even when it does something useful it costs more and is less efficient than having private business do so.
Government isn't supposed to be efficient. It's supposed to do the things that don't get done or don't get done right, by private business. For a few obvious examples:
universal education national defense space flight food and drug safety automobile emissions regulation wilderness management
While, of course, we all want government to be as efficient as it can reasonably be, the actual services are the fundamental reason for its existence, not efficiency. Which is the exact opposite of the corporation, which is tasked with finding the most efficient way of making money.
If we left space flight, exploration, and science, solely to private industry and free market, we'd not have yet landed people on the Moon, we would not have landed probes on Mars, we would not have seen through the haze of Titan, etc.
and iTunes isn't installed by default on any Windows PCs
It was, although that's not directly relevant to the discussion.
so how is iTunes any advantage for ripping mp3s?
I never said it had an advantage. I merely said that when comparing iTunes and WMP, it's fair to present WMP 10 in proper context.
Of course, it's also fair to put iTunes in proper context, but since all versions of iTunes have always been able to rip mp3s, there's no real context to bring up in that regard. If WMP 10 were fairly universal to the extent that there was no significant install base of WMP 9, then the WMP 10 context would not be worth bringing up either, but there is a significant install base of WMP 9 (and earlier), so it is worth bringing up.
Don't make the mistake in thinking that I'm implying that WMP 10 doesn't count, or that iTunes 6 is superior to WMP 10 just because WMP 9 couldn't encode mp3s. I'm just providing relevant context for comparing iTunes and WMP support for mp3 encoding as reflected in the real numbers of the real world.
MS has always had a hard time getting people to upgrade, even when the upgrades are available as free downloads. This is just another example of that difficulty in action.
If you want to compare up-to-date iTunes users with up-to-date WMP users on XP, then certainly they can all rip to mp3 just fine (excepting the DRM CDs). If you want to leave it at that, by all means, do so. But it's certainly fair and appropriate to point out that, in the real world, WMP 10 is not the version installed and in use by many people.
That WMP 10 is not universal amongst WMP installs does not change the fact that WMP 10 can rip mp3s, and that WMP 10 can rip mp3s does not change the fact that there is still a significant install base of older versions without the mp3 plug-in. These facts are not contradictory, but are both relevant. Someone incompletely pointed out one of those facts, so I thought it fair to point out the other to help fill in the complete picture. Why would you have a problem with that?
Yes, it is. I refer you to Microsoft's own page. To save you some clicking and reading, I'll quote the relevant part:
MP3 encoding support is included at no cost with Windows Media Player 10. For Windows Media Player 9 Series, you can add MP3 encoding support by purchasing one of the following plug-ins
If you simply mean that you could add a plug-in to WMP 9, then sure, that's a fair statement. But I wasn't saying you couldn't buy a plug-in, so it's hardly a "that's not true/parent overrated" situation, now is it?
Not really... you could always rip to MP3 in WMP/9.. You just had to buy the codec and install it (I think it was $15 or so)..
That's not coherent. It takes the form of a refutation, but is merely an addition of a fact and not a refutation.
WMP 9 does not rip mp3s. WMP 9 plus an mp3 encoder does.
This is similar to how Windows XP does not burn, nor does it play, DVDs. It would not be a refutation to say that you can, with add-ons. It would be a clarification, which is fine, but it's not a refutation.
Do you still have to buy the codec with WMP10, or is it included now?
The answer to that is in the post you are replying to.
Politicians do not have a monopoly on lying. Your much-beloved corporate executives lie as well.
In the market of government, we don't really have much to control. We can't vote with our dollars OR vote with our ballot. We can't directly affect the actions of the appointee, and some appointees are so powerful it amazes me that the country doesn't cry foul more often (see Ben Bernanke).
Will you stop saying things that are patently false?
In the market of government, we don't really have much to control. We can't vote with our dollars OR vote with our ballot.
You can do both. Did you know that you can actually talk, in person, with your senator? Did you know that you can personally become involved in politics? This isn't some Soviet, fascist, state where it's "Us and Them" when it comes to government. In the US, we are the government. The Bush administration is doing a lot to divide us, but even so, we, the people, still hold a lot of sway.
We can't directly affect the actions of the appointee
Can we "directly affect" the actions of a CEO? If you answer, "yes", how is it different with an appointee? CEO's that don't listen to the market will often, but not always, find themselves out of a job. Likewise, political appointees that draw public ire will often, but not always, find themselves out of their position as well. See Michael Brown, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld's offer to resign, and, in fact, the very person who is the subject of this very story. The fact that the very story you are commenting on contradicts your theory should be a BIG clue that your theory is flawed.
it amazes me that the country doesn't cry foul more often (see Ben Bernanke)"
No, see "The Media". We cry foul whenever the media brings things to our attention. Given that the media is tasked with making a profit and not with informing its viewers, it's no surprise that the quality of the media is so low.
You believe the free market is the answer to everything. You take any opportunity to see anything in that light, including something as tangental as this story, which is not directly related to the free market at all. There are cases where the free market breaks down. For example, a free market allows people to sell snake-oil Cure-Alls.
Don't be so simple-minded. Open and free markets are often quite good, but not always. Free market capitalism is only concerned with money, but the interests of money do not always coincide with the interests of the particular products or services. For example, if a fire department got paid per house saved, wouldn't it be more profitable to let a few houses burn, so long as that allowed more houses to catch fire and thus be saved?
Another situation where the free market fails is when resources are extremely limited to such an extent that monopolies are either required to provide service, or that monopolies naturally arise and are difficult to upend (like phone and cable companies).
And yet another situation in which the free market fails is when costs associated with a service or product are not addressed by the business in question. For a salient example, the bird flu is much more likely to jump from bird to people in farms where the people and animals live in close quarters. That's why it's popping up in Asia where that sort of farming is common. Those farmers, because it's cheaper and easier for them, are going to be partially responsible for any pandemic that arises, yet they won't pay the price. For historical examples, lead in gasoline, clear-cut logging, seat-belts in cars, the fact that the fish in your local river probably aren't safe to eat, etc.
Capitalism is good at using up resources. That's why it works so well, because using up resources is what gives us our modern lifestyle. The downside is that capitalism is not always good at managing resources in a sustainable fashion, nor is it always good at fair distribution of goods and services.
it is refreshing to see people who understand that science is science and religion is religion and there is no problem with the two co-existing so long as neither tries to intrude onto the others territory
Can you point out a territory of religion into which science is not allowed to enter, but is capable of doing so? I hope you're not suggesting that there are religious ideas which science is capable of addressing, yet should not do so.
And iTunes is OS X only, so only a FRACTION of Macs support it.
You are wrong. iTunes originally came out on OS 9, and it ripped to mp3 just fine, with no DRM at all.
Regardless, it's unclear what your point is. While I obviously don't have the numbers, it would seem a logical guess that the number of iTunes on OS 9 installs is insignificant compared to iTunes on OS X installs. While on the other hand, it's a good guess that the number of WMP 9 installs is not insignificant and is likely even higher than WMP 10 installs.
No, it's very fair. Unfair would have been for me to either discount WMP 10 altogether (which you claim I've done, but I have most certainly not done), or to ignore older WMPs that are still in wide use.
If the software exists, no matter its install base, it counts.
This sentence sums up your whole argument, and it has a flaw. The flaw is "no matter its install base". Remove it and you're golden.
"If the software exists, it counts"
I agree with that. I never said WMP 10 didn't count. I just said there's some context to be addressed.
When you think of the phrase, "no matter its install base", alone, it sounds really absurd. If MS were to release a new version of IE that was in every way superior to Firefox, and had no possible way to infect a PC with spyware and the like, but was only installed on, say, 5% of Windows PCs, it would definitely "count", but it would not count as much as if it were installed on all Windows PCs. Hence the usefulness of context.
Anybody can install it just fine.
No, they cannot. But even if they could, for whatever reasons, they have not.
you can hardly expect Microsoft (or Apple for that matter) to support 5 year old operating systems. No progress would ever be made that way.
To begin with, Microsoft does support OS's for far longer than 5 years. If your statement was correct, then "no progress would be made". But one not need go that far to show the flaw you've made here. Quite simply, Apple, Google, Adobe, Microsoft... Well, basically just about everyone writes software that works on Windows as far back as Windows 2000, if not 98 and ME, and they are able to progress just fine.
But that's just a side issue. The fact is, WMP 10 does exist and many people use it. But many people still use WMP 9 and earlier. So it's only fair to take that into account to provide proper context. To not do so is to misrepresent the facts.
And Windows is used by the vast majority of computer users as well as music downloaders so being Windows only is not something small. If it was *nix or OSx only then 90% of people couldn't use it, but that's not the case here.
Of those 90%, over 90% of them will never even hear of Songbird until it's become quite popular with the 10% or so non-Windows users. By definition, technology-wise, most of those 90% are followers, not leaders. These sorts of things tend to work best starting on Mac or Linux.
These first early releases of Songbird will be extremely "not ready" for the masses. If they want to build a following, they will have to target Linux users (since that's where the biggest demand is given that iTunes is not available for Linux).
It's all but guaranteed that the first releases of Songbird will be a really crappy clone of iTunes. Why would your average Windows user skip iTunes for such a thing? They won't. In fact, I really don't see this taking off on Windows or Mac for a very long time, if ever.
While I laud the efforts of the Songbird team, I think they are really going about the project the entirely wrong way.
- They are apologizing for copying iTunes. - They are overly worried about making a good first release (it's much better to release early, release often). - They are releasing for Windows only at first, which is the least receptive market they are targeting.
Still, Open Source has a tendency to correct those types of mistakes over time. If there's a demand, Songbird will indeed fly.
Songbird won't have the general appeal that Firefox has, because unlike the case with IE, most people have a media player that they like, and not one that they use only because there are no useful alternatives, so they'll really need to find their niche.
Look at the map of California. Imagine that Los Angeles , San Diego, and San Francisco are just black, nasty, unbreathable poison. Compare that to the rest of the square footage area of the state.
Inanity 1: Wind blows air around Inanity 2: There are more cities and more roadways than just those three large cities.
Now compare that to the San Andreas fault line
Inanity 3: Cars don't cause earthquakes.
What will cause more damage?
Inanity 4: A wildfire will "cause more damage" to your home than a small leak in the roof. Does that mean you shouldn't patch the leak?
The vents of Yosemite do more toxic spewing than the rest of the US driving public day per day.
Inanity 5: Unreferenced assertion aside, even if it's true: tomatoes contain natural toxins, therefore there's no reason to think adding more could be bad?
If I were an alarmist, I'd be moving the hell out of the northwest too.
Inanity 6: "Too"? Who said, "Mount St. Helens is erupting, I'M LEAVING THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST FOR FEAR OF THE VOLCANO!!!!"
There wasn't a single rational or applicable point in your entire post.
What you were, I think, trying to say is that "Nature kicks more ass by 6AM than the rest of us kick all day". That is most definitely true, but that doesn't make the air in Los Angeles any cleaner. That doesn't keep large swaths of the Amazonian rain forests from being cleared. That doesn't keep us from depleting our supplies of oil and fresh water. Your premise is shown false by countless examples. We're not independent observers to nature, we are part of nature. If we wanted to, we could send the entire planet into an ice age (how many gigatons would that take? certainly less than we have stockpiled amongst us). We could also eradicate, just by logging alone, most of the world's forests in short order. Don't you think that would have an affect? So why do you think that somehow running millions (billions?) of small greenhouse gas generators spread all across the temperate sections of the northern hemisphere won't affect nature? Of all the inanities of your post, the worst is the implied inanity, which is fundamental to your argument, that we do not affect the system within which we live.
An automobile is a dynamic system which is self-regulating. Increase fuel flow rate, and it speeds up. It can sustain massive amounts of explosive force and high temperatures. Yet on a hot day, a hot day that is only a fraction of the temperature inside the cylinders, a car engine can overheat and fail. It would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that a hot day can contribute to engine failure just because the air temperature is so much less than the temperature within the cylinder.
By narrowing it's views, the products it produces will be better.
Microsoft has never been concerned with making its products better. It has only ever been concerned with making money. That is Bill Gates' ethic. He wants to win, and the way he measures winning is money.
Market share is critical to winning, so MS seeks that at all costs, including flagrantly violating federal laws. Quality of their products is only a concern when it's necessary to increase profits.
Microsoft is diametrically at odds with the consumer. The consumer's interest exactly the reverse of Microsoft's. The consumer wants quality products, and will pay if it's necessary to attain that quality. Microsoft has rigged the system and destroyed that dynamic.
You know, I'm not saying that Eisner might not have had some important ideas or insights, but the idea that any CEO does something like this is absurd.
No, what is absurd is your entire post. Your post completely underestimates the importance of leadership. If Eisner's sole goal was the "golden parachute", do you think he would have stayed with Disney for over 20 years? Wouldn't one want to get in and out as quickly as possible in order to seek the next big bonus?
If you need examples of how leadership can affect an organization, for better or worse, one need only look as far as:
Apple The executive branch of the US HP Wal-Mart
Each of those organizations have thrived or suffered under their leadership, and have all done so in different ways due to the very different character of their respective leaders.
Do you think Apple would be the company it is today with Amelio still CEO?
Just out of curiosity, what are these? Not 'all' rules -- but does anybody know (or offer wild speculation on) what happens when open source and fat wads of cash collide?
There are many sets of rules (which add together to form a sort of "ecosystem" of rules, if you want).
When the two collide depends on many things, including the perception of the "fat wads of cash", the license of the particular project, the vulnerability of the project to one person's whims and the nature of that person.
A few examples:
1. MS incorporated code from BSD into Windows. They do not make that code available, and have not (AFAIK) contributed any enhancements back.
2. Sony uses Linux in TiVo, and provides the source as required.
3. Apple, Google and Sun have all hired prominent Open Source programmers and have done so with the intent that these programmers continue work on their Open Source projects.
4. Linus has been offered money to provide Linux under proprietary licenses. Although Linus does not believe he even has the right to do so, he wouldn't do it anyway.
5. RMS has refused to engage in financial endeavors which he feels would compromise his commitment to the FSF.
6. IBM sells Open Source software, provides end-user support for Open Source software, and contributes both software and patents to the Open Source community.
7. Seeing the threat to their business model, the chairman of Microsoft (Bill Gates, in case that wasn't obvious) has equated the Open Source/Free Software movement with Communism, and has lobbied to outlaw state support of Open Source software.
8. In a few cases, Open Source software has been brazenly been offered as a proprietary product in violation of the license agreements. These cases tend to fail miserably (see: CherryOS).
9. SCO vs IBM re: Linux
10. The issues surrounding DeCSS, GIF, MP3, among others.
11. Potentially the future patent wars against Open Source/Free Software (don't expect the plaintiffs to be Apple, IBM, Sun or Google, but either MS, proxies for MS (SCO), or companies out of left-field (say, a food conglomerate acquiring a patent and incorrectly thinking enforcing it against OSS/FS is a good idea, or one of the companies that specialize in patents just operating business as usual).
Etc.
I haven't really outlined any rules specifically, but I hope I've shown that they exist, and provided an idea of how they work under various circumstances. If you want the rules more explicitly spelled out, the best I can offer is to suggest that you read the various licenses, research the various corporations which have supported and/or subverted the Open Source/Free Software communities, and so on.
Unless you're actually selling that printer, are you going to want to spend all day writing a driver for it, much less testing it against a bazillion OS's?
This is wrong in so many ways.
Here are four:
1. Gimp-print, CUPS, etc, etc. 2. (already mentioned) The straw that broke RMS's proprietary camel's back. 3. It's possible to be paid to write Open Source software. 4. If you already own the printer, that can be motivation enough.
Either that, or Jobs figured that even if the deail fails and Disney/Pixar goes south, a couple of billion dollars in pay off are enough to allow him to start over.
That's impossible. Steve cannot buy the almost 20 years he spent building Pixar back with the money he'll have made in this deal.
However, you're right that he's taken a risk. My point is that it's a risk he believes is likely to succeed without destroying what makes Pixar so great (as so many people seem to fear).
Everyone has a price. Some are just more expensive than others.
That's not true, not in the way you mean it to apply here. Once you are a billionaire, how much money would it take to make you do things that right now, as a "thousandaire" would only cost a few thousand? Do you think (for example) that any amount of cash would convince Bill Gates to brutally kill his parents?
Even so, your statement raises a valid question. But, given the facts, it's just not likely that Steve is knowingly cashing in on the destruction of Pixar. It doesn't even enter the realm of the significantly possible. But he is taking a risk that Pixar will be destroyed by Disney, if that's all you mean, but that's a whole different thing than "everyone has a price". There's a huge difference between "betting the company" (as it were), and "selling out the company" (what you've implied).
Didn't Steve also brought in (and trust) John Sculley to run Apple?
Yes, and?
Do you think Iger is going to remove Steve from the board of Disney? That he's going to frustrate the efforts of Jobs and the rest of Pixar to the point of making things that much worse?
Sure, Steve made a mistake with Sculley, but one mistake is not a trend.
That is obviously false. E3 is banning the "booth babe" from their show, and they will go away as long as E3 enforces that ban.
Your whole post conflates the two issues. E3 is not banning "sexuality" as a whole. It's not banning them from games. It's not banning pictures and videos of scantily-clad women. It's banning the "booth babe" from their show, and it's a ban that is likely to succeed.
If such bans were impossible, Go Daddy wouldn't be having such a hard time getting their Super Bowl ads approved.
Or your example: If necessary they'll put a booth babe in the game and have a "game-character" show up. Then what?
The E3 organizers can decide whether the game character is a thinly veiled booth babe, or a legitimate part of the exhibition. They can kick the character out if they so decide. In other words: they can enforce their ban.
Personally, I wouldn't ban the booth babes. I think the level of prudishness in America is utter nonsense, but that doesn't mean I'm going to lie to make my case. When you do make your case on a lie, one merely has to expose your lie in order to "win" the argument much of the time.
I have a problem with giving someone the right to use force against another. Voluntary cooperation is fine, force by mandate of the law is not.
Will you quit being so simple-minded that you overlook the impossibility of your beliefs?
Ayn Rand, with whom your beliefs mesh quite well, if not outright descended from, believed that there could be no conflict between two rational men. That is a necessary axiom for you to be able to maintain your belief. It's also so fundamentally wrong that it's embarrassing that someone could believe it so strongly.
Another required, but flawed, axiom is that of private property. How do you propose to divvy up property? There's no fully rational, moral, and objective way to do it. *ALL* land is taken and kept by force, and someone far back in the chain of *ALL* property deeds initiated that force.
Those two false axioms are your achilles heel. Have the intellectual honesty to confront them and not merely wave them off in a sort of fundamentalist "blank-out"--in an Orwellian act of double-think.
You *CAN'T* have a society empty of the right of one person to force their will on another. It's absolutely impossible so long as the realms of existence of two or more people overlap and contradict.
Be honest. Think.
If you have a house, and I buy all the land around it, and build a 200-story skyscraper around it, can you force me to tear it down? Can you force me to let you walk through my skyscraper to leave your small lot? Can you force me to let people come to you to deliver food and water?
Conversely, what have I forced on you? Your way of thinking believes that since I voluntarily did whatever I did on my own land, and it does not physically happen on your land, that I've not forced anything on you. But I have. I've essentially forced you into a box.
But I've not initiated force against you, by your measure.
Now, let's scale back the extremes. You have a house in a small neighborhood. I build a skyscraper right next door. Now traffic and utilities to your house are devastated by the extremely gigantic needs of my skyscraper. But it's all voluntary, isn't it? My skyscraper makes the local, privately held, utility companies many orders of magnitude more money than your little house does, so they cut service to your house to meet my needs. Completely voluntary.
Or the other direction. You have a respectable home in a respectable neighborhood. Someone moves in next door and opens a meth lab. By what right do you have to stop them? As the property value in your neighborhood drops, as the safety of your neighborhood drops, as the crime-rate increases, what right do you have to prevent the voluntary actions of your neighbors?
Your beliefs directly contradict reality, yet you wish to enforce them on me? You want me to live a fraud of an existence?
Think. Be honest. Accept the dictates of reality. When you contradict reality, someone always loses.
Your beliefs: "I have a problem with giving someone the right to use force against another. Voluntary cooperation is fine, force by mandate of the law is not." Completely contradict reality.
In the early 80's, Disney was severely in danger of fading away. Eisner not only saved Disney financially, but built it into the huge, powerful media corporation it is today. However, it's not all roses. As you noted, "Disney is a supertanker of a company" that "exploit[s] its brand[s] on... third-rate tat."
Disney's new CEO, Robert Iger, has impressed Steve Jobs enough to make this deal possible. Jobs is the type of person who wants to make [insanely] great things, and he wouldn't send one of his greatest creations into the maws of mediocrity. If you recall, it was recent that Jobs was ready to leave Disney in a very public row between Jobs and Eisner.
I fully expect the Pixar acquisition will make Disney better far more than it will make Pixar worse. I also suspect that under Iger, Disney will be vastly different from the Disney your post describes. How Disney's new CEO fares has yet to be decided, but the prognosis is positive, especially if Steve is willing to trust one of his three greatest creations to him.
There's a very interesting quote at the end of that article:
"Let's be honest, we don't really care about selling it, we're just having fun doing it. So long as we're having fun and we're working on problems that interest us then other people can worry about market share and how you sell it to the government or whoever, because that's the stuff that interests them."
If you think about it for a minute, if you consider how Open Source functions, where people work on the things that interest them, the "suits" that are often derided from some quarters are just filling a non-technical need in the Open Source community. There are often calls for people to test, write manuals, and create artwork as something they can do if they aren't programmers, but perhaps "marketing, sales, build corporations" are things that also should be added to that list?
To clarify, I'm certainly not talking about the CherryOS-style GPL-theives, but honest and earnest businesspeople (even though their motives may be primarily cash, they still must abide by proper Open Source rules).
Yes, but that power is not organized. We don't use our power rationally, because the disorganized, unfocused collective isn't rational.
We, the consumers, have wielded our ultimate power, and we've chosen to accept DRM, even if an overwhelming majority of us, had we a democratic vote, would emphatically cast it against DRM.
we can just stop buying or watching their crap... don't pirate it though, just don't buy it or subscribe to stations which force this on you...
If your plan counts on this, I suggest you find a new plan. It's just not going to happen.
If I want a particular song, and it's only legally available with DRM, what rational argument do you have to convince me not to either buy it, or "pirate" it? Show me a true movement, with true potential, and perhaps you can convince me to join it, but if it's just me and like 200 other people on Slashdot, we're not going to have an effect. Why engage in self-immolation if you know it's going to do no good?
Great, this is what I want to see from the RIAA. The more they restrict how people can use their commercial crap, the more encourage independants who'll value their listeners.
I've never quite understood this logic. When you want a specific song, you want that song. Not a similar song by some band you never heard of. The labels have a monopoly on the distribution of songs/albums. You must go through them (to be on the up and up). You can't buy a song from "Bob's DRM-Free Music Store" if Bob doesn't sell that song.
The system is bad, and getting worse all the time. But the reason the system is so bad is that each label has a million little monopolies. The product the labels sell you isn't "music", it's *this* song/album, or *that* song/album.
Apple is not "really" the industry leader for digital audio in any real sense, only in a transitory early adopter phase sense.
That was Diamond.
iPod's popularity may be transitory
A lot of things "may be". But the iPod's popularity probably isn't transitory (in the short-term. In the long term, it could be argued that even Windows' dominance is "transitory").
Or put another way: You have $50 to bet on whether the iPod will be the dominant music player in January, 2009, or will not. You must place your bet, or you forfeit the $50, and you must bet the entire amount either yea or nay. Which way do you bet?
Slashdot Mirror
even when it does something useful it costs more and is less efficient than having private business do so.
Government isn't supposed to be efficient. It's supposed to do the things that don't get done or don't get done right, by private business. For a few obvious examples:
universal education
national defense
space flight
food and drug safety
automobile emissions regulation
wilderness management
While, of course, we all want government to be as efficient as it can reasonably be, the actual services are the fundamental reason for its existence, not efficiency. Which is the exact opposite of the corporation, which is tasked with finding the most efficient way of making money.
If we left space flight, exploration, and science, solely to private industry and free market, we'd not have yet landed people on the Moon, we would not have landed probes on Mars, we would not have seen through the haze of Titan, etc.
You can't get iTunes for pre-XP machines either,
Incorrect.
and iTunes isn't installed by default on any Windows PCs
It was, although that's not directly relevant to the discussion.
so how is iTunes any advantage for ripping mp3s?
I never said it had an advantage. I merely said that when comparing iTunes and WMP, it's fair to present WMP 10 in proper context.
Of course, it's also fair to put iTunes in proper context, but since all versions of iTunes have always been able to rip mp3s, there's no real context to bring up in that regard. If WMP 10 were fairly universal to the extent that there was no significant install base of WMP 9, then the WMP 10 context would not be worth bringing up either, but there is a significant install base of WMP 9 (and earlier), so it is worth bringing up.
Don't make the mistake in thinking that I'm implying that WMP 10 doesn't count, or that iTunes 6 is superior to WMP 10 just because WMP 9 couldn't encode mp3s. I'm just providing relevant context for comparing iTunes and WMP support for mp3 encoding as reflected in the real numbers of the real world.
MS has always had a hard time getting people to upgrade, even when the upgrades are available as free downloads. This is just another example of that difficulty in action.
If you want to compare up-to-date iTunes users with up-to-date WMP users on XP, then certainly they can all rip to mp3 just fine (excepting the DRM CDs). If you want to leave it at that, by all means, do so. But it's certainly fair and appropriate to point out that, in the real world, WMP 10 is not the version installed and in use by many people.
That WMP 10 is not universal amongst WMP installs does not change the fact that WMP 10 can rip mp3s, and that WMP 10 can rip mp3s does not change the fact that there is still a significant install base of older versions without the mp3 plug-in. These facts are not contradictory, but are both relevant. Someone incompletely pointed out one of those facts, so I thought it fair to point out the other to help fill in the complete picture. Why would you have a problem with that?
Yes, it is. I refer you to Microsoft's own page. To save you some clicking and reading, I'll quote the relevant part:
If you simply mean that you could add a plug-in to WMP 9, then sure, that's a fair statement. But I wasn't saying you couldn't buy a plug-in, so it's hardly a "that's not true/parent overrated" situation, now is it?
Not really ... you could always rip to MP3 in WMP/9.. You just had to buy the codec and install it (I think it was $15 or so)..
That's not coherent. It takes the form of a refutation, but is merely an addition of a fact and not a refutation.
WMP 9 does not rip mp3s. WMP 9 plus an mp3 encoder does.
This is similar to how Windows XP does not burn, nor does it play, DVDs. It would not be a refutation to say that you can, with add-ons. It would be a clarification, which is fine, but it's not a refutation.
Do you still have to buy the codec with WMP10, or is it included now?
The answer to that is in the post you are replying to.
They lie? Don't all politicians?
Politicians do not have a monopoly on lying. Your much-beloved corporate executives lie as well.
In the market of government, we don't really have much to control. We can't vote with our dollars OR vote with our ballot. We can't directly affect the actions of the appointee, and some appointees are so powerful it amazes me that the country doesn't cry foul more often (see Ben Bernanke).
Will you stop saying things that are patently false?
In the market of government, we don't really have much to control. We can't vote with our dollars OR vote with our ballot.
You can do both. Did you know that you can actually talk, in person, with your senator? Did you know that you can personally become involved in politics? This isn't some Soviet, fascist, state where it's "Us and Them" when it comes to government. In the US, we are the government. The Bush administration is doing a lot to divide us, but even so, we, the people, still hold a lot of sway.
We can't directly affect the actions of the appointee
Can we "directly affect" the actions of a CEO? If you answer, "yes", how is it different with an appointee? CEO's that don't listen to the market will often, but not always, find themselves out of a job. Likewise, political appointees that draw public ire will often, but not always, find themselves out of their position as well. See Michael Brown, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld's offer to resign, and, in fact, the very person who is the subject of this very story. The fact that the very story you are commenting on contradicts your theory should be a BIG clue that your theory is flawed.
it amazes me that the country doesn't cry foul more often (see Ben Bernanke)"
No, see "The Media". We cry foul whenever the media brings things to our attention. Given that the media is tasked with making a profit and not with informing its viewers, it's no surprise that the quality of the media is so low.
You believe the free market is the answer to everything. You take any opportunity to see anything in that light, including something as tangental as this story, which is not directly related to the free market at all. There are cases where the free market breaks down. For example, a free market allows people to sell snake-oil Cure-Alls.
Don't be so simple-minded. Open and free markets are often quite good, but not always. Free market capitalism is only concerned with money, but the interests of money do not always coincide with the interests of the particular products or services. For example, if a fire department got paid per house saved, wouldn't it be more profitable to let a few houses burn, so long as that allowed more houses to catch fire and thus be saved?
Another situation where the free market fails is when resources are extremely limited to such an extent that monopolies are either required to provide service, or that monopolies naturally arise and are difficult to upend (like phone and cable companies).
And yet another situation in which the free market fails is when costs associated with a service or product are not addressed by the business in question. For a salient example, the bird flu is much more likely to jump from bird to people in farms where the people and animals live in close quarters. That's why it's popping up in Asia where that sort of farming is common. Those farmers, because it's cheaper and easier for them, are going to be partially responsible for any pandemic that arises, yet they won't pay the price. For historical examples, lead in gasoline, clear-cut logging, seat-belts in cars, the fact that the fish in your local river probably aren't safe to eat, etc.
Capitalism is good at using up resources. That's why it works so well, because using up resources is what gives us our modern lifestyle. The downside is that capitalism is not always good at managing resources in a sustainable fashion, nor is it always good at fair distribution of goods and services.
it is refreshing to see people who understand that science is science and religion is religion and there is no problem with the two co-existing so long as neither tries to intrude onto the others territory
Can you point out a territory of religion into which science is not allowed to enter, but is capable of doing so? I hope you're not suggesting that there are religious ideas which science is capable of addressing, yet should not do so.
And iTunes is OS X only, so only a FRACTION of Macs support it.
You are wrong. iTunes originally came out on OS 9, and it ripped to mp3 just fine, with no DRM at all.
Regardless, it's unclear what your point is. While I obviously don't have the numbers, it would seem a logical guess that the number of iTunes on OS 9 installs is insignificant compared to iTunes on OS X installs. While on the other hand, it's a good guess that the number of WMP 9 installs is not insignificant and is likely even higher than WMP 10 installs.
That's hardly fair.
No, it's very fair. Unfair would have been for me to either discount WMP 10 altogether (which you claim I've done, but I have most certainly not done), or to ignore older WMPs that are still in wide use.
If the software exists, no matter its install base, it counts.
This sentence sums up your whole argument, and it has a flaw. The flaw is "no matter its install base". Remove it and you're golden.
"If the software exists, it counts"
I agree with that. I never said WMP 10 didn't count. I just said there's some context to be addressed.
When you think of the phrase, "no matter its install base", alone, it sounds really absurd. If MS were to release a new version of IE that was in every way superior to Firefox, and had no possible way to infect a PC with spyware and the like, but was only installed on, say, 5% of Windows PCs, it would definitely "count", but it would not count as much as if it were installed on all Windows PCs. Hence the usefulness of context.
Anybody can install it just fine.
No, they cannot. But even if they could, for whatever reasons, they have not.
you can hardly expect Microsoft (or Apple for that matter) to support 5 year old operating systems. No progress would ever be made that way.
To begin with, Microsoft does support OS's for far longer than 5 years. If your statement was correct, then "no progress would be made". But one not need go that far to show the flaw you've made here. Quite simply, Apple, Google, Adobe, Microsoft... Well, basically just about everyone writes software that works on Windows as far back as Windows 2000, if not 98 and ME, and they are able to progress just fine.
But that's just a side issue. The fact is, WMP 10 does exist and many people use it. But many people still use WMP 9 and earlier. So it's only fair to take that into account to provide proper context. To not do so is to misrepresent the facts.
And Windows is used by the vast majority of computer users as well as music downloaders so being Windows only is not something small. If it was *nix or OSx only then 90% of people couldn't use it, but that's not the case here.
Of those 90%, over 90% of them will never even hear of Songbird until it's become quite popular with the 10% or so non-Windows users. By definition, technology-wise, most of those 90% are followers, not leaders. These sorts of things tend to work best starting on Mac or Linux.
These first early releases of Songbird will be extremely "not ready" for the masses. If they want to build a following, they will have to target Linux users (since that's where the biggest demand is given that iTunes is not available for Linux).
It's all but guaranteed that the first releases of Songbird will be a really crappy clone of iTunes. Why would your average Windows user skip iTunes for such a thing? They won't. In fact, I really don't see this taking off on Windows or Mac for a very long time, if ever.
While I laud the efforts of the Songbird team, I think they are really going about the project the entirely wrong way.
- They are apologizing for copying iTunes.
- They are overly worried about making a good first release (it's much better to release early, release often).
- They are releasing for Windows only at first, which is the least receptive market they are targeting.
Still, Open Source has a tendency to correct those types of mistakes over time. If there's a demand, Songbird will indeed fly.
Songbird won't have the general appeal that Firefox has, because unlike the case with IE, most people have a media player that they like, and not one that they use only because there are no useful alternatives, so they'll really need to find their niche.
Also true of Windows Media Player. Like iTunes, Windows Media Player 10 will rip your CD's to mp3, with no DRM.
It would be fair to note that mp3 ripping is new to WMP 10, which is XP-only, and wasn't installed by default on most Windows PCs in use today.
All copies of iTunes currently installed can rip to mp3, while only a fraction of the copies of WMP can, which puts things in a little better context.
What an incredibly inane post...
Look at the map of California. Imagine that Los Angeles , San Diego, and San Francisco are just black, nasty, unbreathable poison. Compare that to the rest of the square footage area of the state.
Inanity 1: Wind blows air around
Inanity 2: There are more cities and more roadways than just those three large cities.
Now compare that to the San Andreas fault line
Inanity 3: Cars don't cause earthquakes.
What will cause more damage?
Inanity 4: A wildfire will "cause more damage" to your home than a small leak in the roof. Does that mean you shouldn't patch the leak?
The vents of Yosemite do more toxic spewing than the rest of the US driving public day per day.
Inanity 5: Unreferenced assertion aside, even if it's true: tomatoes contain natural toxins, therefore there's no reason to think adding more could be bad?
If I were an alarmist, I'd be moving the hell out of the northwest too.
Inanity 6: "Too"? Who said, "Mount St. Helens is erupting, I'M LEAVING THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST FOR FEAR OF THE VOLCANO!!!!"
There wasn't a single rational or applicable point in your entire post.
What you were, I think, trying to say is that "Nature kicks more ass by 6AM than the rest of us kick all day". That is most definitely true, but that doesn't make the air in Los Angeles any cleaner. That doesn't keep large swaths of the Amazonian rain forests from being cleared. That doesn't keep us from depleting our supplies of oil and fresh water. Your premise is shown false by countless examples. We're not independent observers to nature, we are part of nature. If we wanted to, we could send the entire planet into an ice age (how many gigatons would that take? certainly less than we have stockpiled amongst us). We could also eradicate, just by logging alone, most of the world's forests in short order. Don't you think that would have an affect? So why do you think that somehow running millions (billions?) of small greenhouse gas generators spread all across the temperate sections of the northern hemisphere won't affect nature? Of all the inanities of your post, the worst is the implied inanity, which is fundamental to your argument, that we do not affect the system within which we live.
An automobile is a dynamic system which is self-regulating. Increase fuel flow rate, and it speeds up. It can sustain massive amounts of explosive force and high temperatures. Yet on a hot day, a hot day that is only a fraction of the temperature inside the cylinders, a car engine can overheat and fail. It would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that a hot day can contribute to engine failure just because the air temperature is so much less than the temperature within the cylinder.
By narrowing it's views, the products it produces will be better.
Microsoft has never been concerned with making its products better. It has only ever been concerned with making money. That is Bill Gates' ethic. He wants to win, and the way he measures winning is money.
Market share is critical to winning, so MS seeks that at all costs, including flagrantly violating federal laws. Quality of their products is only a concern when it's necessary to increase profits.
Microsoft is diametrically at odds with the consumer. The consumer's interest exactly the reverse of Microsoft's. The consumer wants quality products, and will pay if it's necessary to attain that quality. Microsoft has rigged the system and destroyed that dynamic.
You know, I'm not saying that Eisner might not have had some important ideas or insights, but the idea that any CEO does something like this is absurd.
No, what is absurd is your entire post. Your post completely underestimates the importance of leadership. If Eisner's sole goal was the "golden parachute", do you think he would have stayed with Disney for over 20 years? Wouldn't one want to get in and out as quickly as possible in order to seek the next big bonus?
If you need examples of how leadership can affect an organization, for better or worse, one need only look as far as:
Apple
The executive branch of the US
HP
Wal-Mart
Each of those organizations have thrived or suffered under their leadership, and have all done so in different ways due to the very different character of their respective leaders.
Do you think Apple would be the company it is today with Amelio still CEO?
Don't be absurd.
Just out of curiosity, what are these? Not 'all' rules -- but does anybody know (or offer wild speculation on) what happens when open source and fat wads of cash collide?
There are many sets of rules (which add together to form a sort of "ecosystem" of rules, if you want).
When the two collide depends on many things, including the perception of the "fat wads of cash", the license of the particular project, the vulnerability of the project to one person's whims and the nature of that person.
A few examples:
1. MS incorporated code from BSD into Windows. They do not make that code available, and have not (AFAIK) contributed any enhancements back.
2. Sony uses Linux in TiVo, and provides the source as required.
3. Apple, Google and Sun have all hired prominent Open Source programmers and have done so with the intent that these programmers continue work on their Open Source projects.
4. Linus has been offered money to provide Linux under proprietary licenses. Although Linus does not believe he even has the right to do so, he wouldn't do it anyway.
5. RMS has refused to engage in financial endeavors which he feels would compromise his commitment to the FSF.
6. IBM sells Open Source software, provides end-user support for Open Source software, and contributes both software and patents to the Open Source community.
7. Seeing the threat to their business model, the chairman of Microsoft (Bill Gates, in case that wasn't obvious) has equated the Open Source/Free Software movement with Communism, and has lobbied to outlaw state support of Open Source software.
8. In a few cases, Open Source software has been brazenly been offered as a proprietary product in violation of the license agreements. These cases tend to fail miserably (see: CherryOS).
9. SCO vs IBM re: Linux
10. The issues surrounding DeCSS, GIF, MP3, among others.
11. Potentially the future patent wars against Open Source/Free Software (don't expect the plaintiffs to be Apple, IBM, Sun or Google, but either MS, proxies for MS (SCO), or companies out of left-field (say, a food conglomerate acquiring a patent and incorrectly thinking enforcing it against OSS/FS is a good idea, or one of the companies that specialize in patents just operating business as usual).
Etc.
I haven't really outlined any rules specifically, but I hope I've shown that they exist, and provided an idea of how they work under various circumstances. If you want the rules more explicitly spelled out, the best I can offer is to suggest that you read the various licenses, research the various corporations which have supported and/or subverted the Open Source/Free Software communities, and so on.
Unless you're actually selling that printer, are you going to want to spend all day writing a driver for it, much less testing it against a bazillion OS's?
This is wrong in so many ways.
Here are four:
1. Gimp-print, CUPS, etc, etc.
2. (already mentioned) The straw that broke RMS's proprietary camel's back.
3. It's possible to be paid to write Open Source software.
4. If you already own the printer, that can be motivation enough.
Case in point. I can PS print out of emacs well enough, but, for a nice booklet printout, I still need[1] to boot 'Doze and use a spiffier HP driver.
[1]I realize that booklet printing is probably quite doable under Gentoo, I just haven't overcome the static friction of mabooty to figure it out.
In other words:
"I have to use Windows[1].
[1] I don't have to use Windows"
Either that, or Jobs figured that even if the deail fails and Disney/Pixar goes south, a couple of billion dollars in pay off are enough to allow him to start over.
That's impossible. Steve cannot buy the almost 20 years he spent building Pixar back with the money he'll have made in this deal.
However, you're right that he's taken a risk. My point is that it's a risk he believes is likely to succeed without destroying what makes Pixar so great (as so many people seem to fear).
Everyone has a price. Some are just more expensive than others.
That's not true, not in the way you mean it to apply here. Once you are a billionaire, how much money would it take to make you do things that right now, as a "thousandaire" would only cost a few thousand? Do you think (for example) that any amount of cash would convince Bill Gates to brutally kill his parents?
Even so, your statement raises a valid question. But, given the facts, it's just not likely that Steve is knowingly cashing in on the destruction of Pixar. It doesn't even enter the realm of the significantly possible. But he is taking a risk that Pixar will be destroyed by Disney, if that's all you mean, but that's a whole different thing than "everyone has a price". There's a huge difference between "betting the company" (as it were), and "selling out the company" (what you've implied).
Didn't Steve also brought in (and trust) John Sculley to run Apple?
Yes, and?
Do you think Iger is going to remove Steve from the board of Disney? That he's going to frustrate the efforts of Jobs and the rest of Pixar to the point of making things that much worse?
Sure, Steve made a mistake with Sculley, but one mistake is not a trend.
Forbidding something has never made it go away.
That is obviously false. E3 is banning the "booth babe" from their show, and they will go away as long as E3 enforces that ban.
Your whole post conflates the two issues. E3 is not banning "sexuality" as a whole. It's not banning them from games. It's not banning pictures and videos of scantily-clad women. It's banning the "booth babe" from their show, and it's a ban that is likely to succeed.
If such bans were impossible, Go Daddy wouldn't be having such a hard time getting their Super Bowl ads approved.
Or your example:
If necessary they'll put a booth babe in the game and have a "game-character" show up. Then what?
The E3 organizers can decide whether the game character is a thinly veiled booth babe, or a legitimate part of the exhibition. They can kick the character out if they so decide. In other words: they can enforce their ban.
Personally, I wouldn't ban the booth babes. I think the level of prudishness in America is utter nonsense, but that doesn't mean I'm going to lie to make my case. When you do make your case on a lie, one merely has to expose your lie in order to "win" the argument much of the time.
I have a problem with giving someone the right to use force against another. Voluntary cooperation is fine, force by mandate of the law is not.
Will you quit being so simple-minded that you overlook the impossibility of your beliefs?
Ayn Rand, with whom your beliefs mesh quite well, if not outright descended from, believed that there could be no conflict between two rational men. That is a necessary axiom for you to be able to maintain your belief. It's also so fundamentally wrong that it's embarrassing that someone could believe it so strongly.
Another required, but flawed, axiom is that of private property. How do you propose to divvy up property? There's no fully rational, moral, and objective way to do it. *ALL* land is taken and kept by force, and someone far back in the chain of *ALL* property deeds initiated that force.
Those two false axioms are your achilles heel. Have the intellectual honesty to confront them and not merely wave them off in a sort of fundamentalist "blank-out"--in an Orwellian act of double-think.
You *CAN'T* have a society empty of the right of one person to force their will on another. It's absolutely impossible so long as the realms of existence of two or more people overlap and contradict.
Be honest. Think.
If you have a house, and I buy all the land around it, and build a 200-story skyscraper around it, can you force me to tear it down? Can you force me to let you walk through my skyscraper to leave your small lot? Can you force me to let people come to you to deliver food and water?
Conversely, what have I forced on you? Your way of thinking believes that since I voluntarily did whatever I did on my own land, and it does not physically happen on your land, that I've not forced anything on you. But I have. I've essentially forced you into a box.
But I've not initiated force against you, by your measure.
Now, let's scale back the extremes. You have a house in a small neighborhood. I build a skyscraper right next door. Now traffic and utilities to your house are devastated by the extremely gigantic needs of my skyscraper. But it's all voluntary, isn't it? My skyscraper makes the local, privately held, utility companies many orders of magnitude more money than your little house does, so they cut service to your house to meet my needs. Completely voluntary.
Or the other direction. You have a respectable home in a respectable neighborhood. Someone moves in next door and opens a meth lab. By what right do you have to stop them? As the property value in your neighborhood drops, as the safety of your neighborhood drops, as the crime-rate increases, what right do you have to prevent the voluntary actions of your neighbors?
Your beliefs directly contradict reality, yet you wish to enforce them on me? You want me to live a fraud of an existence?
Think. Be honest. Accept the dictates of reality. When you contradict reality, someone always loses.
Your beliefs:
"I have a problem with giving someone the right to use force against another. Voluntary cooperation is fine, force by mandate of the law is not."
Completely contradict reality.
Be honest and think.
In the early 80's, Disney was severely in danger of fading away. Eisner not only saved Disney financially, but built it into the huge, powerful media corporation it is today. However, it's not all roses. As you noted, "Disney is a supertanker of a company" that "exploit[s] its brand[s] on ... third-rate tat."
Disney's new CEO, Robert Iger, has impressed Steve Jobs enough to make this deal possible. Jobs is the type of person who wants to make [insanely] great things, and he wouldn't send one of his greatest creations into the maws of mediocrity. If you recall, it was recent that Jobs was ready to leave Disney in a very public row between Jobs and Eisner.
I fully expect the Pixar acquisition will make Disney better far more than it will make Pixar worse. I also suspect that under Iger, Disney will be vastly different from the Disney your post describes. How Disney's new CEO fares has yet to be decided, but the prognosis is positive, especially if Steve is willing to trust one of his three greatest creations to him.
If you think about it for a minute, if you consider how Open Source functions, where people work on the things that interest them, the "suits" that are often derided from some quarters are just filling a non-technical need in the Open Source community. There are often calls for people to test, write manuals, and create artwork as something they can do if they aren't programmers, but perhaps "marketing, sales, build corporations" are things that also should be added to that list?
To clarify, I'm certainly not talking about the CherryOS-style GPL-theives, but honest and earnest businesspeople (even though their motives may be primarily cash, they still must abide by proper Open Source rules).
Anyway, thought it was interesting.
we, the consumers, have the ultimate power...
Yes, but that power is not organized. We don't use our power rationally, because the disorganized, unfocused collective isn't rational.
We, the consumers, have wielded our ultimate power, and we've chosen to accept DRM, even if an overwhelming majority of us, had we a democratic vote, would emphatically cast it against DRM.
we can just stop buying or watching their crap... don't pirate it though, just don't buy it or subscribe to stations which force this on you...
If your plan counts on this, I suggest you find a new plan. It's just not going to happen.
If I want a particular song, and it's only legally available with DRM, what rational argument do you have to convince me not to either buy it, or "pirate" it? Show me a true movement, with true potential, and perhaps you can convince me to join it, but if it's just me and like 200 other people on Slashdot, we're not going to have an effect. Why engage in self-immolation if you know it's going to do no good?
Great, this is what I want to see from the RIAA. The more they restrict how people can use their commercial crap, the more encourage independants who'll value their listeners.
I've never quite understood this logic. When you want a specific song, you want that song. Not a similar song by some band you never heard of. The labels have a monopoly on the distribution of songs/albums. You must go through them (to be on the up and up). You can't buy a song from "Bob's DRM-Free Music Store" if Bob doesn't sell that song.
The system is bad, and getting worse all the time. But the reason the system is so bad is that each label has a million little monopolies. The product the labels sell you isn't "music", it's *this* song/album, or *that* song/album.
Apple is not "really" the industry leader for digital audio in any real sense, only in a transitory early adopter phase sense.
That was Diamond.
iPod's popularity may be transitory
A lot of things "may be". But the iPod's popularity probably isn't transitory (in the short-term. In the long term, it could be argued that even Windows' dominance is "transitory").
Or put another way: You have $50 to bet on whether the iPod will be the dominant music player in January, 2009, or will not. You must place your bet, or you forfeit the $50, and you must bet the entire amount either yea or nay. Which way do you bet?
Thought so.