That's great. Guess what? That does not equal sales numbers. You can almost be guaranteed that most of the iPod sales in Japan were directly from Apple via the retail store and online.
I don't think you/.ers understand economics or how the currency markets work.
Say that you could choose other stores, how much do you think you would pay for songs? The same prices as you pay in your home country's store. Nope. The same price others pay but adjusted for the currency rate you find at online quote sites? Definitely not.
First of all, the rights holders expect to be paid in each market in their home currencies. Second, those rates you see online are mid-market rates which are a blend of buy and sell rates from the market meaning you would not get those rates even if you bought currency directly from the market. Third, your credit card company provides you with a worse than market rate to cover themselves from market fluctuations and because they usually do not buy/sell currency but rather go through a forex company. Finally, they will usually charge a currency conversion fee.
So it's a copy protection dongle preventing you from running OS X on non-Apple hardware?
The driver is used to generate authentication hashes to startup the OS, nothing more.
It does not alter the behavior of other software running on the platform nor does it prevent you from running other OSes like Linux or Windows on it either.
The question you must ask yourself is this: "Are my fears consistent with the past and current behavior of Apple with regard to DRM and usage rights?"
Currently, Apple allows any user to take a purchased iTMS song with DRM and strip off the DRM using their iLife apps such as iMovie and iDVD to include them in your own "home" media projects.
Those usage rights go far beyond what MSFT's DRM scheme allows for.
Can you explain how MSFT's dream of Palladium is in any way being manifest by Apple's current or past behavior?
What will you run that OS on? If it is true that Apple has a DRM chip on the shipping macs, chances are any PC you would by would also have the same type of chip on their motheboards.
How does the presence of the chip prevent you from running the OS of your choice?
What is that proof of? That could be a picture any motherboard. As for the picture of the PC motherboard in a G5 case, I seem to remember someone taking a case they bought off someone and putting in a P4 motherboard.
"Well, if you don't care about hardware then I would think you would like the endless sea of clones. Sure, they may be boring, but they are cheap and fast."
In my experience, cheap and "good" do not usually go together.
I'm not all about the hardware in a DIY-sense but I am interested in innovation which is completely absent in your "sea of clones" scenario. Funny how selling a bag of horseshit really cheap does not make it smell any better eh? Some people are driven by price whereas others are driven by the value proposition of a product. I care about quality of hardware in that it assures that I don't have to worry about the hardware because it "just works".
I think you also missed the point that the hardware sales are what keep the price of OS X down from what it would have been if they did not sell hardware.
Do you remember the last days of NeXT? Do you remember how much a copy of NeXTStep cost for Intel?
Maybe you should think out side of your "box" and consider the business implications and how a company is supposed to survive by giving their technology away.
If Apple could obtain 10% or more of marketshare "and" piracy of software dissapeared, then perhaps your dream could come true. Unfortunately, the OS pirates have brought this upon us all.
The majority of the PC market which is capable of running modern OSes like XP or Linux with Gnome/KDE with any degree of usability is hardware from the Pentium 3 and newer. Nobody is going to bother to support pre-PCI based technology anyway and drivers for the old creaky hardware is not the cause of 99.9% of stability issues anyway.
Most stability issues are caused by poorly written and tested bleeding edge drivers for "new" hardware.
Anything older than a Pentium 3 is irrelevent for any of the current OSes anyway and Anything below a Pentium 4 or Athlon are irrelevent for any new OSes emerging today.
If you look at the hardware landscape of today, there is very little diversity out there compare with the Pre-Pentium 3 era.
Now compare that with the diverse set of motherboards Apple has to support if you look at the G3 iBooks, G3 Towers, G4 towers, the older G4 Titanium Powerbooks all the way through to the various revisions of the Aluminum powerbooks and the G5 machines. That is a lot of different configurations to support there folks not to mention the various third-party gfx and sound cards.
The reason why Apple's OS is stable is because all drivers including third-party supplied drivers undergo rigorous tests for memory leaks and race conditions using the robust testing tools Apple provides every developer in the Developer tools. Now look at the anemic debugging tools MSFT supplies with Visual Studio.
I remember downloading drivers for my NVidia card when I was a PC user and they were buggy as hell.
If it was rented, you would be required to upgrade. Nobody is forcing you to upgrade.
You can also upgrade OS X from any previous version of OS X. Can the same be said for Windows? No.
Is there a time limit on how long you can use the OS? No.
All this enforces is that you purchase hardware for which this software is "licensed" to operate with. If you realized that this software is being subsidized by hardware "sales", you would not have a problem with it.
Is Apple preventing you from installing other OSes on their platform? No.
What you don't understand is that Apple is not interested in being in the software business. They are a hardware company which creates software to provided added value to the product they sell.
Here is another option, wait until you have to upgrade your machine and buy an intel mac and run any OS you want on it.
DYI's can go to hell as far as I'm concerned because they literally ruined the PC industry by sucking all of the R&D money out of the business leaving us with an endless sea of clones.
You are a hardware head and I'm interested in software and don't give a fuck about hardware as long as it runs the software I want to use.
Does Dell actually research or design any of their own hardware? Do they design or research their own OS?
What many people fail to notice is that the hardware sales subsidize the development of the OS and the hardware design.
Just because the development machines are pretty generic, don't assume that the shipping machines won't include all sorts of nice features that you would have to pay extra for after market on other PCs.
Dell spends the majority of their R&D budget on cost cutting measures.
What is your source? That may be MSFT idea about how to use a computer but where is your source that Apple will prevent you from using the content "you" created in whatever manner you wish?
Come on now, we currently can use iTMS songs (which are DRM protected) however we see fit in personal media projects inside the iApps like iMovie and iDVD.
Stop spreading FUD and making up shit like that.
Given that purchased songs can be used freely, what give you the idea they would do anything like you suggest? MSFT may want to but based on Apple's behavior thus far, I cannot see how you can say Apple will.
Leap seconds are added a various intervals through out various years which would make testing extremely difficult, let alone trying to implement either through some complex calculation or storing dates and times of when to add those seconds relative to UTC.
If you are adding leap hours on a regular interval or one that can be easily calculated, it is both easier to implement and to test.
With leap hours, a QA engineer can write a "simple" auto test which sets the system clock to a point just before each rollover to observe the behaviour of the code.
I think MSFT put some pressure on HP to drop this partnership. Sure, there were other issues such as price protection and what not but I certainly don't buy the "not invented here" excuse.
Just look at their line of PC's. They are just branded and assembled from off the shelf parts and motherboards leaving really nothing to distinguish them from the hundreds other PC assemblers. They don't even have unique software to offer as it all comes from another company (MSFT) now. HP Invent? Sure, if the definition of Invention is it take some product and slap on a sticker.
Their whole business model, outside of printers, is to resell other companies products as their own brand.
Yes, I'm absolutely certain about since I am a Canadian and I have had to pay the levy on CD's at the register at stores like London Drugs. I also enquired about the levies on music player. They listed the sale price but the levy was on top of that.
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You can knock out a prototype of the UI in minutes with Interface builder and have something that you can play with.
Once you are happy with it, you just wire up the code/objects and hit build.
Notice that they have several features which have not been implemented yet but the UI controls are already there in this beta.
Is WinAMP still in development? Is is cross platform compatible? Is it open source? This one is.
That's great. Guess what? That does not equal sales numbers. You can almost be guaranteed that most of the iPod sales in Japan were directly from Apple via the retail store and online.
Say that you could choose other stores, how much do you think you would pay for songs? The same prices as you pay in your home country's store. Nope. The same price others pay but adjusted for the currency rate you find at online quote sites? Definitely not.
First of all, the rights holders expect to be paid in each market in their home currencies. Second, those rates you see online are mid-market rates which are a blend of buy and sell rates from the market meaning you would not get those rates even if you bought currency directly from the market. Third, your credit card company provides you with a worse than market rate to cover themselves from market fluctuations and because they usually do not buy/sell currency but rather go through a forex company. Finally, they will usually charge a currency conversion fee.
The driver is used to generate authentication hashes to startup the OS, nothing more.
It does not alter the behavior of other software running on the platform nor does it prevent you from running other OSes like Linux or Windows on it either.
Currently, Apple allows any user to take a purchased iTMS song with DRM and strip off the DRM using their iLife apps such as iMovie and iDVD to include them in your own "home" media projects.
Those usage rights go far beyond what MSFT's DRM scheme allows for.
Can you explain how MSFT's dream of Palladium is in any way being manifest by Apple's current or past behavior?
How does the presence of the chip prevent you from running the OS of your choice?
What is that proof of? That could be a picture any motherboard. As for the picture of the PC motherboard in a G5 case, I seem to remember someone taking a case they bought off someone and putting in a P4 motherboard.
Well, how is the DRM chip going to prevent you from installing linux on the mac?
The GP was talking about 1996. Steve Jobs came back during the merger with NeXT and Apple has been getting better ever since.
Do you live in an alternate universe or something?
In my experience, cheap and "good" do not usually go together.
I'm not all about the hardware in a DIY-sense but I am interested in innovation which is completely absent in your "sea of clones" scenario. Funny how selling a bag of horseshit really cheap does not make it smell any better eh? Some people are driven by price whereas others are driven by the value proposition of a product. I care about quality of hardware in that it assures that I don't have to worry about the hardware because it "just works".
I think you also missed the point that the hardware sales are what keep the price of OS X down from what it would have been if they did not sell hardware.
Do you remember the last days of NeXT? Do you remember how much a copy of NeXTStep cost for Intel?
Maybe you should think out side of your "box" and consider the business implications and how a company is supposed to survive by giving their technology away.
If Apple could obtain 10% or more of marketshare "and" piracy of software dissapeared, then perhaps your dream could come true. Unfortunately, the OS pirates have brought this upon us all.
The majority of the PC market which is capable of running modern OSes like XP or Linux with Gnome/KDE with any degree of usability is hardware from the Pentium 3 and newer. Nobody is going to bother to support pre-PCI based technology anyway and drivers for the old creaky hardware is not the cause of 99.9% of stability issues anyway.
Most stability issues are caused by poorly written and tested bleeding edge drivers for "new" hardware.
Anything older than a Pentium 3 is irrelevent for any of the current OSes anyway and Anything below a Pentium 4 or Athlon are irrelevent for any new OSes emerging today.
If you look at the hardware landscape of today, there is very little diversity out there compare with the Pre-Pentium 3 era.
Now compare that with the diverse set of motherboards Apple has to support if you look at the G3 iBooks, G3 Towers, G4 towers, the older G4 Titanium Powerbooks all the way through to the various revisions of the Aluminum powerbooks and the G5 machines. That is a lot of different configurations to support there folks not to mention the various third-party gfx and sound cards.
The reason why Apple's OS is stable is because all drivers including third-party supplied drivers undergo rigorous tests for memory leaks and race conditions using the robust testing tools Apple provides every developer in the Developer tools. Now look at the anemic debugging tools MSFT supplies with Visual Studio.
I remember downloading drivers for my NVidia card when I was a PC user and they were buggy as hell.
I see no evidence of either coming from Apple at least.
I see a lot of FUD being spread around here.
The freedom of DIY? That was never a guaranteed freedom in the first place and one that I have no interest in exercising.
You can also upgrade OS X from any previous version of OS X. Can the same be said for Windows? No.
Is there a time limit on how long you can use the OS? No.
All this enforces is that you purchase hardware for which this software is "licensed" to operate with. If you realized that this software is being subsidized by hardware "sales", you would not have a problem with it.
Is Apple preventing you from installing other OSes on their platform? No.
Which one offers more choice?
Did anyone take away your choice of hardware platform? No, you still have it.
Here is another option, wait until you have to upgrade your machine and buy an intel mac and run any OS you want on it.
DYI's can go to hell as far as I'm concerned because they literally ruined the PC industry by sucking all of the R&D money out of the business leaving us with an endless sea of clones.
You are a hardware head and I'm interested in software and don't give a fuck about hardware as long as it runs the software I want to use.
What many people fail to notice is that the hardware sales subsidize the development of the OS and the hardware design.
Just because the development machines are pretty generic, don't assume that the shipping machines won't include all sorts of nice features that you would have to pay extra for after market on other PCs.
Dell spends the majority of their R&D budget on cost cutting measures.
You don't need DVD Jon unless you want him to deliberately condone piracy by running an OS you are not licensed to run.
Come on now, we currently can use iTMS songs (which are DRM protected) however we see fit in personal media projects inside the iApps like iMovie and iDVD.
Stop spreading FUD and making up shit like that.
Given that purchased songs can be used freely, what give you the idea they would do anything like you suggest? MSFT may want to but based on Apple's behavior thus far, I cannot see how you can say Apple will.
Leap seconds are added a various intervals through out various years which would make testing extremely difficult, let alone trying to implement either through some complex calculation or storing dates and times of when to add those seconds relative to UTC.
If you are adding leap hours on a regular interval or one that can be easily calculated, it is both easier to implement and to test.
With leap hours, a QA engineer can write a "simple" auto test which sets the system clock to a point just before each rollover to observe the behaviour of the code.
Just look at their line of PC's. They are just branded and assembled from off the shelf parts and motherboards leaving really nothing to distinguish them from the hundreds other PC assemblers. They don't even have unique software to offer as it all comes from another company (MSFT) now. HP Invent? Sure, if the definition of Invention is it take some product and slap on a sticker.
Their whole business model, outside of printers, is to resell other companies products as their own brand.
In that case, the Chinese unit would have to play by the US rules.
Take your ignorance of other nations elsewhere.
By the same token, US corporations are bound by the laws of each jurisdiction they operate in.
Yes, I'm absolutely certain about since I am a Canadian and I have had to pay the levy on CD's at the register at stores like London Drugs. I also enquired about the levies on music player. They listed the sale price but the levy was on top of that.