If you buy a song from ITMS, you can burn it to a CD. I think there is some limitation on how often you do this (though I think the limitation applies to playlists.) It doesn't look like you can do the same thing with the videos from ITMS, i.e. burn them as a video CD and/or a DVD. Personally I would want to be able to play a TV show I bought, on my home theater or in my bedroom. Having to buy a new iPod, download the video to the iPod from my computer, take the iPod to my living room and connect it, get up to press pause on the iPod when I want to get a drink from the kitchen, etc. does not seem like a good way to go. Burning it to a DVD and popping that in to my DVD player seems a lot better.
complaining about a missing feature which you were never promised, in software which you haven't paid a cent for nor contributed your own effort to, is not going to get you far.
Advantage: Commercial Software
Seriously, Bill Gates would love to use a comment like this to "prove" why proprietary/commercial/closed software will always be superior to FOSS. Commercial software will always concentrate on giving the consumer what they want, because that's what drives sales.
Totally agree. I had a DirecTV/TiVo setup at my old house. I was holding out until the price of the HD version came down a lot. Then I moved and took a look at Comcast's HD-PVR offering. One look was all it took and it was all over. I called DirecTV to cancel my subscription and they asked me why I was cancelling. I told them that I wanted an HD-PVR without having to pay $1000 for their offering. They offered to chop $300 off the price, but that was still not good enough. I thought I would really miss TiVo's interface, but I haven't. The only thing I wish I could change abot my Comcast HD-PVR is that it doesn't allow for picture-in-picture, even though it has two tuners (and allows for two shows to be recorded at the same time.) I was told that there would probably be a software update that would enable this in the future. The home media option would be nice too, but this was disabled on my DirecTV/TiVo box anyways so I'm not missing anything there.
Blogging has had a very little effect on changing global media.
Whoa, where have you been? Perhaps you were not around a year ago when it was blogs reacting to exit poll data that were first claiming that Kerry was going to dethrone Bush. News outlets turned around and reported much the same thing, but only after the blogs focussed attention on it. Mainstream media didn't want such hasty conclusions, not because they were wrong, but because they wanted people to stay tuned all night long.
Even more recently, it was bloggers that started the cries of outrage over the US government's handling of Hurricane Katrina. Again, mainstream media is very reluctant to openly criticize politicians for fear of being accused of lacking impartiality and (more importantly) because they must rely on these same politicians and don't want to burn bridges. Look at 9/11. It tooks months before criticism grew and it had to have its roots with the victims' families. This time things were much, much quicker because of bloggers. Bloggers don't care about being impartial and don't care if they upset politicians.
In both cases, "the news" changed because of bloggers. That's where the power of blogging comes from. It allows a broader range of people to define what is news.
This guy has some generally right ideas beneath his shady arguments. Actually that's what makes it all the more infuriating to read this kind of crap. First, what he's right about.
Legislation telling companies how to run their business is bad. The government has no right to do this (commerce clause is sorely abused to provide the legal grounds.) It can only lead to abuse as it gives the government an easy way to favor one company over others. This inevitably happens because of corruption.
If I sell CDs and want to put some kind of copy-protection on them, I should be able to do it. If the consumer doesn't like that, then they can simply not buy my CD. Nobody should force me to sell my CDs in some government ordained format. I should be free to sell them however I want and let consumers decide.
Similarly, if I am selling content (music, movies, etc.) onlines, I should be able to put whatever copy protection/DRM I want on them.
If I am selling DRM'd content, I should not have to label it as such. Again people don't have to buy it. If I sell it and they can't use it and I won't accept a return, there are existing laws about fraud that cover such situations. No new laws are needed.
Now here's where this guy starts getting things wrong:
If somebody defeats my DRM, that's my problem. I should not expect the government to protect me here. If I'm really worried about people breaking DRM, then I better come up with a really great DRM or re-consider my business model.
The existing content industries should not be protectd against disruptive technologies. It is quite possible that they will not be able to adapt to such technologies and their businesses will eventually fail. This is neither a good or a bad thing, it's just business.
Similarly, emerging business models should not be punished just because they hurt existing companies. You can try to make analogies like "they're stealing property, etc." but these are weak arguments. Established businesses always suffer at the hands of disruptive technologies. It may not seem fair, but it's not the government's place to protect one company over another.
Established companies can adapt to new technologies without help from the government. Let them introduce their DRM if they think that's their only route. That doesn't mean the government must protect this DRM. Let the existing companies compete, just don't draft laws to give them the upper hand. Similarly don't draft laws to "level" the playing ground or any other kind of euphemism for government favoritism. Let the market decide.
This guy tries to use free market principles to argue for government protectionism. The Germans used to have a term for this it was called it National Socialism
Re:it's all just rumor...
on
Video iPod Oct 12?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If your only measure of utility is data storage capacity, then you might be correct. I'm guessing there are some other measures though.
Personally, I bought a Nano for jogging. It's very light and much less likely to have vibration related issues than a hard drive based mp3 player. I had almost bought a shuffle for the same reason instead, but luckily waited until the Nano came out. I generally jog in sweat pants, with an old t-shirt and a heavily worn cap on, so fashion is not exactly high on my list.
Turns out it's just a distribution deal. Downloading the Java JRE will give users the option to also download the Google toolbar. Similarly, the Google toolbar will eventually give users the option to download OpenOffice. There was some hintint at future collaborations between the two companies, but that's it for now.
If the app is like Gmail but even more complicated (which seems likely), even small changes to the browser features this app depends on (some of which are not standardized and were originally introduced by Microsoft) will have massive effects on the app's performance. And Microsoft could easily make such tweaks ad infinitum by way of "security updates" that close security holes by continuously re-tweaking the advanced features of IE.
Ahh, but here is where the ASP-model of software really gives Google a huge advantage over Microsoft's more traditional model. If MS tweaks the IE rendering engine to "break" a Google web app (be it GMail or this new office thingy) who does this affect and can Google respond? Well it only affects people after they've updated Windows. Google can respond by changing the code on their server and having it instantly affect all users. They can do this overnight and without anybody's permission. It takes months for Windows updates to trickle through the home user base and sometimes even longer before sys admins let it trickle through the corporate user base.
This would not be a game that Microsoft would want to play since they could spend a ton of effort only to see their hole patched without anybody even noticing. Not to mention that since Google relies on widely used features that are support by many browsers, breaking a Google web app will likely break many other web apps. The providers of these other apps probably don't have the resources to patch IE problems as quickly as Google does. So that could be another dangerous risk to take, suddenly giving IE a reputation of breaking lots of random websites every time you do a Windows Update. Those same sites will probably work just fine in Firefox or Opera and the providers of those apps will suddenly have a very good reason to advertise this fact!
Perhaps it's time FIREFOX/Mozilla developers stop adding useless features, and concentrate on making FIREFOX *fast*?
I think that is exactly their focus. Compare any of the 1.0.x builds vs. the 1.5 beta . The beta is much faster. Part of how they've made it faster is by keeping it slim, i.e. minimal features. Of course more extensions means that those extensions will require some RAM and some CPU cycles. Just how much RAM/CPU they consume is a function of the extensions, not Firefox. Of course there is some overhead for Firefox to "manage" the extensions, but many people have noted that they have lots of extensions without performance problems so that overhead is not too bad.
Because it's just an excuse to raise prices across the board.
Exactly, check out Bronfman's quote:
Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more.
Notice he didn't say some songs should be more and some songs should be less. If he was really advocating a more "free" market for music, then I'd be able to find obscure songs from the 70s for about a penny each. What this guy wants to do is the opposite of a free market. He wants to use the major label's oligopolic powers to raise prices arbitrarily.
That's a nice idea, but it's wrong. They aren't losing grounds in Office to anything, and that includes anything using an open format. Rich Internet Applications, like GMail and Flickr, are a threat, but not because they use any kind of web standards. In fact, they all use XmlHttpRequest, an API introduced by Microsoft that is not part of any standard, but has been embraced by Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. They aren't losing grounds to Linux on the desktop and most of Linux's corporate adoption was at the expense of Unix, not Windows.
The whole point of the article, the whole point of how Netscape first, and now Google, pose a threat to Windows is that if people can do everything through a browser, then Microsoft's hold on the world becomes more precarious. Its not broken. If the browser doesn't have to be IE, then their grip is even more precarious, but its still not broken. Its not until the average person buys a computer that does not run any MS software that their monopoly starts to break.
Its not Microsft vs. open standards. It might not even be Microsoft vs. Web Apps. Right now it's still mostly Microsoft vs. Google's Web Apps. Google uses open standards only where it helps them. Look at GMail. You can get it through POP, but you lose the interface, search, organizational features. You don't see Google exposing some open protocol to enable these things so that you could read your mail in Outlook Express and get all the functionality of the GMail web interface. They may allow you to get to your mail using some other company's application, but they really want you to use their application. Their application happens to be on the web. Google gives you OS/browser options for running their programs, just like once upon a time a selling point of Microsoft was that they gave you hardware options for running their programs.
Our approach is to extract queries from the ongoing stream of closed captions, issue the queries in real time to a news search engine on the web, and postprocess the top results to determine the news articles that we show to the user.
This sounds like exactly what a search on Google News does. If you're not convinced then keep reading:
As is common in the IR literature [18] the inverse document frequency idf of a term is a function of the frequency f of the term in the collection and the number N of documents in the collection. Specifically, we use the function log(N/(f+1)). Since we do not have a large amount of closed caption data available, we used Google's web collection to compute the idf of the terms. This means N was over 2 billion, and f was the frequency of a term in this collection. Unfortunately, there is a difference in word use in written web pages and spoken TV broadcasts. As a result we built a small set of words that are common in captions but rare in the web data. Examples of such words are reporter and analyst. All of the algorithms below ignore the terms on this stopword list.
So they found TV-specific stop words to use in combination to searching Google's web index.
All this research still begs the question of why would they need their TV station(s). This research seemed was focussed on complimenting existing TV content. It does not provide content on its own, it only supplements it. Also, it finds web pages. TVs do not display web pages and various attempts to marry these technologies have not fared well. Of course I'm also assuming that they would really want to show web pages, not just some targeted ad.
Personally I don't care if Microsoft or Googles dies/wins/{insert melodramatic verb here}. But this could be very interesting. Google has been able to take an unusual business tactic of promoting lots of disparate innovations and then trying to find ways to monetize them. To be honest, it hasn't really worked all that well -- yet. Their lack of monetary success on these fronts has been easily hidden by their massive success in their "old" business: search related advertising. That old business brings in billions that fund all the new businesses, that don't bring in much money (yet.) So what happens if Google has a down quarter where their revenues slipped significantly. Their revenues have generally gone up every quarter since their IPO, so that would be a huge change. It would be interesting to see if they would try to cut costs if their revenues were slipping. They might mean less Google Labs projects. Or maybe they would stick with their same business model, even though that might mean a huge drop in their stock price. Either way, it would be interesting to see how they "grow up" in the face of real adversity.
Get angry with a government that is too weak to enforce laws that are supposed to hinder actions that are natural to business but wrong in the eyes of society
Better yet, get angry when the government hinders business just because what the business is doing is "wrong" in the eyes of society.
The main reason this can't work, is that Google already owns the mindshare of the internet.
Umm, what year is it? This sounds like the kind of meaningless statements commonly made during the dot com boom. Hopefully we've learned something from the bursting of that bubble. It's not mindshare that mattters, it's money. Microsoft might lose lots of money from buying AOL, but maybe what they care about is making Google lose money. If the article is right (big if btw) then taking a 25% chunk out of Google's income would be the goal. Microsoft has certainly shown a willingness to lose money just so that a compettitor would lose money as well, even if they lost more money than the compettitor. Look at Netscape vs. IE or Playstation 3 vs. X-Box 2 for a more modern example. They have the resources (giant pile 'o cash plus massive continuous Windows/Office revenue) to do this.
Well then by that standard, Chris Capossela, one of Microsoft's VPs, would say that MS Office is not worth trying anymore:
"When we asked people what would you like us to do in the next version of Office, nine times out of 10 people have named something that is already in the product"
So it sounds like 90% of Office users haven't been able to find how to do something even after years of using MS Office. Maybe they should all wipe MS Office off their computers and maybe MS Office is not nearly as good as you'd like to think.
That's a nice link. I was really surprised by how Mozilla/Seamonkey users have such issues with Firefox. It seemed like few people used Mozilla because it did something for them that Firefox/Thunderbird doesn't, but instead because they don't like Firefox/Thunderbird for whatever reason (extensions, UI issues, etc.) I wonder if there's a Firefox Wiki where people list why they don't like Mozilla but like Firefox!
I guess it shouldn't be surprising that there would be a backlash against Firefox given its popularity. I guess now Mozill is much more 31337. Just wait until Flock comes out...
The answer to your question is no. Java has clearly borrowed some things from C#, though C# itself heavily borrows from Java. The EJB 3.0 spec for example will make use of dependency injection. Take a look at Groovy which will be integrated into Java (javax.script in 6.0.)
Now it is true that as a more widely used (on the Enterprsie level) language, Java is going to move more slowly than C#. C# is newer and trying to take mindshare from Java, so it must move faster. Just having a great IDE is not enough.
This article is so full of false statements that I don't know where to begin. Heck it even contradicts itself. First they say:
By choosing Intel, Apple gets access to the highly-anticipated chip code-named Yonah, a low-power chip with a dual core processor... AMD does not have a direct Yonah competitor
Then they say
AMD.. is currently developing a low-power, dual-core chip for thin and light notebooks, company spokesman Damon Muzny says.
Ummm, sounds like a Yonah compettitor to me! Then there's this nugget:
Dual-core chips, which both AMD and Intel are emphasizing... are currently throwing a lot of heat, so both CPUs cannot operate at their maximum clock speeds.
This is true of Intel's Pentium D chips, but is simply false when talking about AMD Athlon64-X2 chips. Just take a look at a
power consumption comparison. The X2s consume about the same amount of power as their single core brethren, which is already way-less than plain 'ol Pentium 4s.
Hey some else read the ars article. I am VERY skeptical of their claims in that article:
The designer has complete control of the appearance and behavior of the controls without writing a single piece of code. Once ready to hand off to the developer, the designer simply saves the project using Sparkle and it creates a C# project ready for the developer to use.
IDEs have been trying to do exactly this for a decade. It never works because that "C# project ready for the developer" winds up being a lot of crappy, generated code that the developer spends a ton of time ripping out anyways.
This has always been Microsoft's strategy, not some reaction to Google. They had to kill Netscape because they feared "browser based OS", i.e. all applications running inside a browser thus minimalizaing the importance of the OS. They've introduced numerous anti-standards (HTC for example) in HTML, so that most websites would only work in IE. ActiveX claimed to be about "a richer internet experience" but hide the curious side effect of making this richer experience only available to Windows users. XAML is really just a redux of ActiveX, but maybe will less potential spyware opportunities.
Fine. Let me play devil's (Apple's) advocate... Your S60 will not play songs from the iTunes Music Store. So if there is value in playing songs from the iTunes Music Store, then there is extra value in the ROKR over your S60. So is there value in playing songs from the iTunes Music Store? Well the iTunes Music Store has sold over 250 million songs (actually probably a lot more than that, I think 250 million was passed in January.) So the ROKR does offer something new, and given the popularity of the iTunes Music Store, it arguably offers something better.
Re:I'm seeing a pattern here.
on
Office 12 Exposed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Because Office hasn't been "missing" much functionality for about ten years now, yet MS still needs to get people to buy the new version. Office 97 had all the functionality ever needed by most users.
Slashdot Mirror
If you buy a song from ITMS, you can burn it to a CD. I think there is some limitation on how often you do this (though I think the limitation applies to playlists.) It doesn't look like you can do the same thing with the videos from ITMS, i.e. burn them as a video CD and/or a DVD. Personally I would want to be able to play a TV show I bought, on my home theater or in my bedroom. Having to buy a new iPod, download the video to the iPod from my computer, take the iPod to my living room and connect it, get up to press pause on the iPod when I want to get a drink from the kitchen, etc. does not seem like a good way to go. Burning it to a DVD and popping that in to my DVD player seems a lot better.
Seriously, Bill Gates would love to use a comment like this to "prove" why proprietary/commercial/closed software will always be superior to FOSS. Commercial software will always concentrate on giving the consumer what they want, because that's what drives sales.
Totally agree. I had a DirecTV/TiVo setup at my old house. I was holding out until the price of the HD version came down a lot. Then I moved and took a look at Comcast's HD-PVR offering. One look was all it took and it was all over. I called DirecTV to cancel my subscription and they asked me why I was cancelling. I told them that I wanted an HD-PVR without having to pay $1000 for their offering. They offered to chop $300 off the price, but that was still not good enough. I thought I would really miss TiVo's interface, but I haven't. The only thing I wish I could change abot my Comcast HD-PVR is that it doesn't allow for picture-in-picture, even though it has two tuners (and allows for two shows to be recorded at the same time.) I was told that there would probably be a software update that would enable this in the future. The home media option would be nice too, but this was disabled on my DirecTV/TiVo box anyways so I'm not missing anything there.
Even more recently, it was bloggers that started the cries of outrage over the US government's handling of Hurricane Katrina. Again, mainstream media is very reluctant to openly criticize politicians for fear of being accused of lacking impartiality and (more importantly) because they must rely on these same politicians and don't want to burn bridges. Look at 9/11. It tooks months before criticism grew and it had to have its roots with the victims' families. This time things were much, much quicker because of bloggers. Bloggers don't care about being impartial and don't care if they upset politicians.
In both cases, "the news" changed because of bloggers. That's where the power of blogging comes from. It allows a broader range of people to define what is news.
*cough* The Strokes *cough*
- Legislation telling companies how to run their business is bad. The government has no right to do this (commerce clause is sorely abused to provide the legal grounds.) It can only lead to abuse as it gives the government an easy way to favor one company over others. This inevitably happens because of corruption.
- If I sell CDs and want to put some kind of copy-protection on them, I should be able to do it. If the consumer doesn't like that, then they can simply not buy my CD. Nobody should force me to sell my CDs in some government ordained format. I should be free to sell them however I want and let consumers decide.
- Similarly, if I am selling content (music, movies, etc.) onlines, I should be able to put whatever copy protection/DRM I want on them.
- If I am selling DRM'd content, I should not have to label it as such. Again people don't have to buy it. If I sell it and they can't use it and I won't accept a return, there are existing laws about fraud that cover such situations. No new laws are needed.
Now here's where this guy starts getting things wrong:- If somebody defeats my DRM, that's my problem. I should not expect the government to protect me here. If I'm really worried about people breaking DRM, then I better come up with a really great DRM or re-consider my business model.
- The existing content industries should not be protectd against disruptive technologies. It is quite possible that they will not be able to adapt to such technologies and their businesses will eventually fail. This is neither a good or a bad thing, it's just business.
- Similarly, emerging business models should not be punished just because they hurt existing companies. You can try to make analogies like "they're stealing property, etc." but these are weak arguments. Established businesses always suffer at the hands of disruptive technologies. It may not seem fair, but it's not the government's place to protect one company over another.
- Established companies can adapt to new technologies without help from the government. Let them introduce their DRM if they think that's their only route. That doesn't mean the government must protect this DRM. Let the existing companies compete, just don't draft laws to give them the upper hand. Similarly don't draft laws to "level" the playing ground or any other kind of euphemism for government favoritism. Let the market decide.
This guy tries to use free market principles to argue for government protectionism. The Germans used to have a term for this it was called it National SocialismIf your only measure of utility is data storage capacity, then you might be correct. I'm guessing there are some other measures though.
Personally, I bought a Nano for jogging. It's very light and much less likely to have vibration related issues than a hard drive based mp3 player. I had almost bought a shuffle for the same reason instead, but luckily waited until the Nano came out. I generally jog in sweat pants, with an old t-shirt and a heavily worn cap on, so fashion is not exactly high on my list.
Turns out it's just a distribution deal. Downloading the Java JRE will give users the option to also download the Google toolbar. Similarly, the Google toolbar will eventually give users the option to download OpenOffice. There was some hintint at future collaborations between the two companies, but that's it for now.
This would not be a game that Microsoft would want to play since they could spend a ton of effort only to see their hole patched without anybody even noticing. Not to mention that since Google relies on widely used features that are support by many browsers, breaking a Google web app will likely break many other web apps. The providers of these other apps probably don't have the resources to patch IE problems as quickly as Google does. So that could be another dangerous risk to take, suddenly giving IE a reputation of breaking lots of random websites every time you do a Windows Update. Those same sites will probably work just fine in Firefox or Opera and the providers of those apps will suddenly have a very good reason to advertise this fact!
That's a nice idea, but it's wrong. They aren't losing grounds in Office to anything, and that includes anything using an open format. Rich Internet Applications, like GMail and Flickr, are a threat, but not because they use any kind of web standards. In fact, they all use XmlHttpRequest, an API introduced by Microsoft that is not part of any standard, but has been embraced by Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. They aren't losing grounds to Linux on the desktop and most of Linux's corporate adoption was at the expense of Unix, not Windows.
The whole point of the article, the whole point of how Netscape first, and now Google, pose a threat to Windows is that if people can do everything through a browser, then Microsoft's hold on the world becomes more precarious. Its not broken. If the browser doesn't have to be IE, then their grip is even more precarious, but its still not broken. Its not until the average person buys a computer that does not run any MS software that their monopoly starts to break.
Its not Microsft vs. open standards. It might not even be Microsoft vs. Web Apps. Right now it's still mostly Microsoft vs. Google's Web Apps. Google uses open standards only where it helps them. Look at GMail. You can get it through POP, but you lose the interface, search, organizational features. You don't see Google exposing some open protocol to enable these things so that you could read your mail in Outlook Express and get all the functionality of the GMail web interface. They may allow you to get to your mail using some other company's application, but they really want you to use their application. Their application happens to be on the web. Google gives you OS/browser options for running their programs, just like once upon a time a selling point of Microsoft was that they gave you hardware options for running their programs.
All this research still begs the question of why would they need their TV station(s). This research seemed was focussed on complimenting existing TV content. It does not provide content on its own, it only supplements it. Also, it finds web pages. TVs do not display web pages and various attempts to marry these technologies have not fared well. Of course I'm also assuming that they would really want to show web pages, not just some targeted ad.
Personally I don't care if Microsoft or Googles dies/wins/{insert melodramatic verb here}. But this could be very interesting. Google has been able to take an unusual business tactic of promoting lots of disparate innovations and then trying to find ways to monetize them. To be honest, it hasn't really worked all that well -- yet. Their lack of monetary success on these fronts has been easily hidden by their massive success in their "old" business: search related advertising. That old business brings in billions that fund all the new businesses, that don't bring in much money (yet.) So what happens if Google has a down quarter where their revenues slipped significantly. Their revenues have generally gone up every quarter since their IPO, so that would be a huge change. It would be interesting to see if they would try to cut costs if their revenues were slipping. They might mean less Google Labs projects. Or maybe they would stick with their same business model, even though that might mean a huge drop in their stock price. Either way, it would be interesting to see how they "grow up" in the face of real adversity.
Of course you'll probably actually get modded down, but you're right on man.
That's a nice link. I was really surprised by how Mozilla/Seamonkey users have such issues with Firefox. It seemed like few people used Mozilla because it did something for them that Firefox/Thunderbird doesn't, but instead because they don't like Firefox/Thunderbird for whatever reason (extensions, UI issues, etc.) I wonder if there's a Firefox Wiki where people list why they don't like Mozilla but like Firefox!
I guess it shouldn't be surprising that there would be a backlash against Firefox given its popularity. I guess now Mozill is much more 31337. Just wait until Flock comes out...
The answer to your question is no. Java has clearly borrowed some things from C#, though C# itself heavily borrows from Java. The EJB 3.0 spec for example will make use of dependency injection. Take a look at Groovy which will be integrated into Java (javax.script in 6.0.)
Now it is true that as a more widely used (on the Enterprsie level) language, Java is going to move more slowly than C#. C# is newer and trying to take mindshare from Java, so it must move faster. Just having a great IDE is not enough.
This has always been Microsoft's strategy, not some reaction to Google. They had to kill Netscape because they feared "browser based OS", i.e. all applications running inside a browser thus minimalizaing the importance of the OS. They've introduced numerous anti-standards (HTC for example) in HTML, so that most websites would only work in IE. ActiveX claimed to be about "a richer internet experience" but hide the curious side effect of making this richer experience only available to Windows users. XAML is really just a redux of ActiveX, but maybe will less potential spyware opportunities.
Fine. Let me play devil's (Apple's) advocate... Your S60 will not play songs from the iTunes Music Store. So if there is value in playing songs from the iTunes Music Store, then there is extra value in the ROKR over your S60. So is there value in playing songs from the iTunes Music Store? Well the iTunes Music Store has sold over 250 million songs (actually probably a lot more than that, I think 250 million was passed in January.) So the ROKR does offer something new, and given the popularity of the iTunes Music Store, it arguably offers something better.
Because Office hasn't been "missing" much functionality for about ten years now, yet MS still needs to get people to buy the new version. Office 97 had all the functionality ever needed by most users.