I agree...But I think the "dropped the ball" comment might be a case of the Monday morning quarterback.
No more so than asking why a man who ignored specific warnings about terrorists using hijacked planes as weapons, ignored warnings of a hurricane and doesn't think about Bin Laddin anymore somehow feels the right to demonize other people as being weak on security.
Those who portrayed themselves as Strong on terror (Republicans) lost miserably.
How the media keeps implying that the GOP is stronger on defense is beyond me. I want to ask pundits how any of the following shows strength on security:
Blowing off outgoing Clinton administration officials who were trying to warn them of Al Queda.
Appologizing to communists for a plane crash that their pilot clearly caused (wingers like to forget about this one)
Reading My Pet Goat for twenty minutes after the nation has come under attack, rather than calling your two-time Secretary of Defense, your Vice President who is also a former Secretary of Defense, or NORAD, which you should have heard of during your time in the Air Gaurd.
Spend years savaging Democrats as being unable to protect the country, and then stay on vacation while a hurricane - that you were warned about in advance - was destroying the Gulf Coast.
Let Bin Laddin, who actually attacked us, get away in the Tora Bora mountains so you could invade Iraq, a country that never attacked us.
Doesn't think about Bin Laddin anymore.
Grab power, shred the Constitution, demand the right to torture and secretly imprison people, launch huge domestic spying programs - and yet are completely bat-shit clueless about the fact the largest ports in the U.S. are about to be taken over by an Arab company.
Republicans have proved over and over again that they are weak, not strong, on national security. The press needs a complete enima along with the Republican Party.
Sure I have: "I have a Mac, so PlaysForSure doesn't work for me" is false, because Mac users aren't locked out. They just have to use an emulator.
And people can run iTunes on Windows with no emulation and listen to iTMS songs...so Norway's full of crap, right?
Yes, that's true. It's more restrictive in terms of how you can use the purchased files, but it's less restrictive in terms of freely moving between brands (i.e. it allows a more competitive market), which government tends to be more concerned with.
Sure, you have your choice of manufacturers, but you're still under the control of Microsoft. So if countries like France and Norway want to force Apple to open Fair Play, they also need to force Microsoft to really open Playsforsure.
PlaysforSure devices are created by alot of different manufacturers you have about 10 different companies producing MP3 players to use with the PlaysForSure DRM scheme.
The number of manufacturers is a red herring. It doesn't matter if you have 10 manufactuers or 10 million, it's all under the control of one company - Microsoft. You are at much at their mercy as you are at Apple's. Rather than banning any one form of DRM, Norway should be encouraging an open DRM format that any producer or distributor can use.
Apple by refusing to allow any company to license Fairplay are using their dominant position to kill off competitors and lock people into Apple hardware.
Nonsense. Apple hasn't done a thing to prevent other companies from making mp3 players or from setting up their own online stores and selling the exact same music.
Norway might have a point if Apple not only dominated mp3 player sales but also dominated music distribution...but they don't. There is nothing stoping anyone from buying the same music elsewhere for similar prices and transfering it to portable devices. Until Apple signs deals with the major labels so you can only buy their music through the iTunes store, Norway is way off base.
Let the record show that I tried to take the (relatively) high road here.
No, the record will show that you are stupid. Stupid people deserve a certian amount of slack, but if they whine and pout and continue in their stupidity, they deserve increasing amounts of scorn.
It's funny that you're taking this intellectually arrogant attitude, because you've really offered nothing to prove that you have even the slightest idea what you're talking about.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
But when it's done at the expense of existing product lines, it's a risk. The bottom line is that Apple chose to release a phone at the expense of releasing a new "dedicated" iPod.
They released an updated iPods in the fall at cheaper prices and with more storage, and technology companies generally make radical changes in stages rather than across their entire product line.
The reason that the PS3 starts at $500 is that the blue laser diodes for the Blu-Ray drive are very difficult to manufacture in quantity, and that adds about $200 to the cost.
Okay, care to take a guess as to the number of consumers who, during Christmas shopping, pontificated on diodes vs "OMFG six hundred dollars?!?"
Sony won't eat a $500 loss on each console.
They'll eat a lot more than that if the PS3 flops. And so far, it's flopping quite hard. They need to rapidly gain marketshare to start making money off game sales, and to bring down the cost of the hardware with economies of scale. They also need to sell as many PS3's as possible to increase the number of Blu Ray drives out there vs HD-DVD. It's lose more money now or risk losing their entire investment.
Feel free to dazzle me with more of your astounding brilliance, and maybe call me a fag or something while you're at it.
I have no reason to question your sexuality. However, I do have ample reason to wonder if your mother was a heavy drinker throughout her pregnancy.
Apple always does this, and their stock price and profits have only gone up. Try and find an expo where the major announcment was ready to ship after the keynote. As for announcing a phone months before it will ship, it makes perfect sense, because thousands of people who would have ordinarily signed a 1 or 2 year contract with a different carrier will now wait until the iPhone ships and then switch to Cingular.
Many users got them to work by just putting the dlls in the right places, so it didn't seem to be a 'technical' issue.
Yeah, MS has a tendancy to do that. DX9 was eventually released for 2000, but for a while it was XP only. If you try to install AOE3 on a 2k box, the installer will tell you that you have to have XP...and it lies. Download a library from Microsoft (XML something IIRC) and after a forced install it runs just fine. Proof that they're still abusing their monopoly, imo.
I always get a kick out of how blindly everyone around here thrashes conservatives and praises liberals. I'm a liberal myself, but I don't pretend for one second that the liberal politicians or groups are any "better" or "worse" than their conservative counterparts; even independents have their problems.
Then you are either lying about being a liberal or are a self-hating one.
But now that the Democrats have the power, they are already moving to abuse it.
Problem: at least two of the three examples you list are complete bullshit. And since the subject is hypocracy, where you appropriatly porportionally outraged at, for example, Tom Delay auctioning off chairmanships to the biggest fundraisers?
as PC systems reach and surpass console systems at the end of a console life cycle
PC's had surpassed the current batch of consoles long before they were released. The tendancy of console fanboys to comapre the specs of years-off vaporware to currently shipping PC hardware is quite annoying. I'm like to plop these guys down with some engineers from ATI or Nvidia who feel free to talk about what they expect PC graphics cards to be like in two years.
And as for the warm reception that episode gaming seems to be getting in this thread: how often are episodic games going to be made by indi studios or released to save development time, vs greedy companies like EA just splitting a title up into parts so they can charge twice as much for the same game?
Seriously, you're comparing prices of 2 year old technology to something getting launched in 6 months.
Yeah? And? Why is it not appropriate to compare the price of a new high end phone to a high end phone released two years ago? Does anyone bitch that AMD's new processors don't have the same price as a Pentium D? A Pentium D that was released two years ago? Your argument doesn't make any sense.
It should be cheaper today.
Bullshit. There is no phone out there like the iPhone so you have no basis for comparison...other than the prices of other high end phones when they were released.
I think Apple would lose a lot of flac they get over iTunes if they did sell some content without Fairplay on it.
Considering that if about 50 people who post on Slashdot were run over by a bus and all that flac would disappear, I doubt Apple is going to change their modus operandi.
Of course I am a PC user, like 99% of the world is, perhaps you should think of that:)
And what is Apple's mp3 player marketshare again? And Apple owns the market because they made a superior player/software interface/store, not because the iPod is a "fad".
No no, the market will cause standardization on its own
Hardly. DVD-R/DVD+R, eh? Forced standards can be a good thing for consumers and private industry. Take HDTV for example - at one point IIRC there were 40 different standards floating around. Consumers, even early adopters, didn't have much interest in popping several thousand dollars for a TV set that might be a very heavy, expensive door stop in a few years. And manufacturers didn't put much effort into HDTV as there was no standard and consumer interest was low.
If the government had stepped in and mandated a standard, consumers would have been a lot more confident in making the investment in and HDTV set, and manufacturers could have been making money hand over fist on people upgrading their TV's along with their VHS collections. A win win situation. Instead, "letting the market decide" has just wasted a lot of money. And wasted a lot of time - I saw an HDTV demonstration at PBS in 1991.
Yes, the broadcast flag is a horrible idea, but one that comes from zealous copy control, rather than a new technical standard. IIRC, one reason it has taken so long for HDTV to catch on is that at one point there were 40 different standards floating around. Few consumers would committ to buying a TV for thousands of dollars when there was a good chance it would be useless if a different standard was adopted. If the FCC had steped in, and said "ok, this is the standard - make your own version if you want, but it wont be a standard HDTV" we could have started getting them 10 years ago, or more.
Hold on... something praising a Republican? On Slashdot?
Some Republicans are right wing assholes all of the time, and some Republicans can be right wing assholes some of the time, but not all Republicans are right wing assholes all of the time.
My complaint is that it's being bundled only with something extraneous that increases the cost by about 500% (that Cingular contract won't be cheap)
Okay, do a cost comparison between an 8 gig Nano + a smartphone and get back to me.
and it's being done solely so Apple can gain exposure in a new market
A company wanting exposure in a new market? Wow, did you think that up all by yourself?
Most Slashdotters saw it as manipulative and disrespectful to consumers when Sony pulled the same thing with PS3 and Blu-Ray, but Apple is somehow immune to that.
Okay, seriously, just how stupid are you? The problem with the PS3 is not that it has a Blu-Ray drive, which has been known about for a very long time. The problem is that the "cheap" version is 500 frikkin dollars, and you can buy a Wii and a 360 for the price of the 60 gig PS3.
Sweet flame, d00d. Clever and insightful. Where can I learn to be as smart and witty as you?
Pulling your head out of your ass would be a good start.
"Winning the first round of a lawsuit" doesn't sound like "coming to an agreement" to me. But I'm guessing that either yes, they came to an agreement, or Apple Computer decided to rub it in their faces by playing Beatles music at the expo.:)
You must work for one of those electronic companies that think that because they built an FM radio, microphone, and nose hair trimmer into their mp3 player, that they have an iPod killer on their hands. People aren't against convergance, they're against crappy bolt on features and expensive, jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none devices.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree...But I think the "dropped the ball" comment might be a case of the Monday morning quarterback.
No more so than asking why a man who ignored specific warnings about terrorists using hijacked planes as weapons, ignored warnings of a hurricane and doesn't think about Bin Laddin anymore somehow feels the right to demonize other people as being weak on security.
How the media keeps implying that the GOP is stronger on defense is beyond me. I want to ask pundits how any of the following shows strength on security:
- Blowing off outgoing Clinton administration officials who were trying to warn them of Al Queda.
- Appologizing to communists for a plane crash that their pilot clearly caused (wingers like to forget about this one)
- Reading My Pet Goat for twenty minutes after the nation has come under attack, rather than calling your two-time Secretary of Defense, your Vice President who is also a former Secretary of Defense, or NORAD, which you should have heard of during your time in the Air Gaurd.
- Spend years savaging Democrats as being unable to protect the country, and then stay on vacation while a hurricane - that you were warned about in advance - was destroying the Gulf Coast.
- Let Bin Laddin, who actually attacked us, get away in the Tora Bora mountains so you could invade Iraq, a country that never attacked us.
- Doesn't think about Bin Laddin anymore.
- Grab power, shred the Constitution, demand the right to torture and secretly imprison people, launch huge domestic spying programs - and yet are completely bat-shit clueless about the fact the largest ports in the U.S. are about to be taken over by an Arab company.
Republicans have proved over and over again that they are weak, not strong, on national security. The press needs a complete enima along with the Republican Party.Sure I have: "I have a Mac, so PlaysForSure doesn't work for me" is false, because Mac users aren't locked out. They just have to use an emulator.
And people can run iTunes on Windows with no emulation and listen to iTMS songs...so Norway's full of crap, right?
Yes, that's true. It's more restrictive in terms of how you can use the purchased files, but it's less restrictive in terms of freely moving between brands (i.e. it allows a more competitive market), which government tends to be more concerned with.
Sure, you have your choice of manufacturers, but you're still under the control of Microsoft. So if countries like France and Norway want to force Apple to open Fair Play, they also need to force Microsoft to really open Playsforsure.
PlaysforSure devices are created by alot of different manufacturers you have about 10 different companies producing MP3 players to use with the PlaysForSure DRM scheme.
The number of manufacturers is a red herring. It doesn't matter if you have 10 manufactuers or 10 million, it's all under the control of one company - Microsoft. You are at much at their mercy as you are at Apple's. Rather than banning any one form of DRM, Norway should be encouraging an open DRM format that any producer or distributor can use.
Apple by refusing to allow any company to license Fairplay are using their dominant position to kill off competitors and lock people into Apple hardware.
Nonsense. Apple hasn't done a thing to prevent other companies from making mp3 players or from setting up their own online stores and selling the exact same music.
Once again, the difference is Apple has a monopoly.
Um, no, they don't. They have niether a monopoly on mp3 players nor on music distribution. You are on crack.
and is using that to force out competition in the online music market.
And Apple has done this how? And when? Sounds like a baseless claim to me....
It's gratuitous incompatibility.
Norway might have a point if Apple not only dominated mp3 player sales but also dominated music distribution...but they don't. There is nothing stoping anyone from buying the same music elsewhere for similar prices and transfering it to portable devices. Until Apple signs deals with the major labels so you can only buy their music through the iTunes store, Norway is way off base.
Sorry, I've been away.
Let the record show that I tried to take the (relatively) high road here.
No, the record will show that you are stupid. Stupid people deserve a certian amount of slack, but if they whine and pout and continue in their stupidity, they deserve increasing amounts of scorn.
It's funny that you're taking this intellectually arrogant attitude, because you've really offered nothing to prove that you have even the slightest idea what you're talking about.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
But when it's done at the expense of existing product lines, it's a risk. The bottom line is that Apple chose to release a phone at the expense of releasing a new "dedicated" iPod.
They released an updated iPods in the fall at cheaper prices and with more storage, and technology companies generally make radical changes in stages rather than across their entire product line.
The reason that the PS3 starts at $500 is that the blue laser diodes for the Blu-Ray drive are very difficult to manufacture in quantity, and that adds about $200 to the cost.
Okay, care to take a guess as to the number of consumers who, during Christmas shopping, pontificated on diodes vs "OMFG six hundred dollars?!?"
Sony won't eat a $500 loss on each console.
They'll eat a lot more than that if the PS3 flops. And so far, it's flopping quite hard. They need to rapidly gain marketshare to start making money off game sales, and to bring down the cost of the hardware with economies of scale. They also need to sell as many PS3's as possible to increase the number of Blu Ray drives out there vs HD-DVD. It's lose more money now or risk losing their entire investment.
Feel free to dazzle me with more of your astounding brilliance, and maybe call me a fag or something while you're at it.
I have no reason to question your sexuality. However, I do have ample reason to wonder if your mother was a heavy drinker throughout her pregnancy.
Apple always does this, and their stock price and profits have only gone up. Try and find an expo where the major announcment was ready to ship after the keynote. As for announcing a phone months before it will ship, it makes perfect sense, because thousands of people who would have ordinarily signed a 1 or 2 year contract with a different carrier will now wait until the iPhone ships and then switch to Cingular.
Many users got them to work by just putting the dlls in the right places, so it didn't seem to be a 'technical' issue.
Yeah, MS has a tendancy to do that. DX9 was eventually released for 2000, but for a while it was XP only. If you try to install AOE3 on a 2k box, the installer will tell you that you have to have XP...and it lies. Download a library from Microsoft (XML something IIRC) and after a forced install it runs just fine. Proof that they're still abusing their monopoly, imo.
I always get a kick out of how blindly everyone around here thrashes conservatives and praises liberals. I'm a liberal myself, but I don't pretend for one second that the liberal politicians or groups are any "better" or "worse" than their conservative counterparts; even independents have their problems.
Then you are either lying about being a liberal or are a self-hating one.
But now that the Democrats have the power, they are already moving to abuse it.
Problem: at least two of the three examples you list are complete bullshit. And since the subject is hypocracy, where you appropriatly porportionally outraged at, for example, Tom Delay auctioning off chairmanships to the biggest fundraisers?
as PC systems reach and surpass console systems at the end of a console life cycle
PC's had surpassed the current batch of consoles long before they were released. The tendancy of console fanboys to comapre the specs of years-off vaporware to currently shipping PC hardware is quite annoying. I'm like to plop these guys down with some engineers from ATI or Nvidia who feel free to talk about what they expect PC graphics cards to be like in two years.
And as for the warm reception that episode gaming seems to be getting in this thread: how often are episodic games going to be made by indi studios or released to save development time, vs greedy companies like EA just splitting a title up into parts so they can charge twice as much for the same game?
Seriously, you're comparing prices of 2 year old technology to something getting launched in 6 months.
Yeah? And? Why is it not appropriate to compare the price of a new high end phone to a high end phone released two years ago? Does anyone bitch that AMD's new processors don't have the same price as a Pentium D? A Pentium D that was released two years ago? Your argument doesn't make any sense.
It should be cheaper today.
Bullshit. There is no phone out there like the iPhone so you have no basis for comparison...other than the prices of other high end phones when they were released.
Guess Kim Jung Il hasn't seen Holy Grail.
I think Apple would lose a lot of flac they get over iTunes if they did sell some content without Fairplay on it.
Considering that if about 50 people who post on Slashdot were run over by a bus and all that flac would disappear, I doubt Apple is going to change their modus operandi.
Of course I am a PC user, like 99% of the world is, perhaps you should think of that :)
And what is Apple's mp3 player marketshare again? And Apple owns the market because they made a superior player/software interface/store, not because the iPod is a "fad".
If I continued to steal my music at that point
That's copyright infringment, not stealing, thank you.
No no, the market will cause standardization on its own
Hardly. DVD-R/DVD+R, eh? Forced standards can be a good thing for consumers and private industry. Take HDTV for example - at one point IIRC there were 40 different standards floating around. Consumers, even early adopters, didn't have much interest in popping several thousand dollars for a TV set that might be a very heavy, expensive door stop in a few years. And manufacturers didn't put much effort into HDTV as there was no standard and consumer interest was low.
If the government had stepped in and mandated a standard, consumers would have been a lot more confident in making the investment in and HDTV set, and manufacturers could have been making money hand over fist on people upgrading their TV's along with their VHS collections. A win win situation. Instead, "letting the market decide" has just wasted a lot of money. And wasted a lot of time - I saw an HDTV demonstration at PBS in 1991.
Yes, the broadcast flag is a horrible idea, but one that comes from zealous copy control, rather than a new technical standard. IIRC, one reason it has taken so long for HDTV to catch on is that at one point there were 40 different standards floating around. Few consumers would committ to buying a TV for thousands of dollars when there was a good chance it would be useless if a different standard was adopted. If the FCC had steped in, and said "ok, this is the standard - make your own version if you want, but it wont be a standard HDTV" we could have started getting them 10 years ago, or more.
Hold on... something praising a Republican? On Slashdot?
Some Republicans are right wing assholes all of the time, and some Republicans can be right wing assholes some of the time, but not all Republicans are right wing assholes all of the time.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35 590/ It does have Bluetooth 2.0.
Good.
Size difference is minimal.
That's why I said "is physically larger but has no camera"?
iPhone is cool and will undoubtedly be more popular than the OpenMoko line, but it isn't as revolutionary as they want it to be.
Considering that the OpenMoko was announed two months ago, and apparantly has yet to ship, I don't see how the iPhone is any less revolutionary.
My complaint is that it's being bundled only with something extraneous that increases the cost by about 500% (that Cingular contract won't be cheap)
Okay, do a cost comparison between an 8 gig Nano + a smartphone and get back to me.
and it's being done solely so Apple can gain exposure in a new market
A company wanting exposure in a new market? Wow, did you think that up all by yourself?
Most Slashdotters saw it as manipulative and disrespectful to consumers when Sony pulled the same thing with PS3 and Blu-Ray, but Apple is somehow immune to that.
Okay, seriously, just how stupid are you? The problem with the PS3 is not that it has a Blu-Ray drive, which has been known about for a very long time. The problem is that the "cheap" version is 500 frikkin dollars, and you can buy a Wii and a 360 for the price of the 60 gig PS3.
Sweet flame, d00d. Clever and insightful. Where can I learn to be as smart and witty as you?
Pulling your head out of your ass would be a good start.
"Winning the first round of a lawsuit" doesn't sound like "coming to an agreement" to me. But I'm guessing that either yes, they came to an agreement, or Apple Computer decided to rub it in their faces by playing Beatles music at the expo. :)
You must work for one of those electronic companies that think that because they built an FM radio, microphone, and nose hair trimmer into their mp3 player, that they have an iPod killer on their hands. People aren't against convergance, they're against crappy bolt on features and expensive, jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none devices.