1. Piss off your customers 2. Lose them to competitors 3. Save on support and usage costs, now that your most expensively eccentric customers are a burden on your competitor's network instead of your own. 4. Profit!
Have you ever wondered why so many tech-related service organizations, like ISPs, have such geek-hostile policies? It isn't all incompetence, some of them really *are* asking us to take our business elsewhere.
These companies make their money on averages. The average user pays x dollars and costs y:yx dollars to support. A geek still pays x dollars but due to their generally heavier, and less mainstream, usage patterns they can cost far more than they pay in to the system to support. If service providers can selectively move expensive geeks off of their customer list and onto their competitors', without irritating the average customer, they stand to save themselves a lot of money, and maybe even drive up their competitor's costs at the same time.
The chief problem with this tactic is that it can generate negative word of mouth. But obviously a lot of companies aren't worried enough about that to let it stop them.
Macrovision's CEO's argument with Jobs seems to rest on a faulty foundation. Jobs didn't call for the death of DRM, at least not directly, he called for the big 4 to license their music for sale online without DRM.
If, like most people reading this, you consider DRM a negative for the consumer, then you'd naturally think DRM-free licensing would obviously lead to the death of DRM, at least for music. But if, like Macrovision's CEO, you claim that DRM actually adds value for the consumer, then you should have nothing to fear from competition with non-DRMed sales. If a consumer thinks it is a better value to rent music with DRM, then they will do so regardless of weather music available for sale elsewhere has DRM or not.
The idea that DRMed music cannot be successfully sold when non-DRMed music is also available is only valid if you assume that DRM has a negative impact on the consumer large enough to overwhelm any positives it might offer (like the ability to facilitate online rentals). The fact that Macrovision's CEO equates allowing DRM-free sales opportunities to denying DRMed sales opportunities, while asserting that DRM is a positive for the consumer, would seem to indicate that he is either arguing dishonestly or hasn't really thought this out (or both).
That said, Macrovision's CEO's position actually suggests a compromise (if we assume that Macrovision's CEO is honest in his assertion that he believes DRM adds value for the consumer, and that decision makers at the big 4 agree with him, both of which are far from certain imho): If Apple were to license the RIAA (and it's international equivalents) the right to sub-license FairPlay DRM to anyone they liked, in return for the RIAA's members giving Apple license to sell all their music DRM-free under terms no worse than their current ~70% cut, then everybody wins (after a fashion). Apple gets to sell music DRM-free, the RIAA&co get to sell/rent DRMed music for the iPod under whatever terms they like, and the customer gets to have their choice.
Quoth the article: "To put this in to perspective, if BayTSP were trying to bust me for doing drugs, it'd be like getting arrested because I was hanging out with some dealers, but they never saw me using, buying, or selling any drugs."
That may not be the best choice of examples for a reductio ad absurdum argument. Remember, the war on drugs has given us all kinds of asinine laws to let courts prosecute suspected drug dealers that they can't actually catch dealing drugs. Just possessing large sums of cash can be a crime these days, even if there is no evidence that it was gained illegally; that's at least as much of an unjustified leap as claiming that being connected to a bittorrent tracker implies you're actually up/down-loading the tracked file(s).
The only real difference is that legislators made (or at least endorsed) that cash=drugs leap, while the media companies' minions made the more current bittorrent leap.
Basically, some bluster about exactly which part of the lock-in they're complaining about and what seems like an intentional misinterpretation of Jobs' letter as a sign of acceding to their demands aside, it says: 1) They're not interested in going after the big 4 record companies, since they don't sell directly to consumers; and thus any contractual obligations to the big 4 that prevent Apple from giving the Norwegian Consumer Council what they want are solely Apple's problem. 2) They know other companies are doing the exact same thing as Apple with regards to DRM, but 'everybody's doing it' is no excuse, and they're only going after Apple.
Honestly, to me, this is smelling more and more like the big 4 are using the Norwegians as a proxy to try to legally neuter Apple, so that they can retain sole control of the world's DRMed music for themselves.
It seems fairly obvious at this point that Apple will have to withdraw from Norway come October, and I for one will be interested to see what the Norwegians do then. If they go after Microsoft on the same grounds, trying to force them to license Zune's DRM to all comers, and license Plays4Sure for use with OSes other than Windows, then they'll be somewhat redeemed in my eyes. If they do nothing, or keep going after only Apple despite their withdrawal, then we'll all know in whose pocket the Norwegian Consumer Council resides.
I'm still undecided as to weather that's really a good idea in the long run. In immediate personal terms , it would be a nice option to have, and might even spur me to finally get an iTunes account. However, looking at the bigger picture, there are a few issues that worry me.
First comes the legal situation; As the parent mentioned, it is quite possible that Apple's contracts with the big 4 record companies require that their competition not be allowed to sell through iTunes with better terms than they receive, and selling without DRM could certainly be considered better terms for the customer. I'd certainly have considered putting something like that in if I were a record company exec or lawyer.
Second is complexity for the user; DVD Jon says "This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users", which is both misleading and false imho. Microsoft's implementation of variable 'squirting' privileges for their Zune music was completely transparent to users... that was the problem! People were buying some songs with less than the advertised access privileges, and had no method of figuring out which ones they were other than trial and error. How much more confusing for the user can you get? The goal of adding DRM free music isn't to be user transparent, but to make the user aware that some songs can now be used more freely than others. And that new class of music that is paid for and downloaded online, yet can be used freely, inherently adds complexity to the user experience. It's not all that much, but simplicity and consistency are the often overlooked secrets to apple's recent success imho, and they should never ever be sacrificed without serious consideration.
And finally, there is also the question of leverage. If Apple maintains an all-or-nothing stance on DRM, they could conceivably turn any one of the big 4's caving in into *all* of the big 4 allowing DRM-less sales, just by converting iTunes to be entirely DRM-free and forcing the remaining labels to either go DRM-free of loose millions of dollars and priceless mind/market share by being locked out of iTunes while their competition profits from it. Going DRM-less piecemeal, with no ally among the majors, could easily dilute Apple's leverage against the big 4 labels, and let them hold on to many of their demands for DRM much longer.
When you stop to think about it, the indy tracks people are demanding Apple provide DRM-free right now are already available elsewhere without DRM (and since they're DRM-free, there's nothing stopping you from putting them in your iTunes/iPod yourself), and they're generally already available on iTunes as well with DRM as well. Getting them on iTunes without DRM is a fairly insignificant battle, and if winning it could potentially cost us the ability to truly win the war against DRM in any reasonable timeframe then it just isn't a battle worth fighting right now.
A Mac running Windows via Boot Camp is not running the OS in a virtual machine. It's just using the same kind of BIOS-compatibility layer that any other PC with EFI uses to boot Windows.
But, in any case, the idea of paying $400 for Vista Ultimate + $80 for Parallels, just to run the occasional windows only binary on your mac, is incredibly noxious.
If you look at the actual 1018 movies available to rent on their site, and sort by price, you'll see only the bottom ~10% (110 movies) are available at $1.99. Then 208 movies are available at $2.99. And the remaining 700 movies, the vast majority of their collection, including anything most people would be interested in watching, are $3.99 to rent (more than double the advertised starting price).
I've said before that I would only be interested in online rentals if they can get within spitting distance of the $1.xx per disc I pay at Blockbuster Online or Netflix. $1.99 for everything would just barely meet that qualification, $1.99 for a few token b-movies (or c- or d-movies), and twice that for everything else does not qualify.
(Of course, I have neither a Windows box, nor a Tivo, so the service would be useless to me anyway. I wonder if/when companies are finally going to realize that a disproportionate number of early adopters are mac users...)
Actually, you're wrong, the iPod supports plain old MPEG-4 simple profile (which is basically a subset of modern ASP divx), not just h264. So, if you really want to compare DivX and h264 playback power consumption, you should do it on the same device with the same battery; since comparing apples to oranges means nothing.
I would actually be interested in seeing such a comparison, if anyone watching has a iPod/w video and a couple of days to kill watching the same videos encoded at the same resolution in two different formats until the battery dies.
Also, Apple lists the current generation 5.5 iPods as having 3.5 or 6.5 hours of video playback time on a full charge, for the 30GB and 80GB models respectively (although the previous generation was closer to your 2 hour figure iirc).
Well, IANAL, but looking at the summary of the AVC license here, specifically the portion quoted below, it seems like royalties are only required to be paid by "end product manufacturers". You could certainly argue that source code is not the end product, and thus you could distribute it without limit. And if you want to distribute object code as well, the only limit would be that no single person who builds it should distribute more than 100,000 compiled copies unless they want to pay royalties. I seem to recall that some existing OSS MPEG-4 related projects distribute source code only for that sort of reason.
Royalties to be paid by end product manufacturers for an encoder, a decoder or both ("unit") begin at US $0.20 per unit after the first 100,000 units each year. There are no royalties on the first 100,000 units each year. Above 5 million units per year, the royalty is US $0.10 per unit.
the best way to encode a video would be h.264+aac, probably wrapped in ogm or mkv, but could also work as avi or mov..ogm?.mkv?.avi?.mov? So basically you'll use anything *but* the actual standard MPEG-4 container that's designed to carry h264/aac streams? What's wrong with.mp4?
This is a somewhat separate rant and not really directed at the parent, but it seems like between pirates sticking with their habitual use of Xvid/DivX in avi, and OSS fanatics refusing to use anything non-OSS in favor of Theora in.ogg or.mkv, the world's geeks are actually doing more to set back standardization of digital video than big companies and their DRM. How's that for a turnaround from the audio world where geeks chose mp3 and industry followed!
MPEG-4 standards, specifically h264/aac streams in an.mp4 container, provide the best quality and functionality you can get today (.mkv is nice but it doesn't do anything.mp4 couldn't with the right tools, and neither Xvid/DivX or Theora can touch h264's quality/bitrate), and they are completely standardized and free to use for distributions of up to 100,000 codecs per year afaik.
If we'd all pick up the MPEG-4 stack the way we all standardized on.mp3s, then the digital video world would get a lot simpler.
Imagine a world where every camcorder, or DVD player, or computer, or PMP, or digital camera, or cell phone, or what not, could record and play back in the same interoperable high quality/bitrate video format with no special file conversions or re-encoding, just like all of those devices support.mp3 today...
This is being spun as if it's an anti-DRM move, when it looks more like the opposite to me.
As things are now, the dominance of Apple's iPod, and their exclusive ability to produce DRMed tracks for it, gives them a lot of leverage with a music industry obsessed with DRM. But if you think for a second, you'll notice that the music industry is obsessed by DRM as a means of control, which they loose when Apple leverages hordes of iPod users to keep music prices low.
The obvious solution for the music industry (so obvious that even the big labels are reportedly mulling it over now) is to just release your tracks without DRM, and tell Apple what to go do with themselves when their licensee to sell your music expires. But that means you loose the control you feel you gain via DRM at the same time you destroy whatever leverage over you Apple gains via DRM.
But if you can get the government to force Apple to license their DRM to all comers, then you can maintain your control via DRM, while still destroying Apple's control over DRM. And that's not all, you can even reduce Apple's still dangerously high market share by putting them in a situation where every other player on the market is going to license both Fairplay and Microsoft's DRM, forcing Apple to either pay Microsoft a cut of every iPod sale to get their DRM and compete (in which case MS may well make more money off iPod sales than their own players due to sheer numbers!), or be the only player on the market that can't handle every form of DRMed music.
This legislation not only saves DRM by undermining everyone but the big labels control of it, it also undermines the only force in digital music that is pressing for low prices (because they make their real money on players anyway, and thus benefit from higher adoption more than from high prices) by forcing them to subsidize their own competition to remain competitive. How the hell is that pro-consumer?
If they want to protect their people from DRM, they should outlaw *all* DRM, not just force their licensing terms on Apple's.
Another possibility is that the force of habits in transportation methods picked up living in one area is predominant over actual access to places worth getting to by foot in a new area. Perhaps the teens in your study have built a habit of not walking, and would thus remain sedentary and overweight even if they were moved to a more tightly laid out area, as the people in TFA's study did, and people who make a habit of walking would keep doing so to some degree even if they were placed in the burbs.
I know I'm solidly in the burbs at the moment (albeit only in the 2nd town out for the city, not the deep-burbs), and I still walk to work every day, and occasionally walk to a restaurant for lunch when the weather is decent and dry (the lack of sidewalks in places can make snow and mud a problem). But I'm the only person I work with who seems to do either, even though I know at least one coworker lived closer to the office than I do.
There are places to walk here (5 parks of various sorts, several office complexes, a bank, one community college, one huge electronics store, 3 convenience stores, a video rental place, a hair salon, 2 pizza places, 2 Mexican restaurants, a Korean restaurant, a middle eastern restaurant, a diner, a handful of fast food places, etc... all within less than a mile of my house), people just don't make a habit of walking to them.
Those who think that this would somehow immediately undermine Apple's dominance with the iPod are misguided as to why the iPod is successful imho.
The tinfoil headgear sporting subset of/.ers might like to see Apple's DRM solely as a lock-in scheme, and while no doubt Apple finds any lock-in a reassuring safety net in case they do someday drop the ball on iPod design, for the moment (and for the foreseeable future with the iPhone) Apple doesn't *need* lock-in. The iPod isn't selling because people have huge collections of.m4ps they need to keep compatibility with, it's selling because it's slickly good at what it does and it's a brand a lot of people are pleasantly familiar with.
The simple reality is that if the Music companies start allowing DRM-less downloads, then Apple will probably make even *more* money selling iPods than they are now, as more people start to buy unencrypted music via their computers to put on said iPods. In the long term their share of music sales may be hurt, but as the world's 4th largest seller of music, they already have plenty of momentum and market power; combined with their slick store and integration in iTunes, I would think they can do just fine in a less partitioned market, and retain a good deal of influence with the music industry selling unencrypted music.
I don't think the future is that bleak, we just need the wireless equivalent of USB to pop up (which won't be wireless USB as we know it now, given that it only does data, not power).
All it takes is a cheaply available and relatively generalized wireless power/data standard, with wide enough support that it becomes in a device maker's interests to leverage everyone's preexisting chargers for their new products. In fact, it seems likely that given the lack of physical plug designs to wrangle over for smaller devices looking to cram in extra functionality, a wireless data/power standard could easily become even more universal than current wired USB.
I for one greatly look forward to the day when my cellphone, iPod, laptop, wireless keyboard/mouse, camera, etc all charge whenever they're near a compatible charger. It could easily lead to a tremendous proliferation of more convenient personal technology that I would love to see.
Japan, where Sony first balked at working with Apple, *was* an established market when Apple decided to launch without Sony. Almost everyone had a music-phone, and people in Japan actually *used them*, to the point that a lot of analysts thought the iPod was doomed in Japan even before they knew Sony was holding out. Apple still has only about half the market there, as opposed to ~80% in other areas, but they eventually got their songs, on nice consistent terms.
The fact is, people want a product they can at least pretend to understand, and *consistency* gives them that. The average person doesn't even use the online music store associated with their player, beyond perhaps buying a handful of songs to try it out; most people won't even notice if a store has 1 million songs rather than 1.3 million. It's just not nearly as big a deal as you're making it.
The loss of a few hundred thousand songs is a temporary hiccup that will eventually correct itself if the product is impressive enough in other terms (it isn't quite yet in this case imho, but MS has to address that problem anyway if they want to gain market share), the loss of consistency in what is allowed by DRM will mar the system permanently.
You say: I guarantee you if Sony and Universal music were not available in the Zune store, you'd be sitting here laughing at Microsoft because their music selection was non-existant. And you wouldn't buy one. And neither would anyone else.
The thing is, I'm *already* not buying one, and neither is anyone else for the most part. MS needs to *improve* their products to change that, not cripple them further so they'll have access to more songs to fail to sell. If MS can make a system slick enough to beat the iPod at it's own game, signing on record labels will take care of itself; if they can't then no number of songs will gain them market share.
If MS is ever going to take market share from the iPod, which is clearly their goal, they need to build a consistent, easy to understand device with at least one major advantage over Apple's offerings to overcome people's general tendency to stick with what they know. Wireless could have been that advantage, but they lost their focus and DRMed it into uselessness, and now they're destroying their chance at consistency as well.
The grandparent was referring more to MS's long term behavior in relation to DRM than to the current situation. But even in the immediate sense, MS might have benefitted from showing a bit of spine.
Basically, Microsoft has chosen to: 1) put in stupid DRM features, 2) *and* watch as people continue to buy iPods because when they buy something form iTunes they don't have to guess which of a handful of DRM policies dictates how they can use a particular song, 3) *and* continue to not sell their devices at all.
The whole point of Microsoft's tanking of Plays for Sure in favor of Zune was supposed to be a smooth consistent user experience. Giving half the Sony and Universal tracks you sell different restrictions than the others without telling the buyer is *not* smooth or consistent. They'd have been better off just skipping those tracks altogether if needs be.
That's basically what Apple has done in that kind of situation with Sony in Japan and Austrailia. If a label doesn't want to deal with your terms, just launch without them, and if you start making money they'll cave in eventually. Sacrificing usability for one label's whims is a loosing proposition in the long run; I would think that's especially true when you're trying to buy your way into the market, as Microsoft seems to be in this case.
It isn't MS's fault the music is restricted, any more than it's Apple's in their case
I'd argue that it *is* Microsoft's fault to some degree. I can't think of any major technology company that's been going in for DRM as heavily as they have been. Even Sony was happy with a mere root kit for their DRM, and backed off when enough people complained; whereas in Vista MS has added not one but two levels of access *beyond* the formerly root-equivalent Administrator level to support their DRM schemes, and requires specialized hardware support right down to the silicon for HD content's DRM.
Microsoft has tremendous influence in the market, they could have done a lot to keep things relatively sane if they tailored their systems to the needs of their customers rather than the media industry. And, with just a little marketing savvy, they could have made a mint doing it as well, as Apple's phenomenal success with kinder gentler and more consistent DRM schemes has shown.
The media companies may be pushing this bullshit too hard to stop entirely, but the tech companies owe it to their shareholders as much as their customers to push back for solutions that are, if not entirely and ideally free, at least *usable*.
Zodiac? Perhaps, although it's political enough that I worry they might mess it up to get it made.
What I'd really like to see is The Big U on the big screen. It'd be like Real Genius, only with railguns, computer worms, neon signs, pipe organs, and radioactive rats instead of a mere laser for the mcguffin.
Since Roombas can be made to connect to computers via bluetooth adapters, it stands to reason that if they are sufficiently programable, they could be made to respond directly to the Wiimote via bluetooth, without a Mac playing middleman. This might even eliminate a lot of the the lag the story mentions.
iTunes still supports more or less the same set of 3rd party MP3 players they used to however many years ago when the iPod came out. Since the iPod got big, Apple stopped writing drivers for other peoples players, and the player manufacturers stopped developing their own iTunes plug-ins with Apple's SDKs for fear of assisting 'the competition' (a brain-dead move if you ask me, there are bound to be some disgruntled iPod owners who don't dislike iTunes, and if one of the also-rans had good iTunes support they could scoop them up easily).
I know, I almost got a used 20GB Zen from a friend for about the same price as the iPod Shuffle I ended up getting. But when I looked at the Zen's support under iTunes, the plugin hadn't been updated since the days of iTunes 3.0, and lacked support for basic things like playlists, or adding the first song to an empty player (you had to use some other software to load the first song back onto the player if you emptied it completely, the plug-in only worked with a populated device). And as much as people like to complain about it's minor quirks, and as much as I preferred SJMP back in the day when Apple bought and reworked it, iTunes has really grown on me over the years.
So I went with the shuffle, and never looked back. Given that it's become a more or less permanent fixture in my pocket, I'm actually really glad I got something small and rugged.
There may be some official flash codec from Adobe that you have to pay for, I don't know, but there are definitely other ways to play flash in quicktime.
Quicktime itself can already play older non-video flash presentations. And the flash video codec that Democracy player is asking you to let it install is Perian, an open source project that integrates libavcodec and a bunch of other video related OSS libraries into a Quicktime component.
The Sun-Times is not on that list because they're being sued by some of their advertisers for inflating their circulation numbers, and are in the middle of an audit of those figures.
The last time their reported circulation was on the list, in 2004, they reported 481,798 (which would be #20 on the 2006 top 100 list). However they supposedly over-reported by about 23%; if that's correct it would put their actual circulation down around #30.
Ok, now imagine that your employer: 1. Stopped paying you. 2. Started giving you pointless tasks with arbitrary deadlines, and discarded or returned all of your work without accomplishing anything with it. 3. Demoted you so that even the janitors and rent-a-cops were your superiors. 4. Instituted security policies forbidding you from leaving the building for any reason between 9 and 5, and requiring you to get written permission from your manager to leave your office. 5. Ran 8 55-minute pointless meetings per day, in which you were only allowed to speak at the discretion of the bored middle manager running the powerpoint up front, who would almost certainly dismiss your input because it didn't fit into their prepared slides. 6. Instituted random timed competence tests every week or so, that involved filling in a form full of semi-relevant questions.
Would you still want to work there? Even if it would look *really* good on your resume if you stayed there another 4 years?
School isn't about "working", or at least it shouldn't be. School is supposed to be about LEARNING.
Ok, this is something that I don't really expect the majority of gadget freak slashdotters to ever really grok, but I'll say it anyway:
The iPod's integrated battery is a *good* thing.
The battery in most iPods will never be replaced, and I actually suspect it wouldn't be even if it were a simple 5-second task. Batteries have gotten good enough that their expected service lifetime can come close to matching the expected usage lifetime of devices they power (yes, some will fail early, but that doesn't mean all or even many will, there are always outliers).
Making a battery user-accessible requires adding latches, contacts, extra layers of plastic casing, and other design compromises that just aren't worth it to facilitate a task that *might* be performed once in a device's lifetime. Those compromises cost the device in terms of money, weight, and ruggedness, all of which could be better allocated enhancing something the user does every day, like listening to music on the go.
If you really want to keep your iPod a couple of years down the road, rather than upgrade to the latest greatest gadget like most people, you *can* still replace the battery, or even have a professional do it for you for a reasonable fee. You just won't have spent the last 700+ days carrying around the means to swap out the battery in your pocket, waiting for the one day when it's ready to be changed.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, there's supposed to be a < between the x and y after the colon, so that it says y:y<x, but I forgot to escape it.
Here, let me fill that in for you:
1. Piss off your customers
2. Lose them to competitors
3. Save on support and usage costs, now that your most expensively eccentric customers are a burden on your competitor's network instead of your own.
4. Profit!
Have you ever wondered why so many tech-related service organizations, like ISPs, have such geek-hostile policies? It isn't all incompetence, some of them really *are* asking us to take our business elsewhere.
These companies make their money on averages. The average user pays x dollars and costs y:yx dollars to support. A geek still pays x dollars but due to their generally heavier, and less mainstream, usage patterns they can cost far more than they pay in to the system to support. If service providers can selectively move expensive geeks off of their customer list and onto their competitors', without irritating the average customer, they stand to save themselves a lot of money, and maybe even drive up their competitor's costs at the same time.
The chief problem with this tactic is that it can generate negative word of mouth. But obviously a lot of companies aren't worried enough about that to let it stop them.
Macrovision's CEO's argument with Jobs seems to rest on a faulty foundation. Jobs didn't call for the death of DRM, at least not directly, he called for the big 4 to license their music for sale online without DRM.
If, like most people reading this, you consider DRM a negative for the consumer, then you'd naturally think DRM-free licensing would obviously lead to the death of DRM, at least for music. But if, like Macrovision's CEO, you claim that DRM actually adds value for the consumer, then you should have nothing to fear from competition with non-DRMed sales. If a consumer thinks it is a better value to rent music with DRM, then they will do so regardless of weather music available for sale elsewhere has DRM or not.
The idea that DRMed music cannot be successfully sold when non-DRMed music is also available is only valid if you assume that DRM has a negative impact on the consumer large enough to overwhelm any positives it might offer (like the ability to facilitate online rentals). The fact that Macrovision's CEO equates allowing DRM-free sales opportunities to denying DRMed sales opportunities, while asserting that DRM is a positive for the consumer, would seem to indicate that he is either arguing dishonestly or hasn't really thought this out (or both).
That said, Macrovision's CEO's position actually suggests a compromise (if we assume that Macrovision's CEO is honest in his assertion that he believes DRM adds value for the consumer, and that decision makers at the big 4 agree with him, both of which are far from certain imho):
If Apple were to license the RIAA (and it's international equivalents) the right to sub-license FairPlay DRM to anyone they liked, in return for the RIAA's members giving Apple license to sell all their music DRM-free under terms no worse than their current ~70% cut, then everybody wins (after a fashion).
Apple gets to sell music DRM-free, the RIAA&co get to sell/rent DRMed music for the iPod under whatever terms they like, and the customer gets to have their choice.
Quoth the article:
"To put this in to perspective, if BayTSP were trying to bust me for doing drugs, it'd be like getting arrested because I was hanging out with some dealers, but they never saw me using, buying, or selling any drugs."
That may not be the best choice of examples for a reductio ad absurdum argument.
Remember, the war on drugs has given us all kinds of asinine laws to let courts prosecute suspected drug dealers that they can't actually catch dealing drugs. Just possessing large sums of cash can be a crime these days, even if there is no evidence that it was gained illegally; that's at least as much of an unjustified leap as claiming that being connected to a bittorrent tracker implies you're actually up/down-loading the tracked file(s).
The only real difference is that legislators made (or at least endorsed) that cash=drugs leap, while the media companies' minions made the more current bittorrent leap.
Yeah, as much as /.ers and geeks in general like DVD Jon, he really isn't all that relevant in this case. The Norwegian Consumer Council's Senior Advisor's reply to Jobs' open letter, is far more important.
Basically, some bluster about exactly which part of the lock-in they're complaining about and what seems like an intentional misinterpretation of Jobs' letter as a sign of acceding to their demands aside, it says:
1) They're not interested in going after the big 4 record companies, since they don't sell directly to consumers; and thus any contractual obligations to the big 4 that prevent Apple from giving the Norwegian Consumer Council what they want are solely Apple's problem.
2) They know other companies are doing the exact same thing as Apple with regards to DRM, but 'everybody's doing it' is no excuse, and they're only going after Apple.
Honestly, to me, this is smelling more and more like the big 4 are using the Norwegians as a proxy to try to legally neuter Apple, so that they can retain sole control of the world's DRMed music for themselves.
It seems fairly obvious at this point that Apple will have to withdraw from Norway come October, and I for one will be interested to see what the Norwegians do then. If they go after Microsoft on the same grounds, trying to force them to license Zune's DRM to all comers, and license Plays4Sure for use with OSes other than Windows, then they'll be somewhat redeemed in my eyes. If they do nothing, or keep going after only Apple despite their withdrawal, then we'll all know in whose pocket the Norwegian Consumer Council resides.
I'm still undecided as to weather that's really a good idea in the long run. In immediate personal terms , it would be a nice option to have, and might even spur me to finally get an iTunes account. However, looking at the bigger picture, there are a few issues that worry me.
First comes the legal situation; As the parent mentioned, it is quite possible that Apple's contracts with the big 4 record companies require that their competition not be allowed to sell through iTunes with better terms than they receive, and selling without DRM could certainly be considered better terms for the customer. I'd certainly have considered putting something like that in if I were a record company exec or lawyer.
Second is complexity for the user; DVD Jon says "This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users", which is both misleading and false imho.
Microsoft's implementation of variable 'squirting' privileges for their Zune music was completely transparent to users... that was the problem! People were buying some songs with less than the advertised access privileges, and had no method of figuring out which ones they were other than trial and error. How much more confusing for the user can you get?
The goal of adding DRM free music isn't to be user transparent, but to make the user aware that some songs can now be used more freely than others. And that new class of music that is paid for and downloaded online, yet can be used freely, inherently adds complexity to the user experience. It's not all that much, but simplicity and consistency are the often overlooked secrets to apple's recent success imho, and they should never ever be sacrificed without serious consideration.
And finally, there is also the question of leverage. If Apple maintains an all-or-nothing stance on DRM, they could conceivably turn any one of the big 4's caving in into *all* of the big 4 allowing DRM-less sales, just by converting iTunes to be entirely DRM-free and forcing the remaining labels to either go DRM-free of loose millions of dollars and priceless mind/market share by being locked out of iTunes while their competition profits from it.
Going DRM-less piecemeal, with no ally among the majors, could easily dilute Apple's leverage against the big 4 labels, and let them hold on to many of their demands for DRM much longer.
When you stop to think about it, the indy tracks people are demanding Apple provide DRM-free right now are already available elsewhere without DRM (and since they're DRM-free, there's nothing stopping you from putting them in your iTunes/iPod yourself), and they're generally already available on iTunes as well with DRM as well. Getting them on iTunes without DRM is a fairly insignificant battle, and if winning it could potentially cost us the ability to truly win the war against DRM in any reasonable timeframe then it just isn't a battle worth fighting right now.
A Mac running Windows via Boot Camp is not running the OS in a virtual machine.
It's just using the same kind of BIOS-compatibility layer that any other PC with EFI uses to boot Windows.
But, in any case, the idea of paying $400 for Vista Ultimate + $80 for Parallels, just to run the occasional windows only binary on your mac, is incredibly noxious.
Remember, it's rentals starting at $1.99.
If you look at the actual 1018 movies available to rent on their site, and sort by price, you'll see only the bottom ~10% (110 movies) are available at $1.99.
Then 208 movies are available at $2.99.
And the remaining 700 movies, the vast majority of their collection, including anything most people would be interested in watching, are $3.99 to rent (more than double the advertised starting price).
I've said before that I would only be interested in online rentals if they can get within spitting distance of the $1.xx per disc I pay at Blockbuster Online or Netflix. $1.99 for everything would just barely meet that qualification, $1.99 for a few token b-movies (or c- or d-movies), and twice that for everything else does not qualify.
(Of course, I have neither a Windows box, nor a Tivo, so the service would be useless to me anyway. I wonder if/when companies are finally going to realize that a disproportionate number of early adopters are mac users...)
Actually, you're wrong, the iPod supports plain old MPEG-4 simple profile (which is basically a subset of modern ASP divx), not just h264.
/w video and a couple of days to kill watching the same videos encoded at the same resolution in two different formats until the battery dies.
So, if you really want to compare DivX and h264 playback power consumption, you should do it on the same device with the same battery; since comparing apples to oranges means nothing.
I would actually be interested in seeing such a comparison, if anyone watching has a iPod
Also, Apple lists the current generation 5.5 iPods as having 3.5 or 6.5 hours of video playback time on a full charge, for the 30GB and 80GB models respectively (although the previous generation was closer to your 2 hour figure iirc).
I seem to recall that some existing OSS MPEG-4 related projects distribute source code only for that sort of reason.
the best way to encode a video would be h.264+aac, probably wrapped in ogm or mkv, but could also work as avi or mov. .ogm? .mkv? .avi? .mov? .mp4?
.ogg or .mkv, the world's geeks are actually doing more to set back standardization of digital video than big companies and their DRM. How's that for a turnaround from the audio world where geeks chose mp3 and industry followed!
.mp4 container, provide the best quality and functionality you can get today (.mkv is nice but it doesn't do anything .mp4 couldn't with the right tools, and neither Xvid/DivX or Theora can touch h264's quality/bitrate), and they are completely standardized and free to use for distributions of up to 100,000 codecs per year afaik.
.mp3s, then the digital video world would get a lot simpler.
.mp3 today...
So basically you'll use anything *but* the actual standard MPEG-4 container that's designed to carry h264/aac streams? What's wrong with
This is a somewhat separate rant and not really directed at the parent, but it seems like between pirates sticking with their habitual use of Xvid/DivX in avi, and OSS fanatics refusing to use anything non-OSS in favor of Theora in
MPEG-4 standards, specifically h264/aac streams in an
If we'd all pick up the MPEG-4 stack the way we all standardized on
Imagine a world where every camcorder, or DVD player, or computer, or PMP, or digital camera, or cell phone, or what not, could record and play back in the same interoperable high quality/bitrate video format with no special file conversions or re-encoding, just like all of those devices support
This is being spun as if it's an anti-DRM move, when it looks more like the opposite to me.
As things are now, the dominance of Apple's iPod, and their exclusive ability to produce DRMed tracks for it, gives them a lot of leverage with a music industry obsessed with DRM. But if you think for a second, you'll notice that the music industry is obsessed by DRM as a means of control, which they loose when Apple leverages hordes of iPod users to keep music prices low.
The obvious solution for the music industry (so obvious that even the big labels are reportedly mulling it over now) is to just release your tracks without DRM, and tell Apple what to go do with themselves when their licensee to sell your music expires. But that means you loose the control you feel you gain via DRM at the same time you destroy whatever leverage over you Apple gains via DRM.
But if you can get the government to force Apple to license their DRM to all comers, then you can maintain your control via DRM, while still destroying Apple's control over DRM. And that's not all, you can even reduce Apple's still dangerously high market share by putting them in a situation where every other player on the market is going to license both Fairplay and Microsoft's DRM, forcing Apple to either pay Microsoft a cut of every iPod sale to get their DRM and compete (in which case MS may well make more money off iPod sales than their own players due to sheer numbers!), or be the only player on the market that can't handle every form of DRMed music.
This legislation not only saves DRM by undermining everyone but the big labels control of it, it also undermines the only force in digital music that is pressing for low prices (because they make their real money on players anyway, and thus benefit from higher adoption more than from high prices) by forcing them to subsidize their own competition to remain competitive.
How the hell is that pro-consumer?
If they want to protect their people from DRM, they should outlaw *all* DRM, not just force their licensing terms on Apple's.
Another possibility is that the force of habits in transportation methods picked up living in one area is predominant over actual access to places worth getting to by foot in a new area. Perhaps the teens in your study have built a habit of not walking, and would thus remain sedentary and overweight even if they were moved to a more tightly laid out area, as the people in TFA's study did, and people who make a habit of walking would keep doing so to some degree even if they were placed in the burbs.
I know I'm solidly in the burbs at the moment (albeit only in the 2nd town out for the city, not the deep-burbs), and I still walk to work every day, and occasionally walk to a restaurant for lunch when the weather is decent and dry (the lack of sidewalks in places can make snow and mud a problem). But I'm the only person I work with who seems to do either, even though I know at least one coworker lived closer to the office than I do.
There are places to walk here (5 parks of various sorts, several office complexes, a bank, one community college, one huge electronics store, 3 convenience stores, a video rental place, a hair salon, 2 pizza places, 2 Mexican restaurants, a Korean restaurant, a middle eastern restaurant, a diner, a handful of fast food places, etc... all within less than a mile of my house), people just don't make a habit of walking to them.
Those who think that this would somehow immediately undermine Apple's dominance with the iPod are misguided as to why the iPod is successful imho.
/.ers might like to see Apple's DRM solely as a lock-in scheme, and while no doubt Apple finds any lock-in a reassuring safety net in case they do someday drop the ball on iPod design, for the moment (and for the foreseeable future with the iPhone) Apple doesn't *need* lock-in. The iPod isn't selling because people have huge collections of .m4ps they need to keep compatibility with, it's selling because it's slickly good at what it does and it's a brand a lot of people are pleasantly familiar with.
The tinfoil headgear sporting subset of
The simple reality is that if the Music companies start allowing DRM-less downloads, then Apple will probably make even *more* money selling iPods than they are now, as more people start to buy unencrypted music via their computers to put on said iPods. In the long term their share of music sales may be hurt, but as the world's 4th largest seller of music, they already have plenty of momentum and market power; combined with their slick store and integration in iTunes, I would think they can do just fine in a less partitioned market, and retain a good deal of influence with the music industry selling unencrypted music.
I don't think the future is that bleak, we just need the wireless equivalent of USB to pop up (which won't be wireless USB as we know it now, given that it only does data, not power).
All it takes is a cheaply available and relatively generalized wireless power/data standard, with wide enough support that it becomes in a device maker's interests to leverage everyone's preexisting chargers for their new products. In fact, it seems likely that given the lack of physical plug designs to wrangle over for smaller devices looking to cram in extra functionality, a wireless data/power standard could easily become even more universal than current wired USB.
I for one greatly look forward to the day when my cellphone, iPod, laptop, wireless keyboard/mouse, camera, etc all charge whenever they're near a compatible charger.
It could easily lead to a tremendous proliferation of more convenient personal technology that I would love to see.
Japan, where Sony first balked at working with Apple, *was* an established market when Apple decided to launch without Sony. Almost everyone had a music-phone, and people in Japan actually *used them*, to the point that a lot of analysts thought the iPod was doomed in Japan even before they knew Sony was holding out. Apple still has only about half the market there, as opposed to ~80% in other areas, but they eventually got their songs, on nice consistent terms.
The fact is, people want a product they can at least pretend to understand, and *consistency* gives them that. The average person doesn't even use the online music store associated with their player, beyond perhaps buying a handful of songs to try it out; most people won't even notice if a store has 1 million songs rather than 1.3 million. It's just not nearly as big a deal as you're making it.
The loss of a few hundred thousand songs is a temporary hiccup that will eventually correct itself if the product is impressive enough in other terms (it isn't quite yet in this case imho, but MS has to address that problem anyway if they want to gain market share), the loss of consistency in what is allowed by DRM will mar the system permanently.
You say:
I guarantee you if Sony and Universal music were not available in the Zune store, you'd be sitting here laughing at Microsoft because their music selection was non-existant. And you wouldn't buy one. And neither would anyone else.
The thing is, I'm *already* not buying one, and neither is anyone else for the most part. MS needs to *improve* their products to change that, not cripple them further so they'll have access to more songs to fail to sell. If MS can make a system slick enough to beat the iPod at it's own game, signing on record labels will take care of itself; if they can't then no number of songs will gain them market share.
If MS is ever going to take market share from the iPod, which is clearly their goal, they need to build a consistent, easy to understand device with at least one major advantage over Apple's offerings to overcome people's general tendency to stick with what they know. Wireless could have been that advantage, but they lost their focus and DRMed it into uselessness, and now they're destroying their chance at consistency as well.
The grandparent was referring more to MS's long term behavior in relation to DRM than to the current situation.
But even in the immediate sense, MS might have benefitted from showing a bit of spine.
Basically, Microsoft has chosen to:
1) put in stupid DRM features,
2) *and* watch as people continue to buy iPods because when they buy something form iTunes they don't have to guess which of a handful of DRM policies dictates how they can use a particular song,
3) *and* continue to not sell their devices at all.
The whole point of Microsoft's tanking of Plays for Sure in favor of Zune was supposed to be a smooth consistent user experience. Giving half the Sony and Universal tracks you sell different restrictions than the others without telling the buyer is *not* smooth or consistent. They'd have been better off just skipping those tracks altogether if needs be.
That's basically what Apple has done in that kind of situation with Sony in Japan and Austrailia. If a label doesn't want to deal with your terms, just launch without them, and if you start making money they'll cave in eventually. Sacrificing usability for one label's whims is a loosing proposition in the long run; I would think that's especially true when you're trying to buy your way into the market, as Microsoft seems to be in this case.
It isn't MS's fault the music is restricted, any more than it's Apple's in their case
I'd argue that it *is* Microsoft's fault to some degree. I can't think of any major technology company that's been going in for DRM as heavily as they have been. Even Sony was happy with a mere root kit for their DRM, and backed off when enough people complained; whereas in Vista MS has added not one but two levels of access *beyond* the formerly root-equivalent Administrator level to support their DRM schemes, and requires specialized hardware support right down to the silicon for HD content's DRM.
Microsoft has tremendous influence in the market, they could have done a lot to keep things relatively sane if they tailored their systems to the needs of their customers rather than the media industry. And, with just a little marketing savvy, they could have made a mint doing it as well, as Apple's phenomenal success with kinder gentler and more consistent DRM schemes has shown.
The media companies may be pushing this bullshit too hard to stop entirely, but the tech companies owe it to their shareholders as much as their customers to push back for solutions that are, if not entirely and ideally free, at least *usable*.
Zodiac? Perhaps, although it's political enough that I worry they might mess it up to get it made.
What I'd really like to see is The Big U on the big screen. It'd be like Real Genius, only with railguns, computer worms, neon signs, pipe organs, and radioactive rats instead of a mere laser for the mcguffin.
Taking this hack a step farther:
Since Roombas can be made to connect to computers via bluetooth adapters, it stands to reason that if they are sufficiently programable, they could be made to respond directly to the Wiimote via bluetooth, without a Mac playing middleman. This might even eliminate a lot of the the lag the story mentions.
iTunes still supports more or less the same set of 3rd party MP3 players they used to however many years ago when the iPod came out.
Since the iPod got big, Apple stopped writing drivers for other peoples players, and the player manufacturers stopped developing their own iTunes plug-ins with Apple's SDKs for fear of assisting 'the competition' (a brain-dead move if you ask me, there are bound to be some disgruntled iPod owners who don't dislike iTunes, and if one of the also-rans had good iTunes support they could scoop them up easily).
I know, I almost got a used 20GB Zen from a friend for about the same price as the iPod Shuffle I ended up getting. But when I looked at the Zen's support under iTunes, the plugin hadn't been updated since the days of iTunes 3.0, and lacked support for basic things like playlists, or adding the first song to an empty player (you had to use some other software to load the first song back onto the player if you emptied it completely, the plug-in only worked with a populated device). And as much as people like to complain about it's minor quirks, and as much as I preferred SJMP back in the day when Apple bought and reworked it, iTunes has really grown on me over the years.
So I went with the shuffle, and never looked back. Given that it's become a more or less permanent fixture in my pocket, I'm actually really glad I got something small and rugged.
There may be some official flash codec from Adobe that you have to pay for, I don't know, but there are definitely other ways to play flash in quicktime.
Quicktime itself can already play older non-video flash presentations. And the flash video codec that Democracy player is asking you to let it install is Perian, an open source project that integrates libavcodec and a bunch of other video related OSS libraries into a Quicktime component.
The Sun-Times is not on that list because they're being sued by some of their advertisers for inflating their circulation numbers, and are in the middle of an audit of those figures.
The last time their reported circulation was on the list, in 2004, they reported 481,798 (which would be #20 on the 2006 top 100 list).
However they supposedly over-reported by about 23%; if that's correct it would put their actual circulation down around #30.
Ok, now imagine that your employer:
1. Stopped paying you.
2. Started giving you pointless tasks with arbitrary deadlines, and discarded or returned all of your work without accomplishing anything with it.
3. Demoted you so that even the janitors and rent-a-cops were your superiors.
4. Instituted security policies forbidding you from leaving the building for any reason between 9 and 5, and requiring you to get written permission from your manager to leave your office.
5. Ran 8 55-minute pointless meetings per day, in which you were only allowed to speak at the discretion of the bored middle manager running the powerpoint up front, who would almost certainly dismiss your input because it didn't fit into their prepared slides.
6. Instituted random timed competence tests every week or so, that involved filling in a form full of semi-relevant questions.
Would you still want to work there? Even if it would look *really* good on your resume if you stayed there another 4 years?
School isn't about "working", or at least it shouldn't be. School is supposed to be about LEARNING.
Ok, this is something that I don't really expect the majority of gadget freak slashdotters to ever really grok, but I'll say it anyway:
The iPod's integrated battery is a *good* thing.
The battery in most iPods will never be replaced, and I actually suspect it wouldn't be even if it were a simple 5-second task. Batteries have gotten good enough that their expected service lifetime can come close to matching the expected usage lifetime of devices they power (yes, some will fail early, but that doesn't mean all or even many will, there are always outliers).
Making a battery user-accessible requires adding latches, contacts, extra layers of plastic casing, and other design compromises that just aren't worth it to facilitate a task that *might* be performed once in a device's lifetime. Those compromises cost the device in terms of money, weight, and ruggedness, all of which could be better allocated enhancing something the user does every day, like listening to music on the go.
If you really want to keep your iPod a couple of years down the road, rather than upgrade to the latest greatest gadget like most people, you *can* still replace the battery, or even have a professional do it for you for a reasonable fee. You just won't have spent the last 700+ days carrying around the means to swap out the battery in your pocket, waiting for the one day when it's ready to be changed.