There isn't a single unlicensed track anywhere on my iPod. Not even one unauthorized sample. If the music cartels start charging me for music that I haven't downloaded, ripped, or otherwise pirated, then I'm going to have to stop spending money at iTMS and my local funky CD shop, and treat that "royalty charge" as a blanket license to their entire library.
To recap: you're far too moral ever to steal music. In fact, your iPod is spotless. Even of samples. And you want everyone in the world to know. Hey, whatever; that's just how good you are, Honest Abe.
However, if you're taxed for other people's stealing, you'll not only stop buying music. You'll flip like a BitTorrent version of Norman Bates. One minute it's the nice, paid-for music collection sitting in the chair looking motherly and smelling like apple pie. The next: SCREEEEE SCREEEE SCREEEE and another ruined shower curtain. You'll go on a spree stealing any and everything from the recording industry that you want. And it'll be their fault, gahdammit! They'll have put themselves in a world of hurt! You'll descend on your "local funky CD shop" with foam on your lips and an iPod full of jacked tunes, daring them to see just what kind of lengths you were driven to!
The Nobel Committee has considered your application, and regrets to inform you your prize will be delayed.
A: 24
1 to comb OS X for clues ("R&D")
19 to screw up what the first guy learned ("management")
1 to code it ("advanced software engineering")
1 to introduce new problems ("debugging")
1 to ignore those problems ("QA/QC")
1 to reassign everybody to fix XP (SNAFU)
Correcting his anti-scientific propaganda is only the start. Next, he should pack up his brimstone and seek other work.
It's troubling when a New Jersey public school classroom is turned into a tax-payer supported madrassa for a Baptist mullah. No child there should be subjected to this bad teacher's radical sectarian beliefs.
If the Jeffersonian Wall hadn't been pulled down by villagers with pitchforks, we'd be better able to keep anti-science pastors in their churches, where their separatist ideology is voluntarily sought. But the Wall can be rebuilt. And culturally, our slide into medievalism can be reversed--before more kids are taught rubbish, more books banned, more research harmed.
This won't happen by showing tolerance to primitives. Just as in the Muslim world, our choice in the west is between modernity or antiquity.
...to sentence this guy to so much hard time. Many were hoping he'd get off, but now he's going down, and I just can't see the point in sticking it to him like that. That Chinese judge needs to get laid more.
And you can believe that governors would be calling for his head if he declared martial law in their states.
Why should I believe anything of the sort?
The governors would be quick to save their own ass, as would any civil leader faced with troops and tanks in the street. Martial law does little to inspire courage and much to water the flowers of modesty and obsequiousness. Knowing better than to stick out their own neck, these putative Patrick Henrys would obey orders, lay low, shuffle papers and wait until the coast was clear for avarice-as-usual.
But we don't need to trade in hypotheticals. For a version-in-miniature of how American pols respond to strong arm tactics, just review the past six years of supplicatory response to Bushism by the Democratic Party. Do but prick them and they squeal! If I were Bush--which is to say, if I cared not one whit for constitutional law or democratic processes, if I thought patrimony and privilege gave me a quasi-divine right to rule--the consequences of a crackdown are the very last thing I'd worry about. A few tax credits to the middle class, and the TV-gazing fools would shut up fast enough. I'd even let ol' Olbermann go on doing his beetle-browed Murrow imitation for the few to whom it matters. If too many started paying attention, the CIA could take some photos of him and an orangutan in a hot tub.
We are relatively free, for now, even as the situation has grown more odious each year. The electoral charade, despite its acres of uncounted votes and its Third World-style intimidation, lurches on as clunkily as ever. Little in American experience today suggests that the majority cares if we remain this free or are less free, if we are governed by law or ruled by fiat, if we can chatter privately or are recorded, if our streets are policed or militarily occupied, and even less suggests that our dissipated millionaire political class will fight for us, ever. So let's put no faith in governors, but discover some in ourselves.
Agreed. This is amateur hour stuff. Someone bought a MBP? And he's answering questions? omigod!
Considering the very serious string of problems associated with the Macbook (check out the vernerable macfixit.com or the comprehensive macdefects.com), you'd think Slashdot might be inspired to actually look carefully at the issue.
Slashdot look carefully at the issue? Either I'm drinking too much tonight, or not enough.
The idea that Apple should control what happens on the iPod has to rankle any good geek. We're talking about cool hardware with huge social importance. But it's hampered by a closed system, straitjacketed by anti-competitive encryption that helps keep the online music industry in its infancy.
Meanwhile, Apple is teaching consumers--the majority clueless about what they're losing--that highly-compressed, proprietary files are good value.
As His Dudeness says in The Big Lebowski, "This will not stand, ya know, this will not stand, man." Believe it or not, there is a future after so-so quality.99-cent downloads from iTunes. To that end I hope DVD Jon busts the iPod wide open.
Not being able to future-proof the video card isn't as much a knock against the iMac as it having a marginal, economy-quality GPU right out of the box, Apple being too cheap (and apparently too hungry for 40% margins) to equip it with better. The iMac's fine in many respects, but in this one very ho-hum.
Republicrat or Demopublican, they've all been singing the same market fundamentalist song for decades now.
For a short time, you profited from it. Your stocks did well in the 90s. Your house price did well in the 00s. Then the stock bubble burst and now the housing bubble's bursting,
too.
Suddenly you aren't so sure about your job or your kids' future. You know people it's already happened to. You've heard the predictions out of NYU: job losses to range from 50k to 100,000 per month in the coming recessionary post-bubble economy...
Or maybe you're already one of the hundreds of thousands gutted from your job so that CEOs and shareholders could profit more. Maybe you're wondering when you'll see the "creative" side of all that creative destruction they preach at you from Fox and the WSJ.
The crime: it doesn't have to be like this. But as long as you take no stand, our plutocrats are more than happy to fuck you.
Apple's DRM is unobtrusive enough to most customers that most customers DON'T CARE, and will NEVER "get screwed" by it. Period.
Never? Or as you would say--NEVER?
To disprove that lazy assertion, we only need consider iTMS customers who migrate to another platform.
Now if you leave the iPod platform for any reason, you're stuck with a pile of useless music--unless A) you know how to rid yourself of DRM or B) you go the even further lossy route of conversion.
Anyone who makes the mistake of buying DRM-polluted music is bound to the proprietary player that can decode its toxins.
And that kind of sucks, and it's something consumers don't really think about. It's the kind of locked-in, proprietary suckage that creeps up on most people and forces them to keep going back to the company store, tied to a platform, which was the whole evil purpose of the DRM in the first place: it ties an umbilical cord between "your" music and Apple's profits.
They didn't think about that when the shiny iPod was new and they were happily buying songs for it. But as their iPods inevitably die and market forces bring down the prices of mp3 players well below Apple's boutique rates, you'll see plenty of consumers facing this dilemma.
Then they'll be thankful for any DRM-stripping technology that lets them off Apple's hook.
Churches, the ELKs, and Free Software developers, et all are loosely knit social groups which form for a specific noncommercial purpose. They are not registered businesses with the express purpose of turning a profit.
Your analogy is wanting.
There's little similarity between churches and free software developers. Most churches are far from being "loosely knit social groups," having instead a highly developed dogma, membership requirements, rules, and hierarchichal structure that is the opposite of loosely knit. Among the many differences, though, between churches and free software devs one is critical: the special legal status allowing churches to make largely unregulated and exclusively untaxed profits.
Churches generating sizable revenues frequently use them for the furtherance of their members' interests--spiritual, social, entertainment, business, and otherwise. In this sense, they're less like social groups than corporations. See, for instance, the rise of big, multi-functional, highly profitable megachurches.
If our laws were less guided by sentimentality or superstition, then we'd see to it that money donated, tithed or earned through church business activities would be treated exactly as it is by any for-profit entity in society. So, too, if we wanted to approximate a more just political system, then we would more actively restrict churches from using their protected financial position to influence political issues and elections.
Don't do it! You know how these British invasions of France go. It might fare well in the beginning. Then they'd only dig up some teenaged virgin with a great heaving rack and hysterical visions and kick your skinny arse again. Of course, you could burn her alive, citing Holy Scripture, as all the best pyros do, but you'd soon be driven away, and then you'd have to content yourselves with bossing and occupying, say, the Irish, Indians, Africans and assorted islanders for the rest of the millennium, all before being chopped down to the size of a tail-wagging runt-end adjunct to American oil wars. What a pissload of fun that'd be, mate. No trans-Atlantic hard feelings, now: I just want to spare you the grief.
Let me see if I understand this. You bought a product that told you exactly what it did. Later, a new product comes out that does something different and your complaining because....?
The poster isn't interested in being some corporation's permanent revenue stream. The poster, correctly, reads in Apple's move a bid to get him or her to replace a perfectly fine product with one that has an additional bell or whistle that could in all likelihood be retrofitted, in software, to the 4G iPod. What part of that eludes your grasp?
...each new Mac Mini (now with Front Row, a remote control and TV output) has been inching closer and closer to the TV set. I suspect people will download videos via iTunes just so they can watch them on TV almost instantly, without the fuss of having to leave the house, probably ignoring whether they can watch them on their iPod or not.
Yes, and if it were able to pull off this feat with reasonable fidelity at the right price, Apple could aim to supplant Netflix.
The only two downsides to Netflix are delivery time and availability being limited to DVD pressing. If the studios will play, Apple can solve both these problems. The delivery improvement is obvious. But the real treat would be the digitization of a back catalogue that hasn't yet made the leap to DVD, along with the ultimate transformation of the DVD release into a digital release.
I don't care whether it's Apple, Amazon, Hollywood,l cable, the telcos or somebody else who solves this problem. The dream--and it shouldn't be that hard to realize--is access to every single feature film still extant, delivered promptly. What's the use of a cultural inheritance if you can't tap it when you want it?
Who needs more rez when it means expensively replacing hardware and DVDs? Fanboys of Hollywood product are already swimming in big DVD libraries. They've spent the last few years tricking out their home theaters, too. The target market is saturated.
And in other news, welcome to the start of the housing bubble bust. Maxed out on credit with their "home ATMs" drained and adjustable rate mortgages rising, McMansionland isn't going to be amassing new tech purchases any time soon. They need to save what they have for the
foreclosure attorneys.
While being (in the professor's considered opinion) genuinely amusing, these ads fall somewhat short of geniunely funny. Genuinely funny is more along these lines:
"I Explode, You Explode" (30 seconds)
FADE IN
Mac and PC stand against the eternal white nothingness of consumer choice. PC has papier mache "flames" rising behind his head. He's fanning himself with his big white pasty hand. Mac looks over intermittently for several seconds, working up the nerve to ask. Finally...
Mac: PC, what's wrong? You look hot.
PC: Oh, it's nothing. It's just...well, my battery. The silly thing up and went kablooey!
(oh - and anyone else having the quicktime plugin for ff crash ff when trying to play these?)
Well, er, now that you mention it: very jerky performance in Safari under Tiger on my iBook. Opera = slightly better. Is Apple trying to tell me that I need new hardware to play a freaking advertisement for new hardware?
The term "accepting responsibility" has taken something of a beating lately. The new definition is "admitting guilt but denying any repercussions". Please update your dictionaries.
Sure. And is it any wonder?
We live in a society where CEOs run trillion dollar scams, bleeding states dry and destroying the livelihoods of thousands (but didn't mean to, honest!). Our leaders make up evidence to go to war (but truly believed their own inventions). Our athletes take drugs to hit homers (but just take each day at a time). One of the year's leading novels turns out to be heavily plagiarized (but it was unintentional!). Our journalism is pre-digested, airbrushed, paid for by government and fed to us by smiling automatons lacking conscience or wit (but it's all for our own good!).
When the example at the top's so lame, why should retail clerks not sing the same self-serving songs when caught red-handed? They aren't idiots; they've noticed that invariably, in America, spin is what separates the men from the boys. While he may not have lasted in the trenches, this enterprising young scofflaw has a hell of a future in politics.
The issue here is actually weasel words. "In the box" means, in 99.9% of all contexts, "provided at time of sale." So there is nothing "in the box" if one has to shell out $99.95 separately--and annually!--for.Mac.
Note, though, that it is the author, Tom Yager, who is abusing language in this manner. Apple never claims the.Mac services are provided in the box. I use.Mac, though I can't really endorse it and probably won't resubscribe--it's overpriced and has an inadequate (read: insecure) backup system.
I believe we will see more ventures of this kind in the future, even outside software. The ideas that "little people" never had the resources to implement are a resource that can be valuable and is easily tapped.
We already do. Chances are, if you work for a corporation, the contents of your brainpan are already enriching someone with "resources"--not to mention the power to derive wealth from your ideas.
We have a word in English for this: exploitation. And I'm sure you're right, we'll see a lot more of it.
What is funny is that the whole model started not in some corporate think tank, but in FPS mods. Final Doom is the first instance I can think of.
There's a big difference, isn't there, between someone's uncapitalized idea and another's creative work (level design, skinning, coding, etc.) on a mod. Even in outcomes, there's a difference, as those who honed their skills modding games often found it a path into the industry.
Everyone can have a good idea (and most people think they do), but only programmers can actually do something with their ideas. And since everyone thinks he has good ideas, programmers will typically not want to implement your good idea, because they have good ideas of their own.
So unless you're either a programmer or can pay the salary of one, your idea is not going to be implemented, no matter how good you think it is.
Actually, even Apple doesn't believe that line. That's why it's shipping software for widget design. Apple, correctly, realizes that a large part of the future in software for its users is small gizmos doing tiny, limited tasks that Average Joes can put together themselves. And--gasp!--later throw away as they tire of them or find a better replacement.
There are two reasons for this. One, there's a software glut; all the big tasks are staked out by well-known apps and their myriad clones (and, increasingly, the OS itself). Two, Average Joe, in many cases, has a better idea what he wants than do you. The promise of widgets, I'm sorry to report, is to make you redundant.
Naturally, there's still--and practically only--the niche to go after. The example you go on to cite, Delicious Monster, is so telling. A vanity app par excellence, its compact with the user is to get him or her to scan in a media collection and then basically admire its virtual existence. Heh; if that flips your cookie, great (some of us are too busy actually reading books, listening to music and watching films, y'know?). But it points up one exploitable frontier: just as there will always be a call for celebrity-branded perfumes, so will there be for ego-stroking software.
Slashdot Mirror
To recap: you're far too moral ever to steal music. In fact, your iPod is spotless. Even of samples. And you want everyone in the world to know. Hey, whatever; that's just how good you are, Honest Abe.
However, if you're taxed for other people's stealing, you'll not only stop buying music. You'll flip like a BitTorrent version of Norman Bates. One minute it's the nice, paid-for music collection sitting in the chair looking motherly and smelling like apple pie. The next: SCREEEEE SCREEEE SCREEEE and another ruined shower curtain. You'll go on a spree stealing any and everything from the recording industry that you want. And it'll be their fault, gahdammit! They'll have put themselves in a world of hurt! You'll descend on your "local funky CD shop" with foam on your lips and an iPod full of jacked tunes, daring them to see just what kind of lengths you were driven to!
The Nobel Committee has considered your application, and regrets to inform you your prize will be delayed.
For your sake, friend, I hope it's being taught in Chinese.
A: 24
1 to comb OS X for clues ("R&D")
19 to screw up what the first guy learned ("management")
1 to code it ("advanced software engineering")
1 to introduce new problems ("debugging")
1 to ignore those problems ("QA/QC")
1 to reassign everybody to fix XP (SNAFU)
It's troubling when a New Jersey public school classroom is turned into a tax-payer supported madrassa for a Baptist mullah. No child there should be subjected to this bad teacher's radical sectarian beliefs.
If the Jeffersonian Wall hadn't been pulled down by villagers with pitchforks, we'd be better able to keep anti-science pastors in their churches, where their separatist ideology is voluntarily sought. But the Wall can be rebuilt. And culturally, our slide into medievalism can be reversed--before more kids are taught rubbish, more books banned, more research harmed.
This won't happen by showing tolerance to primitives. Just as in the Muslim world, our choice in the west is between modernity or antiquity.
...to sentence this guy to so much hard time. Many were hoping he'd get off, but now he's going down, and I just can't see the point in sticking it to him like that. That Chinese judge needs to get laid more.
Please stop making such good sense on Slashdot. The servers just weren't built for this kind of stress.
Why should I believe anything of the sort? The governors would be quick to save their own ass, as would any civil leader faced with troops and tanks in the street. Martial law does little to inspire courage and much to water the flowers of modesty and obsequiousness. Knowing better than to stick out their own neck, these putative Patrick Henrys would obey orders, lay low, shuffle papers and wait until the coast was clear for avarice-as-usual.
But we don't need to trade in hypotheticals. For a version-in-miniature of how American pols respond to strong arm tactics, just review the past six years of supplicatory response to Bushism by the Democratic Party. Do but prick them and they squeal! If I were Bush--which is to say, if I cared not one whit for constitutional law or democratic processes, if I thought patrimony and privilege gave me a quasi-divine right to rule--the consequences of a crackdown are the very last thing I'd worry about. A few tax credits to the middle class, and the TV-gazing fools would shut up fast enough. I'd even let ol' Olbermann go on doing his beetle-browed Murrow imitation for the few to whom it matters. If too many started paying attention, the CIA could take some photos of him and an orangutan in a hot tub.
We are relatively free, for now, even as the situation has grown more odious each year. The electoral charade, despite its acres of uncounted votes and its Third World-style intimidation, lurches on as clunkily as ever. Little in American experience today suggests that the majority cares if we remain this free or are less free, if we are governed by law or ruled by fiat, if we can chatter privately or are recorded, if our streets are policed or militarily occupied, and even less suggests that our dissipated millionaire political class will fight for us, ever. So let's put no faith in governors, but discover some in ourselves.
Considering the very serious string of problems associated with the Macbook (check out the vernerable macfixit.com or the comprehensive macdefects.com), you'd think Slashdot might be inspired to actually look carefully at the issue.
Slashdot look carefully at the issue? Either I'm drinking too much tonight, or not enough.
Meanwhile, Apple is teaching consumers--the majority clueless about what they're losing--that highly-compressed, proprietary files are good value.
As His Dudeness says in The Big Lebowski, "This will not stand, ya know, this will not stand, man." Believe it or not, there is a future after so-so quality
People who play PC games, obviously, of which there are many more than use iMacs. And how many is that?
Well, consider: there was talk of Intel buying nVidia for around $10 billion. http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 298
Not being able to future-proof the video card isn't as much a knock against the iMac as it having a marginal, economy-quality GPU right out of the box, Apple being too cheap (and apparently too hungry for 40% margins) to equip it with better. The iMac's fine in many respects, but in this one very ho-hum.
Your audience is growing.
For a short time, you profited from it. Your stocks did well in the 90s. Your house price did well in the 00s. Then the stock bubble burst and now the housing bubble's bursting, too.
Suddenly you aren't so sure about your job or your kids' future. You know people it's already happened to. You've heard the predictions out of NYU: job losses to range from 50k to 100,000 per month in the coming recessionary post-bubble economy...
Or maybe you're already one of the hundreds of thousands gutted from your job so that CEOs and shareholders could profit more. Maybe you're wondering when you'll see the "creative" side of all that creative destruction they preach at you from Fox and the WSJ.
The crime: it doesn't have to be like this. But as long as you take no stand, our plutocrats are more than happy to fuck you.
Never? Or as you would say--NEVER?
To disprove that lazy assertion, we only need consider iTMS customers who migrate to another platform.
Now if you leave the iPod platform for any reason, you're stuck with a pile of useless music--unless A) you know how to rid yourself of DRM or B) you go the even further lossy route of conversion.
Anyone who makes the mistake of buying DRM-polluted music is bound to the proprietary player that can decode its toxins.
And that kind of sucks, and it's something consumers don't really think about. It's the kind of locked-in, proprietary suckage that creeps up on most people and forces them to keep going back to the company store, tied to a platform, which was the whole evil purpose of the DRM in the first place: it ties an umbilical cord between "your" music and Apple's profits.
They didn't think about that when the shiny iPod was new and they were happily buying songs for it. But as their iPods inevitably die and market forces bring down the prices of mp3 players well below Apple's boutique rates, you'll see plenty of consumers facing this dilemma.
Then they'll be thankful for any DRM-stripping technology that lets them off Apple's hook.
But wheels are extra.
Your analogy is wanting.
There's little similarity between churches and free software developers. Most churches are far from being "loosely knit social groups," having instead a highly developed dogma, membership requirements, rules, and hierarchichal structure that is the opposite of loosely knit. Among the many differences, though, between churches and free software devs one is critical: the special legal status allowing churches to make largely unregulated and exclusively untaxed profits.
Churches generating sizable revenues frequently use them for the furtherance of their members' interests--spiritual, social, entertainment, business, and otherwise. In this sense, they're less like social groups than corporations. See, for instance, the rise of big, multi-functional, highly profitable megachurches.
If our laws were less guided by sentimentality or superstition, then we'd see to it that money donated, tithed or earned through church business activities would be treated exactly as it is by any for-profit entity in society. So, too, if we wanted to approximate a more just political system, then we would more actively restrict churches from using their protected financial position to influence political issues and elections.
Don't do it! You know how these British invasions of France go. It might fare well in the beginning. Then they'd only dig up some teenaged virgin with a great heaving rack and hysterical visions and kick your skinny arse again. Of course, you could burn her alive, citing Holy Scripture, as all the best pyros do, but you'd soon be driven away, and then you'd have to content yourselves with bossing and occupying, say, the Irish, Indians, Africans and assorted islanders for the rest of the millennium, all before being chopped down to the size of a tail-wagging runt-end adjunct to American oil wars. What a pissload of fun that'd be, mate. No trans-Atlantic hard feelings, now: I just want to spare you the grief.
The poster isn't interested in being some corporation's permanent revenue stream. The poster, correctly, reads in Apple's move a bid to get him or her to replace a perfectly fine product with one that has an additional bell or whistle that could in all likelihood be retrofitted, in software, to the 4G iPod. What part of that eludes your grasp?
Yes, and if it were able to pull off this feat with reasonable fidelity at the right price, Apple could aim to supplant Netflix.
The only two downsides to Netflix are delivery time and availability being limited to DVD pressing. If the studios will play, Apple can solve both these problems. The delivery improvement is obvious. But the real treat would be the digitization of a back catalogue that hasn't yet made the leap to DVD, along with the ultimate transformation of the DVD release into a digital release.
I don't care whether it's Apple, Amazon, Hollywood,l cable, the telcos or somebody else who solves this problem. The dream--and it shouldn't be that hard to realize--is access to every single feature film still extant, delivered promptly. What's the use of a cultural inheritance if you can't tap it when you want it?
And in other news, welcome to the start of the housing bubble bust. Maxed out on credit with their "home ATMs" drained and adjustable rate mortgages rising, McMansionland isn't going to be amassing new tech purchases any time soon. They need to save what they have for the foreclosure attorneys.
"I Explode, You Explode" (30 seconds)
FADE IN
Mac and PC stand against the eternal white nothingness of consumer choice. PC has papier mache "flames" rising behind his head. He's fanning himself with his big white pasty hand. Mac looks over intermittently for several seconds, working up the nerve to ask. Finally...
Mac: PC, what's wrong? You look hot.
PC: Oh, it's nothing. It's just...well, my battery. The silly thing up and went kablooey!
Mac (smugly): I can do that.
Well, er, now that you mention it: very jerky performance in Safari under Tiger on my iBook. Opera = slightly better. Is Apple trying to tell me that I need new hardware to play a freaking advertisement for new hardware?
Sure. And is it any wonder?
We live in a society where CEOs run trillion dollar scams, bleeding states dry and destroying the livelihoods of thousands (but didn't mean to, honest!). Our leaders make up evidence to go to war (but truly believed their own inventions). Our athletes take drugs to hit homers (but just take each day at a time). One of the year's leading novels turns out to be heavily plagiarized (but it was unintentional!). Our journalism is pre-digested, airbrushed, paid for by government and fed to us by smiling automatons lacking conscience or wit (but it's all for our own good!).
When the example at the top's so lame, why should retail clerks not sing the same self-serving songs when caught red-handed? They aren't idiots; they've noticed that invariably, in America, spin is what separates the men from the boys. While he may not have lasted in the trenches, this enterprising young scofflaw has a hell of a future in politics.
Note, though, that it is the author, Tom Yager, who is abusing language in this manner. Apple never claims the .Mac services are provided in the box. I use .Mac, though I can't really endorse it and probably won't resubscribe--it's overpriced and has an inadequate (read: insecure) backup system.
We already do. Chances are, if you work for a corporation, the contents of your brainpan are already enriching someone with "resources"--not to mention the power to derive wealth from your ideas.
We have a word in English for this: exploitation. And I'm sure you're right, we'll see a lot more of it.
What is funny is that the whole model started not in some corporate think tank, but in FPS mods. Final Doom is the first instance I can think of.
There's a big difference, isn't there, between someone's uncapitalized idea and another's creative work (level design, skinning, coding, etc.) on a mod. Even in outcomes, there's a difference, as those who honed their skills modding games often found it a path into the industry.
So unless you're either a programmer or can pay the salary of one, your idea is not going to be implemented, no matter how good you think it is.
Actually, even Apple doesn't believe that line. That's why it's shipping software for widget design. Apple, correctly, realizes that a large part of the future in software for its users is small gizmos doing tiny, limited tasks that Average Joes can put together themselves. And--gasp!--later throw away as they tire of them or find a better replacement.
There are two reasons for this. One, there's a software glut; all the big tasks are staked out by well-known apps and their myriad clones (and, increasingly, the OS itself). Two, Average Joe, in many cases, has a better idea what he wants than do you. The promise of widgets, I'm sorry to report, is to make you redundant.
Naturally, there's still--and practically only--the niche to go after. The example you go on to cite, Delicious Monster, is so telling. A vanity app par excellence, its compact with the user is to get him or her to scan in a media collection and then basically admire its virtual existence. Heh; if that flips your cookie, great (some of us are too busy actually reading books, listening to music and watching films, y'know?). But it points up one exploitable frontier: just as there will always be a call for celebrity-branded perfumes, so will there be for ego-stroking software.