The other problem with Asimov's rules for robots is the first serious production of thinking machines will be for millitary purposes. Kind of hard to hard wire "will never harm humans" when thats the whole point of building them in the first place.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today, remember always, your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
In Japan alone, so far 11 workers have been killed by production line robots, resulting in precisely zero anti-robot pogroms.
I think we need to draw a distinction here between computer-controlled machines and robots in Asimov's sense of the word. They're very different things.
I think both sides of this point are valid. On the one hand, if the distributors release their movies in HDTV format X, they could potentially make $N,000,000,000. But some fraction of that potential revenue is going to be lost to piracy, leaving them with $M,000,000,000. If they don't release format X, they won't get $M,000,000,000. You have a good point, there.
But on the other hand, we have the fact that Hollywood did not release any movies in HD format despite the existence of at least a few media types until JVC came up with D-Theater. That's pretty strong empirical evidence.
Again, we're back to an either-or proposition. I'm enthusiastically supporting strong copy protection in whatever new HD format comes along. The potential misuses of copying far outweigh any potential legitimate uses of copying, so I'm comfortable with that compromise.
We're basically back to the automatic weapon argument again. Automatic weapons are, technically, covered by the 2nd amendment. They're illegal anyway, because their potential for abuse outweighs the loss of liberty attached to the banning of them.
A society of pure liberty would be an anarchy. We all voluntarily give up some of our liberties to ensure the greater security and prosperity of all. Knowing exactly how much liberty is too much to sacrifice is a tricky thing. But I've made up my mind on this particular issue.
First of all, I really don't understand why you're talking about broadband, and downloading movies off the Internet. This is not a significant problem for movies, and never has been. (It may be in the future, but we're a long way from that point, as you yourself have said.)
What is a significant problem is the counterfeit videotapes and DVDs being sold in vast quantities in Asia and (to a lesser extent) elsewhere. Hollywood wants to prevent widespread piracy. To do this, they're looking for copy-protected data media. The fact that this prevents you from making a backup copy-- which is a dubious "right" in my opinion, anyway-- is an unimportant side-effect.
Your repeated assertion that "it's about control" is simply unfounded. It's not about control. It's about getting paid. Hollywood wants to get paid every time somebody watches a movie. That didn't go over so well-- see Divx-- so they're happy getting paid every time somebody buys a movie. So they're trying to make it hard for people to copy movies. That's it. Please remove your tin-foil hat.
You may be happy living with the current limitations, but will you be happy when Hollywood decides that you can only watch that movie when they want to let you watch it?
Let me get this straight. When a company like Microsoft uses FUD in their marketing, you call "bullshit" on them immediately. But it's okay for you to use that same technique yourself? That's just wrong.
Furthermore, I'll repeat what I've said before. If Hollywood were trying to restrict me in a way that I was not comfortable with, I would oppose it. I'd avoid their products, or whatever happened to be appropriate. But that's not what's happening.
People who moan about Hollywood's desire for copy protection on sheer principle alone-- often invoking the same slippery-slope argument you used here-- are overreacting.
MS chose to package the install with VISE, despite the fact that there are eight million other apps that don't need to.
I agree with you that application installers are pretty much obsolete for OS X, and that if you need one you should use Apple's installer, but in all fairness VISE is the most common installer-maker for Mac OS. It's not like Microsoft went out of their way to find a lousy one, or wrote their own just to be stubborn.
Why on Earth do you have to quit my Apps MS? There is NEVER a good reason for it. No other browser requires anything like this.
Refer to this comment. Microsoft shouldn't take the blame for this. It's MindVision's fault. They built the installer-builder that Microsoft (and lots and lots of others) used.
MSIE 5.2 won't install without quitting my running apps. So, it won't be installed for some time. Maybe Microsoft is just jealous, wants to bring everyone else down to its OS level.
Don't blame Microsoft for this. Blame MindVision. The installer is built with Installer VISE from MindVision, version 7.4.1, which I believe is a direct carbonization of their OS 9 installer-builder product. Back in OS 9 days, quitting all running programs to install software was a resonable, if not necessarily correct, thing to do, so that's why the installer does it.
"About Installer..." should tell you everything you want to know.
I'm as annoyed at this "feature" as anybody, but blame the right party for it.
I hope none of your D-VHS movies ever gets dropped on a magnet or into a bucket of water or some other type of disaster.
Yeah, that'd be bad all right. But I have a sophisticated system for preventing such events. I call it "being careful."
Since you weren't allowed to make a backup...
This is a simple either-or proposition. Either you can have a near-master-quality movie that you cannot copy, or you cannot have a near-master-quality movie at all. I am quite happy with the first option. The wear and tear on a VHS tape through normal operation is somewhat less than you might think, so I'm comfortable with the lifespan of the media. And see above for my opinion on disaster. So the "you can't make a copy" thing really doesn't ring true for me.
Anyway, you must have to much money if you're able to afford a $2000 VCR just to watch your D-VHS tapes that have no random access like a DVD.
Random access brings nothing to the movie-watching experience, in my opinion. Sit down, dim the lights, open the curtain, and roll the film. When it's over, put it back on the shelf and go on about your business. I don't find myself skipping around.
I think you'll find that a lot of home theater enthusiasts like myself care more about the quality of the viewing experience than about extra features or random access. There's no random access on a 35 mm roll, after all.
Through theft, of course. When you release something for sale only to have it widely stolen by pirates on large and small scales, I call that getting burned.
You seem to be saying that the fact that Hollywood has made money somehow invalidates the fact that they've also lost potential revenue through piracy. I don't buy that argument.
Thus, by the statement you gave, they'll never release 1080i movies, EVER, unless the SSSCA becomes law.
You are underinformed. You can buy a few movies on high-definition D-VHS right now. Terminator 2 costs about US$22 at bestprices.com, but it's out of stock.
This is my point. JVC put together a copy protection scheme for D-VHS called D-Theater. They presented it to some movie distributors, and those distributors agreed to release their films in 1080i on the D-VHS format. (Support for D-Theater has not been universal, of course.)
Before D-Theater, there were no pre-recorded high-definition movies. They just didn't exist. Not because of technology-- squeezing 40 GB onto a data tape isn't hard at all. Because of business choices on the part of the distributors.
When a bad format-- or a good format with bad features or side-effects-- comes along, it fails. DiVX failed because people weren't buying the players or the discs. Region coding for DVDs seems to be failing; a good friend of mine lives in Australia, and he says that practically every major vendor sells region-free DVD players there, which makes the whole region-coding system somewhat meaningless.
But the simple fact that a system includes copy protection is not, in my not-very-humble opinion, a good reason for that system to fail. I disagree with your assertion that copy protection is an insidious plot. It's not like we're talking about chlorine in the water, here.
If I were a big-shot executive for a Hollywood distributor, I wouldn't be worried about peer-to-peer, or the next Napster, except in the abstract "hope that never happens" sense. I'd be worried about the rampant copying of videotapes and DVDs going on in the far East. With videos it's absolutely nuts. You can walk up to a street vendor in KL and buy a video for US$3. It looks utterly legitimate, including the box cover and tape label. Pop it in, and the video quality is just what you'd expect from a store-bought video. Excepting the circumstances, there's no reason for you to think it'd been pirated.
The DVD situation is almost as bad. Peer-to-peer piracy is trivia compared to the kind of mass-produced bootlegging going on in Asia.
Hollywood has been burned three times now: VHS, VCD, DVD. It's pretty clear that they won't adopt another, more sophisticated format without some pretty strong copy protection features.
Wow, I bet it feels nice to have so much money that you can subsidize the media industry's foray into HDTV.
Yeah. It does.
Some people don't only want to be mindless consumers.
Um. When did this go from a discussion of the pros and cons of copy protection to an empty critique of my values?
I like watching movies and TV. This does not make me a mindless consumer. I get such a kick out of people who vaguely criticise the various media outlets using loaded words like "culture" and "consumer." Inevitably, I've found that if one digs deep enough, one finds that even those people have a guilty pleasure or two lurking behind their oh-so-proper facades. I'll bet you spend your Saturday nights watching reruns of British sitcoms on public television, or privately enacting some other vice for which you feel indefinitely ashamed.
In other words, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
Give it up, Hard_Code. As much as you might like to think you are, you're no better or worse than the rest of us. The fact that you don't like TV doesn't mean I'm a bad person because I do.
I refuse to support people who object to the studios today because I believe they're objecting inappropriately. People like Hard_Code (the original poster) object to any sort of copy protection or prevention, on principle. They invoke "fair use" to say that it's wrong to prevent copying completely. Like I said, I think that's going too far.
Of course I would object if somebody tried to tell me I could only watch videos on Tuesdays. But that's not what's happening. I'm afraid I don't buy your "slippery slope" argument.
Life is all about compromise. In order to get what I want-- prerecorded movies in high definition-- I'm more than happy to give up an ability that I would never want to use anyway-- the ability to copy or digitize those movies. If I were asked to give up something that I value more, then I'd make a different choice.
Use your imagination and come up with something that you would object to. The problem is, it will be much more difficult to stand up to them then than it is now.
Nonsense. It'll be just as easy not to buy a "only on Tuesday" video in ten years as it is to not buy a DVD today. It's just a consumer's choice, not a revolution.
This is interesting. There's a new type of Ludditism. Instead of rejecting technology prima facie, you're rejecting technologies based on what you call "copyright gestapo restrictions."
For a contrary opinion to that popularly expressed by Slashdotters, head over to the avsforum.com HDTV recorders posting board. There you'll find lots of people enthusiastically supporting copy protection methods like JVC's D-Theater format. Why? Because they know that without those sorts of protections-- or restrictions, if you prefer-- the studios will never release their movies in 1080i format on any medium. A movie recorded in high-bit-rate 1080i is very close, when viewed on consumer gear with a slightly forgiving eye, to an HD master. Studios simply won't release near-master-quality tapes or discs unless they're confident that those movies won't be copied like crazy.
I like owning and watching high-quality movies; that's why I've invested in a high-definition TV, a DVD player, and a collection of DVDs. I'm not interested in making copies of my movies, so the fact that I'm (a) not allowed to, and (b) prevented from doing so doesn't bother me in the least.
So I vocally support copy protection-- or restriction, or prevention, or whatever you want to call it. Without it, I won't be able to watch movies in high definition, and that'd be disappointing. Every time somebody pirates a video, CD, or DVD, they make it ever so slightly less likely that I'll be able to get the kind of entertainment I want in the future.
I searched both Google and AllTheWeb for the name of my company. (For privacy reasons, I'm not going to tell you the name.) We are a small company, and probably few pages on the web link to our site, but Google pulled up our home page as its first search result. AllTheWeb failed to list it in its first page of links.
It's not hard to find our site, either. Our company's name is "foo bars"* and our URL is "foobars.com." Google nailed it, while AllTheWeb bombed.
Doing a more complex search with lots of words from our home page did, finally, get AllTheWeb to cough up our site. So I know it's in there.
So in my opinion it has little to do with how big their index is. It has to do with how good they are at finding what I'm looking for. For me, Google almost always finds what I'm looking for. I've even started using the "I Feel Lucky" button to skip the search results altogether and just take me straight to the first listed site.
*Incidentally, I've always wanted to open a pub called the Foo Bar, but I don't think many people would get it.
Your comment sounded to me like it was specifically designed to diminish the importance AllTheWeb's claim, in favor of Google.
I think you're right, except for the "in favor of Google" part. Timothy said, "pages indexed is not the only measure of a search engine and probably isn't even the most important." AllTheWeb claims that their page index is big, and Timothy is reality-checking that claim.
I think Slashdot editors get too snippy too often in their story posts. But this isn't one of those occasions.
Actually, no, he's right. Apple found that it was more cost-effective to port the parts of the Mac Toolbox that QT needed, than it would be for them to port QT to use the native Win32 API.
If you're talking about GUI elements, then I'm with you-- for QuickTime Player. But are you talking about the QuickTime library itself? I don't believe there's any Mac-specific code in there, at least that I know of.
Why on earth would Apple not want to immediately integrate its new video editing holdings into Quicktime as completely as possible as immediately as possible?
Rayz, Chalice, and Shake are not editing programs. They're compositors. Big, big difference.
Nobody needs QuickTime for a compositor, except possibly to support reading and writing of image formats. And Shake, Chalice, and Rayz already have those problems solved.
(At this point, you may almost almost call Quicktime a full fledged operating system. The thing is such a beast that i have heard it said that Apple does not actually port Quicktime to Windows-- that instead, they wrote a limited Wine-like "emulation" layer translating all the parts of the Macintosh APIs that Quicktime uses into the equivilent parts of the Windows APIs)
Are you just making stuff up at this point, or what?
Meh. Apart from the typical Windows installer-- click "next" thirty-seven times to install this software-- there's absolutely nothing wrong with QuickTime for Windows.
I don't mean to be rude, but you just wasted about 600 bytes talking about Mercedes. Maybe you missed the fact that comparing Apple to Mercedes is just a rhetorical construction. Are you trying to say that it's a flawed comparison? So f'ing what? All comparisons are flawed when examined closely enough.
It's a common trick to try to say someone is wrong by finding fault with the object of his or her comparison. It's just a variation on the old "straw man" technique.
Apple is elitist in a different sense to what I would think of, but yeah, you're right.
Yeah, I think you're assigning a different meaning to "elitist" than the one I'm using. In your context, "elitist" means oriented toward power users. By that definition, I would call Linux (and even moreso, BSD) an elitist operating system: in largest part, Linux and BSD (like many other UNIX variants or derivatives) make no concession to new or inexperienced users. RTFM, baby.
Windows, of course, is the OS equivalent of Wal-Mart.
He's probably also wondering when Apple is going to port OS X to Intel hardware.
Heh. After last week's micro-war on apple.slashdot.org about that, this comment holds a special place in my heart. I wish I'd seen it before I posted to this story, so I could mod it up.
Realistically, the number of extra iPods they'd sell with Windows support is far greater than the number of extra computers they'd sell because of the iPod connection.
You're forgetting one thing. Apple Computer is made up of elitists.
I don't mean that as a dig. I mean it literally. The folks who run Apple Computer-- and lots of people who just work there-- are quite happy with their 5% market share. (Although 10% would be nice, and they're looking to get it.) They hold the opinion that the best, highest quality products aren't for everyone. They point to Mercedes as an example of this principle. Not only are Mercedes cars more expensive than Hyundai cars, they're also better engineered and built. Ditto Apple.
As long as you guys talk about Apple in terms of pure profit-and-loss, you're not going to be getting the whole picture. They're a for-profit corporation, yeah, but they're doing quite well making highly finished products for a narrow market segment. Why rock that boat?
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The other problem with Asimov's rules for robots is the first serious production of thinking machines will be for millitary purposes. Kind of hard to hard wire "will never harm humans" when thats the whole point of building them in the first place.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today, remember always, your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
In Japan alone, so far 11 workers have been killed by production line robots, resulting in precisely zero anti-robot pogroms.
I think we need to draw a distinction here between computer-controlled machines and robots in Asimov's sense of the word. They're very different things.
I think both sides of this point are valid. On the one hand, if the distributors release their movies in HDTV format X, they could potentially make $N,000,000,000. But some fraction of that potential revenue is going to be lost to piracy, leaving them with $M,000,000,000. If they don't release format X, they won't get $M,000,000,000. You have a good point, there.
But on the other hand, we have the fact that Hollywood did not release any movies in HD format despite the existence of at least a few media types until JVC came up with D-Theater. That's pretty strong empirical evidence.
Again, we're back to an either-or proposition. I'm enthusiastically supporting strong copy protection in whatever new HD format comes along. The potential misuses of copying far outweigh any potential legitimate uses of copying, so I'm comfortable with that compromise.
We're basically back to the automatic weapon argument again. Automatic weapons are, technically, covered by the 2nd amendment. They're illegal anyway, because their potential for abuse outweighs the loss of liberty attached to the banning of them.
A society of pure liberty would be an anarchy. We all voluntarily give up some of our liberties to ensure the greater security and prosperity of all. Knowing exactly how much liberty is too much to sacrifice is a tricky thing. But I've made up my mind on this particular issue.
First of all, I really don't understand why you're talking about broadband, and downloading movies off the Internet. This is not a significant problem for movies, and never has been. (It may be in the future, but we're a long way from that point, as you yourself have said.)
What is a significant problem is the counterfeit videotapes and DVDs being sold in vast quantities in Asia and (to a lesser extent) elsewhere. Hollywood wants to prevent widespread piracy. To do this, they're looking for copy-protected data media. The fact that this prevents you from making a backup copy-- which is a dubious "right" in my opinion, anyway-- is an unimportant side-effect.
Your repeated assertion that "it's about control" is simply unfounded. It's not about control. It's about getting paid. Hollywood wants to get paid every time somebody watches a movie. That didn't go over so well-- see Divx-- so they're happy getting paid every time somebody buys a movie. So they're trying to make it hard for people to copy movies. That's it. Please remove your tin-foil hat.
You may be happy living with the current limitations, but will you be happy when Hollywood decides that you can only watch that movie when they want to let you watch it?
Let me get this straight. When a company like Microsoft uses FUD in their marketing, you call "bullshit" on them immediately. But it's okay for you to use that same technique yourself? That's just wrong.
Furthermore, I'll repeat what I've said before. If Hollywood were trying to restrict me in a way that I was not comfortable with, I would oppose it. I'd avoid their products, or whatever happened to be appropriate. But that's not what's happening.
People who moan about Hollywood's desire for copy protection on sheer principle alone-- often invoking the same slippery-slope argument you used here-- are overreacting.
MS chose to package the install with VISE, despite the fact that there are eight million other apps that don't need to.
I agree with you that application installers are pretty much obsolete for OS X, and that if you need one you should use Apple's installer, but in all fairness VISE is the most common installer-maker for Mac OS. It's not like Microsoft went out of their way to find a lousy one, or wrote their own just to be stubborn.
Okay, then. I stand corrected. Dang. I thought I was being all insightful, too. ;-)
Why on Earth do you have to quit my Apps MS? There is NEVER a good reason for it. No other browser requires anything like this.
Refer to this comment. Microsoft shouldn't take the blame for this. It's MindVision's fault. They built the installer-builder that Microsoft (and lots and lots of others) used.
MSIE 5.2 won't install without quitting my running apps. So, it won't be installed for some time. Maybe Microsoft is just jealous, wants to bring everyone else down to its OS level.
Don't blame Microsoft for this. Blame MindVision. The installer is built with Installer VISE from MindVision, version 7.4.1, which I believe is a direct carbonization of their OS 9 installer-builder product. Back in OS 9 days, quitting all running programs to install software was a resonable, if not necessarily correct, thing to do, so that's why the installer does it.
"About Installer..." should tell you everything you want to know.
I'm as annoyed at this "feature" as anybody, but blame the right party for it.
I hope none of your D-VHS movies ever gets dropped on a magnet or into a bucket of water or some other type of disaster.
Yeah, that'd be bad all right. But I have a sophisticated system for preventing such events. I call it "being careful."
Since you weren't allowed to make a backup...
This is a simple either-or proposition. Either you can have a near-master-quality movie that you cannot copy, or you cannot have a near-master-quality movie at all. I am quite happy with the first option. The wear and tear on a VHS tape through normal operation is somewhat less than you might think, so I'm comfortable with the lifespan of the media. And see above for my opinion on disaster. So the "you can't make a copy" thing really doesn't ring true for me.
Anyway, you must have to much money if you're able to afford a $2000 VCR just to watch your D-VHS tapes that have no random access like a DVD.
Random access brings nothing to the movie-watching experience, in my opinion. Sit down, dim the lights, open the curtain, and roll the film. When it's over, put it back on the shelf and go on about your business. I don't find myself skipping around.
I think you'll find that a lot of home theater enthusiasts like myself care more about the quality of the viewing experience than about extra features or random access. There's no random access on a 35 mm roll, after all.
How have they been burned??
Through theft, of course. When you release something for sale only to have it widely stolen by pirates on large and small scales, I call that getting burned.
You seem to be saying that the fact that Hollywood has made money somehow invalidates the fact that they've also lost potential revenue through piracy. I don't buy that argument.
Thus, by the statement you gave, they'll never release 1080i movies, EVER, unless the SSSCA becomes law.
You are underinformed. You can buy a few movies on high-definition D-VHS right now. Terminator 2 costs about US$22 at bestprices.com, but it's out of stock.
This is my point. JVC put together a copy protection scheme for D-VHS called D-Theater. They presented it to some movie distributors, and those distributors agreed to release their films in 1080i on the D-VHS format. (Support for D-Theater has not been universal, of course.)
Before D-Theater, there were no pre-recorded high-definition movies. They just didn't exist. Not because of technology-- squeezing 40 GB onto a data tape isn't hard at all. Because of business choices on the part of the distributors.
When a bad format-- or a good format with bad features or side-effects-- comes along, it fails. DiVX failed because people weren't buying the players or the discs. Region coding for DVDs seems to be failing; a good friend of mine lives in Australia, and he says that practically every major vendor sells region-free DVD players there, which makes the whole region-coding system somewhat meaningless.
But the simple fact that a system includes copy protection is not, in my not-very-humble opinion, a good reason for that system to fail. I disagree with your assertion that copy protection is an insidious plot. It's not like we're talking about chlorine in the water, here.
If I were a big-shot executive for a Hollywood distributor, I wouldn't be worried about peer-to-peer, or the next Napster, except in the abstract "hope that never happens" sense. I'd be worried about the rampant copying of videotapes and DVDs going on in the far East. With videos it's absolutely nuts. You can walk up to a street vendor in KL and buy a video for US$3. It looks utterly legitimate, including the box cover and tape label. Pop it in, and the video quality is just what you'd expect from a store-bought video. Excepting the circumstances, there's no reason for you to think it'd been pirated.
The DVD situation is almost as bad. Peer-to-peer piracy is trivia compared to the kind of mass-produced bootlegging going on in Asia.
Hollywood has been burned three times now: VHS, VCD, DVD. It's pretty clear that they won't adopt another, more sophisticated format without some pretty strong copy protection features.
Wow, I bet it feels nice to have so much money that you can subsidize the media industry's foray into HDTV.
Yeah. It does.
Some people don't only want to be mindless consumers.
Um. When did this go from a discussion of the pros and cons of copy protection to an empty critique of my values?
I like watching movies and TV. This does not make me a mindless consumer. I get such a kick out of people who vaguely criticise the various media outlets using loaded words like "culture" and "consumer." Inevitably, I've found that if one digs deep enough, one finds that even those people have a guilty pleasure or two lurking behind their oh-so-proper facades. I'll bet you spend your Saturday nights watching reruns of British sitcoms on public television, or privately enacting some other vice for which you feel indefinitely ashamed.
In other words, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
Give it up, Hard_Code. As much as you might like to think you are, you're no better or worse than the rest of us. The fact that you don't like TV doesn't mean I'm a bad person because I do.
I refuse to support people who object to the studios today because I believe they're objecting inappropriately. People like Hard_Code (the original poster) object to any sort of copy protection or prevention, on principle. They invoke "fair use" to say that it's wrong to prevent copying completely. Like I said, I think that's going too far.
Of course I would object if somebody tried to tell me I could only watch videos on Tuesdays. But that's not what's happening. I'm afraid I don't buy your "slippery slope" argument.
Life is all about compromise. In order to get what I want-- prerecorded movies in high definition-- I'm more than happy to give up an ability that I would never want to use anyway-- the ability to copy or digitize those movies. If I were asked to give up something that I value more, then I'd make a different choice.
Use your imagination and come up with something that you would object to. The problem is, it will be much more difficult to stand up to them then than it is now.
Nonsense. It'll be just as easy not to buy a "only on Tuesday" video in ten years as it is to not buy a DVD today. It's just a consumer's choice, not a revolution.
This is interesting. There's a new type of Ludditism. Instead of rejecting technology prima facie, you're rejecting technologies based on what you call "copyright gestapo restrictions."
For a contrary opinion to that popularly expressed by Slashdotters, head over to the avsforum.com HDTV recorders posting board. There you'll find lots of people enthusiastically supporting copy protection methods like JVC's D-Theater format. Why? Because they know that without those sorts of protections-- or restrictions, if you prefer-- the studios will never release their movies in 1080i format on any medium. A movie recorded in high-bit-rate 1080i is very close, when viewed on consumer gear with a slightly forgiving eye, to an HD master. Studios simply won't release near-master-quality tapes or discs unless they're confident that those movies won't be copied like crazy.
I like owning and watching high-quality movies; that's why I've invested in a high-definition TV, a DVD player, and a collection of DVDs. I'm not interested in making copies of my movies, so the fact that I'm (a) not allowed to, and (b) prevented from doing so doesn't bother me in the least.
So I vocally support copy protection-- or restriction, or prevention, or whatever you want to call it. Without it, I won't be able to watch movies in high definition, and that'd be disappointing. Every time somebody pirates a video, CD, or DVD, they make it ever so slightly less likely that I'll be able to get the kind of entertainment I want in the future.
Okay, I get it. You've got a bug up your ass. I'll stop trying to have an objective conversation with you now.
I searched both Google and AllTheWeb for the name of my company. (For privacy reasons, I'm not going to tell you the name.) We are a small company, and probably few pages on the web link to our site, but Google pulled up our home page as its first search result. AllTheWeb failed to list it in its first page of links.
It's not hard to find our site, either. Our company's name is "foo bars"* and our URL is "foobars.com." Google nailed it, while AllTheWeb bombed.
Doing a more complex search with lots of words from our home page did, finally, get AllTheWeb to cough up our site. So I know it's in there.
So in my opinion it has little to do with how big their index is. It has to do with how good they are at finding what I'm looking for. For me, Google almost always finds what I'm looking for. I've even started using the "I Feel Lucky" button to skip the search results altogether and just take me straight to the first listed site.
*Incidentally, I've always wanted to open a pub called the Foo Bar, but I don't think many people would get it.
Your comment sounded to me like it was specifically designed to diminish the importance AllTheWeb's claim, in favor of Google.
I think you're right, except for the "in favor of Google" part. Timothy said, "pages indexed is not the only measure of a search engine and probably isn't even the most important." AllTheWeb claims that their page index is big, and Timothy is reality-checking that claim.
I think Slashdot editors get too snippy too often in their story posts. But this isn't one of those occasions.
Actually, no, he's right. Apple found that it was more cost-effective to port the parts of the Mac Toolbox that QT needed, than it would be for them to port QT to use the native Win32 API.
If you're talking about GUI elements, then I'm with you-- for QuickTime Player. But are you talking about the QuickTime library itself? I don't believe there's any Mac-specific code in there, at least that I know of.
Why on earth would Apple not want to immediately integrate its new video editing holdings into Quicktime as completely as possible as immediately as possible?
Rayz, Chalice, and Shake are not editing programs. They're compositors. Big, big difference.
Nobody needs QuickTime for a compositor, except possibly to support reading and writing of image formats. And Shake, Chalice, and Rayz already have those problems solved.
(At this point, you may almost almost call Quicktime a full fledged operating system. The thing is such a beast that i have heard it said that Apple does not actually port Quicktime to Windows-- that instead, they wrote a limited Wine-like "emulation" layer translating all the parts of the Macintosh APIs that Quicktime uses into the equivilent parts of the Windows APIs)
Are you just making stuff up at this point, or what?
have you used quicktime on windows? IT's FOUL!
Meh. Apart from the typical Windows installer-- click "next" thirty-seven times to install this software-- there's absolutely nothing wrong with QuickTime for Windows.
I don't mean to be rude, but you just wasted about 600 bytes talking about Mercedes. Maybe you missed the fact that comparing Apple to Mercedes is just a rhetorical construction. Are you trying to say that it's a flawed comparison? So f'ing what? All comparisons are flawed when examined closely enough.
It's a common trick to try to say someone is wrong by finding fault with the object of his or her comparison. It's just a variation on the old "straw man" technique.
And it's lame.
Apple is elitist in a different sense to what I would think of, but yeah, you're right.
Yeah, I think you're assigning a different meaning to "elitist" than the one I'm using. In your context, "elitist" means oriented toward power users. By that definition, I would call Linux (and even moreso, BSD) an elitist operating system: in largest part, Linux and BSD (like many other UNIX variants or derivatives) make no concession to new or inexperienced users. RTFM, baby.
Windows, of course, is the OS equivalent of Wal-Mart.
He's probably also wondering when Apple is going to port OS X to Intel hardware.
Heh. After last week's micro-war on apple.slashdot.org about that, this comment holds a special place in my heart. I wish I'd seen it before I posted to this story, so I could mod it up.
Realistically, the number of extra iPods they'd sell with Windows support is far greater than the number of extra computers they'd sell because of the iPod connection.
You're forgetting one thing. Apple Computer is made up of elitists.
I don't mean that as a dig. I mean it literally. The folks who run Apple Computer-- and lots of people who just work there-- are quite happy with their 5% market share. (Although 10% would be nice, and they're looking to get it.) They hold the opinion that the best, highest quality products aren't for everyone. They point to Mercedes as an example of this principle. Not only are Mercedes cars more expensive than Hyundai cars, they're also better engineered and built. Ditto Apple.
As long as you guys talk about Apple in terms of pure profit-and-loss, you're not going to be getting the whole picture. They're a for-profit corporation, yeah, but they're doing quite well making highly finished products for a narrow market segment. Why rock that boat?