"Well, Joe SixPack isn't trained to fix his car either, does that mean the state should act like a big car repair shop as well?"
Not the state, but car manufacturers and dealers definitely do.
As people start treating their computers more and more as an "internet machine", the focus shifts from the hardware or software manufacturer to the ISP. To put it another way, if ISP X offers network and system management, and ISP Y only offers internet connectivity, i would definitely recommend ISP X to my friends and relatives. Even if X charges an extra 10 bucks a month for the service.
"My point: if joe six pack is not able to get his computer in good working order, he can pay someone to do it, just like he does to get his car fixed..."
Agreed. However, if the ISP is offering the same maintenance contract, i would definitely recommend it over the Dell contract.
My point is not that the ISP is *obligated* to provide this service. My point is that an ISP is the only entity that's permanently connected to the customer. Hence, it's in a unique position to offer services (such as security and even software support) that no-one else can. This is a unique opportunity for an ISP and they *should* make use of it.
I agree with you. This IS a big problem for ISPs. However, i feel that the solution is not to pass the buck onto the customers. You can't realistically expect Joe SixPack, who doesn't know the difference between the CD tray and a coffee cup holder, to keep his computer up to date with the latest service pack or patch.
A better alternative for the ISPs, IMHO, would be to start behaving like the network administration team in a big company. Joe Sixpack would be better off if the ISP would install a centrally adminsitered system administration client on his machine that automatically scans and deploys the latest anti-virus program. I know that computer-savvy folks wouldn't like to give this much of control of their PCs to ISPs. However, for Joe, this would be the ideal hassle-free solution. With a proper security policy, privacy concerns would also not be an issue.
The ISP could also have an opt-out policy that non-clueless people could make use of.
Sorry, i'm having a little difficulty hearing you from your ivory tower. Nonetheless, i'll try and respond to your insults, that seem to have more ignorance than logic.
"Slavery is wrong, period."
Please read my fuckin post. I said the same thing as well, and that too in the first line of my post. Jeeez
"These kids are being sold in to slavery where there are beaten, abused, sexually exploited, and when they get too big to ride the camels, they are sold off to some other low life who does worse things to them."
You and i know that because we have access to mass media such as TV and the internet. Let me assure you that the people who sell off their children are too busy fighting off starvation to watch the 9 o clock news. Most such parents are also assured by the middle-men that their child will be well fed and educated. Remember, these are simple villagers who've never a city, much less its perversion.
"Now, that your island is plain fucking lame. If I had a kid and I had a choice between starving with my kid and selling them off to be abused, exploited, and/or raped, I would pick starving to death with them. Yes, that sucks too, but I would die with my kids, in my arms, knowing how much I love them, rather than have them turned into 14 year prositute who will die of AIDS at 15."
No-one would sell their child if they knew their child will be sexually molested or raped, you moron. Do you think that parental love is a monopoly of white American suburbia? When do people like you get off your high horse? My point was, given a 10% chance of survival against a 1% chance of surviving hunger, would you choose the 10% option?
"All I have to add is, if the other billion people in your country think that way, you should call up the Queen of England and ask her and the British to come back and run your country, again."
Thousands of American teenagers from Podunk go to Las Vegas or Hollywood to become stars and end up as prostitutes, drug addicts, or worse. Thousands of Americans get murdered, raped, and sexually abused every day, including children and adults. By the same token, if we should invite UK to rule over us once again, you should take your immigrant ass back to the country from which you came.
Note that i have absolutely nothing against Americans or anybody else. I'm only showing you that racial insults or mindsets can go both ways. Instead of looking at something from YOUR point of view, try and put yourself in the other person's shoes. A person dying of disease or hunger does not worry about reconfiguring his/her router.
Re:Now, this is an example...
on
Camel-Riding Robots
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually, this is no big shit. Child labour is extremely common in most countries in Asia and Africa. It only sounds outlandish or cruel to you because it's not common in your country. Note that i'm not supporting child labour or "child selling" in ANY form. I'm only commenting on the present day reality.
The reality is that a LOT of people in Asia and Africa have never ever had 2 square meals in a day, ever since they were born. The number of said people also exceeds the total population of USA, Canada, and Europe combined. Faced with such extreme hunger, many families prefer to sell off their children instead of watching them die of malnutrition or disease. The added benefit is that they make a little money out of it, which sees them through a year or two.
It's not that these people don't love their children. For many such families, selling off their children is actually a demonstration of their love for their child. They know that even though their child will be ill-treated by the Arab or whoever is buying the child, at least their child will be reasonably well-fed and will have an outside chance of getting a decent education. It beats a slow death in any case.
Look at it another way. Say, hypothetically, that you're stranded in an island along with your child. You have a boat that can only seat your child. You're also slowly dying of hunger in the island. Given impending death due to starvation, will you or won't you set your child adrift in the sea if you know that your child has a 10% chance of survival?
P.S. I'm not exaggerating this by any means. Thousands of families in India commit suicide every year, especially if the rainfall is bad that year. The poison of choice, IIRC, is a local pesticide, which has now been banned in many villages. Selling children is also not uncommon.
"You really don't understand supply and demand at all, do you?"
I'm not talking about supply and demand. I'm talking about the fair value of a product.
"a product is "worth" exactly how much somebody is willing to pay for it. not more, not less. unless you understand that simple concept, you do not understand not economics 101, but economics day 1, hour 1, minute 1, second 1."
I haven't taken economics 101, so i'll take your word for it (as far as the economics defintion of a product's "worth" is concerned). That still doesn't change the fact that everything has an inherent value. The manufacturing cost of a product is usually a fair indicator of the fair value (or inherent value plus margin) of a product. If an aspirin costs $1 in USA and costs 10 cents in India, you might be right in saying that it's because of economics or supply/demand. However, that doesn't change the fact that you're getting ripped off. By the way, the same medicine or book that you buy in the US DOES (legally) cost 1/5 or less in India.
Of course, if you're happy to get ripped off and take solace in the great laws of economics, that's another story. I'm not.
I agree with you that the author's/director's cut is an economic deal, and should be treated as such.
However, that doesn't change the fact that the whole creative business has been perverted to such an extent that the laws of economics no longer prevail. We currently live in such an artificial world that we've forgotten the real value of something. This is aided by the fact that a painting sells for tens of millions of dollars, a music album sells for over $20, and a 30 minute TV episode sometimes contains 15 minutes of commercials.
The way things currently are, these creative works are priced as high as a customer can bear. Forget about economics or supply/demand for a second and answer this. How much is something really worth? For a manufactured product, the answer is fairly simple. Take the manufacturing cost (plus R&D cost), add a 10-50% margin, and you'll get a fair value for a product. Economics only kicks in when you want to figure out the exact margin, based on competition or lack of it.
The price for a creative work can be determined similarly as well. The only difference is that the R&D cost in the above example is substituted with the royalty that the creator should get. I don't pretend to be an expert, but my rough calculation tells me that the current prices of books, audio CDs, movies, and paintings are a complete perversion of the above calculation. $20 for a audio CD cannot be justified by ANY real means, especially considering the fact that the same creative work was priced 1/4 a few years ago.
This is my objection to the current system. Barring that, issues like the monopoly of distributors or authors getting a raw deal are just by-products of this screwed up system.
" Soon we will have benchmark woodwinds, benchmark flutes, and worst of all benchmark trumpets. Off course it will come together as all that benchmark jazz. .."
Please, we geeks are non-violent people. Where's all this sax and violins coming from?
Quite some time back, mopeds in India used to be called "wikis" or "vickys". I have no clue why, for i haven't seen a moped brand with the same name. This usage has also stopped of late, and most such mopeds are simply called mopeds or scootys.
A moped, in the Indian context, is a 2-wheeled motorized vehicle, usually with a 50cc engine, with a top speed of perhaps 50kmph, and with a mileage that would put any hybrid vehicle to shame (over 100km per litre). It also has a strange design. It looks like a motorbike on an Atkins diet, and yet has pedals like a bicycle.
Anyway, just thought i'd share as the name "wiki" reminded me of this antiquated motorbike that thinks it's a bicycle.
Altruistic intellectual pursuits are one thing, a penguin t-shirt is completely another.
On the other hand, could this be:- 1. A secret government program to ferret out crackers? 2. Google's latest recruitment drive? 3. Network Associates looking for a new CEO?
Considering the general decline of manners and overall public behaviour, we can confidently say that cellphone usage has caused cerebral damage.
Not commonly known outside scientific circles, the radiation specifically targets the cellula oblongata. Keeping it in the pocket, on the other hand, causes the Ericsson dysfunction syndrome.
In defence of The Hindu, it is one of the few newspapers in India that still believes in honesty and integrity. As such, i would be inclined to take it at face value. This is opposed to The Times Of India, India's largest selling newspaper, and not unlike Fox News. People lovingly call it The Slimes Of India as well. The Hindu, OTOH, enjoys a very good reputation in India, especially for its editorials. The Hindu also irrationally focuses on technical journalism a lot; irrational because most such articles have no sex or death angle.
That being said, i was a little surprised to see a slashdot post referencing The Hindu as well.
> Moore's Law has nothing to do with assembly language and optimizations. From Wikipedia:...
The grandparent was saying that because processor speeds have increased to such an extent (Moore's Law), it doesn't make sense to use assembly to write modern code; even if the assembly code is faster.
"That's what everyone thought, until the Arabs went and invented this damn 0 thing.:)"
Sorry to pick nits, but 0 was invented (discovered?) in India. The arabs copied the numeral system from the Indians and the other civilizations copied it from the arabs. Hence, the so-called Arabic numeral system is really the Indian numeral system. Or so, i've read somewhere:-)
Yes. Unfortunately, the new Dothans are quite expensive nowadays. Furthermore, the (few) desktop motherboards for Dothans are exorbitant as well. I'm guessing that the prices will come down in another 6 months when customers start clamouring for bigger and better P-Ms. I'm planning to build a passively cooled Dothan desktop when that happens:-)
" I always found hard to find how much of that consumed power translates onto wasted power (heat dissipation), but in any case, i wouldn't want to be in a room with a couple of Sonoma servers."
Hello, Sonoma is the new Intel platform for mobile devices. A room with Sonoma servers would be THE most power efficient setup that you can lay your hands on. IMHO, Dothan (the CPU that Sonoma is built on) is a killer x86 CPU in terms of power/performance, and easily whups ANY other CPU by Intel or by AMD.
Unless that was a typo in your last sentence and you meant to say "Smithfield servers" instead of "Sonoma servers".
Thanks. My comment on recursive slashdotting was a half-joke though:-) Was just fantasizing if a phenomenon like slashdotting could get into an infinite loop or something.
I really meant to ask about the kind of hardware setup that slashdot uses.
I would be very curious to know how the "slashdotting" phenomenon maps over time. As i'm not an intarweb elder, i don't know if sites would regularly get slashdotted in the yesteryears. If any veterans are reading, has this increased or decreased over the years?
Another thing is: assuming that the slashdotting is a prime moving internet force, why doesn't slashdot itself get recursively slashdotted, get recursively slashdotted, get recur.. never mind. I mean, what kind of hardware is it running on?
Sorry for the OT. I don't have any other way to ask the readers a question on slashdot itself. Come to think of it, a meta post on slashdot might be an excellent idea.
This is because proprietary systems have an inherent risk: its always them vs the rest of the world. While Apple is maintaining its lead because of exemplary products and service, it only requires a temporary slip for others to catch up. For example, one extreme scenario is if iTunes goes down due to technical, financial, or even legal issues. In such a case, iPod owners are completely hamstrung as they will not be able to buy and run DRM content from any other website.
Ok, i concede that this was a bad example. On another tack, take the scenario of another DRM music format becoming the world standard. Imagine, if you will, your TV, DVD player, watch, car stereo, portable music player, as well as your computer capable of playing this format. Say, you invest in a spanking new HDTV or music system that allows you to insert a memory card (or plug in your portable player) and also supports the new XYZ format. Don't you think people would feel shortchanged if they can't play their $1000 worth of iTunes songs in their new player?
All i'm saying is that if Apple pushes hard enough to standardize a DRM format, the market will explode with new and cool products. This will also translate into better sales (via market growth) for Apple and in the long run, will be the only way for Apple to remain a key player in digitized legal music or video.
History also suggests the same thing. The cheap and ubiquitous manufactured by 100 companies always wins out over the cool and exclusive manufactured by a single company. Not because the cool doesn't remain cool, but because the cheap, by virtue of evolution, always manages to catch up and whittle down the differences in terms of style and cost.
While i agree that Apple's key strength is simplicity and ease of use, i've never understood their need to have proprietary implementations in everything they do. I fear the same for the iPod/iTune in years to come. I can understand the logic if they target niche markets, as is the case with their computer division. However, in the portable music business, they have a near monopoly.
IMHO, this is the perfect opportunity for Apple to further strengthen their brand name and market clout by making iTunes an open standard and encourage others to adopt it as well. This is the only way they can maintain their lead in the long run. While they don't need to do things the Wal-Mart way, they don't need to do it the old IBM way either.
Please also take this constructively. I'm a big fan of Apple, and only mean well.
Slashdot Mirror
"Well, Joe SixPack isn't trained to fix his car either, does that mean the state should act like a big car repair shop as well?"
Not the state, but car manufacturers and dealers definitely do.
As people start treating their computers more and more as an "internet machine", the focus shifts from the hardware or software manufacturer to the ISP. To put it another way, if ISP X offers network and system management, and ISP Y only offers internet connectivity, i would definitely recommend ISP X to my friends and relatives. Even if X charges an extra 10 bucks a month for the service.
"My point: if joe six pack is not able to get his computer in good working order, he can pay someone to do it, just like he does to get his car fixed..."
Agreed. However, if the ISP is offering the same maintenance contract, i would definitely recommend it over the Dell contract.
My point is not that the ISP is *obligated* to provide this service. My point is that an ISP is the only entity that's permanently connected to the customer. Hence, it's in a unique position to offer services (such as security and even software support) that no-one else can. This is a unique opportunity for an ISP and they *should* make use of it.
I agree with you. This IS a big problem for ISPs. However, i feel that the solution is not to pass the buck onto the customers. You can't realistically expect Joe SixPack, who doesn't know the difference between the CD tray and a coffee cup holder, to keep his computer up to date with the latest service pack or patch.
A better alternative for the ISPs, IMHO, would be to start behaving like the network administration team in a big company. Joe Sixpack would be better off if the ISP would install a centrally adminsitered system administration client on his machine that automatically scans and deploys the latest anti-virus program. I know that computer-savvy folks wouldn't like to give this much of control of their PCs to ISPs. However, for Joe, this would be the ideal hassle-free solution. With a proper security policy, privacy concerns would also not be an issue.
The ISP could also have an opt-out policy that non-clueless people could make use of.
Does this make sense?
Sorry, i'm having a little difficulty hearing you from your ivory tower. Nonetheless, i'll try and respond to your insults, that seem to have more ignorance than logic.
"Slavery is wrong, period."
Please read my fuckin post. I said the same thing as well, and that too in the first line of my post. Jeeez
"These kids are being sold in to slavery where there are beaten, abused, sexually exploited, and when they get too big to ride the camels, they are sold off to some other low life who does worse things to them."
You and i know that because we have access to mass media such as TV and the internet. Let me assure you that the people who sell off their children are too busy fighting off starvation to watch the 9 o clock news. Most such parents are also assured by the middle-men that their child will be well fed and educated. Remember, these are simple villagers who've never a city, much less its perversion.
"Now, that your island is plain fucking lame. If I had a kid and I had a choice between starving with my kid and selling them off to be abused, exploited, and/or raped, I would pick starving to death with them. Yes, that sucks too, but I would die with my kids, in my arms, knowing how much I love them, rather than have them turned into 14 year prositute who will die of AIDS at 15."
No-one would sell their child if they knew their child will be sexually molested or raped, you moron. Do you think that parental love is a monopoly of white American suburbia? When do people like you get off your high horse? My point was, given a 10% chance of survival against a 1% chance of surviving hunger, would you choose the 10% option?
"All I have to add is, if the other billion people in your country think that way, you should call up the Queen of England and ask her and the British to come back and run your country, again."
Thousands of American teenagers from Podunk go to Las Vegas or Hollywood to become stars and end up as prostitutes, drug addicts, or worse. Thousands of Americans get murdered, raped, and sexually abused every day, including children and adults. By the same token, if we should invite UK to rule over us once again, you should take your immigrant ass back to the country from which you came.
Note that i have absolutely nothing against Americans or anybody else. I'm only showing you that racial insults or mindsets can go both ways. Instead of looking at something from YOUR point of view, try and put yourself in the other person's shoes. A person dying of disease or hunger does not worry about reconfiguring his/her router.
Actually, this is no big shit. Child labour is extremely common in most countries in Asia and Africa. It only sounds outlandish or cruel to you because it's not common in your country. Note that i'm not supporting child labour or "child selling" in ANY form. I'm only commenting on the present day reality.
The reality is that a LOT of people in Asia and Africa have never ever had 2 square meals in a day, ever since they were born. The number of said people also exceeds the total population of USA, Canada, and Europe combined. Faced with such extreme hunger, many families prefer to sell off their children instead of watching them die of malnutrition or disease. The added benefit is that they make a little money out of it, which sees them through a year or two.
It's not that these people don't love their children. For many such families, selling off their children is actually a demonstration of their love for their child. They know that even though their child will be ill-treated by the Arab or whoever is buying the child, at least their child will be reasonably well-fed and will have an outside chance of getting a decent education. It beats a slow death in any case.
Look at it another way. Say, hypothetically, that you're stranded in an island along with your child. You have a boat that can only seat your child. You're also slowly dying of hunger in the island. Given impending death due to starvation, will you or won't you set your child adrift in the sea if you know that your child has a 10% chance of survival?
P.S. I'm not exaggerating this by any means. Thousands of families in India commit suicide every year, especially if the rainfall is bad that year. The poison of choice, IIRC, is a local pesticide, which has now been banned in many villages. Selling children is also not uncommon.
"You really don't understand supply and demand at all, do you?"
I'm not talking about supply and demand. I'm talking about the fair value of a product.
"a product is "worth" exactly how much somebody is willing to pay for it. not more, not less. unless you understand that simple concept, you do not understand not economics 101, but economics day 1, hour 1, minute 1, second 1."
I haven't taken economics 101, so i'll take your word for it (as far as the economics defintion of a product's "worth" is concerned). That still doesn't change the fact that everything has an inherent value. The manufacturing cost of a product is usually a fair indicator of the fair value (or inherent value plus margin) of a product. If an aspirin costs $1 in USA and costs 10 cents in India, you might be right in saying that it's because of economics or supply/demand. However, that doesn't change the fact that you're getting ripped off. By the way, the same medicine or book that you buy in the US DOES (legally) cost 1/5 or less in India.
Of course, if you're happy to get ripped off and take solace in the great laws of economics, that's another story. I'm not.
I agree with you that the author's/director's cut is an economic deal, and should be treated as such.
However, that doesn't change the fact that the whole creative business has been perverted to such an extent that the laws of economics no longer prevail. We currently live in such an artificial world that we've forgotten the real value of something. This is aided by the fact that a painting sells for tens of millions of dollars, a music album sells for over $20, and a 30 minute TV episode sometimes contains 15 minutes of commercials.
The way things currently are, these creative works are priced as high as a customer can bear. Forget about economics or supply/demand for a second and answer this. How much is something really worth? For a manufactured product, the answer is fairly simple. Take the manufacturing cost (plus R&D cost), add a 10-50% margin, and you'll get a fair value for a product. Economics only kicks in when you want to figure out the exact margin, based on competition or lack of it.
The price for a creative work can be determined similarly as well. The only difference is that the R&D cost in the above example is substituted with the royalty that the creator should get. I don't pretend to be an expert, but my rough calculation tells me that the current prices of books, audio CDs, movies, and paintings are a complete perversion of the above calculation. $20 for a audio CD cannot be justified by ANY real means, especially considering the fact that the same creative work was priced 1/4 a few years ago.
This is my objection to the current system. Barring that, issues like the monopoly of distributors or authors getting a raw deal are just by-products of this screwed up system.
Whoa! Talk about a *bold-faced* lie.
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
"I guess it's more like fight club."
Please, you know the rules.
" Soon we will have benchmark woodwinds, benchmark flutes, and worst of all benchmark trumpets. Off course it will come together as all that benchmark jazz. . ."
Please, we geeks are non-violent people. Where's all this sax and violins coming from?
Quite some time back, mopeds in India used to be called "wikis" or "vickys". I have no clue why, for i haven't seen a moped brand with the same name. This usage has also stopped of late, and most such mopeds are simply called mopeds or scootys.
A moped, in the Indian context, is a 2-wheeled motorized vehicle, usually with a 50cc engine, with a top speed of perhaps 50kmph, and with a mileage that would put any hybrid vehicle to shame (over 100km per litre). It also has a strange design. It looks like a motorbike on an Atkins diet, and yet has pedals like a bicycle.
Anyway, just thought i'd share as the name "wiki" reminded me of this antiquated motorbike that thinks it's a bicycle.
Heh
These are good values to have.
The comma separated values, i mean.
at least give a t-shirt as a prize.
Altruistic intellectual pursuits are one thing, a penguin t-shirt is completely another.
On the other hand, could this be:-
1. A secret government program to ferret out crackers?
2. Google's latest recruitment drive?
3. Network Associates looking for a new CEO?
Considering the general decline of manners and overall public behaviour, we can confidently say that cellphone usage has caused cerebral damage.
Not commonly known outside scientific circles, the radiation specifically targets the cellula oblongata. Keeping it in the pocket, on the other hand, causes the Ericsson dysfunction syndrome.
In defence of The Hindu, it is one of the few newspapers in India that still believes in honesty and integrity. As such, i would be inclined to take it at face value. This is opposed to The Times Of India, India's largest selling newspaper, and not unlike Fox News. People lovingly call it The Slimes Of India as well. The Hindu, OTOH, enjoys a very good reputation in India, especially for its editorials. The Hindu also irrationally focuses on technical journalism a lot; irrational because most such articles have no sex or death angle.
That being said, i was a little surprised to see a slashdot post referencing The Hindu as well.
You misunderstood.
>> Moore's Law has eroded the need for assembly
> Moore's Law has nothing to do with assembly language and optimizations. From Wikipedia:...
The grandparent was saying that because processor speeds have increased to such an extent (Moore's Law), it doesn't make sense to use assembly to write modern code; even if the assembly code is faster.
"That's what everyone thought, until the Arabs went and invented this damn 0 thing. :)"
:-)
Sorry to pick nits, but 0 was invented (discovered?) in India. The arabs copied the numeral system from the Indians and the other civilizations copied it from the arabs. Hence, the so-called Arabic numeral system is really the Indian numeral system. Or so, i've read somewhere
Yes. Unfortunately, the new Dothans are quite expensive nowadays. Furthermore, the (few) desktop motherboards for Dothans are exorbitant as well. I'm guessing that the prices will come down in another 6 months when customers start clamouring for bigger and better P-Ms. I'm planning to build a passively cooled Dothan desktop when that happens :-)
" I always found hard to find how much of that consumed power translates onto wasted power (heat dissipation), but in any case, i wouldn't want to be in a room with a couple of Sonoma servers."
Hello, Sonoma is the new Intel platform for mobile devices. A room with Sonoma servers would be THE most power efficient setup that you can lay your hands on. IMHO, Dothan (the CPU that Sonoma is built on) is a killer x86 CPU in terms of power/performance, and easily whups ANY other CPU by Intel or by AMD.
Unless that was a typo in your last sentence and you meant to say "Smithfield servers" instead of "Sonoma servers".
Thanks. You never know. Perhaps, CmdrTaco gleefully keeps a secret list of sites scalped by slashdot :-)
(kidding)
I'll try mailing him.
Thanks. My comment on recursive slashdotting was a half-joke though :-) Was just fantasizing if a phenomenon like slashdotting could get into an infinite loop or something.
I really meant to ask about the kind of hardware setup that slashdot uses.
I would be very curious to know how the "slashdotting" phenomenon maps over time. As i'm not an intarweb elder, i don't know if sites would regularly get slashdotted in the yesteryears. If any veterans are reading, has this increased or decreased over the years?
Another thing is: assuming that the slashdotting is a prime moving internet force, why doesn't slashdot itself get recursively slashdotted, get recursively slashdotted, get recur.. never mind. I mean, what kind of hardware is it running on?
Sorry for the OT. I don't have any other way to ask the readers a question on slashdot itself. Come to think of it, a meta post on slashdot might be an excellent idea.
Yes, the search is finally over.
This is because proprietary systems have an inherent risk: its always them vs the rest of the world. While Apple is maintaining its lead because of exemplary products and service, it only requires a temporary slip for others to catch up. For example, one extreme scenario is if iTunes goes down due to technical, financial, or even legal issues. In such a case, iPod owners are completely hamstrung as they will not be able to buy and run DRM content from any other website.
Ok, i concede that this was a bad example. On another tack, take the scenario of another DRM music format becoming the world standard. Imagine, if you will, your TV, DVD player, watch, car stereo, portable music player, as well as your computer capable of playing this format. Say, you invest in a spanking new HDTV or music system that allows you to insert a memory card (or plug in your portable player) and also supports the new XYZ format. Don't you think people would feel shortchanged if they can't play their $1000 worth of iTunes songs in their new player?
All i'm saying is that if Apple pushes hard enough to standardize a DRM format, the market will explode with new and cool products. This will also translate into better sales (via market growth) for Apple and in the long run, will be the only way for Apple to remain a key player in digitized legal music or video.
History also suggests the same thing. The cheap and ubiquitous manufactured by 100 companies always wins out over the cool and exclusive manufactured by a single company. Not because the cool doesn't remain cool, but because the cheap, by virtue of evolution, always manages to catch up and whittle down the differences in terms of style and cost.
While i agree that Apple's key strength is simplicity and ease of use, i've never understood their need to have proprietary implementations in everything they do. I fear the same for the iPod/iTune in years to come. I can understand the logic if they target niche markets, as is the case with their computer division. However, in the portable music business, they have a near monopoly.
IMHO, this is the perfect opportunity for Apple to further strengthen their brand name and market clout by making iTunes an open standard and encourage others to adopt it as well. This is the only way they can maintain their lead in the long run. While they don't need to do things the Wal-Mart way, they don't need to do it the old IBM way either.
Please also take this constructively. I'm a big fan of Apple, and only mean well.
Let us not compare Apples to Oranges.
:-)
Sorry, couldn't resist