It suggests that other music stores went DRM free first, when it was iTunes with EMI's catalogue. Plus the "Music should be DRM free" Steve Jobs letter that was part of the process during negotiation - the early parts there are suggesting that it was all the music industry trying to deal, with Apple just riding it out.
So, it works as a timeline if you slot in a couple of missing pieces.
If you want the full IDE? Yes, you need XCode on a Mac, but then it's pretty heavily tailored to writing code for OS X and iOS, so assuming you want to actually write code for those platforms... you're going to want the Mac anyway.
Alternatively, run it on a Hackintosh.
At some point in the process that begins "I will write some code" you will need to obtain access to a computer of some description, so it's "hardly free".
You can write Windows software under Linux... but not because of Microsoft. If you're going to make the point that it's possible to do, then you really should be honest about that. Neither Apple nor Microsoft releases their IDE for anything other than their own platform.
Given the history of "music on the Mac" I think it was intentional.
We had "Rip, Mix, Burn" on the iMac, we had the weakest possible DRM (with a built in removal method in iTunes itself) when the store launched, we had Steve's open letter talking about how music should be (no DRM), and we have their choice of format - AAC (over something proprietary that only Apple devices can read).
I'd say they were firmly in the "ok, we'll accept DRM to get the store going, but seriously guys you'll sell much more without it" camp.
This is pretty much their position with most things - closed ecosystem, running on open formats (so you can get data in and out). It's worked very well for them. I can take my purchased music onto Linux (and I do), I can take my email out from Mail.app (it's all in mbox format), I can get my address book and calendar data out (it's in open formats, and their address and calendar servers are open source), I can get my iTunes library out (alongside the main library file, iTunes keeps a parsable XML file for syncing with other devices), their consumer apps (iLife, iWork) use simple zip archives as their file format with documented XML inside and a PDF version of the file.
Yet, with all that, the cry is "but I can't take my app that I bought for my phone and run it on [other smartphone] - it's so locked down!". Well, yes... in the same way you can't just run a Windows program on OS X or Linux, without using a VM or other solution. That's not lockdown, it's simply incompatibility.
They're not perfect by any means, but they certainly not some Machiavellian Mastermind as often painted on/.
"Forced to fork over" 30%..... in exchange for hosting, payment processing, promotion and 'digital store space'.
It's not like it's protection money. They're actually better off letting Apple handle that (especially the payment processing) and come out ahead compared to having to run all that stuff in house.
Now, there's no option to do it yourself if you want (ie, if you're someone like Amazon and you are not short of hosting space or bandwidth, and already have a payment system set up), but it ensures that everything on the consumer side is streamlined.
For 30%, it's really not a bad deal at all. If you think it's a rip off, then I assume you've never actually dealt with setting up and managing an online payment system, *especially* one that handles frequent small transactions.
I think the cut of in-app subscriptions is a little steep - I'm not agreeing with Apple on that one at all, but the 30% cut of the app sale? Bargain. Simple as.
Except Apple's goal from the start appears to be have been "DRM is a necessary evil" due to the content providers.
They couldn't have done much more during the time they were selling DRM music to encourage you to strip the "protection" off without actually just strait up linking to the pirate bay. They shipped iTunes with the ability to remove the DRM from day one, and strongly encouraged you to do so every time you downloaded tracks.
Their model was "make it easy, convenient and useful for the consumer" and they will buy instead of getting things off napster, and it worked - one of those things involves music that you can move between devices easily, which they had to compromise on initially, but eventually pushed through. It's the reason they never licensed FairPlay to anyone else - they wanted it to die off.
The technology was there in 1969 - the US took it to the moon. The problem is the storage of hydrogen because it has such a low energy density. Apollo solved that by storing it as a liquid (not feasible for a consumer item), but storing it as a compressed gas has issues since to get near the energy density of gasoline you need to *really* compress it - which means strong, heavy tanks and a lot of energy input to compress it like that.
There's currently a lot of research going into how to solve this issue - how do you store useful amounts of hydrogen safely and energy efficiently. The fuel cell is the easy bit!
In the same way that you wouldn't chose a subcompact for moving large amounts of goods from point A to point B, you won't choose an electric vehicle that relies on a charging infrastructure and limited range if you need to travel around frequently out of range of an urban centre.
Safari is pretty good on the Mac - I used to use it alongside Firefox but switched to Safari/Chrome after the whole status bar debacle and the trainwreck that was FF4 (and it looks like I got out at the right time).
I know that I've essentially got two Webkit browsers now, but I'm much happier. In terms of speed I don't really notice any difference in real world use between Safari and Chrome except that Safari has a big memory leak when using Adblock, so it eventually swallows up all the available RAM you have and you need to restart it. It doesn't do this without the extension, so it's something to do with that but it's too useful to leave it uninstalled.
You can, of course, turn that off. You can also customise all the gestures to your liking, so if you feel it is "exactly backward" you can swap it over.
It's subtly different - Apple's brand is one of the most important things to Apple, to the exclusion of a couple of other things that a company might normally place above it (like popularity among geeks, who are traditionally high spenders on hardware).
What they *sell* to you though is a product, which the brand merely accentuates. After the sale you have an iPad/iPhone/Mac and the advertising talks about what those things do, as does the Apple site and the documentation. You get something tangible.
HP, on the other hand, was trying to sell things along the lines of "you need product X because it totally web 2.0's your business effectiveness" (and what are you selling to me? A printer? Right).
Don't get me wrong, the brand is al part of Apple's methods but they do actually back it up with products that reflect favourably on that brand. HP was just selling the sizzle and had a few photos of some hotdogs.
It's a shame because before Carly fucked it up, buying something from HP would have been easy - in a shortlist of products that were all broadly similar, I'd have gone for the HP. Not so much any more.
Well, you did set it up quite nicely. I'm amazed you didn't see it as an easy knockdown, but you were so quick with your Apple trolling you missed the sarcasm.
Here's a thought, if you find yourself being consistently modded down but rarely modded up, might I suggest it has little to do with "a slashdot hive mind" and more to do with you trolling. (That you also think slashdot is a hive mind with a *pro* Apple spin is hilarious, but potentially highly indicative of your conformation bias) .
Also, I'm not sure how you get from "points out by how much you missed the joke" to "Steve Jobs' bitch", or is anyone you perceive as critical of you automatically a supporter of everything you hate?
Not that old... oh what's the word I'm looking for? lie? falsehood? myth? One of those.
Microsoft purchased $150-200 million of non-voting stock in the wake of a lawsuit. It was in no way a "saving" move on their part (nor was it more than a small slice of Apple's cash at the time). They sold this stock at a later date and now do not own any.
They can have icons and everything, and can be launched right from your home screen.
There's currently a speed discrepancy between apps launched this way and the exact same app navigated to from within Safari due to an older version of Webkit being used from the home-screen-launched version, due to security and sandboxing complexity (the new version is faster, but would create a security problem without a proper sandbox), but this is being fixed in iOS5.
And no, you don't have to have them bundled with the phone, or get them through the App Store.
So you "didn't thin so" because you didn;t actually do any research on the topic. Classic slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
It suggests that other music stores went DRM free first, when it was iTunes with EMI's catalogue. Plus the "Music should be DRM free" Steve Jobs letter that was part of the process during negotiation - the early parts there are suggesting that it was all the music industry trying to deal, with Apple just riding it out.
So, it works as a timeline if you slot in a couple of missing pieces.
If you want the full IDE? Yes, you need XCode on a Mac, but then it's pretty heavily tailored to writing code for OS X and iOS, so assuming you want to actually write code for those platforms... you're going to want the Mac anyway.
Alternatively, run it on a Hackintosh.
At some point in the process that begins "I will write some code" you will need to obtain access to a computer of some description, so it's "hardly free".
You can write Windows software under Linux... but not because of Microsoft. If you're going to make the point that it's possible to do, then you really should be honest about that. Neither Apple nor Microsoft releases their IDE for anything other than their own platform.
Given the history of "music on the Mac" I think it was intentional.
We had "Rip, Mix, Burn" on the iMac, we had the weakest possible DRM (with a built in removal method in iTunes itself) when the store launched, we had Steve's open letter talking about how music should be (no DRM), and we have their choice of format - AAC (over something proprietary that only Apple devices can read).
I'd say they were firmly in the "ok, we'll accept DRM to get the store going, but seriously guys you'll sell much more without it" camp.
This is pretty much their position with most things - closed ecosystem, running on open formats (so you can get data in and out). It's worked very well for them. I can take my purchased music onto Linux (and I do), I can take my email out from Mail.app (it's all in mbox format), I can get my address book and calendar data out (it's in open formats, and their address and calendar servers are open source), I can get my iTunes library out (alongside the main library file, iTunes keeps a parsable XML file for syncing with other devices), their consumer apps (iLife, iWork) use simple zip archives as their file format with documented XML inside and a PDF version of the file.
Yet, with all that, the cry is "but I can't take my app that I bought for my phone and run it on [other smartphone] - it's so locked down!". Well, yes... in the same way you can't just run a Windows program on OS X or Linux, without using a VM or other solution. That's not lockdown, it's simply incompatibility.
They're not perfect by any means, but they certainly not some Machiavellian Mastermind as often painted on /.
"Forced to fork over" 30%..... in exchange for hosting, payment processing, promotion and 'digital store space'.
It's not like it's protection money. They're actually better off letting Apple handle that (especially the payment processing) and come out ahead compared to having to run all that stuff in house.
Now, there's no option to do it yourself if you want (ie, if you're someone like Amazon and you are not short of hosting space or bandwidth, and already have a payment system set up), but it ensures that everything on the consumer side is streamlined.
For 30%, it's really not a bad deal at all. If you think it's a rip off, then I assume you've never actually dealt with setting up and managing an online payment system, *especially* one that handles frequent small transactions.
I think the cut of in-app subscriptions is a little steep - I'm not agreeing with Apple on that one at all, but the 30% cut of the app sale? Bargain. Simple as.
iTunes Music Store uses VBR AAC files for their music. It's standard - you can play it in anything that supports AAC.
You're doing it wrong.
I play iTunes Music Store purchases on Ubuntu with zero modification. They're just standard AAC files.
Windows definitely supports AAC, as does Android.
Except Apple's goal from the start appears to be have been "DRM is a necessary evil" due to the content providers.
They couldn't have done much more during the time they were selling DRM music to encourage you to strip the "protection" off without actually just strait up linking to the pirate bay. They shipped iTunes with the ability to remove the DRM from day one, and strongly encouraged you to do so every time you downloaded tracks.
Their model was "make it easy, convenient and useful for the consumer" and they will buy instead of getting things off napster, and it worked - one of those things involves music that you can move between devices easily, which they had to compromise on initially, but eventually pushed through. It's the reason they never licensed FairPlay to anyone else - they wanted it to die off.
Nice retelling of reality, but facts sort of get in the way of that fantasy of yours.
Still, maybe if you scrunch your eyes up really tight and wish really hard, you will be able to forget anything positive Apple has done.
Nice strawman. I guess that's you conceding that the AC has a point.
I guess that's what happens when you use OpenLDAP.
Silly Apple.
The technology was there in 1969 - the US took it to the moon. The problem is the storage of hydrogen because it has such a low energy density. Apollo solved that by storing it as a liquid (not feasible for a consumer item), but storing it as a compressed gas has issues since to get near the energy density of gasoline you need to *really* compress it - which means strong, heavy tanks and a lot of energy input to compress it like that.
There's currently a lot of research going into how to solve this issue - how do you store useful amounts of hydrogen safely and energy efficiently. The fuel cell is the easy bit!
So... don't use an electric vehicle?
It's not rocket science.
In the same way that you wouldn't chose a subcompact for moving large amounts of goods from point A to point B, you won't choose an electric vehicle that relies on a charging infrastructure and limited range if you need to travel around frequently out of range of an urban centre.
Safari is pretty good on the Mac - I used to use it alongside Firefox but switched to Safari/Chrome after the whole status bar debacle and the trainwreck that was FF4 (and it looks like I got out at the right time).
I know that I've essentially got two Webkit browsers now, but I'm much happier. In terms of speed I don't really notice any difference in real world use between Safari and Chrome except that Safari has a big memory leak when using Adblock, so it eventually swallows up all the available RAM you have and you need to restart it. It doesn't do this without the extension, so it's something to do with that but it's too useful to leave it uninstalled.
You can, of course, turn that off. You can also customise all the gestures to your liking, so if you feel it is "exactly backward" you can swap it over.
Yeah, I hear being badly photoshopped is damaging to your health.
It's subtly different - Apple's brand is one of the most important things to Apple, to the exclusion of a couple of other things that a company might normally place above it (like popularity among geeks, who are traditionally high spenders on hardware).
What they *sell* to you though is a product, which the brand merely accentuates. After the sale you have an iPad/iPhone/Mac and the advertising talks about what those things do, as does the Apple site and the documentation. You get something tangible.
HP, on the other hand, was trying to sell things along the lines of "you need product X because it totally web 2.0's your business effectiveness" (and what are you selling to me? A printer? Right).
Don't get me wrong, the brand is al part of Apple's methods but they do actually back it up with products that reflect favourably on that brand. HP was just selling the sizzle and had a few photos of some hotdogs.
It's a shame because before Carly fucked it up, buying something from HP would have been easy - in a shortlist of products that were all broadly similar, I'd have gone for the HP. Not so much any more.
Well, you did set it up quite nicely. I'm amazed you didn't see it as an easy knockdown, but you were so quick with your Apple trolling you missed the sarcasm.
Here's a thought, if you find yourself being consistently modded down but rarely modded up, might I suggest it has little to do with "a slashdot hive mind" and more to do with you trolling. (That you also think slashdot is a hive mind with a *pro* Apple spin is hilarious, but potentially highly indicative of your conformation bias) .
Also, I'm not sure how you get from "points out by how much you missed the joke" to "Steve Jobs' bitch", or is anyone you perceive as critical of you automatically a supporter of everything you hate?
"needed to be saved by Microsoft"
Not that old... oh what's the word I'm looking for? lie? falsehood? myth? One of those.
Microsoft purchased $150-200 million of non-voting stock in the wake of a lawsuit. It was in no way a "saving" move on their part (nor was it more than a small slice of Apple's cash at the time). They sold this stock at a later date and now do not own any.
He wears a fez now. Fezzes are cool.
Whoooooooooooooooooosh!
Wow, what's it like in that alternate reality you live in?
Is the weather nice there?
Your use of the term "iCrap" just makes you look 12 years old.
Come back when you're ready to talk with the grown ups.
What next, you'll replace the S in Microsoft with a $ sign?
They can have icons and everything, and can be launched right from your home screen.
There's currently a speed discrepancy between apps launched this way and the exact same app navigated to from within Safari due to an older version of Webkit being used from the home-screen-launched version, due to security and sandboxing complexity (the new version is faster, but would create a security problem without a proper sandbox), but this is being fixed in iOS5.
And no, you don't have to have them bundled with the phone, or get them through the App Store.
So you "didn't thin so" because you didn;t actually do any research on the topic. Classic slashdot.
They already have one - HTML5 apps are already a feature of iOS. They predate the App Store, even.
If you're hoping Flash will have acceptable performance on that tablet, I think you will be sorely disappointed.