I would imagine that this is as simple as Microsoft somehow tagging the file within the Zune's filesystem (nobody ever said its file management would follow a standard) to prohibit redistribution of the music to other devices, playing more than three times, or playing after three days.
"We'll provide a way to wrap every pirate mp3 out there with DRM if you give us the first mover advantage when we need it."
I'll bet that sentence, or the gist of it was communicated at some point during negotiations for MSFT's Zune marketplace.
And I'm sure the reason for this feature is that Microsoft promised the record companies an end to.mp3 trading if the record companies helped Microsoft become a success. If existing.mp3s are wrapped in DRM as part of a compelling prouct feature, they can no longer be shared on the Internet, with iTunes, or by other means. Total lock in, Zune-heads. Is that what you want? At least iTunes leaves your.mp3s alone.
We'll know this for sure if titles are released in the Zune marketplace ahead of iTunes after a few months - eventually, this could happen, and it will betray the arrangement. The record companies are the only party that can really help this crappy device become more compelling than the iPod by offering content to Zune Marketplace ahead of iTunes.
That's what I'd do if I was an asshole marketdriod at MSFT, anyway. Not that I am - but that's the play I'd try to make with the RIAA and it's member publishers.
Why does everyone talk about sharing music while you talk with some hot girl you met in a club/bar/wherever?
Because this is Slashdot, and people here only conceptualize meeting a girl in a bar.
Pull out a Zune and ofer to share a tune with a real girl in a real bar, and I'd lay my neck on a block against you getting laid, much less her number or name.
Like the past few years of imminent iPhone announcements, that was a rumor, and as such, wasn't reflected in the cold, hard light of reality. Although I'd chuckle to see Microsoft chuck a couple of billion dollars at the record companies to re-buy everyone's iTMS tracks. Talk about corporate welfare and pissing off the geeks...
If you've spent a couple of hundred bucks on iTunes Music Store Tracks like me (all backed up as non-DRM AIFF, thank you) then you have to consider that those tracks will not play on the Sune without reripping - and reripping means you get big files that sound at least as good as the original iTMS store files, or you get Windows DRM o' The Week files that sound a trifle bit crappier.
May I add that this article sounds to have been written by a total flaming fanboy? Holy cripes, I haven't seen so much fawning since Bambi.
However, I feel that the scout organization has fallen so far from its original intended roots that it's nothing but a special interest shadow of its former self. It's very sad, because what once was an organization that helped kids learn about skills and camping and other simple yet vital tasks for a well rounded person have been hammered away into anti-gay, christian centric whored out to any group that wants type of thing
Thanks for saying so well what I've felt often over the past fifteen years. Scouting is nothing more than bitter old men leading impressionable young men around anymore. It's almost like a page program for suburban and exurban white guys.
I was a First Class Scout before leaving when I was 16, to spend more time bike racing. I enjoyed scouts because it let me get outdoors (I'd formerly beena roly-poly little fat computer nerd kid, and while I kept my computer nerd cred, scouts got me outside, working some of that flab off and seeing, doing, and loving the outdoors.
As I crested Muir and Bishop Passes on consecutive days four summers ago, I thought a lot about my time as a scout. I'd never have learned to enjoy the outdoors were it not for my thoughtful and tolerant scoutmaster. Stuff like this - being a shill for big business - and the flaaaaaaming antigay rhetoric coming out of the Boy Scouts is a truly sad thing. The organization could do a lot of good for ALL young men if they chose to.
conventional explosions nevertheless distributed a large quantity of radioactive bomb guts over a wide area
Wow. Sounds like a very dirty bomb.
I sure hope the terra-ists never get a hold of that sort of thing.
It seems countries with WMD capability have been testing dirty bombs far longer than "W The President" told me! I hope he and his cowboy posse are able to round up the wrongdoers responsible for messing up the escargot crop...wait, that's French, right? I hate escargot.
"There's no snails in Thule. Some people want to undermine our efforts to bring plutonium to the Nokos, uh, Arctic Circle by saying that there are radioactive snails. I say those people hate our freedom."
With copper prices skyrocketing, and fiber prices dropping, why would anyone be pushing for this tech?
Here are a few pithy reasons I can think of:
-There's a lot of copper wire in the ground already. Copper serves nearly every home and business in the U.S. -Replacing or supplementing the copper with fiber costs a lot more money than upgrading the switches on the existing copper line.
Sure, fiber makes more sense for new installations, but if you live where I do, new construction amounts to something very close to zero.
All this talk of speedy internet access is great, but I'm still not seeing much benefit when it comes to what my ISP offers.
Exactly. Here in Baton Rouge, BellSouth/SBC has no incentive to upgrade their piss-poor network. Here's an example of how poor the situation in our market is:
-Our cable goes down more often than a high-priced hooker. Since moving here in early September, we've had four outages of 3+ hours. -Our Cox cable service fluctuates -Our condo is 25 years old. The phone post outside the building still has "Property of the Bell System" printed on it, which means it has never been upgraded. Period. I'll let you guess whether or not we can get DSL. -We live among several professional business parks and a couple of high-end neighborhoods. No DSL, no fiber - we're lucky we get cable Internet service. Did I mention we're in an established area of the city? This isn't new construction on the outskirts -we're two miles from the Interstate and three miles from downtown. -After Katrina, no one's cell phone or landline would work for more than a few minutes at a time because surprise - there were no spare circuits available. There was very little limb damage here - the sudden influx of people so overwhelmed the already at-capacity network that over a year later, there are still trailered switches parked every few blocks, tied into the POTS network.
And yet, SBC hasn't seen fit to start or plan any significant new infrastructure. We're the state's Capital, fer Chrissake.
Is it a stretch to predict they'll go after any trick that allows them to leverage their overtaxed existing services? They're cheap.
Baton Rouge wonders why no tech professionals want to move here, while the city council conjures up dreams of being the next Atlanta...I wonder if the dearth of software and technical professionals may have something to do with the crap infrastructure and laissez-faire attitude of the local telecom/entertainment providers?
Considering some of the Lexus drivers I've seen around Cupertino, what's really needed is a self-driving Lexus.
If Toyota can pull that one off, the number of defensive driving maneuvers required within a block of Cupertino's major arterials can be considerably reduced.
After living in their cars on the streets of Wichita for five years, the Dot-Scammers are back in town - with new suits, new shoes, new business ideas, and a new attitude! (They've still got the same penchant for parties, though.)
I hope they crash and burn twice as violently this time. Maybe that'll learn 'em.
I disagree completely. I for one would love to have one device that does everything I need or can think of: cellphone, MP3(Ogg) player, portable video player, PDA, etc.
But I didn't argue that no one wanted a superintegrated do-everything device. Clearly, you want that, and poducts exist for you, like the Zune or Playerphones.
To clarify, few people want a do-everything device. That means that you, while a minority if buyers, will see more value in a single device that does everything. A majority of music player buyers do not share your values, and instead find the discrete purpose and populaar style of the iPod more valuable.
While TFA makes an interesting point, I think it's ultimately wrong for this reason.
Yes, and TFA fail to mention the most important aspect of this "scaring Apple" scenario:
People must actually want these features in order to ante up for the Zune "experience".
IMHO, people don't want this kind of superintegrated media/software/myspace connection. Look at how well AMP'D mobile and the similar "lifestyle" phones are doing - they measure success in the hundreds of customers. ESPN Mobile just went down the toilet for good.
If Microsoft's past performance has been any indication, this attempt at lifestyle superintegration will be a mess - a security and synchronization headache that even for the few interested in such an experience, will quickly become more trouble than it's worth.
Apple wins because the iPod does a few things very well, looking the best while it does it. Zune, in attempting to be all things to all people, misses the point; there are actually very few people who want anything to do everything.
Yes, I bought DRMed stuff that I was having no luck finding elsewhere. And no ITunes isn't suitable for my needs: I don't use or want an Ipod. (SanDisk Sansa if you must know)
iTunes music store lets you burn your music to CD and re-rip it at any level of quality you want - including lossless. The DRM goes away at that point.
Lee: "We wanted an integrated experience from the beginning.... Our focus is on giving the user one great experience."
But Lee, that's not integrated. Integrated would be...not worrying about whether it works or not, regardless of the device. You know, like being able to assume that something will...play for sure. No matter which device.
As someone who is happy to see Apple on top for once, I hope Microsoft keeps hiring these idiots.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised that C|Net didn't review it more highly. They gush all over everything else Microsoft does - and when Apple stumbles, it's front page news, but you can read an article today about Vista that doesn't even mention the fact that it's two years late and dozens of features short.
Why is it, that on blogs, in comments, and many other places, I see this exact bahvior ascribed to Apple (adds DRM to.mp3s, has "proprietary format" conversion) when they've never done any such thing - and when Microsoft does it, it's no big deal?
This looks like a great way for Microsoft to report to the RIAA what people are sharing and to create an audit trail of what people have in their libraries. That way, when the RIAA shows up at your house, you have to come up with CDs for what you've been sharing, or go to jail.
Nice job, Microsoft. I wonder if they're doing this to poison the well?
Makes sense, as Apple does have a patent on the clickwheel design, and I was wondering how MS was going to get around it when I saw this. Simple enough; the wheel is not a wheel.
You know what else Apple has? Something I haven't seen mentioned in the first 120 comments on this post?
The Dock connector.
Apple's trump card, the 30-pin dock connector and it's communications scheme is par of their defense against other players stealing marketshare.
Want to plug your iPod into your new car? Next model year (which starts, ah in a few weeks), you'll be be able to buy a car from any of roughly 3/4 of the world's automakers that has a built-in iPod dock. The offerings this year aren't bad, either.
I see the requisite oval connector shape on the Zune (since they just couldn't stop at copying Apple's buttons and wheel look), but it's unclear what kind of dock connector they're using. If Apple has an exclusive deal with AMP, you can pretty much write the Zune off (as well as for other reasons, like the "what were they thinking?" color choices of white, black...and brown).
So, to sum up: Apple has convinced everyone and their brother to put a dock connector in cars, boomboxes, camera connectors, etc. ad infinitum.
Zune does not have a dock connector, and can't use any iPod accessories, including those that come with a "Steering" wheel.
Republican makes off-colo remarks. Democrats do oppo research on it - by downloading the clip from the Internet. democrats demonized in the press for doing the same thing as everyone else i.e. downloading and playing the file,/b> Democrats look worse than Republican who originally made off-color remarks.
The poster, correctly, reads in Apple's move a bid to get him or her to replace a perfectly fine product with one that has an additional bell or whistle that could in all likelihood be retrofitted, in software, to the 4G iPod. What part of that eludes your grasp?
What is it about the 4th and 5th generation iPods having vastly different system architecture that eludes your grasp?
Although, it could also be a chair sailing out the window. I bet they're bolting down everything in the campus today.,/i>
Exactly. instead having to buy a MCPC or an XBox360 PLUS another box, Apple offers mac and PC-compatible wireless iTunes streaming to the PC for $299.00.
The crumpling sound you'll hear over the next few months is the Windows Media hull as it slowly sinks into the Marianas trench of technology. XBox can have the gaming market - Apple will be selling a lot of these boxes, whatever they end up being called.
Now - if they can only accelerate the schedule and get them out, working, by Christmas.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes I wonder whether or not the ozone hole has always been there and we just noticed the hole one day and thought it was something special.
Sure! Your intuition is far more powerful than 100 years of scien-ma-tific observation.
I mean, the Earth is slightly egg shaped, doesn't it kind of make sense for the atmosphere to also not be spherical?
Sure! As my butt is slightly egg-shaped, you can expect my farts to be egg-shaped as well. Wha? My farts intruded on your space? Must be bad science.
For fuck's sake, chief. Go back to eighth grade science class, then come back and post on slashdot. Willya?
four days ago.
.mp3 players get higher billing than planetary changes - on the planet we live on?
Besides all the technical trinkets, is this where science ends up on Slashdot?
Pretty sad, if you ask me - game consoles and
I would imagine that this is as simple as Microsoft somehow tagging the file within the Zune's filesystem (nobody ever said its file management would follow a standard) to prohibit redistribution of the music to other devices, playing more than three times, or playing after three days.
.mp3 trading if the record companies helped Microsoft become a success. If existing .mp3s are wrapped in DRM as part of a compelling prouct feature, they can no longer be shared on the Internet, with iTunes, or by other means. Total lock in, Zune-heads. Is that what you want? At least iTunes leaves your .mp3s alone.
"We'll provide a way to wrap every pirate mp3 out there with DRM if you give us the first mover advantage when we need it."
I'll bet that sentence, or the gist of it was communicated at some point during negotiations for MSFT's Zune marketplace.
And I'm sure the reason for this feature is that Microsoft promised the record companies an end to
We'll know this for sure if titles are released in the Zune marketplace ahead of iTunes after a few months - eventually, this could happen, and it will betray the arrangement. The record companies are the only party that can really help this crappy device become more compelling than the iPod by offering content to Zune Marketplace ahead of iTunes.
That's what I'd do if I was an asshole marketdriod at MSFT, anyway. Not that I am - but that's the play I'd try to make with the RIAA and it's member publishers.
Why does everyone talk about sharing music while you talk with some hot girl you met in a club/bar/wherever?
Because this is Slashdot, and people here only conceptualize meeting a girl in a bar.
Pull out a Zune and ofer to share a tune with a real girl in a real bar, and I'd lay my neck on a block against you getting laid, much less her number or name.
Like the past few years of imminent iPhone announcements, that was a rumor, and as such, wasn't reflected in the cold, hard light of reality. Although I'd chuckle to see Microsoft chuck a couple of billion dollars at the record companies to re-buy everyone's iTMS tracks. Talk about corporate welfare and pissing off the geeks...
If you've spent a couple of hundred bucks on iTunes Music Store Tracks like me (all backed up as non-DRM AIFF, thank you) then you have to consider that those tracks will not play on the Sune without reripping - and reripping means you get big files that sound at least as good as the original iTMS store files, or you get Windows DRM o' The Week files that sound a trifle bit crappier.
May I add that this article sounds to have been written by a total flaming fanboy? Holy cripes, I haven't seen so much fawning since Bambi.
However, I feel that the scout organization has fallen so far from its original intended roots that it's nothing but a special interest shadow of its former self. It's very sad, because what once was an organization that helped kids learn about skills and camping and other simple yet vital tasks for a well rounded person have been hammered away into anti-gay, christian centric whored out to any group that wants type of thing
Thanks for saying so well what I've felt often over the past fifteen years. Scouting is nothing more than bitter old men leading impressionable young men around anymore. It's almost like a page program for suburban and exurban white guys.
I was a First Class Scout before leaving when I was 16, to spend more time bike racing. I enjoyed scouts because it let me get outdoors (I'd formerly beena roly-poly little fat computer nerd kid, and while I kept my computer nerd cred, scouts got me outside, working some of that flab off and seeing, doing, and loving the outdoors.
As I crested Muir and Bishop Passes on consecutive days four summers ago, I thought a lot about my time as a scout. I'd never have learned to enjoy the outdoors were it not for my thoughtful and tolerant scoutmaster. Stuff like this - being a shill for big business - and the flaaaaaaming antigay rhetoric coming out of the Boy Scouts is a truly sad thing. The organization could do a lot of good for ALL young men if they chose to.
conventional explosions nevertheless distributed a large quantity of radioactive bomb guts over a wide area
Wow. Sounds like a very dirty bomb.
I sure hope the terra-ists never get a hold of that sort of thing.
It seems countries with WMD capability have been testing dirty bombs far longer than "W The President" told me! I hope he and his cowboy posse are able to round up the wrongdoers responsible for messing up the escargot crop...wait, that's French, right? I hate escargot.
Signed, Wingnut
"There's no snails in Thule. Some people want to undermine our efforts to bring plutonium to the Nokos, uh, Arctic Circle by saying that there are radioactive snails. I say those people hate our freedom."
-George W. Bush
With copper prices skyrocketing, and fiber prices dropping, why would anyone be pushing for this tech?
Here are a few pithy reasons I can think of:
-There's a lot of copper wire in the ground already. Copper serves nearly every home and business in the U.S.
-Replacing or supplementing the copper with fiber costs a lot more money than upgrading the switches on the existing copper line.
Sure, fiber makes more sense for new installations, but if you live where I do, new construction amounts to something very close to zero.
All this talk of speedy internet access is great, but I'm still not seeing much benefit when it comes to what my ISP offers.
Exactly. Here in Baton Rouge, BellSouth/SBC has no incentive to upgrade their piss-poor network. Here's an example of how poor the situation in our market is:
-Our cable goes down more often than a high-priced hooker. Since moving here in early September, we've had four outages of 3+ hours.
-Our Cox cable service fluctuates
-Our condo is 25 years old. The phone post outside the building still has "Property of the Bell System" printed on it, which means it has never been upgraded. Period. I'll let you guess whether or not we can get DSL.
-We live among several professional business parks and a couple of high-end neighborhoods. No DSL, no fiber - we're lucky we get cable Internet service. Did I mention we're in an established area of the city? This isn't new construction on the outskirts -we're two miles from the Interstate and three miles from downtown.
-After Katrina, no one's cell phone or landline would work for more than a few minutes at a time because surprise - there were no spare circuits available. There was very little limb damage here - the sudden influx of people so overwhelmed the already at-capacity network that over a year later, there are still trailered switches parked every few blocks, tied into the POTS network.
And yet, SBC hasn't seen fit to start or plan any significant new infrastructure. We're the state's Capital, fer Chrissake.
Is it a stretch to predict they'll go after any trick that allows them to leverage their overtaxed existing services? They're cheap.
Baton Rouge wonders why no tech professionals want to move here, while the city council conjures up dreams of being the next Atlanta...I wonder if the dearth of software and technical professionals may have something to do with the crap infrastructure and laissez-faire attitude of the local telecom/entertainment providers?
a high-end Lexus that can virtually park itself.
Considering some of the Lexus drivers I've seen around Cupertino, what's really needed is a self-driving Lexus.
If Toyota can pull that one off, the number of defensive driving maneuvers required within a block of Cupertino's major arterials can be considerably reduced.
by Pharmboy
Cocaine-fuelled heroin?
Your user name betrays you, young eight-baller.
What the hell is wrong with these morons?
After living in their cars on the streets of Wichita for five years, the Dot-Scammers are back in town - with new suits, new shoes, new business ideas, and a new attitude! (They've still got the same penchant for parties, though.)
I hope they crash and burn twice as violently this time. Maybe that'll learn 'em.
In other words, he's not going to make more movies, he's just going to make loads and loads and loads of terrible TV spin-off series.
I'm hoping for something Christmas-themed, with Ewoks. And maybe a wookie. Oh - and a cocaine-fuelled heroine.
I disagree completely. I for one would love to have one device that does everything I need or can think of: cellphone, MP3(Ogg) player, portable video player, PDA, etc.
But I didn't argue that no one wanted a superintegrated do-everything device. Clearly, you want that, and poducts exist for you, like the Zune or Playerphones.
To clarify, few people want a do-everything device. That means that you, while a minority if buyers, will see more value in a single device that does everything. A majority of music player buyers do not share your values, and instead find the discrete purpose and populaar style of the iPod more valuable.
While TFA makes an interesting point, I think it's ultimately wrong for this reason.
Yes, and TFA fail to mention the most important aspect of this "scaring Apple" scenario:
People must actually want these features in order to ante up for the Zune "experience".
IMHO, people don't want this kind of superintegrated media/software/myspace connection. Look at how well AMP'D mobile and the similar "lifestyle" phones are doing - they measure success in the hundreds of customers. ESPN Mobile just went down the toilet for good.
If Microsoft's past performance has been any indication, this attempt at lifestyle superintegration will be a mess - a security and synchronization headache that even for the few interested in such an experience, will quickly become more trouble than it's worth.
Apple wins because the iPod does a few things very well, looking the best while it does it. Zune, in attempting to be all things to all people, misses the point; there are actually very few people who want anything to do everything.
Just because he approved the action to sting the reporter, he didn't necessairily know what the means were.
God forbid an executive be responsible for actions they approved.
Yes, I bought DRMed stuff that I was having no luck finding elsewhere. And no ITunes isn't suitable for my needs: I don't use or want an Ipod. (SanDisk Sansa if you must know)
iTunes music store lets you burn your music to CD and re-rip it at any level of quality you want - including lossless. The DRM goes away at that point.
Lee: "We wanted an integrated experience from the beginning. ... Our focus is on giving the user one great experience."
But Lee, that's not integrated. Integrated would be...not worrying about whether it works or not, regardless of the device. You know, like being able to assume that something will...play for sure. No matter which device.
As someone who is happy to see Apple on top for once, I hope Microsoft keeps hiring these idiots.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised that C|Net didn't review it more highly. They gush all over everything else Microsoft does - and when Apple stumbles, it's front page news, but you can read an article today about Vista that doesn't even mention the fact that it's two years late and dozens of features short.
C|Net has very little credibility with me.
Why is it, that on blogs, in comments, and many other places, I see this exact bahvior ascribed to Apple (adds DRM to .mp3s, has "proprietary format" conversion) when they've never done any such thing - and when Microsoft does it, it's no big deal?
This looks like a great way for Microsoft to report to the RIAA what people are sharing and to create an audit trail of what people have in their libraries. That way, when the RIAA shows up at your house, you have to come up with CDs for what you've been sharing, or go to jail.
Nice job, Microsoft. I wonder if they're doing this to poison the well?
Makes sense, as Apple does have a patent on the clickwheel design, and I was wondering how MS was going to get around it when I saw this. Simple enough; the wheel is not a wheel.
You know what else Apple has? Something I haven't seen mentioned in the first 120 comments on this post?
The Dock connector.
Apple's trump card, the 30-pin dock connector and it's communications scheme is par of their defense against other players stealing marketshare.
Want to plug your iPod into your new car? Next model year (which starts, ah in a few weeks), you'll be be able to buy a car from any of roughly 3/4 of the world's automakers that has a built-in iPod dock. The offerings this year aren't bad, either.
I see the requisite oval connector shape on the Zune (since they just couldn't stop at copying Apple's buttons and wheel look), but it's unclear what kind of dock connector they're using. If Apple has an exclusive deal with AMP, you can pretty much write the Zune off (as well as for other reasons, like the "what were they thinking?" color choices of white, black...and brown).
So, to sum up:
Apple has convinced everyone and their brother to put a dock connector in cars, boomboxes, camera connectors, etc. ad infinitum.
Zune does not have a dock connector, and can't use any iPod accessories, including those that come with a "Steering" wheel.
Republican makes off-colo remarks.
Democrats do oppo research on it - by downloading the clip from the Internet.
democrats demonized in the press for doing the same thing as everyone else i.e. downloading and playing the file,/b>
Democrats look worse than Republican who originally made off-color remarks.
Lather rinse, repeat.
Good old liberal media - at it again!
The poster, correctly, reads in Apple's move a bid to get him or her to replace a perfectly fine product with one that has an additional bell or whistle that could in all likelihood be retrofitted, in software, to the 4G iPod. What part of that eludes your grasp?
What is it about the 4th and 5th generation iPods having vastly different system architecture that eludes your grasp?
Although, it could also be a chair sailing out the window. I bet they're bolting down everything in the campus today.,/i>
Exactly. instead having to buy a MCPC or an XBox360 PLUS another box, Apple offers mac and PC-compatible wireless iTunes streaming to the PC for $299.00.
The crumpling sound you'll hear over the next few months is the Windows Media hull as it slowly sinks into the Marianas trench of technology. XBox can have the gaming market - Apple will be selling a lot of these boxes, whatever they end up being called.
Now - if they can only accelerate the schedule and get them out, working, by Christmas.