Oh that's an easy one. They won't go away because they like the trappings that we have here over those in any country currently run by Sharia law. There is also the question of free education and health provision. A number of people do leave typical at a financial advantage to themselves.
I'll add that not having a bank account would probably be viewed on as suspicious in itself. In general we don't use cash over here for anything major. Everything is done by plastic/electronic fund transfer. If you were seen to be handling large amount of cash on a regular basis this would be viewed as suspicious.
I would give odds that a lot of the suspects are under suspicion because of association rather than having any real evidence against them. In the current, government stoked, climate merely saying 'terrorist threat' or 'national security' would like get any magistrate to sign the required paperwork.
There is much more pain moving from a *nix to any Linux distro. The reason for this? The fact that a lot of OSS developers consider code that they write to be portable if it works on my than one Linux distro. If you want to run it on Solaris, AIX, IRIX even, prepare for a lot of pain.
It wasn't always the case, and there are exceptions, the more popular Linux gets though the less portable the OSS code. Yes, you have source and can edited it, but that's not the point. OSS software used to be more easily portable than it is now. We have a generation of coders that don't have experience of a wide range of architectures and as such include architecture specific things in the code without realising they are doing so.
Oh please mods at least take a look at reality before modding the parent as insightful. Slashdot is a greater source of misinformation, rumour and bigotry than anything else on the planet.
Apple kit is not expensive if you compare like with like. It hasn't been expensive for years. The internet and business moves quickly, slashdot remains mired in the past.
MS have already annouced the slimming down of the feature set of the OS X version. This reduces its usefulness and ensures that people that are heavily dependent on VB customisations can't jump to OS X.
I view this as a first step in the dropping of Office on OS X and a retrenchment back to Windowsland. Afterall once the majority of Macs are Intel based there is nothing to stop people running the Windows version of Office under a virtualization product which means an extra Windows license. MS wins all round there. Not having to support a Mac development group and getting an extra OS sale.
MS will not do anything that might erode on their current position in the marketplace. Given the take up of Linux in the data centre they aren't going to give Linux a free ride onto the desktop.
How is this better than completely closed-source software?
If you don't know the answer to this then you aren't thinking about it. Instead you are going along with the prevalent Slashdot herd mentality 'DRM is bad'. DRM is a tool. As a tool it is neither good nor bad but can be used to do either.
What would the consumer benefit be of a shift to DVD music? The switch from vinyl to CD provided the consumer with a more robust media and a cleaner sound. Even so the switch took many years and its still possible to buy on vinyl.
I just can't see this flying unless they come out with a compelling reason for the general public to buy into it. This looks like a way to milk another run out of the back catalogue rather than anything else.
Yup. We are rapidly approaching George Orwell's vision over here. We have more CCTV cameras than anywhere else. We are implementing systems that the police will be able to use to track all vehicle movements around the country, records kept for five years, regardless of whether any crime was committed by the driver. There are moves to gather biometric data from all of the population and hold it on file. "If you don't do anything wrong what have you got to hide?".
One current scheme is to setup fingerprint access to schools, this is funded by the DfE (Department for Education) and comes from a special budget. The DfE are reluctant to discuss what is done with the data and how long it will be kept. However, given the present administrations desire to collect biometric data and centralise it, its not too big a step to believe that this too will be centralised. It would mean that the government would have biometrics on the population from when it enters the state education system. Initially this will be fingerprint only but once that has been proven possible to defeat other data will be stored, DNA etc.
There is an argument that all of this will help the authorities prosecute offenders. It smacks too much of a police state for me. This action by the police is merely following the trend that has been established. The police can do no wrong at the moment.
I don't know about the US but we've had widescreen aspect ratio over here in the UK for a number of years, without having HD. If HD and widescreen have been linked then that's a cunning plan on behalf of the broadcasters and manufacturers to get HD widely adopted.
My latest TV is HD capable. I don't see me getting any HD playback device any time soon though. DVD quality is good enough.
A consumer buys a record on iTunes for the flat $10 price. Apple takes its cut (30% or $3.00) but gives the rest to the record company. The record company takes out costs and then gives the artist a small percentage. For our example, let's say 10% or $0.70 goes to the artist.
If the consumer had bought a $10.00 CD instead, the record company would still take the same of costs in terms of percentage but Apple would not have taken the first piece out. The artist would have gotten $1.00 in royalties.
The parent obvious has no idea about how retail works. In the desire to paint Apple as the bad guy the fact that the store that the CD is bought from will want to make a cut as well seems to have lost from the equation. IIRC the stores have a 50%+ cut of the sticker price, which is why they can discount heavily. This would leave the record company with less money from a CD than an online sale. Combine this with the reduced costs, to the record company, then you can see who the real villian is.
Reading the article you have to wonder why artists dont employ a lawyer to go over the terms of the contract to find these things before they sign. The record company has an incentive to push for online sales and appear to be hip and trendy to the general public. They can also use the examples of people who have signed this sort of contract to pressure new artists into similar deals. Rightly saying that at the moment CD sales outstrip online so its not a big deal. Adjusting things once a contract is in place is much harder than sorting things out beforehand.
Apple has to some extent maintained the "ease of use" paradigm in the same way that GUIs are easy to use; they restrict choice. If you give people less choice, they are less confused. If they want to enter the larger market, they need to figure out how to continue to deliver their historic strengths while moving into a position of giving the users the wider variety of choices that they are used to in other OSs.
What wider choices? Seriously if people can manage their digital assets (images, movies, music), access the internet, write documents and manage their accounts that's sufficient for the vast majority of users. The only other thing that the majority of people do with their computers is play games.
The wider market is business and choice isn't a barrier to that. The barrier for widening its appeal to the business market is to provide an easy transition from Windows to OS X. This has to be able to be a phased approach, there aren't many businesses that will be able to move in one fell swoop. Boot Camp does allow them to target the business market to some extent.
Universal are missing a trick here, the best portable device for playing movies at the moment is the Sony PSP. Without a unified DRM format they were bound to go with the one that provides the largest target audience. Although Apple have been successful with iTMS it looks as though Universal's aim here is to ditch the middle man entirely, something going with Apple wouldn't allow them to do.
This is an interesting development but the price point is too high, for most movies, for the moment.
Most blockbuster titles over here are priced at less than price they are quoting here in the stores. They are even cheaper if you buy from an online store and wait for them to be shipped. So at the release price point there is little to offer except a legal way to own a digital copy of the movie. There are people that will pay for this as players become available. Remember this is targeted at ordinary people not the denzeins of slashdot who are preparing to go to whatever lengths to rip a DVD.
The place that this may score is on older films. A lot of older, less popular films are at the high price point in the stores. If they drop to the low price point through this service I can see a larger take up.
Personally, although I use an MP3 player quite regularly, I won't buy an iPod because I won't be locked into using a proprietary music format using proprietary software on Windows only - I'd much rather have a less-featured MP3/OGG player that I can mount as a new drive in either Windows or Linux and copy across the tracks I rip from my music CDs.
FUD. When launched the iPod was an MP3 player. It still plays MP3s. I rip everything as MP3 because that is the most portable format. Yes Ogg has better quality but you are limited in what you can play it back on. That you need a piece a free software to drop the music on shouldn't be an issue really. In case you didn't know iTunes is quite happy to let you store the MP3's wherever and however you want to. Nothing is forced on you.
Incidently, for all the superiority of Open Firmware, most Macs of the past few years can't even boot from USB.
Please define 'recent years' otherwise this is just spreading FUD. Prior to the introduction of USB2 there was no real reason for Macs to support booting from USB. They had Firewire-400 to boot from at much greater speeds. After USB2 was added so was boot support for these disks. Simple really, why provide boot support for a slower disk technology?
MS has no need for EFI. Windows works fine with the BIOS. Device drivers stored in EFI flash memory removes a degree of control from MS over what's on users PCs.
Users have no need for EFI. They take whatever Windows gives them. If they've no experience of what EFI might offer then they are in no position to judge.
MS is after making money out of every aspect of Vista. This includes their programme for signing device drivers and delivering them to customers. If there is an alternate mechanism MS no longer gets its buck. This is bad from a bean counter point of view.
In short: MS makes no extra money by supporting EFI so has no reason to put the work in to make it work.
Title says it all really. There's nothing really new here. Wintel have been trying to push this idea for a while. So far it doesn't address what users really want.
All computer equipment is obsolete once it hits the shop. There is always a better one just about to be released. This was the case when the C64 was around too. Every issue of Byte brought something new.
Just because a new version of something comes out doesn't mean that the old ones are no use. Of course the manufacturers would like you to think it is the case:)
I recently replaced my original 10G iPod with a 60GB iPod Video. If Apple bring out a new one in a few months does this stop mine working? No. Sure a bigger screen would be better for video but the current layout is better for the main use of mine, playing music in the car and at work.
Why have dual-core anything? Why have a separate GPU?
I multi-task on my current laptop. I have music playing, email and IM clients and then whatever it is I'm really doing. Perhaps a bit of photo editing. Perhaps scrubbing through some video footage or writing a DVD. At times this gets the CPU running flat out, this generates heat and is will have the CPU drawing maximum power. Dependant on scheduling and whether the applications are well threaded its possible for the same load on a dual core system to be spread across the cores causing each to run cooler and draw less power.
The dual core system from the article used less power than the single core system for the same tests (the battery lasted longer). Intel do have single core versions of the Yonah chips to come out, its just that the dual-core ones are out first and represent the biggest advance. Expect to see these chips in thinner clients. I use my laptop as a desktop replacement so for me more power is good.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh that's an easy one. They won't go away because they like the trappings that we have here over those in any country currently run by Sharia law. There is also the question of free education and health provision. A number of people do leave typical at a financial advantage to themselves.
I'll add that not having a bank account would probably be viewed on as suspicious in itself. In general we don't use cash over here for anything major. Everything is done by plastic/electronic fund transfer. If you were seen to be handling large amount of cash on a regular basis this would be viewed as suspicious.
I would give odds that a lot of the suspects are under suspicion because of association rather than having any real evidence against them. In the current, government stoked, climate merely saying 'terrorist threat' or 'national security' would like get any magistrate to sign the required paperwork.
It wasn't always the case, and there are exceptions, the more popular Linux gets though the less portable the OSS code. Yes, you have source and can edited it, but that's not the point. OSS software used to be more easily portable than it is now. We have a generation of coders that don't have experience of a wide range of architectures and as such include architecture specific things in the code without realising they are doing so.
Once upon a time IT professionals would know better than to make wide range generalisations of this sort.
Apple kit is not expensive if you compare like with like. It hasn't been expensive for years. The internet and business moves quickly, slashdot remains mired in the past.
I view this as a first step in the dropping of Office on OS X and a retrenchment back to Windowsland. Afterall once the majority of Macs are Intel based there is nothing to stop people running the Windows version of Office under a virtualization product which means an extra Windows license. MS wins all round there. Not having to support a Mac development group and getting an extra OS sale.
MS will not do anything that might erode on their current position in the marketplace. Given the take up of Linux in the data centre they aren't going to give Linux a free ride onto the desktop.
If you don't know the answer to this then you aren't thinking about it. Instead you are going along with the prevalent Slashdot herd mentality 'DRM is bad'. DRM is a tool. As a tool it is neither good nor bad but can be used to do either.
I just can't see this flying unless they come out with a compelling reason for the general public to buy into it. This looks like a way to milk another run out of the back catalogue rather than anything else.
One current scheme is to setup fingerprint access to schools, this is funded by the DfE (Department for Education) and comes from a special budget. The DfE are reluctant to discuss what is done with the data and how long it will be kept. However, given the present administrations desire to collect biometric data and centralise it, its not too big a step to believe that this too will be centralised. It would mean that the government would have biometrics on the population from when it enters the state education system. Initially this will be fingerprint only but once that has been proven possible to defeat other data will be stored, DNA etc.
There is an argument that all of this will help the authorities prosecute offenders. It smacks too much of a police state for me. This action by the police is merely following the trend that has been established. The police can do no wrong at the moment.
My latest TV is HD capable. I don't see me getting any HD playback device any time soon though. DVD quality is good enough.
If the consumer had bought a $10.00 CD instead, the record company would still take the same of costs in terms of percentage but Apple would not have taken the first piece out. The artist would have gotten $1.00 in royalties.
The parent obvious has no idea about how retail works. In the desire to paint Apple as the bad guy the fact that the store that the CD is bought from will want to make a cut as well seems to have lost from the equation. IIRC the stores have a 50%+ cut of the sticker price, which is why they can discount heavily. This would leave the record company with less money from a CD than an online sale. Combine this with the reduced costs, to the record company, then you can see who the real villian is.
Reading the article you have to wonder why artists dont employ a lawyer to go over the terms of the contract to find these things before they sign. The record company has an incentive to push for online sales and appear to be hip and trendy to the general public. They can also use the examples of people who have signed this sort of contract to pressure new artists into similar deals. Rightly saying that at the moment CD sales outstrip online so its not a big deal. Adjusting things once a contract is in place is much harder than sorting things out beforehand.
What wider choices? Seriously if people can manage their digital assets (images, movies, music), access the internet, write documents and manage their accounts that's sufficient for the vast majority of users. The only other thing that the majority of people do with their computers is play games.
The wider market is business and choice isn't a barrier to that. The barrier for widening its appeal to the business market is to provide an easy transition from Windows to OS X. This has to be able to be a phased approach, there aren't many businesses that will be able to move in one fell swoop. Boot Camp does allow them to target the business market to some extent.
The parent isn't insightful its invective. Summary of text. "I bought a computer for the wrong reasons and now I'm spiteful"
"The last, best, hope"
Universal are missing a trick here, the best portable device for playing movies at the moment is the Sony PSP. Without a unified DRM format they were bound to go with the one that provides the largest target audience. Although Apple have been successful with iTMS it looks as though Universal's aim here is to ditch the middle man entirely, something going with Apple wouldn't allow them to do.
Most blockbuster titles over here are priced at less than price they are quoting here in the stores. They are even cheaper if you buy from an online store and wait for them to be shipped. So at the release price point there is little to offer except a legal way to own a digital copy of the movie. There are people that will pay for this as players become available. Remember this is targeted at ordinary people not the denzeins of slashdot who are preparing to go to whatever lengths to rip a DVD.
The place that this may score is on older films. A lot of older, less popular films are at the high price point in the stores. If they drop to the low price point through this service I can see a larger take up.
FUD. When launched the iPod was an MP3 player. It still plays MP3s. I rip everything as MP3 because that is the most portable format. Yes Ogg has better quality but you are limited in what you can play it back on. That you need a piece a free software to drop the music on shouldn't be an issue really. In case you didn't know iTunes is quite happy to let you store the MP3's wherever and however you want to. Nothing is forced on you.
Please define 'recent years' otherwise this is just spreading FUD. Prior to the introduction of USB2 there was no real reason for Macs to support booting from USB. They had Firewire-400 to boot from at much greater speeds. After USB2 was added so was boot support for these disks. Simple really, why provide boot support for a slower disk technology?
If you had EFI you wouldn't need to flash BIOS.
Users have no need for EFI. They take whatever Windows gives them. If they've no experience of what EFI might offer then they are in no position to judge.
MS is after making money out of every aspect of Vista. This includes their programme for signing device drivers and delivering them to customers. If there is an alternate mechanism MS no longer gets its buck. This is bad from a bean counter point of view.
In short: MS makes no extra money by supporting EFI so has no reason to put the work in to make it work.
Title says it all really. There's nothing really new here. Wintel have been trying to push this idea for a while. So far it doesn't address what users really want.
Just because a new version of something comes out doesn't mean that the old ones are no use. Of course the manufacturers would like you to think it is the case :)
I recently replaced my original 10G iPod with a 60GB iPod Video. If Apple bring out a new one in a few months does this stop mine working? No. Sure a bigger screen would be better for video but the current layout is better for the main use of mine, playing music in the car and at work.
I multi-task on my current laptop. I have music playing, email and IM clients and then whatever it is I'm really doing. Perhaps a bit of photo editing. Perhaps scrubbing through some video footage or writing a DVD. At times this gets the CPU running flat out, this generates heat and is will have the CPU drawing maximum power. Dependant on scheduling and whether the applications are well threaded its possible for the same load on a dual core system to be spread across the cores causing each to run cooler and draw less power.
The dual core system from the article used less power than the single core system for the same tests (the battery lasted longer). Intel do have single core versions of the Yonah chips to come out, its just that the dual-core ones are out first and represent the biggest advance. Expect to see these chips in thinner clients. I use my laptop as a desktop replacement so for me more power is good.
Take this as what it is, a victory for common sense, and be magnanimous.