The monitoring you are afraid of isn't practicle with the technology put into practice -- they have to be able to retrieve the device after planting it, which isn't possible in the "random placement" scenarios you are so afraid of (as they don't have a known location to retreive the device).
The fact that technology enables them to be better at tracking a suspect is irrelevant -- they're not gathering information that they couldn't obtain in some other fashion.
Arguing that the police should have efficiency constraints is not a valid justification for requiring a warrant. You would be about as successful arguing that police shouldn't be able to use patrol cars, because it allows a single officer to "monitor" a greater area of the city.
Am I allowed to attach papers or spray paint or Mooninites to my neighbor's car? Do we judge vandalism based upon how hard it is to remove the materials from the vandalized object?
People already "attach" papers to cars (flyers under the windshield wipers), as do police (parking tickets). Spray paint is vandalism (property damage) straight up. Mooninites would depend on your ability to attach and remove it from the car without causing damage (unlikely).
Go one step further -- parking boots. Affixing a boot to the wheel of a car is not considered vandalism or property damage. Towing a car is also not considered vandalism (maybe theft, if you didn't have the right to move the car).
If so, would it not be vandalism if I simple stuck magnetized sex toys to the hood of my neighbor's car? I mean, just as easy to remove.
No. However you'd probably be in violation of a few laws regarding harassment and public decency.
So you believe that the police have no jurisdiction on private roads? So if a speeder turns off the highway onto a private road the police can no longer pull the car over and issue a citation?
Tell me, what does this technology enable that cannot be done with a cop in a cruiser tailing a suspect?
So basically, you are arguing that this shouldn't be allowed because it makes it more difficult for criminals to evade law enforcement? Wow. Good luck with that one.
Warrants take time to obtain. If you just observed someone acting in a suspicious manner, by the time you got a warrant you would no longer be able to locate that person. (crime movie example: you're trying to take down a mafia syndicate; you follow the little guy to figure out who the big fish are, but you only have a limited window to identify and track the big fish).
This isn't as big of a deal as most people here are making it out to be; it is way to tail a car that reduces the odds of being detected, and lowers the risk to both the general public and the police associated with such actions. It does not enable survelance that is not possible through other (also legal) means.
Even if you take "competition" into account, the disproportionate number of PCs vs Mac available still make the Mac a drastically less attractive target.
Yeah, because Apple is too good to depend on undocumented behavior or make invalid assumptions... Oh wait, their programmers are human, just like everyone else.
But it's Apple vs Microsoft; reason and logic left the building before you typed the letter N.
To put that number in perspective, roughly 228.6 million PCs were sold last year. Alone. The MacOS population represents a rounding error to the botnet "community."
I bought the 2gb model for my girlfriend last year and was really impressed with it. I'm probably going to get myself in a few months, if life doesn't throw any unexpected surprises my way.
Microsoft doesn't have a customer pool to offer the labels. That's why they're creating a new device. People aren't going to buy a Zune because Microsoft makes windows -- in fact, if anything you'll see that Microsoft's marketing goes out of its way to keep the Zune brand separate from the Microsoft name.
The labels aren't happy with Apple. They want a better deal than what they have with Apple, but they can't get it because Apple owns the market (if they cut Apple off, they'd lose more than they'd gain). In order to get a better deal, Apple's dominance needs to be lessened. Not only that, but they have to get their foot in the door before the "disruptive" device becomes popular (once it becomes popular, they lose their leverage again).
The label's worst case is the status quo. If they broker a deal with Microsoft that is the same as Apple's, they're encountering their worst case scenario. In that situation, you bail instead of cutting a deal. This isn't rocket science. It's business.
If they don't get what they want from Microsoft, they'll pass and try to get it from the next player who might take Apple out of the picture.
The thing is, I'm *already* not buying one, and neither is anyone else for the most part. MS needs to *improve* their products to change that, not cripple them further so they'll have access to more songs to fail to sell.
What I find most interesting about this situation is that the "crippled" feature is something their competition doesn't offer at all.
If MS can make a system slick enough to beat the iPod at it's own game, signing on record labels will take care of itself; if they can't then no number of songs will gain them market share.
Exclusive content always gives you some market share. It certainly isn't the only factor, but it IS a factor. In this case, Apple would have been the company with the exclusive.
Or are you seriously going to argue that an iPod that only allows music from n-sync to be purchased would sell the same as an iPod that allows all iTunes music to be purchased?
Personally, I like the Zune. I like the fact that it doesn't have a scroll wheel. I like the fact it isn't shiney as hell. I think the UI is slick. I'd buy one if their client-side software didn't fall flat on its face. But it does, which is why I'm getting a clix when the 4gb models get back in stock...:)
I could care less about the DRM/sharing crap -- I'm not going to use it; purchased DRM music is in the worthless category until a "standard" used by all the major players takes hold -- a standard that won't require me to repurchase music every time I think about purchasing a new player (imagine if you had to buy all new cd's every time you bought a new cd player...that's what the current DRM landscape looks like to me).
Unfortunately, there won't be a standard of that type until either the iPod dies, or Apple gets its head out of its ass and allows third parties to playback FairPlay encoded content.
WTF? Up until now you have been arguing that it is stupid not to have a button on the drive, and it is more usable to have it there. All of a sudden you are arguing the opposite?
No, I haven't been arguing that the entire time. The physical box that holds all of the components of the device != drive in the device.
That's what I was arguing - but like I said, that would require cooperation with drive manufacturers. And the drive manufacturers don't give a shit.
Drive manufacturers will make anything if you pay them enough for it. Where do you think the drives in other consumer devices come from? Where is Apple getting their current drives from? They certainly seem capable of producing a drive that doesn't have a button showing up on the front of the device. What is preventing them from adding their own button? NOTHING! They just choose not to!
Because you may not want to pick it up right then. You may want to pick it up later, or leave it in the tray for a temporary unmounting. And it saves time - the disc can eject before you bend over, rather than having to wait for it while you are bent over.The two are intimately related. Bugs directly affect usability in a negative way. How can you artificially separate the two? I'm pretty sure that most people consider a buggy system to be less usable than a non-buggy system.
Yes, bugs in an implementation can make a usable iterface unusable. But we're not talking about bugs in implementation, we're talking about the design. The usable design does not require a buggy implementation, ero bugs in someone's crappy as implementation is not a factor in determining which design is more usable.
Now there's somme of that stupidity you are so quick to throw around. Why didn't they just look at the manual that came with the machine?
I would argue, and I feel rather successfully, if you have to break out the manual to figure out how to do something as simple as turning on the device, you've got some basic usability problems. (unless your device is meant to be some sort of puzzle)
I'll put this to you a different way: when was the last time you had to read a manual to figure out how to turn on a tv, vcr, stero, washer/dryer, etc?
But putting an extra one on/near the drive is added expense and bulk. Do you really want to make the device bigger and costlier just for this, when the button on the keyboard works perfectly at no extra cost?
Really? That's your best argument? It's better to save 50c on your new $2000 mac than to have a more usable device?
I own an HDTV. I love HD programming. My cable company doesn't provide a way to access it unless you use one of their craptastic HD boxes. Hence my frustration.
If you assume the percentage of people who bought a PS3 to play blu-ray movies is similar to the percentage of people who bought an xbox360+hddvd drive to play hd-dvd movies (not an entirely unreasonable assumption, though probably not 100% accurate; should be a decent ballpark figure IMO), you could say that 3% of PS3 owners bought it for a purpose including watching blu-ray movies.
That would add 12,750 to the total number of blu-ray devices that will actually be used to play blu-ray movies.
Windows tracks a "scorecard" of your hardware. Components like your cpu, video card, hd, etc are worth 1 point. Your NIC is worth 3 points.
Windows flags "deactivates" when your score drops under 4. This means you would need to change 4 components (that are not your NIC) to retrigger the validation logic.
In this case, changing the ram and video card wouldn't cut it. You'd also need to swap out the hd and the cpu as well.
Of course. That's the very nature of computing and usability. you can't separate these issues, because they are intimately intwined. If putting an eject button on the drive means that people lose the data on their disks, then that is VERY unusable - because if you lose your data, you have nothing left to use.
For the 100th time, the button doesn't have to be physically attached to the drive. There is no technical issue that *requires* a button on the device the drive is in to eject the disk without safely unmounting. As is clearly evident based on the fact that there is a button on your keyboard you can press which safely unmounts the device.
I refuse to believe you are too stupid to realize this, even though you continually demonstrate that yes, you are that stupid. For some ass-backwards reason, you have a mental block which prevents you from imagining a button on a device that is not physically attached to the drive.
If my computer is under my desk or in a hard-to-reach position, it's much more usable to eject the disk from keyboard or software. otherwise I have to reach to an uncomfortable position.
With that reasoning, why eject the disk at all? (hint: you still have to reach down to pick up the disk after ejecting it)
Why shouldn't we expect eject buttons on our keyboards? It certainly makes things much more convenient in my experience. As does the ability of software to eject a disc - say when you are copying a bunch of discs, and it ejects the disc for you when it's done.
Having a button on the keyboard does not preclude having a button on the device. Having software perform the eject does not preclude having a button on the device. In fact, it would probably be rather convient to have the button on the device trigger some action in software which then tells the drive to ejects the disk.
No, but I've seen people destroy data by pressing the eject button before. Which is better - losing data, or taking five seconds to learn how to unmount and eject your disc? I've never seen any Mac user have problems working out how to remove a disc either - but I've never seen them lose data due to inadvertently ejecting a disk that was in use.
How can I even respond to this? Once again you're assuming that it is absolutely 100% impossible to implement the more usable solution correctly. "OMG, you shouldn't have a button on the device because it MUST mean that the disk will be ejected unsafely." Are you really that dumb? I'm sure I can create a solution that ejects the disk unsafely from the keyboard as well.
The point is about USABILITY, not BUGS. The fact that the PC gets the implementation wrong does not preclude Apple from getting the implementation right.
I've never seen anyone spend half an hour doing that.
My Dad decided to get my Mom a Mac for Chistmas a few years back (she is "timid" computer user). I got a phone call after he had apparently spent half an hour trying to figure it out. This was, apparently, after he'd spent 10 minutes looking for the power button.
The reason is that early Macs did not have hard drives, everything ran from a floppy. If you just had an eject button, then people would totally screw the system and their data by ejecting the disk when it was not safe. It was a usability issue, not an image issue.
Psst...you can still have a button that isn't physically linked to the eject mechanism.
What would you say if their target customers want a huge music store that has all of the music they want to buy?
"Why, people don't actually buy their music that way, so it doesn't matter!" you answer.
Except it does. Because that's how the mass market is making its decision. Kind of like how people buy SUVs for their off-roading capabilities, even though they never take them off of paved roads. They need to know they COULD if they wanted to.
There are players out there exactly like you describe. They play just about every kind of audio, they have a better interface than the iPod, the overall featureset is better, and they're cheaper. Except they don't sell to the masses like the iPod.
You keep combining technical issues with non-technical issues. I've never said the PC method was more technically correct, merely that it was more USABLE.
This whole conversation started revolving around usability of the device, not the technical merits of how a user-specified operation is performed. Putting the eject button on the keyboard and not putting one on the device is LESS USABLE than putting an eject button on the device BECAUSE it isn't in a location people expect it to be based on other disk-based devices they use.
Eh? There's nothing less quirky about the way Windows or Linux does it. So what's your point? The problem is that it is one that can only be solved by co-operation
Really, so you've seen people unable to determine how to get a disk out of the drive on a PC before?
Nobody wants to negotiate a more sane way to do it - so the end result is that things are pretty crappy all around.
We've already described the sane way to do it -- put a damn button where people expect to find one. There is absolutely nothing keeping Apple from making their computer more intuitive by putting a button on the front of their box labeled "eject" (or with an eject icon) that will spit the disk out.
What it would do is destroy the "sleek" look of their product, which is probably the main reason why they don't do it. I also suspect they also secretly enjoy watching people spend half an hour trying to figure out how to get a disk back out of the machine...
That's basically what Apple has done in that kind of situation with Sony in Japan and Austrailia. If a label doesn't want to deal with your terms, just launch without them, and if you start making money they'll cave in eventually. Sacrificing usability for one label's whims is a loosing proposition in the long run; I would think that's especially true when you're trying to buy your way into the market, as Microsoft seems to be in this case.
And if Microsoft was the only entity coming to the party, that strategy might work for them now too. But they're not. They're competing in an established market, where the market leader nets the vast majority of sales, and where the market leader has an established/loyal following.
I guarantee you if Sony and Universal music were not available in the Zune store, you'd be sitting here laughing at Microsoft because their music selection was non-existant. And you wouldn't buy one. And neither would anyone else.
So, they made a choice that sucks, but still puts them (worst case) at feature parity with the market leader. Scenario 1 is still FAR better than scenarios 2 and 3. In fact, you could even argue that the companies preventing their music from being shared will sell fewer songs than the companies that do, meaning that eventually they'll see all the money they're losing and ask to turn it on.
I'm not arguing that DRM doesn't stink, and they got a crapton of things wrong with the Zune. But regarding the DRM crap, everyone is throwing the wrong party under the bus. I guarantee you they didn't WANT to waste time, money, and effort putting this crap into a device.
Spend 5 minutes running through the various options in your head; consider the market environment, consider what (normal) people want, consider the demands of the music companies, consider what the law allows, and consider what kind of negotiating leverage you have available.
Your suggestions so far demonstrate a lack of understanding of the market environment and the kind of leverage Microsoft has available.
The user expects to safely remove the media by pressing the button, as it does on other devices. but that's not what the eject button on the CD-ROM does.
Since when did I say that the eject button had to perform a safe unmount? You got it right later; the eject button on the front of the computer should do a safe unmount before releasing the disk, and it is exactly what Apple should be doing.
The fact that PC drives don't do a safe unmount is irrelevant. Remember, the technical crap doesn't matter to the user; they just want their disk back!
When you put a disc into a computer, it is more than just being a playback device, it is "in" the Operating System - and the interface for the OS is through the keyboard, mouse and screen.
So if I made a computer where you had to eject the disk by pressing a button labeled "eject" on the underside of the mouse, you'd think that was perfectly reasonable because I'm dealing with the disk the way the OS wanted to represent it?
Look, the reason this is a problem isn't because they dealt with some technical issue correctly, it is because the operation is performed in an unexpected way!
So it's logical that you would deal with the representation of the device in the OS, not the device itself.
Oh, you mean by dragging the icon over the trash can, which is the action you're supposed to perform to destroy data?:p
Look, it's fine that Apple does these quirky things. And it is fine that people like them. But those quirks don't make the machine more usable; don't be bewildered when someone is puzzled by behavior that they don't expect.
It works the other way around. Once the Zune has market share the media companies lose their negotiating leverage. They learned their lesson with Apple...
Slashdot Mirror
Nice slippery slope there asswipe.
The monitoring you are afraid of isn't practicle with the technology put into practice -- they have to be able to retrieve the device after planting it, which isn't possible in the "random placement" scenarios you are so afraid of (as they don't have a known location to retreive the device).
The fact that technology enables them to be better at tracking a suspect is irrelevant -- they're not gathering information that they couldn't obtain in some other fashion.
Arguing that the police should have efficiency constraints is not a valid justification for requiring a warrant. You would be about as successful arguing that police shouldn't be able to use patrol cars, because it allows a single officer to "monitor" a greater area of the city.
Am I allowed to attach papers or spray paint or Mooninites to my neighbor's car? Do we judge vandalism based upon how hard it is to remove the materials from the vandalized object?
People already "attach" papers to cars (flyers under the windshield wipers), as do police (parking tickets). Spray paint is vandalism (property damage) straight up. Mooninites would depend on your ability to attach and remove it from the car without causing damage (unlikely).
Go one step further -- parking boots. Affixing a boot to the wheel of a car is not considered vandalism or property damage. Towing a car is also not considered vandalism (maybe theft, if you didn't have the right to move the car).
If so, would it not be vandalism if I simple stuck magnetized sex toys to the hood of my neighbor's car? I mean, just as easy to remove.
No. However you'd probably be in violation of a few laws regarding harassment and public decency.
So you believe that the police have no jurisdiction on private roads? So if a speeder turns off the highway onto a private road the police can no longer pull the car over and issue a citation?
Tell me, what does this technology enable that cannot be done with a cop in a cruiser tailing a suspect?
So basically, you are arguing that this shouldn't be allowed because it makes it more difficult for criminals to evade law enforcement? Wow. Good luck with that one.
More likely the install attempts to write to HKLM and/or HKCU. The relevent dx dlls should already be present in the base Vista install.
Warrants take time to obtain. If you just observed someone acting in a suspicious manner, by the time you got a warrant you would no longer be able to locate that person. (crime movie example: you're trying to take down a mafia syndicate; you follow the little guy to figure out who the big fish are, but you only have a limited window to identify and track the big fish).
This isn't as big of a deal as most people here are making it out to be; it is way to tail a car that reduces the odds of being detected, and lowers the risk to both the general public and the police associated with such actions. It does not enable survelance that is not possible through other (also legal) means.
Even if you take "competition" into account, the disproportionate number of PCs vs Mac available still make the Mac a drastically less attractive target.
Yeah, because Apple is too good to depend on undocumented behavior or make invalid assumptions ... Oh wait, their programmers are human, just like everyone else.
But it's Apple vs Microsoft; reason and logic left the building before you typed the letter N.
To put that number in perspective, roughly 228.6 million PCs were sold last year. Alone. The MacOS population represents a rounding error to the botnet "community."
One that I've had personal experience with:x .aspx
... always fun)
* http://www.iriveramerica.com/prod/ultra/clix/inde
I bought the 2gb model for my girlfriend last year and was really impressed with it. I'm probably going to get myself in a few months, if life doesn't throw any unexpected surprises my way.
(cross country moves
Microsoft doesn't have a customer pool to offer the labels. That's why they're creating a new device. People aren't going to buy a Zune because Microsoft makes windows -- in fact, if anything you'll see that Microsoft's marketing goes out of its way to keep the Zune brand separate from the Microsoft name.
The labels aren't happy with Apple. They want a better deal than what they have with Apple, but they can't get it because Apple owns the market (if they cut Apple off, they'd lose more than they'd gain). In order to get a better deal, Apple's dominance needs to be lessened. Not only that, but they have to get their foot in the door before the "disruptive" device becomes popular (once it becomes popular, they lose their leverage again).
The label's worst case is the status quo. If they broker a deal with Microsoft that is the same as Apple's, they're encountering their worst case scenario. In that situation, you bail instead of cutting a deal. This isn't rocket science. It's business.
If they don't get what they want from Microsoft, they'll pass and try to get it from the next player who might take Apple out of the picture.
The thing is, I'm *already* not buying one, and neither is anyone else for the most part. MS needs to *improve* their products to change that, not cripple them further so they'll have access to more songs to fail to sell.
:)
What I find most interesting about this situation is that the "crippled" feature is something their competition doesn't offer at all.
If MS can make a system slick enough to beat the iPod at it's own game, signing on record labels will take care of itself; if they can't then no number of songs will gain them market share.
Exclusive content always gives you some market share. It certainly isn't the only factor, but it IS a factor. In this case, Apple would have been the company with the exclusive.
Or are you seriously going to argue that an iPod that only allows music from n-sync to be purchased would sell the same as an iPod that allows all iTunes music to be purchased?
Personally, I like the Zune. I like the fact that it doesn't have a scroll wheel. I like the fact it isn't shiney as hell. I think the UI is slick. I'd buy one if their client-side software didn't fall flat on its face. But it does, which is why I'm getting a clix when the 4gb models get back in stock...
I could care less about the DRM/sharing crap -- I'm not going to use it; purchased DRM music is in the worthless category until a "standard" used by all the major players takes hold -- a standard that won't require me to repurchase music every time I think about purchasing a new player (imagine if you had to buy all new cd's every time you bought a new cd player...that's what the current DRM landscape looks like to me).
Unfortunately, there won't be a standard of that type until either the iPod dies, or Apple gets its head out of its ass and allows third parties to playback FairPlay encoded content.
WTF? Up until now you have been arguing that it is stupid not to have a button on the drive, and it is more usable to have it there. All of a sudden you are arguing the opposite?
No, I haven't been arguing that the entire time. The physical box that holds all of the components of the device != drive in the device.
That's what I was arguing - but like I said, that would require cooperation with drive manufacturers. And the drive manufacturers don't give a shit.
Drive manufacturers will make anything if you pay them enough for it. Where do you think the drives in other consumer devices come from? Where is Apple getting their current drives from? They certainly seem capable of producing a drive that doesn't have a button showing up on the front of the device. What is preventing them from adding their own button? NOTHING! They just choose not to!
Because you may not want to pick it up right then. You may want to pick it up later, or leave it in the tray for a temporary unmounting. And it saves time - the disc can eject before you bend over, rather than having to wait for it while you are bent over.The two are intimately related. Bugs directly affect usability in a negative way. How can you artificially separate the two? I'm pretty sure that most people consider a buggy system to be less usable than a non-buggy system.
Yes, bugs in an implementation can make a usable iterface unusable. But we're not talking about bugs in implementation, we're talking about the design. The usable design does not require a buggy implementation, ero bugs in someone's crappy as implementation is not a factor in determining which design is more usable.
Now there's somme of that stupidity you are so quick to throw around. Why didn't they just look at the manual that came with the machine?
I would argue, and I feel rather successfully, if you have to break out the manual to figure out how to do something as simple as turning on the device, you've got some basic usability problems. (unless your device is meant to be some sort of puzzle)
I'll put this to you a different way: when was the last time you had to read a manual to figure out how to turn on a tv, vcr, stero, washer/dryer, etc?
But putting an extra one on/near the drive is added expense and bulk. Do you really want to make the device bigger and costlier just for this, when the button on the keyboard works perfectly at no extra cost?
Really? That's your best argument? It's better to save 50c on your new $2000 mac than to have a more usable device?
Broadcasting local HD networks via QAM isn't very useful if your local cable company changes the channel assignment on a regular basis.
I own an HDTV. I love HD programming. My cable company doesn't provide a way to access it unless you use one of their craptastic HD boxes. Hence my frustration.
Fortunately it's possible to receive HD cable programming without one of their HD boxes ... Oh, wait, you can't...
If you assume the percentage of people who bought a PS3 to play blu-ray movies is similar to the percentage of people who bought an xbox360+hddvd drive to play hd-dvd movies (not an entirely unreasonable assumption, though probably not 100% accurate; should be a decent ballpark figure IMO), you could say that 3% of PS3 owners bought it for a purpose including watching blu-ray movies.
That would add 12,750 to the total number of blu-ray devices that will actually be used to play blu-ray movies.
RAM and a video card arn't sufficient .
Windows tracks a "scorecard" of your hardware. Components like your cpu, video card, hd, etc are worth 1 point. Your NIC is worth 3 points.
Windows flags "deactivates" when your score drops under 4. This means you would need to change 4 components (that are not your NIC) to retrigger the validation logic.
In this case, changing the ram and video card wouldn't cut it. You'd also need to swap out the hd and the cpu as well.
Of course. That's the very nature of computing and usability. you can't separate these issues, because they are intimately intwined. If putting an eject button on the drive means that people lose the data on their disks, then that is VERY unusable - because if you lose your data, you have nothing left to use.
For the 100th time, the button doesn't have to be physically attached to the drive. There is no technical issue that *requires* a button on the device the drive is in to eject the disk without safely unmounting. As is clearly evident based on the fact that there is a button on your keyboard you can press which safely unmounts the device.
I refuse to believe you are too stupid to realize this, even though you continually demonstrate that yes, you are that stupid. For some ass-backwards reason, you have a mental block which prevents you from imagining a button on a device that is not physically attached to the drive.
If my computer is under my desk or in a hard-to-reach position, it's much more usable to eject the disk from keyboard or software. otherwise I have to reach to an uncomfortable position.
With that reasoning, why eject the disk at all? (hint: you still have to reach down to pick up the disk after ejecting it)
Why shouldn't we expect eject buttons on our keyboards? It certainly makes things much more convenient in my experience. As does the ability of software to eject a disc - say when you are copying a bunch of discs, and it ejects the disc for you when it's done.
Having a button on the keyboard does not preclude having a button on the device. Having software perform the eject does not preclude having a button on the device. In fact, it would probably be rather convient to have the button on the device trigger some action in software which then tells the drive to ejects the disk.
No, but I've seen people destroy data by pressing the eject button before. Which is better - losing data, or taking five seconds to learn how to unmount and eject your disc? I've never seen any Mac user have problems working out how to remove a disc either - but I've never seen them lose data due to inadvertently ejecting a disk that was in use.
How can I even respond to this? Once again you're assuming that it is absolutely 100% impossible to implement the more usable solution correctly. "OMG, you shouldn't have a button on the device because it MUST mean that the disk will be ejected unsafely." Are you really that dumb? I'm sure I can create a solution that ejects the disk unsafely from the keyboard as well.
The point is about USABILITY, not BUGS. The fact that the PC gets the implementation wrong does not preclude Apple from getting the implementation right.
I've never seen anyone spend half an hour doing that.
My Dad decided to get my Mom a Mac for Chistmas a few years back (she is "timid" computer user). I got a phone call after he had apparently spent half an hour trying to figure it out. This was, apparently, after he'd spent 10 minutes looking for the power button.
The reason is that early Macs did not have hard drives, everything ran from a floppy. If you just had an eject button, then people would totally screw the system and their data by ejecting the disk when it was not safe. It was a usability issue, not an image issue.
Psst...you can still have a button that isn't physically linked to the eject mechanism.
What would you say if their target customers want a huge music store that has all of the music they want to buy?
"Why, people don't actually buy their music that way, so it doesn't matter!" you answer.
Except it does. Because that's how the mass market is making its decision. Kind of like how people buy SUVs for their off-roading capabilities, even though they never take them off of paved roads. They need to know they COULD if they wanted to.
There are players out there exactly like you describe. They play just about every kind of audio, they have a better interface than the iPod, the overall featureset is better, and they're cheaper. Except they don't sell to the masses like the iPod.
You keep combining technical issues with non-technical issues. I've never said the PC method was more technically correct, merely that it was more USABLE.
This whole conversation started revolving around usability of the device, not the technical merits of how a user-specified operation is performed. Putting the eject button on the keyboard and not putting one on the device is LESS USABLE than putting an eject button on the device BECAUSE it isn't in a location people expect it to be based on other disk-based devices they use.
Eh? There's nothing less quirky about the way Windows or Linux does it. So what's your point? The problem is that it is one that can only be solved by co-operation
Really, so you've seen people unable to determine how to get a disk out of the drive on a PC before?
Nobody wants to negotiate a more sane way to do it - so the end result is that things are pretty crappy all around.
We've already described the sane way to do it -- put a damn button where people expect to find one. There is absolutely nothing keeping Apple from making their computer more intuitive by putting a button on the front of their box labeled "eject" (or with an eject icon) that will spit the disk out.
What it would do is destroy the "sleek" look of their product, which is probably the main reason why they don't do it. I also suspect they also secretly enjoy watching people spend half an hour trying to figure out how to get a disk back out of the machine...
You just described the RIAA's wet dream -- an excuse to sue a company with $50B in the bank for copyright infringment.
That's basically what Apple has done in that kind of situation with Sony in Japan and Austrailia. If a label doesn't want to deal with your terms, just launch without them, and if you start making money they'll cave in eventually. Sacrificing usability for one label's whims is a loosing proposition in the long run; I would think that's especially true when you're trying to buy your way into the market, as Microsoft seems to be in this case.
And if Microsoft was the only entity coming to the party, that strategy might work for them now too. But they're not. They're competing in an established market, where the market leader nets the vast majority of sales, and where the market leader has an established/loyal following.
I guarantee you if Sony and Universal music were not available in the Zune store, you'd be sitting here laughing at Microsoft because their music selection was non-existant. And you wouldn't buy one. And neither would anyone else.
So, they made a choice that sucks, but still puts them (worst case) at feature parity with the market leader. Scenario 1 is still FAR better than scenarios 2 and 3. In fact, you could even argue that the companies preventing their music from being shared will sell fewer songs than the companies that do, meaning that eventually they'll see all the money they're losing and ask to turn it on.
I'm not arguing that DRM doesn't stink, and they got a crapton of things wrong with the Zune. But regarding the DRM crap, everyone is throwing the wrong party under the bus. I guarantee you they didn't WANT to waste time, money, and effort putting this crap into a device.
Spend 5 minutes running through the various options in your head; consider the market environment, consider what (normal) people want, consider the demands of the music companies, consider what the law allows, and consider what kind of negotiating leverage you have available.
Your suggestions so far demonstrate a lack of understanding of the market environment and the kind of leverage Microsoft has available.
The user expects to safely remove the media by pressing the button, as it does on other devices. but that's not what the eject button on the CD-ROM does.
:p
Since when did I say that the eject button had to perform a safe unmount? You got it right later; the eject button on the front of the computer should do a safe unmount before releasing the disk, and it is exactly what Apple should be doing.
The fact that PC drives don't do a safe unmount is irrelevant. Remember, the technical crap doesn't matter to the user; they just want their disk back!
When you put a disc into a computer, it is more than just being a playback device, it is "in" the Operating System - and the interface for the OS is through the keyboard, mouse and screen.
So if I made a computer where you had to eject the disk by pressing a button labeled "eject" on the underside of the mouse, you'd think that was perfectly reasonable because I'm dealing with the disk the way the OS wanted to represent it?
Look, the reason this is a problem isn't because they dealt with some technical issue correctly, it is because the operation is performed in an unexpected way!
So it's logical that you would deal with the representation of the device in the OS, not the device itself.
Oh, you mean by dragging the icon over the trash can, which is the action you're supposed to perform to destroy data?
Look, it's fine that Apple does these quirky things. And it is fine that people like them. But those quirks don't make the machine more usable; don't be bewildered when someone is puzzled by behavior that they don't expect.
It works the other way around. Once the Zune has market share the media companies lose their negotiating leverage. They learned their lesson with Apple...