"Now that Gnome largely depends on Mono (indirect dependencies), they reached an important step."
This is complete FUD. Gnome does not in any way depend on Mono.
In fact, pretty much everything in your post except the "this is my POV" is pure FUD. Nobody has ever found any grounds on which Microsoft could sue any Linux companies, and all this "boycott Novell" stuff is just trying to fuck with a company that is contributing a shitload of great work to the community.
That's the most retarded fucking thing in the world. If you don't like Mono, just don't fucking use it.
The point is, these guys aren't actually contributing anything. Instead they just sit around and criticize fucking awesome hackers. Mono is really fantastic software. If you don't like it, just don't use it.
Sorry, but the Boycott Novell people are complete retards to begin with. To my knowledge they don't actually produce anything for the open source community, but they sit around and bitch and whine about Novell who employs all kinds of open source hackers; including kernel hackers, GTK and GNOME hackers, window manager hackers, Mono hackers, accessibility hackers, open source artists, and more.
Sorry if I have very little sympathy for the situation. It's not that I think anyone should be 'manhandled' under any situation, but these guys are the most inconsiderate members of the "open source community" and it's hard for me to really take most things they say very seriously.
Nobody will just "vote their conscience" until there is a system that rewards that. Right now the system is setup to reward football politics, where people align themselves with the party instead of the individual. If you really like Dennis Kucinich, you still don't vote for him because everyone else is voting for Clinton or Obama so you feel like you need to pick the one of them who sucks less.
I think a really good solution is to use Instant Runoff Elections [1]. Then you can choose the candidate that you really like, and a second and third place candidate. Then if the person you really like doesn't get enough votes, your vote hasn't been thrown away.
But you don't need consistent access to that data at all times of day. Storing your work documents with Google or something (in a non-backup way) strikes many of us as a way to potentially screw yourself over when you suddenly desperately need a certain file and your network is down or something.
Also, in terms of practicality I have to say that I wouldn't know what to do with a few hundred thousand dollars myself. What am I going to do, stuff it under my bed? I feel like there is a purpose in having institutions that make it their business to do with my money what I can't really do myself. For me it's not out of paranoia that I don't store files with Google, but that I don't see the point. I don't NEED Google to store my files, I've been doing it for years myself.
You can try to abstract between different widget toolkits, but this always ends in disaster. This is what wxWidgets does, and their API sucks. Mono tried unsuccessfully to implement WinForms API on top of GTK, but it proved to be impossible so they started over from scratch.
I don't think you understand the stack at all. The gnome libs are not some kind of abstraction over GTK or something, they're basically extensions built over it that also use a few other things that are not under GTK (such as dbus).
Applications are predominantly written using GTK, and they pull in other libs here and there as needed.
Seems like a more productive use of time would be to identify exactly where GTK doesn't work as well as it could, and fix it.
If it's too slow, someone needs to just sit down and fucking profile it and figure out where it's not fast enough. To say, "let's just rewrite every fucking application using Qt" is obscenely ignorant of the development process.
Yeah, but that still falls into the "extra software to install" category. You need to install Silverlight (or Moonlight on Linux or Mac) to get this to work. The interesting part of this Java and Ruby thing is that it runs directly in the browser.
That said, I think the DLR approach is better and more interesting. It's actually kind of sad that Tamarin is duplicating all the effort of this when they could totally take the Mono VM right now and do a lot of this stuff. Mono's VM is actually -really- fast and very useful for exactly this purpose.
Get a clue and do a little more research before you label people at GNOME "stooges". The work that people like Jody Goldberg of GNOME is doing is a huge benefit to everyone, but people like you are turning it into more of a political issue than it should be. Jody is actively going through the OOXML specs on behalf of free software hackers and users (that includes YOU, dumbass!) and figuring out where all the ambiguities are, what doesn't make sense, what isn't implementable as specified, etc. He's trying to make a closed standard open, rather than undertake the futile task of making it disappear.
I haven't read the specs, but that's because I don't hack of any office suite software (and I'm willing to bet money that you don't either, and that you haven't read the specs). But Jody does. And Michael Meeks does. And Miguel has (and may still to some extent, I don't know). Because of that experience they are qualified to talk about it. At least, more qualified than you are. If they say something, why don't you just listen to what they say for a moment rather than blow it off because you've already made up your mind that they're wrong? What exactly has qualified you to know more about this than them? You read a couple/. headlines and you're an expert, right?
And no, I don't really care that RMS praised KDE for this. Instead he should praise them for making a nice office suite, not for for picking a side on a stupid political issue. He should be praising Jody Goldberg for all the hard work he is doing for free software hackers and users out there, in case anyone decides in the future that they want to support OOXML. Just because Jody is doing all this work doesn't mean that GNOME is committed to using OOXML, because it isn't. That's a bullshit conspiracy theory that got started on/. and digg, which are apparently where RMS gets his news from these days. Jody's work is about clarifying the spec in case GNOME is put in a position where they feel they need to support the spec someday.
I'm not even going to start on the MS covert funding conspiracy theory bullshit.
I think you need to pick better battles than this, because there is no real connection between Lenovo (or the Chinese computer industry) and the Chinese government's policies that I am aware of. If you really want to boycott something based on governmental policies, you should buy a bike or start walking everywhere and try to not use so much oil. Alan Greenspan has now said in his latest book what politicians won't say about Iraq, which we all knew before, and that is that it was about oil. There is also a UK study indicating that about 1.2 million Iraqis have died as a result of violence since the US invasion began.
So boycott something that governmental policies actually affect.
The way "Your rights online" is one of the busiest/. categories, the way half the stories have little or nothing to do with IT, and the way articles are almost always spun in terms of "What individual rights will be lost?" rather than "What might society as a whole gain?", for example?
When individual rights are lost, you can't really word that as a gain for society. It's a loss for society. As the people lose rights, the government gains power over them. The rulers are the only ones who benefit from that.
Yeah, but the circumstantial evidence looks pretty bad here. He said his CRX went missing at the same time Nina did, and then while the unmarked police vehicles were following him he went to the abandoned CRX to move it? And when they looked in the CRX the passenger seat of the car was missing and the floor there is soaked as though it has recently been washed? Maybe there's a reasonable explanation, but it certainly looks bad right now since he hasn't provided that explanation.
If the RAM manufacturers are building up stocks of RAM that nobody is buying then maybe they'll start pushing the prices down further to make it more attractive. Then those of us who are using Linux benefit again from Vista's lack of adoption.:)
Clone MacOSX API? Heh. Whether you like the MacOSX destktop or not is sort of irrelevant to the parent's comment, because he's talking about the MacOSX APIs. Which is fucking retarded.
Okay, this has been attempted with Win32 APIs, and it's called WINE. It's a cool project, a lot of good stuff has come out of it.. but it's so far from perfect that to consider developing a serious desktop around it would be insane.
The other problem with the parent's comment is that nobody really likes programming Objective-C that much unless they're already an Apple fanboy. Everyone already knows C and C++ it seems, and everyone who tries to use C# seems to basically like it because it's so ridiculously easy. Objective-C doesn't offer us anything. Plus a free clone would have the usual moving problem target that things like WINE and Mono already have. Plus, there are a lot of rumors and hints pointing that Apple is very interested in Ruby in the future so maybe they'll begin doing a lot of their desktop APIs using Ruby. Honestly, it has much more to offer than Objective-C anyway.
Both of the free desktops have advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I think GTK is a nicer widget toolkit than QT. It has two major disadvantages, in my opinion: it isn't as portable as QT (Win32 port is okay at best, and MacOSX port is very new and untested), and its object-oriented C paradigm is cool but unwieldy. QT has the language advantage of C++, although it honestly isn't really that nice of an API I think, and it is portable which is a big win for writing cross-desktop apps. But the GPL is too restrictive, and it is firmly in the hands of a single company.
Regarding the language problems of GTK, I am very familiar with the bindings to C++, Python, C#, Ruby, Perl, and who the fuck knows what else.. but the problem is that they're not part of GTK and their releases are staggered from those of GTK. If there was some coordination between them so that when GTK 2.12 is released, language bindings all came out at the same time... or better yet, all the language bindings were part of GTK, that would be even better.
You've got to be kidding if you think Bush the sr. and his administration missed the warning signs of the Soviet fall. And pushing the idea that the Soviets were a huge threat.. that was no mis-calculation at all. It was well-known in the government for decades that the Soviets had a vastly smaller nuclear arsenal than we had, and that they were not a really massive threat. That's well documented at this point if you want to search through the National Security Archives at GWU. There was a very clear, very deliberate purpose in the government misleading the US population for that: they needed a reason to keep pushing for more military spending.
There are pretty much two primary ways that the government might try to maintain the economy. They can either dump money into social programs of some sort, or they can dump money into military spending. Each method benefits different people. Social programs benefit the population directly, while military spending primarily benefits large corporations in the form of big government contracts.
Oh yeah, that's the easy part. Next they're going to build an even more powerful computer that's going to compute the question!
Re:Professional graphic artists and retouchers
on
Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 1
You can use the tools that work for you without acting like a total jackass about it, you know. A lot of people are not graphics professionals, and GIMP is just fine for them. I work as a 3d programmer and use Maya, but I don't go around telling the amateurs that they're fucking retards for using Blender or whatever. So just chill out and cut the holier-than-thou attitude.
it is better for them to let pirates copy their software rather than funding competitors like Paint Shop Pro and Gimp
Fund Gimp? heh.
Seriously though, Adobe has historically been pretty cool with Gimp. I used to hear about people asking Adobe to create a Linux version of Photoshop. Most companies give a bullshit answer like, "we're evaluating the marketplace and have not committed one way or the other", but Adobe would actually tell people to use GIMP. As a software consumer, I appreciate that sort of direct response. Even though I'd never buy it (because I'm not hardcore enough of an image editing person and Gimp fills all my needs), I would love to see Adobe release a Linux version of Photoshop someday.
On the subject of Gimp being "good enough" for what I do, I'm curious to know from people out there who do more 2d graphics work: what does Photoshop do that Gimp doesn't do? And please don't respond with "intuitive user interface" types of responses; that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for things like "Photoshop does >8 bits per channel colors" (which is the only thing I already know about it) or whatever.
And maybe that's why he has the job he has and you have the job you have. Every type of job requires a certain type of creativity; not that being a voice actor is necessarily more creative than a C++ programmer, but that it's a different type of creativity. And I would expect that to come out in his personality and how he thinks.
AMD has their own chipsets, they're not buying ATI for that. The thing that AMD doesn't make of their own is integrated graphics chipsets. Intel is the largest vendor of graphics hardware (they either beat NVIDIA and ATI combined, or they come close to it).
With Windows Vista coming out and requiring a GPU for Aeroglass, it totally makes sense for AMD to start producing integrated graphics solutions.
I hope they're not calling this one "Special Edition" and making sure that Harrison Ford doesn't shoot someone first or whatever. Please, tell me it's not ruined!
Yeah, I'm not going to either. But obviously you and I are not the people Microsoft is trying to sell this to. I don't buy individual songs on iTunes (I listen to a lot of classical and opera, and especially opera tends to have very short tracks and very many of them.. $1 a track might be like up to $30 a disc, and operas tend to come on 2-3 discs. Unless you buy a complete Wagner Ring cycle, in which case it's like 14 discs.)
A lot of people are paying for XM and Sirius. So now Microsoft/Urge has one thing they don't have - the ability to choose your own songs. Pretty soon they might start rolling out new features into that subscription, like some more radio-like channels where they choose the songs for you (if you want to try to broaden your horizons), comedy/talk streaming, sports, etc. If they do that, then the only thing they need is a way to stream it into cars via mobile phone networks or something.
I don't know. My first reaction was skeptical, like everyone else's here seems to be. But the more I think about it, I'm beginning to think it's really not a horrible idea.
Consider this: A lot of people are paying similar amounts of money for XM or Sirius satellite radio, and they mostly listen to music. Satellite radio has hundreds of channels that play all kinds of music, but it's still decided by other people what songs you're going to listen to. You can't just turn over to "Classic Rock Channel #12" and get Stairway to Heaven instantly. But when you cease to pay your Sirius bills, you don't keep getting service. So it doesn't seem horribly unfair to me that Microsoft/Urge might cease to let you have access to their music library when you stop paying the bills.
Obviously, satellite radio has other things to offer as well, such as Howard Stern and Jim Breuer and other talk or comedy shows, live sports games, the ability to receive it into your car, etc. But a lot of people are mostly into it for the music.
Also, there are advantages to using Apple's music store, or other online music stores. Obviously on the plus side is the fact that you get to keep the music you buy. The obvious downside is that you have to buy individual songs, and you don't really get to hear whatever is on the site.
So the way I see it, this Microsoft/Urge thing is cool. They're doing something different from Apple, which is great. If Microsoft came along and said, "We'll take a loss by selling songs for $0.50 each and paying the record companies the difference in cost. Then when iTunes fails, we'll raise our rates." See, THAT sounds like the Microsoft we all know and love. But instead they're going with a different business model and trying to compete fairly. So why give them a hard time? Either stick with iTunes or try Microsoft's model and see if you like it.
Slashdot Mirror
It benefits Novell, but Novell benefits Linux.
"Now that Gnome largely depends on Mono (indirect dependencies), they reached an important step." This is complete FUD. Gnome does not in any way depend on Mono. In fact, pretty much everything in your post except the "this is my POV" is pure FUD. Nobody has ever found any grounds on which Microsoft could sue any Linux companies, and all this "boycott Novell" stuff is just trying to fuck with a company that is contributing a shitload of great work to the community.
That's the most retarded fucking thing in the world. If you don't like Mono, just don't fucking use it. The point is, these guys aren't actually contributing anything. Instead they just sit around and criticize fucking awesome hackers. Mono is really fantastic software. If you don't like it, just don't use it.
Sorry, but the Boycott Novell people are complete retards to begin with. To my knowledge they don't actually produce anything for the open source community, but they sit around and bitch and whine about Novell who employs all kinds of open source hackers; including kernel hackers, GTK and GNOME hackers, window manager hackers, Mono hackers, accessibility hackers, open source artists, and more. Sorry if I have very little sympathy for the situation. It's not that I think anyone should be 'manhandled' under any situation, but these guys are the most inconsiderate members of the "open source community" and it's hard for me to really take most things they say very seriously.
Nobody will just "vote their conscience" until there is a system that rewards that. Right now the system is setup to reward football politics, where people align themselves with the party instead of the individual. If you really like Dennis Kucinich, you still don't vote for him because everyone else is voting for Clinton or Obama so you feel like you need to pick the one of them who sucks less.
I think a really good solution is to use Instant Runoff Elections [1]. Then you can choose the candidate that you really like, and a second and third place candidate. Then if the person you really like doesn't get enough votes, your vote hasn't been thrown away.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
But you don't need consistent access to that data at all times of day. Storing your work documents with Google or something (in a non-backup way) strikes many of us as a way to potentially screw yourself over when you suddenly desperately need a certain file and your network is down or something.
Also, in terms of practicality I have to say that I wouldn't know what to do with a few hundred thousand dollars myself. What am I going to do, stuff it under my bed? I feel like there is a purpose in having institutions that make it their business to do with my money what I can't really do myself. For me it's not out of paranoia that I don't store files with Google, but that I don't see the point. I don't NEED Google to store my files, I've been doing it for years myself.
You can try to abstract between different widget toolkits, but this always ends in disaster. This is what wxWidgets does, and their API sucks. Mono tried unsuccessfully to implement WinForms API on top of GTK, but it proved to be impossible so they started over from scratch.
I don't think you understand the stack at all. The gnome libs are not some kind of abstraction over GTK or something, they're basically extensions built over it that also use a few other things that are not under GTK (such as dbus). Applications are predominantly written using GTK, and they pull in other libs here and there as needed.
Seems like a more productive use of time would be to identify exactly where GTK doesn't work as well as it could, and fix it. If it's too slow, someone needs to just sit down and fucking profile it and figure out where it's not fast enough. To say, "let's just rewrite every fucking application using Qt" is obscenely ignorant of the development process.
Yeah, but that still falls into the "extra software to install" category. You need to install Silverlight (or Moonlight on Linux or Mac) to get this to work. The interesting part of this Java and Ruby thing is that it runs directly in the browser. That said, I think the DLR approach is better and more interesting. It's actually kind of sad that Tamarin is duplicating all the effort of this when they could totally take the Mono VM right now and do a lot of this stuff. Mono's VM is actually -really- fast and very useful for exactly this purpose.
Get a clue and do a little more research before you label people at GNOME "stooges". The work that people like Jody Goldberg of GNOME is doing is a huge benefit to everyone, but people like you are turning it into more of a political issue than it should be. Jody is actively going through the OOXML specs on behalf of free software hackers and users (that includes YOU, dumbass!) and figuring out where all the ambiguities are, what doesn't make sense, what isn't implementable as specified, etc. He's trying to make a closed standard open, rather than undertake the futile task of making it disappear.
I haven't read the specs, but that's because I don't hack of any office suite software (and I'm willing to bet money that you don't either, and that you haven't read the specs). But Jody does. And Michael Meeks does. And Miguel has (and may still to some extent, I don't know). Because of that experience they are qualified to talk about it. At least, more qualified than you are. If they say something, why don't you just listen to what they say for a moment rather than blow it off because you've already made up your mind that they're wrong? What exactly has qualified you to know more about this than them? You read a couple /. headlines and you're an expert, right?
And no, I don't really care that RMS praised KDE for this. Instead he should praise them for making a nice office suite, not for for picking a side on a stupid political issue. He should be praising Jody Goldberg for all the hard work he is doing for free software hackers and users out there, in case anyone decides in the future that they want to support OOXML. Just because Jody is doing all this work doesn't mean that GNOME is committed to using OOXML, because it isn't. That's a bullshit conspiracy theory that got started on /. and digg, which are apparently where RMS gets his news from these days. Jody's work is about clarifying the spec in case GNOME is put in a position where they feel they need to support the spec someday.
I'm not even going to start on the MS covert funding conspiracy theory bullshit.
I think you need to pick better battles than this, because there is no real connection between Lenovo (or the Chinese computer industry) and the Chinese government's policies that I am aware of. If you really want to boycott something based on governmental policies, you should buy a bike or start walking everywhere and try to not use so much oil. Alan Greenspan has now said in his latest book what politicians won't say about Iraq, which we all knew before, and that is that it was about oil. There is also a UK study indicating that about 1.2 million Iraqis have died as a result of violence since the US invasion began.
So boycott something that governmental policies actually affect.
When individual rights are lost, you can't really word that as a gain for society. It's a loss for society. As the people lose rights, the government gains power over them. The rulers are the only ones who benefit from that.
Yeah, but the circumstantial evidence looks pretty bad here. He said his CRX went missing at the same time Nina did, and then while the unmarked police vehicles were following him he went to the abandoned CRX to move it? And when they looked in the CRX the passenger seat of the car was missing and the floor there is soaked as though it has recently been washed? Maybe there's a reasonable explanation, but it certainly looks bad right now since he hasn't provided that explanation.
If the RAM manufacturers are building up stocks of RAM that nobody is buying then maybe they'll start pushing the prices down further to make it more attractive. Then those of us who are using Linux benefit again from Vista's lack of adoption. :)
Okay, this has been attempted with Win32 APIs, and it's called WINE. It's a cool project, a lot of good stuff has come out of it.. but it's so far from perfect that to consider developing a serious desktop around it would be insane.
The other problem with the parent's comment is that nobody really likes programming Objective-C that much unless they're already an Apple fanboy. Everyone already knows C and C++ it seems, and everyone who tries to use C# seems to basically like it because it's so ridiculously easy. Objective-C doesn't offer us anything. Plus a free clone would have the usual moving problem target that things like WINE and Mono already have. Plus, there are a lot of rumors and hints pointing that Apple is very interested in Ruby in the future so maybe they'll begin doing a lot of their desktop APIs using Ruby. Honestly, it has much more to offer than Objective-C anyway. Both of the free desktops have advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I think GTK is a nicer widget toolkit than QT. It has two major disadvantages, in my opinion: it isn't as portable as QT (Win32 port is okay at best, and MacOSX port is very new and untested), and its object-oriented C paradigm is cool but unwieldy. QT has the language advantage of C++, although it honestly isn't really that nice of an API I think, and it is portable which is a big win for writing cross-desktop apps. But the GPL is too restrictive, and it is firmly in the hands of a single company.
Regarding the language problems of GTK, I am very familiar with the bindings to C++, Python, C#, Ruby, Perl, and who the fuck knows what else.. but the problem is that they're not part of GTK and their releases are staggered from those of GTK. If there was some coordination between them so that when GTK 2.12 is released, language bindings all came out at the same time... or better yet, all the language bindings were part of GTK, that would be even better.
You've got to be kidding if you think Bush the sr. and his administration missed the warning signs of the Soviet fall. And pushing the idea that the Soviets were a huge threat.. that was no mis-calculation at all. It was well-known in the government for decades that the Soviets had a vastly smaller nuclear arsenal than we had, and that they were not a really massive threat. That's well documented at this point if you want to search through the National Security Archives at GWU. There was a very clear, very deliberate purpose in the government misleading the US population for that: they needed a reason to keep pushing for more military spending.
There are pretty much two primary ways that the government might try to maintain the economy. They can either dump money into social programs of some sort, or they can dump money into military spending. Each method benefits different people. Social programs benefit the population directly, while military spending primarily benefits large corporations in the form of big government contracts.
Oh yeah, that's the easy part. Next they're going to build an even more powerful computer that's going to compute the question!
You can use the tools that work for you without acting like a total jackass about it, you know. A lot of people are not graphics professionals, and GIMP is just fine for them. I work as a 3d programmer and use Maya, but I don't go around telling the amateurs that they're fucking retards for using Blender or whatever. So just chill out and cut the holier-than-thou attitude.
Fund Gimp? heh.
Seriously though, Adobe has historically been pretty cool with Gimp. I used to hear about people asking Adobe to create a Linux version of Photoshop. Most companies give a bullshit answer like, "we're evaluating the marketplace and have not committed one way or the other", but Adobe would actually tell people to use GIMP. As a software consumer, I appreciate that sort of direct response. Even though I'd never buy it (because I'm not hardcore enough of an image editing person and Gimp fills all my needs), I would love to see Adobe release a Linux version of Photoshop someday.
On the subject of Gimp being "good enough" for what I do, I'm curious to know from people out there who do more 2d graphics work: what does Photoshop do that Gimp doesn't do? And please don't respond with "intuitive user interface" types of responses; that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for things like "Photoshop does >8 bits per channel colors" (which is the only thing I already know about it) or whatever.
And maybe that's why he has the job he has and you have the job you have. Every type of job requires a certain type of creativity; not that being a voice actor is necessarily more creative than a C++ programmer, but that it's a different type of creativity. And I would expect that to come out in his personality and how he thinks.
AMD has their own chipsets, they're not buying ATI for that. The thing that AMD doesn't make of their own is integrated graphics chipsets. Intel is the largest vendor of graphics hardware (they either beat NVIDIA and ATI combined, or they come close to it). With Windows Vista coming out and requiring a GPU for Aeroglass, it totally makes sense for AMD to start producing integrated graphics solutions.
I hope they're not calling this one "Special Edition" and making sure that Harrison Ford doesn't shoot someone first or whatever. Please, tell me it's not ruined!
A lot of people are paying for XM and Sirius. So now Microsoft/Urge has one thing they don't have - the ability to choose your own songs. Pretty soon they might start rolling out new features into that subscription, like some more radio-like channels where they choose the songs for you (if you want to try to broaden your horizons), comedy/talk streaming, sports, etc. If they do that, then the only thing they need is a way to stream it into cars via mobile phone networks or something.
Consider this: A lot of people are paying similar amounts of money for XM or Sirius satellite radio, and they mostly listen to music. Satellite radio has hundreds of channels that play all kinds of music, but it's still decided by other people what songs you're going to listen to. You can't just turn over to "Classic Rock Channel #12" and get Stairway to Heaven instantly. But when you cease to pay your Sirius bills, you don't keep getting service. So it doesn't seem horribly unfair to me that Microsoft/Urge might cease to let you have access to their music library when you stop paying the bills.
Obviously, satellite radio has other things to offer as well, such as Howard Stern and Jim Breuer and other talk or comedy shows, live sports games, the ability to receive it into your car, etc. But a lot of people are mostly into it for the music.
Also, there are advantages to using Apple's music store, or other online music stores. Obviously on the plus side is the fact that you get to keep the music you buy. The obvious downside is that you have to buy individual songs, and you don't really get to hear whatever is on the site.
So the way I see it, this Microsoft/Urge thing is cool. They're doing something different from Apple, which is great. If Microsoft came along and said, "We'll take a loss by selling songs for $0.50 each and paying the record companies the difference in cost. Then when iTunes fails, we'll raise our rates." See, THAT sounds like the Microsoft we all know and love. But instead they're going with a different business model and trying to compete fairly. So why give them a hard time? Either stick with iTunes or try Microsoft's model and see if you like it.