Music industry figures were grumbling that Apple's apparent unwillingness to license its FairPlay DRM technology - or, more likely we suspect, do so at a price the music industry is willing to pay - prevents them from creating music files that can be transferred to and played on an iPod.
That's funny. They seem to have been doing a pretty good job of creating music files that can be transferred to and played on my iPod. I get them from the iTunes Music Store.
Why would I be interested in buying them on a CD instead? It's not just Apple that has no interest in buying less-than-CD-quality music on CD.
The real "fly in the ointment" here is the fact that Macs are not running Windows, and so can ignore the copy protection that Microsoft has chosen to honor. I rather suspect that Linux will be equally happy to not comply with the RIAA's imaginary copy protection. I wonder how long before someone makes up a "copy your CDs" image that can be loaded to a USB dongle, and boots into a copy of Linux with a pre-configured ripper.
First, the Mac OS X installer is, in some senses, a Live CD. It doesn't run the Finder, but it does run a significant amount of the rest of the OS, including the GUI. It's horrible. It's increadibly slow
On the other hand, there's BootCD which, while it's not up to booting Tiger yet, does allow you to run a lot faster than the install CD by loading applications into a RAM file system.
You can use BootCD right now to test this with Panther.
at the same time, the whole "You burn CDs by inserting a blank" thing is part of the user experience.
The only way to get the whole user experience is to have the whole OS, yes. On the other hand, it would convince people that are just worried about whether they can deal with such a different user interface. Yes, there's a LOT of people like that.
Plus, well, there's a lot of deliberate marketing features in Panther and more in Tiger, like Expose and dashboard, that are fun to play with by themselves, and you really don't get the feel of them in a video.
I used to run Jaguar on a Beige G3
I used to run Jaguar on a Powermac 7500. I actually booted Puma on it before I upgraded it with a Sonnet Crescendo, and that was pretty sad.
That G3/400 with the on-board frame buffer was quite usable. That was a machine with a 400 MHz CPU, a 40 MHz 64-bit system bus, and a horribly crippled PCI bus that managed about 17 MB/s throughput. Now admittedly the framebuffer was 64 bits wide and on the 40 MHz bus, which meant it had more bandwidth than your Rage Pro on PCI, but still... you can't buy a PC now with less than 1 GHz, 400 MHz front side bus, and AGP graphics.
But I do see that as an issue, which is why I suggested Apple and ATI bundling it with the appropriate graphics cards.
Let people play with the marchitecture features like Dashboard and Expose and the dock, all of which work on dumb cards without the fancy graphics, and only include things like OpenGL screensavers with the Radeon bundled versions...
Well, at least realplayer is available on Linux!! Try that with Quicktime or the Windows Media Player.
Oh, I wasn't meaning to exclude other players by naming just one.
I was thinking of "MPEG4 using open codecs", actually. If they ALSO want to provide Realplayer or WMP or QT or Flash, OK, but an open format should also be available at a minimum.
For documents, plain text should be the required format where possible, with compliant HTML at the fallback. Things like PDF that often require screen scrapers because characters get thrown down in more or less arbitrary order should come after text or rich text.
Are they not competent enough to us png for pictures?
It should be illegal for any government office to do this kind of thing. I see this more and more, with documents in proprietary formats (like Word, Realplayer) and formats intended to be non-copyable (like streaming media). Any government website or document should be in the format that is best suited for automated access (for example, for gathering information for an FOIA request), from the broadest possible range of clients (browsers, etc).
The government can't plead expense for new services at least, because there are plenty of good, cheap-or-free engines available for just about anything they need to do.
At the very least, the existence of an adequate free alternative should be an absolute bar to creating new documents or websites in a proprietary format or accessible only to prorietary tools.
It may even be unconstitutional, under similar arguments to those used to prevent the copyrighting of typefaces.
Oi! We have now had TWO completely wrong-assed stories about this same event in slashdot. #1 was some bumf about "Apple failing to get patents to the iPod" because of some vaguely related patent by some Microsoft spod. Now that's turned into Microsoft invented the iPod?
Render unto us a grand holy rotating break, Taco. At least read your own damn articles before accepting a new one. Or at least apply some damn common sense when you get funky spin like these.
The "piracy is good for Apple" argument has to deal with the fact that piracy really only helps if you have a lock-in to follow up with: a dominant position, or incompatible formats, or something. Apple's pretty damn open by comparison with Microsoft (not that this is hard), and if they did change to make piracy a useful technique they'd lose a lot of the market.
Piracy worked for microsoft didn't it? Er No? Where you sleeping?
Yeh, it worked really well. They had lock-in, a dominant position, AND cross-subsidy so even if they lost a Windows sale they still had a chance of getting Office, and vice-versa.
It didn't make them dominant, but it's had a HUGE part in killing off potential customers.
But, as you note, Apple is in a different situation. So I'm not sure I disagree with your overall position... I just think this point is off target.
Would a Mac OS let me run programs I cannot currently run? I'm not looking for snazzy graphics/clicking effects. I'm thinking that if I can download something that will only work on a Mac then it's worth a shot.
Something that will only work on a Mac?
Or something that won't work on Linux but will work on a Mac?
Well, either way: iLife (iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, etc), Photoshop, GarageBand, IntuemRW, AdiumX, Microsoft Office, iWork, bunches of games, bunches of commercial software - stuff that's just a pain to write and do properly so it doesn't get done open-source, what the heck do you do, what are your hobbies...
That would be a really nifty idea, and you could leave out a lot of the system for this (like, for example, the burner framework, the file system checker, iSync, iCal, most of Utilities, just enough to run Safari and canned apps). You could limit it to run with a live Internet connection, with some grace period (15 minutes?) so you could get your connection UP. Plus put a time limit on the video driver so it won't run accelerated even on supported video cards after six months after the install (and you can't spoof that easily, since it can get the time from the Internet).
You could possibly even fit a minimal OSX with Safari on a bootable CD, not a DVD.
Oooh.
The biggest driver problem would probably be the video card and sound. You won't need SATA or SCSI drivers for this, and you don't REALLY need sound for Safari (but iTunes... nah, people KNOW what iTunes is like, they have that on their PCs anyway)...
Bundle it with the supported video card.
Sure, a few people will hack around these limitations, but they're more likely to get the full thing from P2P networks anyway.
To me, the joy of OS X is that it recognizes everything in the box from the very beginning, and I don't need to open the case for anything if I don't want to.
The same is true of any competant Intel laptop, pretty much. It's certainly true of Thinkpads, and they're better as laptops than any of Apple's 'books as well.
So why am I considering an iBook, even though I hate the 'books?
Because the Joy of OSX is that the software just works. I went through hell getting OSX up in the first place, on a 7500 with third party upgrades and open source patches and XPostFacto to tweak the boot CD. Cheap old NIC, old mainboards with ADB and no USB, no Firewire, no IDE, no DVI, no Altivec, no GPU. But once it was up it was still a joy. Slow, and I wouldn't want to go back to it now... but it worked.
And if it meant I could get OSX on a Thinkpad, and I had to pay Apple the Mac Tax on an iBook in cash, so OSX by itself cost something like $400... I'd still do it. Because OSX is worth it to me.
But I'm not downloading the torrent and cracking OSX and installing it on the sly.
Come on, Apple, get a clue... you can have your cake and eat it too.
I predicted this before he did. I predicted this within seconds of Steve Jobs' announcement. Not that this is evidence of any great intellect or precognition -- so did anyone who wasn't either completely out of the loop or deep in the reality alteration field. It was about as hard to predict as sunrise tomorrow.
And just as this doesn't imply anything about my predictive ability, it doesn't imply anything about Dvorak's, nor anything about the validity of any other predictions he's made.
The OP posted a message that provided some information relevant to the discussion. I assumed they may be interested in knowing more about the group, but I don't know for sure... they may have just been making a comment about iTMS US. If they weren't, someone else might be.
I posted a message that provided some additional information. The OP is presumably an intelligent adult who can decide on his or her own whether that's useful or not.
I'll be sure to remember that the next time I think of posting something that might be useful to slashdot. If I can't provide instant and complete gratification I should just shut the hell up, because a partial answer to an implied question is worse than none at all.
With the Sony having self-destructing CD drives, and the Xbox having hardware security checks to lock out unauthorised accessories, they're going to just be appliances.
So, hobbyists won't be able to connect custom stuff to the XBox 360?
I think I'll sit that one out. Not because I want to do it but because amateur hackers thinking up new uses for stuff is a great source of new ideas and gadgets... the more Microsoft locks up their systems, the less they'll have a part in the next generation of inventors.
Slashdot Mirror
Music industry figures were grumbling that Apple's apparent unwillingness to license its FairPlay DRM technology - or, more likely we suspect, do so at a price the music industry is willing to pay - prevents them from creating music files that can be transferred to and played on an iPod.
That's funny. They seem to have been doing a pretty good job of creating music files that can be transferred to and played on my iPod. I get them from the iTunes Music Store.
Why would I be interested in buying them on a CD instead? It's not just Apple that has no interest in buying less-than-CD-quality music on CD.
The real "fly in the ointment" here is the fact that Macs are not running Windows, and so can ignore the copy protection that Microsoft has chosen to honor. I rather suspect that Linux will be equally happy to not comply with the RIAA's imaginary copy protection. I wonder how long before someone makes up a "copy your CDs" image that can be loaded to a USB dongle, and boots into a copy of Linux with a pre-configured ripper.
We already DO this. That's the only difference between "Music CDRs" and "Data CDRs".
First, the Mac OS X installer is, in some senses, a Live CD. It doesn't run the Finder, but it does run a significant amount of the rest of the OS, including the GUI. It's horrible. It's increadibly slow
On the other hand, there's BootCD which, while it's not up to booting Tiger yet, does allow you to run a lot faster than the install CD by loading applications into a RAM file system.
You can use BootCD right now to test this with Panther.
at the same time, the whole "You burn CDs by inserting a blank" thing is part of the user experience.
The only way to get the whole user experience is to have the whole OS, yes. On the other hand, it would convince people that are just worried about whether they can deal with such a different user interface. Yes, there's a LOT of people like that.
Plus, well, there's a lot of deliberate marketing features in Panther and more in Tiger, like Expose and dashboard, that are fun to play with by themselves, and you really don't get the feel of them in a video.
I used to run Jaguar on a Beige G3
I used to run Jaguar on a Powermac 7500. I actually booted Puma on it before I upgraded it with a Sonnet Crescendo, and that was pretty sad.
That G3/400 with the on-board frame buffer was quite usable. That was a machine with a 400 MHz CPU, a 40 MHz 64-bit system bus, and a horribly crippled PCI bus that managed about 17 MB/s throughput. Now admittedly the framebuffer was 64 bits wide and on the 40 MHz bus, which meant it had more bandwidth than your Rage Pro on PCI, but still... you can't buy a PC now with less than 1 GHz, 400 MHz front side bus, and AGP graphics.
But I do see that as an issue, which is why I suggested Apple and ATI bundling it with the appropriate graphics cards.
Let people play with the marchitecture features like Dashboard and Expose and the dock, all of which work on dumb cards without the fancy graphics, and only include things like OpenGL screensavers with the Radeon bundled versions...
Well, at least realplayer is available on Linux!! Try that with Quicktime or the Windows Media Player.
:-(
Oh, I wasn't meaning to exclude other players by naming just one.
I was thinking of "MPEG4 using open codecs", actually. If they ALSO want to provide Realplayer or WMP or QT or Flash, OK, but an open format should also be available at a minimum.
For documents, plain text should be the required format where possible, with compliant HTML at the fallback. Things like PDF that often require screen scrapers because characters get thrown down in more or less arbitrary order should come after text or rich text.
Are they not competent enough to us png for pictures?
PNG is the poster boy for lost opportunities.
It should be illegal for any government office to do this kind of thing. I see this more and more, with documents in proprietary formats (like Word, Realplayer) and formats intended to be non-copyable (like streaming media). Any government website or document should be in the format that is best suited for automated access (for example, for gathering information for an FOIA request), from the broadest possible range of clients (browsers, etc).
The government can't plead expense for new services at least, because there are plenty of good, cheap-or-free engines available for just about anything they need to do.
At the very least, the existence of an adequate free alternative should be an absolute bar to creating new documents or websites in a proprietary format or accessible only to prorietary tools.
It may even be unconstitutional, under similar arguments to those used to prevent the copyrighting of typefaces.
Oi! We have now had TWO completely wrong-assed stories about this same event in slashdot. #1 was some bumf about "Apple failing to get patents to the iPod" because of some vaguely related patent by some Microsoft spod. Now that's turned into Microsoft invented the iPod?
Render unto us a grand holy rotating break, Taco. At least read your own damn articles before accepting a new one. Or at least apply some damn common sense when you get funky spin like these.
I am assuming [...]
You are assuming that I was serious.
Well, Mac isn't waterproof or swordproof, and I guess it depends on what your wife is into for that one...
:)
But, hey, think of it as a gamble that's got good odds of paying off in a non-conventional way.
Hah, OK. I don't get the vote (resident alien), but if I did I'd probably go for Bill&Opus.
Humm, you should be able to do it from Windows too.
Yeh, but the only spare system I'm running Windows on is a Toshiba Sattelite 320CDT with a Pentium-266. I don't think OSX will run on that.
The "piracy is good for Apple" argument has to deal with the fact that piracy really only helps if you have a lock-in to follow up with: a dominant position, or incompatible formats, or something. Apple's pretty damn open by comparison with Microsoft (not that this is hard), and if they did change to make piracy a useful technique they'd lose a lot of the market.
Piracy worked for microsoft didn't it? Er No? Where you sleeping?
Yeh, it worked really well. They had lock-in, a dominant position, AND cross-subsidy so even if they lost a Windows sale they still had a chance of getting Office, and vice-versa.
It didn't make them dominant, but it's had a HUGE part in killing off potential customers.
But, as you note, Apple is in a different situation. So I'm not sure I disagree with your overall position... I just think this point is off target.
Would a Mac OS let me run programs I cannot currently run? I'm not looking for snazzy graphics/clicking effects. I'm thinking that if I can download something that will only work on a Mac then it's worth a shot.
Something that will only work on a Mac?
Or something that won't work on Linux but will work on a Mac?
Well, either way: iLife (iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, etc), Photoshop, GarageBand, IntuemRW, AdiumX, Microsoft Office, iWork, bunches of games, bunches of commercial software - stuff that's just a pain to write and do properly so it doesn't get done open-source, what the heck do you do, what are your hobbies...
It's such an open-ended question.
That would be a really nifty idea, and you could leave out a lot of the system for this (like, for example, the burner framework, the file system checker, iSync, iCal, most of Utilities, just enough to run Safari and canned apps). You could limit it to run with a live Internet connection, with some grace period (15 minutes?) so you could get your connection UP. Plus put a time limit on the video driver so it won't run accelerated even on supported video cards after six months after the install (and you can't spoof that easily, since it can get the time from the Internet).
You could possibly even fit a minimal OSX with Safari on a bootable CD, not a DVD.
Oooh.
The biggest driver problem would probably be the video card and sound. You won't need SATA or SCSI drivers for this, and you don't REALLY need sound for Safari (but iTunes... nah, people KNOW what iTunes is like, they have that on their PCs anyway)...
Bundle it with the supported video card.
Sure, a few people will hack around these limitations, but they're more likely to get the full thing from P2P networks anyway.
What about Merom/Conroe?
Isn't that "option 1"?
One thing the article didn't make clear is what exactly Intel means by "A New Chip Architecture".
... it's either a new core or a new spin on the P6 core.
... it's yet another Funkitecture, with a good JIT in firmware on chip, like Crusoe.
... it's one of their existing Funkitectures, ditto.
... it's option 3, with Alpha as the CPU and Freeport Express as the JIT.
... it's option 2-4 with the JIT in the BIOS, like Alpha's HAL.
Option 1 (probability: high)
Option 2 (probability: medium)
Option 3 (probability: medium)
Option 4 (probability: low)
Option 5 (probability: medium-high)
I hope it's not options 2 or 3. Intel has a really bad track record in designing actual processor instruction sets.
To me, the joy of OS X is that it recognizes everything in the box from the very beginning, and I don't need to open the case for anything if I don't want to.
The same is true of any competant Intel laptop, pretty much. It's certainly true of Thinkpads, and they're better as laptops than any of Apple's 'books as well.
So why am I considering an iBook, even though I hate the 'books?
Because the Joy of OSX is that the software just works. I went through hell getting OSX up in the first place, on a 7500 with third party upgrades and open source patches and XPostFacto to tweak the boot CD. Cheap old NIC, old mainboards with ADB and no USB, no Firewire, no IDE, no DVI, no Altivec, no GPU. But once it was up it was still a joy. Slow, and I wouldn't want to go back to it now... but it worked.
And if it meant I could get OSX on a Thinkpad, and I had to pay Apple the Mac Tax on an iBook in cash, so OSX by itself cost something like $400... I'd still do it. Because OSX is worth it to me.
But I'm not downloading the torrent and cracking OSX and installing it on the sly.
Come on, Apple, get a clue... you can have your cake and eat it too.
I predicted this before he did. I predicted this within seconds of Steve Jobs' announcement. Not that this is evidence of any great intellect or precognition -- so did anyone who wasn't either completely out of the loop or deep in the reality alteration field. It was about as hard to predict as sunrise tomorrow.
And just as this doesn't imply anything about my predictive ability, it doesn't imply anything about Dvorak's, nor anything about the validity of any other predictions he's made.
don't sit here and pretend thats what he wanted
I'm not pretending anything.
The OP posted a message that provided some information relevant to the discussion. I assumed they may be interested in knowing more about the group, but I don't know for sure... they may have just been making a comment about iTMS US. If they weren't, someone else might be.
I posted a message that provided some additional information. The OP is presumably an intelligent adult who can decide on his or her own whether that's useful or not.
The only person throwing a "hissy fit" is you.
I'll be sure to remember that the next time I think of posting something that might be useful to slashdot. If I can't provide instant and complete gratification I should just shut the hell up, because a partial answer to an implied question is worse than none at all.
Thank you for clearing that up for me.
Yes, we know listening to samples is an alternative to getting the actual complete album.
Depends on what you want them for.
It's enough to tell me I don't care if he's on iTMS or not.
But if you want an album, you can get one.
Now I suppose you'll tell me that a CD isn't an alternative to downloading them from iTMS.
You can listen to samples of his music at his website (flash sample player).
Does anyone from the UK find it amusing that the submitter of the story failed to notice the dry irony and sarcasm that ZDNet UK are actually using?
Probably not. People from the UK are likely to realise that the submitter of the story was being ironic.
Really, did you ever truly believe that MS embraced the hobbyist with the original xbox?
No, of course not. They abandoned the hobbyist back in the '80s.
It's just that lately they seem to have gone from shoving them around to beating them up.
With the Sony having self-destructing CD drives, and the Xbox having hardware security checks to lock out unauthorised accessories, they're going to just be appliances.
Who cares about appliances?
So, hobbyists won't be able to connect custom stuff to the XBox 360?
I think I'll sit that one out. Not because I want to do it but because amateur hackers thinking up new uses for stuff is a great source of new ideas and gadgets... the more Microsoft locks up their systems, the less they'll have a part in the next generation of inventors.