Or more likely, as they did with iTunes LP and Extras is that they'll release it to everyone when the bugs are ironed out.
Apple's general direction with formats is open: aac, mp4,.mbox,.ics, documented xml (for their productivity apps), and increasing standardisation of WebKit's engine on the WC3's standards for html and css (including future draft specs like html5).
It's a far cry from embrace, extend and extinguish. Just compare it to something like the WMA format, which is just slightly tweaked mpeg4 designed to be just a little bit incompatible, forcing you to use Windows. Or the outlook.pst format, which is legendary for its PITA incompatibility when you want to get messages *out* of Outlook and into a new client (while getting them *in* is super easy). Or the Office file formats themselves.
Apple aren't totally free and clear on this - their iTunes library is a blob, but they do keep a concurrent human-readable, documented XML copy alongside the proprietary one that iTunes itself uses, for example, but it doesn't have all of the features or data in it, just most of it (it won't have your play counts etc) - it's better than nothing though.
Getting your data *out* of an Apple system, should you so choose, is pretty easy - you can take it to a new system (running different tools) with relative ease.
Shock horror, they sell stuff in the markets where they advertise, and don't sell stuff where they don't!
There are a few exceptions to this - namely when the iPhone came out, and people were buying them in the US and selling them overseas for a large markup, and again when the iPad was launched, into markets that Apple wasn't targeting specifically with marketing. Other than that, they advertise in markets where they sell products.
Or to phrase it more accurately: you're a hypocrite.
Your hype, frothing and hyperbole aren't that at all are they, it's just righteous anger!
You can't seriously adopt the "all Apple fans are so aggressive and trolling" when your post starts the way it did, and then try to claim it as a pre-emptive strike against the "aggressive" Apple fans that you are expecting to reply to your post.
How do you know it's untrue? Have you looked back over recent Apple posts on slashdot? The wealth of disinformation and just plain wrong data that is touted as "fact" is staggering.
This is not just confined to information about Apple, but all of the "unpopular" entities on slashdot - Google, MS, Sony, Apple, Facebook etc. The genuine issues with these large companies (and they all have them) are drowned out by nonsense wailing, gnashing and frothing from people with an axe to grind and whose only desire is to astroturf.
On the point of.ogg, it would be nice if it was a standard supported format, but the market is just not there (ie, not enough demand). The solution would be to allow you to add third party codecs of your own to the iPod itself, since it seems crazy that you can extend iTunes this way (well, not crazy that you can do it - anything that Quicktime will play, iTunes will play), but you can end up in a situation where iTunes will play a track that you can't sync to your iPod. Any of the current devices running iOS should be ideal for codec extensions.
And more's the better if it did - AAC is technically a better codec than mp3. Both have patent and licensing issues, but AAC is an open standard as designed from the start. Mp3 was grandfathered in and is more tightly patent controlled by a single company.
It would be better if AAC took over.
Note that Apple does not control or own AAC - it just uses it as its default format.
Interesting that you think that is me. For what it's worth, I have only one slashdot account: this one, and never post AC. I have 15 mod points, almost all the time, since I much prefer responding to points I disagree with rather than moderating them. Whether you believe that is entirely up to you.
Your paranoia that anyone who disagrees with you is out to mod you down with secret extra accounts with stored up mod points might make you want to look at *why* you feel everyone is out to get you.
Also as a side note, the "Mac OS X user base" is a gross misrepresentation of Mac desktops/laptops, as Mac OS X includes iPod Touch, iPad, all iPhone incarnations, and AppleTV.
Where did you get this bit of total misinformation from?
The OS X installed base is just that: people using OS X on a desktop or a laptop. The iOS install base is totally different, which is where iPod/iPod Touch/iPhone and iPad are counted.
While the original AppleTV (the large one) runs a customised version of OS X 10.4 Tiger (that is not "exposed" to the user unless you play about with it, like installing XBMC on it etc), those are not counted in the install base and even if they were, would be a very, very small number relative to the desktops and laptops.
There's nothing stopping them - QuickTime on the Mac is a well documented system. The Mac version of XBMC uses it for just that reason, for example. It should be trivial for firefox to do the same if they wanted.
Goodness me, no wonder you posted AC. OS X definitely has hardware decoding support for H.264 as well as full software decoding support out of the box. 5 seconds on google would have confirmed that. It also comes with Quicktime 7 (at a minimum - Quicktime X in 10.6) that have a full set of modern codecs of various flavours out of the box - H.264 being among them.
Not only that, it ships with an H.264 *encoder* too as well as just a decoder (yes, yes, I am aware that the term "codec" is a combination of both terms).
There's no reason that firefox couldn't use these codecs provided by QuickTime very trivially - they choose not to for ideological reasons, which I have no problem with them taking.
Why say goodbye to the Mac? If you are desperate for H.264 content on the Mac and are in love with Firefox, you can just fire up Safari or one of any number of other browsers that support H.264 on the Mac.
The same can be said for XP - no need to update.
As for "typical Microsoft" did you expect them to be actively developing new features like this (and really, it's an extension to windows rather than an extension to firefox) to anything other than their current Windows product?
XP and Vista are supported products, but I'm not expecting them to release new software on them - fine if they do, but it's no great conspiracy if they do not in this case.
By "haven't even bothered" you mean "investigated and found not enough evidence to prosecute or no evidence of anything they can convict on" as well as paid off celebs who refuse to testify now.
For a totally new definition of "myth" that means the opposite of what most people think it means.
It is one of the concerns for that platform - the fact that 1.6 devices are still shipping, and that the handsets out there all have various levels of hardware that are far more disparate than the small range of hardware on iOS devices makes this so.
It is a strength of the android platform in one sense, and a downside in others, just as iOS has the reverse stengths and weaknesses in this sense.
Add to this the problems with some android handset vendors locking down the ability to update to the newer android versions and you have a fragmentation issue.
Not just unstable elements. Plenty of stable elements have more than one, sometimes multiple isotopes. boron, chlorine, bromine, tin to name just a couple off the top of my head.
My goodness, what are you smoking and can I have some?
This is exactly what I'm talking about - the 5670 is perfectly fine for the majority of gamers, even in 2010. The 4670 was very high up in the 2009 list, and the 5670 is better still.
Like I said, it's not going to win any cutting edge awards, but it is not meant to.
There's no way that in 2010, a Radeon 5670 is the "absolute low end" for the majority of games though, you're just deluding yourself.
Which was just another Monday in the rest of the world. Amazon's servers are all over the place, and no doubt have considerable fall-back ability and redundancy.
Preventative care also requires that doctors are involved in the process. You don;t just blanket the population with mammograms - you use them as part of a broad spectrum of techniques that identify risk and use them where the doctor feels it is appropriate.
Unfortunately, the US system doesn't work this way because accountants make treatment decisions.
I personally know a woman, a friend of mine, who cannot get MRI scans done on her breast tissue as part of her ongoing care, because her doctor has told her (and her insurance company) that regular mammograms are totally useless as a diagnostic tool for her because of years of scar tissue and other fibrous growth arising from her considerable radiotherapy as a teenager to kill other cancers. However, the insurance company won't pay for an annual MRI scan, which the doctor is asking for, but it WILL pay for quarterly mammograms (THAT COST MORE COMBINED) that are utterly diagnostically useless to my friend.
Preventative care is not just "give everyone all the tests and see what sticks" - it involves doctors actually doing their jobs without interference.
So if that's the case, why are all the other systems in the developed world, in every single other developed country *other* than the US spending less per capita (by more than half) than the US and still posting numbers for life expectancy that match and often exceed the US figures?
The poor aren't necessarily sick just because they are poor - they get sick because they do not receive any (or extremely limited) preventative care that exacerbates any health problems they have, and causes uncaught early problems that could be easy and cheap to treat rather than letting it get to a stage where they either seek treatment or die (and most importantly, won't force them out of the workforce and onto disability, or just into a situation where they cannot provide for their family).
Take on everyone and no one is "dead weight" because everyone has the same level of care.
Although, if you consider poor people to be "dead weight" and not even worth saving (ie, your position is that you just abandon them and let them fend for themselves, and the weakest ones will die off and stop draining your taxes), then Universal Healthcare isn't for you - I don't even think modern society is for you.
Given that Steam for Mac was released this year, and is already up to nearly 5% (given that Steam for Windows has been around for much, much longer), even when the library of Mac-compatible games on there is still not growing as quickly as it really should [the majority of games on the service are still Windows only, the Mac library is small but growing] (although Valve are porting their own titles as quickly as they can), I think that your numbers actually say the opposite of what you are saying.
"Bleeding edge" performance doesn't matter to as many people as you think it does - while there is a lot to be done on OS X in terms of gaming performance (the GPU drivers were really the biggest hit, and those have come on considerably in recent months), an OS X system will run most modern games just fine if they meet the specs - at least comparably to a Windows box.
I don;t want to be tweaking my RAM timings to get an extra 2fps out of Crisis, I just want to kick back after working and play a game now and again, crucially without having to reboot my machine into Windows for the convenience factor.
Not all "Gamers" are using liquid-cooled, overclocked, fan-heater-sounding rigs to play games - I would wager that most gamers are not like this any more, since the hardware pretty much caught up to the software in most cases - by which I mean, the games look good enough and play well enough on high settings on pretty modest hardware (cost wise) these days. You don;t need to buy a $600 GPU or a custom 15 fan case any more.
Any Mac bought in the last couple of years is going to have pretty decent hardware from a gaming perspective - ok, not cutting edge, but then most turnkey PC setups are not cutting edge either. Last year's iMacs were shipping with Radeon 4670s and 4850s, and the current ones have 5670s and 5750s (standard on the 27" and better specced 21.5", 4670 on the base one). They're not going to win benchmarking tests by any stretch of the chalk, but they're not miles behind any more, and the drivers are much better.
I'll follow up with a stat of my own (although will be difficult to back up as it was from the most recent Keynote - 1 in 5 new PCs sold in the US is a Mac - that's a growing market. Your argument is that since Mac is only at 5% on Steam (despite only being available to Mac for about 6 months, and still in its infancy) that there's no need to target Mac gamers - the same could have been said for designing websites that do more than just target IE, back when it was 95% of the browser market. Who needs Firefox?
Mac users have been crying out for game developers to release things on their platform for years - they are a captive and willing audience. Blizzard has been making hay on it for some time, and so were Bungie before Microsoft bought them out and took over the franchise that was supposed to be Mac-exclusive (Halo) and made it their Xbox launch title. Given that the Mac OS X user base is growing year on year, and has been since it came out (and that the numbers just cannot be old users upgrading - the base is very definitely growing quite rapidly) it only makes sense to target the platform for games, especially since the primary difficulty (the PPC architecture being different from x86) is now gone, making porting easier.
A doctor prescribes blood sugar monitoring, with a machine that takes little strips. He tells the patient "5 times per day". The insurance company says "oh, no no no, you don;t need to do it 5 times a day, no matter what some medical professional tells you. Our medically untrained accountants tell us you only need 2 per day, so that is what we will pay for, and we won't pay for any preventative treatment or doctor's visits".
A few years later the patient requires an expensive surgery to correct their diabetic foot ulcer, which they would never have developed in the first place if they could adequately measure their blood sugar throughout the day (and you really can't wing it, no matter how careful you are if you are reliant on insulin), resulting in a large cost to the medical industry to treat that condition.
It has been shown time and again that preventative care cuts costs in universal systems *enormously*. There is very, very little preventative care in the US system, relative to its size and population, because it is expensive to go to the doctor, so little problems that could be nipped in the bud develop into expensive headaches when patients with no insurance or very poor insurance skip out on medical care until they practically fall into an ER at death's door because they can't ignore it any longer.
It's not a magic bullet for reducing costs, but it is one example of the many things that would need to change to make healthcare affordable in the US. It's not just a case of saying "single payer, and everything else stays the same". There is a considerable amount of inefficiency, waste and pork in the system. A major restructure would be required to make a universal healthcare system work. It'll never happen, primarily because the pharma and insurance industries, and the congressmen and senators they have purchased have far too much invested to ever let it get off the ground. The propaganda machine was practically smoking with just the hugely diluted and not-nearly-enough healthcare bill that just passed. If a genuine universal bill came along, it would glow bright orange with fury.
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Or more likely, as they did with iTunes LP and Extras is that they'll release it to everyone when the bugs are ironed out.
Apple's general direction with formats is open: aac, mp4, .mbox, .ics, documented xml (for their productivity apps), and increasing standardisation of WebKit's engine on the WC3's standards for html and css (including future draft specs like html5).
It's a far cry from embrace, extend and extinguish. Just compare it to something like the WMA format, which is just slightly tweaked mpeg4 designed to be just a little bit incompatible, forcing you to use Windows. Or the outlook .pst format, which is legendary for its PITA incompatibility when you want to get messages *out* of Outlook and into a new client (while getting them *in* is super easy). Or the Office file formats themselves.
Apple aren't totally free and clear on this - their iTunes library is a blob, but they do keep a concurrent human-readable, documented XML copy alongside the proprietary one that iTunes itself uses, for example, but it doesn't have all of the features or data in it, just most of it (it won't have your play counts etc) - it's better than nothing though.
Getting your data *out* of an Apple system, should you so choose, is pretty easy - you can take it to a new system (running different tools) with relative ease.
Shock horror, they sell stuff in the markets where they advertise, and don't sell stuff where they don't!
There are a few exceptions to this - namely when the iPhone came out, and people were buying them in the US and selling them overseas for a large markup, and again when the iPad was launched, into markets that Apple wasn't targeting specifically with marketing. Other than that, they advertise in markets where they sell products.
Or to phrase it more accurately: you're a hypocrite.
Your hype, frothing and hyperbole aren't that at all are they, it's just righteous anger!
You can't seriously adopt the "all Apple fans are so aggressive and trolling" when your post starts the way it did, and then try to claim it as a pre-emptive strike against the "aggressive" Apple fans that you are expecting to reply to your post.
That's not discussion; that's trolling.
How do you know it's untrue? Have you looked back over recent Apple posts on slashdot? The wealth of disinformation and just plain wrong data that is touted as "fact" is staggering.
This is not just confined to information about Apple, but all of the "unpopular" entities on slashdot - Google, MS, Sony, Apple, Facebook etc. The genuine issues with these large companies (and they all have them) are drowned out by nonsense wailing, gnashing and frothing from people with an axe to grind and whose only desire is to astroturf.
On the point of .ogg, it would be nice if it was a standard supported format, but the market is just not there (ie, not enough demand). The solution would be to allow you to add third party codecs of your own to the iPod itself, since it seems crazy that you can extend iTunes this way (well, not crazy that you can do it - anything that Quicktime will play, iTunes will play), but you can end up in a situation where iTunes will play a track that you can't sync to your iPod. Any of the current devices running iOS should be ideal for codec extensions.
And more's the better if it did - AAC is technically a better codec than mp3. Both have patent and licensing issues, but AAC is an open standard as designed from the start. Mp3 was grandfathered in and is more tightly patent controlled by a single company.
It would be better if AAC took over.
Note that Apple does not control or own AAC - it just uses it as its default format.
Interesting that you think that is me. For what it's worth, I have only one slashdot account: this one, and never post AC. I have 15 mod points, almost all the time, since I much prefer responding to points I disagree with rather than moderating them. Whether you believe that is entirely up to you.
Your paranoia that anyone who disagrees with you is out to mod you down with secret extra accounts with stored up mod points might make you want to look at *why* you feel everyone is out to get you.
And this is why neckbeards have an image problem, folks.
Also as a side note, the "Mac OS X user base" is a gross misrepresentation of Mac desktops/laptops, as Mac OS X includes iPod Touch, iPad, all iPhone incarnations, and AppleTV.
Where did you get this bit of total misinformation from?
The OS X installed base is just that: people using OS X on a desktop or a laptop. The iOS install base is totally different, which is where iPod/iPod Touch/iPhone and iPad are counted.
While the original AppleTV (the large one) runs a customised version of OS X 10.4 Tiger (that is not "exposed" to the user unless you play about with it, like installing XBMC on it etc), those are not counted in the install base and even if they were, would be a very, very small number relative to the desktops and laptops.
This is from the company that called a product "Bob" and decided that the best colour for a media player was shit brown.
They do make good mice though.
There's nothing stopping them - QuickTime on the Mac is a well documented system. The Mac version of XBMC uses it for just that reason, for example. It should be trivial for firefox to do the same if they wanted.
Goodness me, no wonder you posted AC. OS X definitely has hardware decoding support for H.264 as well as full software decoding support out of the box. 5 seconds on google would have confirmed that. It also comes with Quicktime 7 (at a minimum - Quicktime X in 10.6) that have a full set of modern codecs of various flavours out of the box - H.264 being among them.
Not only that, it ships with an H.264 *encoder* too as well as just a decoder (yes, yes, I am aware that the term "codec" is a combination of both terms).
There's no reason that firefox couldn't use these codecs provided by QuickTime very trivially - they choose not to for ideological reasons, which I have no problem with them taking.
Why say goodbye to the Mac? If you are desperate for H.264 content on the Mac and are in love with Firefox, you can just fire up Safari or one of any number of other browsers that support H.264 on the Mac.
The same can be said for XP - no need to update.
As for "typical Microsoft" did you expect them to be actively developing new features like this (and really, it's an extension to windows rather than an extension to firefox) to anything other than their current Windows product?
XP and Vista are supported products, but I'm not expecting them to release new software on them - fine if they do, but it's no great conspiracy if they do not in this case.
Garry's mod seems to be just fine. Perhaps you should look harder?
By "haven't even bothered" you mean "investigated and found not enough evidence to prosecute or no evidence of anything they can convict on" as well as paid off celebs who refuse to testify now.
For a totally new definition of "myth" that means the opposite of what most people think it means.
It is one of the concerns for that platform - the fact that 1.6 devices are still shipping, and that the handsets out there all have various levels of hardware that are far more disparate than the small range of hardware on iOS devices makes this so.
It is a strength of the android platform in one sense, and a downside in others, just as iOS has the reverse stengths and weaknesses in this sense.
Add to this the problems with some android handset vendors locking down the ability to update to the newer android versions and you have a fragmentation issue.
Not just unstable elements. Plenty of stable elements have more than one, sometimes multiple isotopes. boron, chlorine, bromine, tin to name just a couple off the top of my head.
Well, IUPAC can't be right all the time - they standardised on "Sulfur" for goodness sake! ;)
I just got used to hydrogen being 1.0079, now I'm going to have to memorise the table all over again.
My goodness, what are you smoking and can I have some?
This is exactly what I'm talking about - the 5670 is perfectly fine for the majority of gamers, even in 2010. The 4670 was very high up in the 2009 list, and the 5670 is better still.
Like I said, it's not going to win any cutting edge awards, but it is not meant to.
There's no way that in 2010, a Radeon 5670 is the "absolute low end" for the majority of games though, you're just deluding yourself.
Yes, your own last mile.
Which was just another Monday in the rest of the world. Amazon's servers are all over the place, and no doubt have considerable fall-back ability and redundancy.
The air temperature on the exhaust vents from the server room went up by 0.2 degrees.
The "DDOS" was hailed a success with measurable results!
Preventative care also requires that doctors are involved in the process. You don;t just blanket the population with mammograms - you use them as part of a broad spectrum of techniques that identify risk and use them where the doctor feels it is appropriate.
Unfortunately, the US system doesn't work this way because accountants make treatment decisions.
I personally know a woman, a friend of mine, who cannot get MRI scans done on her breast tissue as part of her ongoing care, because her doctor has told her (and her insurance company) that regular mammograms are totally useless as a diagnostic tool for her because of years of scar tissue and other fibrous growth arising from her considerable radiotherapy as a teenager to kill other cancers. However, the insurance company won't pay for an annual MRI scan, which the doctor is asking for, but it WILL pay for quarterly mammograms (THAT COST MORE COMBINED) that are utterly diagnostically useless to my friend.
Preventative care is not just "give everyone all the tests and see what sticks" - it involves doctors actually doing their jobs without interference.
So if that's the case, why are all the other systems in the developed world, in every single other developed country *other* than the US spending less per capita (by more than half) than the US and still posting numbers for life expectancy that match and often exceed the US figures?
The poor aren't necessarily sick just because they are poor - they get sick because they do not receive any (or extremely limited) preventative care that exacerbates any health problems they have, and causes uncaught early problems that could be easy and cheap to treat rather than letting it get to a stage where they either seek treatment or die (and most importantly, won't force them out of the workforce and onto disability, or just into a situation where they cannot provide for their family).
Take on everyone and no one is "dead weight" because everyone has the same level of care.
Although, if you consider poor people to be "dead weight" and not even worth saving (ie, your position is that you just abandon them and let them fend for themselves, and the weakest ones will die off and stop draining your taxes), then Universal Healthcare isn't for you - I don't even think modern society is for you.
Given that Steam for Mac was released this year, and is already up to nearly 5% (given that Steam for Windows has been around for much, much longer), even when the library of Mac-compatible games on there is still not growing as quickly as it really should [the majority of games on the service are still Windows only, the Mac library is small but growing] (although Valve are porting their own titles as quickly as they can), I think that your numbers actually say the opposite of what you are saying.
"Bleeding edge" performance doesn't matter to as many people as you think it does - while there is a lot to be done on OS X in terms of gaming performance (the GPU drivers were really the biggest hit, and those have come on considerably in recent months), an OS X system will run most modern games just fine if they meet the specs - at least comparably to a Windows box.
I don;t want to be tweaking my RAM timings to get an extra 2fps out of Crisis, I just want to kick back after working and play a game now and again, crucially without having to reboot my machine into Windows for the convenience factor.
Not all "Gamers" are using liquid-cooled, overclocked, fan-heater-sounding rigs to play games - I would wager that most gamers are not like this any more, since the hardware pretty much caught up to the software in most cases - by which I mean, the games look good enough and play well enough on high settings on pretty modest hardware (cost wise) these days. You don;t need to buy a $600 GPU or a custom 15 fan case any more.
Any Mac bought in the last couple of years is going to have pretty decent hardware from a gaming perspective - ok, not cutting edge, but then most turnkey PC setups are not cutting edge either. Last year's iMacs were shipping with Radeon 4670s and 4850s, and the current ones have 5670s and 5750s (standard on the 27" and better specced 21.5", 4670 on the base one). They're not going to win benchmarking tests by any stretch of the chalk, but they're not miles behind any more, and the drivers are much better.
I'll follow up with a stat of my own (although will be difficult to back up as it was from the most recent Keynote - 1 in 5 new PCs sold in the US is a Mac - that's a growing market. Your argument is that since Mac is only at 5% on Steam (despite only being available to Mac for about 6 months, and still in its infancy) that there's no need to target Mac gamers - the same could have been said for designing websites that do more than just target IE, back when it was 95% of the browser market. Who needs Firefox?
Mac users have been crying out for game developers to release things on their platform for years - they are a captive and willing audience. Blizzard has been making hay on it for some time, and so were Bungie before Microsoft bought them out and took over the franchise that was supposed to be Mac-exclusive (Halo) and made it their Xbox launch title. Given that the Mac OS X user base is growing year on year, and has been since it came out (and that the numbers just cannot be old users upgrading - the base is very definitely growing quite rapidly) it only makes sense to target the platform for games, especially since the primary difficulty (the PPC architecture being different from x86) is now gone, making porting easier.
A simple example would be blood sugar monitoring.
A doctor prescribes blood sugar monitoring, with a machine that takes little strips. He tells the patient "5 times per day". The insurance company says "oh, no no no, you don;t need to do it 5 times a day, no matter what some medical professional tells you. Our medically untrained accountants tell us you only need 2 per day, so that is what we will pay for, and we won't pay for any preventative treatment or doctor's visits".
A few years later the patient requires an expensive surgery to correct their diabetic foot ulcer, which they would never have developed in the first place if they could adequately measure their blood sugar throughout the day (and you really can't wing it, no matter how careful you are if you are reliant on insulin), resulting in a large cost to the medical industry to treat that condition.
It has been shown time and again that preventative care cuts costs in universal systems *enormously*. There is very, very little preventative care in the US system, relative to its size and population, because it is expensive to go to the doctor, so little problems that could be nipped in the bud develop into expensive headaches when patients with no insurance or very poor insurance skip out on medical care until they practically fall into an ER at death's door because they can't ignore it any longer.
It's not a magic bullet for reducing costs, but it is one example of the many things that would need to change to make healthcare affordable in the US. It's not just a case of saying "single payer, and everything else stays the same". There is a considerable amount of inefficiency, waste and pork in the system. A major restructure would be required to make a universal healthcare system work. It'll never happen, primarily because the pharma and insurance industries, and the congressmen and senators they have purchased have far too much invested to ever let it get off the ground. The propaganda machine was practically smoking with just the hugely diluted and not-nearly-enough healthcare bill that just passed. If a genuine universal bill came along, it would glow bright orange with fury.