And of course Microsoft hasn't dealt with security
on
David Pogue Takes On Vista
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The much improved Internet Explorer 7 (also available for Windows XP) alerts you when you're visiting one of those fake bank or eBay Web sites (called phishing scams).
Unfortunately Internet Explorer, Active X, and the Desktop are still the same incestuous codependant family, with he least competant member... the HTML control... left in charge of security.
The level of integration in applications that use the HTML control is so great that it's inherently impossible to prevent cross-zone attacks. I can only categorize their continued use of this bankrupt approach... unique among all browsers and other applications that display untrusted files... a sign of improbable (and probably criminal) incompetance or mind-bogglingly callous cynicism.
You get the feeling that Microsoft's managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, "Copy that."
If you believe what Marlin Eller (a former Microsoft exec) wrote in his book, Microsoft has been doing this since Windows 1.0. Why did the first few versions of Windows use cooperative multitasking? Because the Macintosh didn't do multitasking at all, and because cooperative multitasking made running a single app seem faster and more responsive to Bill Gates as he shuffled between the team developing Windows and the team working on the Applications Apple was writing for the as-yet-unrevealed Macintosh.
Bill Gates loved the Macintosh, and I suspect he still does... he sees Apple as Microsoft's unpaid unofficial brainstorming lab. He doesn't care if a few geeks think of Vista as an OS X clone, because he knows that 99.44% of the customer base simply don't care.
They already have UFS and don't make it really usable, even after making a big deal about it being updated to the latest version from FreeBSD in Panther. It's a shame, too, because while HFS+ has a lot of nifty features all of them could be emulated over UFS or ZFS or any other file system (by putting the hooks for applications like Spotlight in the vnode layer rather than the file system - the vnode layer already has most of the hooks Spotlight needs), it falls far behind UFS in terms of reliability.
In fact HFS+ is *so* bad that if it wasn't for a couple of apps that absolutely freak out if they don't have their pet un-emulated feature I would have gone to UFS long since... even if I lost Spotlight completely. Until my Mac I had never run into a file system that wasn't so badly damaged as to be unbootable that coudn't be repaired by fsck... but apparently with HFS+ just running it "too full" can trash it, and I lost my system disk on my old G4 three months running because of that!
So I wouldn't hold out any expectations of ZFS being implemented in any useful way. They already have better file systems than HFS+ and they're not using them.
I have. I got 16% of net, which was 16% of 40% of the retail price, after costs. Except that it was 16% of 20% of retail because they subcontracted production and sales to another company for 50%, and after marketing and packaging design and other expenses were taken care of I never saw a penny after my advance.
And it turned out that other company was owned by the same guy as the first, and that 50% basically went into his pocket.
If I could have gotten a flat fee for him to make NON exclusive sales, and ended up with 25% of what he got in his pocket, I would have been much better off.
I like Amanda because it's completely automated once you set it up... you don't have to keep track of whether you're doing full or incremental dumps. But there's all kinds of alternatives, and any UNIX backup software that can be configured to use hfstar or hfspax to catch the extra HFS+ attributes can accomodate a Mac as well.
It was acknowledged by game developers in the 1980s that you would sell two copies of a game for the Apple platform, one on the East Coast of the US and one on the West Coast. Everyone else would get theirs from BBS systems. This virtually stopped game development for that platform.
I think that's more due to the fact that the Macintosh in the 1980s was a marginal game platform at best, and the Apple II was dying a terrible death as the Apple//GS was completely out-performed by the doomed siamese twins of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST.
During the 1980s I had to get a pirate copy of one Apple game... Wizardry. that's because after I bought it the copy protection pretty much destroyed it within a few months... so I had a local pirate write a pirate copy over the original disk. I guess my original copy of Wizardry must have been the third sale of that product.
#15 - MenuCalendarClock, or a variety of other similar programs.
#14 - Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets or Amnesty. I use Konf/Yahoo Widgets. The problem with Amnesty is that Dashbord widgets are CPU hogs. Putting them in their own layer means you don't have to care because they're only running a small part of the time.
#13 - I've used a combination of applications working together to make the middle mouse button bring up the window menus as a context menu, but Apple should ABSOLUTELY make contextual menus available from the menu bar the way Services are, and make the main menus and Services available with contextual menus. There's five places that are close to the mouse under Fitt's Law, and the fifth is... where the mouse is right now.:)
#12 - The Dock needs a lot more work than this. In NeXTstep the Shelf (the equivalent of the right half of the Dock) was a real place... you could drag documents into it and out again, so that it provided an intermediate place to "pause" a drag and drop operation while you shuffled windows. The "Poof" is cute, but it's a bad user interface design... if you want to trash a Docked object, the trash is right there.
I use XShelf for this.
#11 - If anyone knows of software that fixes this, I would love to hear of it.
#10 - I used to use third party apps, but now I just have a folder containing aliases pointing to the system and personal application folders, and certain places in the Library, in the Dock. And, yes, this could be made a lot better.
#9 - "The rest of the world long since accepted that IBM makes the best keyboards" - Indeed. I would dearly love to be running OS X on a Thinkpad instead of a Macbook, mostly for this very reason. (Yes, I know that's Lenovo now, but the principle's still valid)
#8 - CUPS MUST DIE
#7 - The low level user interface isn't even internally consistent on the Mac. Every application has its own UI for configuring hotkeys - this should be a single "hotkeys and input" item in the Preferences, that lets you assign ANY key or corner combination to any application using the new "input manager" they create to implement this.
#6 - There's a million apps for this, and none should need to exist. Plus... laptop fan controls, keyboard illumination, sleep/hibernate behaviour, and all the rest of the laptop configuration crap that you shouldn't haveto deal with but in the real world you all too often do.
#5, #4, #3, #2, #1 - Finder is two separate programs that don't work well together. The old OS 9 Finder should be pulled out and restored fully for the benefit of the folks who like a spcial Finder, and the old NeXT File manager should be pulled out and restored fully for those of us who prefer a file browser.
On the reader peeves:
#1 - If I select shut down, and some application wants to know if I really want it to close, give me a window that says "yes, kill it and the rest of the pig-dogs, I WANT TO SHUT DOWN NOW". In fact that should be a button on the "shut down" dialog. "Cancel, Shutdown, Kill the pigdogs". Same with "sleep". And give me an option to go into safe sleep AND power off in a single operation (you could call it Hibernate:) ).
#2 - It's in there. Almost. RETURN on a file SHOULD put you into edit on the file name. Except when it doesn't. See points #5 through #1 in the previous section.:)
#3 - YES. Steve, old man, nobody kicked sand in your face for putting two buttons on the NeXT mouse. It's time to give up on this whole passive-aggressive single-button-mouse thing. See also "putting OS X on a Thinkpad". You got IBM japan to help you out on one of the Powerbooks (3400, I think)... you can do it again. Nobody will call you a wuss.
He said "the current implementations are too complex".
This isn't at odds with Microsoft's position, which is that making DRM an integral part of the OS is the best way to implement it. If you trust Microsoft, they will make DRM simple. And that will make it good.
What about iTunes Allowances? Are they counting them or not? They're credit card purchases, but they're more like gift certificates than song purchases.
Misunderstood, out of date, misinterpreted, I don't know where the disconnect is but what was credible for a 7" screen in a Classic Mac is pretty annoying on my Macbook Pro's 17" display - let alone the 23" next to it.
The locations easiest to reach on the screen are not the edges or the corners, they're the location of the mouse itself. As screens get larger, this becomes more and more true.
The most comment operations need to be right where the mouse is in a contextual menu, selected from a specific and consistent button right on the mouse.
At least one sector of the mouse's neighborhood should be reserved for the system in something like a "pie" menu. On the Mac, up-left and up-right could bring up pie versions of the Apple menu and Spotlight, up could have the application name and menu, and the remaining would be left for the application's use. On Windows, you could have the window control menu in the upper left, Start in the lower right, and so on...
It's so much quicker to activate menus with a "twitch" than a sweep. I've managed to get my middle mouse button/mouse wheel to bring up the top level menus under the mouse, and it's a HUGE win on a 23" screen... but I'd much rather have one contextual button than two...
The best thing they could do to for the user interface to make me want to upgrade from 2000 to Vista would be to take the Pocket PC/Pocket PC 2002 theme... one that's flat, clean, and un-gimmicky (not to mention easy to implement efficiently) and make it the default.
This is great! Visual basic scripts in Office documents were one of the hardest things to manage from a security perspective because Microsoft's "fixes" for scripting vulnerabilities in Word repeatedly broke the software that we were using to prevent automated script execution in Word. In fact this was the straw that broke the camel's back and the reason we eventually opted for the lesser evil of anti-virus software.
Removing that avenue of attack is a big victory for the continued security of Mac OS X.
A reference to a COM object in a Word doc is the same as a Word doc executing something.
A reference to a COM object in an Internet Explorer document is the same as the reference to a COM object in a Word document. But the HTML document isn't code, the same HTML document in any other browser renders fine without invoking COM, because the format is abstract enough that the tags Microsoft interprets as being a COM object Mozilla interprets directly.
As such the design is flawed.
Well of course it's flawed. It should be abstract enough that implementation details (like COM) simply aren't embedded into it. My point wasn't that it's not flawed, it's that even if you try and filter out the "code" objects you can still be penetrated. Just like you can in Internet Explorer.
The buttons for the features you mentioned pause/skip are tactile, just like normal buttons except they're part of the scroll wheel.
Doesn't play, friend. I've done the iPod thing and it doesn't work by feel. Hold it in your hand and find the right orientation by feel, don't brush the scroll wheel, you'll change the volume, or put it into the menu interface so when you TRY and change the volume it doesn't do anything because it's scrolling unseen through a list of menus... whoops, now you've changed playlists... that's why the only iPod I'm interested in is the Shuffle.
With normal buttons you'd also have to lock it when in your pocket
I've never had to do that with any other music player I've owned, including the iPod shuffle, because the buttons are firm enough that being brushed by clothing doesn't effect them.
you'd also have to look at it to see what you're doing if navigating through menus
If you're changing playlists, or doing something else involved, sure, but 90% of the time you're using play/pause, skip/next/back/replay, or changing the volume. With a conventional player, all of those are separate controls. With the iPod, there simply aren't enough controls to do that. In the iPod Shuffle, the stuff you can do by touch is all you do, and it works. The iPod proper crams a much more complex interface into a barely more capable set of controls, and it doesn't, not for me.
THe iPod Shuffle gets away with six controls because it doesn't have a menu interface, and the new shuffle has the power/shuffle switches separated because even Apple can learn that too much overloading is bad. Too bad they can't do the same thing with the iPod.
(or, for that matter, their horrid fetish mouse and single-button touchpad. Love OS X, wish I could run it on hardware that was better designed than my Macbook Pro... at least a Microsoft mouse works with it when I have a desktop available)
And if they were going to do a mini that was both fast enough and cheap enough to compete in the console market, why the hell would they have bothered making the crippled horror that is the current mini?
Is it possible to provide such functionality without turning the document into code.
The document isn't code, it's COM data objects. They don't need to contain code, in fact they usually contain references to COM objects and serialized copies of the associated data.
The problem is that the distinction between data and code is slippery. Macros, for example, are not executable machine code but they do execute. An object can encapsulate a DLL in a scrambled form that's not recognisable as code (for example, a portion of an image file) and a macro to extract the code and execute or install it.
That's the iPod, for me. Except the click-wheel is not "amusing". The emotion it invokes in me when I use it is closer to "blinding rage" than "amusement".
Here's a device you're going to shove in your pocket, and you're going to want to hit things like the volume controls and the pause and skip button by feel, and so what's the interface? A touch-sensitive wheel (so you have to lock it when you're not using it) that requires you to look at the screen to see what the touch-sensitive areas mean at any given moment.
The only thing dumber would be an iPod with a touch-screen interface.
Any player that looks like a removable drive to the computer AND plays the tracks loaded onto it through that interface can be used with iTunes or any other media player on any platform. I used a non-iPod flash player for three years before the iPod Shuffle came out, using a smart playlist to create a random selection of tracks that fit on my player, and then dragged the whole playlist to the virtual drive to play.
(this is where I "invented" (independently at least) the iPod shuffle... I feel that it's a pretty obvious idea, and I was kind of ticked off at Steve Jobs unnecessary jabs at flash players when the iPod Mini was announced)
I currently don't use a player because I gave my iPod to my daughter, but I'm also considering a new device and thinking about third party players because I dislike the "click wheel" intensely. I have no need to play DRM-infested files on it (all my iTMS purchases are backed up to audio CD, as recommended by Apple), so whether it's got Microsoft's, Sony's, or Apple's DRM support (or none at all) is irrelevant.
So, what's out there that has (a) a bulk storage interface for loading and managing music, and (b) a decent control layout? A d-pad or 3-way thumb-control plus a *single* button cluster would be ideal.
A Word document is a stream of COM data objects. This is one reason why Word documents can't be made backwards compatible, and since it's in Microsoft's interest to force users to upgrade over time they have little incentive to change this design.
The problem is that unless they take steps to prevent it, and COM object that's supported on the system can be theoretically includes or referenced, including ActiveX controls. Just as in Internet Explorer and Outlook, they try and filter out "dangerous" components... but over the 7 years since they introduced IE they've been unable to solve the problem.
And they have too much face tied up in the design to easily back out even if they wanted to. And, as noted, they have little reason to want to.
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The much improved Internet Explorer 7 (also available for Windows XP) alerts you when you're visiting one of those fake bank or eBay Web sites (called phishing scams).
... unique among all browsers and other applications that display untrusted files ... a sign of improbable (and probably criminal) incompetance or mind-bogglingly callous cynicism.
Unfortunately Internet Explorer, Active X, and the Desktop are still the same incestuous codependant family, with he least competant member... the HTML control... left in charge of security.
The level of integration in applications that use the HTML control is so great that it's inherently impossible to prevent cross-zone attacks. I can only categorize their continued use of this bankrupt approach
You get the feeling that Microsoft's managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, "Copy that."
If you believe what Marlin Eller (a former Microsoft exec) wrote in his book, Microsoft has been doing this since Windows 1.0. Why did the first few versions of Windows use cooperative multitasking? Because the Macintosh didn't do multitasking at all, and because cooperative multitasking made running a single app seem faster and more responsive to Bill Gates as he shuffled between the team developing Windows and the team working on the Applications Apple was writing for the as-yet-unrevealed Macintosh.
Bill Gates loved the Macintosh, and I suspect he still does... he sees Apple as Microsoft's unpaid unofficial brainstorming lab. He doesn't care if a few geeks think of Vista as an OS X clone, because he knows that 99.44% of the customer base simply don't care.
They already have UFS and don't make it really usable, even after making a big deal about it being updated to the latest version from FreeBSD in Panther. It's a shame, too, because while HFS+ has a lot of nifty features all of them could be emulated over UFS or ZFS or any other file system (by putting the hooks for applications like Spotlight in the vnode layer rather than the file system - the vnode layer already has most of the hooks Spotlight needs), it falls far behind UFS in terms of reliability.
In fact HFS+ is *so* bad that if it wasn't for a couple of apps that absolutely freak out if they don't have their pet un-emulated feature I would have gone to UFS long since... even if I lost Spotlight completely. Until my Mac I had never run into a file system that wasn't so badly damaged as to be unbootable that coudn't be repaired by fsck... but apparently with HFS+ just running it "too full" can trash it, and I lost my system disk on my old G4 three months running because of that!
So I wouldn't hold out any expectations of ZFS being implemented in any useful way. They already have better file systems than HFS+ and they're not using them.
I have. I got 16% of net, which was 16% of 40% of the retail price, after costs. Except that it was 16% of 20% of retail because they subcontracted production and sales to another company for 50%, and after marketing and packaging design and other expenses were taken care of I never saw a penny after my advance.
And it turned out that other company was owned by the same guy as the first, and that 50% basically went into his pocket.
If I could have gotten a flat fee for him to make NON exclusive sales, and ended up with 25% of what he got in his pocket, I would have been much better off.
I like Amanda because it's completely automated once you set it up... you don't have to keep track of whether you're doing full or incremental dumps. But there's all kinds of alternatives, and any UNIX backup software that can be configured to use hfstar or hfspax to catch the extra HFS+ attributes can accomodate a Mac as well.
"15 things to make OSX more like Windows".
Hardly. Windows contextual menus are fucked up too.
I don't want to make OS X contextual menus "more like Windows", I want to make them "right".
Apple should have a modifier key that enables this behavior.
No, please god, no more modifier keeys to memorize.
It was acknowledged by game developers in the 1980s that you would sell two copies of a game for the Apple platform, one on the East Coast of the US and one on the West Coast. Everyone else would get theirs from BBS systems. This virtually stopped game development for that platform.
//GS was completely out-performed by the doomed siamese twins of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST.
... Wizardry. that's because after I bought it the copy protection pretty much destroyed it within a few months... so I had a local pirate write a pirate copy over the original disk. I guess my original copy of Wizardry must have been the third sale of that product.
I think that's more due to the fact that the Macintosh in the 1980s was a marginal game platform at best, and the Apple II was dying a terrible death as the Apple
During the 1980s I had to get a pirate copy of one Apple game
#15 - MenuCalendarClock, or a variety of other similar programs.
:)
:) ).
:)
#14 - Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets or Amnesty. I use Konf/Yahoo Widgets. The problem with Amnesty is that Dashbord widgets are CPU hogs. Putting them in their own layer means you don't have to care because they're only running a small part of the time.
#13 - I've used a combination of applications working together to make the middle mouse button bring up the window menus as a context menu, but Apple should ABSOLUTELY make contextual menus available from the menu bar the way Services are, and make the main menus and Services available with contextual menus. There's five places that are close to the mouse under Fitt's Law, and the fifth is... where the mouse is right now.
#12 - The Dock needs a lot more work than this. In NeXTstep the Shelf (the equivalent of the right half of the Dock) was a real place... you could drag documents into it and out again, so that it provided an intermediate place to "pause" a drag and drop operation while you shuffled windows. The "Poof" is cute, but it's a bad user interface design... if you want to trash a Docked object, the trash is right there.
I use XShelf for this.
#11 - If anyone knows of software that fixes this, I would love to hear of it.
#10 - I used to use third party apps, but now I just have a folder containing aliases pointing to the system and personal application folders, and certain places in the Library, in the Dock. And, yes, this could be made a lot better.
#9 - "The rest of the world long since accepted that IBM makes the best keyboards" - Indeed. I would dearly love to be running OS X on a Thinkpad instead of a Macbook, mostly for this very reason. (Yes, I know that's Lenovo now, but the principle's still valid)
#8 - CUPS MUST DIE
#7 - The low level user interface isn't even internally consistent on the Mac. Every application has its own UI for configuring hotkeys - this should be a single "hotkeys and input" item in the Preferences, that lets you assign ANY key or corner combination to any application using the new "input manager" they create to implement this.
#6 - There's a million apps for this, and none should need to exist. Plus... laptop fan controls, keyboard illumination, sleep/hibernate behaviour, and all the rest of the laptop configuration crap that you shouldn't haveto deal with but in the real world you all too often do.
#5, #4, #3, #2, #1 - Finder is two separate programs that don't work well together. The old OS 9 Finder should be pulled out and restored fully for the benefit of the folks who like a spcial Finder, and the old NeXT File manager should be pulled out and restored fully for those of us who prefer a file browser.
On the reader peeves:
#1 - If I select shut down, and some application wants to know if I really want it to close, give me a window that says "yes, kill it and the rest of the pig-dogs, I WANT TO SHUT DOWN NOW". In fact that should be a button on the "shut down" dialog. "Cancel, Shutdown, Kill the pigdogs". Same with "sleep". And give me an option to go into safe sleep AND power off in a single operation (you could call it Hibernate
#2 - It's in there. Almost. RETURN on a file SHOULD put you into edit on the file name. Except when it doesn't. See points #5 through #1 in the previous section.
#3 - YES. Steve, old man, nobody kicked sand in your face for putting two buttons on the NeXT mouse. It's time to give up on this whole passive-aggressive single-button-mouse thing. See also "putting OS X on a Thinkpad". You got IBM japan to help you out on one of the Powerbooks (3400, I think)... you can do it again. Nobody will call you a wuss.
He said "the current implementations are too complex".
This isn't at odds with Microsoft's position, which is that making DRM an integral part of the OS is the best way to implement it. If you trust Microsoft, they will make DRM simple. And that will make it good.
People looking for indie and unusual stuff are more likely to go with eMusic...
What about iTunes Allowances? Are they counting them or not? They're credit card purchases, but they're more like gift certificates than song purchases.
Why keep buying? Because there's always new music.
My own iTunes purchases have dropped mainly because I've discovered eMusic.
Misunderstood, out of date, misinterpreted, I don't know where the disconnect is but what was credible for a 7" screen in a Classic Mac is pretty annoying on my Macbook Pro's 17" display - let alone the 23" next to it.
The locations easiest to reach on the screen are not the edges or the corners, they're the location of the mouse itself. As screens get larger, this becomes more and more true.
The most comment operations need to be right where the mouse is in a contextual menu, selected from a specific and consistent button right on the mouse.
At least one sector of the mouse's neighborhood should be reserved for the system in something like a "pie" menu. On the Mac, up-left and up-right could bring up pie versions of the Apple menu and Spotlight, up could have the application name and menu, and the remaining would be left for the application's use. On Windows, you could have the window control menu in the upper left, Start in the lower right, and so on...
It's so much quicker to activate menus with a "twitch" than a sweep. I've managed to get my middle mouse button/mouse wheel to bring up the top level menus under the mouse, and it's a HUGE win on a 23" screen... but I'd much rather have one contextual button than two...
Aero exists to compete with Luna.
The best thing they could do to for the user interface to make me want to upgrade from 2000 to Vista would be to take the Pocket PC/Pocket PC 2002 theme... one that's flat, clean, and un-gimmicky (not to mention easy to implement efficiently) and make it the default.
I endorse this PRODUCT and/or SERVICE!
This is great! Visual basic scripts in Office documents were one of the hardest things to manage from a security perspective because Microsoft's "fixes" for scripting vulnerabilities in Word repeatedly broke the software that we were using to prevent automated script execution in Word. In fact this was the straw that broke the camel's back and the reason we eventually opted for the lesser evil of anti-virus software.
Removing that avenue of attack is a big victory for the continued security of Mac OS X.
A reference to a COM object in a Word doc is the same as a Word doc executing something.
A reference to a COM object in an Internet Explorer document is the same as the reference to a COM object in a Word document. But the HTML document isn't code, the same HTML document in any other browser renders fine without invoking COM, because the format is abstract enough that the tags Microsoft interprets as being a COM object Mozilla interprets directly.
As such the design is flawed.
Well of course it's flawed. It should be abstract enough that implementation details (like COM) simply aren't embedded into it. My point wasn't that it's not flawed, it's that even if you try and filter out the "code" objects you can still be penetrated. Just like you can in Internet Explorer.
The buttons for the features you mentioned pause/skip are tactile, just like normal buttons except they're part of the scroll wheel.
Doesn't play, friend. I've done the iPod thing and it doesn't work by feel. Hold it in your hand and find the right orientation by feel, don't brush the scroll wheel, you'll change the volume, or put it into the menu interface so when you TRY and change the volume it doesn't do anything because it's scrolling unseen through a list of menus... whoops, now you've changed playlists... that's why the only iPod I'm interested in is the Shuffle.
With normal buttons you'd also have to lock it when in your pocket
I've never had to do that with any other music player I've owned, including the iPod shuffle, because the buttons are firm enough that being brushed by clothing doesn't effect them.
you'd also have to look at it to see what you're doing if navigating through menus
If you're changing playlists, or doing something else involved, sure, but 90% of the time you're using play/pause, skip/next/back/replay, or changing the volume. With a conventional player, all of those are separate controls. With the iPod, there simply aren't enough controls to do that. In the iPod Shuffle, the stuff you can do by touch is all you do, and it works. The iPod proper crams a much more complex interface into a barely more capable set of controls, and it doesn't, not for me.
THe iPod Shuffle gets away with six controls because it doesn't have a menu interface, and the new shuffle has the power/shuffle switches separated because even Apple can learn that too much overloading is bad. Too bad they can't do the same thing with the iPod.
(or, for that matter, their horrid fetish mouse and single-button touchpad. Love OS X, wish I could run it on hardware that was better designed than my Macbook Pro... at least a Microsoft mouse works with it when I have a desktop available)
Not with the GMA950.
And if they were going to do a mini that was both fast enough and cheap enough to compete in the console market, why the hell would they have bothered making the crippled horror that is the current mini?
Is it possible to provide such functionality without turning the document into code.
The document isn't code, it's COM data objects. They don't need to contain code, in fact they usually contain references to COM objects and serialized copies of the associated data.
The problem is that the distinction between data and code is slippery. Macros, for example, are not executable machine code but they do execute. An object can encapsulate a DLL in a scrambled form that's not recognisable as code (for example, a portion of an image file) and a macro to extract the code and execute or install it.
Why not buy the CD and then rip it to MP3s?
Let's do the numbers on "Money for Nothing".
Buy the CD and rip it to MP3s
Cost: $10.99 plus shipping for "Brothers in Arms" from Amazon.
Time: 5-10 days for delivery.
Alternative:
Cost: $10.99 plus 50c worth of gas for "Brothers in Arms" from Borders.
Time: 30 minutes to an hour shopping trip.
Buy the track from iTMS and "Mix, Burn, Rip"
Cost: $0.99 for the track, plus $0.25 for a CD-R (worst case)
Time: 30 seconds to a minute.
Results
Instant gratification and a fraction of the cost. that's what *I* call money for nothing!
weak-or-broken-to-the-point-of-amusing interfaces.
That's the iPod, for me. Except the click-wheel is not "amusing". The emotion it invokes in me when I use it is closer to "blinding rage" than "amusement".
Here's a device you're going to shove in your pocket, and you're going to want to hit things like the volume controls and the pause and skip button by feel, and so what's the interface? A touch-sensitive wheel (so you have to lock it when you're not using it) that requires you to look at the screen to see what the touch-sensitive areas mean at any given moment.
The only thing dumber would be an iPod with a touch-screen interface.
Any player that looks like a removable drive to the computer AND plays the tracks loaded onto it through that interface can be used with iTunes or any other media player on any platform. I used a non-iPod flash player for three years before the iPod Shuffle came out, using a smart playlist to create a random selection of tracks that fit on my player, and then dragged the whole playlist to the virtual drive to play.
(this is where I "invented" (independently at least) the iPod shuffle... I feel that it's a pretty obvious idea, and I was kind of ticked off at Steve Jobs unnecessary jabs at flash players when the iPod Mini was announced)
I currently don't use a player because I gave my iPod to my daughter, but I'm also considering a new device and thinking about third party players because I dislike the "click wheel" intensely. I have no need to play DRM-infested files on it (all my iTMS purchases are backed up to audio CD, as recommended by Apple), so whether it's got Microsoft's, Sony's, or Apple's DRM support (or none at all) is irrelevant.
So, what's out there that has (a) a bulk storage interface for loading and managing music, and (b) a decent control layout? A d-pad or 3-way thumb-control plus a *single* button cluster would be ideal.
A Word document is a stream of COM data objects. This is one reason why Word documents can't be made backwards compatible, and since it's in Microsoft's interest to force users to upgrade over time they have little incentive to change this design.
The problem is that unless they take steps to prevent it, and COM object that's supported on the system can be theoretically includes or referenced, including ActiveX controls. Just as in Internet Explorer and Outlook, they try and filter out "dangerous" components... but over the 7 years since they introduced IE they've been unable to solve the problem.
And they have too much face tied up in the design to easily back out even if they wanted to. And, as noted, they have little reason to want to.