What's bad about Apple's success is that it's delayed the inevitable changes (that are desparately needed) in the "mega/multi-media" industry.
You think?
Rhapsody seems to work as well as iTunes. My wife is happy with it. It supports Microsoft's DRM. So does everyone else. Do you think that Microsoft wouldn't have been able to leverage Windows to provide lock-in on another market without Apple's help? I find that... unconvincing.
The only inevitable change Apple has delayed is the solidification of the music industry around Windows Media Players. I don't see that as a bad thing.
Invisible? To everyone with an iPod, but what if you'd like to play music on another player? Or what if you use Linux exclusively?
Yes, that's why it's good.
That's the great thing about competition for DRM. It means you have to deal with the DRM.
If Apple didn't stick their foot in the door, It *would* be invisible, because everyone would be doing their cooperative cross-licensing until they were all doing whatever Microsoft did, just like they do with Office documents and everything else where the format matters.
However, I do not want Apple closing me off to choosing the hardware I want to use, not for my media player and not in my computer.
Neither do I. I've used a generic Mp3 player, and an iPod shuffle, to play the music I downloaded from iTMS. And the music I've bought from eMusic, or from the artists, or the samples I've downloaded through MP3blogs, or the CDs I've ripped, because there isn't a common DRM standard.
I hate having a stupid style-over-function Macbook to get a laptop running OS X, and I'll be right up there with you pushing for a decently priced generic OS X (I reckon $500 a copy would probably work). But when it comes to DRM, the worse the better.
The problem, which Cory points out, is that when you de-DRM songs by burning an audio CD, and re-import as MP3, you have to manually re-enter meta data.
Some of it, I guess, but this just didn't seem to match my memory... so I just did this as an experiment.
I took my latest 80 minutes worth of protected ACC files, putthem in a playlist, burned it, imported the CD.
Sure enough, all the ID3 information is intact. The only thing I lost was the cover art. I can live with that. What are you and Cory talking about?
I've had the Mac OS X user interface freeze on me... on my Macbook Pro, on my Mac Mini, on my G4/466, my Beige G3, all the way back to my upgraded 7500. It happens, just like it does with Windows. Deal.
At least on the Mac you can often ssh in and do a clean shutdown or even just kill loginwindow and get back up without bouncing all the way. Windows doesn't give you this option... you gotta put it to bed by cutting its head off.
Instead of having two confusing and conflicting DRM schemes in use, we'd have one, licensed by Microsoft, that everyone used... like CSS on DVDs. It's CSS, more than iTunes, that opened up the "only a little DRM" floodgates. I'd love to believe that Joe Sixpack would care enough about DRM to refuse to use encrypted music files if Apple hadn't made it easy... but Joe Sixpack doesn't actually care that iTunes is "only a little DRM", he only cares if it works for him
By forcing the industry to accept his "second best" solution, Jobs stuck a huge stick in the muzzle of the DRM beast, because now they can't pick the most popular option and force every player to use it. He might have done it because he wanted to control the market and because didn't want to pay license fees to Microsoft for WMA, but no matter what the reason... it's kept DRM in everyone's face.
And that's bad for DRM's acceptance, long term. And that's good for consumers.
From TFA: no one but Apple can sell you proprietary file-format music that will play on the iPod.
From me: Good!
Christ, Cory used to go on about how DRM was fundamentally unworkable. This kind of problem is one of the reasons why DRM is fundamentally unworkable. Why's he telling us that this is a bad thing?
Without Apple's DRM it'd all be "plays4sure" by now.
Which is stronger than Apple's "nudge-nudge-wink-wink" honor system DRM, and (since it's all under Microsoft's eye) has the potential of becoming as invisible and ubiquitous as DVD encryption.
Competition from Apple makes sure that DRM remains fragmented, difficult, and ineffective. And that's good for consumers even if they don't think so right now...
So yeah I feel sorry for anyone buying music from anywhere other than ITMS or $PIRATESITE
I feel sorry for people getting music from anywhere but iTunes or eMusic or mp3bogs like 3hive or buying CDs in used music stores and ripping them or...
There's bunches of online vendors I do business with who I have to use paypal with (if they support it) because they will only ship to my billing address and won't ship to a PO box, and I have my mail sent to a PO box because I've had too much trouble with material sent to my street address going missing.
I don't know what the underlying reasons that they only use Fedex or UPS are, I just now they're pretty damn pervasive, and I wish the USPS would make them unnecessary.
On the other hand there's stuff like Matrix XP that's better than the "real" sequels. Google for it, and bear in mind that it was done before Matrix Reloaded/Rebooted/Revolutions/whatever...
You couldn't buy solid-state storage by the GB in 1999.
That's just the latest maguffin. It's always "in 2 years we'll be able to do X and still have great battery life", and in two years time you can't get a PDA that only does X any more.
Mate, I'm a system administrator, 20 years supporting UNIX and DOS and Windows, and I take an install as an opportunity to clean out all the cruft. A clean reinstall, even of the same version, is a performance booster.
Of course the only things I keep on Windows are games... all the important stuff is on UNIX and Mac OS X, both of which maintain preferences in regular files.
The Powerbook 2400c was designed for Apple by IBM Japan. Perhaps Lenovo might want to talk to Steve about a rematch?
Here's what I want from my Macbook Pro and my old Thinkpad t23:
Thinkpad: Two mouse/trackpad buttons, trackpad AND trackpoint, plenty of status indicators when open, BLACK, easy access to internals, pay attention to the feel of the keyboard... beveled keys may not be as stylin' but they're easier to type on, docking connector, built-in night light above the screen, working fans and cooling, optical drive on the side and replacable... and I do prefer the tray drive: you can't read business-card CDs in slot drives.
Macbook: OS X, Decent GPU, OS X, can tell status when closed (usually), OS X, Firewire built in, OS X... um... I think that's it.
Here's what I don't like:
Thinkpad: Windows, Intel graphics, teeny cursor keys, can't tell if it's on if it's closed.
Macbook: Keyboard aggravates my RSI, HEAT, one-button trackpad, Magsafe "unplug if you look at it wrong" power connector, HEAT, aluminum case, ports cluttering all sides (especially the USB port that puts any mouse cable right where I want to put the mouse itself, plugging 6 cables every time I set it down on my desk, HEAT, too hard to get into (adding RAM required trying three different screwdrivers until I found one that didn't threaten to strip the screw head), have to watch it to be sure it's really sleeping, HEAT HEAT HEAT.
As for the operating systems:
Windows: consistent keyboard support in the original user interface, reliable hibernation even if the hardware doesn't support it, "run explorer windows as separate processes".
OS X: Not stealing three keys for dedicated OS tasks, sleep works most of the time, transparent multi-display support, doesn't suck.
And dislikes:
Windows: It's an opaque toxic swamp full of industrial waste.
OS X: Why don't you sleep when I tell you to sleep? Why don't you hibernate (safe sleep isn't)? Why didn't Finder get an execution-style termination instead of infecting NeXT's File Manager?
(more for both, of course, see hates-software.com for details)
I'd rather Microsoft and Palm quit *expanding* on the PDA and concentrated on making a better PDA.
Higher resolution screens - great, so long as they don't shortchange battery life.
Bluetooth - great, but give me a standard USB or serial interface as well... you can't charge via BT.
Wifi - my experience with wifi on PDAs hasn't been terribly good. But that may have changed.
Faster processors, huge memory, multimedia support - include me out.
Unfortunately you can't get a better screen without getting all the rest of the junk included. In fact you can hardly get a PDA without the rest of the junk these days.
What's special about technology is that this is slashdot and most of us understand technology. If this were an audience that had the same common level of understanding of the politics of the Middle East, or Japanese Martial Arts, we;d be complaining about how reporters covered them instead.
This reminds me of something I wrote in 1998 after Harlan Ellison announced that there was something particularly broken about journalism on the Internet.
I used to be a big fan of newspaper reporters. Jimmy Olsen was my hero. In contrast to television crews, newspaper and magazine journalists seemed to have the opportunity to spend the time necessary to get the facts straight, they didn't have to take a complex subject and trim it down to a thirty second sound bite.
But you know, as time went on and I got closer to the heart of some of these stories, I found that the more I knew about the facts the less accurate the stories seemed. That made me wonder, how close to reality were the rest of the stories, the ones I didn't know anything about? -- Harlan Ellison versus the Crazy Yenta Gossip Line
He's someone who wants control over what's on and his computer.
Then you absolutely need to be running some variant of UNIX, whether Mac OS X or Linux. Hardware is not where the big boys are implementing their lock-ins these days.
Going to 64 bit at the application when you don't have to (and if you have to, you know it) blows away performance. That's why Windows on the AMD64 is still as 32-bit as it can get away with, and why Mac OS X on the G5 is only 64-bit for background jobs.
This isn't to say that there aren't good arguments for many of your conclusions, but this isn't one of them.
Digital and MS-DOS use CR-LF, UNIX uses LF, and Apple, bless it's heart, uses CR.
DEC operating systems for the most part use variable-record files with one record per line and either a 1 or 2 byte count plus an optional carriage control word per record.
CP/M and MS-DOS used CR/LF, but that was kind of an accident caused by the fact that every program was implementing its own I/O.
Apple and OS/9 and most mainframes that didn't used record-oriented files used CR, because that matched how FORTRAN behaved.
UNIX uses LF, because that's what the ANSI standard specified, but that was an "obscure standard that nobody else picked". I think they did the right thing because it happens to be very useful for a number of other reasons... but if it wasn't for UNIX gaining popularity it'd have gotten nowhere.
One small reason why Apple hardware costs a little bit more is that, effectively, Apple is forced to implement both FireWire and USB 2.0...
USB... which Apple adopted *first*?
And that firewire hardware must add all of 5 bucks to the price of the Mac. That cuts Apple's margin on the Mac mini from $300 to $295. That's gotta be hurting them.
Every tool I've ever seen anywhere came in three price point: the cheap for the newbies, the medium for the professionals and the pricey for the amateurs.
Unless you're a graphic artist, that would be the Walmart/eMachine, the Mac mini, and the Gamer PC.
I won't be upgrading from my G4 mini to an Intel mini, but that's still the one I'd get for a home computer if I was buying now... and I'd still use a KVM to switch from my professional Mac to my amateur "Wintendo".
No, it doesn't depend on the intent of the user - evil technology is evil in anyones hands
I didn't say anything about Apple's intent. I'm just talking about Apple's actions.
DRM technology, whether it's based on TPM or simply in the obscurity of a closed-source kernel, is evil in proportion to its effectiveness. Apple's DRM is basically "honor system", and Apple's not even using TPM for DRM. Meanwhile Microsoft's DRM support is already tough enough that people at Microsoft have complained about it... they can't even use Windowblinds while reading Microsoft's internal docs because the DRM won't let them.
It doesn't matter whether your Windows based PC makes TPM optional or not, because pretty soon you'll have to turn it on if you've got one installed to read Microsoft Reader e-Books, listen to Audible e-Books, play digital video, listen to WMA-encoded mysic on your Plays-for-sure music player... and people will happily turn it on, and eventually you'll have to do the same just to do biz.
That's not based on anyone's *intent*, that's just based on technology that Microsoft's already shipping or announced. Tell me what Apple's doing that makes you worried about them?
They have said that their next integrated graphics chip will support Direct-X 10 and be able to run Vista with all the goodies.
1. But what's it's OpenGL support going to be like? 2. Intel has broken too many promises about future performance. I'm not cutting them any slack. 3. I didn't even say Intel won't ever make a decent GPU, I just said that their current offering makes the 9200 in the Mac mini look good... so the OP's problems with his laptop are even more of an issue right now.
The fact that no games play on the Mac is a bonus. It means I'm not tempted to load my Mac down with crap, and I don't care if I have to reinstall my "Wintendo" every few months because there's nothing important on it.
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What's bad about Apple's success is that it's delayed the inevitable changes (that are desparately needed) in the "mega/multi-media" industry.
You think?
Rhapsody seems to work as well as iTunes. My wife is happy with it. It supports Microsoft's DRM. So does everyone else. Do you think that Microsoft wouldn't have been able to leverage Windows to provide lock-in on another market without Apple's help? I find that... unconvincing.
The only inevitable change Apple has delayed is the solidification of the music industry around Windows Media Players. I don't see that as a bad thing.
Invisible? To everyone with an iPod, but what if you'd like to play music on another player? Or what if you use Linux exclusively?
Yes, that's why it's good.
That's the great thing about competition for DRM. It means you have to deal with the DRM.
If Apple didn't stick their foot in the door, It *would* be invisible, because everyone would be doing their cooperative cross-licensing until they were all doing whatever Microsoft did, just like they do with Office documents and everything else where the format matters.
However, I do not want Apple closing me off to choosing the hardware I want to use, not for my media player and not in my computer.
Neither do I. I've used a generic Mp3 player, and an iPod shuffle, to play the music I downloaded from iTMS. And the music I've bought from eMusic, or from the artists, or the samples I've downloaded through MP3blogs, or the CDs I've ripped, because there isn't a common DRM standard.
I hate having a stupid style-over-function Macbook to get a laptop running OS X, and I'll be right up there with you pushing for a decently priced generic OS X (I reckon $500 a copy would probably work). But when it comes to DRM, the worse the better.
The problem, which Cory points out, is that when you de-DRM songs by burning an audio CD, and re-import as MP3, you have to manually re-enter meta data.
Some of it, I guess, but this just didn't seem to match my memory... so I just did this as an experiment.
I took my latest 80 minutes worth of protected ACC files, putthem in a playlist, burned it, imported the CD.
Sure enough, all the ID3 information is intact. The only thing I lost was the cover art. I can live with that. What are you and Cory talking about?
I've had the Mac OS X user interface freeze on me... on my Macbook Pro, on my Mac Mini, on my G4/466, my Beige G3, all the way back to my upgraded 7500. It happens, just like it does with Windows. Deal.
At least on the Mac you can often ssh in and do a clean shutdown or even just kill loginwindow and get back up without bouncing all the way. Windows doesn't give you this option... you gotta put it to bed by cutting its head off.
Without Apple, it would be even more mainstream.
Instead of having two confusing and conflicting DRM schemes in use, we'd have one, licensed by Microsoft, that everyone used... like CSS on DVDs. It's CSS, more than iTunes, that opened up the "only a little DRM" floodgates. I'd love to believe that Joe Sixpack would care enough about DRM to refuse to use encrypted music files if Apple hadn't made it easy... but Joe Sixpack doesn't actually care that iTunes is "only a little DRM", he only cares if it works for him
By forcing the industry to accept his "second best" solution, Jobs stuck a huge stick in the muzzle of the DRM beast, because now they can't pick the most popular option and force every player to use it. He might have done it because he wanted to control the market and because didn't want to pay license fees to Microsoft for WMA, but no matter what the reason... it's kept DRM in everyone's face.
And that's bad for DRM's acceptance, long term. And that's good for consumers.
From TFA: no one but Apple can sell you proprietary file-format music that will play on the iPod.
From me: Good!
Christ, Cory used to go on about how DRM was fundamentally unworkable. This kind of problem is one of the reasons why DRM is fundamentally unworkable. Why's he telling us that this is a bad thing?
Reverse psychology?
Without Apple's DRM it'd all be "plays4sure" by now.
Which is stronger than Apple's "nudge-nudge-wink-wink" honor system DRM, and (since it's all under Microsoft's eye) has the potential of becoming as invisible and ubiquitous as DVD encryption.
Competition from Apple makes sure that DRM remains fragmented, difficult, and ineffective. And that's good for consumers even if they don't think so right now...
So yeah I feel sorry for anyone buying music from anywhere other than ITMS or $PIRATESITE
I feel sorry for people getting music from anywhere but iTunes or eMusic or mp3bogs like 3hive or buying CDs in used music stores and ripping them or...
There's bunches of online vendors I do business with who I have to use paypal with (if they support it) because they will only ship to my billing address and won't ship to a PO box, and I have my mail sent to a PO box because I've had too much trouble with material sent to my street address going missing.
I don't know what the underlying reasons that they only use Fedex or UPS are, I just now they're pretty damn pervasive, and I wish the USPS would make them unnecessary.
You think this guy or Moller will get a production model into a dealership first?
On the other hand there's stuff like Matrix XP that's better than the "real" sequels. Google for it, and bear in mind that it was done before Matrix Reloaded/Rebooted/Revolutions/whatever...
You couldn't buy solid-state storage by the GB in 1999.
That's just the latest maguffin. It's always "in 2 years we'll be able to do X and still have great battery life", and in two years time you can't get a PDA that only does X any more.
Give it another 2 years.
I've been hearing people say that since I got my first PDA in 1999.
Mate, I'm a system administrator, 20 years supporting UNIX and DOS and Windows, and I take an install as an opportunity to clean out all the cruft. A clean reinstall, even of the same version, is a performance booster.
Of course the only things I keep on Windows are games... all the important stuff is on UNIX and Mac OS X, both of which maintain preferences in regular files.
The Powerbook 2400c was designed for Apple by IBM Japan. Perhaps Lenovo might want to talk to Steve about a rematch?
Here's what I want from my Macbook Pro and my old Thinkpad t23:
Thinkpad: Two mouse/trackpad buttons, trackpad AND trackpoint, plenty of status indicators when open, BLACK, easy access to internals, pay attention to the feel of the keyboard... beveled keys may not be as stylin' but they're easier to type on, docking connector, built-in night light above the screen, working fans and cooling, optical drive on the side and replacable... and I do prefer the tray drive: you can't read business-card CDs in slot drives.
Macbook: OS X, Decent GPU, OS X, can tell status when closed (usually), OS X, Firewire built in, OS X... um... I think that's it.
Here's what I don't like:
Thinkpad: Windows, Intel graphics, teeny cursor keys, can't tell if it's on if it's closed.
Macbook: Keyboard aggravates my RSI, HEAT, one-button trackpad, Magsafe "unplug if you look at it wrong" power connector, HEAT, aluminum case, ports cluttering all sides (especially the USB port that puts any mouse cable right where I want to put the mouse itself, plugging 6 cables every time I set it down on my desk, HEAT, too hard to get into (adding RAM required trying three different screwdrivers until I found one that didn't threaten to strip the screw head), have to watch it to be sure it's really sleeping, HEAT HEAT HEAT.
As for the operating systems:
Windows: consistent keyboard support in the original user interface, reliable hibernation even if the hardware doesn't support it, "run explorer windows as separate processes".
OS X: Not stealing three keys for dedicated OS tasks, sleep works most of the time, transparent multi-display support, doesn't suck.
And dislikes:
Windows: It's an opaque toxic swamp full of industrial waste.
OS X: Why don't you sleep when I tell you to sleep? Why don't you hibernate (safe sleep isn't)? Why didn't Finder get an execution-style termination instead of infecting NeXT's File Manager?
(more for both, of course, see hates-software.com for details)
I'd rather Microsoft and Palm quit *expanding* on the PDA and concentrated on making a better PDA.
Higher resolution screens - great, so long as they don't shortchange battery life.
Bluetooth - great, but give me a standard USB or serial interface as well... you can't charge via BT.
Wifi - my experience with wifi on PDAs hasn't been terribly good. But that may have changed.
Faster processors, huge memory, multimedia support - include me out.
Unfortunately you can't get a better screen without getting all the rest of the junk included. In fact you can hardly get a PDA without the rest of the junk these days.
This reminds me of something I wrote in 1998 after Harlan Ellison announced that there was something particularly broken about journalism on the Internet.
He's someone who wants control over what's on and his computer.
Then you absolutely need to be running some variant of UNIX, whether Mac OS X or Linux. Hardware is not where the big boys are implementing their lock-ins these days.
Going to 64 bit at the application when you don't have to (and if you have to, you know it) blows away performance. That's why Windows on the AMD64 is still as 32-bit as it can get away with, and why Mac OS X on the G5 is only 64-bit for background jobs.
This isn't to say that there aren't good arguments for many of your conclusions, but this isn't one of them.
Digital and MS-DOS use CR-LF, UNIX uses LF, and Apple, bless it's heart, uses CR.
DEC operating systems for the most part use variable-record files with one record per line and either a 1 or 2 byte count plus an optional carriage control word per record.
CP/M and MS-DOS used CR/LF, but that was kind of an accident caused by the fact that every program was implementing its own I/O.
Apple and OS/9 and most mainframes that didn't used record-oriented files used CR, because that matched how FORTRAN behaved.
UNIX uses LF, because that's what the ANSI standard specified, but that was an "obscure standard that nobody else picked". I think they did the right thing because it happens to be very useful for a number of other reasons... but if it wasn't for UNIX gaining popularity it'd have gotten nowhere.
One small reason why Apple hardware costs a little bit more is that, effectively, Apple is forced to implement both FireWire and USB 2.0...
USB... which Apple adopted *first*?
And that firewire hardware must add all of 5 bucks to the price of the Mac. That cuts Apple's margin on the Mac mini from $300 to $295. That's gotta be hurting them.
Every tool I've ever seen anywhere came in three price point: the cheap for the newbies, the medium for the professionals and the pricey for the amateurs.
Unless you're a graphic artist, that would be the Walmart/eMachine, the Mac mini, and the Gamer PC.
I won't be upgrading from my G4 mini to an Intel mini, but that's still the one I'd get for a home computer if I was buying now... and I'd still use a KVM to switch from my professional Mac to my amateur "Wintendo".
No, it doesn't depend on the intent of the user - evil technology is evil in anyones hands
I didn't say anything about Apple's intent. I'm just talking about Apple's actions.
DRM technology, whether it's based on TPM or simply in the obscurity of a closed-source kernel, is evil in proportion to its effectiveness. Apple's DRM is basically "honor system", and Apple's not even using TPM for DRM. Meanwhile Microsoft's DRM support is already tough enough that people at Microsoft have complained about it... they can't even use Windowblinds while reading Microsoft's internal docs because the DRM won't let them.
It doesn't matter whether your Windows based PC makes TPM optional or not, because pretty soon you'll have to turn it on if you've got one installed to read Microsoft Reader e-Books, listen to Audible e-Books, play digital video, listen to WMA-encoded mysic on your Plays-for-sure music player... and people will happily turn it on, and eventually you'll have to do the same just to do biz.
That's not based on anyone's *intent*, that's just based on technology that Microsoft's already shipping or announced. Tell me what Apple's doing that makes you worried about them?
They have said that their next integrated graphics chip will support Direct-X 10 and be able to run Vista with all the goodies.
1. But what's it's OpenGL support going to be like?
2. Intel has broken too many promises about future performance. I'm not cutting them any slack.
3. I didn't even say Intel won't ever make a decent GPU, I just said that their current offering makes the 9200 in the Mac mini look good... so the OP's problems with his laptop are even more of an issue right now.
The fact that no games play on the Mac is a bonus. It means I'm not tempted to load my Mac down with crap, and I don't care if I have to reinstall my "Wintendo" every few months because there's nothing important on it.