I fully agree with you about what is the right thing to do. Unfortunately we already live in the society you mention, as exemplified by Amazon's behavior. I didn't check to see if they offer to pay for the return shipping--or better yet, for UPS/FedEx pickup so you're not inconvenienced--but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't. We live in a world where the stronger can make mistakes at the cost of the weaker and almost always get away with it. The "right thing" for Amazon to do would be to offer a profuse amount of groveling, free return shipping with pickup, and possibly some small token discount or credit towards a future purchase as a "sorry" for the inconvenience. The "right thing" certainly does not include sending threatening ultimatum-laden emails.
> And I welcome any way to subvert such technologies.
How about forgoing computers in schools entirely if they're not economically feasible anyway? I think the value of computers in education has been seriously exaggerated, not least because of efforts by Microsoft, I'm sure. Especially in K-12 a lot of the learning is of the more basic kind, and while adding computer knowledge would be nice, I think it's much less important than giving kids a solid foundation in the basics. Judging by the atrocious (lack of) competence in English and Math amongst college freshmen, computers should be pretty low on the list of priorities. How's that for subverting ad-supported computers?
> he uses his columns as a bully pulpit to promote that ideology
Which is quite right of center politically, to say the least. Which would be fine if he kept it out of his TECHNOLOGY column, but of course he can't. I remember reading one of his columns back in the late 90s when InfoWorld was still somewhat worth reading, and it was a lunatic rant against Bill Clinton and how he'd met him in person at some junket and had to fight the urge to jump at his jugular--or something to that effect, anyway. That's the problem with a lot of these one-hit-wonders that clamber onto the public stage via some specific talent and then feel qualified to have a publicly worthwhile opinion on everything else. Metcalfe is a particular stinker in that respect, especially considering that he didn't single-handedly invent Ethernet anyway.
> However, if they only offer it at 128K, I just won't buy that offering. > I'll either not buy it all or buy the CD and rip it at my preferred portable setting.'
That was my point exactly, to offer a broad range of formats and quality to address different needs, tastes and budgets. What you consider your preferred portable settings for example are entirely excessive for my needs--I primarily listen to music in the car, and even 128K MP3 is overkill there due to ambient noise. I'd rather pay less for less quality for MY needs, and let you pay more for YOUR needs.
> I wouldn't pay 5$ for a 128kbps mp3 album when I could down 192kbps VBR for free.
We're not talking about pirating here, of course free will always beat non-free. We're talking about what a sensible pricing model would be so that a large percentage of people would buy instead of copy. And no, I don't consider 128K MP3 the bee's knee either, it was just an example. Somehing more palatable for $5 might be 160K WMA or equivalent. My point was to offer a tiered pricing model so users could make their own quality-vs-price trade-off decisions.
> If my tax dollars were paying for all of EMI's music to enter public domain
Who the hell is talking about that? You're reading things into it that aren't there.
On a different note, if EMI is seriously considering selling unencumbered music, I would suggest they buy allofmp3's back-end software, or they develop something along similar lines along with a similar sales model, except of course more realistic pricing that hopefully actually compensates the artists. I personally consider up to around $5 an album for 128Kbps MP3 an acceptable price, any higher than than and downloads almost completely lose their attraction. Future pricing models simply HAVE to take into consideration the quality-per-buck aspect, otherwise it won't fly long term. Paying $10 an album for considerably lower quality than what you get on a CD from Target or Wal-Mart at the same price simply won't fly. Besides, offering a tiered pricing model also gives them the chance to zero in on the sweet spot of the market.
Well, congratulations! Alas, your ability to use the iPod sans iTunes is less a testament to Apple's magnanimity than to the resourcefulness of the people that made it possible. That software didn't write itself, and Apple didn't go out of their way to make it easy for these apps to be written. Not exactly hard, either, but the debate is about just how open Apple is, and I have to conclude that "not very."
The cornerstones of American justice, which have reduced criminality in this country to practically zero. How about for a change doing something effective, like restricting the rights of companies from even OBTAINING data they don't need? If you don't have information to begin with, it's much harder to abuse. The level of unnecessary information collection in the US is mind boggling, yet you cannot usually question or refuse any such requests without being denied the service you're trying to obtain. European--in particular German--data privacy has historically been much, much more effective, because it approaches information on a need-to-know basis and empowers the citizen to refuse to provide information they deem unnecessary. Only recently have these systems started to weaken, primarily because they have been pressured into adopting some of the cavalier American attitudes towards data privacy, often under the guise of fighting terrorism or international crime (child pornography, money laundering, etc.)
Wow, it's pretty obvious who the idiot is, especially when Jon makes such an excellent point. Another thing that makes Jobs' "we'd welcome openness" comment appear so facetious is the fact that they have done everything in their power to tie iTunes and the iPod closely together, and never the twain shall part. That has nothing to do with DRM but everything with tying the user to a specific (delivery/music/etc.) platform.
> You don't become fanatical about a Mac, just because it looks good. There has to be something more there to cause these levels of devotion.
Well, I guess we disagree on the definition of a fanatic. I tend to associate it more with irrational support of something, and I like Winston Churchill's definition: "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". The more you have well justified reasons for liking something, the less you are a fanatic in my mind. A fanboy would really be something different, more of a geek version of a rah-rah cheerleader with pom-poms and such, but I digress.
> the Mac would be dead if it weren't for professional users in graphics and publishing during the "dark days."
I would definitely have to disagree with that assessment, but there's really no way to prove or disprove things one way or the other. I'm just thinking that the Mac never really lost that professional base you speak of, even during the "dark days", and they still teetered on the brink. I have no doubt in my mind that they would have fallen in if Steve Jobs hadn't come back and put some shiny into the platform. I remember quite clearly when people considered it only a matter of time before Apple would be sold for peanuts. The thing is, there is no real money in the professional market, certainly not in the small numbers that use Macs. Just look at the PC market--despite a Windows box being on just about every corporate desktop in America, the consumer market still eclipses the corporate one in terms of numbers shipped and total revenue. There's power in the sheer number of consumers out there.
> And Macs weren't shiny then, they were beige.
Well, the OS was still shiny for the day--I clearly remember people waxing poetic over the elegance and simplicity of the Mac GUI, so that was the shiny of the day. And frankly, they were right, though only skin deep. From a developer point of view the Mac was a total mess and only got worse until OS X.
> How is it any harder to use a screwdriver to take the parts out of a Mac and put them in another case? > How is it difficult to stick neon lights in your Mac? The Powermac/Mac Pro even has a transparent side-panel > that can be used instead of the aluminium to put all those lights on the inside.
Oh come on, you're reaching now. Yeah, there's "A" Mac with transparent side panels--hold me back! Without that, internal modding is pretty useless. Compare that to the sheer endless modding cases you can buy for the PC, with ridiculous junk like blue LED RAM and windowed hard drives. Don't get me wrong, I consider that entire endeavor ludicrous, but OTOH many of its followers aren't of the ricer variety either. There are plenty of modders out there with great technical skills that choose the PC as their platform very deliberately. Besides, you can't really compare ricers to computer modders. While many of the Civic-with-an-RS-sticker crowd are indeed cheap bastards and wouldn't know good handling from a blowjob, PC modders tend to drop loads of cash on their hobby, so they're definitely the high end of the PC market.
> Why do you think people install custom wallpapers, fiddle with their colors, invent entirely custom GUI themes
Actually, I have to disagree on the motivations for these. Those are toys for people that are not really doing much on their computer and are bored all day long. For anyone else the system sounds and other flashy widgets get old and annoying after about five minutes. When I do my development work I want to see as much as possible of my work and as little as possible of the OS and anything not directly related to what I'm doing. That's why I run two 20" displays at 1600x1200, one with a maximized code editor, the other full of reference windows and file browsers and such. Anything else would seriously encroach on my screen space and would get turned off. At first the flashy Dashboard widgets seemed incredibly useful (a.k.a. Konfabulator), and many Mac users rave about them, but after trying to use them for a few days I simply had to get rid of them because most are definitely form-over-function and don't provide anything that couldn't be obtained in a less intrusive fashion.
Well said, and it's a switching reason I can respect, but alas it's not an answer heard too often from Mac fans, simply because most people don't understand much of the OS beyond the shiny.
Could it also perhaps be that you're just better at what you than your local competition? Or are you telling me that if for some reason you were forced to work on the PC platform you would somehow experience an instant lobotomy that would lead to irrational file naming and general sloppiness? Give yourself a bit more credit than just the OS you use, otherwise you smack of the "no, but I stayed at the Holiday Inn Express" syndrome.
> Actually, the post I was replying to was specifically addressing Mac "fanatics."
Of which you definitely are one, as your six paragraph reply to my two sentence response exemplifies. Fanboyism is nothing new--I was the most rabid Amiga devotee in its days, and we put you Mac drones to shame without question in that department.
Your Beverly Hills comment is ironic given that it probably is one of the places with a high Mac penetration precisely for its usefulness as a powerful tool in niche industries like audio and video production. Around most of the rest of the world the Mac does indeed primarily appeal to human magpies, including around my neck of the woods. At my company of over 15,000 employees the number of Macs on the network can be counted on the fingers of one hand, even though we do a lot of the things Macs are considered great at.
You can tell a magpie from the relatively shallow reasons for their liking of the Mac. If you dig deeper regarding why they like the Mac, the answers pretty much dry up after "ease of use" and "iPhoto" and tend to peter out in the "oooh, shiny" territory. I personally could and often do give them much better reasons for liking their Mac than they personally have, such as the solid underlying OS and its clean architecture (as opposed to the utter and total mess that were the pre-X versions), and its nice and seamless scriptability, amongst other things. But at this point I usually tend to lose them, since they usually have no clue what I'm talking about. I have a full appreciation of the modern Mac OS, I just happen to have zero confidence in Apple and its attitude towards its customers, and I certainly have no use for a single-source hardware platform that leads to monopolistic pricing. If the irrational rumors of a porting of the Mac OS to the generic x86 platform had been true, I would have very seriously considered adopting it.
Regarding the question of why Mac users don't mod their machines as opposed to the apparently more shallow hordes of PC users who do, the answer is quite simple: the closed hardware platform makes it much harder. You can't simply go and buy a flashy case with windows and such, and the amount of pimped up hardware that will actually work in a Mac (internal crap with blue LEDs on it) is rather limited. You would have to be a true hardware hack to mod a Mac, and while there are indeed examples of impressively modded Macs out there, the pickings are slim.
Actually, most I know ARE. Everything else they own is also shiny. Very few Mac fans I know like it for the "right" reasons, but because it's shiny. When OS X first came out, it was Aqua-this and Aqua-that all day long.
LOL, well said. I went through that a decade and a half ago when I switched from the moribund Amiga. If you think Windows isn't thrilling today, you haven't switched from a multitasking OS to Windows 3.1-on-DOS.
What hasn't sunk in with Bill and probably never will is that most Windows users are pragmatists and not fanboys. There simply isn't much in the OS to incite rabid love and loyalty, just the sober realization and acceptance that it's an OS with the widest hardware support, the most available software, and which runs on a cheaper and more open hardware platform. Other than that, there are plenty of more elegant and emotionally engaging operating systems out there.
I don't know about desktop integration since I've never used that, but could you please give me some examples of which pages use ActiveX components in IE? The application looks and acts practically identical in IE6 on XP and in Firefox, with the exception of some minor rendering differences. This would beg the question why they would have developed an ActiveX version of a functionality if the same thing can--and has--been achieved in a more standards-compliant fashion?
No it isn't. It works perfectly fine in Firefox across platforms and in other browsers as well. In fact, some people consider OWA Microsoft's best web app, far better than anything they hoist at you on their own website.
> So this scanner is meant to protect the dignity of passengers how?
Easy:
Sir, please insert the Dignity Protector Applicator into your rectum when this light turns green, then rest both palms on these shiny metal pads and relax all muscles. Next!
Slashdot Mirror
...make a hard copy of the Internet and browse it on the john.
DISCLAIMER: joke appropriated from Dilbert
I fully agree with you about what is the right thing to do. Unfortunately we already live in the society you mention, as exemplified by Amazon's behavior. I didn't check to see if they offer to pay for the return shipping--or better yet, for UPS/FedEx pickup so you're not inconvenienced--but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't. We live in a world where the stronger can make mistakes at the cost of the weaker and almost always get away with it. The "right thing" for Amazon to do would be to offer a profuse amount of groveling, free return shipping with pickup, and possibly some small token discount or credit towards a future purchase as a "sorry" for the inconvenience. The "right thing" certainly does not include sending threatening ultimatum-laden emails.
> Education is the only thing [...] that separates our society from those of the primative past.
Am I the only one who found this amusing?!
> And I welcome any way to subvert such technologies.
How about forgoing computers in schools entirely if they're not economically feasible anyway? I think the value of computers in education has been seriously exaggerated, not least because of efforts by Microsoft, I'm sure. Especially in K-12 a lot of the learning is of the more basic kind, and while adding computer knowledge would be nice, I think it's much less important than giving kids a solid foundation in the basics. Judging by the atrocious (lack of) competence in English and Math amongst college freshmen, computers should be pretty low on the list of priorities. How's that for subverting ad-supported computers?
> point your finger instead at the people who give Metcalfe a platform to express said political opinions
In a way I did, that's pretty much when I stopped reading InfoWorld.
> he uses his columns as a bully pulpit to promote that ideology
Which is quite right of center politically, to say the least. Which would be fine if he kept it out of his TECHNOLOGY column, but of course he can't. I remember reading one of his columns back in the late 90s when InfoWorld was still somewhat worth reading, and it was a lunatic rant against Bill Clinton and how he'd met him in person at some junket and had to fight the urge to jump at his jugular--or something to that effect, anyway. That's the problem with a lot of these one-hit-wonders that clamber onto the public stage via some specific talent and then feel qualified to have a publicly worthwhile opinion on everything else. Metcalfe is a particular stinker in that respect, especially considering that he didn't single-handedly invent Ethernet anyway.
> However, if they only offer it at 128K, I just won't buy that offering.
> I'll either not buy it all or buy the CD and rip it at my preferred portable setting.'
That was my point exactly, to offer a broad range of formats and quality to address different needs, tastes and budgets. What you consider your preferred portable settings for example are entirely excessive for my needs--I primarily listen to music in the car, and even 128K MP3 is overkill there due to ambient noise. I'd rather pay less for less quality for MY needs, and let you pay more for YOUR needs.
> I wouldn't pay 5$ for a 128kbps mp3 album when I could down 192kbps VBR for free.
We're not talking about pirating here, of course free will always beat non-free. We're talking about what a sensible pricing model would be so that a large percentage of people would buy instead of copy. And no, I don't consider 128K MP3 the bee's knee either, it was just an example. Somehing more palatable for $5 might be 160K WMA or equivalent. My point was to offer a tiered pricing model so users could make their own quality-vs-price trade-off decisions.
> If my tax dollars were paying for all of EMI's music to enter public domain
Who the hell is talking about that? You're reading things into it that aren't there.
On a different note, if EMI is seriously considering selling unencumbered music, I would suggest they buy allofmp3's back-end software, or they develop something along similar lines along with a similar sales model, except of course more realistic pricing that hopefully actually compensates the artists. I personally consider up to around $5 an album for 128Kbps MP3 an acceptable price, any higher than than and downloads almost completely lose their attraction. Future pricing models simply HAVE to take into consideration the quality-per-buck aspect, otherwise it won't fly long term. Paying $10 an album for considerably lower quality than what you get on a CD from Target or Wal-Mart at the same price simply won't fly. Besides, offering a tiered pricing model also gives them the chance to zero in on the sweet spot of the market.
Well, congratulations! Alas, your ability to use the iPod sans iTunes is less a testament to Apple's magnanimity than to the resourcefulness of the people that made it possible. That software didn't write itself, and Apple didn't go out of their way to make it easy for these apps to be written. Not exactly hard, either, but the debate is about just how open Apple is, and I have to conclude that "not very."
The cornerstones of American justice, which have reduced criminality in this country to practically zero. How about for a change doing something effective, like restricting the rights of companies from even OBTAINING data they don't need? If you don't have information to begin with, it's much harder to abuse. The level of unnecessary information collection in the US is mind boggling, yet you cannot usually question or refuse any such requests without being denied the service you're trying to obtain. European--in particular German--data privacy has historically been much, much more effective, because it approaches information on a need-to-know basis and empowers the citizen to refuse to provide information they deem unnecessary. Only recently have these systems started to weaken, primarily because they have been pressured into adopting some of the cavalier American attitudes towards data privacy, often under the guise of fighting terrorism or international crime (child pornography, money laundering, etc.)
Wow, it's pretty obvious who the idiot is, especially when Jon makes such an excellent point. Another thing that makes Jobs' "we'd welcome openness" comment appear so facetious is the fact that they have done everything in their power to tie iTunes and the iPod closely together, and never the twain shall part. That has nothing to do with DRM but everything with tying the user to a specific (delivery/music/etc.) platform.
> You don't become fanatical about a Mac, just because it looks good. There has to be something more there to cause these levels of devotion.
Well, I guess we disagree on the definition of a fanatic. I tend to associate it more with irrational support of something, and I like Winston Churchill's definition: "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". The more you have well justified reasons for liking something, the less you are a fanatic in my mind. A fanboy would really be something different, more of a geek version of a rah-rah cheerleader with pom-poms and such, but I digress.
> the Mac would be dead if it weren't for professional users in graphics and publishing during the "dark days."
I would definitely have to disagree with that assessment, but there's really no way to prove or disprove things one way or the other. I'm just thinking that the Mac never really lost that professional base you speak of, even during the "dark days", and they still teetered on the brink. I have no doubt in my mind that they would have fallen in if Steve Jobs hadn't come back and put some shiny into the platform. I remember quite clearly when people considered it only a matter of time before Apple would be sold for peanuts. The thing is, there is no real money in the professional market, certainly not in the small numbers that use Macs. Just look at the PC market--despite a Windows box being on just about every corporate desktop in America, the consumer market still eclipses the corporate one in terms of numbers shipped and total revenue. There's power in the sheer number of consumers out there.
> And Macs weren't shiny then, they were beige.
Well, the OS was still shiny for the day--I clearly remember people waxing poetic over the elegance and simplicity of the Mac GUI, so that was the shiny of the day. And frankly, they were right, though only skin deep. From a developer point of view the Mac was a total mess and only got worse until OS X.
> How is it any harder to use a screwdriver to take the parts out of a Mac and put them in another case?
> How is it difficult to stick neon lights in your Mac? The Powermac/Mac Pro even has a transparent side-panel
> that can be used instead of the aluminium to put all those lights on the inside.
Oh come on, you're reaching now. Yeah, there's "A" Mac with transparent side panels--hold me back! Without that, internal modding is pretty useless. Compare that to the sheer endless modding cases you can buy for the PC, with ridiculous junk like blue LED RAM and windowed hard drives. Don't get me wrong, I consider that entire endeavor ludicrous, but OTOH many of its followers aren't of the ricer variety either. There are plenty of modders out there with great technical skills that choose the PC as their platform very deliberately. Besides, you can't really compare ricers to computer modders. While many of the Civic-with-an-RS-sticker crowd are indeed cheap bastards and wouldn't know good handling from a blowjob, PC modders tend to drop loads of cash on their hobby, so they're definitely the high end of the PC market.
> Why do you think people install custom wallpapers, fiddle with their colors, invent entirely custom GUI themes
Actually, I have to disagree on the motivations for these. Those are toys for people that are not really doing much on their computer and are bored all day long. For anyone else the system sounds and other flashy widgets get old and annoying after about five minutes. When I do my development work I want to see as much as possible of my work and as little as possible of the OS and anything not directly related to what I'm doing. That's why I run two 20" displays at 1600x1200, one with a maximized code editor, the other full of reference windows and file browsers and such. Anything else would seriously encroach on my screen space and would get turned off. At first the flashy Dashboard widgets seemed incredibly useful (a.k.a. Konfabulator), and many Mac users rave about them, but after trying to use them for a few days I simply had to get rid of them because most are definitely form-over-function and don't provide anything that couldn't be obtained in a less intrusive fashion.
Well said, and it's a switching reason I can respect, but alas it's not an answer heard too often from Mac fans, simply because most people don't understand much of the OS beyond the shiny.
Could it also perhaps be that you're just better at what you than your local competition? Or are you telling me that if for some reason you were forced to work on the PC platform you would somehow experience an instant lobotomy that would lead to irrational file naming and general sloppiness? Give yourself a bit more credit than just the OS you use, otherwise you smack of the "no, but I stayed at the Holiday Inn Express" syndrome.
> Actually, the post I was replying to was specifically addressing Mac "fanatics."
Of which you definitely are one, as your six paragraph reply to my two sentence response exemplifies. Fanboyism is nothing new--I was the most rabid Amiga devotee in its days, and we put you Mac drones to shame without question in that department.
Your Beverly Hills comment is ironic given that it probably is one of the places with a high Mac penetration precisely for its usefulness as a powerful tool in niche industries like audio and video production. Around most of the rest of the world the Mac does indeed primarily appeal to human magpies, including around my neck of the woods. At my company of over 15,000 employees the number of Macs on the network can be counted on the fingers of one hand, even though we do a lot of the things Macs are considered great at.
You can tell a magpie from the relatively shallow reasons for their liking of the Mac. If you dig deeper regarding why they like the Mac, the answers pretty much dry up after "ease of use" and "iPhoto" and tend to peter out in the "oooh, shiny" territory. I personally could and often do give them much better reasons for liking their Mac than they personally have, such as the solid underlying OS and its clean architecture (as opposed to the utter and total mess that were the pre-X versions), and its nice and seamless scriptability, amongst other things. But at this point I usually tend to lose them, since they usually have no clue what I'm talking about. I have a full appreciation of the modern Mac OS, I just happen to have zero confidence in Apple and its attitude towards its customers, and I certainly have no use for a single-source hardware platform that leads to monopolistic pricing. If the irrational rumors of a porting of the Mac OS to the generic x86 platform had been true, I would have very seriously considered adopting it.
Regarding the question of why Mac users don't mod their machines as opposed to the apparently more shallow hordes of PC users who do, the answer is quite simple: the closed hardware platform makes it much harder. You can't simply go and buy a flashy case with windows and such, and the amount of pimped up hardware that will actually work in a Mac (internal crap with blue LEDs on it) is rather limited. You would have to be a true hardware hack to mod a Mac, and while there are indeed examples of impressively modded Macs out there, the pickings are slim.
> Mac fans aren't Mac fans because it's shiny
Actually, most I know ARE. Everything else they own is also shiny. Very few Mac fans I know like it for the "right" reasons, but because it's shiny. When OS X first came out, it was Aqua-this and Aqua-that all day long.
LOL, well said. I went through that a decade and a half ago when I switched from the moribund Amiga. If you think Windows isn't thrilling today, you haven't switched from a multitasking OS to Windows 3.1-on-DOS.
What hasn't sunk in with Bill and probably never will is that most Windows users are pragmatists and not fanboys. There simply isn't much in the OS to incite rabid love and loyalty, just the sober realization and acceptance that it's an OS with the widest hardware support, the most available software, and which runs on a cheaper and more open hardware platform. Other than that, there are plenty of more elegant and emotionally engaging operating systems out there.
I don't know about desktop integration since I've never used that, but could you please give me some examples of which pages use ActiveX components in IE? The application looks and acts practically identical in IE6 on XP and in Firefox, with the exception of some minor rendering differences. This would beg the question why they would have developed an ActiveX version of a functionality if the same thing can--and has--been achieved in a more standards-compliant fashion?
> The web interface is rife with Active X.
No it isn't. It works perfectly fine in Firefox across platforms and in other browsers as well. In fact, some people consider OWA Microsoft's best web app, far better than anything they hoist at you on their own website.
> but who ever said life was fair?
Right, and who ever said that the consumer should always be the one behaving fairly?
> Is there anything that's ONLY available from iTunes that can't be acquired elsewhere?
Yes, a fanatical devotion to a company.
> So this scanner is meant to protect the dignity of passengers how?
Easy:
Sir, please insert the Dignity Protector Applicator into your rectum when this light turns green, then rest both palms on these shiny metal pads and relax all muscles. Next!