine these things. Outside of what we have, there still isn’t.

Our second wave tool does all of these things, and more. I could bore you until your ears bled listing features and innovations, but suffice to say that it’s the real thing. Moreover, because we assumed realtime (synchronous) computation from the start, creating a building takes seconds.

Green Button

Now, how you get “what if?” uses this ability. Let’s say that you can calculate out the basics of simple warehouse and office wing as per engineering spec. Done. Yay. Now, what we really want to know is this — if energy price is increasing $X per year, are we better off spending big on extra insulation, or perhaps doors with better heat retention, or adding fewer windows, or.. what, exactly?

Press the Green Button. All of these possibilities is calculated, from scratch, giving you the up-front construction cost as well as a “total ownership” cost for 10 years. Depending on where the building is constructed, energy price stability, etc. it may not pay you to invest too much into certain “green” stuff (insulation etc.) On the other hand in a region with brutal winters, it’s handy to know when the payoff comes for the extra that may be invested up front.

Sound familiar? This, folks, is very similar to a spreadsheet. Only this time it’s really smart. And more importantly, every time the CPU people make faster chips, our users can make fancier structures and do more “what if?” playing. In short, our company has pioneered the second wave in this industry: we take what was good about the first wave, and we build on this to make it faster and smarter and better.

I for one am happy we didn’t use Java. You can’t do second wave stuff with that.

Air Power

From another site we have this —

“Air power alone would not have defeated Saddam. On the other hand, the Legions were perfectly capable of imposing a regime change on Iraq.”

This has been said multiple times and in different ways. It has been repeated often enough that it’s almost a truism. But… is it?

Seems to me that a systematic extermination of Iraqi units from the air would work fine. What appears to be holding back doing this sort of thing seems to be the notion that air power alone can’t win anything. Some of this is obviously due to past experience with the pre-modern smart bomb wielding air force. And part of it is due to internecine warfare with other military branches; e.g. the USAF doesn’t want to deal with choppers or harriers or other ground support units because, it seems, the USAF would as soon be dogfighting over the English Channel in Sopwith Camels.

Set this aside for a moment, though. Let’s assume that we could’ve gone into Iraq and do so with air units alone regardless of service branch in control. Are the naysayers trying to honestly say that complete air control and unlimited shoot to kill authorisation wouldn’t have defeated Iraq just as handily? Whether an artillery unit is taken out by a tank or by a helicopter, it’s still just as dead. And helicopters get there faster.

Seems to me that the US owns the requisite technology to get things done; what is needed seems to be leadership that gets it, is willing to wield it correctly, and can put a plan in operation that works. I think the notion that air power can’t win wars is antiquated and has yet to be fully attempted/demonstrated in the modern era.