What these countries are trying to do is let you use any music player with any music store, and vice versa, and hopefully get rid of the extra DRM problems created by all of this in the mean time. And it doesn't seem to be exclusive to iTunes, it applies to everyone. I'm certainly hoping for these kind of changes, more choice is nver a bad thing.
No, what they're doing is saying you cannot buy closed DRM, and you cannot sell DRM.
How is it even their business what people do with their money willingly? And what's worse, why do people clamor "Please Government! Save me from my own bad decisions!"
I guess being an American, I just don't get it... Although that aspect of Americanism is dying fast.
Vista's Software Protection Platform (SPP) can put unvalidated copies of the software into a reduced-functionality mode
So you can avoid bloat and annoying requesters by not validating a copy?
No, they reduce functionality by adding "over 300 new innovative desktop productivity solutions that let you do things from browse photos to surf the 'net, with better access to your media through We'reFairlySureItPlaysSomewhere(TM) technology."
Now correct me if I'm wrong but nobody screams "censorship" when an incompetent doctor is kicked out of the AMA.
Doctors RARELY have their licenses revoked these days, but that's beside the point.
Doctors are "kicked out" for felonies and acts of malice, such as intentional mal-practice. They're never kicked out for what they believe, even if it's more obviously false than global warming denial.
Doctors can believe ALL KINDS of crazy crap from homeopathy to astral projection. That's why if you ever see a doctor on TV ranting about a product, feel free to call them full of it. They're just people with fancy degrees.
I'm pre-med myself, but I have no illusions about the profession.
Besides, there's plenty of evidence to show global warming isn't doing what was advertised. Doctors claiming magnet therapy works have much less of a leg to stand on.
I am worried that the media is now in the hands of so few people, but who would police this "fairness?
No kidding. I hear news organizations say all the time "We're fair, we present BOTH sides"..
As a Libertarian, I say there's almost always more than 2 sides to an issue.
Take Gay marriage (which probably put Bush in office the 2nd time). Some are in favor, some are against, and others say that the government shouldn't be issuing marriage licenses in the first place. I never ONCE heard the latter point of view on ANY of the 24 hour news channels.
Also, he insults his userbase and his peers in a cheap attempt to gain respect.
This sounds trollish but this comment is pretty sound. "Anyone who disagrees with me is a ___" is a commonality in Eran's articles.. just take this article:
Panic mongers who think that the iPhone needs to be a hobbyist development tool should take a good look at the state of development for Palm and WinCE before recommending a similar mess for Apple.
Yes, the iPhone is a phone, but you'd have to be a complete moron with zero vision to look at it and say "it's been done before."
Anyone unglued about the name of this product is seriously logic impaired. It doesn't even matter in the slightest.
And then there are there are the attacks on specific people:
Frankly, Mr. Beschizza, it is obvious why you write for aesthetic obsessive magazines rather than engineer actual products. But thanks for continuing the bothersome tradition of repeating the complaints of yesterday's wags.
Yes, Apple just walked in and noticed you were incompetently selling the same old crap with slight hardware improvements over the last half decade, and decided to kick you out.
Whatever though, it's his blog and he certainly did put a lot of effort into it. I like how it's doing well and that these are basically long-winded forum posts with ads (no sarcasm, I actually think that's cool).
But if you're reading this Mr. Eran, just try to lay off the personal attacks. Just because you're a minor internet celebrity doesn't mean people will put up with shrillness.
"Users are stupid and that needs to be the starting point for software developers." I read their trade magazines: "No matter how hard we pray...every network is at one time or other exposed to the ultimate technology risk: users."
People working in offices should have a modicum of training with a computer. If a person had terrible spelling in the oldendays (before spellcheck was prevalent), they would probably be fired. IT people like myself (at my old job) having to go around and teach the most basic of tasks to people who should know a thing or two is extremely frustrating.
In the modern business world, being computer illiterate is like not knowing how to read. Imagine 'grammar' techs going around saying "now what does sound the 'A' make?... no, it makes the 'aaah' sound, see now? Good, have a cookie."
Some things I don't mind doing, like when windows bugs out and the printer gets deselected, I'll happily mutter "you know, windows should be a little robust, this kind of thing shouldn't happen, we should switch to macs" while I'm fixing the box and me and the user can find some common ground to grouse about. Other things, like how to change the margins in a Word document (which people forget sometimes twice a day) really pushed the limits of my patience.
The same goes for software development. I developed my own CMS recently. 99% of it was just tweaking the interface to make it more and more usable--not having too many options on a single page so as to not confuse people--that sort of thing. UI is a huge pain to deal with. I ended up just having layers of complexity so I could bring the learning curve to zero. Writing the 'help' pages was so tedious and interminable I nearly gave up after I wrote in "Enter domain here, click here for more information on domains." Is it so much to ask that a person running their own website who uses my CMS should know what a domain is? After working technical support for so long, I realize that yes, yes it is. The only hope you have in UI development is to dump as much user-friendliness in there as possible and pray that they can figure the rest out on their own.
This example pretty much says it all: I got an e-mail from a person using my CMS which read something like, "How do I get this thing started? I double clicked on the 'index.php' and it just opened a notepad with a whole bunch of gibberish [...] "
It's not always the IT guy's fault he's pissed off.
Well, he also blames Apple. He gives the example of eMusic, which sells a lot of music from independent labels without DRM (and that of course with the labels agreement). The same music is sold by Apple in the iTunes Store with their fairplay DRM. It seems that in theses cases Apple's assertion that "we have to use DRM, otherwise the labels would not allow us to sell the music" is not true.
While I see how that could be construed as a 'lie', I think it has more to do with the way the iTMS is setup. I think no matter what you download on the service, it's encrypted by default. It's probably just a 'better safe than sued' approach by Apple.
For instance, a while ago I saw a free track ('I fought the law' cover by Greenday.. admittedly it was crap) on iTMS, so I downloaded it. The song was encrypted (m4p), even though anyone could download iTunes (free), sign up for the store (free), and download the track (free). It's not like they'd be losing money by letting me distribute it to all my friends (who would promptly kick my ass for filling their inbox with such crappy music). It's probably just encrypted by default.
In fact, apart from possibly podcasts, I think everything on iTMS is encrypted as you download it. If all downloaded content is encrypted, Apple doesn't have to worry about Fairplay being circumvented upon reception.
But since the advent of the iPod and iTunes, I have refused to buy anything from Apple just because of their support of DRM. I don't need my rights "managed", especially by a corporation.
I'm a mac user and I don't have any DRM'd files on my hard drive except iTMS TV shows. I have 80GB of music, all Mp3. Apple's mp3 encoder works really well, too.
DRM is only there if you want it there. It's not some dirty little secret like it is with the subscription services.
Most people are aware by now of the limitations they face with iTMS files, and yet it's the 4th biggest source of music worldwide (first for downloads).
DVDs can't be ripped with any software you can purchase, does that mean you don't buy or rent them? DRM isn't intrinsically bad, especially when you can just avoid buying DRM products.
Who's saying the job could have been created in the U.S.?
Exactly! Especially with the upcoming minimum wage increase, there are many jobs being created oversees that would not exist in the United States even if there was more protectionism.
Instead of Mattel opening a factory in China to make its stupid toys, they would buy them direct from a Chinese company.
As far as tech jobs, I think American companies like Google will be focusing on new technology rather than engineering implementation of old tech. Abroad, companies will be paying engineers to make custom software applications, which simply require one to know the language, not have big ideas.
Programming is a large field broken into 2 groups: The Art/Science, and the commodity. There's no need for overpaid American geeks to waste time making custom data management software for American corporations. The market for that got too big and the economy of scale on producing new programmers got cheap. As a programmer myself, I'm sad to say I didn't see it coming.
Also, there's no correlation between the loss of American jobs and offshoring. In fact, far more offshoring went on during the 90's than the 2000's and nobody can say the US had fewer jobs afterwards.
The nature of trade is quite simple: each party places a higher value on the good/service they're getting than the good/service they're giving. Therefore, American companies who outsource oversees have more capital at the end of the day, which they generally use to create more wealth.
Somewhere in there it trickles down, but you can take an economics class to learn about that.
The author is Dan Blacharski. As in THE Dan Blacharski. Apparently, "He and his wife enjoy spending time restoring his 1888 Victorian home, and spends winters in Bangkok. " (for some reason, mentioned at the bottom of TFA)
It sounds like a made up name I gave to the cops in Mexico once while looking at a black car.
On Topic, I just read the article (it's less than two pages)... Oddly enough, the/. summary is all you need to know. It's just a short essay about why computer -> TV is the next 'big thing' according to M$ and Apple.
I'm really not so sure. You can't even download DVD quality movies off the internet yet, and with ('unrippable') HDDVD or BluRay being the next big thing, it seems even less likely that a computer will be the center of media. Then there's TV shows, which look better ripped off analog cable into a TiVo (which is cheaper than an Apple TV) than bought and paid for from iTMS.
The future of media has already been decided: TiVo and high-resolution optical, not the Media PC.
I think most of us who tool around the macrumor sites had a pretty good idea of what they were going to release. The only 'secret' was when. I wasn't surprised by any feature the phone had.
Bundled as part of Toast? Well, so much for that idea then. A CD burning application that costs $100 and breaks with every security and system update that apple puts out? No thank you, I'll stick with the "unofficial hacks" (which work just fine).
I don't understand, I haven't updated toast 7.0 since it came out and haven't upgraded to 7.1--or whatever it's at now (I'm doing 10.4.8 on a Mac Pro now).
Toast has always been the 'end-all' of burning software since I started using it nearly a decade ago.
These days it can take in raw video, including mpeg2, and burn a DVD with no other software. It'll auto-compress video (and video_ts) to fit DVDs.
Combined with ElGato's software, burning TV shows from Miglia or EyeTV devices can be done without recompression. I used to do this three or 4 times a week, putting 2 hours on each disc.
It even started doing dual layer way before Apple even offered the option.
I've never had compatibility issues, even though I rarely upgrade. In fact, I've never had a single issue with Toast, and I use it for all sorts of crazy stuff.
The best methods available for surveying casualties tells us [bbc.co.uk] that the body count is around the most probable number of 655 thousand, which is backed by the statistical community.
It most certainly is not (keep in mind, this is from a fairly anti-war website).
The 655k figure study, by the Lancet medical journal, sampled heavily from the most violent areas. The 655k figure is BS, and so is the survey.
Let's face it... too much spam and off topic posts are the reasons Yahoo took down the boards, not to improve the board itself.
If people still use them (and they do, in droves), that's all that would matter to yahoo.
I have a feeling they were worried about being held liable for content/weirdos so they're putting in some sort of automated screener to find questionable content.
Everyone jumped for joy when MySpace was getting sued for the actions of its users. Now other sites have to watch out to protect idiots from freaks, because the idiots will sue if they don't.
Slashdot Mirror
What these countries are trying to do is let you use any music player with any music store, and vice versa, and hopefully get rid of the extra DRM problems created by all of this in the mean time. And it doesn't seem to be exclusive to iTunes, it applies to everyone. I'm certainly hoping for these kind of changes, more choice is nver a bad thing.
No, what they're doing is saying you cannot buy closed DRM, and you cannot sell DRM.
How is it even their business what people do with their money willingly? And what's worse, why do people clamor "Please Government! Save me from my own bad decisions!"
I guess being an American, I just don't get it... Although that aspect of Americanism is dying fast.
No, they reduce functionality by adding "over 300 new innovative desktop productivity solutions that let you do things from browse photos to surf the 'net, with better access to your media through We'reFairlySureItPlaysSomewhere(TM) technology."
Now correct me if I'm wrong but nobody screams "censorship" when an incompetent doctor is kicked out of the AMA.
Doctors RARELY have their licenses revoked these days, but that's beside the point.
Doctors are "kicked out" for felonies and acts of malice, such as intentional mal-practice. They're never kicked out for what they believe, even if it's more obviously false than global warming denial.
Doctors can believe ALL KINDS of crazy crap from homeopathy to astral projection. That's why if you ever see a doctor on TV ranting about a product, feel free to call them full of it. They're just people with fancy degrees.
I'm pre-med myself, but I have no illusions about the profession.
Besides, there's plenty of evidence to show global warming isn't doing what was advertised. Doctors claiming magnet therapy works have much less of a leg to stand on.
What he said.
I am worried that the media is now in the hands of so few people, but who would police this "fairness?
No kidding. I hear news organizations say all the time "We're fair, we present BOTH sides"..
As a Libertarian, I say there's almost always more than 2 sides to an issue.
Take Gay marriage (which probably put Bush in office the 2nd time). Some are in favor, some are against, and others say that the government shouldn't be issuing marriage licenses in the first place. I never ONCE heard the latter point of view on ANY of the 24 hour news channels.
Also, he insults his userbase and his peers in a cheap attempt to gain respect.
This sounds trollish but this comment is pretty sound. "Anyone who disagrees with me is a ___" is a commonality in Eran's articles.. just take this article:
Panic mongers who think that the iPhone needs to be a hobbyist development tool should take a good look at the state of development for Palm and WinCE before recommending a similar mess for Apple.
Yes, the iPhone is a phone, but you'd have to be a complete moron with zero vision to look at it and say "it's been done before."
Anyone unglued about the name of this product is seriously logic impaired. It doesn't even matter in the slightest.
And then there are there are the attacks on specific people:
Frankly, Mr. Beschizza, it is obvious why you write for aesthetic obsessive magazines rather than engineer actual products. But thanks for continuing the bothersome tradition of repeating the complaints of yesterday's wags.
Yes, Apple just walked in and noticed you were incompetently selling the same old crap with slight hardware improvements over the last half decade, and decided to kick you out.
Whatever though, it's his blog and he certainly did put a lot of effort into it. I like how it's doing well and that these are basically long-winded forum posts with ads (no sarcasm, I actually think that's cool).
But if you're reading this Mr. Eran, just try to lay off the personal attacks. Just because you're a minor internet celebrity doesn't mean people will put up with shrillness.
"Users are stupid and that needs to be the starting point for software developers." I read their trade magazines: "No matter how hard we pray...every network is at one time or other exposed to the ultimate technology risk: users."
... no, it makes the 'aaah' sound, see now? Good, have a cookie."
People working in offices should have a modicum of training with a computer. If a person had terrible spelling in the oldendays (before spellcheck was prevalent), they would probably be fired. IT people like myself (at my old job) having to go around and teach the most basic of tasks to people who should know a thing or two is extremely frustrating.
In the modern business world, being computer illiterate is like not knowing how to read. Imagine 'grammar' techs going around saying "now what does sound the 'A' make?
Some things I don't mind doing, like when windows bugs out and the printer gets deselected, I'll happily mutter "you know, windows should be a little robust, this kind of thing shouldn't happen, we should switch to macs" while I'm fixing the box and me and the user can find some common ground to grouse about. Other things, like how to change the margins in a Word document (which people forget sometimes twice a day) really pushed the limits of my patience.
The same goes for software development. I developed my own CMS recently. 99% of it was just tweaking the interface to make it more and more usable--not having too many options on a single page so as to not confuse people--that sort of thing. UI is a huge pain to deal with. I ended up just having layers of complexity so I could bring the learning curve to zero. Writing the 'help' pages was so tedious and interminable I nearly gave up after I wrote in "Enter domain here, click here for more information on domains." Is it so much to ask that a person running their own website who uses my CMS should know what a domain is? After working technical support for so long, I realize that yes, yes it is. The only hope you have in UI development is to dump as much user-friendliness in there as possible and pray that they can figure the rest out on their own.
This example pretty much says it all: I got an e-mail from a person using my CMS which read something like, "How do I get this thing started? I double clicked on the 'index.php' and it just opened a notepad with a whole bunch of gibberish [...] "
It's not always the IT guy's fault he's pissed off.
I don't want to go outside.
Well, he also blames Apple. He gives the example of eMusic, which sells a lot of music from independent labels without DRM (and that of course with the labels agreement). The same music is sold by Apple in the iTunes Store with their fairplay DRM. It seems that in theses cases Apple's assertion that "we have to use DRM, otherwise the labels would not allow us to sell the music" is not true.
While I see how that could be construed as a 'lie', I think it has more to do with the way the iTMS is setup. I think no matter what you download on the service, it's encrypted by default. It's probably just a 'better safe than sued' approach by Apple.
For instance, a while ago I saw a free track ('I fought the law' cover by Greenday.. admittedly it was crap) on iTMS, so I downloaded it. The song was encrypted (m4p), even though anyone could download iTunes (free), sign up for the store (free), and download the track (free). It's not like they'd be losing money by letting me distribute it to all my friends (who would promptly kick my ass for filling their inbox with such crappy music). It's probably just encrypted by default.
In fact, apart from possibly podcasts, I think everything on iTMS is encrypted as you download it. If all downloaded content is encrypted, Apple doesn't have to worry about Fairplay being circumvented upon reception.
Without a mouthpiece, a horn is still a horn....
:(
WRONG! Without a mouthpiece, a horn is a dying corporation with stocks plummeting and thousands of layoffs.
I suck at metaphors
Do you know a way to make iTunes rip VBR files?
Preferences -> Advanced -> Setting: -> Custom
But since the advent of the iPod and iTunes, I have refused to buy anything from Apple just because of their support of DRM. I don't need my rights "managed", especially by a corporation.
I'm a mac user and I don't have any DRM'd files on my hard drive except iTMS TV shows. I have 80GB of music, all Mp3. Apple's mp3 encoder works really well, too.
DRM is only there if you want it there. It's not some dirty little secret like it is with the subscription services.
Most people are aware by now of the limitations they face with iTMS files, and yet it's the 4th biggest source of music worldwide (first for downloads).
DVDs can't be ripped with any software you can purchase, does that mean you don't buy or rent them? DRM isn't intrinsically bad, especially when you can just avoid buying DRM products.
Hint: We don't need to be kings of the world to be doing well. When the rest of the world catches up, we'll all be better off.
Sorry to break it to you, but most of Canada observes DST too. But not us here in Saskatchewan. Too bad I don't still use NT or 2000. :)
Yeah but who cares about Canada?
All tucked away down there...
Direct from M$:
Move to Arizona, Hawaii, or anywhere outside the US.
Who's saying the job could have been created in the U.S.?
Exactly! Especially with the upcoming minimum wage increase, there are many jobs being created oversees that would not exist in the United States even if there was more protectionism.
Instead of Mattel opening a factory in China to make its stupid toys, they would buy them direct from a Chinese company.
As far as tech jobs, I think American companies like Google will be focusing on new technology rather than engineering implementation of old tech. Abroad, companies will be paying engineers to make custom software applications, which simply require one to know the language, not have big ideas.
Programming is a large field broken into 2 groups: The Art/Science, and the commodity. There's no need for overpaid American geeks to waste time making custom data management software for American corporations. The market for that got too big and the economy of scale on producing new programmers got cheap. As a programmer myself, I'm sad to say I didn't see it coming.
Also, there's no correlation between the loss of American jobs and offshoring. In fact, far more offshoring went on during the 90's than the 2000's and nobody can say the US had fewer jobs afterwards.
The nature of trade is quite simple: each party places a higher value on the good/service they're getting than the good/service they're giving. Therefore, American companies who outsource oversees have more capital at the end of the day, which they generally use to create more wealth.
Somewhere in there it trickles down, but you can take an economics class to learn about that.
80 Australian CS lab computers - What's that in US computers?
Trick question! Australia doesn't have computers yet... Or soap.
The author is Dan Blacharski. As in THE Dan Blacharski. Apparently, "He and his wife enjoy spending time restoring his 1888 Victorian home, and spends winters in Bangkok. " (for some reason, mentioned at the bottom of TFA)
/. summary is all you need to know. It's just a short essay about why computer -> TV is the next 'big thing' according to M$ and Apple.
It sounds like a made up name I gave to the cops in Mexico once while looking at a black car.
On Topic, I just read the article (it's less than two pages)... Oddly enough, the
I'm really not so sure. You can't even download DVD quality movies off the internet yet, and with ('unrippable') HDDVD or BluRay being the next big thing, it seems even less likely that a computer will be the center of media. Then there's TV shows, which look better ripped off analog cable into a TiVo (which is cheaper than an Apple TV) than bought and paid for from iTMS.
The future of media has already been decided: TiVo and high-resolution optical, not the Media PC.
I think most of us who tool around the macrumor sites had a pretty good idea of what they were going to release. The only 'secret' was when. I wasn't surprised by any feature the phone had.
back PEDALING, not peddling.
Nonsense. They meant that they went back in time to sell Tivos to people in the past.
"Back Peddling"
Bundled as part of Toast? Well, so much for that idea then. A CD burning application that costs $100 and breaks with every security and system update that apple puts out? No thank you, I'll stick with the "unofficial hacks" (which work just fine).
I don't understand, I haven't updated toast 7.0 since it came out and haven't upgraded to 7.1--or whatever it's at now (I'm doing 10.4.8 on a Mac Pro now).
Toast has always been the 'end-all' of burning software since I started using it nearly a decade ago.
These days it can take in raw video, including mpeg2, and burn a DVD with no other software. It'll auto-compress video (and video_ts) to fit DVDs.
Combined with ElGato's software, burning TV shows from Miglia or EyeTV devices can be done without recompression. I used to do this three or 4 times a week, putting 2 hours on each disc.
It even started doing dual layer way before Apple even offered the option.
I've never had compatibility issues, even though I rarely upgrade. In fact, I've never had a single issue with Toast, and I use it for all sorts of crazy stuff.
Underneath sovereign territory ... If it's oil, Greenland better brace for the invasion.
Currently modded "insightful"
Does that mean that insightful is the label we give to 'lame jokes' now?
Well.. not interesting, not underrated, and not funny, I guess there's not much left.
The best methods available for surveying casualties tells us [bbc.co.uk] that the body count is around the most probable number of 655 thousand, which is backed by the statistical community.
It most certainly is not (keep in mind, this is from a fairly anti-war website).
The 655k figure study, by the Lancet medical journal, sampled heavily from the most violent areas. The 655k figure is BS, and so is the survey.
A much better study is available here.
Let's face it... too much spam and off topic posts are the reasons Yahoo took down the boards, not to improve the board itself.
If people still use them (and they do, in droves), that's all that would matter to yahoo.
I have a feeling they were worried about being held liable for content/weirdos so they're putting in some sort of automated screener to find questionable content.
Everyone jumped for joy when MySpace was getting sued for the actions of its users. Now other sites have to watch out to protect idiots from freaks, because the idiots will sue if they don't.
Wow dude, you are just f*cking batsh*t nuts, aren't you?