This poll is now closed.

So, let's review this completely unscientific but interesting poll.

1. Most votes: More than 2 terrabytes of storage.  That is very interesting.  Far greater than I would have expected.  The rivet's demographic is skewed, but still quite impressive ladies and gentlemen.
2. There is a little gap between <750 gigs and >1 terrabyte.  It seems that you either got it or you don't.  Not a whole lotta gray area going on here.
3. Whoever answered "what?" needs to get with the program.

This poll was just an illustration how accelerating change has invaded our personal lives. The levels of data storage that the poll contains were corporate levels 10 years ago and government levels 20 years ago. Now you can buy a memory stick with 64 gigs on it!

You can't stop it, just gotta love it

You've seen this.

Did you know he has a whole set of videos up there? I like this one:

This is fascinating. Check out his views: Chocolate Rain has been viewed 15 MILLION times... That is incredible. 

The death of the music industry as a viable big business has been commented on at length out in teh intertubes, but I think Tay Zonday takes it to another level.

What is the channel (as in distribution channel to sell his product) that he is using to sell his music?  Ummm...He isn't...

How does an industry compete against free?  I mean Tay could set up shop and with just a little bit of help monetize his videos on his own.  Making himself a music pipeline of one.

If I was the record industry I'd be a bit freaked out...

p.s. check out this interview of Tay.

I mean what is apple gonna do...sue em?

These are the two companies that get a pass, neither one can do any evil or bad thing. So what happens when one steps on the toes of the other...

BTW this is yet another example of google's attempts to put everyone else out of business.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)

And by failure I mean unmitigated success.

But I do also mean failure as viewed through our Ray Kurzweil jaded shades. We expect so much out of our technology these days that a device as radical and beautiful and exemplary as the iPhone is still seen as incomplete.

Comparison

Compare it to the most radical phones of the 1990s. I'd argue it wasn't even a phone that was radical back then, but the Palm Pilot, a PDA. The Palm Pilot experimented with the user interface...how would someone work with a handheld effectively.

Compare it to the phones of the mid 1980s. Just having a mobile car phone by itself was the cool thing. Remember the bricks? Remember the mini-briefcase sized phones? 'nuff said.

Why do we not laud it for what it is

What we have here is accelerating returns personified. We are so human that we can't see what has happened. Our perception of the future is constrained by our living in the present.

The iPhone is not perfect.

It does not do absolutely evertyhing in a perfect way. It should be on a fast network. It should have more memory. It should allow us to change to competing phone networks.

What it does do is let us see what can be done, what should be done, and what will be done.

Comparing a current version of the iPod against the earlier versions gives us insight into what changes we might have in store from Apple vis a vis the iPhone. 2-3 years from now we'll be 2-3 versions in and the iPhone will have plugged its remaining product holes.

You will need to be ready for the future because it is on the way here whether you want it or not.

So...techRivet doesn't really review gadgets all that much, it's not the raison d’être of the site.  But even we here at the vast world headquarters of techRivet.com get sucked into the hype.

For the video itself techRivet would like to send you over to one of our online partners: [Gadget Grid]

For it appears that the truth may live up to the hype and let me tell you that would be amazing.  Walt Mossberg the mavin for all gadget-dom has come out with a largely lauditory review.

The two worries about the device prior to launch were:

1. The screen-as-keyboard
2. The slower network

Walt says the keyboard is a "non-issue".  Check off one.

He then says that the slower network may be a problem as you move about outside, but inside the iPhone seemlessly picks up wifi networks.  Half-check.

But the statement that got me was this one:
"It is certainly the most beautiful and the most radical smart-phone or handheld computer I have ever tested!" - Walt Mossberg

I for one welcome our new iPhone overlords

I have believed from the day it was announced that REGARDLESS of its actual real world capabilities the iPhone was going to be a smash.  There was no way it wouldn't be.  But now it appears that Apple has done it and is poised, poised only mind you, to do to the cell phone market what it did to the mp3 player market.

It will be fascinating to see what the world of the phone will look like in 5 years.

...and no I am not participating in link whoredom, how dare you say so.

Ahh the glorious thought of putting all that vinyl into digital format. Haven't we all been there at one time? No? Well I have.

I inherited a whole bunch of old Victorola records from the 1920's and 1930's and a even a few from the teens. I thought it would be a grand idea to rip them all to mp3 to preserve them digitally forever. The problem is...that's a really tedious thing to do. And it's worse with a modern album.

Tedious Process

The reason? Well, when you rip a cd to your computer, it's all nicely split up into tracks, named, categorized etc. With a vinyl album you record the whole side at once. Then you have to get some music editing software, cut the long side up into songs, save them separately, name them...nothing hard mind you, but just tedious.

So if you have grand plans of recording your entire vinyl collection to digital, well nice to know ya, cause you have a significant task in front of you. I just ripped the three or four albums I HAD to have and will now only do it once in a blue moon.

I don't care Greg, I want to do it anyways.

Well ok then, here's what I used to accomplish the task:

Audacity: It's a cool sound track editor that accomplishes everything you need to do and more. You can export to WAV format or MP3 or Ogg. Simple cut and paste capabilities for editing the track. It's easy.

Besides that all you need is a nice turntable, mine can play 78's but then I had the requirement to rip the old victorola records.

You can run everything through a standard receiver with phono inputs (do they still make those?). You don't need anything special on your computer really. I just use the standard line-in/line-out jacks for sound. I lay out how to wire it together below.

Steps for recording:

1. Place record on turntable
2. Start Audacity
3. Begin recording with Audacity (don't worry it's trivial to cut out all the lead-in white noise)
4. Play the record (you know, put that needle thingy on the record)
5. Make sure the sound levels are correct in Audacity. - if not set it correctly and go back to step 2.
6. Let album play until end of side - repeat for other side if necessary.
7. Using Audacity
   1. Save the entire Audacity project first.
   2. Determine each seperate song
   3. Cut down to single song by highlighting the rest of the recording and cutting.
   4. Save seperate song as newly titled audacity project [optional but recomended]
   5. Export to format of your choice: MP3, OGG, WAV.
8. Rinse and Repeat with next record

Done and Done.

Semantic Web

As an aside this brings up the whole issue of the semantic web. For as you notice in this process the easy part is getting the song ripped, the hard part is the tedious entry of the metadata.

This is the case for any type of content. The transfer of bits from the cd to computer or picture to computer or album to cumputer is relatively trivial. The hard part is getting the human to add in the description, the title, the tags etc.

We become the inputs to the machine. When it becomes aware are we just analogues for nerve endings?...

As the launch of the iPhone approaches, I've been thinking a lot about the strategy behind the pricing and realizing how absolutely brilliant it is. The vast majority of people believe the device is over-priced at $499 and $599 for 4GB and 8GB models. I think they've hit the real sweet spot.

You probably don't even notice but here is a good example.

Two Gigabyte MP3 player circa 1997:

...eh...

Two Gigabyte MP3 player circa 2001:

Two Gigabyte MP3 player circa 2007:

Gadget Universe - The Ultimate Smallest MP3 Player (2GB)

Two Gigabyte MP3 Player circa 2011: