The best argument Jobs made in his letter was that the music industry is already selling the same files they want locked down with DRM in a completely un-encrypted format on little plastic disks.
It's like they are insisting on having at least three deadbolt locks on their back door of their house, while they have no plans to even install a lock on the front door.
People who want to scatter their content to the four winds can already do so by getting a CD and ripping it.
Therefore, DRM on the iTMS files protects absolutely nothing.
The only effect it is having is that it hurts on-line sales, because DRM-encrypted files have less value than those on CD.
If I were a cynical person, I would suspect that this was their agenda all along. But since I'm not *cough*, I have no explanation for their position.
This Liszt of composer puns is becoming a Verdi tiresome Paine, and causing a lot of Strauss. Ives got a Mahler of a headache now. My nerves are starting to un-Ravel, to be perfectly Franck. Now knock that Schmidt Orff! Have you no Morales???
Lots of people get by in life without being able to do arithmetic in their heads. They can balance their checkbooks and everything. Why? Because you can walk into any dime store and pick up a machine that will do it for you.
Are you better off knowing how to divide 72 by 9 in your head? Sure, when it comes up in daily life it's handy not to have to reach for the calculator.
However, with the energy that you and I once applied to rote memorization of multiplication tables, some of those kids could be learning something else.
Like how to speak and read Chinese, for example. In the business world, such a skill would be vastly more important. So would higher math skills.
In my tech career, I have *never* been called on to use my recall of the multiplication table, but I have often had to write out and grok rather complex algebra and/or calculus problems. My 3rd grade 'rithmetic has never come up, but my High School pre-calc has always given me an edge. If I could have skipped all that rote learning entirely and gone straight to geometry and algebra at a young age, I would probably be even better off now than I am.
All the high-paying jobs for people who are good at basic math went away with the spreadsheet. The days of the green visors and sleeve cuffs are OVER. Why should we run our schools as if we are preparing kids for them?
Math skills don't even help you get your taxes done any faster these days. My federal and state returns were done using on-line tax software in an hour and ten minutes, never required me to figure out even a single sum, and were probably more accurate than my returns from five years ago.
I'm sure you are very proud at being better at math than your kid sister, but your instant recall of 4*8=32 doesn't really give you any kind of competitive edge in the real world anymore. Stop kidding yourself that it does.
Reminds me of how impressed I made a girl because I could calculate what everyone owed for a meal without thinking too hard about it. The dumb age has officially arrived, not only are people using spell check to go between there their and they're, they don't even know the difference in some cases. I start to feel like a rare minority some days...
Perhaps you need to stop hanging around so many stupid people. That, or learn a little patience and tolerance.
Think back to your school days. How many of your classmates got a "C" or worse on their math and grammar final exams? In most cases, a "C" grade means 70%. If they drifted all the way through public school while only mastering about 70%, how literate can they really be? This is why newspapers are written at about a 5th-grade level. This is why splitting up a restaurant check with a bunch of "average" rubes is going to result in remarkably incorrect tallies?
What ends up happening is they teach the kid to use a crutch. Instead of practicing arithmetic, they let kids in grade 3 (!) just use calculators. My kids only know the times tables because I *made* them learn it. Flashcards and practice, just like I did (I had a hard time with it too). They already forgive me for it. My son is seen as a "math prodigy", to use his teachers words - and quite frankly (not to denigrate him), his abilities are what I would consider average for his age. He isn't like moved on to precalculus on his own, or anything like that. He can add, subtract, multiply and divide simple numbers in his head. This makes him a prodigy in the modern US education system. ouch.
Repeat for spelling. The school could give a shit. Here's how spelling is taught - "OK KIDS, CLICK SPELL CHECK". They're, there, their, who cares.
Likewise, home economics classes should not use gas or electric oven ranges. The kids should first learn how to rub sticks together to create fire, and roast mastodon meat on sticks from beasts which they speared themselves. What hope do they have to get by in the modern world without such basic survival skills?
Repeat for history and philosophy. Okay kids, open your "text book" and READ about the wisdom of Aristotle. No need to be paired up with (and sexually molested by) a tribal elder who will teach you everything via oral tradition! What a joke!
Call me old fashioned if you must, but I jist don't cotton to these new-fangled "printing presses" and what-not. All you need for education is a good teacher and a solid stick of hickory!
Schools today are going to hell in a bucket, I tells ya!
These nihilistic views (in which I include theism) miss a basic fact about life: the only moment of life I ever experience is RIGHT NOW. So worrying about the "point" of those future RIGHT NOWs, which I am not currently experiencing, makes no sense. Give purpose to RIGHT NOW, and you win.
And RIGHT NOW my purpose is to take a Chemistry final, heh---not for the future experience or grades or whatnot, but because it should be interesting. See, it's all in how you frame things in your mind.
Being concerned only with "right now" is a perfect example of what I was speaking of: a good coping strategy in reaction to the oncoming train of your inevitable suffering and death.
Besides, what do you say to people who are in agony Right Now, but hope for things to be better, either ten years down the road or perhaps in the "next life"?
Why, as a scientist at heart, would you think there there is a "meaning of life" to be "proven?" _v/d++
Because every scientist is a human being first. Why toil to understand the coils and springs of the universe if life has no purpose? Why inquire? Why even eat or breathe? Rocks and trees don't need a reason to exist. They simply do. Humans need a reason to get out of bed in the morning, because out ongoing existence is a daily choice. We are wired to require greater meaning, whether it exists or not.
To believe in a higher power and/or an existence beyond death is one of several ways to ascribe meaning to your life. It requires a leap of faith to do so, but it's pretty much the most successful paradigm.
Another way is to live your life "for others." This is, of course, rather silly and futile, because the "other" lives are equally meaningless to your own.
Thirdly, there's living according to your own will and conscience. This is a losing game, because nobody really wants to die and everybody eventually does. Those who delay death long enough become old and decrepit, even though nobody wants that for themselves either. Most strident atheist world-views center around coping strategies for dealing with this particular bit of Bad News.
Boot Camp, the way most Mac users who run Windows go about it, is not a VM.
In spite of this headline being way off base (and clearly flamebait), this particular license restriction is exactly the sort of thing which keeps me using Macs. Charging extra for support of VM environments??? Come on. That's asinine.
When Coke was getting beat up by the Pepsi Challenge, they did their own taste tests, and New Coke won pretty much every single time.
Which demostrates exactly why the "taste tests" were so meaningless.
Unless you are buying a cola to sip at two ounces at a time, the Pepsi Challenge outcome does not indicate which soda you would enjoy drinking more. It just indicates that, when a tiny back-to-back sample is taken, the sweeter-tasting of the two will usually be chosen as the one which tastes "better."
If Coca-cola had tried to simply change formulae quietly, instead of introducing "New Coke" as an entirely different product, I believe the backlash still would have happened, only more slowly and permanently, as Coke drinkers would gradually notice that their cola no longer tastes better to them than the other one.
their formula was, and still is a trade secret (but easily reverse-engineered). Not patented.
I stand corrected. Perhaps the trade secret leaked, but I distinctly remember, at the time, that Coca-cola was concerned that they were no longer going to be able to be the completely exclusive makers of their old formula.
Agreed. Since I've been mostly drinking diet soda, water, and beer, all sugar-based colas taste way to sweet to me now, but when you are actually drinking the stuff, Pepsi does taste sweeter.
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
No, but seriously, there were far less crafty and conspiratorial reasons behind New Coke.
It started with the invention of NutraSweet. Diet Coke pushed Tab and all other sugar-free colas into total obscurity. It not only became the #1 diet soda, it became the #3 soda overall.
The crucial difference between the flavors of Coke and Pepsi is the choice of citrus used. Coke has always used lemon, while Pepsi uses lime. That's why Coke has that "snap" that hard-core Coke fans crave, while Pepsi tastes slightly sweeter (which led to them winning all those "Pepsi Challenge" taste tests... If you just have a sip of each back-to-back, the sweeter one will taste "better.")
Diet Coke has a formula which is extremely sweet, like Pepsi.
Younger people tend to prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi, while older folks like Coke... generally speaking.
This created a demographic scare for Coke execs in the 1980s. They saw that a whole generation was growing up on Pepsi, and feared for their market-share dominance. Not considering that some of these Pepsi-drinking kids might gradually change their preference, they panicked.
New Coke was an effort to capture the younger market, by making a sugar-based cola which tasted pretty much the same as the startlingly popular Diet Coke, and compete with Pepsi on the basis of sweetness.
The problem was, people who drink Coke exclusively don't like the ultra-sweet taste of Pepsi.
If it was an on-purpose maneuver, it was a terribly risky one. The ONLY reason their old customers came back for "Classic" Coke was because there was, and is, nobody making anything that tastes quite like Coca-Cola. (Actually, there may have been, since the patent on Coke's old formula has long since run out, but nobody is calling their attention to it.)
As for why Classic doesn't *quite* taste the same to picky cola drinkers: Coke keeps most of the formula the same, but uses whatever sweetner is cheapest at the time for the region which is making it, which in almost all cases is either high fructose corn syrup or beet sugar. They figure most people won't care, and they are mostly right.
If you are one of those hard-core Coke fans and miss "the real thing", go shopping in April.
For the Passover, Coke makes a limited batch of Kosher Coke, so kids from traditional Jewish families can have a little Coke with their feast. The thing is, there is only one Coke formula which has been approved as Kosher, and that's the original formula using cane sugar for sweetener.
You can identify the Kosher cans of Coke by looking for the triangle-shaped seal of the Rabbinical Council near the base of the can. I don't drink Coke anymore (all that sugar is bad for you), but back in the day I used to buy it by the crate-load out of local supermarkets and hoard enough to get me through as much of the year as I could.
By being such a shallow and closed-minded person ("I only need to listen to [insert any music style here] for five minutes to know I don't like it" is pretty damned shallow, to call a spade a spade), you've cut yourself off from a great deal of pleasure which life has to offer.
That's kind of sad.
To hope that anybody is impressed that the tiny, limited scope of your tastes happens to be classy orchestral music is even more regretful. It shows that you are not only a person with unadventurous tastes, but a snob about it as well.
I kind of wondered about that, too. It's like his only real experience with the Mac comes from back in the System 7 days or something.
They think they are "cool" and "hip," they don't care about the fact that they have to reset the permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes
Reset the permissions? I've been running multiple OS X systems since 10.0, and I've never had to "reset the permissions" even once. I'm not even sure I know where to look to do something like that. WTF is he talking about?
I would like to get all riled up over his flamebait... but I mostly just feel sorry for the poor, confused person writing this nonsense.
Bash your current product to show how "honest" and humble you are about your past errors, while creating demand for the much "better" the next one will be because you have learned from your horrific mistakes.
For analog audio connections (and if you are not doing 5.1, there are terrific advantages to analog audio connections), the RCA jack is still a great way to go. Most high-end audio gear still uses them.
TOSLink is not even found on all amplifiers as an input option.
The problem Apple is going to run into is that most people choose a cell provider first, then get the best phone they can that will work with that provider.
I chose T-Mobile (and dropped Sprint) because of service and price. Cingular won't win me over with a fancier phone. They need to offer better rates and/or better service than what I'm getting now to get me to change and THEN I will look at what phones they have.
You've got it backwards. Verizon was tricking customers, promoting their plan in cents and then charging in dollars, claiming that it was what they meant all along.
Are you even reading my posts, or just guessing at what my points are. You even cut and pasted the line where I said that is was not a legally binding agreement before snapping back with "(is there a signature on that agreement? no? then it's arguably not legally binding anyway)".
My point is that he's going against the spirit of the agreement, not the letter of it.
I never said he was breaking any laws, just that he was being dishonest.
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The best argument Jobs made in his letter was that the music industry is already selling the same files they want locked down with DRM in a completely un-encrypted format on little plastic disks.
It's like they are insisting on having at least three deadbolt locks on their back door of their house, while they have no plans to even install a lock on the front door.
People who want to scatter their content to the four winds can already do so by getting a CD and ripping it.
Therefore, DRM on the iTMS files protects absolutely nothing.
The only effect it is having is that it hurts on-line sales, because DRM-encrypted files have less value than those on CD.
If I were a cynical person, I would suspect that this was their agenda all along. But since I'm not *cough*, I have no explanation for their position.
This Liszt of composer puns is becoming a Verdi tiresome Paine, and causing a lot of Strauss. Ives got a Mahler of a headache now. My nerves are starting to un-Ravel, to be perfectly Franck. Now knock that Schmidt Orff! Have you no Morales???
Lots of people get by in life without being able to do arithmetic in their heads. They can balance their checkbooks and everything. Why? Because you can walk into any dime store and pick up a machine that will do it for you.
Are you better off knowing how to divide 72 by 9 in your head? Sure, when it comes up in daily life it's handy not to have to reach for the calculator.
However, with the energy that you and I once applied to rote memorization of multiplication tables, some of those kids could be learning something else.
Like how to speak and read Chinese, for example. In the business world, such a skill would be vastly more important. So would higher math skills.
In my tech career, I have *never* been called on to use my recall of the multiplication table, but I have often had to write out and grok rather complex algebra and/or calculus problems. My 3rd grade 'rithmetic has never come up, but my High School pre-calc has always given me an edge. If I could have skipped all that rote learning entirely and gone straight to geometry and algebra at a young age, I would probably be even better off now than I am.
All the high-paying jobs for people who are good at basic math went away with the spreadsheet. The days of the green visors and sleeve cuffs are OVER. Why should we run our schools as if we are preparing kids for them?
Math skills don't even help you get your taxes done any faster these days. My federal and state returns were done using on-line tax software in an hour and ten minutes, never required me to figure out even a single sum, and were probably more accurate than my returns from five years ago.
I'm sure you are very proud at being better at math than your kid sister, but your instant recall of 4*8=32 doesn't really give you any kind of competitive edge in the real world anymore. Stop kidding yourself that it does.
Reminds me of how impressed I made a girl because I could calculate what everyone owed for a meal without thinking too hard about it. The dumb age has officially arrived, not only are people using spell check to go between there their and they're, they don't even know the difference in some cases. I start to feel like a rare minority some days...
Perhaps you need to stop hanging around so many stupid people. That, or learn a little patience and tolerance.
Think back to your school days. How many of your classmates got a "C" or worse on their math and grammar final exams? In most cases, a "C" grade means 70%. If they drifted all the way through public school while only mastering about 70%, how literate can they really be? This is why newspapers are written at about a 5th-grade level. This is why splitting up a restaurant check with a bunch of "average" rubes is going to result in remarkably incorrect tallies?
What ends up happening is they teach the kid to use a crutch. Instead of practicing arithmetic, they let kids in grade 3 (!) just use calculators. My kids only know the times tables because I *made* them learn it. Flashcards and practice, just like I did (I had a hard time with it too). They already forgive me for it. My son is seen as a "math prodigy", to use his teachers words - and quite frankly (not to denigrate him), his abilities are what I would consider average for his age. He isn't like moved on to precalculus on his own, or anything like that. He can add, subtract, multiply and divide simple numbers in his head. This makes him a prodigy in the modern US education system. ouch.
Repeat for spelling. The school could give a shit. Here's how spelling is taught - "OK KIDS, CLICK SPELL CHECK". They're, there, their, who cares.
Likewise, home economics classes should not use gas or electric oven ranges. The kids should first learn how to rub sticks together to create fire, and roast mastodon meat on sticks from beasts which they speared themselves. What hope do they have to get by in the modern world without such basic survival skills?
Repeat for history and philosophy. Okay kids, open your "text book" and READ about the wisdom of Aristotle. No need to be paired up with (and sexually molested by) a tribal elder who will teach you everything via oral tradition! What a joke!
Call me old fashioned if you must, but I jist don't cotton to these new-fangled "printing presses" and what-not. All you need for education is a good teacher and a solid stick of hickory!
Schools today are going to hell in a bucket, I tells ya!
The succubus quest was the single most fun thing I did the entire time I played that game.
Pretty much all the other quests were kind of boring.
IMHO, YMMV, yadda yadda yadda
These nihilistic views (in which I include theism) miss a basic fact about life: the only moment of life I ever experience is RIGHT NOW. So worrying about the "point" of those future RIGHT NOWs, which I am not currently experiencing, makes no sense. Give purpose to RIGHT NOW, and you win.
And RIGHT NOW my purpose is to take a Chemistry final, heh---not for the future experience or grades or whatnot, but because it should be interesting. See, it's all in how you frame things in your mind.
Being concerned only with "right now" is a perfect example of what I was speaking of: a good coping strategy in reaction to the oncoming train of your inevitable suffering and death.
Besides, what do you say to people who are in agony Right Now, but hope for things to be better, either ten years down the road or perhaps in the "next life"?
Why, as a scientist at heart, would you think there there is a "meaning of life" to be "proven?" _v/d++
Because every scientist is a human being first. Why toil to understand the coils and springs of the universe if life has no purpose? Why inquire? Why even eat or breathe? Rocks and trees don't need a reason to exist. They simply do. Humans need a reason to get out of bed in the morning, because out ongoing existence is a daily choice. We are wired to require greater meaning, whether it exists or not.
To believe in a higher power and/or an existence beyond death is one of several ways to ascribe meaning to your life. It requires a leap of faith to do so, but it's pretty much the most successful paradigm.
Another way is to live your life "for others." This is, of course, rather silly and futile, because the "other" lives are equally meaningless to your own.
Thirdly, there's living according to your own will and conscience. This is a losing game, because nobody really wants to die and everybody eventually does. Those who delay death long enough become old and decrepit, even though nobody wants that for themselves either. Most strident atheist world-views center around coping strategies for dealing with this particular bit of Bad News.
Boot Camp, the way most Mac users who run Windows go about it, is not a VM.
In spite of this headline being way off base (and clearly flamebait), this particular license restriction is exactly the sort of thing which keeps me using Macs. Charging extra for support of VM environments??? Come on. That's asinine.
That, or it's about the fact that you are stealing office supplies. I lost patience midway through paragraph 2.
When Coke was getting beat up by the Pepsi Challenge, they did their own taste tests, and New Coke won pretty much every single time.
Which demostrates exactly why the "taste tests" were so meaningless.
Unless you are buying a cola to sip at two ounces at a time, the Pepsi Challenge outcome does not indicate which soda you would enjoy drinking more. It just indicates that, when a tiny back-to-back sample is taken, the sweeter-tasting of the two will usually be chosen as the one which tastes "better."
If Coca-cola had tried to simply change formulae quietly, instead of introducing "New Coke" as an entirely different product, I believe the backlash still would have happened, only more slowly and permanently, as Coke drinkers would gradually notice that their cola no longer tastes better to them than the other one.
their formula was, and still is a trade secret (but easily reverse-engineered). Not patented.
I stand corrected. Perhaps the trade secret leaked, but I distinctly remember, at the time, that Coca-cola was concerned that they were no longer going to be able to be the completely exclusive makers of their old formula.
Agreed. Since I've been mostly drinking diet soda, water, and beer, all sugar-based colas taste way to sweet to me now, but when you are actually drinking the stuff, Pepsi does taste sweeter.
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
No, but seriously, there were far less crafty and conspiratorial reasons behind New Coke.
It started with the invention of NutraSweet. Diet Coke pushed Tab and all other sugar-free colas into total obscurity. It not only became the #1 diet soda, it became the #3 soda overall.
The crucial difference between the flavors of Coke and Pepsi is the choice of citrus used. Coke has always used lemon, while Pepsi uses lime. That's why Coke has that "snap" that hard-core Coke fans crave, while Pepsi tastes slightly sweeter (which led to them winning all those "Pepsi Challenge" taste tests... If you just have a sip of each back-to-back, the sweeter one will taste "better.")
Diet Coke has a formula which is extremely sweet, like Pepsi.
Younger people tend to prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi, while older folks like Coke... generally speaking.
This created a demographic scare for Coke execs in the 1980s. They saw that a whole generation was growing up on Pepsi, and feared for their market-share dominance. Not considering that some of these Pepsi-drinking kids might gradually change their preference, they panicked.
New Coke was an effort to capture the younger market, by making a sugar-based cola which tasted pretty much the same as the startlingly popular Diet Coke, and compete with Pepsi on the basis of sweetness.
The problem was, people who drink Coke exclusively don't like the ultra-sweet taste of Pepsi.
If it was an on-purpose maneuver, it was a terribly risky one. The ONLY reason their old customers came back for "Classic" Coke was because there was, and is, nobody making anything that tastes quite like Coca-Cola. (Actually, there may have been, since the patent on Coke's old formula has long since run out, but nobody is calling their attention to it.)
As for why Classic doesn't *quite* taste the same to picky cola drinkers: Coke keeps most of the formula the same, but uses whatever sweetner is cheapest at the time for the region which is making it, which in almost all cases is either high fructose corn syrup or beet sugar. They figure most people won't care, and they are mostly right.
If you are one of those hard-core Coke fans and miss "the real thing", go shopping in April.
For the Passover, Coke makes a limited batch of Kosher Coke, so kids from traditional Jewish families can have a little Coke with their feast. The thing is, there is only one Coke formula which has been approved as Kosher, and that's the original formula using cane sugar for sweetener.
You can identify the Kosher cans of Coke by looking for the triangle-shaped seal of the Rabbinical Council near the base of the can. I don't drink Coke anymore (all that sugar is bad for you), but back in the day I used to buy it by the crate-load out of local supermarkets and hoard enough to get me through as much of the year as I could.
Enjoy judging others.
It's not judgement I offer, but pity.
By being such a shallow and closed-minded person ("I only need to listen to [insert any music style here] for five minutes to know I don't like it" is pretty damned shallow, to call a spade a spade), you've cut yourself off from a great deal of pleasure which life has to offer.
That's kind of sad.
To hope that anybody is impressed that the tiny, limited scope of your tastes happens to be classy orchestral music is even more regretful. It shows that you are not only a person with unadventurous tastes, but a snob about it as well.
but the picture shows her with full pupil dilation in moderate light.
Aren't movie-camera lights typically really fucking bright? Just because that still shot looks like moderate light, doesn't mean that it is.
Also, isn't the OP trying to convey how much the lawyers would lose?
No.
At least, I sincerely hope not.
"Loose the lawyers" metaphorically means to release the lawyers from all restrictions, allowing them to rampage and pillage through the streets.
Using "loose" as a verb like that is a relatively common idiom.
My favorite genre is Baroque. I don't like anything after that. How's that?
Every bit as shallow as people who only like country/western music.
But if that's what makes you happy please feel free to continue to stay within your very limited scope of artistic appreciation.
I only have to hear about five seconds of opera to know that I hate it :)
People like you are the reason why great orchestral music needs to be on tax-supported public radio while ABBA became international superstars.
I kind of wondered about that, too. It's like his only real experience with the Mac comes from back in the System 7 days or something.
They think they are "cool" and "hip," they don't care about the fact that they have to reset the permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes
Reset the permissions? I've been running multiple OS X systems since 10.0, and I've never had to "reset the permissions" even once. I'm not even sure I know where to look to do something like that. WTF is he talking about?
I would like to get all riled up over his flamebait... but I mostly just feel sorry for the poor, confused person writing this nonsense.
It's classic Microsoft speak.
Bash your current product to show how "honest" and humble you are about your past errors, while creating demand for the much "better" the next one will be because you have learned from your horrific mistakes.
Rinse, repeat.
"Decidedly antiquated" RCA jacks!?
For analog audio connections (and if you are not doing 5.1, there are terrific advantages to analog audio connections), the RCA jack is still a great way to go. Most high-end audio gear still uses them.
TOSLink is not even found on all amplifiers as an input option.
The problem Apple is going to run into is that most people choose a cell provider first, then get the best phone they can that will work with that provider.
I chose T-Mobile (and dropped Sprint) because of service and price. Cingular won't win me over with a fancier phone. They need to offer better rates and/or better service than what I'm getting now to get me to change and THEN I will look at what phones they have.
You've got it backwards. Verizon was tricking customers, promoting their plan in cents and then charging in dollars, claiming that it was what they meant all along.
Where did I say it was a stock E1505?
Okay, so what is it?
Wait. Don't bother telling me. I wouldn't want you to type any more than necessary with those ultra-delicate hands of yours.
Are you even reading my posts, or just guessing at what my points are. You even cut and pasted the line where I said that is was not a legally binding agreement before snapping back with "(is there a signature on that agreement? no? then it's arguably not legally binding anyway)".
My point is that he's going against the spirit of the agreement, not the letter of it.
I never said he was breaking any laws, just that he was being dishonest.
Holy shit. Learn to read.