RMS designed the GPL. He did not, however, design the mindset it produced; that just kind of happened. And that mindset does not necessarily mean only one thing.
The rest of your post.. To be honest I am not quite sure what you are trying to say. There is no semantic distinction made in the post you are responding to between open source and free software. I understand what the difference is supposed to be but that doesn't mean everyone observes it all the time.
Hm. I phrased that sentence unclearly. "Promote" was meant in the "To contribute to the progress or growth of" sense not the "To advocate" sense. A better way of putting the sentence would have been "The project will fork, and leave the hands of the maintainer, if the maintainer does not everything he can to work toward the program being the best possible."..
The GPL mindset is designed, at the very core, with the sole end goal of making the best computer program possible. Everything else-- the financial success of companies like Redhat included-- is merely a means to that end, or coincidental.
The capitalist mindset is designed, at the very core, with the sole end goal of making a bunch of money. Everything else-- creating a good product included-- is merely a means to that end, or coincidental.
People can sit down and found an open source or a commercial software products with these not being their goals, but the open source project or the company will, in time, take on a life of their own. The project will fork, and leave the hands of the maintainer, if the maintainer does not do everything he can to promote it being the best program possible. The company meanwhile will eventually pass out of its original creator's hands, usually into the hands of a board of directors who care only about making the most money possible.
Because these different mindsets are so different, things the open source community does tend to seem completely mind-bogglingly nonsensical to the commercial community, and vice versa. Both sides would have an easier time understanding each other if it were understood on both sides that with a GPLed program, it is not the people, it is the source code, that is in control; and with a company it is not the people, it is the corporate culture, that is in control. Some groups of people do a better job of keeping a reign on their code/corporation than others, of course, but this is still what things seem to tend toward.
Now, there's something slightly more complicated going on here. It is that in most cases, the corporate side of things comes from a culture in which capitalism as a philosophy reigns supreme. This philosophy says that the free market will always defeat everything, because it is ultimately efficient. The mutual selfishness of everyone, acting upon each other, will ensure that only the strongest companies survive, the market winds up with the most fitting goods possible, and the capitalist system overall ends with as much wealth within it as is possible. They then get confused when these open source "things" crop up that don't seem to follow the rules of capitalism at all. They get confused because their philosophy tells them that the way to succeed is to let capitalism optimise everything; but then they see "inefficient", unoptimized, seemingly altruistic open source succeeding, they can't understand why that is. The first thing they've missed is that the open source world is going for a completely different kind of "efficiency" than the capitalist world. Both worlds want efficiency; they just want efficiency at different things. The second thing they've missed is that Open Source does indeed work within a survival-of-the-fittest free market very much like the one capitalism describes. It's just that it isn't a market of money. It's a market of ideas.
So after reading your post, I thought "Hm, I wonder if SCO is still distributing or selling Linux somewhere." So I went to SCO's front page just to poke at it out of mild, idle curiousity. There's a little box on the front page that says "Looking for a promotion, contest, or campaign? Enter keyword here." If you enter something that's an SCO product it forwards you there. If you enter anything else it forwards you to a search page. Okay, I thought, what the heck, let's see what happens when I type in "linux". I did so, and to my surprise was promptly forwarded to http://www.sco.com/products/linux/, which said only:
Forbidden You don't have permission to access/products/linux/ on this server.
For no good reason, I find this funny.
P.S. Searching for "Caldera Linux", on the other hand, returned some search results, including this absolutely fascinating page, which describes a developer-only "technology preview" of.. "the upcoming linux 2.4 kernel". The page seems to still be under the impression you can still sign up for SCO's "OpenLinux Developer's Network". They have e-mail addresses and an 800 number that points to the voice mail of some poor fellow within SCO named "Chris Morris". Hm.
Implementing a system where when people stumble onto out-of-date materials on your site, they get a notice saying "This material is out of date. Follow this link for a more current page." involves nontrivial programming changes, careful thought, an architecture for tracking which pages currently reflect the present on each issue, and a careful and continnuous evaluation of your site for which materials no longer reflect the current state of things. It would be extremely useful and neat, but also require, you know, actual work.
Implementing a system where out-of-date materials are in robots.txt, thus decreasing the possibility people will accidentally stumble onto them, requires an intern, a perl script, "find./*" and 20 minutes. Which, as the story link notes, appears to have been exactly how this was done.
Perhaps their goal is simply so that when people google or whatnot for information on the Bush Administration and Iraq, they will be likely to find the Bush Administration's current views on and actions in Iraq, rather than outdated material?
Completely ignoring for the moment the fact that these views and actions are really somewhat embarrasing for the Bush administration, this really makes sense from a practical viewpoint. Few things are as annoying as searching for something news-ish and finding primarily material from two years ago. And after all, if they ONLY were interested in people forgetting the old materials, they could have just removed those materials from the site totally. (Though perhaps they were aware removing the materials completely would cause mirrors, which would be fully searchable, to spring up.)
So.. I just have to ask: Where's Linux headed next?
Well, right now they're readying for the release of the 2.6.0 kernel, which they were saying in July would be ready in "less than" 7 months and will start showing up in boxed products shortly after that (probably whenever 2.6.2 comes). The new kernel brings, among other things, an O(1) scheduler, improved responsiveness for user actions, and vastly improved support for linux in embedded devices. One can also expect ReiserFS to begin to gain wider acceptance in this period. After that it looks like the schedule seems mostly to be to improve support for enterprise-class ("big iron") environments.
On the side of things more directly related to the user, GNOME is readying for their 2.4 release, which they expect by spring. 2.4 promises an unprecidented degree of polish, and may well prove to be the release that finally reaches the point "normal people" can deal with it-- if for no other reason than that it will FINALLY offer a clear, sane, graphical way for X users to *change their fricking screen resolution*. 2.4 will probably also be the version that Sun uses once they start shipping GNOME as the default desktop environment for Solaris.
On the other side of the user-interface fence, the competing KDE project will be releasing version 3.2 in december. Among other things will include inproved font support and a bundled groupware suite. After that it appears that among their plans is work on abstracting their theme display stuff by moving toward SVG-based graphics, which among other things will improve accessability by improving the support for those who need high-contrast or large-type displays.
Sounds pretty busy to me. That answer your question?
Story probably should have provided a link
on
Bitter EJB
·
· Score: 3, Informative
To Bitter Java, Bruce Tate's previous and somewhat less targetted book. I read this book and it was absolutely fantastic-- I would recommend it, and based on the pedigree I would say this new book is probably worthy of recommendation as well.
Bitter Java went in exquisite detail into the various ways things can go wrong in Java development, and in Java-like languages, in an attempt to teach good design by counterexample (most of the book concerned real-life examples of what they called "antipatterns"). It is one of the better books on OO design I've come across. Unfortunately I accidentally left my copy on an airplane somewhere between Indianapolis and Dallas:(
Microsoft is right here. After all, it's not their fault if the selected President* told his people to give a brisk slap on the wrist to Microsoft after the previously administration had won the case in court and had them bound, bent over and greased up.
There may be some technically oriented people who want to inform their non-technically-oriented friends, relatives, and acquaintances about what's been going on in the World of Slashdot, but cannot simply forward their acquaintances the original slashdot articles because they wouldn't make as much sense to someone not familiar with all of this already.
Cringely is useful for this purpose, if nothing else, since he is good at taking technically-oriented "stuff" and presenting it in a manner palpable and coherent to totally non-technical people. Which makes good e-mail forwards.
The MPAA, in an effort to reduce theft on the high seas and kidnapping, (yes, in addition to "piracy", they are now referring to "illegally abducted films"),
Wow. I'm just waiting to see what happens as this process continues to its logical conclusion.
Some new words the MPAA introduces into English between now and 2103
Rape - When people take single screen captures of sex scenes or scenes with actresses in skimpy outfits or really even just any scene from a movie that they liked, and post it in a "pictures page" on geocities
Pedophilia - When clips, recordings, or scripts for a a film that hasn't been released yet are leaked to the internet, or (more often) leaked to Harry Knowles
Genocide - Replaces outmoded term "piracy" in 2067 as a common verb for using p2p services. This is to reflect that by using a p2p service, you are personally destroying the way of life of the entire movie industry. The MPAA comes to the conclusion that this is the right word to use after the crossover film that serves as Gigli part 8 and Tomb Raider part 23 makes less than $500,000 gross, and clearly people downloading films from p2p networks are to blame
No, that's the standard nonsense. We've been getting this for YEARS in mac discussion channels. Apple is a monopoly, and more closed than MS, because you can only buy Apple products from Apple.
I suppose by this same logic, Charmin is a monopoly, because you can only buy Charmin Toilet Paper from Charmin. And Blockbuster is a monopoly in the same sense iTunes is, because when you are physically inside of a Blockbuster franchise, you can't rent movies from Hollywood Video.
Microsoft isn't a monopoly, though, they're just successful.
Is that iTunes, in the preferences, will let you set your default ripping format to be mp3.
WMP will not, unless you buy an add-on. It makes you use WMA. Hmm. And though I don't know becuase I don't use windows, as far as I can tell, the DRM is non-optional. I have a friend who recorded himself performing a few short classical pieces he performed himself on the piano. He recorded them in WMP. They now have this bizarre DRM embedded into them which cannot by any means be removed, and the files can only be played on the one computer at a time "designated", and they can only be played when you are connected to the internet and Microsoft's servers are responding.
Yeah, when apple *SELLS* music, they use AAC. This is pure pragmatism. By using 128 kbps AAC they can get the same sound quality as 192 kbps mp3 with reduced storage and transmission costs. There is no reason whatsoever they could not have used mp3 with their DRM wrapper; they chose AAC for efficiency purposes.
The way I prefer to look at it is that since we understand Technology, we understand what it can do. And more importantly, we understand its limitations.
It isn't enough just to use technology. You also have to understand it. And you also have to understand when it is and is not appropriate. If you understand the technology here you also understand that there are a number of things that have to be done to make this technology something you can trust. And you can see Diebold is not doing these things. Anyone who knows enough about software that, seeing the Diebold system, we can design in our heads five to ten ways on the spur of the moment that, if we worked for Diebold, we could cause the system to cheat and never get caught... well, it's unlikely we're going to trust that system very much.
Instead of designing a workable solution
If you look, there HAVE been constructive threads on the subject of what a well-done, trustable electronic voting system would look like. THis was actually the Ask Slashdot one week if I remember right. However, that is not the subject of this article. So you are not getting that sort of response.
Hopefully by that time Apple's found some new "next big thing" to latch on to.
The nice thing, hopefully, about the iTunes Music Store is that once it stops being an active profit-bringer because of the iPods, it still is at least breaking even. So Apple isn't really paying any money for it to run. It's just kind of self-sufficient.
Moreover, even if they don't make any money from it, the iTunes Music Store does good things for apple. It engenders some kind of goodwill, it makes some people who might otherwise write Apple off take them seriously enough as a still-vital company they might look at some of Apple's hardware offerings, it gives Apple something they can point at and say "look at all the revenue passing through the Music Store every month, we're not going anywhere anytime soon".
Perhaps most importantly though if iTunes is adopted in a big way it makes a big logjam on the spread of Windows Media. If someone really loves iTunes, even if they don't like the iPod they'll be more likely to buy an mp3 player than a wmv player. If nothing else, this means that once wma starts trying to take off, people will actually go "wait, this DRM is really stupid" since they've dealt with what is, purely relatively speaking, a more reasonable DRM system (iTunes).
Also, iTunes is a sneakily brilliant and possibly unintentional way of making absolutely certain that almost everyone has a non-Microsoft way of viewing MPEG4s. WMV vs. MPEG4 is likely going to erupt into a rather painful war at some point, and this is MPEG4's big beachhead... how many music players do you think will add AAC as a result of the iTunes store? Maybe not many, but certainly more than there would have been otherwise..
A minor note in response to something small you said:
While I have no doubt there are a lot of uninformed mac-zealot idiots out there, you have to understand where the opinion mac users have of WMP is coming from. If you had used WMP for macintosh, you would know that it really is just truly awful. It is massive, buggy, it's as un-mac-like as it could be, it's a resource hog, early versions were kind of difficult to install, it does wierd things, and it is just overall incredibly unpleasant to use.
No one I know who has a macintosh uses it, usually not even to play WMVs. The Mac users I know who actually want to play WMVs or DiVXes tend to either use wierd QT codec tricks, or use the not-always-effective but vastly superior VideoLAN Client. And this isn't just anti-Microsoft sentiment. Mac users flock to and often praise Microsoft products when they are acceptable; witness the huge success of Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer on the Mac, both of which are excellent groups of software. But I've used several different versions of it, and Windows Media Player for mac really is just a horrible piece of software.
So what you have to understand is that when you hear massive whining from the mac camp about WM, this isn't just the standard "ooh someone threatened mommy" knee-jerk apple protectionism. What you are seeing mostly is some kind of primal, feral fear, in which the mac users realize that if Windows Media gains any more of a foothold they'll have to use that horrid program. As a result, even mac users who would ordianarily be reasonable attack WM in a rabid manner, just because they're afraid they're going to be at some point forced to use it and they just want it to die.
I don't know if WMA/WMV is a better codec/format than anything else out there. All I know is that the lock-in implications of it imposed by Microsoft make it unacceptable from my view. (And, from the one time I successfully used it on a windows machine, I think I can safely say the DRM system is wonky as all hell. But that's another argument.) Anyway, I'm sorry that you had a run-in with the zealotous-idiot crowd:)
If you look at the actual article, they note that "Wilcox estimates that firms taking Microsoft up on its offer to integrate back-end processes with front-end client software on the desktop may run up tabs 10 to 40 percent higher than with earlier editions of Microsoft's products, depending on the server licenses and client access licenses (CALs) they purchase. "
That is all. This is not a comparison against Linux, Macintosh or whatever competing Office suites may be left. This is simply an alalysis of how Microsoft's vendor lock-in--- umm, i mean, how the vertical integration of Microsoft's products affects the amount that companies will pay to use those products.
Isn't it grand how monopolies lower prices for consumers because they're more Efficient? Ahhh.
Slashdot Mirror
?
RMS designed the GPL. He did not, however, design the mindset it produced; that just kind of happened. And that mindset does not necessarily mean only one thing.
The rest of your post.. To be honest I am not quite sure what you are trying to say. There is no semantic distinction made in the post you are responding to between open source and free software. I understand what the difference is supposed to be but that doesn't mean everyone observes it all the time.
Hm. I phrased that sentence unclearly. "Promote" was meant in the "To contribute to the progress or growth of" sense not the "To advocate" sense. A better way of putting the sentence would have been "The project will fork, and leave the hands of the maintainer, if the maintainer does not everything he can to work toward the program being the best possible."..
Your signature offends me
Hm. You mean because of the blatantly commercial whoring of my musical project's site, or because I said "shit"? Just curious.
The way I look at it is this.
The GPL mindset is designed, at the very core, with the sole end goal of making the best computer program possible. Everything else-- the financial success of companies like Redhat included-- is merely a means to that end, or coincidental.
The capitalist mindset is designed, at the very core, with the sole end goal of making a bunch of money. Everything else-- creating a good product included-- is merely a means to that end, or coincidental.
People can sit down and found an open source or a commercial software products with these not being their goals, but the open source project or the company will, in time, take on a life of their own. The project will fork, and leave the hands of the maintainer, if the maintainer does not do everything he can to promote it being the best program possible. The company meanwhile will eventually pass out of its original creator's hands, usually into the hands of a board of directors who care only about making the most money possible.
Because these different mindsets are so different, things the open source community does tend to seem completely mind-bogglingly nonsensical to the commercial community, and vice versa. Both sides would have an easier time understanding each other if it were understood on both sides that with a GPLed program, it is not the people, it is the source code, that is in control; and with a company it is not the people, it is the corporate culture, that is in control. Some groups of people do a better job of keeping a reign on their code/corporation than others, of course, but this is still what things seem to tend toward.
Now, there's something slightly more complicated going on here. It is that in most cases, the corporate side of things comes from a culture in which capitalism as a philosophy reigns supreme. This philosophy says that the free market will always defeat everything, because it is ultimately efficient. The mutual selfishness of everyone, acting upon each other, will ensure that only the strongest companies survive, the market winds up with the most fitting goods possible, and the capitalist system overall ends with as much wealth within it as is possible. They then get confused when these open source "things" crop up that don't seem to follow the rules of capitalism at all. They get confused because their philosophy tells them that the way to succeed is to let capitalism optimise everything; but then they see "inefficient", unoptimized, seemingly altruistic open source succeeding, they can't understand why that is. The first thing they've missed is that the open source world is going for a completely different kind of "efficiency" than the capitalist world. Both worlds want efficiency; they just want efficiency at different things. The second thing they've missed is that Open Source does indeed work within a survival-of-the-fittest free market very much like the one capitalism describes. It's just that it isn't a market of money. It's a market of ideas.
So after reading your post, I thought "Hm, I wonder if SCO is still distributing or selling Linux somewhere." So I went to SCO's front page just to poke at it out of mild, idle curiousity. There's a little box on the front page that says "Looking for a promotion, contest, or campaign? Enter keyword here." If you enter something that's an SCO product it forwards you there. If you enter anything else it forwards you to a search page. Okay, I thought, what the heck, let's see what happens when I type in "linux". I did so, and to my surprise was promptly forwarded to
/products/linux/ on this server.
http://www.sco.com/products/linux/, which said only:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access
For no good reason, I find this funny.
P.S. Searching for "Caldera Linux", on the other hand, returned some search results, including this absolutely fascinating page, which describes a developer-only "technology preview" of.. "the upcoming linux 2.4 kernel". The page seems to still be under the impression you can still sign up for SCO's "OpenLinux Developer's Network". They have e-mail addresses and an 800 number that points to the voice mail of some poor fellow within SCO named "Chris Morris". Hm.
Implementing a system where when people stumble onto out-of-date materials on your site, they get a notice saying "This material is out of date. Follow this link for a more current page." involves nontrivial programming changes, careful thought, an architecture for tracking which pages currently reflect the present on each issue, and a careful and continnuous evaluation of your site for which materials no longer reflect the current state of things. It would be extremely useful and neat, but also require, you know, actual work.
./*" and 20 minutes. Which, as the story link notes, appears to have been exactly how this was done.
Implementing a system where out-of-date materials are in robots.txt, thus decreasing the possibility people will accidentally stumble onto them, requires an intern, a perl script, "find
Perhaps their goal is simply so that when people google or whatnot for information on the Bush Administration and Iraq, they will be likely to find the Bush Administration's current views on and actions in Iraq, rather than outdated material?
Completely ignoring for the moment the fact that these views and actions are really somewhat embarrasing for the Bush administration, this really makes sense from a practical viewpoint. Few things are as annoying as searching for something news-ish and finding primarily material from two years ago. And after all, if they ONLY were interested in people forgetting the old materials, they could have just removed those materials from the site totally. (Though perhaps they were aware removing the materials completely would cause mirrors, which would be fully searchable, to spring up.)
So.. I just have to ask: Where's Linux headed next?
Well, right now they're readying for the release of the 2.6.0 kernel, which they were saying in July would be ready in "less than" 7 months and will start showing up in boxed products shortly after that (probably whenever 2.6.2 comes). The new kernel brings, among other things, an O(1) scheduler, improved responsiveness for user actions, and vastly improved support for linux in embedded devices. One can also expect ReiserFS to begin to gain wider acceptance in this period. After that it looks like the schedule seems mostly to be to improve support for enterprise-class ("big iron") environments.
On the side of things more directly related to the user, GNOME is readying for their 2.4 release, which they expect by spring. 2.4 promises an unprecidented degree of polish, and may well prove to be the release that finally reaches the point "normal people" can deal with it-- if for no other reason than that it will FINALLY offer a clear, sane, graphical way for X users to *change their fricking screen resolution*. 2.4 will probably also be the version that Sun uses once they start shipping GNOME as the default desktop environment for Solaris.
On the other side of the user-interface fence, the competing KDE project will be releasing version 3.2 in december. Among other things will include inproved font support and a bundled groupware suite. After that it appears that among their plans is work on abstracting their theme display stuff by moving toward SVG-based graphics, which among other things will improve accessability by improving the support for those who need high-contrast or large-type displays.
Sounds pretty busy to me. That answer your question?
The ever-popular "WIMP"
>> I beg to differ. Many Outlook viri are embedded into HTML messages that require no user action to run.
> 1999 called, it wants its FUD back.
Valve Systems called and said that they want 1999 to return their fucking source code.
To Bitter Java, Bruce Tate's previous and somewhat less targetted book. I read this book and it was absolutely fantastic-- I would recommend it, and based on the pedigree I would say this new book is probably worthy of recommendation as well.
:(
Bitter Java went in exquisite detail into the various ways things can go wrong in Java development, and in Java-like languages, in an attempt to teach good design by counterexample (most of the book concerned real-life examples of what they called "antipatterns"). It is one of the better books on OO design I've come across. Unfortunately I accidentally left my copy on an airplane somewhere between Indianapolis and Dallas
Even ignoring for a moment if there were problems with the methodology here.
If you can definitively tell me "people who had the option to play the demo were 13% less likely to then buy our game"..
I am not going to interpret that as meaning "demos make people less likely to buy games"...
I am going to interpret that as meaning "your game sucks"...
Microsoft is right here. After all, it's not their fault if the selected President* told his people to give a brisk slap on the wrist to Microsoft after the previously administration had won the case in court and had them bound, bent over and greased up.
And who selected the president?
Correction: there is no such thing as a good email forward.
You win.
There may be some technically oriented people who want to inform their non-technically-oriented friends, relatives, and acquaintances about what's been going on in the World of Slashdot, but cannot simply forward their acquaintances the original slashdot articles because they wouldn't make as much sense to someone not familiar with all of this already.
Cringely is useful for this purpose, if nothing else, since he is good at taking technically-oriented "stuff" and presenting it in a manner palpable and coherent to totally non-technical people. Which makes good e-mail forwards.
The MPAA, in an effort to reduce theft on the high seas and kidnapping, (yes, in addition to "piracy", they are now referring to "illegally abducted films"),
Wow. I'm just waiting to see what happens as this process continues to its logical conclusion.
Some new words the MPAA introduces into English between now and 2103
Rape - When people take single screen captures of sex scenes or scenes with actresses in skimpy outfits or really even just any scene from a movie that they liked, and post it in a "pictures page" on geocities
Pedophilia - When clips, recordings, or scripts for a a film that hasn't been released yet are leaked to the internet, or (more often) leaked to Harry Knowles
Genocide - Replaces outmoded term "piracy" in 2067 as a common verb for using p2p services. This is to reflect that by using a p2p service, you are personally destroying the way of life of the entire movie industry. The MPAA comes to the conclusion that this is the right word to use after the crossover film that serves as Gigli part 8 and Tomb Raider part 23 makes less than $500,000 gross, and clearly people downloading films from p2p networks are to blame
"It comes in YARDS?"
"..."
"I'm getting one."
No, that's the standard nonsense. We've been getting this for YEARS in mac discussion channels. Apple is a monopoly, and more closed than MS, because you can only buy Apple products from Apple.
I suppose by this same logic, Charmin is a monopoly, because you can only buy Charmin Toilet Paper from Charmin. And Blockbuster is a monopoly in the same sense iTunes is, because when you are physically inside of a Blockbuster franchise, you can't rent movies from Hollywood Video.
Microsoft isn't a monopoly, though, they're just successful.
Is that iTunes, in the preferences, will let you set your default ripping format to be mp3.
WMP will not, unless you buy an add-on. It makes you use WMA. Hmm. And though I don't know becuase I don't use windows, as far as I can tell, the DRM is non-optional. I have a friend who recorded himself performing a few short classical pieces he performed himself on the piano. He recorded them in WMP. They now have this bizarre DRM embedded into them which cannot by any means be removed, and the files can only be played on the one computer at a time "designated", and they can only be played when you are connected to the internet and Microsoft's servers are responding.
Yeah, when apple *SELLS* music, they use AAC. This is pure pragmatism. By using 128 kbps AAC they can get the same sound quality as 192 kbps mp3 with reduced storage and transmission costs. There is no reason whatsoever they could not have used mp3 with their DRM wrapper; they chose AAC for efficiency purposes.
The way I prefer to look at it is that since we understand Technology, we understand what it can do. And more importantly, we understand its limitations.
It isn't enough just to use technology. You also have to understand it. And you also have to understand when it is and is not appropriate. If you understand the technology here you also understand that there are a number of things that have to be done to make this technology something you can trust. And you can see Diebold is not doing these things. Anyone who knows enough about software that, seeing the Diebold system, we can design in our heads five to ten ways on the spur of the moment that, if we worked for Diebold, we could cause the system to cheat and never get caught... well, it's unlikely we're going to trust that system very much.
Instead of designing a workable solution
If you look, there HAVE been constructive threads on the subject of what a well-done, trustable electronic voting system would look like. THis was actually the Ask Slashdot one week if I remember right. However, that is not the subject of this article. So you are not getting that sort of response.
Hopefully by that time Apple's found some new "next big thing" to latch on to.
The nice thing, hopefully, about the iTunes Music Store is that once it stops being an active profit-bringer because of the iPods, it still is at least breaking even. So Apple isn't really paying any money for it to run. It's just kind of self-sufficient.
Moreover, even if they don't make any money from it, the iTunes Music Store does good things for apple. It engenders some kind of goodwill, it makes some people who might otherwise write Apple off take them seriously enough as a still-vital company they might look at some of Apple's hardware offerings, it gives Apple something they can point at and say "look at all the revenue passing through the Music Store every month, we're not going anywhere anytime soon".
Perhaps most importantly though if iTunes is adopted in a big way it makes a big logjam on the spread of Windows Media. If someone really loves iTunes, even if they don't like the iPod they'll be more likely to buy an mp3 player than a wmv player. If nothing else, this means that once wma starts trying to take off, people will actually go "wait, this DRM is really stupid" since they've dealt with what is, purely relatively speaking, a more reasonable DRM system (iTunes).
Also, iTunes is a sneakily brilliant and possibly unintentional way of making absolutely certain that almost everyone has a non-Microsoft way of viewing MPEG4s. WMV vs. MPEG4 is likely going to erupt into a rather painful war at some point, and this is MPEG4's big beachhead... how many music players do you think will add AAC as a result of the iTunes store? Maybe not many, but certainly more than there would have been otherwise..
A minor note in response to something small you said:
:)
While I have no doubt there are a lot of uninformed mac-zealot idiots out there, you have to understand where the opinion mac users have of WMP is coming from. If you had used WMP for macintosh, you would know that it really is just truly awful. It is massive, buggy, it's as un-mac-like as it could be, it's a resource hog, early versions were kind of difficult to install, it does wierd things, and it is just overall incredibly unpleasant to use.
No one I know who has a macintosh uses it, usually not even to play WMVs. The Mac users I know who actually want to play WMVs or DiVXes tend to either use wierd QT codec tricks, or use the not-always-effective but vastly superior VideoLAN Client. And this isn't just anti-Microsoft sentiment. Mac users flock to and often praise Microsoft products when they are acceptable; witness the huge success of Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer on the Mac, both of which are excellent groups of software. But I've used several different versions of it, and Windows Media Player for mac really is just a horrible piece of software.
So what you have to understand is that when you hear massive whining from the mac camp about WM, this isn't just the standard "ooh someone threatened mommy" knee-jerk apple protectionism. What you are seeing mostly is some kind of primal, feral fear, in which the mac users realize that if Windows Media gains any more of a foothold they'll have to use that horrid program. As a result, even mac users who would ordianarily be reasonable attack WM in a rabid manner, just because they're afraid they're going to be at some point forced to use it and they just want it to die.
I don't know if WMA/WMV is a better codec/format than anything else out there. All I know is that the lock-in implications of it imposed by Microsoft make it unacceptable from my view. (And, from the one time I successfully used it on a windows machine, I think I can safely say the DRM system is wonky as all hell. But that's another argument.) Anyway, I'm sorry that you had a run-in with the zealotous-idiot crowd
Thanks.
Maybe I'm just out of it, but I am not seeing where on the ebgames site you are getting this November 18 date from.
Could we have a direct link, please? Thanks.
If you look at the actual article, they note that "Wilcox estimates that firms taking Microsoft up on its offer to integrate back-end processes with front-end client software on the desktop may run up tabs 10 to 40 percent higher than with earlier editions of Microsoft's products, depending on the server licenses and client access licenses (CALs) they purchase. "
That is all. This is not a comparison against Linux, Macintosh or whatever competing Office suites may be left. This is simply an alalysis of how Microsoft's vendor lock-in--- umm, i mean, how the vertical integration of Microsoft's products affects the amount that companies will pay to use those products.
Isn't it grand how monopolies lower prices for consumers because they're more Efficient? Ahhh.