Anyone with the dough to buy a system that can run Vista sensibly could use the same money to buy all three of the latest gen consoles, all of the big name titles for each of them, and enough takeaway for several weeks of gaming with the change.
Bull. I spend £600 on upgrading my current system a year ago, and it'll run Vista just fine. True, I "only" bought 2 250GB drives, Athlon X2 4400, motherboard, 7800GTX, 2GB of RAM and a 500W PSU, but for another £300 or so I could've thrown in case, monitor, optical drive, sound card, keyboard/mouse and speakers then, and could definitely get it all now for less than £1000. The PS3 is slated to cost about £450, the Wii costs £180 and the XBox 360 is £280, for a total of £910 *if* you can find the Wii and PS3 for retail and don't have to get scalped on eBay.
I've read the "Vista capable PC + Vista = all three consoles + games + change" thing a few times, and it's simply wrong.
Any desktop bought in the past five years is going to cope with your average e-mail, web browsing, word processing, and so on in its sleep, and most will do things like photo editing and video editing for those with digital cameras/camcorders too.
Now, I'm impatient, but transcoding an hour-long home movie of my daughter's birthday (or whatever) takes too damn long on my PC for my liking. I don't do it enough to warrant a serious investment in hardware for it, but a 5 year old desktop is going to absolutely suck for it.
So the short answer is: I doubt Vista will ever have enough penetration into the serious gaming market to make a difference.
I remember when people said the same thing about XP. There was no reason to upgrade from Win 2k (or even 98), WPA was an egregious violation of privacy, etc etc. A quick look at Valve's Half Life 2 survery results shows that 88% of HL2 players are running XP SP2; XP is used by 97% of players.
Now I don't know whether or not Vista will gain a significant share of the gamers market, but I do know one thing - it's far too early to be predicting that it never will. Serious gamers are well used to dropping serious money on serious hardware, and mostly have a serious thing for eye-candy and modding their machines. If there's one thing Vista definitely supplies, it's eye candy. Any "serious" gamer already has a machine that's perfectly capable of running Vista, so that won't be an issue.
Not only are they very much more likely to alienate and anger their remaining employees, if they lose the case they'll lose face too. Angry alienated employees may still stay out of fear, but will most likely leave when the threat is shown to be hollow.
Install IIS by default and make it listen to requests from everywhere? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if everyone had their own little web server thingy running on their desktop so they could share their Word documents with other people in the office?
IIS doesn't install by default on any desktop Windows OS since at least Win2k, and I don't remember having it installed under NT, either. IIS isn't even available for XP Home, and won't be available for the Home editions of Vista below Home Premium. Even on Home Premium it won't be installed by default.
UPnP on by default? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if you just plugged the computer into the LAN, and it automatically knew about the printer down the hall.
I can't speak for any other version (and I do remember an early UPnP exploit when XP was released), but on XP Pro SP 2 at least UPnP is on but firewalled off by default. You have to explicitly open a hole in the firewall to discover UPnP devices on the network.
Now, this is available (to admins) by clicking a link right there in the explorer window (when you're browsing the Neighbourhood Network), although it asks you if you're sure, so it's not hard to disable the protection. However, it's not entirely true to say that UPnP is on by default, at least not any more, as while it's on, it's not accessible.
Oh, and it *is* cool to be able to plug stuff into a LAN and have it find each other automatically. It's just a shame that there are too many arseholes in the world for it to be entirely safe.
Right now though we don't know if it is a bug - it could simply be that some low-level employee mixed up some keys, and the families have received keys for Visual Studio. From the article:
Microsoft confirms that the keys are indeed valid, but not for Windows Vista. The CSR I spoke with was unable to tell what the key was for, but it did appear to be a valid key, for something.
Sounds like a process issue, not a software one. If that's true, then someone's generated or supplied keys to the wrong product; this is not a Vista issue (although I appreciate that that makes no difference at all to the affected families; it certainly is a Microsoft issue).
am looking at Apple wondering when they will get off their asses and start selling MacOS for PC machines
They'll do that the day they become a software company, the day they can make as much money selling just OS X as they can selling OS X + their hardware, and the day they want to try to support the same huge number of possible combinations of hardware as MS has to.
OS X is so very stable mostly because it only has to support a tiny number of hardware configurations. The only stability problems I've had with XP have been due directly to third party drivers or flaky hardware. Now it helps that I know not to install any old crap on my machine, but if Apple made OS X generally available you'd see many of the same problems that Windows has.
Having just tested it myself (I'm in the UK and signed up for this address mid- to late 2006), yes they both work. Interestingly, on this occasion while my test mail using "@gogglemail.com" was delivered within a second or two, the one I sent using "@gmail.com" took a minute or two to arrive. Given that this is only a single test, though, that might be coincidental.
Why not just type yahoo in the address bar, and hit Ctrl+Enter?
I've been using the internet and web since 1994, I've been a programmer at a web agency for nearly 8 years now, I spend 10+ hours per day sat in front of a computer, I browse the web every single day, I started using Mozilla from one of the milestone releases before switching to Firefox at 1.1 or so, used Netscape Communicator for years before that, and while I loathe IE I have used all versions from 3.0 to 7.0 inclusive, and I had absolutely no idea that you could do that.
Vista is just making it so you'll need to upgrade stuff for the sake of getting their DRM shit working.
Only if you want to play DRMed content. If not, you don't need to upgrade.
Why should I drop $200 for something that'll require me to drop another $1000 for no new functionality?
You'll only need to drop that extra $1000 to be able to view HD content on your PC. You can't do that under Win2k at all, and it's unlikely that you'll be able to do it under Ubuntu either, at least not legally (depending on local laws, etc), and certainly not for a while.
Dropping the $1000 *will* get you new functionality, and certainly isn't required for the OS itself.
Blame the content producers as well as MS; they're the ones mandating a complete secure path to play HD content at full resolution. It would have been nice if MS had used their clout to tell them where to shove the restriction, but ultimately, it's arguably not really their battle. We can do that simply by refusing to buy the stuff and (and this is important) *telling them why*. (If sales are lacklustre they'll just blame it on piracy unless people tell them why they're not buying it. Of course, they'll still blame piracy, but if people are public enough about it it'll be harder to do so)
When I bought my first PC, about 8/9 years ago, I bought it second hand from a friend of a friend. It came with a Windows 95 upgrade CD and a floppy disk marked something like "For Windows 95 Upgrade DO NOT DELETE". (Hand-written of course, this wasn't anything official...) The Win95 upgrade CD required that you prove to it that you had a qualifying previous OS before it would install; in this case, there was enough of a suitable OS on that floppy to satisfy it.
Ok, so it didn't have to be installed (I just inserted the floppy when prompted for proof, iirc), but it needed a little more than just a valid key.
DRM is a more important issue than you seem to think it is, because it makes the archival of our contemporary literature impossible.
Right now, there are two things preventing people from cracking any given DRM implementation wide open - time and the DMCA.
In the future, when the rights holders are dead and forgotten and historians are sifting through the digital archives trying to see what sort of things entertained us, neither of those things will be a problem. The biggest issue will be hardware to access whatever media is involved (how many 8" disk drives can you lay your hands on? 8 track cassette machines? working Betamax VCRs?).
society may lose these works entirely in the future. That's the whole deal - DRM barely even slows pirates down.
In which case there's no chance that society will ever lose the works, is there, if piracy is still so easy - there will always be pirate copies available.
Mark-up is defined as the cost added to something before it is sold on. Unless those shows are costing the cable company "about $0.0014" per viewer to show, then the mark-up is unlikely to be 1700%.
However this does bring up an interesting question -- if time-shifting is legal, as the courts have held up, and if time-shifting could imply a necessary format-shifting (from broadcast format to tape or disk, for example), might not this new behavior by CBS and NBC actually allow you to time-shift and format-shift not by watching the videos online but by downloading them in a more big screen-friendly format (say, DivX, playable on any HTPC) from a bittorrent tracker somewhere? Seems like a gray area to me.
IANAL, etc, but I very strongly suspect that you're only allowed to time- and format-shift for personal use, so doing so then distributing them via p2p would be illegal. In fact, I'd be amazed if a phrase along the lines of "for personal use only" isn't right there in the fair use clause. Also, while I don't know about US copyright law, here in the UK the clause that allows for time-shifting specifically disallows building up a "home library" of recordings - ie you're not allowed to keep them indefinitely.
Perhaps you need to learn how AV software works. I said "If it's a real time scan on a file you're accessing, then it can definitely wait, as the file won't be opened/executed until the scan has completed anyway" because any anti-virus software worth using scans every single file you attempt to access before that access takes place. As such, it doesn't matter what the virus claims to be, the AV software will have scanned it before it tells the OS.
The general sequence of events is:
1 user double-clicks a file 2 the AV soft's real-time scanner is invoked to scan it 3a the file is clean, access is granted 3b the file is dirty, access is denied
It doesn't matter how long step 2 takes, or what other apps get to use cycles while it's suspended - it will complete before either of steps 3a or 3b.
Classic: multimedia apps take precedence over anti-virus.
Yes, as it should. If the AV activity is a scheduled full system scan, then it can indeed wait those few tenths of seconds extra, as if you're already infected, they won't make any difference. If it's a real time scan on a file you're accessing, then it can definitely wait, as the file won't be opened/executed until the scan has completed anyway.
So what exactly is the problem with giving a multimedia app a higher priority on the processor than your AV software? We're not talking about killing the AV soft, just lowering the priority; it's still running.
they've merely reimplemented nice
You've been able to set process priority through the Task Manager since at least NT4 (the earliest I remember it being available; it may have been in earlier versions too, I just don't remember seeing it personally).
Ya really easy I'm sure, unless you use CHMOD to make those files read only for the user. Then the malware would have to guess the root/admin password.
Or just read the file in, delete it and write it out again. Delete permission on files is governed by the directory they're in; as long as you have write and execute on the containing directory, you can delete the file and recreate it. No need to guess anyone's password.
Try it for yourself - open a read-only file in your home directory with vi, modify it, and try to save it. Vi will tell you that it's read-only, and to use "w!" to override. If you do, vi simply deletes the file and writes out the modified version.
Given that the vast majority of infections are due to users running trojaned executables they obtained from untrustworthy sources, how exactly do you intend to argue that it's Microsoft's fault?
Of course it backfires by leading them to think "well, I might as well get my money's worth" which *AA execs were somehow too stupid to see would happen.
Or maybe they figured "well, everyone's going to do it anyway, we might as well claw back some of our lost profits".
Scrapping the tax won't make any appreciable difference to the amount of copyright infringement; anyone who cites the tax as a reason for their own copying is most likely using it as a convenient excuse for an activity they'd perform regardless.
aren't they supposed to be notoriously difficult to leave?
I think they're notorious for being difficult to get people out of; most members don't want to leave (often because of brainwashing and other indoctrination techniques), and the cult strong opposes outsiders who try to remove members.
Again, I don't know as I've never been there, but that's the popular perception, at least as I perceive it.
Other countries have a national standard ID card and have yet to become fascist police states; merely having a standard ID is necessary but not sufficient.
Apple offered a solution that works, and it works on all platforms.
It doesn't work on all platforms though, that's the point. Even ignoring the fact that it only works with iPods, is there an iTunes for BSD, or Solaris, or even Linux?
So the only draw-back is that your locked in to using an iPod?!?!
That's a pretty big drawback for those of us who bought a rival player a couple of years ago that still works perfectly and don't feel like throwing it away just to gain access to iTunes music. (It also beggars belief that you can say in one breath that it works "on all platforms" then in the next admit that you're locked in to using the iPod - you do realise that that is in itself a platform, don't you?)
Hell, the have 3 versions of the damn thing, there's a gazillion accessories for it, so what's the problem?
Microsoft currently produce a number of different versions of Windows, and there are "a gazillion accessories" for them too - so it's fine that many people are effectively locked into using Windows?
Apple have by far the largest slice of the pie when it comes to music players and online sales. There is no technical reason at all why they couldn't licence FairPlay to other vendors and so allow interoperability with iTunes and the iPod. They don't want to because they don't want to allow that sort of competition. Why shouldn't I be able to use iTunes-bought music on my iRiver? Because then Apple will make a little bit less money?
Compete on merit, not on artificial technical barriers.
MicroSoft, Sony, Dell, HP, Verizon, Bank of America, etc. doesn't seem to give a rats as about me, and I get to hear "Well it was your choice" all the time.
That's funny, I hear pretty-much the opposite about MS and Sony, with most people here loudly decrying their business tactics and especially MS's monopoly status.
Suck it up Norway, if you don't like the business model, don't buy the damn thing.
Which is exactly what they're doing. They're not forcing Apple to licence FairPlay to others (as they can't), they're preventing Apple from selling a product in their jurisdiction which contravenes their law. That's the way it's supposed to work.
I think copyright law might disagree with you there. Ok, so distribution isn't literally "handing out", but they're still not supposed to be doing it...
Slashdot Mirror
Post 1 million user slashdot? The place started going to pot around about the hundred thousand user mark if you ask me.
(Cue 2- or 3-digit UIDer saying the same about the ten thousand user mark in 3, 2, 1...)
Anyone with the dough to buy a system that can run Vista sensibly could use the same money to buy all three of the latest gen consoles, all of the big name titles for each of them, and enough takeaway for several weeks of gaming with the change.
Bull. I spend £600 on upgrading my current system a year ago, and it'll run Vista just fine. True, I "only" bought 2 250GB drives, Athlon X2 4400, motherboard, 7800GTX, 2GB of RAM and a 500W PSU, but for another £300 or so I could've thrown in case, monitor, optical drive, sound card, keyboard/mouse and speakers then, and could definitely get it all now for less than £1000. The PS3 is slated to cost about £450, the Wii costs £180 and the XBox 360 is £280, for a total of £910 *if* you can find the Wii and PS3 for retail and don't have to get scalped on eBay.
I've read the "Vista capable PC + Vista = all three consoles + games + change" thing a few times, and it's simply wrong.
Any desktop bought in the past five years is going to cope with your average e-mail, web browsing, word processing, and so on in its sleep, and most will do things like photo editing and video editing for those with digital cameras/camcorders too.
Now, I'm impatient, but transcoding an hour-long home movie of my daughter's birthday (or whatever) takes too damn long on my PC for my liking. I don't do it enough to warrant a serious investment in hardware for it, but a 5 year old desktop is going to absolutely suck for it.
So the short answer is: I doubt Vista will ever have enough penetration into the serious gaming market to make a difference.
I remember when people said the same thing about XP. There was no reason to upgrade from Win 2k (or even 98), WPA was an egregious violation of privacy, etc etc. A quick look at Valve's Half Life 2 survery results shows that 88% of HL2 players are running XP SP2; XP is used by 97% of players.
Now I don't know whether or not Vista will gain a significant share of the gamers market, but I do know one thing - it's far too early to be predicting that it never will. Serious gamers are well used to dropping serious money on serious hardware, and mostly have a serious thing for eye-candy and modding their machines. If there's one thing Vista definitely supplies, it's eye candy. Any "serious" gamer already has a machine that's perfectly capable of running Vista, so that won't be an issue.
does anyone out there ever press that "safely remove hardware" thing anyway?
Yeah, I do. I prefer Windows to finish writing to the device before I yank it out of the socket.
Not only are they very much more likely to alienate and anger their remaining employees, if they lose the case they'll lose face too. Angry alienated employees may still stay out of fear, but will most likely leave when the threat is shown to be hollow.
On the whole I agree with you, but:
Install IIS by default and make it listen to requests from everywhere? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if everyone had their own little web server thingy running on their desktop so they could share their Word documents with other people in the office?
IIS doesn't install by default on any desktop Windows OS since at least Win2k, and I don't remember having it installed under NT, either. IIS isn't even available for XP Home, and won't be available for the Home editions of Vista below Home Premium. Even on Home Premium it won't be installed by default.
UPnP on by default? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if you just plugged the computer into the LAN, and it automatically knew about the printer down the hall.
I can't speak for any other version (and I do remember an early UPnP exploit when XP was released), but on XP Pro SP 2 at least UPnP is on but firewalled off by default. You have to explicitly open a hole in the firewall to discover UPnP devices on the network.
Now, this is available (to admins) by clicking a link right there in the explorer window (when you're browsing the Neighbourhood Network), although it asks you if you're sure, so it's not hard to disable the protection. However, it's not entirely true to say that UPnP is on by default, at least not any more, as while it's on, it's not accessible.
Oh, and it *is* cool to be able to plug stuff into a LAN and have it find each other automatically. It's just a shame that there are too many arseholes in the world for it to be entirely safe.
Right now though we don't know if it is a bug - it could simply be that some low-level employee mixed up some keys, and the families have received keys for Visual Studio. From the article:
Microsoft confirms that the keys are indeed valid, but not for Windows Vista. The CSR I spoke with was unable to tell what the key was for, but it did appear to be a valid key, for something.
Sounds like a process issue, not a software one. If that's true, then someone's generated or supplied keys to the wrong product; this is not a Vista issue (although I appreciate that that makes no difference at all to the affected families; it certainly is a Microsoft issue).
am looking at Apple wondering when they will get off their asses and start selling MacOS for PC machines
They'll do that the day they become a software company, the day they can make as much money selling just OS X as they can selling OS X + their hardware, and the day they want to try to support the same huge number of possible combinations of hardware as MS has to.
OS X is so very stable mostly because it only has to support a tiny number of hardware configurations. The only stability problems I've had with XP have been due directly to third party drivers or flaky hardware. Now it helps that I know not to install any old crap on my machine, but if Apple made OS X generally available you'd see many of the same problems that Windows has.
Having just tested it myself (I'm in the UK and signed up for this address mid- to late 2006), yes they both work. Interestingly, on this occasion while my test mail using "@gogglemail.com" was delivered within a second or two, the one I sent using "@gmail.com" took a minute or two to arrive. Given that this is only a single test, though, that might be coincidental.
Why not just type yahoo in the address bar, and hit Ctrl+Enter?
I've been using the internet and web since 1994, I've been a programmer at a web agency for nearly 8 years now, I spend 10+ hours per day sat in front of a computer, I browse the web every single day, I started using Mozilla from one of the milestone releases before switching to Firefox at 1.1 or so, used Netscape Communicator for years before that, and while I loathe IE I have used all versions from 3.0 to 7.0 inclusive, and I had absolutely no idea that you could do that.
How the hell is a normal user supposed to know?
Vista is just making it so you'll need to upgrade stuff for the sake of getting their DRM shit working.
Only if you want to play DRMed content. If not, you don't need to upgrade.
Why should I drop $200 for something that'll require me to drop another $1000 for no new functionality?
You'll only need to drop that extra $1000 to be able to view HD content on your PC. You can't do that under Win2k at all, and it's unlikely that you'll be able to do it under Ubuntu either, at least not legally (depending on local laws, etc), and certainly not for a while.
Dropping the $1000 *will* get you new functionality, and certainly isn't required for the OS itself.
Blame the content producers as well as MS; they're the ones mandating a complete secure path to play HD content at full resolution. It would have been nice if MS had used their clout to tell them where to shove the restriction, but ultimately, it's arguably not really their battle. We can do that simply by refusing to buy the stuff and (and this is important) *telling them why*. (If sales are lacklustre they'll just blame it on piracy unless people tell them why they're not buying it. Of course, they'll still blame piracy, but if people are public enough about it it'll be harder to do so)
When I bought my first PC, about 8/9 years ago, I bought it second hand from a friend of a friend. It came with a Windows 95 upgrade CD and a floppy disk marked something like "For Windows 95 Upgrade DO NOT DELETE". (Hand-written of course, this wasn't anything official...) The Win95 upgrade CD required that you prove to it that you had a qualifying previous OS before it would install; in this case, there was enough of a suitable OS on that floppy to satisfy it.
Ok, so it didn't have to be installed (I just inserted the floppy when prompted for proof, iirc), but it needed a little more than just a valid key.
DRM is a more important issue than you seem to think it is, because it makes the archival of our contemporary literature impossible.
Right now, there are two things preventing people from cracking any given DRM implementation wide open - time and the DMCA.
In the future, when the rights holders are dead and forgotten and historians are sifting through the digital archives trying to see what sort of things entertained us, neither of those things will be a problem. The biggest issue will be hardware to access whatever media is involved (how many 8" disk drives can you lay your hands on? 8 track cassette machines? working Betamax VCRs?).
society may lose these works entirely in the future. That's the whole deal - DRM barely even slows pirates down.
In which case there's no chance that society will ever lose the works, is there, if piracy is still so easy - there will always be pirate copies available.
If enough people don't buy the companies will abandon it.
Which is precisely his point - not enough people care or even know about it to make a difference.
It's effectively a 1700% markup.
Mark-up is defined as the cost added to something before it is sold on. Unless those shows are costing the cable company "about $0.0014" per viewer to show, then the mark-up is unlikely to be 1700%.
However this does bring up an interesting question -- if time-shifting is legal, as the courts have held up, and if time-shifting could imply a necessary format-shifting (from broadcast format to tape or disk, for example), might not this new behavior by CBS and NBC actually allow you to time-shift and format-shift not by watching the videos online but by downloading them in a more big screen-friendly format (say, DivX, playable on any HTPC) from a bittorrent tracker somewhere? Seems like a gray area to me.
IANAL, etc, but I very strongly suspect that you're only allowed to time- and format-shift for personal use, so doing so then distributing them via p2p would be illegal. In fact, I'd be amazed if a phrase along the lines of "for personal use only" isn't right there in the fair use clause. Also, while I don't know about US copyright law, here in the UK the clause that allows for time-shifting specifically disallows building up a "home library" of recordings - ie you're not allowed to keep them indefinitely.
Perhaps you need to learn how AV software works. I said "If it's a real time scan on a file you're accessing, then it can definitely wait, as the file won't be opened/executed until the scan has completed anyway" because any anti-virus software worth using scans every single file you attempt to access before that access takes place. As such, it doesn't matter what the virus claims to be, the AV software will have scanned it before it tells the OS.
The general sequence of events is:
1 user double-clicks a file
2 the AV soft's real-time scanner is invoked to scan it
3a the file is clean, access is granted
3b the file is dirty, access is denied
It doesn't matter how long step 2 takes, or what other apps get to use cycles while it's suspended - it will complete before either of steps 3a or 3b.
Classic: multimedia apps take precedence over anti-virus.
Yes, as it should. If the AV activity is a scheduled full system scan, then it can indeed wait those few tenths of seconds extra, as if you're already infected, they won't make any difference. If it's a real time scan on a file you're accessing, then it can definitely wait, as the file won't be opened/executed until the scan has completed anyway.
So what exactly is the problem with giving a multimedia app a higher priority on the processor than your AV software? We're not talking about killing the AV soft, just lowering the priority; it's still running.
they've merely reimplemented nice
You've been able to set process priority through the Task Manager since at least NT4 (the earliest I remember it being available; it may have been in earlier versions too, I just don't remember seeing it personally).
Ya really easy I'm sure, unless you use CHMOD to make those files read only for the user. Then the malware would have to guess the root/admin password.
Or just read the file in, delete it and write it out again. Delete permission on files is governed by the directory they're in; as long as you have write and execute on the containing directory, you can delete the file and recreate it. No need to guess anyone's password.
Try it for yourself - open a read-only file in your home directory with vi, modify it, and try to save it. Vi will tell you that it's read-only, and to use "w!" to override. If you do, vi simply deletes the file and writes out the modified version.
Given that the vast majority of infections are due to users running trojaned executables they obtained from untrustworthy sources, how exactly do you intend to argue that it's Microsoft's fault?
Of course it backfires by leading them to think "well, I might as well get my money's worth" which *AA execs were somehow too stupid to see would happen.
Or maybe they figured "well, everyone's going to do it anyway, we might as well claw back some of our lost profits".
Scrapping the tax won't make any appreciable difference to the amount of copyright infringement; anyone who cites the tax as a reason for their own copying is most likely using it as a convenient excuse for an activity they'd perform regardless.
aren't they supposed to be notoriously difficult to leave?
I think they're notorious for being difficult to get people out of; most members don't want to leave (often because of brainwashing and other indoctrination techniques), and the cult strong opposes outsiders who try to remove members.
Again, I don't know as I've never been there, but that's the popular perception, at least as I perceive it.
Other countries have a national standard ID card and have yet to become fascist police states; merely having a standard ID is necessary but not sufficient.
Apple offered a solution that works, and it works on all platforms.
It doesn't work on all platforms though, that's the point. Even ignoring the fact that it only works with iPods, is there an iTunes for BSD, or Solaris, or even Linux?
So the only draw-back is that your locked in to using an iPod?!?!
That's a pretty big drawback for those of us who bought a rival player a couple of years ago that still works perfectly and don't feel like throwing it away just to gain access to iTunes music. (It also beggars belief that you can say in one breath that it works "on all platforms" then in the next admit that you're locked in to using the iPod - you do realise that that is in itself a platform, don't you?)
Hell, the have 3 versions of the damn thing, there's a gazillion accessories for it, so what's the problem?
Microsoft currently produce a number of different versions of Windows, and there are "a gazillion accessories" for them too - so it's fine that many people are effectively locked into using Windows?
Apple have by far the largest slice of the pie when it comes to music players and online sales. There is no technical reason at all why they couldn't licence FairPlay to other vendors and so allow interoperability with iTunes and the iPod. They don't want to because they don't want to allow that sort of competition. Why shouldn't I be able to use iTunes-bought music on my iRiver? Because then Apple will make a little bit less money?
Compete on merit, not on artificial technical barriers.
MicroSoft, Sony, Dell, HP, Verizon, Bank of America, etc. doesn't seem to give a rats as about me, and I get to hear "Well it was your choice" all the time.
That's funny, I hear pretty-much the opposite about MS and Sony, with most people here loudly decrying their business tactics and especially MS's monopoly status.
Suck it up Norway, if you don't like the business model, don't buy the damn thing.
Which is exactly what they're doing. They're not forcing Apple to licence FairPlay to others (as they can't), they're preventing Apple from selling a product in their jurisdiction which contravenes their law. That's the way it's supposed to work.
it requires some training and experience to actually know what you're doing.
So? How much time do you think you have between elections anyway?
noone handing out things they werent supposed to
I think copyright law might disagree with you there. Ok, so distribution isn't literally "handing out", but they're still not supposed to be doing it...