Linux as a server/mainframe OS is quite capable of competing in a situation like this, and already does in many cases, whereas Gnome and KDE can barely compete with each other most of the time.
Except for the technical advantages. I can take a PCM file from a ripped cd and encode it with similar settings in iTunes (aac), neroenc (aac), lame, and the vorbis encoder, and everything but lame and vorbis sound like the range is compressed too far, and mp3 sounds poor on some tracks that are difficult to encode, but on the vorbis version those same passages are not as annoying.
I've done this on multiple tracks on multiple machines with good earphones, vorbis is always the least annoying for passages with encoder defects. However i do have an 3gen nano so vorbis isn't a real option, nor is alternative firmware.
If Apple doesn't have the source already, they must have found out about that exploit somewhere.......the source had nothing to do with it. Closed source is not going to stop Apple from running the latest binary unlocker on a test machine and watching what it does.
Apple is well aware of how the current unlocks are being accomplished, this changes nothing on that end. It does make it much faster to RESPOND to Apples re-locking attempts though.
GPL may not restrict commercial use and sale of software, but it sure makes it difficult. Like it or not, a large amount of software written today is written for financial gain. GPL makes it quite literally impossible to ensure you get paid for your work, because anyone who buys your software also gets the code and full right to give it out to whoever they want to.
It's good that some companies can make money on services and support (Red Hat etc), but that doesn't work everywhere.
There needs to be an open source license that gives you everything the GPL does, but only to people who paid for the software. Anyone who has a license for the software can modify it all they want, give out their modifications and even complete modified versions, but only to others who have a license for the software.
MS plan has always been to center all media around windows, everything they do is to further that goal. The only reason they are selling DRM-less tracks is they have to in order to have any chance whatsoever of competing.
If the situation were turned around with MS at the top of the market, they would be closing things even further like always.
I don't have any idea about the licensing in this case, but using code with an unclear license opens your business up to a lot of unwanted attention and possible legal action. Thats not a good thing even if you don't want ethical crusaders working for you.
Posting code to get help with it, or show methods, etc, automatically means you have the right to use it for whatever you want? Are you kidding? You are trying to turn a situation that is almost purely a copyright issue, into one of complex reasoning and conjecture.
Similarly, downloading something and using it in a commercial product are very different.
Wireless sync isn't enough to justify packing the device and its software with a complete and functional TCP/IP stack, a radio chip, and an antenna. If it's going to have WiFi it needs to do something I can use it for more often, as it is now the Zune wireless is only really useful when you are in the same room as your computer, where you can just as easily plug it in since it needs to charge once in a while anyway.
I buy iTunes music cards all the time, they list value in US dollars just fine.
Credit card processing amounts to a fraction of the cost of a purchase, and most retailers pass it on to consumers. Instead Microsoft chose to implement points for the sole purpose of making songs appear to be cheaper than they are.
The only reason Microsoft is selling DRM-less songs is because they are forced to do so to compete in a market where no one wants PlaysForSure/MS devices. In the absence of the push for DRM free music from Apple and others, Microsoft would have ALREADY dominated the entire market, locked everything to Windows and pushed excessive DRM on the entire mess for the sole benefit of Microsoft.
Their business model has and always will be, how can we use this to prop up Windows?
Lock all Music to Windows with WMA-DRM Lock all VIDEO to Windows by pushing WMV on hollywood Lock the Zune to Windows....this sort of thing repeats itself constantly. In the absence of a reason to do otherwise, Microsoft attempts to tie everything they are involved with to Windows, and only Windows, all wrapped up in MS-only DRM.
By the way, in the majority of markets, news, talk radio and sports are on AM radio, not FM. Thats why the radio is useless to me, you can only use it for FM radio music, which is poor quality and ridiculous since the device itself is MADE for playing music you already own.
Thats how it always is, "if only microsoft would stop playing stupid games and un-cripple this" and they never do.
They use everything as a way to prop up windows instead of making nice stuff people want. It's a conflict of interest they aren't going to drop any time soon.
If people wanted subscription music with Windows only cheap devices, people would have done that instead, because brand name can only take the iPod so far. That model failed a long time ago (MS seems to agree, dropping every partner for their own system), in part because MS used the entire thing as an opportunity to edge out competition to Windows. They are doing the same thing again, so you will forgive me if I don't reward them for it.
WiFi is nice, but the old Zune should have had it a year ago, instead MS screwed around letting the entire market beta test a literal brick, and let the iPod Touch and iPhone become the first devices with a real use for the capability. Radio isn't all that useful either, the point is to listen to high quality music you already own on a small device you can actually carry around.
Then you have the ridiculous Zune "Points", real stores use money and refrain from using stupid tricks to make it look like songs are cheaper than they are.
There are plugins for WMP to use with the iPod, and the OS X version of iTunes works with a lot of devices other than iPods.
However, neither of their DRM systems work on the others players, and really if you're buying DRMd music you have little to complain about anyway because device compatibility isn't your real problem.
1. install vista 2. run vista 3. do some stuff 4. stare at unresponsive disk-thrashing computer, repeatedly screaming "WTF ARE YOU DOING...YOU AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE DOING ANYTHING..."
You might want to try using Gpart to see if you can recover the partition table (which is in the MBR). Fdisk won't help you unless the boot code is missing, and even then that only matters if you are booting from this disk.
The only thing holding up Microsoft right now are its somewhat tamed OEM agreements, and the mediocre backward compatibility. The backward compatibility of Windows (with all its problems) is a somewhat poor situation for users, but forcing a change would get Microsoft tons of criticism, and would remove the mediocre advantage users have in sticking with Windows. It would be enough for users to consider alternatives, which is bad for MS, hence little changes will happen.
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Linux as a server/mainframe OS is quite capable of competing in a situation like this, and already does in many cases, whereas Gnome and KDE can barely compete with each other most of the time.
Except for the technical advantages. I can take a PCM file from a ripped cd and encode it with similar settings in iTunes (aac), neroenc (aac), lame, and the vorbis encoder, and everything but lame and vorbis sound like the range is compressed too far, and mp3 sounds poor on some tracks that are difficult to encode, but on the vorbis version those same passages are not as annoying.
I've done this on multiple tracks on multiple machines with good earphones, vorbis is always the least annoying for passages with encoder defects. However i do have an 3gen nano so vorbis isn't a real option, nor is alternative firmware.
They are worried about the long term success of open source software that Sun controls, not open source in general.
If Apple doesn't have the source already, they must have found out about that exploit somewhere.......the source had nothing to do with it. Closed source is not going to stop Apple from running the latest binary unlocker on a test machine and watching what it does.
Apple is well aware of how the current unlocks are being accomplished, this changes nothing on that end. It does make it much faster to RESPOND to Apples re-locking attempts though.
GPL may not restrict commercial use and sale of software, but it sure makes it difficult. Like it or not, a large amount of software written today is written for financial gain. GPL makes it quite literally impossible to ensure you get paid for your work, because anyone who buys your software also gets the code and full right to give it out to whoever they want to.
It's good that some companies can make money on services and support (Red Hat etc), but that doesn't work everywhere.
There needs to be an open source license that gives you everything the GPL does, but only to people who paid for the software. Anyone who has a license for the software can modify it all they want, give out their modifications and even complete modified versions, but only to others who have a license for the software.
Yea, now that it's "cool".
MS plan has always been to center all media around windows, everything they do is to further that goal. The only reason they are selling DRM-less tracks is they have to in order to have any chance whatsoever of competing.
If the situation were turned around with MS at the top of the market, they would be closing things even further like always.
I don't have any idea about the licensing in this case, but using code with an unclear license opens your business up to a lot of unwanted attention and possible legal action. Thats not a good thing even if you don't want ethical crusaders working for you.
Posting code to get help with it, or show methods, etc, automatically means you have the right to use it for whatever you want? Are you kidding? You are trying to turn a situation that is almost purely a copyright issue, into one of complex reasoning and conjecture.
Similarly, downloading something and using it in a commercial product are very different.
Most of the time its either a civil citation or a misdemeanor.
They're talking about the IP type of stolen, not the physical goods type.
Asus....I'm pretty sure they had something to do with it :D
Wireless sync isn't enough to justify packing the device and its software with a complete and functional TCP/IP stack, a radio chip, and an antenna. If it's going to have WiFi it needs to do something I can use it for more often, as it is now the Zune wireless is only really useful when you are in the same room as your computer, where you can just as easily plug it in since it needs to charge once in a while anyway.
I buy iTunes music cards all the time, they list value in US dollars just fine.
Credit card processing amounts to a fraction of the cost of a purchase, and most retailers pass it on to consumers. Instead Microsoft chose to implement points for the sole purpose of making songs appear to be cheaper than they are.
The only reason Microsoft is selling DRM-less songs is because they are forced to do so to compete in a market where no one wants PlaysForSure/MS devices. In the absence of the push for DRM free music from Apple and others, Microsoft would have ALREADY dominated the entire market, locked everything to Windows and pushed excessive DRM on the entire mess for the sole benefit of Microsoft.
....this sort of thing repeats itself constantly. In the absence of a reason to do otherwise, Microsoft attempts to tie everything they are involved with to Windows, and only Windows, all wrapped up in MS-only DRM.
Their business model has and always will be, how can we use this to prop up Windows?
Lock all Music to Windows with WMA-DRM
Lock all VIDEO to Windows by pushing WMV on hollywood
Lock the Zune to Windows
By the way, in the majority of markets, news, talk radio and sports are on AM radio, not FM. Thats why the radio is useless to me, you can only use it for FM radio music, which is poor quality and ridiculous since the device itself is MADE for playing music you already own.
Microsofts vision with the Zune is to lock it to Windows like everything they touch.
Its a nice device, but how can we use it to prop up Windows and stifle competition?
And yet those feature packed devices are all still failing.
Thats how it always is, "if only microsoft would stop playing stupid games and un-cripple this" and they never do.
They use everything as a way to prop up windows instead of making nice stuff people want. It's a conflict of interest they aren't going to drop any time soon.
If people wanted subscription music with Windows only cheap devices, people would have done that instead, because brand name can only take the iPod so far. That model failed a long time ago (MS seems to agree, dropping every partner for their own system), in part because MS used the entire thing as an opportunity to edge out competition to Windows. They are doing the same thing again, so you will forgive me if I don't reward them for it.
WiFi is nice, but the old Zune should have had it a year ago, instead MS screwed around letting the entire market beta test a literal brick, and let the iPod Touch and iPhone become the first devices with a real use for the capability. Radio isn't all that useful either, the point is to listen to high quality music you already own on a small device you can actually carry around.
Then you have the ridiculous Zune "Points", real stores use money and refrain from using stupid tricks to make it look like songs are cheaper than they are.
You're trying to take that little mess and lead people to believe he is wrong about everything, which isn't true.
There are plugins for WMP to use with the iPod, and the OS X version of iTunes works with a lot of devices other than iPods.
However, neither of their DRM systems work on the others players, and really if you're buying DRMd music you have little to complain about anyway because device compatibility isn't your real problem.
Netcraft says that joke is no longer in circulation
What I've seen with Vista is this:
1. install vista
2. run vista
3. do some stuff
4. stare at unresponsive disk-thrashing computer, repeatedly screaming "WTF ARE YOU DOING...YOU AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE DOING ANYTHING..."
The fact that CSS is broken is the reason they started screwing with the disc itself, and the VOB format, giving it bad cells etc.
This is just as bad, and in fact worse, because now DVDs DON'T play in every DVD player.
You might want to try using Gpart to see if you can recover the partition table (which is in the MBR). Fdisk won't help you unless the boot code is missing, and even then that only matters if you are booting from this disk.
The only thing holding up Microsoft right now are its somewhat tamed OEM agreements, and the mediocre backward compatibility. The backward compatibility of Windows (with all its problems) is a somewhat poor situation for users, but forcing a change would get Microsoft tons of criticism, and would remove the mediocre advantage users have in sticking with Windows. It would be enough for users to consider alternatives, which is bad for MS, hence little changes will happen.