The BBC is not going to give up this revenue stream easily (the creation of new programming would suffer) which is why some form of DRM is necessary.
No it's really not necessary. They could be selling that content on all the various online outlets worldwide for the first six months, then allow free access (with entry of a TV license code) after that and continue selling to foreign markets. Instead they broadcast it over the air for free then try to sell DVDs, and have this outlandish DRM scheme which tries to limit any downloads to 7 days, or 31 days, I forget what their limit is now. All because the BBC and Trust are too stupid to realise that broadcast media is on the way out.
They could probably make more selling episodes of Doctor Who on iTunes/XBox to US customers in the next few years than they'll ever make on syndication deals.
This content is broadcast over the air for free in the UK, and can be recorded by anyone with a PVR, transcoded to whatever format they choose then posted on the internet. If the BBC really want to force people to route around them completely by doing that, they'd couldn't have chosen a better system. It's doomed to failure (as all DRM is ultimately), it's aggravating, and it's unfair to those who pay their license fee and don't use Windows.
For me, if I go out and pay an arm and a leg for Vista (don't like the pricing, but they don't ask me about these things), it should be great out of the box, and it should have all the basics (a browser to get online, a file system I can use to store and browse, the ability to play a CD, etc).
The argument here isn't over whether MS should be able to bundle stuff with their OS (though unfortunately that's what some of the anti-trust stuff has focussed on) - it's whether MS should be allowed to exploit a leading position in one market (OS) to crush competition in other markets (desktop search in this instance). Of course MS should be able to bundle IE (for example) - should they be able to attempt to kill any other browser company though? Should they be allowed to attempt to kill the internet as a multi-platform endeavour (this is the end-game of Silverlight, and was the long-term purpose of IE (including IE Mac) )?
Are you familiar with the expressions "cut off the oxygen supply (of Netscape)", "a vig on every transaction (on the internet)", and "I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to kill Google"? The story of Java on Windows? BeOS? OS2? DR-DOS?
While you flippantly use the term evil to describe MS, their focus on 'winning' (where winning means dominating and owning any market entered) at all costs does lead to evil. Their flagrant and illegal abuse of the market position of Windows in the past does mean they're held to stricter standards, as it should. In my opinion MS should be allowed to build whatever they like into their products, but they should be closely scrutinised for illegal actions, like breaking rival software, bribery, breaking contracts, buying out competition in nascent markets, bullying suppliers and customers, attempting to strongarm OEM PC makers with secret contracts, attempting to crush (not beat fairly but crush) rival tech like Java, the web and Google Desktop search by breaking OS compatibility, coming out with Windows extensions to break other implementations (Java) etc etc. With all these actions, MS has set back the computing world years.
Or were you us, and it's your product that people say is unfair, how would you balance "justice" with usability?
If I were you, I'd actually try to win on merits, not by manipulation and extinguishing competitors. While Microsoft employees don't even understand why people mistrust their company (which you patently don't), the attitude of those in the 'outside world', as you charmingly put it, won't change.
Guess what, though? There's no EDGE in most of Europe. UMTS got popular before EDGE was really developed. So the iPhone "breakthrough internet device" can do 5-7KB/s in most of Europe. It's as fast as dial-up with 3x the latency!
The first European release of the iphone may well be 3G; release in the EU is 6 months away at least. So all this speculation really is a bit premature. I'd be surprised if it's not 3G, given that 3G is much more prevalent in Europe.
If you are serious about transfer speeds, you'll be using wifi anyway. Built in and free.
Um, you do realize that Microsoft's push for WPE/XAML (aka Silverlight) already targets Windows IE, Windows Firefox, Mac Firefox, and Mac Safari, don't you?
But for now long? The support for other browsers will be selectively killed just as IE Mac, Java Windows and many other techs were. Or just deprecated and constantly a little behind the times like Mac office. The reason it targets all those platforms is to draw people in. After that it starts to work better on Windows, and then not at all unless you have the latest Windows. Great way to tie customers in long-term so long as they don't realise you're doing it till it's too late.
Do a google search for some MS emails where they discuss doing exactly this to break Java. Why should we trust them again?
I tend to enjoy "fancy" CSS designs, and I have found differences in basically every browser as a result. As soon as margins, line-height, and other "formatting" of the sort gets involved, things just get nasty. Firefox and Opera and IE7 in Strict are all standards-compliant more-or-less, but when pixels start to matter, I've found I have to do a lot of klugy things.
It's obvious from this statement that you test in IE first and then test your broken code in other browsers later.
IE7 in Strict are all standards-compliant more-or-less
The official, Thomas O. Barnett, an assistant attorney general, had until 2004 been a top antitrust partner at the law firm that has represented Microsoft in several antitrust disputes. At the firm, Justice Department officials said, he never worked on Microsoft matters. Still, for more than a year after arriving at the department, he removed himself from the case because of conflict of interest issues. Ethics lawyers ultimately cleared his involvement.
Seems strange that they'd hire someone from a law firm associated with Microsoft for the Justice Dept. and then put him in a position to comment on an MS case.
And storing your documents in binary formats that you can only open with software from one vendor reliably is practical? It's not even a nice idea - it may be common practice, but it's insane if you want to store the documents for any length of time.
A switch would cost money initially but would save a huge amount more when you count the costs of archiving (long term), retreival and upgrades for editing software, not to mention the cost to the people the local govt deals with. At present they mostly have Word, but will they want to upgrade to version vxxtreme to send you documents in 2011? What if MS drops support for OS X or Dell starts to sell Linux machines mainstream and they don't support the newest version from MS?
You'd be far safer to stipulate plain text or PDF, or ODF for submitted documents, and contrary to your belief that there is no way to regulate attachments, it would be pretty simple, both politically and technically. You could bounce messages with word attachments automatically with a reply saying to resubmit in one of these formats instead; people would get the message quickly enough.
It's too bad you will probably get modded down for having an opinion that runs against the tide of apple love, because it is a totally valid one to have.
All the comments on this thread that provide this meta-information (I or the parent will be modded down by frenzied zealots) are in fact modded up. That's the funny thing about Slashdot; though the users seem to have the impression that it's populated by Linux/Apple fans, in fact the vast majority of the readers use Windows. It'd be fun if they showed statistics for their userbase (didn't they once have this), or even a little tag beside each user (optionally) saying which browsers they'd accessed the site with.
Phone UI's are horrible.
++ This is the main reason I'll be looking at an iPhone when they're available.
So again, I'm sorry I flamed you so hard. But you did not say what you thought you were saying. And what you did say was utterly ridiculous.
Is that the best you can do by way of an apology? You were clearly wrong:
that's assuming that they were legitimately democratically elected, unlike say our president for two elections running.
Not even the opposition charges that he isn't legitimate. He is widely popular from polls, as well as the many elections he's won.
Note the position of legitimately, and who it refers to [Chavez], then note the use of the same word in the reply, which talks about Chavez. The widely popular from polls bit should have given you a clue as well. In fact he did say what he thought he was saying, you just misread it. The above does not clearly refer to Bush at all but to Chavez; why not just admit you were wrong, instead of insulting him again?
"Next we headed for the land of Bashan, where King Og and his army attacked us at Edrei. But the LORD told me, 'Do not be afraid of him, for I have given you victory over Og and his army, giving you his entire land. Treat him just as you treated King Sihon of the Amorites, who ruled in Heshbon.' So the LORD our God handed King Og and all his people over to us, and we killed them all. We conquered all sixty of his towns, the entire Argob region in his kingdom of Bashan. These were all fortified cities with high walls and barred gates. We also took many unwalled villages at the same time. We completely destroyed the kingdom of Bashan, just as we had destroyed King Sihon of Heshbon. We destroyed all the people in every town we conquered - men, women, and children alike. But we kept all the livestock for ourselves and took plunder from all the towns."
- Christian Bible - Deuteronomy 3:1-7 NLT
"Kill [even] the good among the gentiles." - Talmud - Mechilta, Beshalach 2 (on Exodus 14:7)
A recent study in the US showed that 80% of Muslims were opposed to using suicide bombing as a tactic to defend Islam. I was shocked about the remaining 20%.
Are suicide bombs qualitatively different from routine torture of suspects, carpet bombing of towns like Fallujah, and cluster bombs dropped on civilian areas? If so how?
The end result of all these tactics are lots of dead civilians and widespread fear in the civilian population.
who actually disbanded the IE team after IE6 --can you believe it?
The purpose of Internet Explorer was to kill the internet - embrace, extend, extinguish. When the IE6 team was disbanded, they had pretty much killed any competition in the browser market. They even went as far as just discontinuing the mac version. WPF/Silverlight are an attempt to do exactly the same thing by giving the appearance of being open/cross platform - right till MS decides they dominate enough to pull the rug out from opposing platforms. So don't expect anything great from MS in a browser - they could have fixed IE in v.7 to support CSS and the DOM properly and allow a level playing field, but they will never do that, it's just not in the corporate DNA.
Funny how windows has become a poorly debugged set of device drivers as Andresson predicted despite Microsoft's best efforts to kill the web.
I'm very skeptical that it will be OSX in anything but name, or possibly kernel. But almost any application that is suitable for a phone would not be very usable on a desktop and vice versa. Video games have a much higher threshold on a desktop. Excel would be a travesty on a phone. Even the VNC version that I have on my desktop would positively suck on a phone. Even phone-centered apps like Address Book or iCal are not suited to the tiny screen on the iPhone.
If it has :
WebView NSTextField NSControl
that implies an awful lot of cocoa being ported. Once that's done a lot of the frameworks (address book etc) could come along too - *if* there's enough space for them. Frankly, they couldn't have Safari on there if all the supporting cocoa frameworks didn't come too.
The guts of most applications will work fine. The GUI, as you say, can't be shared between the two, but to hook up a new vastly simpler GUI and recompile for another chip would be pretty trivial. I can't see why something like a spreadsheet wouldn't work quite well - just have minimal toolbars etc and show only the cells - pop up number pad for entry. You couldn't use the GUI from MS Excel or Word, but that's no loss.
Probably memory constraints are more of a problem. Perhaps many apps would have to be tuned for that. I'm sure they won't release an SDK for a while as development might still be a bit hairy, but when they get up to 32MB phones, possibly with hard disk, and 1GHZ processors, why not? Perhaps they can launch a small tablet that uses the same OS X nano too, and amortise development costs further.
At that point it'll become very important how close the APIs are for the phone and desktop and they'd be crazy not to have thought this through and gone for convergence.
They do sell a lot of their content, to other broadcasters around the world and in the UK on satellite. They also sell their programs on DVD and radio programs on CD.
I'm aware of that thanks. My point is they have an opportunity here to start selling and distributing their content online - they could sell worldwide and eventually bypass all the headaches with the physical distribution methods you mentioned (which are myriad). Instead they have created a player which will bleed money, piss off people who download it and find out its using their connection for uploads too, and tie them to Microsoft for everything.
Wow.
I guess this is the result of this agreement, and they've been sold a bridge by MS:
From the BBC "To ensure that the BBC is able to embrace the creative challenges of the digital future, we need to forge strategic partnerships with technology companies and distributors for the benefit of licence payers."
hitting something like UKNova and bittorrenting the shows.
Interesting that the illegal bitttorrent actually has a broader selection, the shows actually stay up longer than a month, and will probably remain more widespread than their legal solution, isn't it?
How many times have you been talking to someone and they mentioned something that was on the previous evening and you think D'oh! I wanted to watch that. This will allow you to watch it.
Actually, no it won't, because I don't use Microsoft software. This doesn't interest me at all, and I suspect it won't interest a lot of people, because of the annoying limitations. It'd be much cooler if I could find out about a series or programme and go and watch a few previous episodes of it, no matter when it aired on broadcast TV. The great thing about the internet as opposed to TV is that all content can be available, all the time. You don't have to worry about time-shifting to get something, it's always there (though you may sometimes have to pay). This approach (time-limited, tied to their player) ignores all those advantages.
They should be selling this content, DRM free, to the rest of the world, hell, I think they should be selling it in the UK too, then maybe they could bring the license fee down a little to compensate. Selling their content online (for reasonable prices) would allow them to move long-term to a model where they are a content creator and licenser, not a broadcaster.
However just like their archive this has been hobbled by rights issues and silly rules about 'broadcasting' on the internet for 7 days, 30 days, or whatever their limit is now. If it wasn't for those rules, they wouldn't have to use DRM at all. Instead they're stuck in 1996, trying to create an ecosystem that their users couldn't care less about.
They've bought into this Microsoft DRM, and are now going to pay the price of becoming irrelevant to users of other platforms, like OS X, mobile phones, consoles which don't come from MS, Linux etc. Good job BBC. How they will move it to other platforms is anyone's guess - the BBC says it might be difficult within 2 years to move to OS X (which is what the trust wanted) - that's hardly a promising sign. Frankly, I don't think they'll ever make it with their 'iPlayer'. MS certainly has nil incentive to provide a working solution on OS X or Linux.
Quite apart from the DRM I don't want to download another player for every TV station that wants to go online - they should use the outlets currently available, like Microsoft Live and iTunes, to sell their stuff. Instead of using standard channels and outlets they've rolled their own player and bought in DRM. Channel 4 has pulled the same trick and their forum is full of people complaining about how crap it is. The C4 player even installs a P2P client to serve their stuff for you without asking. Nice.
These media creators/outlets are obviously stuck in the 1990s, and they're not going to get the internet till they're dragged kicking and streaming onto it. The fact they still talk about broadcasting when they're actually talking about downloads says everything really. They're trying to hobble downloads to turn them into a broadcast.
What a service like this needs to succeed :
1. Offer downloads of files which will play on any modern video software, on computers, phones etc etc 2. Not time limited 3. Sell the damn content worldwide 1 year after first broadcast 4. Use any sales channel you can get, don't try to limit it to your 'iPlayer' 5. DRM not required, in fact it'd be a huge hindrance because it makes it impossible to do 1 above 6. Don't try to turn the Internet into TV - the obverse is inevitable, and the sooner you get used to it the better.
I really don't see a way out until we shake out of our lethergy and understand that they want us all dead or converted to Islam. Anything else is al-Taqiyya.
You do realise that invading Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or nuclear weapons programs don't you?
Crashproof Solutions means that we don't care if an individual component of our solution crashes. If a desktop, laptop, pda, or a server crashes at one of our clients, it is not an emergency.
I see. Maybe you should change that to Crash recovery solutions then? On second thoughts, since your clients are already used to Microsoft doublespeak, don't bother. Your entire business plan seems to be predicated on cleaning up after second rate products.
As to your pitching WM5 as a killer solution, going by all the comments I've had from people who actually bought one - no thanks. I don't want a phone that crashes all the time, I want one that just works. Perhaps the iPhone will fit the bill.
Re:It would be a great first language
on
Beginning Ruby
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Very few languages let you do the first three without worrying about classes and/or functions. If you pick Java as your first programming language you'll have to learn about classes and functions, even to just write your first hello world program. You won't have to know very much, but it's easier to grasp these concepts one at a time. Therefore, I find a good progression of languages to be Basic, C, Java (Or C#,VB.Net,any other OO Language).
I don't see why you think Ruby would make any of that difficult - perhaps you're getting Ruby mixed up with other languages, it's one of the better ones to learn with in my opinion. In the interactive ruby shell (irb) you can learn this stuff easily:
1. Learn about variables and doing simple math
irb > 2+2 => 4 irb > x = 3 => 3 irb > y = 2 => 2 irb > x + y => 5
2. Learn about conditional statements
irb > if (x > 2) irb > y = 10 irb > end => 10 irb > x + y => 13
3. Learn about looping structures
irb > 2.times do irb * puts "Hello world" irb > end Hello world Hello world
irb > ["jan","feb","march","april"].each do | month | irb * puts month irb > end jan feb march april
4. Learn about functions
irb > def max(a,b) irb > if a > b irb > a irb > else irb * b irb > end irb > end => nil irb > m = max(4,8) => 8
I can't ignore this comment as it seems Slashdot keeps perpetuating this myth... Why do people keep perpetuating this misnomer??
This is incorrect usage - it looks like you wrote myth twice, realised this looked bad, and then searched around for another word to replace it with.
The entry on Wikipedia is misleading if not downright wrong, but if you consult *any* proper dictionary, you'll find a better definition. You appear to be using wikipedia as a dictionary and to think that misnomer means simply 'something which is wrong'. Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and wiktionary is a crap dictionary. The comment you replied to doesn't misname anything, it asserts that Vista needs lots of graphics cards to run. Perhaps that's wrong, perhaps it's mistaken, perhaps it's a widely accepted slashdot myth, but it's not a misnomer.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world uses misnomer to mean using the wrong name for something, not something which is wrong or mistaken. Your usage is just a mistake, and not one that's common enough for you to claim it's correct.
Why is this important? If we continually misuse words, they lose all meaning. We already have plenty of words for things which are wrong, mistaken, or myths, you could have used them instead.
Why won't people on the internet just accept they're wrong sometimes?
Slashdot Mirror
No it's really not necessary. They could be selling that content on all the various online outlets worldwide for the first six months, then allow free access (with entry of a TV license code) after that and continue selling to foreign markets. Instead they broadcast it over the air for free then try to sell DVDs, and have this outlandish DRM scheme which tries to limit any downloads to 7 days, or 31 days, I forget what their limit is now. All because the BBC and Trust are too stupid to realise that broadcast media is on the way out.
They could probably make more selling episodes of Doctor Who on iTunes/XBox to US customers in the next few years than they'll ever make on syndication deals.
This content is broadcast over the air for free in the UK, and can be recorded by anyone with a PVR, transcoded to whatever format they choose then posted on the internet. If the BBC really want to force people to route around them completely by doing that, they'd couldn't have chosen a better system. It's doomed to failure (as all DRM is ultimately), it's aggravating, and it's unfair to those who pay their license fee and don't use Windows.
The argument here isn't over whether MS should be able to bundle stuff with their OS (though unfortunately that's what some of the anti-trust stuff has focussed on) - it's whether MS should be allowed to exploit a leading position in one market (OS) to crush competition in other markets (desktop search in this instance). Of course MS should be able to bundle IE (for example) - should they be able to attempt to kill any other browser company though? Should they be allowed to attempt to kill the internet as a multi-platform endeavour (this is the end-game of Silverlight, and was the long-term purpose of IE (including IE Mac) )?
Are you familiar with the expressions "cut off the oxygen supply (of Netscape)", "a vig on every transaction (on the internet)", and "I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to kill Google"? The story of Java on Windows? BeOS? OS2? DR-DOS?
While you flippantly use the term evil to describe MS, their focus on 'winning' (where winning means dominating and owning any market entered) at all costs does lead to evil. Their flagrant and illegal abuse of the market position of Windows in the past does mean they're held to stricter standards, as it should. In my opinion MS should be allowed to build whatever they like into their products, but they should be closely scrutinised for illegal actions, like breaking rival software, bribery, breaking contracts, buying out competition in nascent markets, bullying suppliers and customers, attempting to strongarm OEM PC makers with secret contracts, attempting to crush (not beat fairly but crush) rival tech like Java, the web and Google Desktop search by breaking OS compatibility, coming out with Windows extensions to break other implementations (Java) etc etc. With all these actions, MS has set back the computing world years.
If I were you, I'd actually try to win on merits, not by manipulation and extinguishing competitors. While Microsoft employees don't even understand why people mistrust their company (which you patently don't), the attitude of those in the 'outside world', as you charmingly put it, won't change.
IMAP over SSL?
The first European release of the iphone may well be 3G; release in the EU is 6 months away at least. So all this speculation really is a bit premature. I'd be surprised if it's not 3G, given that 3G is much more prevalent in Europe.
If you are serious about transfer speeds, you'll be using wifi anyway. Built in and free.
But for now long? The support for other browsers will be selectively killed just as IE Mac, Java Windows and many other techs were. Or just deprecated and constantly a little behind the times like Mac office. The reason it targets all those platforms is to draw people in. After that it starts to work better on Windows, and then not at all unless you have the latest Windows. Great way to tie customers in long-term so long as they don't realise you're doing it till it's too late.
Do a google search for some MS emails where they discuss doing exactly this to break Java. Why should we trust them again?
It's obvious from this statement that you test in IE first and then test your broken code in other browsers later.
heh
Seems strange that they'd hire someone from a law firm associated with Microsoft for the Justice Dept. and then put him in a position to comment on an MS case.
But Safari DOES support two-button mouse functionality.
Supports but does not depend upon to work.
And storing your documents in binary formats that you can only open with software from one vendor reliably is practical? It's not even a nice idea - it may be common practice, but it's insane if you want to store the documents for any length of time.
A switch would cost money initially but would save a huge amount more when you count the costs of archiving (long term), retreival and upgrades for editing software, not to mention the cost to the people the local govt deals with. At present they mostly have Word, but will they want to upgrade to version vxxtreme to send you documents in 2011? What if MS drops support for OS X or Dell starts to sell Linux machines mainstream and they don't support the newest version from MS?
You'd be far safer to stipulate plain text or PDF, or ODF for submitted documents, and contrary to your belief that there is no way to regulate attachments, it would be pretty simple, both politically and technically. You could bounce messages with word attachments automatically with a reply saying to resubmit in one of these formats instead; people would get the message quickly enough.
All the comments on this thread that provide this meta-information (I or the parent will be modded down by frenzied zealots) are in fact modded up. That's the funny thing about Slashdot; though the users seem to have the impression that it's populated by Linux/Apple fans, in fact the vast majority of the readers use Windows. It'd be fun if they showed statistics for their userbase (didn't they once have this), or even a little tag beside each user (optionally) saying which browsers they'd accessed the site with.
++
This is the main reason I'll be looking at an iPhone when they're available.
Is that the best you can do by way of an apology? You were clearly wrong
Note the position of legitimately, and who it refers to [Chavez], then note the use of the same word in the reply, which talks about Chavez. The widely popular from polls bit should have given you a clue as well. In fact he did say what he thought he was saying, you just misread it. The above does not clearly refer to Bush at all but to Chavez; why not just admit you were wrong, instead of insulting him again?
But how often have you seen that? I've seen it once in 6 years use of various Macs on OS X - I think it was when I was first using parallels.
In contrast under OS 9 I was *very* familiar with that Bomb icon and various cryptic error codes which meant nothing to me.
That site contains Flash. Have you tried it without Flash installed?
"Next we headed for the land of Bashan, where King Og and his army attacked us at Edrei. But the LORD told me, 'Do not be afraid of him, for I have given you victory over Og and his army, giving you his entire land. Treat him just as you treated King Sihon of the Amorites, who ruled in Heshbon.' So the LORD our God handed King Og and all his people over to us, and we killed them all. We conquered all sixty of his towns, the entire Argob region in his kingdom of Bashan. These were all fortified cities with high walls and barred gates. We also took many unwalled villages at the same time. We completely destroyed the kingdom of Bashan, just as we had destroyed King Sihon of Heshbon. We destroyed all the people in every town we conquered - men, women, and children alike. But we kept all the livestock for ourselves and took plunder from all the towns."
- Christian Bible - Deuteronomy 3:1-7 NLT
"Kill [even] the good among the gentiles."
- Talmud - Mechilta, Beshalach 2 (on Exodus 14:7)
Are suicide bombs qualitatively different from routine torture of suspects, carpet bombing of towns like Fallujah, and cluster bombs dropped on civilian areas? If so how?
The end result of all these tactics are lots of dead civilians and widespread fear in the civilian population.
The purpose of Internet Explorer was to kill the internet - embrace, extend, extinguish. When the IE6 team was disbanded, they had pretty much killed any competition in the browser market. They even went as far as just discontinuing the mac version. WPF/Silverlight are an attempt to do exactly the same thing by giving the appearance of being open/cross platform - right till MS decides they dominate enough to pull the rug out from opposing platforms. So don't expect anything great from MS in a browser - they could have fixed IE in v.7 to support CSS and the DOM properly and allow a level playing field, but they will never do that, it's just not in the corporate DNA.
Funny how windows has become a poorly debugged set of device drivers as Andresson predicted despite Microsoft's best efforts to kill the web.
Wow 1/2 a million dollars in one year from the HP foundation.
Yes, Microsoft optimised Java out of existence on Windows.
If it has :
WebView
NSTextField
NSControl
that implies an awful lot of cocoa being ported. Once that's done a lot of the frameworks (address book etc) could come along too - *if* there's enough space for them. Frankly, they couldn't have Safari on there if all the supporting cocoa frameworks didn't come too.
The guts of most applications will work fine. The GUI, as you say, can't be shared between the two, but to hook up a new vastly simpler GUI and recompile for another chip would be pretty trivial. I can't see why something like a spreadsheet wouldn't work quite well - just have minimal toolbars etc and show only the cells - pop up number pad for entry. You couldn't use the GUI from MS Excel or Word, but that's no loss.
Probably memory constraints are more of a problem. Perhaps many apps would have to be tuned for that. I'm sure they won't release an SDK for a while as development might still be a bit hairy, but when they get up to 32MB phones, possibly with hard disk, and 1GHZ processors, why not? Perhaps they can launch a small tablet that uses the same OS X nano too, and amortise development costs further.
At that point it'll become very important how close the APIs are for the phone and desktop and they'd be crazy not to have thought this through and gone for convergence.
I'm aware of that thanks. My point is they have an opportunity here to start selling and distributing their content online - they could sell worldwide and eventually bypass all the headaches with the physical distribution methods you mentioned (which are myriad). Instead they have created a player which will bleed money, piss off people who download it and find out its using their connection for uploads too, and tie them to Microsoft for everything.
Wow.
I guess this is the result of this agreement, and they've been sold a bridge by MS
Interesting that the illegal bitttorrent actually has a broader selection, the shows actually stay up longer than a month, and will probably remain more widespread than their legal solution, isn't it?
Actually, no it won't, because I don't use Microsoft software. This doesn't interest me at all, and I suspect it won't interest a lot of people, because of the annoying limitations. It'd be much cooler if I could find out about a series or programme and go and watch a few previous episodes of it, no matter when it aired on broadcast TV. The great thing about the internet as opposed to TV is that all content can be available, all the time. You don't have to worry about time-shifting to get something, it's always there (though you may sometimes have to pay). This approach (time-limited, tied to their player) ignores all those advantages.
They should be selling this content, DRM free, to the rest of the world, hell, I think they should be selling it in the UK too, then maybe they could bring the license fee down a little to compensate. Selling their content online (for reasonable prices) would allow them to move long-term to a model where they are a content creator and licenser, not a broadcaster.
However just like their archive this has been hobbled by rights issues and silly rules about 'broadcasting' on the internet for 7 days, 30 days, or whatever their limit is now. If it wasn't for those rules, they wouldn't have to use DRM at all. Instead they're stuck in 1996, trying to create an ecosystem that their users couldn't care less about.
They've bought into this Microsoft DRM, and are now going to pay the price of becoming irrelevant to users of other platforms, like OS X, mobile phones, consoles which don't come from MS, Linux etc. Good job BBC. How they will move it to other platforms is anyone's guess - the BBC says it might be difficult within 2 years to move to OS X (which is what the trust wanted) - that's hardly a promising sign. Frankly, I don't think they'll ever make it with their 'iPlayer'. MS certainly has nil incentive to provide a working solution on OS X or Linux.
Quite apart from the DRM I don't want to download another player for every TV station that wants to go online - they should use the outlets currently available, like Microsoft Live and iTunes, to sell their stuff. Instead of using standard channels and outlets they've rolled their own player and bought in DRM. Channel 4 has pulled the same trick and their forum is full of people complaining about how crap it is. The C4 player even installs a P2P client to serve their stuff for you without asking. Nice.
These media creators/outlets are obviously stuck in the 1990s, and they're not going to get the internet till they're dragged kicking and streaming onto it. The fact they still talk about broadcasting when they're actually talking about downloads says everything really. They're trying to hobble downloads to turn them into a broadcast.
What a service like this needs to succeed :
1. Offer downloads of files which will play on any modern video software, on computers, phones etc etc
2. Not time limited
3. Sell the damn content worldwide 1 year after first broadcast
4. Use any sales channel you can get, don't try to limit it to your 'iPlayer'
5. DRM not required, in fact it'd be a huge hindrance because it makes it impossible to do 1 above
6. Don't try to turn the Internet into TV - the obverse is inevitable, and the sooner you get used to it the better.
You do realise that invading Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or nuclear weapons programs don't you?
I see. Maybe you should change that to Crash recovery solutions then? On second thoughts, since your clients are already used to Microsoft doublespeak, don't bother. Your entire business plan seems to be predicated on cleaning up after second rate products.
As to your pitching WM5 as a killer solution, going by all the comments I've had from people who actually bought one - no thanks. I don't want a phone that crashes all the time, I want one that just works. Perhaps the iPhone will fit the bill.
I don't see why you think Ruby would make any of that difficult - perhaps you're getting Ruby mixed up with other languages, it's one of the better ones to learn with in my opinion. In the interactive ruby shell (irb) you can learn this stuff easily:
1. Learn about variables and doing simple math
irb > 2+2
=> 4
irb > x = 3
=> 3
irb > y = 2
=> 2
irb > x + y
=> 5
2. Learn about conditional statements
irb > if (x > 2)
irb > y = 10
irb > end
=> 10
irb > x + y
=> 13
3. Learn about looping structures
irb > 2.times do
irb * puts "Hello world"
irb > end
Hello world
Hello world
irb > ["jan","feb","march","april"].each do | month |
irb * puts month
irb > end
jan
feb
march
april
4. Learn about functions
irb > def max(a,b)
irb > if a > b
irb > a
irb > else
irb * b
irb > end
irb > end
=> nil
irb > m = max(4,8)
=> 8
Your original usage :
I can't ignore this comment as it seems Slashdot keeps perpetuating this myth... Why do people keep perpetuating this misnomer??
This is incorrect usage - it looks like you wrote myth twice, realised this looked bad, and then searched around for another word to replace it with.
The entry on Wikipedia is misleading if not downright wrong, but if you consult *any* proper dictionary, you'll find a better definition. You appear to be using wikipedia as a dictionary and to think that misnomer means simply 'something which is wrong'. Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and wiktionary is a crap dictionary. The comment you replied to doesn't misname anything, it asserts that Vista needs lots of graphics cards to run. Perhaps that's wrong, perhaps it's mistaken, perhaps it's a widely accepted slashdot myth, but it's not a misnomer.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world uses misnomer to mean using the wrong name for something, not something which is wrong or mistaken. Your usage is just a mistake, and not one that's common enough for you to claim it's correct.
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Amisnomer
Why is this important? If we continually misuse words, they lose all meaning. We already have plenty of words for things which are wrong, mistaken, or myths, you could have used them instead.
Why won't people on the internet just accept they're wrong sometimes?