... it included something like the iPhone interface and/or Inkwell and was a convertible.
Sub-notebook keyboards are a little cramped for me. Yes, I know Bluetooth keyboard blahblahblah (I'm using one with my Powerbook as I type this), but you can't carry that on the road.
"When we used cassette tapes, we could play them in any cassette player we wanted, regardless of who manufactured it."
In theory, yes. But if some handed me anything other than a Maxell II-S 90, I'd look at them like they just landed on the planet from Mars.:-)
And speak to me not of the "quality" of cassettes the labels used.
Now, with iTunes, you're locked in only with regards to portable players. You want to take your tunes to the car? Burn a CD. Want to make a mix CD? No prob. Want to strip the DRM? Burn, rip.
I'd prefer no DRM, but I know the labels wouldn't. And Apple has to serve two masters here: The major labels, and the consumer. So far, as evidenced by their popularity, they've done a decent job of compromise between those two opposing forces. This statement by Jobs, though, along with the hardball he played re: pricing is an indication of which side of the argument he'd rather be on.
DRM is a broken system: Jobs knows that more than all of us. And his entire second career at Apple has been about fixing the things that he considers broken, be it music (iPod), software (OS X), presentations (Keynote) or phones (iPhone). Hopefully, he can break DRM in order to fix buying music online as well.
"And the reason you were locked into cassettes is that technology to rapidly transfer music between media was not available."
???
What would you call dual cassette decks, "mix tapes", even recording my albums to play into the car? The cassette was *all* about shifting my music around various mediums and between users.
Now, that being said, I'd love it if DRM went away tomorrow. The reason it's there is to impose artificial limits on the perceived value of music. The cost/benefit of most CD's WAY out of whack: 9/10's of my music I've listened to a max of 3 three times or so. $.99 for a lossless, DRM-free track via iTunes or whatever that's tagged with a unique watermarked ID that allows the copyright holders to chase down the people who break the law but doesn't affect people like me who respect copyright is where things need to be, IMO.
I'm not sure if I want something like this if it means it comes in at f11 or the like. Who wants a cameraphone that you can only use on sunny days, has a flash range that's measured in nanometers or comes with an ISO rating that requires scientific notation?
*IF* this can turn in f stops close to or equal to prime focus lenses or good quality zooms, for a reasonable price, then I'm interested. All those 75-300mm f5.6-f8 (or worse) lenses are useless, IMO, even with today's faster ISO chips/films. Gimme my old 180mm f2.8 any day.
Then that would be a test of the radar warning and alert mechnisms, not the missile tracking and guidance, wouldn't it? Those can and do exist independent of each other.
You have to make decisions based on what you see and know, not speculation.
Ummn, which is why I runs Macs right now, and try (and don't always succeed) not to gloat when my Windows-using friends get infected.
And beyond that, two things:
You have to plan for the enemy's possibilities, not likelihoods. Is it likely that other OS's, as they gain marketshare, will be higher-profile (though more difficult) targets? Maybe. Is it a possibility? Yes.
Secondly, running my user accounts as non-admin, backing up and running Clam A/V are all pretty painless on OS X, and easily worth the effort to set up. The benefit of doing this easily outweighs the cost of watching years of photos, music, documents and movies vanish due to malware.
Yeah, as much as I like living pain (not worry) -free with OS X so far, it's only a matter of time until the cost/benefit of launching a reasonably successful large-scale attack against the OS arrives.
In the meantime, I'll keep Clam AV going, backup regularly, and keep my admin account separate from the others.
Your analogy is wrong (and not even close) because there are many, many places online where I can download music legally and cheaply which plays just dandy with my iPod and are in common, non-DRM'ed codecs not under Apple's control. Apple does not lock you into a sole vendor for your music when you get an iPod.
And then there other quasi-legal methods of finding music or ripping my own CD's that I bought online. Maybe you were thinking of the Zune, which locks up even your legal tracks under DRM?
10 minutes, nay, 30 seconds on Apple's iPod page would have told you this.
Norway isn't asking Apple to take extra steps to interoperate with competitors' hardware, they're asking them to take less steps to prevent interoperability. There is a difference between dictating that the music be offered in an arbitrary codec and dictating that the music be offered in a form usable by a player supporting the codec that is used.
Either way, they're telling Apple, *solely because their success*, how to conduct business with the competition in Norway. The message is clear: Even if you follow all the rules and obey all the laws, if you get too big, we'll squash you.
If they want to slit their wrists and give up the potential sales tax revenue from iPods and iTunes Music Store revenue, let 'em. Just as the Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it, so it is with the market forces. If people want something bad enough, they'll get it. For a collary to this from another EU country, look at how Red Bull became popular. This may be the best thing to happen to Apple in Scandanavia.
So the problem is that Apple won't let competitors to use the software they developed and paid for and the relationships they fostered with the Norwegian labels, both indie and the RIAA, nor share the revenue from that process and iPods sales with companies that don't have Apple's best interests in mind?
Are you in favour of regulations that forces Sears to haul around merchandise from JC Penney without compensation as well?
There's no law that forces people to use iTunes, nor does iTunes have a monopoly on downloaded music, and Apple hasn't used its market share to squeeze others out of the business (unlike Microsoft). What have they done wrong, except become popular?
What would you say if I told you that Windows being the dominant OS and IE being the dominant browser was also the market forces?
But they're not. So your argument is invalid. They've been convicted of anti-trust practices (not being a monopoly).
Previous to that incident, though, (say, 1985 on) Apple had only themselves to blame. They screwed up right, left and center, going for profits when they should have pursued marketshare, churning out crappy products and freezing out 3rd party developers. They go the marketshare they deserved in 1996, when they almost went under, because of all those mistakes.
I hate to break this to you, but iTunes won't play WMAs on Windows, at least not directly.
Well, yeah, that's common knowledge. Been that way (IIRC) from the first edition of iTunes for Windows. But does iTunes prevent, say, Windows Media Player from playing a WMA, or any other program that manages music from operating correctly or being installed? That was the essence of the anti-trust suit against Windows. Monopolies aren't necessarily a bad thing. Monopolies that prevent competition are.
Personally, I'd love to see nekkid MP3's as the standard. It's what the market wants, and it was the standard for the iPod when it first launched: Remember the DRM on the first iPod? "Don't steal music." The iTunes store was the first and most successful effort at balancing the marginal cost / marginal benefit for the consumer to get music online legally with the ease of use of P2P. More needs to be done, though, and I think that the recent move to watermarking is the way to go.
Look, I loathe DRM as much as the next guy, but Apple's not using their market dominance to smack around, say, Microsoft from making a run at them. Microsoft is doing a FINE job all by themselves at lousing up their attempts to dethrone Apple.:-)
Ergo, this is just market forces at work. The market has spoken, and people prefer the iPod and iTunes to the competition. Until there's good evidence that iTunes prevents someone from, say, playing a WMA file on Windows or the like, Apple's in the clear on this. Let them have their success, and stop monkeying with the system.
Sarbanes-Oaxley compliance. Again.
FWIW, I have Boot Camp on this very machine. It's worth an addtional 30 bills, if for no other reason than it opens up the world of Windows gaming to me yet again. If some of the Wine-based alternatives for OS X pan out, then I'll drop Boot Camp. Until then...
As a center-right Reagan Democrat, now a "Crunchy Con" (is it just me, or have political labels become more and more like band classifications? "Emo-core", et al? I digress...), let me say "Thank you!" for pointing this out about elements of the global warming crowd. I've seen wild-eyed zealotry in the eyes of some environmentalists that would do a Pentecostal preacher proud.
I'm open to the idea of climate change being caused by man's actions, and that's one of the reasons why we bought a Civic Hybrid. But please, let it be a Reformation (without the nasty Hugenot/Knox/Etc battles) and not a Crusade. If I want preaching, I'll turn on an old Billy Graham crusade.
I guess with Gore, it's "Once a Southern Baptist, always a Southern Baptist.":-)
(ready the "Offtopic" mod points now, fellas. I got it coming for this, and I know it...)
How did this get past my "No political stories at all on the front page" settings ? The flamewars these type of stories always set off makes Windows v. Linux look like a tempest in a teapot. If I wanted ignorant political blathering, I'd surf Kos or the Freepers. Bad form, editors, bad form.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that it is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." - P.J. O'Rourke.
Slashdot Mirror
Daymn.
I mean, seriously, *Damn*.
That's a helluvan idea. Well-played, sir, well played.
... it included something like the iPhone interface and/or Inkwell and was a convertible.
Sub-notebook keyboards are a little cramped for me. Yes, I know Bluetooth keyboard blahblahblah (I'm using one with my Powerbook as I type this), but you can't carry that on the road.
Ok, that made my day. Well-played, sir, well-played!
"When we used cassette tapes, we could play them in any cassette player we wanted, regardless of who manufactured it."
:-)
In theory, yes. But if some handed me anything other than a Maxell II-S 90, I'd look at them like they just landed on the planet from Mars.
And speak to me not of the "quality" of cassettes the labels used.
Now, with iTunes, you're locked in only with regards to portable players. You want to take your tunes to the car? Burn a CD. Want to make a mix CD? No prob. Want to strip the DRM? Burn, rip.
I'd prefer no DRM, but I know the labels wouldn't. And Apple has to serve two masters here: The major labels, and the consumer. So far, as evidenced by their popularity, they've done a decent job of compromise between those two opposing forces. This statement by Jobs, though, along with the hardball he played re: pricing is an indication of which side of the argument he'd rather be on.
DRM is a broken system: Jobs knows that more than all of us. And his entire second career at Apple has been about fixing the things that he considers broken, be it music (iPod), software (OS X), presentations (Keynote) or phones (iPhone). Hopefully, he can break DRM in order to fix buying music online as well.
"And the reason you were locked into cassettes is that technology to rapidly transfer music between media was not available."
???
What would you call dual cassette decks, "mix tapes", even recording my albums to play into the car? The cassette was *all* about shifting my music around various mediums and between users.
Now, that being said, I'd love it if DRM went away tomorrow. The reason it's there is to impose artificial limits on the perceived value of music. The cost/benefit of most CD's WAY out of whack: 9/10's of my music I've listened to a max of 3 three times or so. $.99 for a lossless, DRM-free track via iTunes or whatever that's tagged with a unique watermarked ID that allows the copyright holders to chase down the people who break the law but doesn't affect people like me who respect copyright is where things need to be, IMO.
According to that logic, then, I'm still "locked in" to cassette tapes.
Or maybe consumers eat the loss and move on to a format they feel is better/cheaper/more convenient.
I'm not sure if I want something like this if it means it comes in at f11 or the like. Who wants a cameraphone that you can only use on sunny days, has a flash range that's measured in nanometers or comes with an ISO rating that requires scientific notation?
*IF* this can turn in f stops close to or equal to prime focus lenses or good quality zooms, for a reasonable price, then I'm interested. All those 75-300mm f5.6-f8 (or worse) lenses are useless, IMO, even with today's faster ISO chips/films. Gimme my old 180mm f2.8 any day.
Then that would be a test of the radar warning and alert mechnisms, not the missile tracking and guidance, wouldn't it? Those can and do exist independent of each other.
You have to make decisions based on what you see and know, not speculation.
Ummn, which is why I runs Macs right now, and try (and don't always succeed) not to gloat when my Windows-using friends get infected.
And beyond that, two things:
You have to plan for the enemy's possibilities, not likelihoods. Is it likely that other OS's, as they gain marketshare, will be higher-profile (though more difficult) targets? Maybe. Is it a possibility? Yes.
Secondly, running my user accounts as non-admin, backing up and running Clam A/V are all pretty painless on OS X, and easily worth the effort to set up. The benefit of doing this easily outweighs the cost of watching years of photos, music, documents and movies vanish due to malware.
Didn't you read Slashdot yesterday? It's the dinosaur's fault!
Either that, or get the dinosaurs to drive hybrids and install CFL bulbs.
Yeah, as much as I like living pain (not worry) -free with OS X so far, it's only a matter of time until the cost/benefit of launching a reasonably successful large-scale attack against the OS arrives.
In the meantime, I'll keep Clam AV going, backup regularly, and keep my admin account separate from the others.
Your analogy is wrong (and not even close) because there are many, many places online where I can download music legally and cheaply which plays just dandy with my iPod and are in common, non-DRM'ed codecs not under Apple's control. Apple does not lock you into a sole vendor for your music when you get an iPod.
And then there other quasi-legal methods of finding music or ripping my own CD's that I bought online. Maybe you were thinking of the Zune, which locks up even your legal tracks under DRM?
10 minutes, nay, 30 seconds on Apple's iPod page would have told you this.
Norway isn't asking Apple to take extra steps to interoperate with competitors' hardware, they're asking them to take less steps to prevent interoperability. There is a difference between dictating that the music be offered in an arbitrary codec and dictating that the music be offered in a form usable by a player supporting the codec that is used.
Either way, they're telling Apple, *solely because their success*, how to conduct business with the competition in Norway. The message is clear: Even if you follow all the rules and obey all the laws, if you get too big, we'll squash you.
If they want to slit their wrists and give up the potential sales tax revenue from iPods and iTunes Music Store revenue, let 'em. Just as the Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it, so it is with the market forces. If people want something bad enough, they'll get it. For a collary to this from another EU country, look at how Red Bull became popular. This may be the best thing to happen to Apple in Scandanavia.
So the problem is that Apple won't let competitors to use the software they developed and paid for and the relationships they fostered with the Norwegian labels, both indie and the RIAA, nor share the revenue from that process and iPods sales with companies that don't have Apple's best interests in mind?
Are you in favour of regulations that forces Sears to haul around merchandise from JC Penney without compensation as well?
There's no law that forces people to use iTunes, nor does iTunes have a monopoly on downloaded music, and Apple hasn't used its market share to squeeze others out of the business (unlike Microsoft). What have they done wrong, except become popular?
But they're not. So your argument is invalid. They've been convicted of anti-trust practices (not being a monopoly).
Previous to that incident, though, (say, 1985 on) Apple had only themselves to blame. They screwed up right, left and center, going for profits when they should have pursued marketshare, churning out crappy products and freezing out 3rd party developers. They go the marketshare they deserved in 1996, when they almost went under, because of all those mistakes.I hate to break this to you, but iTunes won't play WMAs on Windows, at least not directly.
Well, yeah, that's common knowledge. Been that way (IIRC) from the first edition of iTunes for Windows. But does iTunes prevent, say, Windows Media Player from playing a WMA, or any other program that manages music from operating correctly or being installed? That was the essence of the anti-trust suit against Windows. Monopolies aren't necessarily a bad thing. Monopolies that prevent competition are.Personally, I'd love to see nekkid MP3's as the standard. It's what the market wants, and it was the standard for the iPod when it first launched: Remember the DRM on the first iPod? "Don't steal music." The iTunes store was the first and most successful effort at balancing the marginal cost / marginal benefit for the consumer to get music online legally with the ease of use of P2P. More needs to be done, though, and I think that the recent move to watermarking is the way to go.
Then the world will be divide in two - those who have iPods and those who don't.
I thought it was already...
"You're being too successful. Please stop."
:-)
Look, I loathe DRM as much as the next guy, but Apple's not using their market dominance to smack around, say, Microsoft from making a run at them. Microsoft is doing a FINE job all by themselves at lousing up their attempts to dethrone Apple.
Ergo, this is just market forces at work. The market has spoken, and people prefer the iPod and iTunes to the competition. Until there's good evidence that iTunes prevents someone from, say, playing a WMA file on Windows or the like, Apple's in the clear on this. Let them have their success, and stop monkeying with the system.
There's no such thing as bad publicity!
<tom cruise> Yes, there is.</tom cruise>
Sarbanes-Oaxley compliance. Again. FWIW, I have Boot Camp on this very machine. It's worth an addtional 30 bills, if for no other reason than it opens up the world of Windows gaming to me yet again. If some of the Wine-based alternatives for OS X pan out, then I'll drop Boot Camp. Until then...
"Hey! You got chocolate in my peanut butter!"
"You got peanut butter in my chocolate!"
In this case, though, read "strychnine" instead of "peanut butter".
We don't say "slow light" anymore. We say "Luminescentally Challenged".
As a center-right Reagan Democrat, now a "Crunchy Con" (is it just me, or have political labels become more and more like band classifications? "Emo-core", et al? I digress...), let me say "Thank you!" for pointing this out about elements of the global warming crowd. I've seen wild-eyed zealotry in the eyes of some environmentalists that would do a Pentecostal preacher proud.
:-)
I'm open to the idea of climate change being caused by man's actions, and that's one of the reasons why we bought a Civic Hybrid. But please, let it be a Reformation (without the nasty Hugenot/Knox/Etc battles) and not a Crusade. If I want preaching, I'll turn on an old Billy Graham crusade.
I guess with Gore, it's "Once a Southern Baptist, always a Southern Baptist."
(ready the "Offtopic" mod points now, fellas. I got it coming for this, and I know it...)
How did this get past my "No political stories at all on the front page" settings ? The flamewars these type of stories always set off makes Windows v. Linux look like a tempest in a teapot. If I wanted ignorant political blathering, I'd surf Kos or the Freepers. Bad form, editors, bad form.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that it is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." - P.J. O'Rourke.