Saturday, December 27, 2003

From iTunes to Napster and from Wal-Mart to Microsoft, Knowledge@Wharton handicaps the odds for success and failure among the various music services. [CNET News.com] My colleagues at Huntsman Hall don't seem to get online music. The critical reason streaming makes no sense is technological: it requires huge transmission overcapacity and universal availability to provide without glitches. If my AT&T Wireless GSM phone doesn't still work most workdays between 4 and 6 pm at my office at 33rd and Walnut because of network overloading from the traffic jam on the Schuylkill, what chance that on-demand streaming music will be available to me wherever I am anytime soon? The analogy with satellite radio is spurious: there's a huge difference between broadcasting 200 radio channels and making any of a few million songs available instantly to possibly many thousands of not-quite simultaneous listeners. These analysts don't seem to appreciate the dire implications of heavy-tailed distributions for on-demand realtime services. In contrast, a download requires no further network after it is done, has no realtime requirements, and can be done wherever it is convenient. Another issue is user interface. I can find the music I have on iTunes or my iPod because I bought it on CD or via download. I (mostly) remember what I have. Do I feel like Kind of Blue or like Ghazal's The Rain? The jukebox in the sky is undifferentiated; finding something you don't kind know about through a small portable device is at best awkward (think of your cellphone address book x 10^5). As for the analyst who could not see who would want to store 10K songs at $1/song, he misses completely the bootstrap effect of music one already has. I have 1180 tracks on iTunes, most from CDs but 59 from iTunes. The only reason I don't have more from the iTunes store is that they don't have yet much of the eclectic mix I care for. The 40Gb iPod is not the benchmark; the cheaper 10Gb units are. My first-generation 5Gb iPod is too small for my current music library. That is, from seeding a portable player with already purchased CD music, additional online purchases become natural. Finally, downloading doesn't need to be painful. It looks as though the analysts never used the iTunes Music Store. Which is not perfect, but which definitely makes buying totally straightforward. 1:49:27 PM

AP: The Holstein infected with mad cow disease in Washington state was imported into the United States from Canada about two years ago, federal investigators tentatively concluded Saturday. [Yahoo! News - Top Stories] Blame Canada season again. But how did it get into the US meat supply? It was a milk cow, it was visibly disabled, and yet the meat was processed and the infection was caught only by luck of the draw. If this one was caught too late in a random sample, how many others have passing through undetected? I don't have the numbers to estimate it, but it shouldn't be too difficult to come up the probability that at least k infected animals entered the meat supply undetected given the sampling procedure and the one detection. The idiocy of claiming this one detection proves that "the system works" is yet another instance of the scientific illiteracy that is a major untreated infection in our executive and legislative. 12:23:54 PM