I keep forgetting that another of Java's faults is the completely arbitrary requirement for users to configure its memory requirements, despite the fact most users will have no idea how to do this, what legitimate requirements a program might have, and even that they're supposed to do this at all.
I think it's ironic you accuse the grandparent of being an "ID:10-T". I'd say that moniker is properly deserved of the person who thought users should be doing this.
I don't think it has anything to do with coolness.
Java the language is actually fine. I don't know many people with major issues with it (at least, not compared to other mainstream programming languages - I'm not talking scripting languages here, so Python and Ruby zealots need not reply.) It's a little verbose, and it's imperfect, but it's an average language. It can certainly be improved, but I'd prefer it to C++ or even Objective C, if natively compiled and linked with a decent library.
Java the library, on the other hand, is a poorly organized and overly large confusing mess. It's hard to find the exact classes you need without having an intimate knowledge of the entire library, something hard to do because it's just so large.
Java the run time environment is slow, it uses memory poorly and programs generally take an age to load on all VMs, and vary in speed depending on the quality of the VM.
Java the portable environment is clumsy and eschews industry standards. Portable, standardized, solutions exist for many applications that Java deliberately ignores, from the POSIX APIs (Java doesn't even give you access to environment variables any more) to OpenGL (which Java deliberately ignores in favour of Sun's "higher" level wrappers.)
Java the system forces you to write portable applications, so Java is unusable for many small, one off, tasks. As a basic example, you can't write a one-off CGI in Java (the load time and lack of POSIX features makes that impossible), the "proper" way to use Java in this instance is to use a full blown application server like Tomcat. But if you're writing something small, that's simply overkill. Note: please don't respond saying "You're just using the wrong language", I know that, that's precisely the point, because of a few dumb design decisions, Java isn't suited to this, and those design decisions appear, for the most part, to be arbitrary and not in any way complementary to the system.
Java the web plug-in has, in the past, been unreliable and prone to crashing the container browser. While these issues have arguably been fixed in more recent environments, they've still left a sore taste in the mouth of anyone using them. Certain features, such as simple website authentication, generally become PITAs with Java applets because those applets rarely interface with the browser well enough, forcing the user to repeatedly re-enter usernames and passwords, or the developer to work around the issue with complex alternative authentication systems.
Java isn't cool or uncool. Java just has a bad reputation, a reputation justified by various design issues that all serve to reduce the number of applications for which you'd want to use it. It's fairly good at the "giant web services application" area, it seems to suck for the most part elsewhere.
I wonder if Shawn Fanning ever realized that this was the logical end point of the revolution he started - deliberately create a network that makes it easy to infringe artist's rights and makes it difficult to identify specific infringers, and you end up with a situation where the innocent - be it "every broadband user" (as proposed by El Reg and the EFF - I'm serious, both are proposing the solution to P2P is a compulsory broadband tax) or in this case, "every student", ends up having to pay for the music instead, with the RIAA and MPAA desperately leveraging any single point of liability they can find.
Kind of sucks, doesn't it? Everyone suffers because two groups - artists and copyright infringers - decide to take everything to the most extreme extents they can.
This is why NASA is such good value for money. Thanks to a few billion dollars worth of satellites and other space craft, this light can finally reach our eyes.
Copyright isn't about preventing the passing on of information, it's about the passing on of a particular representation of that information, a representation that took time and money to produce.
Cable companies are against "a la carte" programming because the costs of distributing content are largely fixed. Someone watching three programmes a month costs as much to support at someone who has the TV on all the time. Indeed, it costs almost as much to have a home out there that's wired for cable but isn't using it as it does to support a paying customer - only the content has to be paid for.
Someone who barely uses the roads will have an entirely different insurance profile to someone who is driving at rush hour every day on the busiest roads. To an insurance company, if they can fine tune insurance rates on a person by person basis, to make the payments higher than the payouts for everyone, this benefits the insurance company.
Insurance companies are not interested in subsidizing any customers. It is far better to lose a customer than to subsidize them. Unlike cable, insurance companies increase their costs the more customers they have, and the higher the risk customers, the more those costs increase.
If Progressive can lose a loss making customer to State Farm, they'll be happy about that. If Progressive can put something in cars that rewards expensive-to-support customers for better driving, that successfully encourages better driving, then Progressive is also happy about it, and can reduce their premiums, pay out more to share holders, and pay their staff better. It's win-win-win for everyone except, potentially, for civil liberties.
No, The GPL is a contract that grants a license if certain obligations are done.
No, it's not a contract. You don't have to agree to do anything - remember, you don't have the right to distribute binaries without source by default, because you don't have the right to distribute binaries.
BSD is more of a license (I think the leaving of copyright notices is required).
There is absolutely no difference in terms of how both licenses only permit you to perform some acts with the code. In the case of the BSDs, you may distribute binaries without source, but you must credit the copyright holders if you do. The sole difference between them from a legal standpoint is that the BSD license gives you permission to do more things you wouldn't otherwise be able to do than the GPL does.
Using GPL software does not require accepting the GPL contract
license
but once one starts to ditribute it, then one enters into (an implied) contract with the authors.
No, there is no contract. You're not obligated to do anything, the authors have merely given you permission to distribute the code with source (and no permission to distribute it without it.)
There's nothing contractual about the GPL. It's a license.
No, EULA's are not compulsory. What they do is attempt to make agreeing to an EULA unavoidable before you can physically manage to install and run the software.
I didn't say they were compulsory, I said they were "compulsory", ie in practice, if you want to use the software, you MUST agree to it.
They're simply rejecting to notion of supporting real, after real tried to license Fairplay.
No, they're making threats of potential legal action, and considering changing the firmware, to lock Real out of the system.
And they are trying to lock iPod users to the iTMS (or more specifically, systems that exclusively support the iPod) as the only legal source of downloadable music for that platform. The fact someone can also build up a collection by buying CDs isn't relevent to a discussion about downloadable music.
Great, now we're going to have hysterical articles from Annie Jacobsen about Syrian musicians who are trying to use "Garageband" on a PowerBook while in flight.
It was terrifying. Each followed a ritual where they would drink a large glass of iced tea and then immediately, 30 minutes later, went to the bathroom. For what purpose I wondered? It became clear when they pulled out seven large PowerBooks. "Allah be praised for such a wonderful tool!" cried one, launching something called GarageBand. Garage, Band. Garages - the traditional location for the terrorist to manufacture a bomb, far from prying eyes, and bands - what you'd use to wrap around a bomb to keep it together? So obvious! And with the PowerBook's infamous exploding batteries I realised it straight away - these were no laptops, these were the bombs, the devices they intended to use to blow us to kingdom come!
I called over an air steward. She sympathized with me. "Yes, it does look sort of suspicious if you're paranoid" she agreed, "but actually they're just musicians". "Is there an air marshall on board?" I asked. "Look, it's all in hand, there's nothing to worry about" she replied, clearly terrified out of her mind.
My worst suspicions were confirmed when she quickly, 45 minutes later, spoke to a man on the back row. He came up to me. "There's nothing to worry about, I'm an US Air Marshall ma'am, if anything were to happen I'd be here". "Thank god!" I cried, jumping up with relief, "An air marshall! There's an air marshall on board! We don't have to worry about those shifty-looking Arabian featured terrorists!"
The GPL isn't a contract because one party (the user) isn't obliged to do anything they weren't already legally obliged to do. The GPL licenses copyrighted material, that is, it provides permission to use it in certain ways that were, without the licensing, illegal.
An EULA is arguably a contract. The GPL is a license, not a contract. It's an important distinction.
For what it's worth, while the GPL is a license (it only gives rights, it doesn't take any away, not even as an exchange. Note, I said rights. I know the less intelligent amongst the BSD advocates will say that the GPL "takes away" rights in that it doesn't let you include your code in a proprietary product, but actually that isn't a legal right to begin with, so the GPL can't take it away), EULAs are "license agreements". Legally, there is a distinction, an EULA arguably falls under the contracts category, not under the license category.
The major distinctions being: EULAs are generally "compulsory", in that you must agree to them simply to use the software (using the software, by itself, is a fair use right, so your rights are immediately curtailed), and EULAs usually place limitations on how you can use the software and what you may do to back the software up, usually giving you less rights than you started with.
People read the GPL like it's an EULA, but it isn't. The GPL basically says "Ok, you weren't allowed to do this, that, and the other, but we're going to let you do this and that." An EULA reads more like "You were able to do this, that, and the other, but we don't like that, so from now on you can only do this and the other, not that, and even then, when you do the other, you can only do it like...".
The point I'm making is that simply because a license might get legally enforced or struck down, doesn't mean that License Agreements will be likewise. I'd say the odds are in favour of the GPL being held up, because it would be an obvious restriction of an artist's rights if it wasn't, but EULA's are another matter because they impose upon consumers and take rights away, and that should, when coupled with basic "First Sale Doctrine" type precendents, make them invalid in most cases.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I do read Slashdot, and that's almost as good, right?
What they're saying is quite easy to understand actually: Kerry didn't specifically vote against any of these systems. He voted against bills that included them, but had those bills been specifically for those weapon systems rather than simply about budgeting or other miscellaneous issues, Kerry's vote would most likely have been different.
You could use similar logic to that of the Republican who penned the original diatribe to argue that miscellananeous politician you don't like voted to abolish the military, or voted to abolish schools, simply by finding an omnibus bill that includes, amongst other things, funding for either that the politician voted against. The probable reason the Repug who penned the thing cut and pasted earlier didn't is because it would be even more obviously bogus.
Finally, Snopes is not attacking the Republicans at the end, it's pointing out that the diatribe it's debunking doesn't add up. It's somewhat absurd for any party to accuse the other of trying to sink some weapon system, when that other party has never, in practice, done anything of the sort, and when the party making the accusation has actually made a conscious decision to abolish these things.
If you've read Snopes for any length of time, you'll note any bias tends to be to the right, not left, blindly republishing gushing glurge about Bush with a truth sticker despite a lack of any reason why anyone would want to find out the "truth" about it. In this case though, they've found the facts don't fit the accusation.
I furrow my eyebrows at anyone who is surprised by people's responses to REAL's vigilantism
I may have missed something but what vigilantism?
Actually, that's another thing that pisses me off, the zealot's insistance on using the most extreme language to describe something they'd never normally describe that way. Real has, on a basic, technical level, worked out how Apple's only available DRM scheme works so that their software, under the control of an iPod's owner, can use that DRM scheme and put music on that iPod without it being easily transferable (and hence without the music industry throwing a hissy fit.)
That's all. Hardly "vigilantism", "stealing", or even "raping" (as one swivel-eyed zealot claimed on one forum I read - what is it with computer users that they insist on devaluing one of the worst crimes short of killing someone can commit against another human being?)
I'm sorry, I replied to your point and then kind of meandered, and it could kind of look like I'm responding to you when I'm actually responding to a more general issue. If I gave that impression I apologise.
Perhaps those people shouldn't have signed the petition then? I'm sure they thought they were being "clever", but generally speaking, if you press a button saying "I agree", knowing exactly what it means, without even the slightest amount of coercion, then you're going to just have to put up with it when the maker of that button claims you pushed it.
I must admit I find this pretty bizarre and can only attribute the hostility to the fact that so many people seem to blindly love Apple, and, with some justification (the whole Malware for Windows clients BS, even though this is no longer something Real engages in), hate Real Networks. I think it boils down to exactly that.
Under normal circumstances, most Slashdotters and others would be in favour of being able to play whatever their iPods are capable of, and be furious at the notion of a company actually seeking to prevent that by mis-using the law, as Apple is proposing. Having a choice would usually be considered a good thing.
But today, no. No, it's suddenly no longer my iPod or your iPod, it still belongs, apparently, to Apple, and Real is just evil to try to sell iPod users music.
I don't think Apple is the great source of goodness the zealots maintain. In this case, they're demonstrably trying to lock iTMS buyers to the iPod platform and iPod users to the iTMS music delivery system, so creating a cycle preventing users from migrating to alternatives. Apple's behaviour in the past has also been suspect, from the look and feel lawsuits of the 1980s, to the arbitrary hardware locks of recent years (from iDVD to the Blue and White G3 "Simple G4 upgrades disabled in firmware" hack that they had to reverse rapidly)
I love much of the technology that comes out of Culpertino, but - despite having four Macs in various forms - I'm less and less inclined to want to continue throwing my money in that direction.
And in the meantime, I'll continue to act with bemusement, surprise, and concern when Slashbots leap on the whole "Real has no right to sell me music I can play on something I bought" bandwagon. They're all lined up and naked waiting for the Culpertino dominatrix to spank them. Why?
One thing to be aware of is that cut and pasting Republican trolls without doing the barest minimum of research to check them can make you look like an idiot.
I hold no brief for Kerry, he's not my kind of politician, he doesn't appear to share my values, and he hasn't been tough enough against the current administration. But I'm absolutely amazed at the level of lies and distortions the right is willing to entertain to try to discredit him.
I found a useful workaround was to look for media and formats that are relatively obscure. Laserdisc still has a reputation, which means it's still pricy on eBay et al.
I got a CED and CED Player when I wanted to get the original version. This is a format RCA came out with in the early eighties and it died a quick death. You can get players on eBay, and the discs themselves, extremely cheaply, and what makes it even better is that the media itself is solid state (not magnetic), so as long as it hasn't been scratched, it will look as good as it did in 1981-3 (or whenever it was when it was made.)
Now, that's not fantastic, but it's reasonable. Also if the format you buy supports stereo, then chances are you're getting a Dolby ProLogic (5.1) soundtrack (because that's what was on the original reels, these being transfered to video more or less unchanged.) Feed it into a modern receiver, and you're good to go.
About the only major downsides are the resolutions and the fact what you buy will be full screen.
Re:Some of the changes (possible spoilers)
on
Star Wars on DVD
·
· Score: 4, Funny
My understanding is that Lucas has been fairly concerned about the criticism of the "Greedo shooting first" thing and has modified it quite a bit in the new DVD version. I took a sneak peek at the modified script.
Essentially, Greedo will take Solo at gun-point to a small room and torture Solo for about five minutes. At the end of this sequence, Solo is able to get an arm free and knocks over a rack of sharp pointy metal rods, which fall on Greedo knocking him out, but otherwise leaving him uninjured.
Solo then gets up, considers shooting Greedo, but then says "No, I cannot shoot you Greedo. That would be decending to the same depths as Jabba the Hutt. One day you will look back on this, on what you did today, and you will be filled with regret and remorse. When that day comes, consider it your punishment, for you will feel so much shame you will wish I had killed you."
With this, he puts back on his loin-cloth and round glasses, and hastily makes his way back to the Millenium Falcon.
None of them. That's the whole point. Real, right now, is the only DRM music provider that lets you put its music on iPods and the iPods competitors. iTMS doesn't let you do that.
This is why Apple wants to kill the service. Someone who buys music from Real can upgrade from their iPod to most other types of MP3 player and still play the music they've bought. Someone who buys music from iTMS can only upgrade to a new iPod.
what makes you think somewhat cheap songs are going to make people switch players?
I'm not even sure where to begin with this comment.
I said that if Real has a large enough installed base - that is, a signficant number of people whose music collection is primarily from Real, and Apple cripples the iPod, users will switch to Real-supported MP3 players. This isn't because their music is "cheap", it's because most of their music no longer works on an iPod. Their iPod, thanks to Apple, will suddenly become a brick.
What makes YOU think someone would continue to own an iPod if it doesn't play their paid-for music collection?
Let me illustrate a scenario:
Let me illustrate one instead. Bob buys hundreds of songs in Real, 192kbps, format. He buys them because they work on his iPod. He hasn't updated the firmware, because he knows that'll fuck up his ability to play his music collection.
His iPod becomes obsolete. Perhaps because of disk space, or because he needs something smaller, or maybe it just died.
What is he going to do?
a) Buy another iPod, knowing it will already contain firmware designed to prevent him from playing most of the music he has, and rebuy every single song he has, knowing that some of the music will not even be available any more.
b) Say "Screw you Apple", and buy something else? I mean, who buys an MP3 player, no matter how nicely designed it is, that will not play their own paid-for music?
This, to get back to the original point, is why Real is trying to expand its user base. It wants enough people to own large Real music databases for Apple to be committing commercial suicide by crippling the iPod. Whether the strategies they're adopting will get them there is another debate, but the basic logic that Apple cannot lock them out without it backfiring if Real has a significant enough market share is certainly a very reasonable one.
You do know this is absolute balderdash don't you?
If Real reprogrammed their code to spit out un-DRM'd AACs, or MP3s, Apple would still have to support this format.
Apple's problem is not with Real producing files that can be played on an iPod, it's that they've locked those files using the DRM system built into iPods. This is about DRM, not file support.
At which point, if Real has a large enough installed base, Apple's potential iPod buyers switch to Real-supported MP3 players.
This is actually Apple's problem with the whole thing. If you can buy online music that's platform agnostic, then you're not going to have a music collection that locks you to iPods and to upgrading exclusively to iPods (and a handful of non-competitive licensed alternatives.)
The only thing Real can do is get a large enough installed base so Apple is genuinely hurt by any actions it performs to prevent Real users from using iPods to play their music.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's ironic you accuse the grandparent of being an "ID:10-T". I'd say that moniker is properly deserved of the person who thought users should be doing this.
Java the language is actually fine. I don't know many people with major issues with it (at least, not compared to other mainstream programming languages - I'm not talking scripting languages here, so Python and Ruby zealots need not reply.) It's a little verbose, and it's imperfect, but it's an average language. It can certainly be improved, but I'd prefer it to C++ or even Objective C, if natively compiled and linked with a decent library.
Java the library, on the other hand, is a poorly organized and overly large confusing mess. It's hard to find the exact classes you need without having an intimate knowledge of the entire library, something hard to do because it's just so large.
Java the run time environment is slow, it uses memory poorly and programs generally take an age to load on all VMs, and vary in speed depending on the quality of the VM.
Java the portable environment is clumsy and eschews industry standards. Portable, standardized, solutions exist for many applications that Java deliberately ignores, from the POSIX APIs (Java doesn't even give you access to environment variables any more) to OpenGL (which Java deliberately ignores in favour of Sun's "higher" level wrappers.)
Java the system forces you to write portable applications, so Java is unusable for many small, one off, tasks. As a basic example, you can't write a one-off CGI in Java (the load time and lack of POSIX features makes that impossible), the "proper" way to use Java in this instance is to use a full blown application server like Tomcat. But if you're writing something small, that's simply overkill. Note: please don't respond saying "You're just using the wrong language", I know that, that's precisely the point, because of a few dumb design decisions, Java isn't suited to this, and those design decisions appear, for the most part, to be arbitrary and not in any way complementary to the system.
Java the web plug-in has, in the past, been unreliable and prone to crashing the container browser. While these issues have arguably been fixed in more recent environments, they've still left a sore taste in the mouth of anyone using them. Certain features, such as simple website authentication, generally become PITAs with Java applets because those applets rarely interface with the browser well enough, forcing the user to repeatedly re-enter usernames and passwords, or the developer to work around the issue with complex alternative authentication systems.
Java isn't cool or uncool. Java just has a bad reputation, a reputation justified by various design issues that all serve to reduce the number of applications for which you'd want to use it. It's fairly good at the "giant web services application" area, it seems to suck for the most part elsewhere.
Kind of sucks, doesn't it? Everyone suffers because two groups - artists and copyright infringers - decide to take everything to the most extreme extents they can.
I'll get my coat.
You know, they could always land in the daytime.
Copyright isn't about preventing the passing on of information, it's about the passing on of a particular representation of that information, a representation that took time and money to produce.
Someone who barely uses the roads will have an entirely different insurance profile to someone who is driving at rush hour every day on the busiest roads. To an insurance company, if they can fine tune insurance rates on a person by person basis, to make the payments higher than the payouts for everyone, this benefits the insurance company.
Insurance companies are not interested in subsidizing any customers. It is far better to lose a customer than to subsidize them. Unlike cable, insurance companies increase their costs the more customers they have, and the higher the risk customers, the more those costs increase.
If Progressive can lose a loss making customer to State Farm, they'll be happy about that. If Progressive can put something in cars that rewards expensive-to-support customers for better driving, that successfully encourages better driving, then Progressive is also happy about it, and can reduce their premiums, pay out more to share holders, and pay their staff better. It's win-win-win for everyone except, potentially, for civil liberties.
There's nothing contractual about the GPL. It's a license.
And they are trying to lock iPod users to the iTMS (or more specifically, systems that exclusively support the iPod) as the only legal source of downloadable music for that platform. The fact someone can also build up a collection by buying CDs isn't relevent to a discussion about downloadable music.
An EULA is arguably a contract. The GPL is a license, not a contract. It's an important distinction.
BTW what the hell is "Blink love"? I thought you were pointing out some typo in my message until I did a search and couldn't find it anywhere.
The major distinctions being: EULAs are generally "compulsory", in that you must agree to them simply to use the software (using the software, by itself, is a fair use right, so your rights are immediately curtailed), and EULAs usually place limitations on how you can use the software and what you may do to back the software up, usually giving you less rights than you started with.
People read the GPL like it's an EULA, but it isn't. The GPL basically says "Ok, you weren't allowed to do this, that, and the other, but we're going to let you do this and that." An EULA reads more like "You were able to do this, that, and the other, but we don't like that, so from now on you can only do this and the other, not that, and even then, when you do the other, you can only do it like ...".
The point I'm making is that simply because a license might get legally enforced or struck down, doesn't mean that License Agreements will be likewise. I'd say the odds are in favour of the GPL being held up, because it would be an obvious restriction of an artist's rights if it wasn't, but EULA's are another matter because they impose upon consumers and take rights away, and that should, when coupled with basic "First Sale Doctrine" type precendents, make them invalid in most cases.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I do read Slashdot, and that's almost as good, right?
You could use similar logic to that of the Republican who penned the original diatribe to argue that miscellananeous politician you don't like voted to abolish the military, or voted to abolish schools, simply by finding an omnibus bill that includes, amongst other things, funding for either that the politician voted against. The probable reason the Repug who penned the thing cut and pasted earlier didn't is because it would be even more obviously bogus.
Finally, Snopes is not attacking the Republicans at the end, it's pointing out that the diatribe it's debunking doesn't add up. It's somewhat absurd for any party to accuse the other of trying to sink some weapon system, when that other party has never, in practice, done anything of the sort, and when the party making the accusation has actually made a conscious decision to abolish these things.
If you've read Snopes for any length of time, you'll note any bias tends to be to the right, not left, blindly republishing gushing glurge about Bush with a truth sticker despite a lack of any reason why anyone would want to find out the "truth" about it. In this case though, they've found the facts don't fit the accusation.
Actually, that's another thing that pisses me off, the zealot's insistance on using the most extreme language to describe something they'd never normally describe that way. Real has, on a basic, technical level, worked out how Apple's only available DRM scheme works so that their software, under the control of an iPod's owner, can use that DRM scheme and put music on that iPod without it being easily transferable (and hence without the music industry throwing a hissy fit.)
That's all. Hardly "vigilantism", "stealing", or even "raping" (as one swivel-eyed zealot claimed on one forum I read - what is it with computer users that they insist on devaluing one of the worst crimes short of killing someone can commit against another human being?)
I'm sorry, I replied to your point and then kind of meandered, and it could kind of look like I'm responding to you when I'm actually responding to a more general issue. If I gave that impression I apologise.
I must admit I find this pretty bizarre and can only attribute the hostility to the fact that so many people seem to blindly love Apple, and, with some justification (the whole Malware for Windows clients BS, even though this is no longer something Real engages in), hate Real Networks. I think it boils down to exactly that.
Under normal circumstances, most Slashdotters and others would be in favour of being able to play whatever their iPods are capable of, and be furious at the notion of a company actually seeking to prevent that by mis-using the law, as Apple is proposing. Having a choice would usually be considered a good thing.
But today, no. No, it's suddenly no longer my iPod or your iPod, it still belongs, apparently, to Apple, and Real is just evil to try to sell iPod users music.
I don't think Apple is the great source of goodness the zealots maintain. In this case, they're demonstrably trying to lock iTMS buyers to the iPod platform and iPod users to the iTMS music delivery system, so creating a cycle preventing users from migrating to alternatives. Apple's behaviour in the past has also been suspect, from the look and feel lawsuits of the 1980s, to the arbitrary hardware locks of recent years (from iDVD to the Blue and White G3 "Simple G4 upgrades disabled in firmware" hack that they had to reverse rapidly)
I love much of the technology that comes out of Culpertino, but - despite having four Macs in various forms - I'm less and less inclined to want to continue throwing my money in that direction.
And in the meantime, I'll continue to act with bemusement, surprise, and concern when Slashbots leap on the whole "Real has no right to sell me music I can play on something I bought" bandwagon. They're all lined up and naked waiting for the Culpertino dominatrix to spank them. Why?
I hold no brief for Kerry, he's not my kind of politician, he doesn't appear to share my values, and he hasn't been tough enough against the current administration. But I'm absolutely amazed at the level of lies and distortions the right is willing to entertain to try to discredit him.
I got a CED and CED Player when I wanted to get the original version. This is a format RCA came out with in the early eighties and it died a quick death. You can get players on eBay, and the discs themselves, extremely cheaply, and what makes it even better is that the media itself is solid state (not magnetic), so as long as it hasn't been scratched, it will look as good as it did in 1981-3 (or whenever it was when it was made.)
Now, that's not fantastic, but it's reasonable. Also if the format you buy supports stereo, then chances are you're getting a Dolby ProLogic (5.1) soundtrack (because that's what was on the original reels, these being transfered to video more or less unchanged.) Feed it into a modern receiver, and you're good to go.
About the only major downsides are the resolutions and the fact what you buy will be full screen.
Essentially, Greedo will take Solo at gun-point to a small room and torture Solo for about five minutes. At the end of this sequence, Solo is able to get an arm free and knocks over a rack of sharp pointy metal rods, which fall on Greedo knocking him out, but otherwise leaving him uninjured.
Solo then gets up, considers shooting Greedo, but then says "No, I cannot shoot you Greedo. That would be decending to the same depths as Jabba the Hutt. One day you will look back on this, on what you did today, and you will be filled with regret and remorse. When that day comes, consider it your punishment, for you will feel so much shame you will wish I had killed you."
With this, he puts back on his loin-cloth and round glasses, and hastily makes his way back to the Millenium Falcon.
This is why Apple wants to kill the service. Someone who buys music from Real can upgrade from their iPod to most other types of MP3 player and still play the music they've bought. Someone who buys music from iTMS can only upgrade to a new iPod.
I said that if Real has a large enough installed base - that is, a signficant number of people whose music collection is primarily from Real, and Apple cripples the iPod, users will switch to Real-supported MP3 players. This isn't because their music is "cheap", it's because most of their music no longer works on an iPod. Their iPod, thanks to Apple, will suddenly become a brick.
What makes YOU think someone would continue to own an iPod if it doesn't play their paid-for music collection?
Let me illustrate one instead. Bob buys hundreds of songs in Real, 192kbps, format. He buys them because they work on his iPod. He hasn't updated the firmware, because he knows that'll fuck up his ability to play his music collection.His iPod becomes obsolete. Perhaps because of disk space, or because he needs something smaller, or maybe it just died.
What is he going to do?
a) Buy another iPod, knowing it will already contain firmware designed to prevent him from playing most of the music he has, and rebuy every single song he has, knowing that some of the music will not even be available any more.
b) Say "Screw you Apple", and buy something else? I mean, who buys an MP3 player, no matter how nicely designed it is, that will not play their own paid-for music?
This, to get back to the original point, is why Real is trying to expand its user base. It wants enough people to own large Real music databases for Apple to be committing commercial suicide by crippling the iPod. Whether the strategies they're adopting will get them there is another debate, but the basic logic that Apple cannot lock them out without it backfiring if Real has a significant enough market share is certainly a very reasonable one.
If Real reprogrammed their code to spit out un-DRM'd AACs, or MP3s, Apple would still have to support this format.
Apple's problem is not with Real producing files that can be played on an iPod, it's that they've locked those files using the DRM system built into iPods. This is about DRM, not file support.
This is actually Apple's problem with the whole thing. If you can buy online music that's platform agnostic, then you're not going to have a music collection that locks you to iPods and to upgrading exclusively to iPods (and a handful of non-competitive licensed alternatives.)
The only thing Real can do is get a large enough installed base so Apple is genuinely hurt by any actions it performs to prevent Real users from using iPods to play their music.