Casting Out Nines

After saying that Apple needed to add more storage to the iPod Touch before they could count on me buying one, they have obliged. Unfortunately the prices haven’t changed, and the 16 GB (which would just barely be big enough for me) is still $399. The new 32 GB model is $499.  Look: $500 is way too much for a music player, sorry, no matter how much stuff it does.

Now all Apple has to do is make the 32 GB model $399 and the 16 GB one $299, and we’re in business. or better ye, make the 32 GB model $299. Or maybe $29.

After writing my two recent posts about the Amazon Kindle, I began to notice that I was not only unimpressed but bothered, even angered, at certain elements of the Amazon Kindle. I don’t usually get ticked off at an electronic gadget I don’t own, so I had to think about what my problem was. After a while, I pinpointed the cause: It’s the way Kindle handle blog subscriptions. You can get blog content sent straight to the Kindle, but only the blogs that Amazon chooses to offer you, and only after paying a fee.  Most blog “subscriptions” on the kindle are $0.99/month. Cheap, negligible even, but still not free. And this strikes me as being simply wrong.

The power of technology consists in its capacity to be a liberating force in our lives. This goes all the way back to foundational technologies such as electricity, indoor plumbing, the automobile, and so on. The reason we include technology in our lives — the reason we keep buying new technologies — is not so that we can own a device. We own the device because in some kind of sum-total way the technology makes us more free.

Take the iPod for instance. It does cost you something to own an iPod, apart from the cost of the device, namely that if you get your music from iTunes you had better be ready to own only iPods for the rest of your music-loving days, thanks to Apple’s DRM. But that opportunity cost is offset in numerous ways. The iPod and iTunes make me free to buy only the songs I want rather than the whole album, to try new music at low cost, to arrange music and play back music the way I want, to carry literally 20 years’ worth of collected music with me in a small, sleek, and incredibly well-designed package.

Or closer to home, consider computer algebra systems like Maple or Matlab. Of course it’s cool that these programs can do symbolic integration or calculate π  to the 100,000th decimal place. But what makes them powerful and not just cool is the way that they free mathematics students and researchers to concentrate on learning concepts and big ideas, or making observations and reasoned conjectures, rather than having to worry about whether our calculations are right all the time.

And so here comes the Kindle, and from the get-go it starts locking me down in all these  different ways without giving me any truly freeing technological advantage in return. You can buy books straight from the device; but all the books you already own have to be re-bought and sent to the device. You can send your own text or Word documents for viewing on the Kindle, but only through email and only after paying a fee to do so. That’s your own content being put on your own device, and you’re being charged for it. And don’t get me started again on the lack of PDF support.

In this situation, the overwhelming message being sent is that Amazon is not interested in making a product that will revolutionize the way I conceive and consume books, but rather a product that will make them lots of money, to be made in turn on expenses both big and small and not all of them necessary or even warranted. This just isn’t the kind of technology that the world needs today.

1. Oh! Darling (Beatles, Abbey Road)
2. A Kind Of Magic (Queen, Classic Queen)
3. New Song (Howard Jones, The Best of Howard Jones)
4. Love Is The Seventh Wave (Sting, The Dream of the Blue Turtles)
5. Turn It On Again (Genesis, Duke)
6. Strong Hand Of Love (Mark Heard, High Noon)
7. Badge (Cream, Goodbye)
8. Vital Signs (Rush, Moving Pictures)
9. Hard Time Killing Floor Blues (Chris Thomas King, O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack)
10. Tempus Fugit (Yes, Drama)

So last week we saw some rare Yes studio session footage from 1976, with a comment from me wondering how good Yes might have gotten if it hadn’t been for Jon Anderson’s faux-yogi lyrics. Fast-forward to 1980/1981 and you have the answer to my question in Drama, the one Yes album not containing Anderson or his lyrics. This album wasn’t supposed to be any good, with Anderson and Rick Wakeman having departed and replaced by two relative unknowns at vocals and keyboards. But in fact it’s one of their best. Here’s the video for “Tempus Fugit” (#10):

Trivia questions for the audience:

1. Who are those newcomers at vocals and keyboards?
2. What band were they previously in, and what is that band’s claim to fame?
3. What band did guitarist Steve Howe and the new keyboardist go on to form the next year, and what was their big radio hit?
4. What connection did the new vocalist go on to have with Yes in the early 80’s?
5. The new vocalist here went on to produce albums for lots of artists, including one hugely popular singer in the 90’s. Who was that singer?

No cheating by using Wikipedia, please.