"So yes, I give the UK a lot of respect for standing alone against the Nazi War Machine during that period."
Indeed, they do deserve that credit.
But what about, you know, the little ones the Nazis did their war beta-testing with? I quote Wikipedia on the Spanish Civil War: "[...] became in some cases a world war by proxy, with Germany in particular using the war as a rehearsal for many of the blitzkrieg tactics it later used in the war in Europe."
Just a sample where 22 tons of bombing "tests" were performed: "The bombing of Guernica was an aerial attack on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War by planes of the German Luftwaffe "Condor Legion" and subordinate Italian Fascists from the Corpo Truppe Volontarie expeditionary force organized as Aviazione Legionaria. The raid was called Operation Rügen and resulted in widespread destruction and civilian deaths in the Republican held town of Guernica in the Basque Country."
Oh, and later on, no one did come to liberate us or anything. We should be getting some kudos as well, we did live 36 years of dictatorship under the Nazi beta-tester friends. The dictator was actually alive and the dictatorship in place when I was born.
Actually, as an extra bit of trivia, it was an MI6 officer who flew the soon-to-be dictator to Morocco to run the war: " A British MI6 intelligence agent, Major Hugh Pollard, then flew Franco to Spanish Morocco [...]"
I do think we deserve kudos as well and we didn't get the USA nor Britain nor France to help...
"What WOULD have been impressive:
- A new headless Mac Desktop that fits between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro.
- An iPhone Nano, about the size of the old iPod Nano with 1-2gb of memory for $99-$149.
- A Mac tablet running full Leopard with multitouch. Bonus points if it's under $1500.
- An iMac with a curved monitor like what's been shown at CES.
- Price drops on the iPhone, iPod Touch, or Mac Mini.
In a word: meh."
Feel free to go to http://www.apple.com/jobs and send your awesome CV, in 9 months we want to see all these products delivered. You'll be the product manager in the development of said products, overseeing the bunch of idiots that work at Apple that somehow couldn't get that out of the door in time. Good luck. Free hint: the CFO will want to see you immediately to find out how to recap the costs of development of these awesome products at that price. Oh, and drop all that insider info to iSupply, they also want to know. *Chuckle*
"Sadly, it will almost certainly be worse -- it'll probably require payment of a large fee to AT&T, AND require approval of your specific app by AT&T itself. So you can forget freeware, anything remotely controversial, or that doesn't mesh with their Grand ARPU-increasing strategy of the week. (ARPU = Average Revenue Per User)"
Come on, I'd say it's pointless and whinning until it is released and the final terms are known. It reminds me too much of the "no-SDK" whinning. A decent SDK takes time. You run the risk of getting this kind of whinning: "Yeah, they released this SDK along with the iPhone, but it's beta software at best, the API keeps changing, there are a lot of system updates, my iPhone keeps crashing and OMG there are exploits in the wild. They should have waited until it was ready, sheesh."
Here you have a glowing preview of hands-on 10-minute usage: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2082444,00.as p
And no, I wouldn't consider PCMag to be a 'fanboi' site at all...
Some excerpts:
"For the most, it was an absolute revelation. Seeing the device in action is one thing--but actually using it is another. Each application is impressive in its own right, from photo-management software to the Safari Web browser, but it's the overall touch-screen interface that takes the breath away."
"The rest of the interface requires no practice whatsoever." [everything except the virtual keyboard]
The first is a very positive comment, the second... a killer.
You know, when the original iPod was revealed, I was sorely disappointed and ruled out any possible success, too expensive, bulky, etc. Typical NW.LSTAN.L crowd.
Me, along with the/. folks, has been proven spectaculary wrong.
When the iPhone was revealed, I was quite impressed, but after the RDF faded and details, specs and price were digested upon, I have deja vu. I think the device too bulky, overpriced, no 3G support, crowded market, blah, blah, blah... Typical DIINAGT crowd (guess that one)
All my instincts tell me the iPhone is wrong... but reading previews such as this one... Um, think of how many PHBs are there that cannot configure his/her email client properly or many other 'simple' tasks that call techs to "fix their computers" again and again. They obviously cannot figure out SmartPhone apps or config that much. A phone that is instantly usable will be a success no matter what. Even if it's a 0.5% of the market.
Man, it's only a 0.9 version... 1.0 and 2.0 will come out and the iPhone Nano (as many have pointed out) as well, we'll see... Hell, even if its a Cube, they can always dumb it down and release an unlocked consumer $299 version... it's not that the know-how or the patents are going away.
"You'll also notice that the Japanese have almost universally shunned any form factor other than the clamshell... just as we have"
Yeah, but not in Europe, no.
While I personally prefer clamshell style phones, in Europe candy-bar is either king or head-to-head (around 17/28 offers on Spanish Vodafone-subsidized consumer phones are clamshell http://tienda.vodafone.es/do/catalogo/moviles/todo s ), hell, not so long ago Nokia candy-bars were nearly universal around here...
Do not underestimate the phone market, it is HUGE, and there are many massive markets besides the US and Japan, Europe is no small fry (GSM / GPRS is truly universal in Europe and it was spearheaded here). On the other hand, UMTS and beyond is yet to gain a significant foothold in the mass-market consumer phone european market, no matter where the markedroids would like UMTS (and others) to be, it is nowhere as ubiquitous as GPRS/GSM.
3G is still to become what it's meant to become, no true killer-apps, no user critical-mass, expensive provider fees, expensive provider fees perception, sub-par network coverage (heck, my GPRS phone sound quality and coverage runs rings around my CIO's 3G exec phone), FUD about the VoIP and other data services, etc.
Don't discount other markets in the phone business, don't discount legacy, don't discount 2G, don't discount 2.5G...
The tax is applicable to *all* digital support mediums except hard-disks and DSL lines.
That includes but is not limited to: compact flash cards, cell-phones and -yeah- even memory-sticks. AFAIK, iPods and similar devices are actually included as well.
If I were an enterprising consumer electronics manufacturer, I would happily repackage iPod or the like as "portable" HDs and have the "installation process" magically rewrite the firmware to "enable" the "portable HD" to have some other "unsupported" features such as on-the-go music playing. "It was an accident, the developer who has made the mistake has been fired, we'll "fix" it in the next release, really".
It is also proportional to the storage capacity.
One of the most outrageous consequences is that if I legally buy a song on a legal download service, say iTunes, I pay for the right to listen to it, and I pay again for the iPod and again for the backup CD I burn the DRM'd files on as a backup.
I wouldn't call it that "transparent", the AutomaticOpaquenessFilter(tm) has kicked in:
We are currently unable to serve your request
We apologize, but an error occurred and your request could not be completed.
This error has been logged. If you have additional information that you believe may have caused this error please report the problem here.
Haldeman deserves it for sure...
on
2006 Nebula Awards
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Haldeman is a very good writer (read Forever War) and I think quite 'underrated' as well. I will definitely buy 'Camouflage' to read what this fuss is all about. I wondered at the content of the Forever War novel until I knew he is a Vietnam veteran (if anyone is interested, you can read a bio here and at the usual places).
Reading the finalist listing though, I've seen that there is the damn fine novel 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell' by Susanna Clarke. Very amazing book, superbly written, it even has annotations in essay style, definitely a contender which I recommend to anyone interested in reading a good novel and as a fantasy genre initiation (though I would never define it as 'fantasy').
Even though I put off my judgement until I have read Camouflage, if S. Clarke lost to Haldeman, then it must be a damn fine novel indeed.
(Speaking of runners-up, John C. Wright is also quite good, his Golden Age series give some needed fresh-air to the hard-sf speculative fiction genre.)
Thousands of words have been written about the upcoming Vista OS suckiness, lack of significant innovations, MacOSX features copied and so on. The clear view offered by this video really conveys what words can't do in any way. Geez, we have been doing this in MacOSX for years.
I will show this to my Windows-using friends... Ah, the power of images.
Re:5 Stars Rating Systems are Poor Design
on
More iTunes Math
·
· Score: 1
That's why I use the 5-star rating system in a different way.
In iTunes there is a boolean (checked/unchecked) that you can use as an extra binary digit.
Horrible or bad song: I thrash them Not that good, but still a keeper (it's in a full album or something): unchecked Regular: not rated but checked From 1 to 5: from nice to exceptional
Actually, if a song is nice enough for me to take the seconds to perform the rating means it is worthy.
There goes your gaussian... yeah, I know my values would probably be classified as outliers, but the system works for me, so to Hell with statistics
"6th Avenue Electronics, Boscovs, Bose, Brandsmart,Circuit City, Crutchfield, Electronic Express, Fred Meyer, HH Greggs, J&R, Longs, Meijer, Mobile Planet, Musicland, PC Richards, Radio Shack, RCS EXPERIENCE, Rite Aid, Sam's, Shopko, Sharper Image, Target, Tweeter or Wal-Mart?"
Yeah, I don't live near any of those, actually, parent poster is quite lucky only to need to "drive several hundred miles", I would probable have to fly several hundreds or even thousands of miles to get to one. The original poster question is legitimate, our local retailers usually don't have them in stock (a friend of mine counted herself lucky to be one of the five receiving one last week), nevermind to test on-site.
Some of us kinda, like, live in non-US countries, you know, those places around Mexico an' stuff...
Re:lousy photo storage, so-so MP3 player
on
Video iPod Screen Test
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"And the fact that after all these years, Apple still hasn't figured out how to let you safely remove removable devices without dragging them into the trash can first is sad."
Have you tried to remove a removable device on a PC (say, an USB memory stick)? You need to go to a tiny icon on the task bar, use a contextual menu, and two crazy screens show up with non-intuitive options, etc. Ridiculous.
There is now a new Windows version called Cleaner XL.
Which hasn't been updated in years, has one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen, if chock-full of bugs, has poor streaming support, is nearly obsolete, etc.
From time to time, I discover a new obvious reproduceable bug and dutifully report it to them... only to be answered back: "Purchase a support ticket...". One particular bug in MPEG-1 support that I reported has been sitting at their "desks" for years now. Just check their support forum and you'll see. I wouldn't call Cleaner XL "new"...
Ummmm... I have taken a look at the source code of QT4Linux.
It seems that they are using the OSS faac to do the actual MPEG4 audio encoding, which they have integrated into their QT4L wrapper.
So I suppose that they might be using QT itself for the H.264 part but not for the audio part (the summary is quite misleading). I'm not all that familiar with the source, but this is what it seems.
Note1: On the FAAC site there are the relevant notices of the licensing of MPEG-4 audio
Note2: The QuickTime Pro app in windows is licensed to generate MPEG-4 audio but custom apps aren't
Mmmmm... I really wonder how do they manage MPEG4 audio encoding via QT4Linux...
According to Apple, non-MacOSX OS's are not licensed to export AAC audio using QuickTime due to licensing concerns. According to the developer note, once a suitable license is acquired the interested party then could happily encode to AAC using QuickTime.
I'm dowloading the source code... I'm really curious.
1.- Release a wireless version 2.- Release a version that has coded colored lights inside, to provide feedback and/or show which areas are active, etc. They even own a patent on this. 3.- ? 4.- profit!
Ah, and the gesture apps of MacOSX will soon take advantage of the scrollwheel to capture gesturing commands
Yeah, I am also of this opinion. I have done some feasibility studies of FCP on a medium company. Literally thousands of dollars could be saved by having FCP AppleScriptable. Not anything magical about that, mind you, just that the megabucks could be saved by refraining on the purchase of ultra-expensive custom developed solutions that only have the added value of being able to automate some human-resources intensive tasks.
The GUI widgets in FCP are non-native and this hints that the task of making it AppleScriptable is massive... otherwise Apple would be JustPlainStupid(TM) in my opinion not to implement AppleScript support in FCP. I do pray that they're on it.
Re:I would love a mac, but the pricing is insane
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 1
Oh! And it runs OSX??? Yeah, definitely go for it.
I am convinced that it's a confusion made on purpose. In advertising, not many oversights you can find.
There are some people that fondly remember the good ol' days when Natpser let you freely download MP3s.
In a beer-induced haze, some people vaguely watch the commercial and may come to think that Napster lets you download MP3. Is a WMA Janus-enabled player a *music* player? Yeah. Is it a *MP3* player? Well, yeah, amongst many other things.
The only way I envision the Napster execs can hope to capture a few percent digits of the market is to hope Janus get thoroughly cracked (it will) and their service will allow users to download and keep -albeit ilegally- all the music they want.
Yeah, good business model:
(1) Sign up for a month. (2) Download a gazillion songs. (3) Crack them. (4) Quit Napster forever. (5)...? (6) Keep a gazillion songs for $15 (7) Profit? (8) Napster execs looking stupid
Yeah, I am sure the RIAA will be happy then. Either Napster goes broke or the RIAA will kill it off.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, they do deserve that credit.
But what about, you know, the little ones the Nazis did their war beta-testing with? I quote Wikipedia on the Spanish Civil War:
"[...] became in some cases a world war by proxy, with Germany in particular using the war as a rehearsal for many of the blitzkrieg tactics it later used in the war in Europe."
Just a sample where 22 tons of bombing "tests" were performed:
"The bombing of Guernica was an aerial attack on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War by planes of the German Luftwaffe "Condor Legion" and subordinate Italian Fascists from the Corpo Truppe Volontarie expeditionary force organized as Aviazione Legionaria. The raid was called Operation Rügen and resulted in widespread destruction and civilian deaths in the Republican held town of Guernica in the Basque Country."
Oh, and later on, no one did come to liberate us or anything. We should be getting some kudos as well, we did live 36 years of dictatorship under the Nazi beta-tester friends. The dictator was actually alive and the dictatorship in place when I was born.
Actually, as an extra bit of trivia, it was an MI6 officer who flew the soon-to-be dictator to Morocco to run the war:
" A British MI6 intelligence agent, Major Hugh Pollard, then flew Franco to Spanish Morocco [...]"
I do think we deserve kudos as well and we didn't get the USA nor Britain nor France to help...
Feel free to go to http://www.apple.com/jobs and send your awesome CV, in 9 months we want to see all these products delivered. You'll be the product manager in the development of said products, overseeing the bunch of idiots that work at Apple that somehow couldn't get that out of the door in time. Good luck. Free hint: the CFO will want to see you immediately to find out how to recap the costs of development of these awesome products at that price. Oh, and drop all that insider info to iSupply, they also want to know. *Chuckle*
Come on, I'd say it's pointless and whinning until it is released and the final terms are known. It reminds me too much of the "no-SDK" whinning. A decent SDK takes time. You run the risk of getting this kind of whinning: "Yeah, they released this SDK along with the iPhone, but it's beta software at best, the API keeps changing, there are a lot of system updates, my iPhone keeps crashing and OMG there are exploits in the wild. They should have waited until it was ready, sheesh."
Observe, know the facts, react accordingly.
dani++
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2082444,00.a
And no, I wouldn't consider PCMag to be a 'fanboi' site at all...
Some excerpts:
"For the most, it was an absolute revelation. Seeing the device in action is one thing--but actually using it is another. Each application is impressive in its own right, from photo-management software to the Safari Web browser, but it's the overall touch-screen interface that takes the breath away."
"The rest of the interface requires no practice whatsoever." [everything except the virtual keyboard]
The first is a very positive comment, the second... a killer.
You know, when the original iPod was revealed, I was sorely disappointed and ruled out any possible success, too expensive, bulky, etc. Typical NW.LSTAN.L crowd. /. folks, has been proven spectaculary wrong.
Me, along with the
When the iPhone was revealed, I was quite impressed, but after the RDF faded and details, specs and price were digested upon, I have deja vu. I think the device too bulky, overpriced, no 3G support, crowded market, blah, blah, blah... Typical DIINAGT crowd (guess that one)
All my instincts tell me the iPhone is wrong... but reading previews such as this one... Um, think of how many PHBs are there that cannot configure his/her email client properly or many other 'simple' tasks that call techs to "fix their computers" again and again. They obviously cannot figure out SmartPhone apps or config that much. A phone that is instantly usable will be a success no matter what. Even if it's a 0.5% of the market.
Man, it's only a 0.9 version... 1.0 and 2.0 will come out and the iPhone Nano (as many have pointed out) as well, we'll see... Hell, even if its a Cube, they can always dumb it down and release an unlocked consumer $299 version... it's not that the know-how or the patents are going away.
"You'll also notice that the Japanese have almost universally shunned any form factor other than the clamshell... just as we have"
o s ), hell, not so long ago Nokia candy-bars were nearly universal around here...
Yeah, but not in Europe, no.
While I personally prefer clamshell style phones, in Europe candy-bar is either king or head-to-head (around 17/28 offers on Spanish Vodafone-subsidized consumer phones are clamshell http://tienda.vodafone.es/do/catalogo/moviles/tod
Do not underestimate the phone market, it is HUGE, and there are many massive markets besides the US and Japan, Europe is no small fry (GSM / GPRS is truly universal in Europe and it was spearheaded here). On the other hand, UMTS and beyond is yet to gain a significant foothold in the mass-market consumer phone european market, no matter where the markedroids would like UMTS (and others) to be, it is nowhere as ubiquitous as GPRS/GSM.
3G is still to become what it's meant to become, no true killer-apps, no user critical-mass, expensive provider fees, expensive provider fees perception, sub-par network coverage (heck, my GPRS phone sound quality and coverage runs rings around my CIO's 3G exec phone), FUD about the VoIP and other data services, etc.
Don't discount other markets in the phone business, don't discount legacy, don't discount 2G, don't discount 2.5G...
These two demos worked perfectly:
1 2378047444&q=Motorrider&pl=true
- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-41344461
- http://maclive.net/sid/135
Wonder what internal build of Vista they used...
The tax is applicable to *all* digital support mediums except hard-disks and DSL lines.
That includes but is not limited to: compact flash cards, cell-phones and -yeah- even memory-sticks. AFAIK, iPods and similar devices are actually included as well.
If I were an enterprising consumer electronics manufacturer, I would happily repackage iPod or the like as "portable" HDs and have the "installation process" magically rewrite the firmware to "enable" the "portable HD" to have some other "unsupported" features such as on-the-go music playing. "It was an accident, the developer who has made the mistake has been fired, we'll "fix" it in the next release, really".
It is also proportional to the storage capacity.
One of the most outrageous consequences is that if I legally buy a song on a legal download service, say iTunes, I pay for the right to listen to it, and I pay again for the iPod and again for the backup CD I burn the DRM'd files on as a backup.
We are currently unable to serve your request
We apologize, but an error occurred and your request could not be completed.
This error has been logged. If you have additional information that you believe may have caused this error please report the problem here.
Reading the finalist listing though, I've seen that there is the damn fine novel 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell' by Susanna Clarke. Very amazing book, superbly written, it even has annotations in essay style, definitely a contender which I recommend to anyone interested in reading a good novel and as a fantasy genre initiation (though I would never define it as 'fantasy').
Even though I put off my judgement until I have read Camouflage, if S. Clarke lost to Haldeman, then it must be a damn fine novel indeed.
(Speaking of runners-up, John C. Wright is also quite good, his Golden Age series give some needed fresh-air to the hard-sf speculative fiction genre.)
Man, f***ing impressive... I was blown away.
Thousands of words have been written about the upcoming Vista OS suckiness, lack of significant innovations, MacOSX features copied and so on. The clear view offered by this video really conveys what words can't do in any way. Geez, we have been doing this in MacOSX for years.
I will show this to my Windows-using friends... Ah, the power of images.
That's why I use the 5-star rating system in a different way.
In iTunes there is a boolean (checked/unchecked) that you can use as an extra binary digit.
Horrible or bad song: I thrash them
Not that good, but still a keeper (it's in a full album or something): unchecked
Regular: not rated but checked
From 1 to 5: from nice to exceptional
Actually, if a song is nice enough for me to take the seconds to perform the rating means it is worthy.
There goes your gaussian... yeah, I know my values would probably be classified as outliers, but the system works for me, so to Hell with statistics
"6th Avenue Electronics, Boscovs, Bose, Brandsmart,Circuit City, Crutchfield, Electronic Express, Fred Meyer, HH Greggs, J&R, Longs, Meijer, Mobile Planet, Musicland, PC Richards, Radio Shack, RCS EXPERIENCE, Rite Aid, Sam's, Shopko, Sharper Image, Target, Tweeter or Wal-Mart?"
Yeah, I don't live near any of those, actually, parent poster is quite lucky only to need to "drive several hundred miles", I would probable have to fly several hundreds or even thousands of miles to get to one. The original poster question is legitimate, our local retailers usually don't have them in stock (a friend of mine counted herself lucky to be one of the five receiving one last week), nevermind to test on-site.
Some of us kinda, like, live in non-US countries, you know, those places around Mexico an' stuff...
Have you tried to remove a removable device on a PC (say, an USB memory stick)? You need to go to a tiny icon on the task bar, use a contextual menu, and two crazy screens show up with non-intuitive options, etc. Ridiculous.
At least the MacOSX option is consistent.
Which hasn't been updated in years, has one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen, if chock-full of bugs, has poor streaming support, is nearly obsolete, etc.
From time to time, I discover a new obvious reproduceable bug and dutifully report it to them... only to be answered back: "Purchase a support ticket...". One particular bug in MPEG-1 support that I reported has been sitting at their "desks" for years now. Just check their support forum and you'll see. I wouldn't call Cleaner XL "new"...
Best,
Dani++
It seems that they are using the OSS faac to do the actual MPEG4 audio encoding, which they have integrated into their QT4L wrapper.
So I suppose that they might be using QT itself for the H.264 part but not for the audio part (the summary is quite misleading). I'm not all that familiar with the source, but this is what it seems.
Note1: On the FAAC site there are the relevant notices of the licensing of MPEG-4 audio
Note2: The QuickTime Pro app in windows is licensed to generate MPEG-4 audio but custom apps aren't
According to Apple, non-MacOSX OS's are not licensed to export AAC audio using QuickTime due to licensing concerns. According to the developer note, once a suitable license is acquired the interested party then could happily encode to AAC using QuickTime.
I'm dowloading the source code... I'm really curious.
I wonder who those guys called ISO are, that they endorse the MPEG-4 audio spec that includes AAC? Maybe a stardards body?
Oh, rest assured, they will:
1.- Release a wireless version
2.- Release a version that has coded colored lights inside, to provide feedback and/or show which areas are active, etc. They even own a patent on this.
3.- ?
4.- profit!
Ah, and the gesture apps of MacOSX will soon take advantage of the scrollwheel to capture gesturing commands
You mean like true plug-and-play in Linux or seamless universal works-without-a-hitch copy-paste among X11 apps?
They are definitely considered "basic" to any Mac user... aren't they? Remember: Basic(user) == ExtremelyDifficult(engineer)
Serious burn injuries hurt.
I know what I'm talking about... they hurt like nothing you can imagine.
They hurt, and hurt, and hurt, and hurt some more, and then even more. It's just undescribable.
Pray that your superior genes and sheer luck preserve you from such injuries, they destroy your world.
A lot.
I am working on a research project that deals with Augmented Reality (basically VR goggles that are see through).
AR deals with guys that hang around somewhere and use the following simultaneously to do some shit:
- GPS receiver: to know where one is going and have data referenced following position
- See-thru goggles that display geographical information (coming from an VGA port)
- PDA or some sort of input/otput device
- Wireless: for network stuff and group behaviour
- Database: some sort of sane data repository that can be updated
- Bluetooth: problably to connect all these devices together and not strangle the users with cabling
Yeah, an small/light non-custom-built machine that can deal with all this easily would be great indeed. Oh, and sane developer tools as well.
Once proof of concept and prototyping is done, someone else will find the funding for embedded custom development.
No, really. They don't. They're in the business of selling computers and peripherals.
Having those computers and peripherals work well (or at least up to their expectations) incidentally needs of propietary operating systems.
Dani++
PS: look on the changelog of Bash, recently there has been some significant Apple contributions, reported on /., even.
Yeah, I am also of this opinion. I have done some feasibility studies of FCP on a medium company. Literally thousands of dollars could be saved by having FCP AppleScriptable. Not anything magical about that, mind you, just that the megabucks could be saved by refraining on the purchase of ultra-expensive custom developed solutions that only have the added value of being able to automate some human-resources intensive tasks.
The GUI widgets in FCP are non-native and this hints that the task of making it AppleScriptable is massive... otherwise Apple would be JustPlainStupid(TM) in my opinion not to implement AppleScript support in FCP. I do pray that they're on it.
Oh! And it runs OSX??? Yeah, definitely go for it.
(Not trolling, really)
I am convinced that it's a confusion made on purpose. In advertising, not many oversights you can find.
...?
There are some people that fondly remember the good ol' days when Natpser let you freely download MP3s.
In a beer-induced haze, some people vaguely watch the commercial and may come to think that Napster lets you download MP3. Is a WMA Janus-enabled player a *music* player? Yeah. Is it a *MP3* player? Well, yeah, amongst many other things.
The only way I envision the Napster execs can hope to capture a few percent digits of the market is to hope Janus get thoroughly cracked (it will) and their service will allow users to download and keep -albeit ilegally- all the music they want.
Yeah, good business model:
(1) Sign up for a month.
(2) Download a gazillion songs.
(3) Crack them.
(4) Quit Napster forever.
(5)
(6) Keep a gazillion songs for $15
(7) Profit?
(8) Napster execs looking stupid
Yeah, I am sure the RIAA will be happy then. Either Napster goes broke or the RIAA will kill it off.