Viewstate isn't useful in some circumstances, but it's hardly the only useful web technology that depends on JavaScript being enabled -- all the AJAX and Web 2.0 buzz is dependent on client-side JavaScript, as well. And you can certainly write ASP.Net code without using viewstate -- and viewstate can bloat your pages enough that you may not want to use it anyway.
As for the prebuilt components ASP.Net ships with, some of them flatly suck, especially is you believe in proper HTML semantics over tag soup. But that doesn't change the fact that the technology is fantastic for building your own reusable components.
Lots of music players can play music that don't have DRM -- nearly all of them. If you rip your music library to MP3, you can play it on virtually any device that plays music, and you will be DRM-free.
Granted, most of these devices don't have wifi, but even there, you still have options right now. For example, plenty of Pocket PCs can stream music (or video) over wifi. Drop in a 4GB flash card (some are now under $150) and you've got yourself a perfectly serviceable portable music player that can play streaming as well as downloaded audio. It can also play no-DRM Divx movies, has a wide array of simple games, and can (obviously) serve as a personal organizer.
And Sony Pictures could release a movie today on a nonstandard DVD that only works on a Sony Model ZX-87 DVD player (or whatever), and not on any other player.
As a rule, this doesn't happen, because it leads to (a) customer service nightmares (b) lower sales?
I've never used Context, but I agree the usability on Visual Studio is pretty poor, though I tolerate it for my job.
But you might check out the two I recommended if you still need a Windows text editor -- for me at least, the basics work well, and each has some interesting features that I haven't found in other editors. Both are shareware, though TextPad is minimally intrusive if you don't register it for a while.
TextPad has the ability to configure different document settings based on document types. If you want your HTML files to autowrap and display tabs as 2 spaces, but your Ruby files to not wrap and to autoconvert tabs to spaces (4 spaces each), TextPad might be the text editor for you.
UltraEdit has a number of useful project features that you find in IDEs but not usually in standalone text editors, like the ability to configure a collection of documents as a project, and to launch with the same files open that it had last time it closed. It also has column mode, which takes a little getting used to, but can save you hours of time when you need it.
Happily, both support Unix regular expressions.
There's no editor that's the right fit for everyone, but each of these work pretty well for me.
Let me see if I understand you correctly. In the future, Sony is going to produce Blu-Ray discs that contain firmware flashes that will somehow retroactively hack a variety of hardware they didn't even manufacture and work seamlessly with hundreds of different models of player made by dozens of different manufacturers?
Write the couple years of "no DRM" off to "marketing", and enjoy the heavily DRM'ed future...
Actually, I think this is great. By the time that they start re-enabling this flag, there will have been plenty of time to crack the underlying DRM, just as happened with DVDs.
It's not a firmware issue -- it's an issue determined on a per-title basis. The player has the capability to force downsampling, but these titles will not activate that capability.
Any future titles (or rereleases of the same titles) could have this flag enabled, and they would be downsampled. However, this wouldn't change your ability to watch any previously purchased discs at the higher resolution over analog.
I'm all for a virtual machine solution as well -- I'd love it for web development.
But I'm flatly puzzled that you claim you can't find a decent text editor for Windows. What is it you want that the Mac has that UltraEdit or TextPad won't do?
This is pretty far afield from your post, but PT is definitely what I first thought of in relation to this topic.
How many movies were released the year Planescape Torment came out that were deeper or more thought provoking? Were there any at all? I love all sorts of "artsy pretentious movies," and I'll put Torment up against nearly any of them.
I apologize for getting pretentious here for a minute, but in some ways, Torment sets out to really take on the possibilities of the medium in the same way that experimental films like Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera did. The fundamental nature of gaming that sets it apart from other media is that your experience is defined by the choices you make -- which is the whole point of Torment. To the point that adapting Torment as a novel or movie would make about as much sense as adapting the Empire State Building in interpretive dance.
I'm pretty sure that 50 years from now, PT will have all the appeal to younger generations of the silent version of Nosferatu. Low resolution isometric graphics that don't have any of the flash of even today's slick-looking games are going to be appealing as eating your vegetables. But surely something like that doesn't change anything.
There were bugs which made it a lot trickier than it should have been to install new searches last time I used ff. And isn't there one search that you can't change, the default if a domain doesn't exist or something.
There's one that's hard to change -- if you type in something at the address bar that doesn't resolve as a URL at all (e.g. "foo", as opposed to "foo.com") it won't send you to Google, but it will send you to directly to the #1 search result from a Google search (the "I Feel Lucky" result). This is configurable, but not easily so. Of course, a Firefox extension to make this easily configurable would be pretty easy to write.
As far as adding other searches, I'm not sure what the problem was when you tried it, but I have searches for Yahoo, IMDB, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay, Webster, etc., and they were all trivially easy to set up.
I had never come across an IE-only site in that sense - maybe designers didn't realise other browsers existed so didn't bother to block them or something.
Out of necessity, Opera has always been really good at pretending to be IE, especially on Windows. For example, it will render pages designed for IE "quirks mode" the same way IE does, even though that rendering of those pages does not conform to W3C standards. Opera for Windows also has a plug-in that will run VBScript and ActiveX. Even some of the things in IE that are obviously bugs -- such as miscalculated offsets for object placement and such -- are often reproduced in Opera.
Again, I'm not criticizing Opera, because I don't think they had much of a choice. But while mimicking IE's non-standard rendering does an admirable job of presenting a better experience for their users, it also helps to perpetuate poor standardization.
In any case, surfing with other browsers besides Opera or IE will give you any number of examples of pages that were obviously designed with only IE in mind.
And although they may be crossplatform, mozilla's extra stuff is just as bad from the point of browser lock-in (and there are sites that will give you activex control for IE, some kind of extendy thing for ff, and nothing for anyone else)
What extra stuff? They implement some pieces of W3C standards that other browsers haven't implemented yet, but Opera is ahead of the curve on other pieces of the standards. All browsers should be trying to improve their implementation of W3C standards.
I think the bottom line is that we're in an awkward transitional period. We're past the "pages are designed for IE, and everyone else has to adapt to that" stage, but we're not at a point where you can just design everything to XHTML Transitional and CSS2 and have all the browsers support your page correctly. So currently, good web design usually involves implementing a fair number of browser-specific hacks and testing that they work correctly across the browsers you want to support. Which sucks.
Now that Microsoft is at least trying to develop a more standards-compliant IE 7, there is hope out there that we will get a fixed target. If that happens, then as long as you don't need to use the most advanced, bleeding-edge features in designing a web page, you can just design to the standard and any browser that doesn't display it properly is broken in some definable way that the vendor needs to fix. Of course, it's way to early to tell what will happen with IE 7 -- by most accounts, it's currently a broken mess. But of Opera, Mozilla, and Safari, none are all that far from this level of support.
Of course, even if and when we finally have a working standard, that won't force everyone who writes a web page to use it. But at least there will be a consistent body of knowledge out there -- here's how to build a standards-compliant web page that should work for all the browsers. That's pretty much the holy grail of web design, and that's where we need to get. And I really believe that the success of Firefox is a big part of helping us get there.
I can read a book in the bathtub. Are any of the ebook readers waterproof? None I've heard of.
I realize that this probably isn't going to win you over, but FYI, you can get waterproof cases for pocket pcs, and probably for other devices as well.
But it's not just the user's choice - they make money by making Google excessively integrated as shipped, and hard to change.
I'm not sure what you mean. It's not that easy to uninstall searches, but it takes 2 minutes to go find different searches and install them. And switching to a different default search is as easy as clicking on the button and selecting something else. I use other searches in Firefox all the time.
Opera installs Google as well, and gets paid for it just like Mozilla.
It's also worth noting that since Firefox is free software, if they start bundling Gator, anyone can build a Gator-free distribution. I'm not criticizing Opera, but if their users don't have the same recourse.
Whereas now they are developed and tested with only IE and FF in mind, and anyone else is no better off.
Users are better off in 2 ways:
Mozilla actually tries to follow W3C standards, so other standards-compliant browsers should be pretty close to right, even without testing. In the old days, Opera had to resort to emulating IE bugs to get pages to look right.
Mozilla runs on multiple platforms. An IE-only web represented platform lock-in as well.
If your goal is to maximize the number of Opera users, no doubt, Firefox is a hindrance. If your goal is to maximize browser choice, it's surely a massive victory.
I've had at least one site that will block browsers other than IE and firefox.
Nothing is going to protect people from the gross stupidity of the occasional web designer. But there are surely less "IE and Mozilla only" sites than there were IE only sites before, especially when some designers thought that building sites around Windows-only ActiveX controls were a good idea.
Furthermore, I've known users who are now turned off switching - "I tried firefox and didn't like it, I'm sticking with IE from now on".
Yes, and other people have decided that since you can choose your browser now, it's okay to shop around and sample everything that's out there. If many of them stick with Firefox after looking around, you can hardly say that's a sign they've done something wrong.
I like Opera. I've used it a bit, and I test web pages with it. I like Firefox better, but I have no trouble imagining that people could like Opera better. Or Safari. Or Seamonkey. Or some other browser I've never even heard of. Choice is good.
Firefox is making a good browser, and they make it available to anyone, with source code, on a wide variety of platforms. They've taken steps to solidify their financial ability to keep making a good browser, and without changing their software in any way that can't be easily altered if you don't like it. I just can't see how that hurts anyone.
There is a balance to be struck. You can do the pauper thing. Or you can be a completely unethical scumbag and make lots and lots of money. Neither of these is the best path.
In what way do you think that developing a free, GPL'ed browser and making spinoff income off the fact that people choose to search with Google fails to strike this balance?
And if you say it's because they've been too aggressive at promoting their product, remember that before Firefox's popularity got off the ground, IE's market share was so towering that most commercial websites were developed and tested with only IE in mind. If Firefox were just another obscure browser with no market share, this would likely still be the case.
A DVD player started out expensive -- heck HD-DVD players are starting out moderately expensive. But everyone knew they were going to get cheaper. I don't foresee $100 Mac Minis any time soon, and a $600 box for every TV seems to be unlikely to work.
Much more practical and affordable is some kind of set top box like a MediaMVP. You can buy one today for $100, and it plays music, video, and photos nicely. Of course, Apple doesn't make set top boxes, and their DRM prevents you from using the existing solutions that are out there.
But really, who would want an open solution that would work on their choice of hardware?
I love the idea of unlimited on-demand downloads, but I can't imagine that the MPAA is dying to allow you to watch hundreds of movies for a flat fee, even though most people would only watch a few.
CinemaNow has a subscription service already, except that they can't get a license for any Hollywood movies. So they offer Hollywood movies as on-demand 24-hour rentals instead.
Not that CinemaNow is of any use to you -- it's Windows-only.
So are people going to buy a Mac Mini (as well as a funky adapter) for every TV in the house, or settle for movies that they can only watch at one location, like TV used to be in the 1950s?
I think you're overestimating the willingness of consumers to buy video that they don't really have control over -- in the sense it it will only play on a computer or iPod, neither of which is currently a primary outlet for watching movies or TV programming.
If Apple is able to get a foothold in the video market also, then why would anyone download video if it's a pain to load onto their iPod Videos?
It's far from settled that this is Apple's market to lose. My 4-year-old iPaq has a better screen for watching movies than Apple's current offering with the 2.5" screen. We'll see what the next generation player looks like.
Also, it's not a lock that the point of these services is to download video to mini-players. Sure, if you take the bus a lot or have an hour-long commute by train, an iPod video may be a slice of heaven. But people take MP3 players with them in the car, jogging, all sorts of places where a video player will be an active hindrance.
By allowing movies to be burned to DVD (unlike Apple's current offerings), Amazon is allowing you to watch movies:
in the living room -- though this is where the low quality is most likely to bite them
in the bedroom, where people generally have smaller TVs and lower quality expectations
in a car DVD player, perfect for grabbing a new movie to entertain the kids on that long car ride
on those little portable DVD players, which are a lot cheaper than iPods and come with bigger screens
on your computer, of course; there's a lot more cheap notebooks out there than iPod videos, and they have much bigger screens
presumably on portable players not made by Apple
It's still way up in the air how all this plays out. In a couple of years, people may look back on iTunes video as Apple's biggest flop since the Newton.
This time, owners of the "failed" format will simply be expected to purchase their favourite films again, to the benefit of the movie studios.
Not if companies like LG make good on their promises to make dual-standard devices.
With a dual-standard device, both standards can win, where "win" is defined as not being orphaned. Buy a player that supports both, and you don't need to care which format ends up being the dominant one, because you'll be able to play both types of media.
Q: Who won, DVD+R or DVD-R? A: Who cares? Any decent DVD recorder drive can use both.
Sure, it's confusing to consumers to have to choose amongst two different DVD recording media standards when the differences are minor, but it's not the end of the world. For prerecorded media, having two supported standards is even less important -- just buy whichever one a movie is released on.
Of course, lots of people use Rhapsody as a platform to sample music and decide whether they like it before buying it. So by keeping it off Rhapsody, they are impeding people from hearing their music and deciding to go buy it.
This is analogous to making sure your new music doesn't get on the radio, so people will have to buy the CD to listen to it -- not exactly a proven business model.
A related phenomenon is that DVD sales of a movie increase when it's on television. Counter to the intuitive "I saw it on TV, why would I buy it?" logic you might expect, the fact the movie is on TV reminds people that it exists at all, and that they liked it. Therefore, they go buy it while it's fresh in their minds.
For example, are there any phones I can install my own OS and software on (preferably something free and hackable...) and still have them work as phones?
There are a number of Linux smartphones that have been made, but I'm not sure any of them are actually available in the US. They seem to be popular in Asia.
Palm OS smartphones have plenty of software available for them for you to install, but the OS isn't open or particularly hackable. The next generation of Palm OS is being build on top of Linux, but the timetable and roadmap seem kind of up in the air right now.
In addition, there are a number that run Pocket PC. You can run and develop your own software on these, as well, but it's a version of Windows, so it's about what you'd expect from the standpoint of openness or hackability.
In principle, Linux could be ported to Pocket PC phones, since they are architecturally similar to (and run the same processor family, ARM, as) the iPaq, which has a Linux community.
The Nokia 770 looks great -- the only thing I really wish it had was more memory. It has 64MB of RAM, 128MB of FLASH, and a tiny flash slot (RS-MMC) that doesn't come in very large sizes.
On the plus side, it's a USB host, so you can get a thumb drive or a battery powered USB hub and a 1.8" USB hard drive, but it's a little less portable with all that random stuff handing off it.
The devices you're talking about already exist -- they're smartphones and PDAs. And there's nothing at all wrong with them. They're so portable you can take them anywhere, provide easy access to moderate amounts of information, and they have great connectivity.
But they don't do some things well. Movies are tiny on a smartphone -- it's hard to make out detail. A 7" screen is much better for this except in the most cramped of spaces.
And while some information can be conveniently crammed into a tiny screen, it's impractical for other information. Want to browse through a technical specs document in 8.5x11 PDF format on a smartphone? Prepare to do a lot of scrolling.
And yes, notebooks can do all those things and more, and they're portable. But they're not easy to use in some situations -- for example, referring to a web page for more information while you're out shopping, for example.
In the end, you personally may not need one of these at all. In fact, from what you've said, you don't need a notebook computer, either. But those have caught on just a little, and this form factor may end up catching on as well.
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Viewstate isn't useful in some circumstances, but it's hardly the only useful web technology that depends on JavaScript being enabled -- all the AJAX and Web 2.0 buzz is dependent on client-side JavaScript, as well. And you can certainly write ASP.Net code without using viewstate -- and viewstate can bloat your pages enough that you may not want to use it anyway.
As for the prebuilt components ASP.Net ships with, some of them flatly suck, especially is you believe in proper HTML semantics over tag soup. But that doesn't change the fact that the technology is fantastic for building your own reusable components.
Lots of music players can play music that don't have DRM -- nearly all of them. If you rip your music library to MP3, you can play it on virtually any device that plays music, and you will be DRM-free.
Granted, most of these devices don't have wifi, but even there, you still have options right now. For example, plenty of Pocket PCs can stream music (or video) over wifi. Drop in a 4GB flash card (some are now under $150) and you've got yourself a perfectly serviceable portable music player that can play streaming as well as downloaded audio. It can also play no-DRM Divx movies, has a wide array of simple games, and can (obviously) serve as a personal organizer.
And Sony Pictures could release a movie today on a nonstandard DVD that only works on a Sony Model ZX-87 DVD player (or whatever), and not on any other player.
As a rule, this doesn't happen, because it leads to (a) customer service nightmares (b) lower sales?
What changes with a new format?
I've never used Context, but I agree the usability on Visual Studio is pretty poor, though I tolerate it for my job.
But you might check out the two I recommended if you still need a Windows text editor -- for me at least, the basics work well, and each has some interesting features that I haven't found in other editors. Both are shareware, though TextPad is minimally intrusive if you don't register it for a while.
TextPad has the ability to configure different document settings based on document types. If you want your HTML files to autowrap and display tabs as 2 spaces, but your Ruby files to not wrap and to autoconvert tabs to spaces (4 spaces each), TextPad might be the text editor for you.
UltraEdit has a number of useful project features that you find in IDEs but not usually in standalone text editors, like the ability to configure a collection of documents as a project, and to launch with the same files open that it had last time it closed. It also has column mode, which takes a little getting used to, but can save you hours of time when you need it.
Happily, both support Unix regular expressions.
There's no editor that's the right fit for everyone, but each of these work pretty well for me.
Let me see if I understand you correctly. In the future, Sony is going to produce Blu-Ray discs that contain firmware flashes that will somehow retroactively hack a variety of hardware they didn't even manufacture and work seamlessly with hundreds of different models of player made by dozens of different manufacturers?
Please take off the tinfoil hat.
Write the couple years of "no DRM" off to "marketing", and enjoy the heavily DRM'ed future...
Actually, I think this is great. By the time that they start re-enabling this flag, there will have been plenty of time to crack the underlying DRM, just as happened with DVDs.
It's not a firmware issue -- it's an issue determined on a per-title basis. The player has the capability to force downsampling, but these titles will not activate that capability.
Any future titles (or rereleases of the same titles) could have this flag enabled, and they would be downsampled. However, this wouldn't change your ability to watch any previously purchased discs at the higher resolution over analog.
I'm all for a virtual machine solution as well -- I'd love it for web development.
But I'm flatly puzzled that you claim you can't find a decent text editor for Windows. What is it you want that the Mac has that UltraEdit or TextPad won't do?
You can do stuff like this on Windows notebooks too. Turning that stuff off is always the first thing I have to do when I get a new notebook.
This is pretty far afield from your post, but PT is definitely what I first thought of in relation to this topic.
How many movies were released the year Planescape Torment came out that were deeper or more thought provoking? Were there any at all? I love all sorts of "artsy pretentious movies," and I'll put Torment up against nearly any of them.
I apologize for getting pretentious here for a minute, but in some ways, Torment sets out to really take on the possibilities of the medium in the same way that experimental films like Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera did. The fundamental nature of gaming that sets it apart from other media is that your experience is defined by the choices you make -- which is the whole point of Torment. To the point that adapting Torment as a novel or movie would make about as much sense as adapting the Empire State Building in interpretive dance.
I'm pretty sure that 50 years from now, PT will have all the appeal to younger generations of the silent version of Nosferatu. Low resolution isometric graphics that don't have any of the flash of even today's slick-looking games are going to be appealing as eating your vegetables. But surely something like that doesn't change anything.
Yes -- web development is the killer app for loading Windows, OS X, and Linux simultaneously with virtualization.
For that matter, other kinds of cross-platform testing, for example, for Java applications, would benefit similarly.
There were bugs which made it a lot trickier than it should have been to install new searches last time I used ff. And isn't there one search that you can't change, the default if a domain doesn't exist or something.
There's one that's hard to change -- if you type in something at the address bar that doesn't resolve as a URL at all (e.g. "foo", as opposed to "foo.com") it won't send you to Google, but it will send you to directly to the #1 search result from a Google search (the "I Feel Lucky" result). This is configurable, but not easily so. Of course, a Firefox extension to make this easily configurable would be pretty easy to write.
As far as adding other searches, I'm not sure what the problem was when you tried it, but I have searches for Yahoo, IMDB, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay, Webster, etc., and they were all trivially easy to set up.
I had never come across an IE-only site in that sense - maybe designers didn't realise other browsers existed so didn't bother to block them or something.
Out of necessity, Opera has always been really good at pretending to be IE, especially on Windows. For example, it will render pages designed for IE "quirks mode" the same way IE does, even though that rendering of those pages does not conform to W3C standards. Opera for Windows also has a plug-in that will run VBScript and ActiveX. Even some of the things in IE that are obviously bugs -- such as miscalculated offsets for object placement and such -- are often reproduced in Opera.
Again, I'm not criticizing Opera, because I don't think they had much of a choice. But while mimicking IE's non-standard rendering does an admirable job of presenting a better experience for their users, it also helps to perpetuate poor standardization.
In any case, surfing with other browsers besides Opera or IE will give you any number of examples of pages that were obviously designed with only IE in mind.
And although they may be crossplatform, mozilla's extra stuff is just as bad from the point of browser lock-in (and there are sites that will give you activex control for IE, some kind of extendy thing for ff, and nothing for anyone else)
What extra stuff? They implement some pieces of W3C standards that other browsers haven't implemented yet, but Opera is ahead of the curve on other pieces of the standards. All browsers should be trying to improve their implementation of W3C standards.
I think the bottom line is that we're in an awkward transitional period. We're past the "pages are designed for IE, and everyone else has to adapt to that" stage, but we're not at a point where you can just design everything to XHTML Transitional and CSS2 and have all the browsers support your page correctly. So currently, good web design usually involves implementing a fair number of browser-specific hacks and testing that they work correctly across the browsers you want to support. Which sucks.
Now that Microsoft is at least trying to develop a more standards-compliant IE 7, there is hope out there that we will get a fixed target. If that happens, then as long as you don't need to use the most advanced, bleeding-edge features in designing a web page, you can just design to the standard and any browser that doesn't display it properly is broken in some definable way that the vendor needs to fix. Of course, it's way to early to tell what will happen with IE 7 -- by most accounts, it's currently a broken mess. But of Opera, Mozilla, and Safari, none are all that far from this level of support.
Of course, even if and when we finally have a working standard, that won't force everyone who writes a web page to use it. But at least there will be a consistent body of knowledge out there -- here's how to build a standards-compliant web page that should work for all the browsers. That's pretty much the holy grail of web design, and that's where we need to get. And I really believe that the success of Firefox is a big part of helping us get there.
I can read a book in the bathtub. Are any of the ebook readers waterproof? None I've heard of.
I realize that this probably isn't going to win you over, but FYI, you can get
waterproof
cases for pocket pcs, and probably for other devices as well.
I'm not sure what you mean. It's not that easy to uninstall searches, but it takes 2 minutes to go find different searches and install them. And switching to a different default search is as easy as clicking on the button and selecting something else. I use other searches in Firefox all the time.
Opera installs Google as well, and gets paid for it just like Mozilla.
It's also worth noting that since Firefox is free software, if they start bundling Gator, anyone can build a Gator-free distribution. I'm not criticizing Opera, but if their users don't have the same recourse.
Whereas now they are developed and tested with only IE and FF in mind, and anyone else is no better off.
Users are better off in 2 ways:
If your goal is to maximize the number of Opera users, no doubt, Firefox is a hindrance. If your goal is to maximize browser choice, it's surely a massive victory.
I've had at least one site that will block browsers other than IE and firefox.
Nothing is going to protect people from the gross stupidity of the occasional web designer. But there are surely less "IE and Mozilla only" sites than there were IE only sites before, especially when some designers thought that building sites around Windows-only ActiveX controls were a good idea.
Furthermore, I've known users who are now turned off switching - "I tried firefox and didn't like it, I'm sticking with IE from now on".
Yes, and other people have decided that since you can choose your browser now, it's okay to shop around and sample everything that's out there. If many of them stick with Firefox after looking around, you can hardly say that's a sign they've done something wrong.
I like Opera. I've used it a bit, and I test web pages with it. I like Firefox better, but I have no trouble imagining that people could like Opera better. Or Safari. Or Seamonkey. Or some other browser I've never even heard of. Choice is good.
Firefox is making a good browser, and they make it available to anyone, with source code, on a wide variety of platforms. They've taken steps to solidify their financial ability to keep making a good browser, and without changing their software in any way that can't be easily altered if you don't like it. I just can't see how that hurts anyone.
There is a balance to be struck. You can do the pauper thing. Or you can be a completely unethical scumbag and make lots and lots of money. Neither of these is the best path.
In what way do you think that developing a free, GPL'ed browser and making spinoff income off the fact that people choose to search with Google fails to strike this balance?
And if you say it's because they've been too aggressive at promoting their product, remember that before Firefox's popularity got off the ground, IE's market share was so towering that most commercial websites were developed and tested with only IE in mind. If Firefox were just another obscure browser with no market share, this would likely still be the case.
Exactly. Opera is cleaning up in the mobile and embedded market.
The best part is, it's because their browser does have a small footprint, so they're being paid to keep it that way.
Nice try, but it's a weak analogy.
A DVD player started out expensive -- heck HD-DVD players are starting out moderately expensive. But everyone knew they were going to get cheaper. I don't foresee $100 Mac Minis any time soon, and a $600 box for every TV seems to be unlikely to work.
Much more practical and affordable is some kind of set top box like a MediaMVP. You can buy one today for $100, and it plays music, video, and photos nicely. Of course, Apple doesn't make set top boxes, and their DRM prevents you from using the existing solutions that are out there.
But really, who would want an open solution that would work on their choice of hardware?
I love the idea of unlimited on-demand downloads, but I can't imagine that the MPAA is dying to allow you to watch hundreds of movies for a flat fee, even though most people would only watch a few.
CinemaNow has a subscription service already, except that they can't get a license for any Hollywood movies. So they offer Hollywood movies as on-demand 24-hour rentals instead.
Not that CinemaNow is of any use to you -- it's Windows-only.
So are people going to buy a Mac Mini (as well as a funky adapter) for every TV in the house, or settle for movies that they can only watch at one location, like TV used to be in the 1950s?
I think you're overestimating the willingness of consumers to buy video that they don't really have control over -- in the sense it it will only play on a computer or iPod, neither of which is currently a primary outlet for watching movies or TV programming.
It's far from settled that this is Apple's market to lose. My 4-year-old iPaq has a better screen for watching movies than Apple's current offering with the 2.5" screen. We'll see what the next generation player looks like.
Also, it's not a lock that the point of these services is to download video to mini-players. Sure, if you take the bus a lot or have an hour-long commute by train, an iPod video may be a slice of heaven. But people take MP3 players with them in the car, jogging, all sorts of places where a video player will be an active hindrance.
By allowing movies to be burned to DVD (unlike Apple's current offerings), Amazon is allowing you to watch movies:
It's still way up in the air how all this plays out. In a couple of years, people may look back on iTunes video as Apple's biggest flop since the Newton.
This time, owners of the "failed" format will simply be expected to purchase their favourite films again, to the benefit of the movie studios.
Not if companies like LG make good on their promises to make dual-standard devices.
With a dual-standard device, both standards can win, where "win" is defined as not being orphaned. Buy a player that supports both, and you don't need to care which format ends up being the dominant one, because you'll be able to play both types of media.
Q: Who won, DVD+R or DVD-R?
A: Who cares? Any decent DVD recorder drive can use both.
Sure, it's confusing to consumers to have to choose amongst two different DVD recording media standards when the differences are minor, but it's not the end of the world. For prerecorded media, having two supported standards is even less important -- just buy whichever one a movie is released on.
Of course, lots of people use Rhapsody as a platform to sample music and decide whether they like it before buying it. So by keeping it off Rhapsody, they are impeding people from hearing their music and deciding to go buy it.
This is analogous to making sure your new music doesn't get on the radio, so people will have to buy the CD to listen to it -- not exactly a proven business model.
A related phenomenon is that DVD sales of a movie increase when it's on television. Counter to the intuitive "I saw it on TV, why would I buy it?" logic you might expect, the fact the movie is on TV reminds people that it exists at all, and that they liked it. Therefore, they go buy it while it's fresh in their minds.
For example, are there any phones I can install my own OS and software on (preferably something free and hackable...) and still have them work as phones?
There are a number of Linux smartphones that have been made, but I'm not sure any of them are actually available in the US. They seem to be popular in Asia.
Palm OS smartphones have plenty of software available for them for you to install, but the OS isn't open or particularly hackable. The next generation of Palm OS is being build on top of Linux, but the timetable and roadmap seem kind of up in the air right now.
In addition, there are a number that run Pocket PC. You can run and develop your own software on these, as well, but it's a version of Windows, so it's about what you'd expect from the standpoint of openness or hackability.
In principle, Linux could be ported to Pocket PC phones, since they are architecturally similar to (and run the same processor family, ARM, as) the iPaq, which has a Linux community.
The Nokia 770 looks great -- the only thing I really wish it had was more memory. It has 64MB of RAM, 128MB of FLASH, and a tiny flash slot (RS-MMC) that doesn't come in very large sizes.
On the plus side, it's a USB host, so you can get a thumb drive or a battery powered USB hub and a 1.8" USB hard drive, but it's a little less portable with all that random stuff handing off it.
The devices you're talking about already exist -- they're smartphones and PDAs. And there's nothing at all wrong with them. They're so portable you can take them anywhere, provide easy access to moderate amounts of information, and they have great connectivity.
But they don't do some things well. Movies are tiny on a smartphone -- it's hard to make out detail. A 7" screen is much better for this except in the most cramped of spaces.
And while some information can be conveniently crammed into a tiny screen, it's impractical for other information. Want to browse through a technical specs document in 8.5x11 PDF format on a smartphone? Prepare to do a lot of scrolling.
And yes, notebooks can do all those things and more, and they're portable. But they're not easy to use in some situations -- for example, referring to a web page for more information while you're out shopping, for example.
In the end, you personally may not need one of these at all. In fact, from what you've said, you don't need a notebook computer, either. But those have caught on just a little, and this form factor may end up catching on as well.