I am ahead of the curve

A while ago I said to myself (and e-mailed to Sam): "You know, what Apple should do to make their overpriced, mostly unimpressive .mac service a little more worthwhile is to develop an Apple-branded tool called iBlog that uses hosting on the .mac account."

Well, somebody else beat them to it, and today, guess what they just bundled. This ought to be a permanent thing, really.

(It still costs too much. And xjournal is still free, and, yes, he fixed the dual-processor crashes. Very, very nice.)

Another bad idea, and the implications of its badness

Charles Haddad thinks Apple or somebody else ought to make a wireless streaming MP3 player with no nonvolatile storage. It would be portable radio on demand, basically, with no ability to keep the songs. As the Apple Turns rightly thinks this is a dumb idea, for several reasons.

Their characterization of this as the ghost of the "diskless Network Computer" idea is on the money, and it points to a larger observation. A large part of the rationale for NCs, back in their brief period of plausibility in the mid-Nineties, was that network bandwidth, latency and reliability were going to improve faster than mass storage would. In fact, exactly the opposite happened. Consumer networking has improved, and computers have gotten faster at the usual exponential rate, but mass storage has exploded in unbelievable science-fiction-dream fashion. It's the great unsung technology story of the past ten years, and it's affected everything.

It started with CD-ROMs. But one of the great things about the CD-ROM boom of the early 1990s, from a software house's point of view, was that few people had the capability to pirate the things: not only did they not have burners, most PCs with CD-ROM drives had hard disks too small to hold the contents of one. It was never going to last.

Just a few years back, people were saying that streaming was the only practical way to distribute music over the Internet just because nobody would ever buy a 100-gigabyte hard drive to store a music collection. Now such unimaginable monsters are pretty common in PCs and TiVos, and you can get a 40-gig one inside a glorified Walkman. And it happened before most Americans got broadband Internet.

Not all MP3 players have hard disks in them. But even the cheap ones have enough flash memory to hold a few albums worth of (compressed) music, and everyone knows that 64 megs of solid-state mass storage are dirt-cheap and fit in a keychain. Any digital music player that doesn't have that is going to be perceived as what it is: a device that's been intentionally crippled beyond reason.