Yes - because they don't like what Apple was offering them, DRM-free or not.
Right. And what exactly do they not like about their deal with Apple?
They want to charge you more for their music. They'd like you to purchase multiple tracks for each device you own, and they'd really like it if you couldn't burn those tracks to CD.
Your post makes no sense because Apple has no say in the dealings that Universal does with other on-line retailers. Yes, competition is great. Theoretically, if Universal was uncomfortable with iTunes' dominance in the marketplace they would make sweetheart deals with other on-line retailers to provide cheaper music with more freedom to drive people away from iTunes, and the consumer would win. But that is not what is happening, because they're just too greedy, and the other tech companies too easily roll over to the whims of the entertainment industry. iTunes is successful in part because they're the only ones who have stood up to the record companies.
Instead, Universal uses its dominant position to strong-arm more money out of companies like Apple and Microsoft -- you'll recall that Universal stayed out of the Zune music store until Microsoft agreed to give then a cut of the Zune hardware sales. That's all that this is about.
It allows web developers to verify that their web sites work with Safari, which is important to both the OS X and iPhone platforms since most developers don't have an extra Mac kicking around for testing. It's clear that Safari/Win32 was designed to render as close as possible to the native OS X version as possible, right down to the font rendering.
It allows people who are curious about OS X to try out a fundamental OS X application, and in that case you'd want that experience to be as authentic as possible. If Apple was serious about challenging IE and Firefox on Windows they would've developed a Windows web browser, but obviously not what they're trying to do. It's simply about increasing OS X exposure to those who are curious.
It allows web developers to verify that their web sites work with Safari, which is important to both the OS X and iPhone platforms since most developers don't have an extra Mac kicking around for testing. It's clear that Safari/Win32 was designed to render as close as possible to the native OS X version as possible, right down to the font rendering.
It allows people who are curious about OS X to try out a fundamental OS X application, and in that sense you'd want that experience to be as authentic as possible. If Apple was serious about challenging IE and Firefox on Windows they would've developed a Windows web browser, but obviously not what they're trying to do. It's simply about increasing OS X exposure to those who are curious.
Speaking of Explorer Shell extensions, recent OS X converts may be curious about how Finder extensions work.
One might assume that the Finder extension framework is sprinkled with all sorts of Cocoa goodness, where objects are magically discovered, loaded, and consumed by Finder though some thoughtfully conceived Objective-C interfaces/protocols.
Nope. It's COM, complete with IUnknowns and HRESULTs, UUIDs and E_FAILs. (The headers are provided by Microsoft). Finder is, after all, just a plain old C++ application (as seen by its svelte memory footprint and quirky bugs/features), and therefore needs a COM-like framework for dynamically loading other C++ objects/extensions. So why not just use COM? This is known as the Core Foundation Plug-in Framework and is actually used in all sorts of places.
If you're curious, drill down into any package in ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items/, open Info.plist, and notice how the CFPluginFactories and CFPluginTypes start to look very similar to certain areas of the Windows Registry.
Well, *I* was surprised, anyway. Considering that both Objective-C and COM were conceived at roughly the same time (late 80s) to solve the roughly the same problem (Smalltalk dynamicism with C performance) I found it interesting that the two should end up meeting, on a Mac no less. I guess there's just no getting around that fact that there's still a lot of code out there that is written in, or needs to be written in static C/C++.
I assert that people who insist on bundling a brand new computer with a 5 year old OS that's due to go out of print in less than 10 months, are wasting their money. How is that a troll? How does that contradict anything else I've written?.
It's one thing to get the most out of an old computer and avoid rushing out to buy a brand new OS release. It's a whole other thing the eschew the latest OS release without due reason, and explicitly purchase a nearly out-of-date OS.
Obviously there are very good reasons why some users with very specific needs, e.g. businesses, would avoid upgrading to Vista right away. But that is NOT what this is about. This is about consumers being irrationally prudish. And people generally are prudish when it comes to these sorts of things, myself included. That doesn't make it the smart or right thing to do. So I say, why buy a brand new PC at all? (especially when so many people are ditching their old systems specifically to upgrade to Vista)
For all the supposed problems with Vista I have yet to read a single concrete problem that should prevent an average consumer from bundling Vista with a new PC. You offered one, "built-in DRM", which is as meaningless a reason as one could suggest. You're quite right, I don't understand. If there's a concrete task the Vista prevents you from doing, let's hear it.
How could anyone suggest that a new XP license, today, has the same value as a Vista license? The usable XP life expectancy is obviously coming to an end, where Vista's is just beginning. For consumer PCs, it's as foolish to purchase XP now as it would have been to purchase Windows 2000 6 months after XP was released.
At work, I protested the upgrade to "slow and bloated" Windows 2000, and I protested the upgrade to "fruity, quirky" WinXP. In both cases, my protests were unfounded. It only takes a few week to understand the many problems that a new OS solves. Vista will be no different.
For my home needs, all I need from Windows is the ability to run some old Windows applications. And for that purpose, Win2K is perfect, however, I'm not going to demand the Dell sell me a new Win2K license as a protest. That would be dumb.
If you *need* to run XP for some reason, then just install it, set up a dual boot, or run it in a VM. Demanding that Dell sell you *another* WinXP license is a waste of money and a pointless protest. Furthermore, with each passing week the value of a WinXP license is worth less and less. It was that way with Win2K, it was that way with XP, and it will be that way with Vista. What makes you think it will be any different.
Even if there are growing pains with Vista, it's incredibly naive to think those issues won't be sorted out within a few months.
Please, explain to us how the built in DRM will be sorted out in a few months?
If you're protesting Microsoft's business practices by demanding that Dell sell you an out-of-date software license, that's not only dumb, but delusional. If Microsoft's business practices are unacceptable to you, your only option is to stop being a Microsoft customer.
So you're going to turn down Vista, and instead pay for *another* WinXP license?
Why wouldn't you dual boot, or run WinXP in a VM? If you have a dual-boot Vista/XP machine, you'll undoubtedly find that the XP partition will lose its usefulness in a matter of weeks. Try it!
As the title suggests, these are consumer PCs intended for home use. I don't think Dell ever stopped selling XP to business customers.
Perhaps the business would consider installing XP on it for themselves? Surely they must already own some XP licenses. Is there a reason why they couldn't transfer the WinXP license from the dead laptop to the new laptop? Buying a whole new XP license seems kind of dum^h^h^h unnecessary to me.
Do the headlines "Dell to Offer Win XP On Consumer PCs again", and "Dell brings back XP on home systems" suggest to you that this is a move for business customers?
Do the headlines "Dell to Offer Win XP On Consumer PCs again", and "Dell brings back XP on home systems" suggest to you that this is a move for business customers?
Of course businesses won't immediately migrate to XP, but don't most businesses handle their software licensing manually, rather than depend on Dell to licenese, install, and configure the OS for them?
Look, I'm no Microsoft shill. I gave up on the platform two years ago.
What I'm suggesting is that spending money for a license to use obsolete software is a bad move. Even if there are growing pains with Vista, it's incredibly naive to think those issues won't be sorted out within a few months. On the other hand, Windows XP is going to be looking very obsolete and dated within the year.
It's perfectly fine to not want to be an early Vista adopter. But, regardless of one's opinion of Vista's features or initial quality, spending money on old WinXP at this point is like throwing your money away.
Vista is without a doubt the future of the Windows platform; if you don't want to partake just yet, hold off buying a new machine altogether. Demanding a new machine with WinXP is just irrational.
This is good news for Firefox. So long as Microsoft thinks it has "won" the browser war, the steady erosion of IE's market share will happen by hook or by crook.
Microsoft doesn't think it has won the browser war, it knows it lost and gave up years ago.
For Microsoft, winning the war meant ensuring that the most viewed and essential web sites only worked in Windows, or worked significantly better in Windows than other operating systems. In other words, it mean crippling the web for non-Windows platforms. And for a brief period in the late 90s and early 00s this was exactly the case.
Prior to, say, 2002 or 2003, there was a real penalty for not using IE in Windows. But that hasn't been the case for years. In fact, many web sites now work better in Firefox than in IE.
Interoperability won, and Microsoft lost. What's odd is that (apparently) so many people still don't recognize that fact.
The goal of IE development in 1997 was to become the web web browser that mattered. The goal of IE in 2007 is to make sure the built-in Windows web browser doesn't suck.
But it can't play iTunes playlists, which makes it useless to the apparently 110 million iTunes users out there.
Geeks have been hooking up their PCs to their home entertainment systems since the late 90s, so excuse my while I yawn at your XBox hack. But what we haven't seen yet is a successful product that does this for the average consumer in an elegant manner, which is why Apple TV is interesting. That is, to see how well it works and if it succeeds or not.
They pulled the HD out of the Apple TV unit and attached it to an existing OS X system. The disk apparently contains a pretty standard OS X 10.4.7 install, so they just added the additional QuickTime plug-ins to/Library/QuickTime/.
Apparently they also enabled ssh. My speculation: They reconfigured launchd and the firewall to allow ssh connections to sshd, and presumably they configured the local user account (whatever it is) to allow public-key authentication so they don't have to futz around with any passwords. All of that can be done by simply editing text configuration files.
Either way works for me. Or how about we split the difference and move the clocks a half-hour ahead once and for all.
One thing is certain: the current method of adjusting the time twice a year is the worst and most expensive solution to a very trivial problem, especially in this day and age.
That was one expensive piece of pointless legislation.
I've always felt that if we could harness all of the time and energy software developers and IT departments have spent over the years working on DST-related issues in software and apply it to some other purpose of good, we'd all be driving around in flying cars and taking vacations on the moon by now. It is 2007, after all. You know, the future?
That's right. I'm blaming the state of the world on DST.
What is amazing to me is that Jobs/Apple have a near monopoly on digital music downloads/players that would only be hurt by a lack of DRM lock-in and yet Jobs is still advocating for the change
It's not amazing at all. What is amazing is that so many people seem to think that the iPod's popularity is artificial and due to some sort of proprietary lock-in.
Could someone get a hold of the one guy who actually feels locked-in to the iPod/iTunes "platform"? I imagine he'd like to make a statement on his impending freedom.
... for Norwegian iTMS users. All of the iTMS users I've talked to just absolutely love it, obviously. For a lot of people, iTMS a great way to explore and discover new music, which is the hardest thing about being a music fan. It's also cheaper than CDs. But I guess the Norwegian government feels they need to protect their citizens from themselves.
I'm convinced that the only people who are "getting more and more annoyed at DRM" are the Cory Doctorowites who have never purchased music on-line and refuse to use iTMS or similar services on principal alone. The reality is, for the few people who are actually concerned about backing up their music, backups are as easy with iTMS-purchased music as anything else. Indeed, iTunes nags you to burn backups of your purchases. Of course, most people are not concerned with backups, since most music only has a popular shelf life of a few years. I have a box full of old hair-metal cassettes and scratched CDs that I can't listen to anymore. Since I'm no longer a fan of Motley Crue, Slaughter, and Skid Row, it's hardly the calamity that the anti-DRM mob would make it out to be.
It's very easy to remove the DRM from iTMS purchases. If there was ever popular movement to migrate away from iTunes/iPod it would happen; the software has already been written. But as it stands, there is no such movement.
When did people start equating rudimentary copy protection with Digital Rights Management?
The term has lost all meaning. People are throwing it around whenever they stumble upon any bug, missing feature, or technical limitation that causes them grief. "I can't use my iPod with multiple computers, I hate DRM." "Internet Explorer crashed, DRM strikes again." "This website requires registration, DRM is out of control."
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Right. And what exactly do they not like about their deal with Apple?
They want to charge you more for their music. They'd like you to purchase multiple tracks for each device you own, and they'd really like it if you couldn't burn those tracks to CD.
Your post makes no sense because Apple has no say in the dealings that Universal does with other on-line retailers. Yes, competition is great. Theoretically, if Universal was uncomfortable with iTunes' dominance in the marketplace they would make sweetheart deals with other on-line retailers to provide cheaper music with more freedom to drive people away from iTunes, and the consumer would win. But that is not what is happening, because they're just too greedy, and the other tech companies too easily roll over to the whims of the entertainment industry. iTunes is successful in part because they're the only ones who have stood up to the record companies.
Instead, Universal uses its dominant position to strong-arm more money out of companies like Apple and Microsoft -- you'll recall that Universal stayed out of the Zune music store until Microsoft agreed to give then a cut of the Zune hardware sales. That's all that this is about.
Speaking of Explorer Shell extensions, recent OS X converts may be curious about how Finder extensions work.
One might assume that the Finder extension framework is sprinkled with all sorts of Cocoa goodness, where objects are magically discovered, loaded, and consumed by Finder though some thoughtfully conceived Objective-C interfaces/protocols.
Nope. It's COM, complete with IUnknowns and HRESULTs, UUIDs and E_FAILs. (The headers are provided by Microsoft). Finder is, after all, just a plain old C++ application (as seen by its svelte memory footprint and quirky bugs/features), and therefore needs a COM-like framework for dynamically loading other C++ objects/extensions. So why not just use COM? This is known as the Core Foundation Plug-in Framework and is actually used in all sorts of places.
If you're curious, drill down into any package in ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items/, open Info.plist, and notice how the CFPluginFactories and CFPluginTypes start to look very similar to certain areas of the Windows Registry.
Well, *I* was surprised, anyway. Considering that both Objective-C and COM were conceived at roughly the same time (late 80s) to solve the roughly the same problem (Smalltalk dynamicism with C performance) I found it interesting that the two should end up meeting, on a Mac no less. I guess there's just no getting around that fact that there's still a lot of code out there that is written in, or needs to be written in static C/C++.
I assert that people who insist on bundling a brand new computer with a 5 year old OS that's due to go out of print in less than 10 months, are wasting their money. How is that a troll? How does that contradict anything else I've written?.
It's one thing to get the most out of an old computer and avoid rushing out to buy a brand new OS release. It's a whole other thing the eschew the latest OS release without due reason, and explicitly purchase a nearly out-of-date OS.
Obviously there are very good reasons why some users with very specific needs, e.g. businesses, would avoid upgrading to Vista right away. But that is NOT what this is about. This is about consumers being irrationally prudish. And people generally are prudish when it comes to these sorts of things, myself included. That doesn't make it the smart or right thing to do. So I say, why buy a brand new PC at all? (especially when so many people are ditching their old systems specifically to upgrade to Vista)
For all the supposed problems with Vista I have yet to read a single concrete problem that should prevent an average consumer from bundling Vista with a new PC. You offered one, "built-in DRM", which is as meaningless a reason as one could suggest. You're quite right, I don't understand. If there's a concrete task the Vista prevents you from doing, let's hear it.
How could anyone suggest that a new XP license, today, has the same value as a Vista license? The usable XP life expectancy is obviously coming to an end, where Vista's is just beginning. For consumer PCs, it's as foolish to purchase XP now as it would have been to purchase Windows 2000 6 months after XP was released.
For my home needs, all I need from Windows is the ability to run some old Windows applications. And for that purpose, Win2K is perfect, however, I'm not going to demand the Dell sell me a new Win2K license as a protest. That would be dumb.
If you *need* to run XP for some reason, then just install it, set up a dual boot, or run it in a VM. Demanding that Dell sell you *another* WinXP license is a waste of money and a pointless protest. Furthermore, with each passing week the value of a WinXP license is worth less and less. It was that way with Win2K, it was that way with XP, and it will be that way with Vista. What makes you think it will be any different.If you're protesting Microsoft's business practices by demanding that Dell sell you an out-of-date software license, that's not only dumb, but delusional. If Microsoft's business practices are unacceptable to you, your only option is to stop being a Microsoft customer.
So you're going to turn down Vista, and instead pay for *another* WinXP license?
Why wouldn't you dual boot, or run WinXP in a VM? If you have a dual-boot Vista/XP machine, you'll undoubtedly find that the XP partition will lose its usefulness in a matter of weeks. Try it!
So am I, but I'm not going to rush out and demand that someone sell me some new Win2k licenses...
Do the headlines "Dell to Offer Win XP On Consumer PCs again", and "Dell brings back XP on home systems" suggest to you that this is a move for business customers?
Do the headlines "Dell to Offer Win XP On Consumer PCs again", and "Dell brings back XP on home systems" suggest to you that this is a move for business customers?
Of course businesses won't immediately migrate to XP, but don't most businesses handle their software licensing manually, rather than depend on Dell to licenese, install, and configure the OS for them?
Look, I'm no Microsoft shill. I gave up on the platform two years ago.
What I'm suggesting is that spending money for a license to use obsolete software is a bad move. Even if there are growing pains with Vista, it's incredibly naive to think those issues won't be sorted out within a few months. On the other hand, Windows XP is going to be looking very obsolete and dated within the year.
It's perfectly fine to not want to be an early Vista adopter. But, regardless of one's opinion of Vista's features or initial quality, spending money on old WinXP at this point is like throwing your money away.
Vista is without a doubt the future of the Windows platform; if you don't want to partake just yet, hold off buying a new machine altogether. Demanding a new machine with WinXP is just irrational.
Microsoft doesn't think it has won the browser war, it knows it lost and gave up years ago.
For Microsoft, winning the war meant ensuring that the most viewed and essential web sites only worked in Windows, or worked significantly better in Windows than other operating systems. In other words, it mean crippling the web for non-Windows platforms. And for a brief period in the late 90s and early 00s this was exactly the case.
Prior to, say, 2002 or 2003, there was a real penalty for not using IE in Windows. But that hasn't been the case for years. In fact, many web sites now work better in Firefox than in IE.
Interoperability won, and Microsoft lost. What's odd is that (apparently) so many people still don't recognize that fact.
The goal of IE development in 1997 was to become the web web browser that mattered. The goal of IE in 2007 is to make sure the built-in Windows web browser doesn't suck.
Yup, Mr. lpcszHungarianNotation himself has blasted off into space. They should leave him up there. Ha ha, just kidding.
Grrr....
Who else would post a Dvorak troll to the front page? What a waste.
But it can't play iTunes playlists, which makes it useless to the apparently 110 million iTunes users out there.
Geeks have been hooking up their PCs to their home entertainment systems since the late 90s, so excuse my while I yawn at your XBox hack. But what we haven't seen yet is a successful product that does this for the average consumer in an elegant manner, which is why Apple TV is interesting. That is, to see how well it works and if it succeeds or not.
They pulled the HD out of the Apple TV unit and attached it to an existing OS X system. The disk apparently contains a pretty standard OS X 10.4.7 install, so they just added the additional QuickTime plug-ins to /Library/QuickTime/.
Apparently they also enabled ssh. My speculation: They reconfigured launchd and the firewall to allow ssh connections to sshd, and presumably they configured the local user account (whatever it is) to allow public-key authentication so they don't have to futz around with any passwords. All of that can be done by simply editing text configuration files.
Either way works for me. Or how about we split the difference and move the clocks a half-hour ahead once and for all.
One thing is certain: the current method of adjusting the time twice a year is the worst and most expensive solution to a very trivial problem, especially in this day and age.
That was one expensive piece of pointless legislation.
I've always felt that if we could harness all of the time and energy software developers and IT departments have spent over the years working on DST-related issues in software and apply it to some other purpose of good, we'd all be driving around in flying cars and taking vacations on the moon by now. It is 2007, after all. You know, the future?
That's right. I'm blaming the state of the world on DST.
It's not amazing at all. What is amazing is that so many people seem to think that the iPod's popularity is artificial and due to some sort of proprietary lock-in.
Could someone get a hold of the one guy who actually feels locked-in to the iPod/iTunes "platform"? I imagine he'd like to make a statement on his impending freedom.
... for Norwegian iTMS users. All of the iTMS users I've talked to just absolutely love it, obviously. For a lot of people, iTMS a great way to explore and discover new music, which is the hardest thing about being a music fan. It's also cheaper than CDs. But I guess the Norwegian government feels they need to protect their citizens from themselves.
I'm convinced that the only people who are "getting more and more annoyed at DRM" are the Cory Doctorowites who have never purchased music on-line and refuse to use iTMS or similar services on principal alone. The reality is, for the few people who are actually concerned about backing up their music, backups are as easy with iTMS-purchased music as anything else. Indeed, iTunes nags you to burn backups of your purchases. Of course, most people are not concerned with backups, since most music only has a popular shelf life of a few years. I have a box full of old hair-metal cassettes and scratched CDs that I can't listen to anymore. Since I'm no longer a fan of Motley Crue, Slaughter, and Skid Row, it's hardly the calamity that the anti-DRM mob would make it out to be.
It's very easy to remove the DRM from iTMS purchases. If there was ever popular movement to migrate away from iTunes/iPod it would happen; the software has already been written. But as it stands, there is no such movement.
Very Terse.
When did people start equating rudimentary copy protection with Digital Rights Management?
The term has lost all meaning. People are throwing it around whenever they stumble upon any bug, missing feature, or technical limitation that causes them grief. "I can't use my iPod with multiple computers, I hate DRM." "Internet Explorer crashed, DRM strikes again." "This website requires registration, DRM is out of control."