Deciding to port MediaPlayer and IE makes a lot of sense to me. Recently, I feel like MS has been making preliminary moves the get themselves well positioned for an environment where applications are not so important but where content is extremely important. After all, even if code becomes a commodity content won't.
If they can sucessfully push media player it means that the WMA format gets closer to the status of de facto standard. One that MS is able to control and leverage.
And IE is basically a vehicle for pushing proprietary extensions to HTML et al. That strategy helps MS steer the web a little better. It's common knowledge that MS had long envisioned something akin to the internet; they just thought it would happen later and be a proprietary network of their own (MSN). They quickly realigned themselves to the reality but they've never really ceased efforts to put the internet under their thumb.
I mean it makes a certain amount of sense to port to Mac because I think most remaining Mac users are sort of die hard. Hence, making Mac a more palatable platform doesn't really lure people away from Windows.
But Linux is different. If MS sells Office on Linux they may make a several million in the short term but really they would probably just enourage a significant portion of their market share to move over in the long term.
Consider companies that want to switch to a new OS but are tied to Windows because they are dependant on Office.
So I think this will turn out to be just a rumor, or else, MS will back off later claiming that Linux is not mature enough support their products.
The bits on cryptography reminded me of something I heard Bruce Schneier say in one of his seminars. Someone asked him when it would be that two people could have a totally secret communication.
His response was that that time was 100 years ago. 100 years ago, two people could go out in the middle of a field, look around, and be totally certain that no one was listening to the conversation.
Now, one way or another, you have to trust someone. At some point you have to rely on the workings or assertions of other people. The people that designed and coded your encryption software, the people that designed and built you communication devices, the people that swept the room for bugs, the people that verify that your friend's digital signature is legit.
I have a Music Clip and it's really a lot worse than you probably imagined. For one (as has already been pointed out) it only natively understands ATRAC3. Other than trying to own every aspect of the digital music distro. system, the main advantage of going with ATRAC3 is that the decoder is a lot smaller than those for MP3s. This is what allowed them to make the clip in it's funky form factor.
But that's not the end of the stupidity. On top of the ATRAC3 business, the Music Clip software also employs OpenMG. This is an encryption/authentication scheme that was developed by Sony in an attempt to beat SDMI to the punch. Sony is hoping that if they can actually implement a workable form of copy protection, the rest of the SDMI people will decide to go with that.
So what does all this mean in terms of using the device? Well since the music clip refuses to understand non-encrypted, non-authenticated MP3s, you have to "import" your entire library is order dump it on your device. Your MP3 library has to be converted to ATRAC3 and "protected" by OpenMG. You've just doubled the size of your music library.
It's more than just an issue of targeting. It's one thing to notice that males play a certain type of game and go after them in your ads. It's another to craft a type of ad that panders to men while degrading or insulting women. There are plenty of male dominated markets (like technology products in general) that don't do that (at least not so often). It's not hard to see that Laura Croft is pretty demeaning. In any case, it becomes a positive feedback loop. If you target men in that way, you tend to edge some of the females out. Then you have a greater percentage of males in the audience and the tendencies increase. The other possibility to consider is that the types of games females typically play, just don't lend themselves to in depth coverage in gaming magazines. I have no idea if this is true but it's a possibility. It just amazes me that game manufacturers don't try to go after the female market more. If the advertising and catering is really so strongly geared towards males, and if females really do constitute 50 percent of the gaming market, it's the perfect opportunity to create and games and forums that appeal more directly to them.
Frankly, the world could use another open source text editor. I like Emacs well enough and use it quite a bit but it would be refreashing to see something new. Something without all the bloat and all of the increasingly anacronistic controls. And something that was designed to compile on multiple platforms from the get-go (Abiword has done this rather well but it's a word processor).
For instance, a new editor should be designed from the biggining with a GUI. I'm a huge fan of CLIs, but with text editing GUIs buy you a few nice features: squigly red underlines for mispelled words, pop-up boxes representing choices for automatic completion of member functions etc. Pull-down menus for functions, classes etc.
Most of this stuff should be controlable since I recognize that not everyone wants all this crap cluttering up thier display all the time.
And while I'm on it, it would be nice to see some sort of XML standard that specified basic text editor prefs and syntax highlighting settings. That way, prefs could be more easily transported from one compliant text editor to another. Many text editors are powerful but it's litterally useless if people don't know how to use it. This might help a little.
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Umm. Last I checked, factoring co-primes was not NP. Can anyone else back me up on that?
You know. I have one simple request. And that is to have a space station with frikin' laser beams attached to it's head!
If they can sucessfully push media player it means that the WMA format gets closer to the status of de facto standard. One that MS is able to control and leverage.
And IE is basically a vehicle for pushing proprietary extensions to HTML et al. That strategy helps MS steer the web a little better. It's common knowledge that MS had long envisioned something akin to the internet; they just thought it would happen later and be a proprietary network of their own (MSN). They quickly realigned themselves to the reality but they've never really ceased efforts to put the internet under their thumb.
So this could be a way of covering their bases.
I mean it makes a certain amount of sense to port to Mac because I think most remaining Mac users are sort of die hard. Hence, making Mac a more palatable platform doesn't really lure people away from Windows.
But Linux is different. If MS sells Office on Linux they may make a several million in the short term but really they would probably just enourage a significant portion of their market share to move over in the long term.
Consider companies that want to switch to a new OS but are tied to Windows because they are dependant on Office.
So I think this will turn out to be just a rumor, or else, MS will back off later claiming that Linux is not mature enough support their products.
His response was that that time was 100 years ago. 100 years ago, two people could go out in the middle of a field, look around, and be totally certain that no one was listening to the conversation.
Now, one way or another, you have to trust someone. At some point you have to rely on the workings or assertions of other people. The people that designed and coded your encryption software, the people that designed and built you communication devices, the people that swept the room for bugs, the people that verify that your friend's digital signature is legit.
But that's not the end of the stupidity. On top of the ATRAC3 business, the Music Clip software also employs OpenMG. This is an encryption/authentication scheme that was developed by Sony in an attempt to beat SDMI to the punch. Sony is hoping that if they can actually implement a workable form of copy protection, the rest of the SDMI people will decide to go with that.
So what does all this mean in terms of using the device? Well since the music clip refuses to understand non-encrypted, non-authenticated MP3s, you have to "import" your entire library is order dump it on your device. Your MP3 library has to be converted to ATRAC3 and "protected" by OpenMG. You've just doubled the size of your music library.
It's more than just an issue of targeting. It's one thing to notice that males play a certain type of game and go after them in your ads. It's another to craft a type of ad that panders to men while degrading or insulting women. There are plenty of male dominated markets (like technology products in general) that don't do that (at least not so often). It's not hard to see that Laura Croft is pretty demeaning. In any case, it becomes a positive feedback loop. If you target men in that way, you tend to edge some of the females out. Then you have a greater percentage of males in the audience and the tendencies increase. The other possibility to consider is that the types of games females typically play, just don't lend themselves to in depth coverage in gaming magazines. I have no idea if this is true but it's a possibility. It just amazes me that game manufacturers don't try to go after the female market more. If the advertising and catering is really so strongly geared towards males, and if females really do constitute 50 percent of the gaming market, it's the perfect opportunity to create and games and forums that appeal more directly to them.
For instance, a new editor should be designed from the biggining with a GUI. I'm a huge fan of CLIs, but with text editing GUIs buy you a few nice features: squigly red underlines for mispelled words, pop-up boxes representing choices for automatic completion of member functions etc. Pull-down menus for functions, classes etc.
Most of this stuff should be controlable since I recognize that not everyone wants all this crap cluttering up thier display all the time.
And while I'm on it, it would be nice to see some sort of XML standard that specified basic text editor prefs and syntax highlighting settings. That way, prefs could be more easily transported from one compliant text editor to another. Many text editors are powerful but it's litterally useless if people don't know how to use it. This might help a little.
-gsh