Actually, the 360 is now making some money for Microsoft, $75 per every premium sold. Of course, at launch they were losing $126 a piece, but improved manufacturing really flips it.
Where do you get these figures? Can you back this up? I tend to believe that the 360 was sold at a loss at release day and is making some small profit now but really that's just an opinion and they certainly don't publicly disclose this kind of information. Your reference?
According to all available info. The Xbox and 360 were sold at a loss up till even today. The Xbox has too many outsourced components. The part costs have not fallen for MS significantly while the selling price has.
The thing is, there *is* no available info on this, only speculation. It's widely accepted that the xbox sold at a loss for most or all of it's time on the market, and almost as widely accepted that the xbox 360 sold at a loss on launch day - but no one here actually *knows* this for a fact, and, honestly, there's little reason to think that the 360 couldn't be turning some small profit now, over a year after it's release, still selling at it's original price.
Microsoft learned a whole lot from making the xbox hardware and I don't think they're dumb enough to make the same mistakes again (though they had new problems this time with the original runs of 360 hardware, that was corrected over a year ago.)
Are you serious? This is an old standby to get laws passed that would otherwise be considered outside the juristiction of the federal government. Go look up how the 55mph national speed limit was enforced (hint: it didn't apply to ALL roads, just ALL roads in states that wanted funding for interstate highways)
The federal government collects this money from all the working members of society, then they withold it from anyone who won't accept rules that they are not actually supposed to be able to make. That's generally considered extortion.
In the razor blade model they sell the razor itself for very little if any profit, and sell the blades for a ludicrous margin (they're up to something like $3-$4 per blade on some of the fanciest gilette razors now). This compares very well to the video game industry (though the margin on the games is not quite as crazy).
The iPod itself is most definitely sold at a profit. This is a core income source for Apple. The songs on iTunes may generate considerable *revenue* as per your example of your nieces, but for $25 of iTunes gift cards (assuming they are actually used) Apple is probably going to pay $20 to the RIAA folks, $2 to the retailer who sold it, $2 for bandwidth, and make $1 of profit. All approximations, but this is the sort of margin they (and everyone else) are getting on music downloads.
Now, gift cards are great for situations like this because some percentage of them will never be redeemed - and *that* is virtually all profit for Apple.
pops up itunes, which last I checked WAS MAKING A LOT OF MONEY.
You might want to actually check on that. iTunes (nor any other 99c music site) has never made 'a lot' of money. The margin is too thin based on the amount the content owners demand per-song. iTunes is marketing for selling more iPods - if they make anything it's icing on the cake (and I'm willing to believe that iTunes music sales are slightly profitable for Apple.)
Heh, can you imagine: "This model: $299. Add $139 for Windows. Add $29 for Novell Linux." Why do you think we don't see Dell or HP doing something like that?
Microsoft does not charge Dell $139 for a copy of Windows (and never has). In fact, it's closer to $29 than $139. With Windows Vista for $50, with Novell Linux for $29. I know what most people would choose.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's more integration with Vista too, perhaps the messenger package installed as default, however that one is also speculation.
Messenger was installed by default in XP. It is not installed at all in Vista (not by default or even an option, you need to download Windows Live Messenger if you want it.)
What makes you think that it will involve an activex control? Microsoft pulled off OWA (Outlook Web Access) which is browser based yet offers much of the same functionality as Outlook, and requires nothing installed on the end user's machine. OWA is, quite honestly, one of Microsoft's best creations. I'm sure that the updated hotmail will be much the same.
immediately rip it back to mp3 with myfairtunes... it's 100% of the quality of the original file just shy the drm
Say what? You can not convert an AAC (regardless of DRM) to an MP3 and not lose quality. They are differnet compression algorithms and your decompress/recompress inherently loses quality. You could convert it to a WAV file without losing quality (or APE, or FLAC, or even windows media lossless) - but compressing it back to any format will lose quality. If you had to decompress it to get around the DRM (which you may or may not have to do) they you'd generally still lose quality turning it back into an AAC file.
Jim Allchin is (was) a President of Microsoft, not a Product Manager. He drove Vista to completion - which is something no one with the title of Product Manager would have the power to do. GP is right about what a "product manager" really is. GMs and PUMs are the people who own overall products and the final decisions about them.
Task manager never was and still isn't an accurate picture of physical memory in use. It's total combined address space, it duplicates the counts for standard system dlls, it counts stacks that are reserved but not committed - and among other things microsoft significantly increased the default (reserved) stack size for every thread of every process in Vista to decrease the incidence of stack overflow problems in applications. This doesn't cost any "real" memory, though it does cost address space within a process. Processes which may actually run out of address space on a 32-bit machine (like server apps) typically specify the stack sizes they want, and they are lower than the OS default. Server apps are rapidly moving to 64-bit anyway where this is a non-issue (for now).
Now, Vista *does* consume significantly more memory than XP at idle, and certainly needs more memory to run well - but it's not using 544mb without any apps running and, remarkably, it is extremely difficult to answer the question "how much memory is in use" in part because that question isn't specific enough to give an answer.
- Pages in memory? - Does cache count (windows uses *everything* left as a cache, and in Vista it proactively fills that cache before you even run apps based on your page-usage-history, that is, what apps you tend to run though vista is not considering "applications" here but rather a much more generic concept of image-backed pages) - Does it count if it's been written to the page file but is still in memory as well (like most OS's, windows proactively writes out private pages to the pagefile before it really needs to so that it can free physical memory quickly when needed - this also helps the system reach hybrid sleep state faster) - Does it count if it's image-backed (sharable)? What if it's still in memory? What if it was never read into memory or was read into memory at process start and will never be touched again, thrown away as soon as memory pressure reqires it?
There is no easy answer other than "add memory until it performs well" and for Vista that seems to be a minnimum of 1GB, depending on the system, more "real" graphics card memory lowers the requirement, slower hard drives (and thus greater need for caching) increase the requirement.
Before the internet exploded into popularity the majority of businesses used LANs and the majority of home users had sandboxed services like Prodigy, if anything. In short, before the internet exploted into popularity this issue didn't exist.
This doesn't absolve Microsoft from the blame for what they did... they implemented everything they could think of to enable what truely was useful functionality, with little or no regard for security. The Win95 and IE teams take some of the largest blame, and because they were so focused on home scenarios and not corporate scenarios they were considerably more oblivious than the NT folks.
Microsoft's success in building a product that home users wanted and in embracing (even if late) the internet is exactly what led to the security of windows being exposed as an abomination. The fact is, if you put millions of copies of AmigaOS, or some old Mac OS, onto the internet and everybody seriously used them - they too would fall apart because they weren't built with the security threats of the internet in mind. Microsoft is trying to rectify that now and has been for years; and I don't think anyone can seriously say that they haven't improved by leaps and bounds - whether or not they've improved enough is another matter (really, you can never improve enough on this front.)
Sun build Java years later after the internet was a fairly well understood concept. They had the benefit of creating a new environment with absolutely no need for backward compatability and as a result were able to build something far more secure. The fact that Java apps, by their very nature, don't need the same level of access to system resources as typical native applications made this task simpler. Microsoft's.NET environment has a similar record of security, however the moment you p/invoke to native code you introduce yourself to the same old world of legacy code and legacy issues where tradeoffs are required between compatability and secure design.
LUA/UAC represents a very large effort, one of the largest chunks of work shipping in Vista, to significantly improve the situation. It's not as easy for microsoft as forcing users to run as non-admin, they also needed to make existing applications and user-expected behavior actually work in this environment. They need to overcome years of application development with the assumption that users are running as admin, years that date back to well before the internet sprung into the minds of the average user.
The minor effort that it required for them to add a 3D UI
Honestly, when people write things like this I truly don't think they understand what is going on. This was an unbelieveably complicated thing to do - I know macs have been doing it for some time, but that doesn't change the fact that altering the window manager in such dramatic ways for the first time since Win95 and keeping it from breaking tons of 3rd party apps was a very large effort. The changes people saw in XP were not this deep - they were drawn on top of the Win95 style frames (you can see this with unresponsive applications and if you delve in and try to much with the windowprocs for drawing) - the changes in the vista window manager are not skin deep - it's works in a fundamentally different way.
Add that to the fact that they build a new driver model to accomodate this and other goals that virtualizes video memory in a similar way to the way system memory is virtualized with a swap file and you have a very daunting task. For a very long time in Vista development this feature fell apart so often that there was a hotkey to kill it and go back to the traditional GDI based window manager.
Now, whether or not all this effort was worth it is another matter; and some would argue (and may very well be right) that they did it simply to compete with Apple. Well, that's what companies do - they need to catch up to their competitors before they can even consider overtaking them. That said, the new model has a number of technical benefits (with the biggest downside being that it sucks up memory.) In particular it allows the GUI to be more defensive in dealing with programs that hang up and stop repainting - and it takes away the responsibility that apps used to have to repaint quickly in the face of window move events that exposed previously hidden client space - which a significant number of apps handled rather poorly.
In theory, by no longer being obligated to perform these quick repaints, apps can alter their design to cache less information and in the process can gain back some of the memory lost in the window manager.
You must be intentionally playing dumb here. Come on, do you really think they're going to sell a version of Vista that can't run office (or any other major consumer application?) Yes, you can run office, yes, you can view photos, play mpegs and other videos, run games, etc etc etc.
Home Basic will run any 3rd party software (and in-house software) - the only exception might be some server applications (no, I don't think you can run Exchange Server on Vista Home Basic - then again, you can't run it on *any* client SKU and this is no different than it was with XP and Win2K.)
Here's the basic home options for those who can't understand the web site (?!??!)
Home Basic: Runs all your stuff, no frills Home Premium: Add Media Center and a bunch of utilities Ultimate: Add domain join and even more utilities
The biz SKUs you don't even need to think about unless you are a business. "Starter" probably can't run some applications but it isn't even for sale in the first world.
Would you rather Microsoft shove every feature/applet down your throat with one version? I do believe that's what the DOJ was so very pissed about. With the exception of domain join (which is really a biz feature) pretty much every feature above and beyond Home Basic is available from multiple third parties if you so prefer - I believe most people *wanted* to have that option.
Add that to the fact that Vista can be upgraded from Basic->Premium->Ultimate on the fly from a simple tool in the control panel if you later decide you want the additional features and... stop whining about having too many options.
Heck even this little patch of desert is nice and unblurred http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=area+51&ie =UTF8&z=14&ll=37.228688,-115.804482&spn=0.052144,0.118103&t=h&om=1 so bugger all I dunno.
I wouldn't assume that unblurred = unedited. local.live.com's representation of the white house and surrounding buildings is clearly edited, the Area 51 images could well be edited (buildings removed?) - some of those "white roofs" are way too "plain" - it's rare for a large building to not have some kind of HVAC at least on it's roof.
And this one is a breakthrough:
* >10x reduction in gate oxide leakage power With static power now accounting for up to 50% of all power this is excelent.
I hate to be pedantic, but you can't have a "10x reduction" in anything, a 1x reduction is zero. What does this really mean? 90% reduction (1/10th remaining)?
What the heck is wrong with paying licensing fees to use a proprietary format - there's a license to make DVD players for Dolby Digital among other things. The point is anyone who wants to do it can do it (as long as they follow the rules). Apple is locking out everyone which is very different.
I don't even know if there *are* license fees for PlaysForSure (do you know or are you just guessing???). I'm sure there's a certification process to validate that the device actually keeps the content protected, but is that really a suprise?
"Not letting them use DRM" would be a Hell of a lot better than what Norway's actually doing, which is giving Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" DRM (which is just as proprietary!) preferential treatment.
That's not true at all - anyone who wants to can make a player that works with Microsoft's DRM model. This isn't just hypothetical, there are hundreds of different devices from dozens of manufacturers that do this today. Norway is not complaining about proprietary DRM, they are complaining about 100% lock-in by the largest player in the market.
It's amazing how well all the massively unbalanced professions fit the legos vs. dolls model so well (these are all generalizations, and the generalizations create the percentage results. I totally respect that individual people make individual choices and there's nothing at all wrong with that.)
Before I had children I thought that boys and girls had basically the same odds for any skill set and that the difference when they grow up was largely based on how parents expose boys vs. girls to different things and create different expectations.
I have two children now, a boy and a girl, and I know how wrong I was. It's not just the differnece between my own children (which is, itself, blatantly dolls vs. legos just like the stereotype) - it's also what I've observed is virtually every other set of children I've been around in playgroups, malls, playgrounds, museums, etc. Most girls have a set of interests and behavior that is very different from most boys.
I've bought my daughter legos, I've tried to work with her to build them, I've tried to keep her interest - it can't be done - she thinks they're mildly fascinating since her brother has them but will not sit still to play with them, she frankly wants to put her doll in the stroller and push her around the house. I've even found her Dora Legos (on ebay, they don't make them anymore, can you guess why?) - she likes the dora character pieces, wants to carry them around, doesn't actually want to build anything.
My son (at 5!) has built a ~3100 piece star destroyer and is embarking on building a ~3500 piece death star (among many many other lego sets he's built) - I couldn't pry his interest from this if I tried.
Software programming is all about building things piece by piece from a limited set of basic shapes. System administration and building up IT infrastructure is also about putting pieces together to build something better and more interesting. Now, IT as a general profession has a wider array of jobs and skill requirements, and as such you do find more women in "people-centric" IT positions (marketing, IT HR, usability, call centers for non-techncial areas - those that haven't been outsourced anyway). In my area of work there is clearly a larger imbalance the more "technical" the job requirements are.
Outlook has been using word to render opened emails and edit emails by default for a few versions now (but not for preview, afaik). So the news is they pulled the option to render/edit using IE? The HTML support is somewhat more limited but still perfectly capable of color, fonts, tables, and images? CSS for emails??? Do you complain that slashdot posts can't use the full gamut of HTML features that are possible for web pages?
Email is a different medium, and a more limited set of HTML is appropriate. I'm sure that's not the reason they did this - they did it to have one less dependency and to drop a feature few were still using (i.e. changing their default email renderer to IE). As a bonus, by using a different renderer they make it harder for people to write one-size-fits-all exploits - plenty of email clients will still use IE, but Outlook won't. An exploit targetted at IE won't get in through outlook and an exploit targetted at word won't get in through Windows Mail or many other non Microsoft mail clients that use IE.
Word offeres substantially better editing capabilities than the IE editable HTML control; this is why it has been the default for composing mail for some time. The only reason IE was used in the first place was because it was more lightweight than embedding an instance of Word; it might still be, but the cost of running word is now less of an issue than the benefit of getting the Word editor.
As if there was ever a public understanding that there was a differnence between "OSX" and "Mac OSX"? What other OSX do you think people would know about?
This is clearly running "OSX" to just about the same extent that PocketPCs are running "Windows" - except that Microsoft never pretended that they were running the "full desktop OS" - it was always well known that they were based on WinCE (which was the actual brand used for several years before being renamed to Windows Mobile).
Jobs clearly implied that the phone was running the "real" OSX to give people the impression it was powerful and open, before having to admit that it is really very closed (and likely also very limited with major OSX APIs missing, lame arguments about the semantics of what exactly is and is not an "OSX" API not withstanding).
None of this says that the iPhone is good or bad (in fact it looks extremely intersting), just that Jobs appears to be getting more and more willing to mislead people to help product launches. One of the first things I heard about this phone was that Jobs said it had the highest res display of any phone, only to look up the specs and see that it is not even a VGA phone (and VGA PocketPC phones have been available for years). I'm sure he's got some subtle-semantic reason passed through legal that makes his statement defensible, but it's still a lie in my book.
BS. I can run whatever I want to run, including my own home brew apps, on my Windows Mobile (Audiovox 5600) phone - on Cingular. This is a Cingular approved I bought through Cingular. Jobs is completely fabricating this excuse.
My point is that what he's doing is annoying and ineffective (for him or his goal of getting Dell to change their options for new PCs) not that it's necessarialy "wrong"... Dell is making a rational business decision to not refuse this because the cost to them (22 people per year * $55... heh) is lower than the cost to their business of a negative press article saying that they refused to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Where do you get these figures? Can you back this up? I tend to believe that the 360 was sold at a loss at release day and is making some small profit now but really that's just an opinion and they certainly don't publicly disclose this kind of information. Your reference?
The thing is, there *is* no available info on this, only speculation. It's widely accepted that the xbox sold at a loss for most or all of it's time on the market, and almost as widely accepted that the xbox 360 sold at a loss on launch day - but no one here actually *knows* this for a fact, and, honestly, there's little reason to think that the 360 couldn't be turning some small profit now, over a year after it's release, still selling at it's original price.
Microsoft learned a whole lot from making the xbox hardware and I don't think they're dumb enough to make the same mistakes again (though they had new problems this time with the original runs of 360 hardware, that was corrected over a year ago.)
Are you serious? This is an old standby to get laws passed that would otherwise be considered outside the juristiction of the federal government. Go look up how the 55mph national speed limit was enforced (hint: it didn't apply to ALL roads, just ALL roads in states that wanted funding for interstate highways)
The federal government collects this money from all the working members of society, then they withold it from anyone who won't accept rules that they are not actually supposed to be able to make. That's generally considered extortion.
In the razor blade model they sell the razor itself for very little if any profit, and sell the blades for a ludicrous margin (they're up to something like $3-$4 per blade on some of the fanciest gilette razors now). This compares very well to the video game industry (though the margin on the games is not quite as crazy).
The iPod itself is most definitely sold at a profit. This is a core income source for Apple. The songs on iTunes may generate considerable *revenue* as per your example of your nieces, but for $25 of iTunes gift cards (assuming they are actually used) Apple is probably going to pay $20 to the RIAA folks, $2 to the retailer who sold it, $2 for bandwidth, and make $1 of profit. All approximations, but this is the sort of margin they (and everyone else) are getting on music downloads.
Now, gift cards are great for situations like this because some percentage of them will never be redeemed - and *that* is virtually all profit for Apple.
You might want to actually check on that. iTunes (nor any other 99c music site) has never made 'a lot' of money. The margin is too thin based on the amount the content owners demand per-song. iTunes is marketing for selling more iPods - if they make anything it's icing on the cake (and I'm willing to believe that iTunes music sales are slightly profitable for Apple.)
I dunno, do they make pink sharpies?
Microsoft does not charge Dell $139 for a copy of Windows (and never has). In fact, it's closer to $29 than $139. With Windows Vista for $50, with Novell Linux for $29. I know what most people would choose.
Messenger was installed by default in XP. It is not installed at all in Vista (not by default or even an option, you need to download Windows Live Messenger if you want it.)
What makes you think that it will involve an activex control? Microsoft pulled off OWA (Outlook Web Access) which is browser based yet offers much of the same functionality as Outlook, and requires nothing installed on the end user's machine. OWA is, quite honestly, one of Microsoft's best creations. I'm sure that the updated hotmail will be much the same.
Jim Allchin is (was) a President of Microsoft, not a Product Manager. He drove Vista to completion - which is something no one with the title of Product Manager would have the power to do. GP is right about what a "product manager" really is. GMs and PUMs are the people who own overall products and the final decisions about them.
What are you doing? Looking at task manager?
Task manager never was and still isn't an accurate picture of physical memory in use. It's total combined address space, it duplicates the counts for standard system dlls, it counts stacks that are reserved but not committed - and among other things microsoft significantly increased the default (reserved) stack size for every thread of every process in Vista to decrease the incidence of stack overflow problems in applications. This doesn't cost any "real" memory, though it does cost address space within a process. Processes which may actually run out of address space on a 32-bit machine (like server apps) typically specify the stack sizes they want, and they are lower than the OS default. Server apps are rapidly moving to 64-bit anyway where this is a non-issue (for now).
Now, Vista *does* consume significantly more memory than XP at idle, and certainly needs more memory to run well - but it's not using 544mb without any apps running and, remarkably, it is extremely difficult to answer the question "how much memory is in use" in part because that question isn't specific enough to give an answer.
- Pages in memory?
- Does cache count (windows uses *everything* left as a cache, and in Vista it proactively fills that cache before you even run apps based on your page-usage-history, that is, what apps you tend to run though vista is not considering "applications" here but rather a much more generic concept of image-backed pages)
- Does it count if it's been written to the page file but is still in memory as well (like most OS's, windows proactively writes out private pages to the pagefile before it really needs to so that it can free physical memory quickly when needed - this also helps the system reach hybrid sleep state faster)
- Does it count if it's image-backed (sharable)? What if it's still in memory? What if it was never read into memory or was read into memory at process start and will never be touched again, thrown away as soon as memory pressure reqires it?
There is no easy answer other than "add memory until it performs well" and for Vista that seems to be a minnimum of 1GB, depending on the system, more "real" graphics card memory lowers the requirement, slower hard drives (and thus greater need for caching) increase the requirement.
Before the internet exploded into popularity the majority of businesses used LANs and the majority of home users had sandboxed services like Prodigy, if anything. In short, before the internet exploted into popularity this issue didn't exist.
... they implemented everything they could think of to enable what truely was useful functionality, with little or no regard for security. The Win95 and IE teams take some of the largest blame, and because they were so focused on home scenarios and not corporate scenarios they were considerably more oblivious than the NT folks.
.NET environment has a similar record of security, however the moment you p/invoke to native code you introduce yourself to the same old world of legacy code and legacy issues where tradeoffs are required between compatability and secure design.
This doesn't absolve Microsoft from the blame for what they did
Microsoft's success in building a product that home users wanted and in embracing (even if late) the internet is exactly what led to the security of windows being exposed as an abomination. The fact is, if you put millions of copies of AmigaOS, or some old Mac OS, onto the internet and everybody seriously used them - they too would fall apart because they weren't built with the security threats of the internet in mind. Microsoft is trying to rectify that now and has been for years; and I don't think anyone can seriously say that they haven't improved by leaps and bounds - whether or not they've improved enough is another matter (really, you can never improve enough on this front.)
Sun build Java years later after the internet was a fairly well understood concept. They had the benefit of creating a new environment with absolutely no need for backward compatability and as a result were able to build something far more secure. The fact that Java apps, by their very nature, don't need the same level of access to system resources as typical native applications made this task simpler. Microsoft's
LUA/UAC represents a very large effort, one of the largest chunks of work shipping in Vista, to significantly improve the situation. It's not as easy for microsoft as forcing users to run as non-admin, they also needed to make existing applications and user-expected behavior actually work in this environment. They need to overcome years of application development with the assumption that users are running as admin, years that date back to well before the internet sprung into the minds of the average user.
Add that to the fact that they build a new driver model to accomodate this and other goals that virtualizes video memory in a similar way to the way system memory is virtualized with a swap file and you have a very daunting task. For a very long time in Vista development this feature fell apart so often that there was a hotkey to kill it and go back to the traditional GDI based window manager.
Now, whether or not all this effort was worth it is another matter; and some would argue (and may very well be right) that they did it simply to compete with Apple. Well, that's what companies do - they need to catch up to their competitors before they can even consider overtaking them. That said, the new model has a number of technical benefits (with the biggest downside being that it sucks up memory.) In particular it allows the GUI to be more defensive in dealing with programs that hang up and stop repainting - and it takes away the responsibility that apps used to have to repaint quickly in the face of window move events that exposed previously hidden client space - which a significant number of apps handled rather poorly.
In theory, by no longer being obligated to perform these quick repaints, apps can alter their design to cache less information and in the process can gain back some of the memory lost in the window manager.
You must be intentionally playing dumb here. Come on, do you really think they're going to sell a version of Vista that can't run office (or any other major consumer application?) Yes, you can run office, yes, you can view photos, play mpegs and other videos, run games, etc etc etc.
... stop whining about having too many options.
Home Basic will run any 3rd party software (and in-house software) - the only exception might be some server applications (no, I don't think you can run Exchange Server on Vista Home Basic - then again, you can't run it on *any* client SKU and this is no different than it was with XP and Win2K.)
Here's the basic home options for those who can't understand the web site (?!??!)
Home Basic: Runs all your stuff, no frills
Home Premium: Add Media Center and a bunch of utilities
Ultimate: Add domain join and even more utilities
The biz SKUs you don't even need to think about unless you are a business. "Starter" probably can't run some applications but it isn't even for sale in the first world.
Would you rather Microsoft shove every feature/applet down your throat with one version? I do believe that's what the DOJ was so very pissed about. With the exception of domain join (which is really a biz feature) pretty much every feature above and beyond Home Basic is available from multiple third parties if you so prefer - I believe most people *wanted* to have that option.
Add that to the fact that Vista can be upgraded from Basic->Premium->Ultimate on the fly from a simple tool in the control panel if you later decide you want the additional features and
What the heck is wrong with paying licensing fees to use a proprietary format - there's a license to make DVD players for Dolby Digital among other things. The point is anyone who wants to do it can do it (as long as they follow the rules). Apple is locking out everyone which is very different.
I don't even know if there *are* license fees for PlaysForSure (do you know or are you just guessing???). I'm sure there's a certification process to validate that the device actually keeps the content protected, but is that really a suprise?
That's not true at all - anyone who wants to can make a player that works with Microsoft's DRM model. This isn't just hypothetical, there are hundreds of different devices from dozens of manufacturers that do this today. Norway is not complaining about proprietary DRM, they are complaining about 100% lock-in by the largest player in the market.
Daycare providers
Construction workers
Flight attendents
It's amazing how well all the massively unbalanced professions fit the legos vs. dolls model so well (these are all generalizations, and the generalizations create the percentage results. I totally respect that individual people make individual choices and there's nothing at all wrong with that.)
Before I had children I thought that boys and girls had basically the same odds for any skill set and that the difference when they grow up was largely based on how parents expose boys vs. girls to different things and create different expectations.
I have two children now, a boy and a girl, and I know how wrong I was. It's not just the differnece between my own children (which is, itself, blatantly dolls vs. legos just like the stereotype) - it's also what I've observed is virtually every other set of children I've been around in playgroups, malls, playgrounds, museums, etc. Most girls have a set of interests and behavior that is very different from most boys.
I've bought my daughter legos, I've tried to work with her to build them, I've tried to keep her interest - it can't be done - she thinks they're mildly fascinating since her brother has them but will not sit still to play with them, she frankly wants to put her doll in the stroller and push her around the house. I've even found her Dora Legos (on ebay, they don't make them anymore, can you guess why?) - she likes the dora character pieces, wants to carry them around, doesn't actually want to build anything.
My son (at 5!) has built a ~3100 piece star destroyer and is embarking on building a ~3500 piece death star (among many many other lego sets he's built) - I couldn't pry his interest from this if I tried.
Software programming is all about building things piece by piece from a limited set of basic shapes. System administration and building up IT infrastructure is also about putting pieces together to build something better and more interesting. Now, IT as a general profession has a wider array of jobs and skill requirements, and as such you do find more women in "people-centric" IT positions (marketing, IT HR, usability, call centers for non-techncial areas - those that haven't been outsourced anyway). In my area of work there is clearly a larger imbalance the more "technical" the job requirements are.
Outlook has been using word to render opened emails and edit emails by default for a few versions now (but not for preview, afaik). So the news is they pulled the option to render/edit using IE? The HTML support is somewhat more limited but still perfectly capable of color, fonts, tables, and images? CSS for emails??? Do you complain that slashdot posts can't use the full gamut of HTML features that are possible for web pages?
Email is a different medium, and a more limited set of HTML is appropriate. I'm sure that's not the reason they did this - they did it to have one less dependency and to drop a feature few were still using (i.e. changing their default email renderer to IE). As a bonus, by using a different renderer they make it harder for people to write one-size-fits-all exploits - plenty of email clients will still use IE, but Outlook won't. An exploit targetted at IE won't get in through outlook and an exploit targetted at word won't get in through Windows Mail or many other non Microsoft mail clients that use IE.
Word offeres substantially better editing capabilities than the IE editable HTML control; this is why it has been the default for composing mail for some time. The only reason IE was used in the first place was because it was more lightweight than embedding an instance of Word; it might still be, but the cost of running word is now less of an issue than the benefit of getting the Word editor.
As if there was ever a public understanding that there was a differnence between "OSX" and "Mac OSX"? What other OSX do you think people would know about?
This is clearly running "OSX" to just about the same extent that PocketPCs are running "Windows" - except that Microsoft never pretended that they were running the "full desktop OS" - it was always well known that they were based on WinCE (which was the actual brand used for several years before being renamed to Windows Mobile).
Jobs clearly implied that the phone was running the "real" OSX to give people the impression it was powerful and open, before having to admit that it is really very closed (and likely also very limited with major OSX APIs missing, lame arguments about the semantics of what exactly is and is not an "OSX" API not withstanding).
None of this says that the iPhone is good or bad (in fact it looks extremely intersting), just that Jobs appears to be getting more and more willing to mislead people to help product launches. One of the first things I heard about this phone was that Jobs said it had the highest res display of any phone, only to look up the specs and see that it is not even a VGA phone (and VGA PocketPC phones have been available for years). I'm sure he's got some subtle-semantic reason passed through legal that makes his statement defensible, but it's still a lie in my book.
BS. I can run whatever I want to run, including my own home brew apps, on my Windows Mobile (Audiovox 5600) phone - on Cingular. This is a Cingular approved I bought through Cingular. Jobs is completely fabricating this excuse.
My point is that what he's doing is annoying and ineffective (for him or his goal of getting Dell to change their options for new PCs) not that it's necessarialy "wrong" ... Dell is making a rational business decision to not refuse this because the cost to them (22 people per year * $55 ... heh) is lower than the cost to their business of a negative press article saying that they refused to do so.