My main problem with the GPL and the 'slashdot zealots' that come out on both ends, is that it is difficult for the to maintain a rational view when looked at across IP in general.
GPL exaggeration: Don't ever use GPL to build upon without releasing the code, copyright is our friend and hammer. Musician exaggeration: Dude, wtf, so you wrote a song 20 years ago..you think you deserve to live off of it forever? Copyrights last waaaay too long as is!
My main problem with the GPL is that I am not free to use it the way I want to. I understand the reasons why to some extent, but the reality is that as software becomes ever and ever more complex, you become reliant on other people's code to get to the 'good part' (ie. I don't need to write my own TCPIP stack to use the internet, my own display drivers to talk to draw on the screen, etc). I recently started working on an ebook reader for my PDA in C# (http://www.slainwilde.com ). One of the things I wanted to do was add in MS Reader LIT ebook decompession for non-DRM ebooks, and to do it on the PDA device itself. But some of the things I wanted to do (live streaming from the lit reader CAB rather than needing to unzip it completely to a full file), I couldn't really do it if I still wanted the possibility to use some off-the-shelf C# component to get the program out there faster. At least in my understanding of the license. And yet this library uses Public Domain code right and left without batting an eye. Again, not that it shouldn't. But it basically means that I will either have to not have those features I want, or I will have to go to a lot more trouble to avoid using some off the shelf component that could save me a week or two of effort.
Not everyone can be a 'subject expert' in everything they want to use to build a program. It made the whole project less appealing to me in a certain sense, every time I looked at some piece of code and saw how it would shape my ability to use it without jumping thru hoops. I'm not saying I have the answers, just that the problems are real for even the 'guy in a basement' trying to do something fun.
Full page zoom negates all arguments. It is a freaking godsend and worth any instability to be able to use it.
That said, I do miss my Clear Cache, and my Compact Menu (which sadly left me without a menu when I upgraded until I found another Addon to unhide it). Grab and Drag I miss too. Perma Tabs too, but TreeStyle Tabs is rockin.
Yes, but you won't be competing against all of the people who ARE using bittorrent. And if direct download times are really that bad, maybe your throttled bittorrent would still be faster:)
I would have expected the more traditional: "I use Noscript and FlashBlock like all leet users, so it doesn't affect me.":P
Adobe/Macromedia has consistently made some pretty great products and has a good track record of opening up their specs for a lot of it, like PDF, Flex, etc. Flash player can run on 99.5% of the desktop browsers out there, which isn't perfect, but is damn good. They at least made an effort to get it to work on Linux, when *nix accounts for an insignificant part of the market, like it or not.
I think the mentality is what is causing the up in arms-ness.
A somewhat flawed analogy: "Windows: I can install special 'plugins' (AV, Firewall, and Malware detections) to make it more secure. But ultimately, if I could fork Windows and actually make it secure, I would given many of the attitudes involved."
I realize this isn't a perfect analogy, as Windows has never really been secured, and then had that feature taken away, but it should point out how developer attitudes can really poison the process.
This is the same problem I have with the open and save dialogs in Vista...Invariably the save dialog opens in the middle of the screen, some file happens to be under my mouse when the dialog opens, and a huge tooltip obscures the text inputs for the file name. Basic usability thrown right out...
Open & Save dialogs in general are my bane...I've seen at least 10 different formats buitl in to windows alone, much less stuff like Flash, where the tree isn't available, so I end up saving the stuff meant to be in one 'assets' folder into the wrong 'assets' folder because I can't see that I am in the wrong project.
You got the factory/interstate analogy backwards. AT&T is the 'government' in this scenario, providing roads and highways, and the 'factories' are consumers and transportation businesses. So pretty much the exact opposite, and traffic jams show exactly what happens, and why AT&T is making some noise about it now. That said, they have 3 years by their own time table, which should be plenty of time, to reduce/avoid the issues.
It's called the 'appearance of an impropriety'. If the cop was a murder police, and worked on a case that involved someone, and then went to work for that someone during the case, I would argue would seem obviously improper.
Forgot I reinstalled my system, so I wasn't logged in.. doh.
How was DoubleClick evil? I'm not sure I get it. I worked there for 6 years, and know a lot about what went on. So I'm not really sure where they got such a bad reputation, other than they did what everyone else was doing and were successful at it.
That said, I will admit that the purchase and suggested integration of the offline catalog thingy (Abacus I think), was not well thought out, but I would also say that someone was going to try it, and they laid off as soon as it got to be an issue.
Otherwise, what does DCLK do? For the most part they are simply the middleman between the advertisers and the producers. Somehow they have a worse reputation than DeBeers, and they are the axe murderers of middlemen.
It's not like any of the sites that DCLK does business would suddenly just not have ads if DCLK never existed. DCLK didn't make popups to my knowledge. They were simply a transmission medium (ISP in some minds, virus in others, lol) that provided reporting and targeting for advertisers across multiple sites when the major sites were sort of walled fortresses. Meaning you had to book ads with Yahoo specifically through their ad dept., then go to Altavista, and book ads directly with them, etc. They just standardized things and made it so advertisers just had to learn one system to book ads on all of them.
I'm sure I'll earn some bad karma for this, but I am interested in the actual details of what they do that is different from everyone else in the business that singles them out.
Microsoft said the two patents it was found to have infringed upon related to technology that allows users to enter dates into calendars and another used in tablet computers to recognize patterns in handwriting.
From a related article: Microsoft said the two patents it was found to have infringed upon related to technology that allows users to enter dates into calendars and another used in tablet computers to recognize patterns in handwriting.
Wow...How in God's name is 'entering dates into a calendar' or anything to do with the 5 people who actually use Tablet handwriting recognition worth 367$ million?
I mean, so you infringed...fine. Can happen innocently or not. Even if you determine it wasn't innocent, say make it triple damages. How do you come close to $367 million with 'entering dates into a calendar' or handwriting recognition. If more than 1 million tablets have sold, I would be surprised...if you valued the handwriting piece at even a huge portion of the cost of the OS, say 1%, that's still only $1mm in real damages ( with magic numbers of say $100 for OS, 1 million units, and 1% of the functionality).
I mean on the one hand, I think being able to sue a bad actor into non-existence... not bankruptcy, out of the game entirely... is an effective tool to deal with the most egregious violators (life and limb shit, not 'usability enhancements'), I can see how litigation really needs to be reigned in over crap like this.
My understanding is that the kernel for OSX is available, as OpenDarwin or whatever, so in that sense, it is very Linux-like. You can do whatever you want to it, like make it compile for non-Apple hardware, which people do daily. The fact that their windowing manager is not Gnome or KDE or open source, doesn't make it any less linux-like unless you are saying that Gnome is Linux too.
I am not disagreeing that being 'allowed' to re-distribute the complete linux source without change is a good thing. There is considerable disagreement over the REQUIREMENT to do so in some cases though.
Philosophical aspects aside, I think most people can objectively agree that OSX is better for desktop app usage, because it essentially DOES everything that Linux does, plus it does additional things that Linux doesn't do or doesn't do well, like run Photoshop or whatever.
The crux of the matter is that in some cases people don't mind paying extra for that added functionality, since they can drive the agenda with it, get bugs fixed or otherwise affect the progress of an application by using market forces in their traditional sense, not some direct 'I'll pay you to implement this feature' way that some people hold up as a viable alternative (not IMO, bounties CAN work, just not with the same power as traditional market forces).
Maybe this is sort of rambling, and it isn't meant to be an attack, just me throwing my thoughts out there in between coding breaks.
If I am not allowed to write my own music player to play ogg/flac/some format not supported by apple/some music store other than iTunes and have it work exactly like the built in music player (which presumably keeps playing when you switch to the Calendar), then Apple is doing something wrong here IMO.
A lot of 'reader' software only support certain fonts, though it might be possible to rename an OCR font as Times New Roman for instance. But typically even this isn't necessary. On windows for instance you can use DPI settings or choose large fonts combined with a very high screen size (think virtualization) to screen capture anything out there currently with 99.99% accuracy (ie. one error every 10 pages-ish). Can't screen cap something? That's what virtualization was made for... screen cap on the host, not the guest.
Obviously OCR fonts and the like don't work for Kindle, but 8Mpixel screen shots (or HD video) of it probably would, assuming the camera was mounted. My point was to offer a practical solution to the 'they don't let us, so what do we do' sentimentality of the post. I think the 'DRM isn't acceptable' posts on SlashDot have pretty much been covered. My point was that it isn't too hard to get around on a personal level, and as long as you don't distribute your efforts, there is no (very low) risk.
It only takes an hour to OCR a normal 3-400 page book. Problem solved. It takes even less to simply scan it in and use a 15MB PDF to read. If you are really desperate you could set up a kindle with decent lighting and a high megapixel digital camera and snap away to your hearts delight. 2-3 seconds per page * 300 (if you do single side, 150 if you do both at once) is 10 minutes to 'scan' a book. You could probably even automate it, if Kindle has an auto page turn feature, or you have something that can press a button every once in a while.
I would say at a minimum for software dev these days (caveat, it really depends on what you are working on obviously), but realistically having a dual processor is a great idea (no matter how fast/slow) simply for debug purposes of multi-threaded apps. And 2GB just doesn't cover it these days if you do anything with eclipse or flex builder, photoshop, flash, etc. You end up thrashing your page cache or having to close/reopen apps every few minutes. At least in my experience. That said, 4GB and dual 3ghz is a great sweet spot, though x64 on Windows can be an issue if you us that OS:P
You fail to understand that if it is broken then you can't prevent malicious installs to begin with. How long before we see a virus/malware that INCLUDES jailbreak? Maybe the steps are honerous now, but they will be streamlined for sure... and then Apple relying on that brick wall is going to look pretty foolish. I'm not saying they should lock it down...I just think that claiming you can lock it down for noobs, and allow power users to jailbreak, etc. ignores the fact that malicious code will take advantage of that fact.
that SDK says your app can't run in the background. I would imagine (not being an iPhone owner but having some common sense) that the iPhone will continue to play music if you are using say the Calendar functionality. If I am not able to create a media player that allows me to provide that same level of functionality, whether it is for some unsupported format not found in iTunes, or if I want to use another media player on my iPhone to download songs from Napster, then I think Apple will be opening itself up to a world of trouble, monopoly-wise. That is exactly how M$ got in trouble, was leveraging their OS to keep out competition. You can't have it both ways... you either allow 3rd party apps or you don't. If a particular carrier wants to prevent some type of network usage/traffic, I can see the carrier doing that, just like you ISP doesn't have to provide you with Newsgroups...but your OS had damn well better not try and block Newsgroups just because it has some forum software it wants to push.
I would argue there is a difference. You can have a monopoly position in a market and not be a monopolist. A monopolist is an entity that uses their market dominance to gain an unfair advantage and to prevent competition.
So for instance: Microsoft would override Netscape being set as the default browser, every time it started up. To my knowledge Apple hasn't done that kind of thing (ignore a user's wishes and launch its program instead). Apple makes its own hardware, so you can't claim that they are using their OS dominance of that hardware to bully the makers of the hardware, other than in the sense that they make deals with their suppliers as a normal course of business. (I am aware of Apple clones back when, just not sure if there is any relevance.) Computers and OS's have traditionally been written exclusively for their hardware, so even though things have changed recently, it doesn't make their business model less valid just a little outdated.
I'm sure that Apple has done things that are anti-competitive: Thinking of the iPhone SDK right now, it doesn't allow programs to run in the background...I don't own an iPhone, but I imagine that audio playback doesn't stop if you switch to your calendar....but if I wanted to write my own media player for the iPhone, would it turn off when I switched apps? In that sense I would consider them to be anti-competitive. Not to mention the 30% vig on apps.
iTunes has a market dominant position, perhaps even a monopoly, but unless they are using that monopoly to actively deny others to the marker by preventing others from making deals with the record labels, then they aren't being monopolistic.
(Disclaimer: Not a Mac Fanboi - I have one dual boot mac laptop, and 4 Windows boxes.)
That's some very cheap media, lol. I mean, even for cheap media, that is cheap.:) I don't really do -R, so I was just going by the AllMediaOutlet price of 30cents per Ritek DVD+R disk basically. Then another 10 cents per disk to put it into a 500 disk wallet album, etc. Obviously there is the time cost of me getting up and switching the disks as well, using the sharpie, and dealing with the inevitable bad disks. That's how I calculated my costs. Any way you slice it, pretty soon it will be cheaper to just leave it on hard drives, and save the 20 minutes per disk (I always verify my burns).
Also, keep in mind that more and more, people are getting 720p BluRay rips that are 8.5GB, and Dual Layer media is easily $1.30 per at least from my usual sources.
And I agree that flash drives will have a price disadvantage for a number of years, but I think the convenience, size factor, power issues (no need to spin a disk, or need to take up that space in a laptop, etc.) will quickly push the market in that direction. And your friend can always just copy the movie off the flash drive onto a cheaper harddisk.
Won't happen overnight, but seems inevitable to me.
Yea, Burnable Media will be going out of business a year from now. DVD+R media is the only one BARELY still better than just buying a hard disk and leaving it on there. Once 1TB drives hit $100, then it is cheaper just to buy new hard drives than to 1) Buy a burner, 2) Buy the media, 3) Store the media, 4) Plus the actual time/effort involved in burning as opposed to just leaving an ISO or VIDEO_TS folder on the drive. At $100 per 1TB, the cost of storing a DVD is ~ $0.45, which is about the cost of media per disc if you are getting at least Ritek quality.
Harddrive manufacturers (and then in 3-5 years, flash manufacturers) are going to get a serious boost in volume within the year I would say, and media vendors are going to start consolidating and going out of business. Then in 3-5 years, when you can get a 20GB flash stick for $2, I can see it happening again. Whereas HD need to overtake media in price, I don't think flash will, as there are other advantages to using the sticks that they could cost say twice as much to store 20GB and still be useful.
And yet there is no serious home brew effort that I've found for doing the simplest of things: Swapping a blank/burned or read DVD/CD from a tray. The closest thing was Sony's DVD burner/carousel, and everything else is 'commercial' grade. Someone with a tiny bit of robotics experience should be able to put together one of these that costs less than $100 no problem.
Slashdot Mirror
My main problem with the GPL and the 'slashdot zealots' that come out on both ends, is that it is difficult for the to maintain a rational view when looked at across IP in general.
GPL exaggeration: Don't ever use GPL to build upon without releasing the code, copyright is our friend and hammer.
Musician exaggeration: Dude, wtf, so you wrote a song 20 years ago..you think you deserve to live off of it forever? Copyrights last waaaay too long as is!
My main problem with the GPL is that I am not free to use it the way I want to. I understand the reasons why to some extent, but the reality is that as software becomes ever and ever more complex, you become reliant on other people's code to get to the 'good part' (ie. I don't need to write my own TCPIP stack to use the internet, my own display drivers to talk to draw on the screen, etc). I recently started working on an ebook reader for my PDA in C# (http://www.slainwilde.com ). One of the things I wanted to do was add in MS Reader LIT ebook decompession for non-DRM ebooks, and to do it on the PDA device itself. But some of the things I wanted to do (live streaming from the lit reader CAB rather than needing to unzip it completely to a full file), I couldn't really do it if I still wanted the possibility to use some off-the-shelf C# component to get the program out there faster. At least in my understanding of the license. And yet this library uses Public Domain code right and left without batting an eye. Again, not that it shouldn't. But it basically means that I will either have to not have those features I want, or I will have to go to a lot more trouble to avoid using some off the shelf component that could save me a week or two of effort.
Not everyone can be a 'subject expert' in everything they want to use to build a program. It made the whole project less appealing to me in a certain sense, every time I looked at some piece of code and saw how it would shape my ability to use it without jumping thru hoops. I'm not saying I have the answers, just that the problems are real for even the 'guy in a basement' trying to do something fun.
Why does it always have to be about race?
Full page zoom negates all arguments. It is a freaking godsend and worth any instability to be able to use it.
That said, I do miss my Clear Cache, and my Compact Menu (which sadly left me without a menu when I upgraded until I found another Addon to unhide it). Grab and Drag I miss too. Perma Tabs too, but TreeStyle Tabs is rockin.
Yes, but you won't be competing against all of the people who ARE using bittorrent. And if direct download times are really that bad, maybe your throttled bittorrent would still be faster :)
I would have expected the more traditional: "I use Noscript and FlashBlock like all leet users, so it doesn't affect me." :P
Adobe/Macromedia has consistently made some pretty great products and has a good track record of opening up their specs for a lot of it, like PDF, Flex, etc. Flash player can run on 99.5% of the desktop browsers out there, which isn't perfect, but is damn good. They at least made an effort to get it to work on Linux, when *nix accounts for an insignificant part of the market, like it or not.
I think the mentality is what is causing the up in arms-ness.
A somewhat flawed analogy:
"Windows: I can install special 'plugins' (AV, Firewall, and Malware detections) to make it more secure. But ultimately, if I could fork Windows and actually make it secure, I would given many of the attitudes involved."
I realize this isn't a perfect analogy, as Windows has never really been secured, and then had that feature taken away, but it should point out how developer attitudes can really poison the process.
This is the same problem I have with the open and save dialogs in Vista...Invariably the save dialog opens in the middle of the screen, some file happens to be under my mouse when the dialog opens, and a huge tooltip obscures the text inputs for the file name. Basic usability thrown right out...
Open & Save dialogs in general are my bane...I've seen at least 10 different formats buitl in to windows alone, much less stuff like Flash, where the tree isn't available, so I end up saving the stuff meant to be in one 'assets' folder into the wrong 'assets' folder because I can't see that I am in the wrong project.
You got the factory/interstate analogy backwards. AT&T is the 'government' in this scenario, providing roads and highways, and the 'factories' are consumers and transportation businesses. So pretty much the exact opposite, and traffic jams show exactly what happens, and why AT&T is making some noise about it now. That said, they have 3 years by their own time table, which should be plenty of time, to reduce/avoid the issues.
It's called the 'appearance of an impropriety'. If the cop was a murder police, and worked on a case that involved someone, and then went to work for that someone during the case, I would argue would seem obviously improper.
Forgot I reinstalled my system, so I wasn't logged in.. doh.
How was DoubleClick evil? I'm not sure I get it. I worked there for 6 years, and know a lot about what went on. So I'm not really sure where they got such a bad reputation, other than they did what everyone else was doing and were successful at it.
That said, I will admit that the purchase and suggested integration of the offline catalog thingy (Abacus I think), was not well thought out, but I would also say that someone was going to try it, and they laid off as soon as it got to be an issue.
Otherwise, what does DCLK do? For the most part they are simply the middleman between the advertisers and the producers. Somehow they have a worse reputation than DeBeers, and they are the axe murderers of middlemen.
It's not like any of the sites that DCLK does business would suddenly just not have ads if DCLK never existed. DCLK didn't make popups to my knowledge. They were simply a transmission medium (ISP in some minds, virus in others, lol) that provided reporting and targeting for advertisers across multiple sites when the major sites were sort of walled fortresses. Meaning you had to book ads with Yahoo specifically through their ad dept., then go to Altavista, and book ads directly with them, etc. They just standardized things and made it so advertisers just had to learn one system to book ads on all of them.
I'm sure I'll earn some bad karma for this, but I am interested in the actual details of what they do that is different from everyone else in the business that singles them out.
Microsoft said the two patents it was found to have infringed upon related to technology that allows users to enter dates into calendars and another used in tablet computers to recognize patterns in handwriting.
From a related article:
Microsoft said the two patents it was found to have infringed upon related to technology that allows users to enter dates into calendars and another used in tablet computers to recognize patterns in handwriting.
Wow...How in God's name is 'entering dates into a calendar' or anything to do with the 5 people who actually use Tablet handwriting recognition worth 367$ million?
I mean, so you infringed...fine. Can happen innocently or not. Even if you determine it wasn't innocent, say make it triple damages. How do you come close to $367 million with 'entering dates into a calendar' or handwriting recognition. If more than 1 million tablets have sold, I would be surprised...if you valued the handwriting piece at even a huge portion of the cost of the OS, say 1%, that's still only $1mm in real damages ( with magic numbers of say $100 for OS, 1 million units, and 1% of the functionality).
I mean on the one hand, I think being able to sue a bad actor into non-existence... not bankruptcy, out of the game entirely... is an effective tool to deal with the most egregious violators (life and limb shit, not 'usability enhancements'), I can see how litigation really needs to be reigned in over crap like this.
My understanding is that the kernel for OSX is available, as OpenDarwin or whatever, so in that sense, it is very Linux-like. You can do whatever you want to it, like make it compile for non-Apple hardware, which people do daily. The fact that their windowing manager is not Gnome or KDE or open source, doesn't make it any less linux-like unless you are saying that Gnome is Linux too.
I am not disagreeing that being 'allowed' to re-distribute the complete linux source without change is a good thing. There is considerable disagreement over the REQUIREMENT to do so in some cases though.
Philosophical aspects aside, I think most people can objectively agree that OSX is better for desktop app usage, because it essentially DOES everything that Linux does, plus it does additional things that Linux doesn't do or doesn't do well, like run Photoshop or whatever.
The crux of the matter is that in some cases people don't mind paying extra for that added functionality, since they can drive the agenda with it, get bugs fixed or otherwise affect the progress of an application by using market forces in their traditional sense, not some direct 'I'll pay you to implement this feature' way that some people hold up as a viable alternative (not IMO, bounties CAN work, just not with the same power as traditional market forces).
Maybe this is sort of rambling, and it isn't meant to be an attack, just me throwing my thoughts out there in between coding breaks.
Wine doesn't support full text justification in its RichEdit control for instance, which is a serious problem IMO.
If I am not allowed to write my own music player to play ogg/flac/some format not supported by apple/some music store other than iTunes and have it work exactly like the built in music player (which presumably keeps playing when you switch to the Calendar), then Apple is doing something wrong here IMO.
A lot of 'reader' software only support certain fonts, though it might be possible to rename an OCR font as Times New Roman for instance. But typically even this isn't necessary. On windows for instance you can use DPI settings or choose large fonts combined with a very high screen size (think virtualization) to screen capture anything out there currently with 99.99% accuracy (ie. one error every 10 pages-ish). Can't screen cap something? That's what virtualization was made for... screen cap on the host, not the guest.
Obviously OCR fonts and the like don't work for Kindle, but 8Mpixel screen shots (or HD video) of it probably would, assuming the camera was mounted. My point was to offer a practical solution to the 'they don't let us, so what do we do' sentimentality of the post. I think the 'DRM isn't acceptable' posts on SlashDot have pretty much been covered. My point was that it isn't too hard to get around on a personal level, and as long as you don't distribute your efforts, there is no (very low) risk.
It only takes an hour to OCR a normal 3-400 page book. Problem solved. It takes even less to simply scan it in and use a 15MB PDF to read. If you are really desperate you could set up a kindle with decent lighting and a high megapixel digital camera and snap away to your hearts delight. 2-3 seconds per page * 300 (if you do single side, 150 if you do both at once) is 10 minutes to 'scan' a book. You could probably even automate it, if Kindle has an auto page turn feature, or you have something that can press a button every once in a while.
I would say at a minimum for software dev these days (caveat, it really depends on what you are working on obviously), but realistically having a dual processor is a great idea (no matter how fast/slow) simply for debug purposes of multi-threaded apps. And 2GB just doesn't cover it these days if you do anything with eclipse or flex builder, photoshop, flash, etc. You end up thrashing your page cache or having to close/reopen apps every few minutes. At least in my experience. That said, 4GB and dual 3ghz is a great sweet spot, though x64 on Windows can be an issue if you us that OS :P
You fail to understand that if it is broken then you can't prevent malicious installs to begin with. How long before we see a virus/malware that INCLUDES jailbreak? Maybe the steps are honerous now, but they will be streamlined for sure... and then Apple relying on that brick wall is going to look pretty foolish. I'm not saying they should lock it down...I just think that claiming you can lock it down for noobs, and allow power users to jailbreak, etc. ignores the fact that malicious code will take advantage of that fact.
But burnable media will see a sharp decline in the near future when price per GB for HD's matches price per GB for burned media.
that SDK says your app can't run in the background. I would imagine (not being an iPhone owner but having some common sense) that the iPhone will continue to play music if you are using say the Calendar functionality. If I am not able to create a media player that allows me to provide that same level of functionality, whether it is for some unsupported format not found in iTunes, or if I want to use another media player on my iPhone to download songs from Napster, then I think Apple will be opening itself up to a world of trouble, monopoly-wise. That is exactly how M$ got in trouble, was leveraging their OS to keep out competition. You can't have it both ways... you either allow 3rd party apps or you don't. If a particular carrier wants to prevent some type of network usage/traffic, I can see the carrier doing that, just like you ISP doesn't have to provide you with Newsgroups...but your OS had damn well better not try and block Newsgroups just because it has some forum software it wants to push.
I would argue there is a difference. You can have a monopoly position in a market and not be a monopolist. A monopolist is an entity that uses their market dominance to gain an unfair advantage and to prevent competition.
So for instance: Microsoft would override Netscape being set as the default browser, every time it started up. To my knowledge Apple hasn't done that kind of thing (ignore a user's wishes and launch its program instead). Apple makes its own hardware, so you can't claim that they are using their OS dominance of that hardware to bully the makers of the hardware, other than in the sense that they make deals with their suppliers as a normal course of business. (I am aware of Apple clones back when, just not sure if there is any relevance.) Computers and OS's have traditionally been written exclusively for their hardware, so even though things have changed recently, it doesn't make their business model less valid just a little outdated.
I'm sure that Apple has done things that are anti-competitive: Thinking of the iPhone SDK right now, it doesn't allow programs to run in the background...I don't own an iPhone, but I imagine that audio playback doesn't stop if you switch to your calendar....but if I wanted to write my own media player for the iPhone, would it turn off when I switched apps? In that sense I would consider them to be anti-competitive. Not to mention the 30% vig on apps.
iTunes has a market dominant position, perhaps even a monopoly, but unless they are using that monopoly to actively deny others to the marker by preventing others from making deals with the record labels, then they aren't being monopolistic.
(Disclaimer: Not a Mac Fanboi - I have one dual boot mac laptop, and 4 Windows boxes.)
That's some very cheap media, lol. I mean, even for cheap media, that is cheap. :) I don't really do -R, so I was just going by the AllMediaOutlet price of 30cents per Ritek DVD+R disk basically. Then another 10 cents per disk to put it into a 500 disk wallet album, etc. Obviously there is the time cost of me getting up and switching the disks as well, using the sharpie, and dealing with the inevitable bad disks. That's how I calculated my costs. Any way you slice it, pretty soon it will be cheaper to just leave it on hard drives, and save the 20 minutes per disk (I always verify my burns).
Also, keep in mind that more and more, people are getting 720p BluRay rips that are 8.5GB, and Dual Layer media is easily $1.30 per at least from my usual sources.
Of course you then have to deal with all the drives, but a 1TB drive takes up a lot less space than 250 dvd's. And there are those new docking stations:
http://www.geekstuff4u.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=&products_id=630
And I agree that flash drives will have a price disadvantage for a number of years, but I think the convenience, size factor, power issues (no need to spin a disk, or need to take up that space in a laptop, etc.) will quickly push the market in that direction. And your friend can always just copy the movie off the flash drive onto a cheaper harddisk.
Won't happen overnight, but seems inevitable to me.
Yea, Burnable Media will be going out of business a year from now. DVD+R media is the only one BARELY still better than just buying a hard disk and leaving it on there. Once 1TB drives hit $100, then it is cheaper just to buy new hard drives than to 1) Buy a burner, 2) Buy the media, 3) Store the media, 4) Plus the actual time/effort involved in burning as opposed to just leaving an ISO or VIDEO_TS folder on the drive. At $100 per 1TB, the cost of storing a DVD is ~ $0.45, which is about the cost of media per disc if you are getting at least Ritek quality.
Harddrive manufacturers (and then in 3-5 years, flash manufacturers) are going to get a serious boost in volume within the year I would say, and media vendors are going to start consolidating and going out of business. Then in 3-5 years, when you can get a 20GB flash stick for $2, I can see it happening again. Whereas HD need to overtake media in price, I don't think flash will, as there are other advantages to using the sticks that they could cost say twice as much to store 20GB and still be useful.
And yet there is no serious home brew effort that I've found for doing the simplest of things: Swapping a blank/burned or read DVD/CD from a tray. The closest thing was Sony's DVD burner/carousel, and everything else is 'commercial' grade. Someone with a tiny bit of robotics experience should be able to put together one of these that costs less than $100 no problem.