Not saying there's no biology in intelligence, but assuming that biologists alone can answer the big questions about intelligence seems like an even bigger presumption. Psychologists and theologists are probably a better bet.
The last Linux UI innovation I can recall is themeability - and I am still not sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Theming is hardly new - I'd consider multiple interoperating desktops/WMs to be far more "innovative" (though i wouldn't use that word for reasons i've expounded upon before) - I have yet to see a widespread OS with such an astonishing zoo of user interfaces. Yeah, some look just like Windows, but what did you expect - lots of people like that interface and are happy with it. But if you compare say KDE against ratpoison, or GNOME against Enlightenment, and yet they can all run the same apps, use each others system trays etc (well, almost) - that's something new, and different.
Are you sure? I thought RealAudio streams used RDP, just bouncing off RTSP. I was looking at this last night in fact, I was told that while RA and RM might be supported, RealAudio streams were not...
Says the PFY as he fires up MPlayer(having downloaded the illegally-distributed Windows DLLs from the mplayer authors)
Um, they aren't illegally distributed. Apple themselves distribute them for free - they'd be hard pressed to argue in court that while it's OK for random multimedia CDs and websites to redistribute QuickTime, it's not ok for the MPlayer guys to do it.
Linux has half a percent of the desktop market. Apple, with MacOS, has something like 4-5%, I think?
Er, what? You need to get a handle on statistics dude! Nobody knows how big the market share of Linux is, but it's easily 2-3% - companies like IDC say this, not some random joe off the net. Apples market share has been declining steadily for some time now, go read OSNews, they have reported on it several times, and it's now hovering slightly above 2%. So you're smoking some serious stuff if you think MacOS is a long way in front of Linux in terms of market share - it may even be the other way around.
They don't, quite frankly, have the time to screw around with, essentially, something that can't even be called "competition"
Apples biggest competitor is Linux by a long, long way. It's the only OS that also appeals to the UNIX-minded user base and can be installed on Apple hardware. No, Windows basically targets a different market at this level. I suspect this is the biggest reason they aren't doing anything - if you look at their contributions to free software, they've done basically what the licenses forced them to do and no more. They're happy to use free software to further their own ends, but aren't really happy to actually take part in the community.
their legal department head is a total psycho-policy-bitch, completely the wrong thing for a cute-and-cuddly computer company
Apple aren't cute and cuddly, not even close. You might like to think they are, but go through and learn about their history, Jobs' working style, you clearly already know about their legal tendancies. They're a company out to make the biggest buck they can, and the "cute and cuddly" feeling is a glow projected by their fearsome marketing department, not by their actions.
Fabrice Bellard is one of the most elite hacker-guru people I know. He's not only responsible for FFmpeg, but also the QEMU emulator, which will eventually let you run x86 Linux binaries on other CPU architectures (including Wine). He knows his stuff, let's put it that way.
give customers what they want and adapt to market and economic trends.. want to lose money?
The problem being of course that their "customers" want their music for free, and that involves them losing money. I have some sympathy for them. They are hardly pure and innocent here, but the fact is that an entire generation of people have allowed themselves effectively flout the law because "everybody does it, it's market conditions". Not healthy. Not healthy at all.
Yeah, I'm the same way, I used to follow each release and even the nightlies. I'm not so bothered these days. BUT (and i'm sure you're all sick of hearing this yet i don't care) Firebird on Linux totally owns. Get the Firebird GTK2/XFT2 builds, google for them (NOT the official ones) and you'll get a pretty, visually integrated very fast browser with extensions coming out the wazoo. When I saw the list of available extensions I felt I was in candyland. You should try it! It's the future of Mozilla, that's for sure.
Do these problems really exist? are they bad? Can we have some real evidence instead of just opinion.
Oh, they are real enough. The GTK2 platform doesn't even have stuff to do uppercase/lowercasing, because it essentially becomes meaningless in many langauges. Instead there is a "case normal" function or something like that, which will eliminate different ways of writing the same characters I believe, but it is all black magic to me.
...RedHat? Apt-get and its Synaptic GUI both run on RedHat and Matthias Saou of FreshRPMs [freshrpms.net] maintains a giant archive of currently 1655 packages specifically for RedHat.
FreshRPMs does rock yes, but 1665? Where did you get that figure from? If you at the shrike archives, I see 300 odd. Are you adding together all the redhat versions?
The main problem with things like apt is that unless you're on a distro like Debian or Gentoo the package you want never seems to be available. Even with those distros, it's either available but out of date or not available at all.
Hmm, so? Microsoft are attempting to expand into Asia, this has been covered here many times before. As Redhat and Microsoft are competitors at present, it makes sense to mention this in the context of the story.
I've long been puzzled as to why a company should pay for improvements to a system, if they then have to make these available to their competitors
Because it solves their problem, and the GPL means they have to release those changes. Of course, if their problem is solved they probably don't really care what happens to the changes, the GPL just makes sure they don't seal it off simply because they can.
I also have to agree. What kind of discussion does Michael hope to promote when he speaks of "Borgs" and assimilation, not to speak of the childish style he adopts?
It might interest you to know that Microsoft employees routinely refer to themselves as borg, new employees joining as "assimilation" etc, go read some blogs of employees if you don't believe me. It's a running joke, I doubt anybody takes it seriously.
One could make the argument that KDE is doing the same thing with Konqueror.
One could also make the argument that this is pretty irrelevant as KDE follows what Windows does very closely. It was more a case of, OK, we need a component embedding system (made kparts), now what do we do with it? Hey, the stuff you can do with Explorer looks cool, good demo of it, let's do that too! Only better!
I don't think MS only wrote IE to kill Netscape either, though that may have been high in some of their execs minds. A web rendering engine is such a useful thing for an OS to have.
I don't think you understand - when there are already implementations out there, that are working, debugged and with tested interop you don't just drop that because somebody invented an entirely new spec with only minor improvements over the original.
Getting standards up and running is hard, but the user is who benefits at the end of the day. Open source coders implement standards because they realise this, and while that doesn't mean we should be slaves to them, it does mean they should receive proper respect, especially when developed by the open source community itself.
Besides, my reading of the situation was that the improvements were not clear cut - some of them were perhaps valid only for cases where one app was not willing to implement fast scaling and disk space was a big concern, ie not most apps that want to use thumbnails.
then your harsh criticism of Mosfet seems very rude and misplaced to me.
If anything it'd be the other way around....
So I'd be very curious to hear why you think this very skilled and talented programmer,
with a huge experience in graphics, is not welcome to change a vapor and PR "draft"
into an effective and sound specification?
It's not vapor, and in fact has several implementations. Needing interoperating implementations is part of the criteria for being marked as a standard on that site. And there's nothing wrong with attempting to improve an existing spec, my problem was with the way he pointed out his issues with the current spec, apparently ignored the authors responses and then announced the "Professional Thumbnails Spec", which is a tad insulting to the makers of the original one don't you think?
So, rather than try and work with others on this - which is after all what standards are all about, and perhaps compromise a bit with his own app, he "invented" his own non-standard within the space of a couple of days.
Not that I particularly care about this issue - some of his objections to the original spec made sense although there were valid reasons for using the given techniques (his objections were mostly related to PixiePlus not being able to do whatever it wanted *shrug*).
If even wannabe spec writers can't stand constructive criticism,
then there's few hope for interoperability indeed...
I'm not sure what you mean, nor why you seem to be attacking me. I didn't write the thumbnail spec, Thomas Leonard did (mostly). My point was that you occasionally get people who think that don't bother following the (openly discussed and designed) specs, because it's inconvenient to them, which makes the whole excercise a bit pointless.
I'm trying to create a packaging metadata spec at the moment to allow standardised LSB RPMs to be installed on all compliant distros using native dep resolvers etc - in short, making a standard that the relevant people can work to and are interested in is fantastically hard work. It's not just a case of writing something down and say "Agree to it!", everything has to be discussed, specified and of course there is always a slight worry in that you might be heading in the wrong direction etc.
Lack of apparent interest from vendors is also somewhat discouraging. There are quite a few specs up on freedesktop.org that are only implemented by GNOME, with KDE "pending". Then for instance Mosfet comes along and claims the thumbnail spec is stupid for reasons x, y and z and proceeds to invent his own (the so-called "professional" thumbnail spec) and ask for it to replace the existing one! Not exactly encouraging.
iPod sports AAC. That's the kicker. I'd rather have quality than quantity.
You realise that WMA is actually very high quality right? They had some seriously smart bunnies work on the Windows Media codecs. I don't know how it compares to AAC, but I know it blows MP3 away, so I'd guess it's strongly competitive.
What you say? It's a proprietary format? Yup, but hey, if you pay the right price Microsoft will license it to you - just like with AAC. Oh and they both have some kind of DRM too.
To be more accurate, Mozilla is fast, but the Mozilla X/GFX module is not tightly optimized. I once saw a trace (a long time ago now) that indicated it drew the same things 3 times in a row.
Also, the desktop doesn't run in double-buffered mode, so the windows don't exactly move smoothly. This is not an X problem, it's a toolkit/desktop environment problem.
Ah, no, it's an X problem. GTK2 does in fact double buffer everything (i assume Qt does too but I don't know for sure). Tearing is caused by the latency between an application getting its windows damaged/resized and repainting them. What you mean by "double buffered desktop" is actually a desktop where the display engine repaints damaged areas synchronously without waiting for the apps to catch up, so the movement/repaint takes place at the same time.
X provides something that lets you do this, called backing stores/save unders (terminology depends on whether you're speaking from context of client or server). Unfortunately, they are broke. They ship on XFree disabled by default for various reasons, but if you're curious enable them then try scrolling a text view in GTK. You'll see the memory usage of X go up and up, because it treats the scrolled area as one big window and tries to save huge amounts of garbage, never freeing it (or something).
If KDE doesn't use XRender and Xv to render faster, it's not an X problem.
XRender is cool, and has a lot of potential, but right now it's not heavily optimized and is quite slow. Not all drivers accelerate it, in fact I'm pretty sure most don't. Xv is a bit left field, I assume you're talking about fast scaling - Xv requires pixel data to be in video colourspace, it's not particularly suitable for desktop usage. XRender provides the opportunity for accelerated scaling, but again, XRender isn't finished and it's not optimized.
This is indicative of a wider problem in general, namely that free software effectively exists outside the normal economy. The concept of "everybody who uses this idea must pay us" seems reasonable when you start from the assumption that everything has a price, but free software essentially rewrites the economics of the software industry - the friction between the old and the new manifests itself in problems like this.
The only solutions that I can see are for all software to be free software, and for programmers who were traditionally employed on selling software as a product to move to a service based economy, or for official recognition and protection to be given to the free software economy. One of the implications of the second is ruling software patents invalid of course, but this problem extends outside the realm of software - who is to say that other scientists, engineers or even authors/artists/etc would not want to freely share ideas and information without hindrance from patents?
I'm no coder, but there are thousands of people out there that can crack whatever MS tries to do
Cracking is one thing, having a well supported, integrated out of the box experience is something totally different. Anybody who installs Redhat with nVidia cards still get appalling speed because they are on the no-frills NV driver. You know the hoops you have to go through to run Linux on an XBox? It's strictly for hobbyists only.
Another poster in this thread pointed out that we don't control the desktop market - unfortunately the glut of WinModems and hardware with binary-only drivers hammers this fact home constantly. Until people start building Linux specific hardware and selling it in stores next to "standard" stuff, hardware support will continue to be a weak point in the armour of Linux.
What's stopping somebody from "partnering" with a manufacturer, producing a PC that won't boot DOS/Windows, but will boot Linux?
Nothing, and I suspect it's only a matter of a few years before we see somebody take Linux and integrate it really tightly with the hardware. I'm looking forward to it:) But I seriously, seriously doubt that such a beast would be prevented from running Windows - the makers of the hardware would want to sell hardware, not play political games. They may profit from Linux being successful yes, but if you want to buy this Linux-tuned PC or laptop and run Windows on it, why should they say no? They don't own an OS, so have little vested interest in seeing it win out.
Well, we really are OT now, but as stuff built on top of computer platforms/operating systems are generally mutually exclusive, they can be arguably treated as separate markets. Microsoft may dominate web browers on Windows, but they do not on Linux or MacOS - their anti-competitive practices don't affect the choice we have because they don't compete for our custom.
Therefore if Apple attempts to lock out competitors on the Mac platform, it could be argued that they are being anti-competitive. Now there's nothing stopping you from using another media player, but let's face it, who in their right mind would compete against a flagship product that's bundled with the OS and given away for free? It's IE all over again.
But hell, if I can buy my music in this way for all the time to come, I really could care less if the RIAA has a hand in it.
Good to see you're honest about this - I wonder how many Slashdotters actually meant "I'm too lazy to walk down to the local store" when they said "I'm going to stop buying CDs because the evil RIAA doesn't give enough to the artist".
Of course, now there is an option that lets you pay 2 mega-corps instead of 1, people are dancing for joy because they can just move their arm a bit instead of going out of the door.
Anything which encourages people to purchase music directly by cutting out the retail link can only help artists in the long run.
This doesn't cut out the retail link though. It simple eliminates your local record store and replaces it with Apple.
If people get used to this kind of thing, they're much more likely to purchase music from independent artists someday - because independent artists will probably never be able to afford to get their CDs into record stores, but it won't be too much trouble for them to get onto download services.
Sure, assuming Apple don't end up with a near monopoly. This kind of thing suffers a classic network effect - can you see people joining 20 or 30 different download services to get their music? No, they'll use the ones that are most convenient - ie the ones that are integrated with their computers. I don't know for sure but I'd bet a lot that Apple won't be allowing eMusic to plug into iTunes anytime soon.
Right now the price Apple charges for getting a track onto this service is about 30-40 US cents, something around that figure. If they become a dominant middle man, who's to say that Apple won't start putting on the squeeze to up the margins just like the big bad old record companies did? They are all shareholder owned at the end of the day.
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Not saying there's no biology in intelligence, but assuming that biologists alone can answer the big questions about intelligence seems like an even bigger presumption. Psychologists and theologists are probably a better bet.
Theming is hardly new - I'd consider multiple interoperating desktops/WMs to be far more "innovative" (though i wouldn't use that word for reasons i've expounded upon before) - I have yet to see a widespread OS with such an astonishing zoo of user interfaces. Yeah, some look just like Windows, but what did you expect - lots of people like that interface and are happy with it. But if you compare say KDE against ratpoison, or GNOME against Enlightenment, and yet they can all run the same apps, use each others system trays etc (well, almost) - that's something new, and different.
Are you sure? I thought RealAudio streams used RDP, just bouncing off RTSP. I was looking at this last night in fact, I was told that while RA and RM might be supported, RealAudio streams were not...
Um, they aren't illegally distributed. Apple themselves distribute them for free - they'd be hard pressed to argue in court that while it's OK for random multimedia CDs and websites to redistribute QuickTime, it's not ok for the MPlayer guys to do it.
Linux has half a percent of the desktop market. Apple, with MacOS, has something like 4-5%, I think?
Er, what? You need to get a handle on statistics dude! Nobody knows how big the market share of Linux is, but it's easily 2-3% - companies like IDC say this, not some random joe off the net. Apples market share has been declining steadily for some time now, go read OSNews, they have reported on it several times, and it's now hovering slightly above 2%. So you're smoking some serious stuff if you think MacOS is a long way in front of Linux in terms of market share - it may even be the other way around .
They don't, quite frankly, have the time to screw around with, essentially, something that can't even be called "competition"
Apples biggest competitor is Linux by a long, long way. It's the only OS that also appeals to the UNIX-minded user base and can be installed on Apple hardware. No, Windows basically targets a different market at this level. I suspect this is the biggest reason they aren't doing anything - if you look at their contributions to free software, they've done basically what the licenses forced them to do and no more. They're happy to use free software to further their own ends, but aren't really happy to actually take part in the community.
their legal department head is a total psycho-policy-bitch, completely the wrong thing for a cute-and-cuddly computer company
Apple aren't cute and cuddly, not even close. You might like to think they are, but go through and learn about their history, Jobs' working style, you clearly already know about their legal tendancies. They're a company out to make the biggest buck they can, and the "cute and cuddly" feeling is a glow projected by their fearsome marketing department, not by their actions.
Fabrice Bellard is one of the most elite hacker-guru people I know. He's not only responsible for FFmpeg, but also the QEMU emulator, which will eventually let you run x86 Linux binaries on other CPU architectures (including Wine). He knows his stuff, let's put it that way.
The problem being of course that their "customers" want their music for free, and that involves them losing money. I have some sympathy for them. They are hardly pure and innocent here, but the fact is that an entire generation of people have allowed themselves effectively flout the law because "everybody does it, it's market conditions". Not healthy. Not healthy at all.
Yeah, I'm the same way, I used to follow each release and even the nightlies. I'm not so bothered these days. BUT (and i'm sure you're all sick of hearing this yet i don't care) Firebird on Linux totally owns. Get the Firebird GTK2/XFT2 builds, google for them (NOT the official ones) and you'll get a pretty, visually integrated very fast browser with extensions coming out the wazoo. When I saw the list of available extensions I felt I was in candyland. You should try it! It's the future of Mozilla, that's for sure.
Oh, they are real enough. The GTK2 platform doesn't even have stuff to do uppercase/lowercasing, because it essentially becomes meaningless in many langauges. Instead there is a "case normal" function or something like that, which will eliminate different ways of writing the same characters I believe, but it is all black magic to me.
FreshRPMs does rock yes, but 1665? Where did you get that figure from? If you at the shrike archives, I see 300 odd. Are you adding together all the redhat versions?
The main problem with things like apt is that unless you're on a distro like Debian or Gentoo the package you want never seems to be available. Even with those distros, it's either available but out of date or not available at all.
Hmm, so? Microsoft are attempting to expand into Asia, this has been covered here many times before. As Redhat and Microsoft are competitors at present, it makes sense to mention this in the context of the story.
Because it solves their problem, and the GPL means they have to release those changes. Of course, if their problem is solved they probably don't really care what happens to the changes, the GPL just makes sure they don't seal it off simply because they can.
It might interest you to know that Microsoft employees routinely refer to themselves as borg, new employees joining as "assimilation" etc, go read some blogs of employees if you don't believe me. It's a running joke, I doubt anybody takes it seriously.
One could also make the argument that this is pretty irrelevant as KDE follows what Windows does very closely. It was more a case of, OK, we need a component embedding system (made kparts), now what do we do with it? Hey, the stuff you can do with Explorer looks cool, good demo of it, let's do that too! Only better!
I don't think MS only wrote IE to kill Netscape either, though that may have been high in some of their execs minds. A web rendering engine is such a useful thing for an OS to have.
Blargh, I was thinking of a different spec, s/Thomas Leonard/Jens Finke/
Getting standards up and running is hard, but the user is who benefits at the end of the day. Open source coders implement standards because they realise this, and while that doesn't mean we should be slaves to them, it does mean they should receive proper respect, especially when developed by the open source community itself.
Besides, my reading of the situation was that the improvements were not clear cut - some of them were perhaps valid only for cases where one app was not willing to implement fast scaling and disk space was a big concern, ie not most apps that want to use thumbnails.
If anything it'd be the other way around....
So I'd be very curious to hear why you think this very skilled and talented programmer, with a huge experience in graphics, is not welcome to change a vapor and PR "draft" into an effective and sound specification?
It's not vapor, and in fact has several implementations. Needing interoperating implementations is part of the criteria for being marked as a standard on that site. And there's nothing wrong with attempting to improve an existing spec, my problem was with the way he pointed out his issues with the current spec, apparently ignored the authors responses and then announced the "Professional Thumbnails Spec", which is a tad insulting to the makers of the original one don't you think?
So, rather than try and work with others on this - which is after all what standards are all about, and perhaps compromise a bit with his own app, he "invented" his own non-standard within the space of a couple of days.
Not that I particularly care about this issue - some of his objections to the original spec made sense although there were valid reasons for using the given techniques (his objections were mostly related to PixiePlus not being able to do whatever it wanted *shrug*).
If even wannabe spec writers can't stand constructive criticism, then there's few hope for interoperability indeed...
I'm not sure what you mean, nor why you seem to be attacking me. I didn't write the thumbnail spec, Thomas Leonard did (mostly). My point was that you occasionally get people who think that don't bother following the (openly discussed and designed) specs, because it's inconvenient to them, which makes the whole excercise a bit pointless.
Lack of apparent interest from vendors is also somewhat discouraging. There are quite a few specs up on freedesktop.org that are only implemented by GNOME, with KDE "pending". Then for instance Mosfet comes along and claims the thumbnail spec is stupid for reasons x, y and z and proceeds to invent his own (the so-called "professional" thumbnail spec) and ask for it to replace the existing one! Not exactly encouraging.
You realise that WMA is actually very high quality right? They had some seriously smart bunnies work on the Windows Media codecs. I don't know how it compares to AAC, but I know it blows MP3 away, so I'd guess it's strongly competitive.
What you say? It's a proprietary format? Yup, but hey, if you pay the right price Microsoft will license it to you - just like with AAC. Oh and they both have some kind of DRM too.
To be more accurate, Mozilla is fast, but the Mozilla X/GFX module is not tightly optimized. I once saw a trace (a long time ago now) that indicated it drew the same things 3 times in a row.
Also, the desktop doesn't run in double-buffered mode, so the windows don't exactly move smoothly. This is not an X problem, it's a toolkit/desktop environment problem.
Ah, no, it's an X problem. GTK2 does in fact double buffer everything (i assume Qt does too but I don't know for sure). Tearing is caused by the latency between an application getting its windows damaged/resized and repainting them. What you mean by "double buffered desktop" is actually a desktop where the display engine repaints damaged areas synchronously without waiting for the apps to catch up, so the movement/repaint takes place at the same time.
X provides something that lets you do this, called backing stores/save unders (terminology depends on whether you're speaking from context of client or server). Unfortunately, they are broke. They ship on XFree disabled by default for various reasons, but if you're curious enable them then try scrolling a text view in GTK. You'll see the memory usage of X go up and up, because it treats the scrolled area as one big window and tries to save huge amounts of garbage, never freeing it (or something).
If KDE doesn't use XRender and Xv to render faster, it's not an X problem.
XRender is cool, and has a lot of potential, but right now it's not heavily optimized and is quite slow. Not all drivers accelerate it, in fact I'm pretty sure most don't. Xv is a bit left field, I assume you're talking about fast scaling - Xv requires pixel data to be in video colourspace, it's not particularly suitable for desktop usage. XRender provides the opportunity for accelerated scaling, but again, XRender isn't finished and it's not optimized.
The only solutions that I can see are for all software to be free software, and for programmers who were traditionally employed on selling software as a product to move to a service based economy, or for official recognition and protection to be given to the free software economy. One of the implications of the second is ruling software patents invalid of course, but this problem extends outside the realm of software - who is to say that other scientists, engineers or even authors/artists/etc would not want to freely share ideas and information without hindrance from patents?
Cracking is one thing, having a well supported, integrated out of the box experience is something totally different. Anybody who installs Redhat with nVidia cards still get appalling speed because they are on the no-frills NV driver. You know the hoops you have to go through to run Linux on an XBox? It's strictly for hobbyists only.
Another poster in this thread pointed out that we don't control the desktop market - unfortunately the glut of WinModems and hardware with binary-only drivers hammers this fact home constantly. Until people start building Linux specific hardware and selling it in stores next to "standard" stuff, hardware support will continue to be a weak point in the armour of Linux.
Nothing, and I suspect it's only a matter of a few years before we see somebody take Linux and integrate it really tightly with the hardware. I'm looking forward to it :) But I seriously, seriously doubt that such a beast would be prevented from running Windows - the makers of the hardware would want to sell hardware, not play political games. They may profit from Linux being successful yes, but if you want to buy this Linux-tuned PC or laptop and run Windows on it, why should they say no? They don't own an OS, so have little vested interest in seeing it win out.
Therefore if Apple attempts to lock out competitors on the Mac platform, it could be argued that they are being anti-competitive. Now there's nothing stopping you from using another media player, but let's face it, who in their right mind would compete against a flagship product that's bundled with the OS and given away for free? It's IE all over again.
Not my concern of course. I don't use a Mac.
Good to see you're honest about this - I wonder how many Slashdotters actually meant "I'm too lazy to walk down to the local store" when they said "I'm going to stop buying CDs because the evil RIAA doesn't give enough to the artist".
Of course, now there is an option that lets you pay 2 mega-corps instead of 1, people are dancing for joy because they can just move their arm a bit instead of going out of the door.
This doesn't cut out the retail link though. It simple eliminates your local record store and replaces it with Apple.
If people get used to this kind of thing, they're much more likely to purchase music from independent artists someday - because independent artists will probably never be able to afford to get their CDs into record stores, but it won't be too much trouble for them to get onto download services.
Sure, assuming Apple don't end up with a near monopoly. This kind of thing suffers a classic network effect - can you see people joining 20 or 30 different download services to get their music? No, they'll use the ones that are most convenient - ie the ones that are integrated with their computers. I don't know for sure but I'd bet a lot that Apple won't be allowing eMusic to plug into iTunes anytime soon.
Right now the price Apple charges for getting a track onto this service is about 30-40 US cents, something around that figure. If they become a dominant middle man, who's to say that Apple won't start putting on the squeeze to up the margins just like the big bad old record companies did? They are all shareholder owned at the end of the day.