By the time you find out how it can be bad...
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...it will be too late to complain.
Consider: The record industry is looking for ways to justify multi-tier pricing, where some songs cost 75 cents, and other songs cost $2, or $3. What better way to justify that than to say, "People really play <this> song more than <that> song, so we deserve much more money for it!". I would actually be happy to do that, if I thought that the artist would get the extra money, but I'm pretty sure any extra money will magically vaporize somewhere in the record labels. "overhead", or "promotional copies" or something.
Consider: If I understand this right, they are tracking what songs you play. Not what songs you buy from them, but what songs you play from anywhere you obtained it. First off, if the song is not one that you bought from them, then how can they tell what you're playing? From the artist name and song title that you typed in? Geez, people can't even get consistent data into the gracenote database (which is why I still avoid that), so just how accurate is the data going to be when the names are based on what a million different people type in? For that matter, I rename some of the songs I do buy from iTMS, because they even they don't name things completely consistently (although they do better than Gracenote).
Consider: Let's say the RIAA feeds certain songs into the file-sharing networks, which have unique markers in them (either spellings of artist names, or MD5 digests of the song, or something). Then they come knocking on Apple's door saying "Have you noticed anyone playing <this> song? And you can tie that playing to a specific authenticated user? Hey, that's Great!".
Consider: Let's say the government finds out that "terrorists" really like to play "Desert Rose" from Sting. Or they want to know everyone who listens to the podcasts from Al Franken. Gee, maybe Apple would know. Once there is a database, then who knows what "interesting" things someone might want to find out from mining that data...
I don't know if any of these are going to happen, but the thing is that we won't know the downside until we see it. And all of this is for what? So they can recommend more songs for us to buy? They do an awful job with the "Just for You" recommendations as it is. I don't need someone tracking down more songs for me to buy -- particularly not the person who directly profits from me buying stuff. Real live human beings have a tough-enough time agreeing on what which albums are good, even if they agree on an artists they like. Anything the store recommends is still going to be nothing more than a random guess. The "up-side" of this is extremely insignificant. If you want to find more interesting music to listen to, then search for it yourself. You can spend months on amazon reading reviews (both pro and con) from real live people who have bought a variety of albums, and get a much better idea of what music to try than you'll get from database-mining and a 30-second snippet of some song.
disclaimers: a) in general, I like Apple. I like MacOS much more than Windows. I own four ipods. I buy songs from iTMS (not a lot but some). b) I think Sony should be completely boycotted for their recent DRM fiasco. c) I think it's hysterical that Microsoft claims people should hate iPods because they "lock you into" a single vendor. d) I prefer to buy CD's over digital downloads, and my iTunes music collection is about 99% songs ripped from legit CD's that I personally bought.
Re:Apple, please fix widgets in Classic environmen
on
MacOS X DP3
·
· Score: 1
So Apple are punishing users for the non-action of developers? An interesting theory, and given Apple's history not totally inconceivable.
First of, I think it's a bit much to call this "punishment". So some windows will look a little differently than others. Big deal.
More importantly, there is a perfectly fine and non-sinister reason for "classic" apps to look distinctly different from native "Carbon" or "Cocoa" applications.
All "Classic" apps will run inside of a single unix process. While that unix process will enjoy memory-protection from other unix processes (and visa-versa), all Classic apps inside that process will have no memory protection from each other. Thus, a bug in any ONE classic application can cause ALL classic applications to crash. They could all disappear at the same time, in a case where the "bluebox" process has to reboot itself to fix a problem.
Now, consider the user. They have just bought into this great new operating system because it is supposed to be so much more reliable. Then, in the middle of doing something, half of the applications that they have running may suddenly disappear. There is a major advantage -- to the user -- to realize that all of those applications were classic applications. Ie, all the modern applications are just fine, it's only the never-updated applications which happened to disappear all at once.
Yes, this (in turn) will put pressure on users to upgrade to modern applications. That in turn puts pressure on developers to update their applications to at least the Carbon level. Maybe everyone is annoyed with being "forced", but everyone also benefits. Developers know that users can readily tell a Carbon app from a Classic app, so chances are they can make money on an upgrade which does NOTHING but carbon-ize the app. Users then get applications which ARE memory-protected from each other. The classic application which had the bug in it might very well still have the bug in it after it is carbon-ized, but now only THAT application will crash, and a bug in that application should not be able to bring down any other applications on the machine.
All-in-all, I think this is a very clever and NON-PAINFUL way to encourage everyone to persue and obtain the biggest advantage of going to MacOS 10, which is to say, increased reliability. The people who don't get that reliability will at least see why they are not getting it. Also, the people handling user-support calls will have a trivial way to distinguish one whole class of support problems.
Slashdot Mirror
...it will be too late to complain.
Consider: The record industry is looking for ways to justify multi-tier pricing, where some songs cost 75 cents, and other songs cost $2, or $3. What better way to justify that than to say, "People really play <this> song more than <that> song, so we deserve much more money for it!". I would actually be happy to do that, if I thought that the artist would get the extra money, but I'm pretty sure any extra money will magically vaporize somewhere in the record labels. "overhead", or "promotional copies" or something.
Consider: If I understand this right, they are tracking what songs you play. Not what songs you buy from them, but what songs you play from anywhere you obtained it. First off, if the song is not one that you bought from them, then how can they tell what you're playing? From the artist name and song title that you typed in? Geez, people can't even get consistent data into the gracenote database (which is why I still avoid that), so just how accurate is the data going to be when the names are based on what a million different people type in? For that matter, I rename some of the songs I do buy from iTMS, because they even they don't name things completely consistently (although they do better than Gracenote).
Consider: Let's say the RIAA feeds certain songs into the file-sharing networks, which have unique markers in them (either spellings of artist names, or MD5 digests of the song, or something). Then they come knocking on Apple's door saying "Have you noticed anyone playing <this> song? And you can tie that playing to a specific authenticated user? Hey, that's Great!".
Consider: Let's say the government finds out that "terrorists" really like to play "Desert Rose" from Sting. Or they want to know everyone who listens to the podcasts from Al Franken. Gee, maybe Apple would know. Once there is a database, then who knows what "interesting" things someone might want to find out from mining that data...
I don't know if any of these are going to happen, but the thing is that we won't know the downside until we see it. And all of this is for what? So they can recommend more songs for us to buy? They do an awful job with the "Just for You" recommendations as it is. I don't need someone tracking down more songs for me to buy -- particularly not the person who directly profits from me buying stuff. Real live human beings have a tough-enough time agreeing on what which albums are good, even if they agree on an artists they like. Anything the store recommends is still going to be nothing more than a random guess. The "up-side" of this is extremely insignificant. If you want to find more interesting music to listen to, then search for it yourself. You can spend months on amazon reading reviews (both pro and con) from real live people who have bought a variety of albums, and get a much better idea of what music to try than you'll get from database-mining and a 30-second snippet of some song.
disclaimers: a) in general, I like Apple. I like MacOS much more than Windows. I own four ipods. I buy songs from iTMS (not a lot but some). b) I think Sony should be completely boycotted for their recent DRM fiasco. c) I think it's hysterical that Microsoft claims people should hate iPods because they "lock you into" a single vendor. d) I prefer to buy CD's over digital downloads, and my iTunes music collection is about 99% songs ripped from legit CD's that I personally bought.
First of, I think it's a bit much to call this "punishment". So some windows will look a little differently than others. Big deal.
More importantly, there is a perfectly fine and non-sinister reason for "classic" apps to look distinctly different from native "Carbon" or "Cocoa" applications.
All "Classic" apps will run inside of a single unix process. While that unix process will enjoy memory-protection from other unix processes (and visa-versa), all Classic apps inside that process will have no memory protection from each other. Thus, a bug in any ONE classic application can cause ALL classic applications to crash. They could all disappear at the same time, in a case where the "bluebox" process has to reboot itself to fix a problem.
Now, consider the user. They have just bought into this great new operating system because it is supposed to be so much more reliable. Then, in the middle of doing something, half of the applications that they have running may suddenly disappear. There is a major advantage -- to the user -- to realize that all of those applications were classic applications. Ie, all the modern applications are just fine, it's only the never-updated applications which happened to disappear all at once.
Yes, this (in turn) will put pressure on users to upgrade to modern applications. That in turn puts pressure on developers to update their applications to at least the Carbon level. Maybe everyone is annoyed with being "forced", but everyone also benefits. Developers know that users can readily tell a Carbon app from a Classic app, so chances are they can make money on an upgrade which does NOTHING but carbon-ize the app. Users then get applications which ARE memory-protected from each other. The classic application which had the bug in it might very well still have the bug in it after it is carbon-ized, but now only THAT application will crash, and a bug in that application should not be able to bring down any other applications on the machine.
All-in-all, I think this is a very clever and NON-PAINFUL way to encourage everyone to persue and obtain the biggest advantage of going to MacOS 10, which is to say, increased reliability. The people who don't get that reliability will at least see why they are not getting it. Also, the people handling user-support calls will have a trivial way to distinguish one whole class of support problems.