that could be kind of fun... but the world's not ready for it yet. I'm kind of surprised steve hasn't put 2 headphone jacks on an iPod yet. It sounds silly, but that would accomplish the same "sharing" feature for about 5 cents on the cost versus battery stealing wirless.
I wonder if ThinkGeek still has iCopulate? they thought of iPod to iPod sharing years ago.
there's a small list of stores NOT using Fairplay... emusic, rapsody, iTMS, and audible.. pretty much every body else is windows "plays for sure". They've paid a lot of money to MS for licensing, and servers... and MS borked them all!
the Papparazzi do that kind of stuff all the time, the big papers love to print juicy details gleaned from stolen photos, picked up extentsion phones, and the like... some how they think they're above being the TARGETS of such tactics. What HP did is mostly no different than Hard Copy or Dateline does to seedy car dealers and big company greasy CEOs. This reporter got her stories because she was willing to be a tool in a backstabbing match... funny how it comes back around to get you... if the papers don't like corporations cracking down on who talks to reporters, they need to tell the reporters to stop taking "tainted" sources as stories. I've wanted press accountability like this for a while... I bet it's realy worth that big scoop now that her records are out there for all of congress to see!!
why should a high profile press reporter have any more "privacy" than Britney Spears? After all, look how much stuff the tabloids get to publish legally! Don't think it's not legal... there just isn't any money in tracking random reporters like they do hollywood stars.. unless a big corp is bankrolling it. Think of the "hidden cameras" and "riveting exposes" you see on the boob tube and supermarket news racks.. YES, they can do that to you too! Don't like people randomly reading your emails to teenage boys? Don't like that bad day you had and hopped in the car wihtout the carseat? How about that skinny dip you didn't think anybody knew about? not so funny any more is it.. to bad it's part of the game every body pays to watch.
relize it's not about company power.. most of what they did anybody could do... if they didn't get caught too. Remember, HP was not about a "legal" case, they wanted the disloyal leakers found... it cost 1 CEO her job because the media circus surrounding her pushed the board to make poor decisions and not follow the company's own standards. Several directors worked in concert, without board permission, to defame her as "secret sources" to the press to effect their private interests above those they agreed to as the board! That's the real issue conveniently brushed under the rug in all this. This is monied board members worrried about their personal options in the press and taking their fustrations with the CEO out publicly behind her back. IF that happened, in that scale, by any other supervisor other than board members in any other company, they'd expect to loose their jobs too, CEOs included. What those two did was equally as bad as the spying.. hard to pin a legal concequence on, but entirely a breach of code of conduct and board ethics... any other boards should fire them immedietaly, and revoke their options. Yes, the "spying" is bad, but about 99% of the stuff is perfectly legal.. just a little unsporting and untrusting.. but given that their behavior cost 1 CEO her job, would you sit by knowing one of your bosses was talking to reporters behind your back and wait for them to do it to you too?
but the terrorists are getting the good stuff anyway, they just buy surplus Army stingers from the terrorist we sold them to 10 years ago... they don't engineer anything!
exactly, most of the "bombmaking" stuff can be found in most garages of anybody that works on cars, furnature, gardening at the same time. The rules are left open to a huge amount of indiviual officer (in)descression. I've often wondered what would happen if I went to Walmart for the harmless household items like peanut butter, shortening, draino, ammonia, bleach, leangh of copper tubing, solder, etc all on the same ticket?
The BIGGER question is why isn't the NRA backing them up also!!! The 2nd amendment isn't just about GUNS, it's about the ability to have weapons... and anything that might be a weapon.. something the courts have neatly side stepped but making rules only about guns.. while severely limiting billy clubs, knives, swords, and the like.. "Arms" aren't just guns.
excellent example of this... the OS version RH WS versus Window XP. He claims RH WS expensive at $299 while windows is $140 OEM. Read that again. RH is offically supported for so many instance calls per year/term etc.. and if you find a bug they will write it down and may actually fix it... just for you! For 5 seats that's a steal. Compare to MS windows, for starters that $140 price does not entitle you to call Microsoft for any problem! There is NO support for OEM, you must call who you bought it from. The "supported" version is $299 as well... but that still doesn't entitle you to call for support... you have to pay per call for that as well. For 5 seats of windows you're not even a bug on the windscreen.
As far as the other products he mentioned, they are buying commercial licenses without the usual "GPL only" restrictions as well as support. These are companies that will actually ANSWER your calls and fix problems you find, not just take your money and point you to a website. Remember, MS Visual studio, C#, CE tools may be cheap for price, but come with NO SUPPORT!!! NONE! if you want to actually call somebody, you have to pay per call/hour/service additional. The cost for most commercial products is only to legally USE them. not get help!
Perhaps this company didn't need quite so many support options, it seems a little silly to purchase the "deluxe" versions for such a small shop. But I'd give them credit for trying and helping out by paying!
The real meaning to get from all of this is that only the Govt. can spy on you, an obtain records illegally. If this was an FBI official that illegally "phreaked" a few phone numbers to catch said drug dealer the worst that would happen is they'd loose their case.
But we can't have NORMAL citizens doing that... that's uncivilized. I would think that HP the company should be drafting criminal industrial-espionage charges and "fair services" charges against the board members for leaking ILLEGALLY. But that won't happen... CEOs are just "employees" and board members are "owners" of the lower classes. Holding boards responsible has even less likely hood of happening than a CEO going to jail.
I wonder if this AG will be charging George Bush any time soon? If a ORDERING or REQUESTING little "phreaking" is worth up to 12 years, what's systematically setting up spy works at the telcos?? The information HP obtained was LESS than what the govt is stealing from ATT!!!
Actually, Lucas made the SW movies very cheaply. Phantom was only $110M and the other two were comparable. They actually came in UNDER budget... very rare for the film industry.
What he needed to do was recoup some of that cost into other things. When you make a "blockbuster" you trash almost all the sets with in a few weeks of shooting... sets that are more detailed and cost more than most of our houses! Compare SW:TPM to SG-1 where they use simple sets, and reuse, reuse, reuse to cut costs. They made more fully decorated sets for SW:TPM than an entire season of SG-1. Then let's get started on the digital models! Again, the cost nearly as much to create as the "meatspace" models, but they aren't being REUSED in anything else! Movies are full of huge non-recurring set costs that nobody thinks about. Lucas could do 3-4 seasons of a TV show with just the leftovers/reused props/efffects from his movies.. and we'd probably like the story better too.
but when dozens of servers are only a few feet apart the loss isn't important anymore... but having a separate 300W switching power supply for every system IS a waste of resources. ATX made sense when mobos were $300 a pop... you wanted to break out the fickle power circuitry as it's usually the first to go, now they're $50...the power circuitry is a trivial cost per board. (and like Google says, nobody uses the volts provided anyway so all that circuitry is duplicated in the PS and MOBO) You'll notice laptops all take about 14.4V directly... so it's possible to do this, just nobody wants to rock the market. Google wants that supply external so they can manage the low power directly... at the scale Google purchases custom racks and UPS equipment is much easier to handle.
you almost get it... Yes, you have the new technology with a patent, so in a case like this though, it is CHEAPER for you to make the new stuff! You are still in a market with the three other companies that have to charge $x to make a profit. Instead of under cutting them, because you couldn't make that many anyway, you market yours at a small premium.. because it's better... split up the market, and make more profit than the other guys... everybody wins! Customers don't loose because the other makers will keep the new guy from gouging too badly.. after all, you can't get the product to market quickly unless it's compatible with the connectors already out there... so it's still a commodity.. the time you enjoy "premium" status is short.. in the tech industry measured in months, not years!
you missed the part where the cable companies aren't paying royalties to the OTA stations to carry the channels! There was quite a famous case in the early days of cable that the FCC & court said that because cable was local licensed to provide TV, they could carry OTA channels for Free as long as they carried the whole channel all the time it was on the air... they couldn't cherry pick prime time,then run other shows over it during the day.
I'm not saying they shouldn't charge for HD, but only the cost to bring OTA channels to your house.. under the same terms as they they are using now... What I was protesting was the fact that cable companies are trying again to cherry pick what they show without giving back to the stations. They don't want to provide all the sub channels and full resolution like OTA... but still want to get the channels for free... get it!
the post I replied to was questioning why the telocs would waste money on the failed buisiness model of a tiered internet... That money's not wasted for them... The person I repliled too mentioned that it was "too hard" to restrict TCP in the manner that the telcos are propopsint. They employ the successors of those who WROTE TCP! Such limitations are what they do for fun and profit. they are just biding their time to make back that money hand over fist... the fact that they're not willing to roll out wide spread broadband (which like you said we've already paid for) until the pay-per-bit system is firmly in place is a continued slap in the face.
banks will care in about 2 months that Opera doesn't work! 2 months is when PS3 and Wii come out with web access built in. Wii is already going to ship with Opera to download. PS3 may be on board shortly after because Opera is pretty much the only game in town for embedded browsers... and they're cheap too! (compared to getting MS to help you out)
isn't she the one who lied about her age so basically all her work was considered "kiddie" porn. That is honestly the best example of the problems with the whole porn crackdown problem. As I've read, she appeared to be "of age" to the producers in a time before such things were checked closely, and engaged in normal "adult" porn. So to the average viewer it would appear as normal, legal, adult porn. That's where the age police come in and say that because she lied about her age, you're all guilty of "kiddie porn" charges... It doesn't make sense to tie such harsh legal charges to just a picture... that appears to be adult.. because a bit of paper work is out of place.. FOREVER! I'm not for advocating actually kiddie porn, but it seems a bit of a streach of free speech to hold posession of an image with the same weight as creating it? Especially now that we know older porn my have more "time bombs" waiting to go off. Of course the FBI has millions of dollars to research every dirty picture out there, you and I don't... but that's the point.. to scare everybody away from it, isn't it! I think the biggest problem I have is the "FOREVER" issue... the idea that a mere image stuffed in a shoebox from 20 years ago could mean instant and increasing amounts of hard time as this whole thing gets more psycotic. Imagine finding one of these in your departed dad's closet from before you were born...it's a very dangerous thing we've got going here. Even Military secrets aren't guarded that closely!
the main thing 1080p is good for is marketing right now. Bandwidth wise 720p and 1080i are the same. With the advent of LCD/DLP televisions 1080p came to market as a sort of step-child.. it's not really an offical standard, but because things like LCDs don't understand the idea of interlacing anyway the manufactures thru it in there. There's no such thing as 1080i on an LCD... it's linescanned to 1080p by default of how LCDs work. But adding the feature is a checkbox serious people think they need so why not.
but that's exactly what Enron was doing. They were selling their "emissions rights" to other companies for profit. Federal law required them to shut down the plants when they exceeded their emissions quota even though the plants were fine. Hence they had high power prices and rolling brownouts while Enron got fat selling the "rights" to run the power somewhere else.. for example to a coal powered company in the midwest that might not be able to upgrade their equipment fast enough. As far as power plants, again Enron sold the rights to the emissions, so if you could build it, you couldn't run it or the feds would shut you down. perfect manapulation of the regulations!
Just like on airplanes, how many WANTS of the airlines to charge fees have become TSA regulations restricting what passagers can bring/do onboard planes.
That's exactly what this is, the leganary Northwest Passage finally possible to normal traffic. This is HUGE. It would reduce the travel route for goods from China/Asia by over half! and bypass many hostile weather/political areas. It litterally would dump directly into the northern EU countries... some of the most stable in the world and very close to current manufactureing centers in Russia and Germany, UK, and France. In a hugely political move, this could cut the US off from the rest of the world. No more Panama, Goods between China and the EU could move freely with no intruption.
I always expected Xbox to fail, or MS to come to their senses. MS really betrayed PC gamers with XBox by holding the industry back 3-4 years to make gaming Xbox only.. only to come back with Vista, DX10 and now the PC is back in the game... whatever. I was looking for an XBox OS for gamers, like XP with all the backwards stuff stripped out. That would have been really cool to dual boot PC games.. heck even have Xbox games work on PCs and PC games act like a console. But MS wants their new monopoly to play with and only sell 1 monopoly OS. There's plenty of Slashdotters that would run "Singularity" if they could get.Net 2 and IE would be just happy.. but MS doesn't think in terms of growing markets anymore... they thing in terms of buying them.
Apple should release a demo version of OSX with NeoOffice for regular PCs just for fun to mess with Microsoft's profit margins. Perhaps they could release only Tiger without Quartz or only run in vesa mode so most apps would work, but drivers would be scarce. Ship a bootable CD, or dual install system that could crib off all the windows settings.. becuse Apple has a real license to NTFS it would work perfectly. They could even charge a little bit for it (not looke desperate) and maybe include stripped out XCODE tools for the whole experience. If they marketed it as a "one time tech demo" thing it wouldn't hurt their business too much. There's a lot of people wanting to try it out but don't have access to a mac long enough to be confident in it and drop the cash. Of couse Apple apps (iTunes/quicktime) Offically ported to Linux would have the same effect. Apple threatening MS lunch would make huge waves on Wall Street.. more than some silly Zune device from MS.
no, iTunes is the main reason for Apple's success. I've tried other bundled players for years, musicmatch, windows media player, and the bunch of Windows ones over the years were never up to snuff for just PLAYING music...let alone buying it. Apple's from the get go "just worked". Sure it's not as fancy with as many options as the others, but it just worked... without complicated options. I bought a few songs and it was painless as well.. all the way from purchase to burning a CD. When adding the first iPod to the mix, the longest part was installing the ipod software, syncing music was painless... even more so with the newest iPod I just bought... didn't even have to install anything for the actual iPod. Sorry, but no Microsoft product has ever been THAT good.
nobody has a profitable music store.. the only people making profit from online music is the RIAA. Everybody else is just resellers with magic packaging. Any attempt to make more profit than operation expense would be sponged right back up by the music companies. Microsoft can understand and play that game just like they do, but with offers on the table to "replace" all the iTunes music for iPod owners MS is looking like a ripe target for a big check to the RIAA. MS can't bleed all that money to help the RIAA snip apple's wings, and turn around and try to lose money on selling the actual units too. MS is getting rapidly pinched for cash here even though they have buckets, it's not enough, or wise to use it that way..even for Microsoft's extravagant money spending.
what they need to do is focus on a sourceforge type code base registry rather than actual patent applications. Rather than sourceforge working on whole projects, they could be small snips of interesting stuff, or even raw ideas fleshed out publicly so nobody else could patent them...or at least have a public searchable source of "we invented this" prior art for OSS projects to point to.
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I wonder if ThinkGeek still has iCopulate? they thought of iPod to iPod sharing years ago.
there's a small list of stores NOT using Fairplay... emusic, rapsody, iTMS, and audible.. pretty much every body else is windows "plays for sure". They've paid a lot of money to MS for licensing, and servers... and MS borked them all!
the Papparazzi do that kind of stuff all the time, the big papers love to print juicy details gleaned from stolen photos, picked up extentsion phones, and the like... some how they think they're above being the TARGETS of such tactics. What HP did is mostly no different than Hard Copy or Dateline does to seedy car dealers and big company greasy CEOs. This reporter got her stories because she was willing to be a tool in a backstabbing match... funny how it comes back around to get you... if the papers don't like corporations cracking down on who talks to reporters, they need to tell the reporters to stop taking "tainted" sources as stories. I've wanted press accountability like this for a while... I bet it's realy worth that big scoop now that her records are out there for all of congress to see!!
why should a high profile press reporter have any more "privacy" than Britney Spears? After all, look how much stuff the tabloids get to publish legally! Don't think it's not legal... there just isn't any money in tracking random reporters like they do hollywood stars.. unless a big corp is bankrolling it. Think of the "hidden cameras" and "riveting exposes" you see on the boob tube and supermarket news racks.. YES, they can do that to you too! Don't like people randomly reading your emails to teenage boys? Don't like that bad day you had and hopped in the car wihtout the carseat? How about that skinny dip you didn't think anybody knew about? not so funny any more is it.. to bad it's part of the game every body pays to watch.
relize it's not about company power.. most of what they did anybody could do... if they didn't get caught too. Remember, HP was not about a "legal" case, they wanted the disloyal leakers found... it cost 1 CEO her job because the media circus surrounding her pushed the board to make poor decisions and not follow the company's own standards. Several directors worked in concert, without board permission, to defame her as "secret sources" to the press to effect their private interests above those they agreed to as the board! That's the real issue conveniently brushed under the rug in all this. This is monied board members worrried about their personal options in the press and taking their fustrations with the CEO out publicly behind her back. IF that happened, in that scale, by any other supervisor other than board members in any other company, they'd expect to loose their jobs too, CEOs included. What those two did was equally as bad as the spying.. hard to pin a legal concequence on, but entirely a breach of code of conduct and board ethics... any other boards should fire them immedietaly, and revoke their options. Yes, the "spying" is bad, but about 99% of the stuff is perfectly legal.. just a little unsporting and untrusting.. but given that their behavior cost 1 CEO her job, would you sit by knowing one of your bosses was talking to reporters behind your back and wait for them to do it to you too?
but the terrorists are getting the good stuff anyway, they just buy surplus Army stingers from the terrorist we sold them to 10 years ago... they don't engineer anything!
exactly, most of the "bombmaking" stuff can be found in most garages of anybody that works on cars, furnature, gardening at the same time. The rules are left open to a huge amount of indiviual officer (in)descression. I've often wondered what would happen if I went to Walmart for the harmless household items like peanut butter, shortening, draino, ammonia, bleach, leangh of copper tubing, solder, etc all on the same ticket? The BIGGER question is why isn't the NRA backing them up also!!! The 2nd amendment isn't just about GUNS, it's about the ability to have weapons... and anything that might be a weapon.. something the courts have neatly side stepped but making rules only about guns.. while severely limiting billy clubs, knives, swords, and the like.. "Arms" aren't just guns.
As far as the other products he mentioned, they are buying commercial licenses without the usual "GPL only" restrictions as well as support. These are companies that will actually ANSWER your calls and fix problems you find, not just take your money and point you to a website. Remember, MS Visual studio, C#, CE tools may be cheap for price, but come with NO SUPPORT!!! NONE! if you want to actually call somebody, you have to pay per call/hour/service additional. The cost for most commercial products is only to legally USE them. not get help!
Perhaps this company didn't need quite so many support options, it seems a little silly to purchase the "deluxe" versions for such a small shop. But I'd give them credit for trying and helping out by paying!
But we can't have NORMAL citizens doing that... that's uncivilized. I would think that HP the company should be drafting criminal industrial-espionage charges and "fair services" charges against the board members for leaking ILLEGALLY. But that won't happen... CEOs are just "employees" and board members are "owners" of the lower classes. Holding boards responsible has even less likely hood of happening than a CEO going to jail.
I wonder if this AG will be charging George Bush any time soon? If a ORDERING or REQUESTING little "phreaking" is worth up to 12 years, what's systematically setting up spy works at the telcos?? The information HP obtained was LESS than what the govt is stealing from ATT!!!
What he needed to do was recoup some of that cost into other things. When you make a "blockbuster" you trash almost all the sets with in a few weeks of shooting... sets that are more detailed and cost more than most of our houses! Compare SW:TPM to SG-1 where they use simple sets, and reuse, reuse, reuse to cut costs. They made more fully decorated sets for SW:TPM than an entire season of SG-1. Then let's get started on the digital models! Again, the cost nearly as much to create as the "meatspace" models, but they aren't being REUSED in anything else! Movies are full of huge non-recurring set costs that nobody thinks about. Lucas could do 3-4 seasons of a TV show with just the leftovers/reused props/efffects from his movies.. and we'd probably like the story better too.
but when dozens of servers are only a few feet apart the loss isn't important anymore... but having a separate 300W switching power supply for every system IS a waste of resources. ATX made sense when mobos were $300 a pop... you wanted to break out the fickle power circuitry as it's usually the first to go, now they're $50...the power circuitry is a trivial cost per board. (and like Google says, nobody uses the volts provided anyway so all that circuitry is duplicated in the PS and MOBO) You'll notice laptops all take about 14.4V directly... so it's possible to do this, just nobody wants to rock the market. Google wants that supply external so they can manage the low power directly... at the scale Google purchases custom racks and UPS equipment is much easier to handle.
you almost get it... Yes, you have the new technology with a patent, so in a case like this though, it is CHEAPER for you to make the new stuff! You are still in a market with the three other companies that have to charge $x to make a profit. Instead of under cutting them, because you couldn't make that many anyway, you market yours at a small premium.. because it's better... split up the market, and make more profit than the other guys... everybody wins! Customers don't loose because the other makers will keep the new guy from gouging too badly.. after all, you can't get the product to market quickly unless it's compatible with the connectors already out there... so it's still a commodity.. the time you enjoy "premium" status is short.. in the tech industry measured in months, not years!
you missed the part where the cable companies aren't paying royalties to the OTA stations to carry the channels! There was quite a famous case in the early days of cable that the FCC & court said that because cable was local licensed to provide TV, they could carry OTA channels for Free as long as they carried the whole channel all the time it was on the air... they couldn't cherry pick prime time,then run other shows over it during the day. I'm not saying they shouldn't charge for HD, but only the cost to bring OTA channels to your house.. under the same terms as they they are using now... What I was protesting was the fact that cable companies are trying again to cherry pick what they show without giving back to the stations. They don't want to provide all the sub channels and full resolution like OTA... but still want to get the channels for free... get it!
the post I replied to was questioning why the telocs would waste money on the failed buisiness model of a tiered internet... That money's not wasted for them... The person I repliled too mentioned that it was "too hard" to restrict TCP in the manner that the telcos are propopsint. They employ the successors of those who WROTE TCP! Such limitations are what they do for fun and profit. they are just biding their time to make back that money hand over fist... the fact that they're not willing to roll out wide spread broadband (which like you said we've already paid for) until the pay-per-bit system is firmly in place is a continued slap in the face.
you realize they are talking about actual silicon chips here and not games right?
banks will care in about 2 months that Opera doesn't work! 2 months is when PS3 and Wii come out with web access built in. Wii is already going to ship with Opera to download. PS3 may be on board shortly after because Opera is pretty much the only game in town for embedded browsers... and they're cheap too! (compared to getting MS to help you out)
isn't she the one who lied about her age so basically all her work was considered "kiddie" porn. That is honestly the best example of the problems with the whole porn crackdown problem. As I've read, she appeared to be "of age" to the producers in a time before such things were checked closely, and engaged in normal "adult" porn. So to the average viewer it would appear as normal, legal, adult porn. That's where the age police come in and say that because she lied about her age, you're all guilty of "kiddie porn" charges... It doesn't make sense to tie such harsh legal charges to just a picture... that appears to be adult.. because a bit of paper work is out of place.. FOREVER! I'm not for advocating actually kiddie porn, but it seems a bit of a streach of free speech to hold posession of an image with the same weight as creating it? Especially now that we know older porn my have more "time bombs" waiting to go off. Of course the FBI has millions of dollars to research every dirty picture out there, you and I don't... but that's the point.. to scare everybody away from it, isn't it! I think the biggest problem I have is the "FOREVER" issue... the idea that a mere image stuffed in a shoebox from 20 years ago could mean instant and increasing amounts of hard time as this whole thing gets more psycotic. Imagine finding one of these in your departed dad's closet from before you were born...it's a very dangerous thing we've got going here. Even Military secrets aren't guarded that closely!
the main thing 1080p is good for is marketing right now. Bandwidth wise 720p and 1080i are the same. With the advent of LCD/DLP televisions 1080p came to market as a sort of step-child.. it's not really an offical standard, but because things like LCDs don't understand the idea of interlacing anyway the manufactures thru it in there. There's no such thing as 1080i on an LCD... it's linescanned to 1080p by default of how LCDs work. But adding the feature is a checkbox serious people think they need so why not.
Just like on airplanes, how many WANTS of the airlines to charge fees have become TSA regulations restricting what passagers can bring/do onboard planes.
That's exactly what this is, the leganary Northwest Passage finally possible to normal traffic. This is HUGE. It would reduce the travel route for goods from China/Asia by over half! and bypass many hostile weather/political areas. It litterally would dump directly into the northern EU countries... some of the most stable in the world and very close to current manufactureing centers in Russia and Germany, UK, and France. In a hugely political move, this could cut the US off from the rest of the world. No more Panama, Goods between China and the EU could move freely with no intruption.
I always expected Xbox to fail, or MS to come to their senses. MS really betrayed PC gamers with XBox by holding the industry back 3-4 years to make gaming Xbox only.. only to come back with Vista, DX10 and now the PC is back in the game... whatever. I was looking for an XBox OS for gamers, like XP with all the backwards stuff stripped out. That would have been really cool to dual boot PC games.. heck even have Xbox games work on PCs and PC games act like a console. But MS wants their new monopoly to play with and only sell 1 monopoly OS. There's plenty of Slashdotters that would run "Singularity" if they could get .Net 2 and IE would be just happy.. but MS doesn't think in terms of growing markets anymore... they thing in terms of buying them.
Apple should release a demo version of OSX with NeoOffice for regular PCs just for fun to mess with Microsoft's profit margins. Perhaps they could release only Tiger without Quartz or only run in vesa mode so most apps would work, but drivers would be scarce. Ship a bootable CD, or dual install system that could crib off all the windows settings.. becuse Apple has a real license to NTFS it would work perfectly. They could even charge a little bit for it (not looke desperate) and maybe include stripped out XCODE tools for the whole experience. If they marketed it as a "one time tech demo" thing it wouldn't hurt their business too much. There's a lot of people wanting to try it out but don't have access to a mac long enough to be confident in it and drop the cash. Of couse Apple apps (iTunes/quicktime) Offically ported to Linux would have the same effect. Apple threatening MS lunch would make huge waves on Wall Street.. more than some silly Zune device from MS.
no, iTunes is the main reason for Apple's success. I've tried other bundled players for years, musicmatch, windows media player, and the bunch of Windows ones over the years were never up to snuff for just PLAYING music...let alone buying it. Apple's from the get go "just worked". Sure it's not as fancy with as many options as the others, but it just worked... without complicated options. I bought a few songs and it was painless as well.. all the way from purchase to burning a CD. When adding the first iPod to the mix, the longest part was installing the ipod software, syncing music was painless... even more so with the newest iPod I just bought... didn't even have to install anything for the actual iPod. Sorry, but no Microsoft product has ever been THAT good.
nobody has a profitable music store.. the only people making profit from online music is the RIAA. Everybody else is just resellers with magic packaging. Any attempt to make more profit than operation expense would be sponged right back up by the music companies. Microsoft can understand and play that game just like they do, but with offers on the table to "replace" all the iTunes music for iPod owners MS is looking like a ripe target for a big check to the RIAA. MS can't bleed all that money to help the RIAA snip apple's wings, and turn around and try to lose money on selling the actual units too. MS is getting rapidly pinched for cash here even though they have buckets, it's not enough, or wise to use it that way..even for Microsoft's extravagant money spending.
what they need to do is focus on a sourceforge type code base registry rather than actual patent applications. Rather than sourceforge working on whole projects, they could be small snips of interesting stuff, or even raw ideas fleshed out publicly so nobody else could patent them.. .or at least have a public searchable source of "we invented this" prior art for OSS projects to point to.