Its impossible to say anybody copied anyone else with concepts like preemptive multitasking and memory management... these are concepts that have been part of computer science and operating system design for DECADES and that every CS student learns about...
Human interface design, however, is something else entirely, in my opinion... there is still much innovation to be had in this area... its been a long time since anyone's released anything really revolutionary...
I argue that because of Microsoft, many many steps back have been taken backward in interfaces... all starting with when they thought it was a neat idea to surf your hard drive with your web browser... been downhill ever since.
Apple, on the other hand might be working on some pretty remarkable innovations, take Expose for example.
Seinfeld, for the first few seasons, had a Mac Classic. He used it in a couple of episodes actually... A little later on he got it replaced, but NOT with a Windows machine...
He actually has (presumably his own) 20th Anniversary Macintosh ( a black flat panel Mac with a Bose sound system and cost $10,000 back in 1997 ). It was there till the series ended. He never had a windows machine on his desk.
No Mac has the "Striped Plastic" thing you are talking about anymore... at least in the last 4 years or so... so Apple agrees with you that stripes are Passe....
I wrote BuyMusic with my concerns with their service... specifically with the issue of upgrading my computer, and system failures. I figured they'd be willing to help in either case. Here was the back and forth.
My Email:
I am extremely hesitant to spend any money on your web site because of your policy on "primary" and "secondary" licenses. You state on your help page that the licenses that I associate with a computer CANNOT be transferred. Now we cannot kid ourselves that computers do not go outdated or break. I find myself getting a completely new machine every 2 or 3 years. What if I download some music onto my current machine, and, through no fault of mine, its hard drive is wiped... catastrophic data loss. The same goes for if I choose to replace my old computer. Can you assure me that I will still be able to use the music that I bought (and more importantly the license) on another computer? I back up all my data regularly, but what about my "primary" license? If you can assure me that I will not lose music in something as routine as buying a new computer, I will feel comfortable enough to spend money on your service.
Their Response:
Thank you for writing to us.
We apologize for any confusion. Due to license restrictions, we are unable to allow for extra downloads in the event of a system upgrade or computer crash. We are also unable to assist if songs have been mistakenly deleted or files become corrupted. In addition, the encryption technology that we use is not intended to be compatible with system backup software. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.
Please note, however, that in all of the aforementioned cases you are free to download your music again if your license still has downloads available. To see if you still have downloads available, log into your BuyMusic.com 'My Account' and click on 'View My Downloads'.
Apple, on the other hand, has a form on their support page that specifically deals with cases where a computer goes down for the count, or where the user sells or formats the computer forgetting to deauthorize it.
I'm really really surprised that BuyMusic put absolutely NO thought into what would happen if a user loses his computer, or decides its time to retire it. This is not some obscure issue that will never come up for most people. Upgrading one's computer is the one constant of using a PC, really! Its making very little sense to use this at all compared to going to a store and picking up the CD.
Emphasis on being cheaper than iTMS, from a marketing standpoint, yes. Practically speaking, no. Most songs are still 99 cents, some greater at 1.29, and with vastly shadier DRM rules than Apple.
You forget that part of the reason for Apple's landmark deal with the recording industry bringing the most reasonable DRM scheme to public to date is because the recording industry knew that it was only going to be available to 3% of the computing public in the US.
for the big 5, these couple of months between a mac and windows versions is an experiment period. They let Apple be as liberal as possible with DRM to see if it takes off and if there are any major hurdles... A couple months down the road, when they are more confident with the buying public, and Apple's abilities to handle the store, they will allow for a windows version.
This is not a case of Apple trying to cater to Mac users exclusively. This is a situation where the music industry is trying to be VERY cautious.
IF, for example, Apple did not have the success that they did, selling a million songs in the 1st week, and averaging about half a million a week since then... if they performed like BuyMusic had their first week, the recording industry would have let it die... but iTunes is becoming more and more the poster boy of buying music online, even moreso after this half rate imitator.
It was not THEIR software... it was Roxio's, but they specifically printed on their FAQ that if you're using windows 2000, you must select that plugin to burn.
It may not have been their software, but they are responsible for it.
The roxio plugin IS BuyMusic's problem, because the FAQ website TOLD HER to use that plugin with Windows Media Player.
follow this link... you'll have to use IE 5.0 on a windows machine, or turn off javascript in your browser to view it.
http://www.buymusic.com/support/help.aspx#Howto_Bu rn
I quote.
In the Items on Device pane, click one of the following:
Audio CD (available only on Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional)
Data CD (available only on Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional)
HighMAT CD (available only on Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional)
Roxio CD Burning (available only on Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition (Me), and Windows 2000)
She SAID that she was using Windows 2000 as her "primary" licensed machine. According to the FAQ, she had but ONE choice, Roxio CD Burning, and BuyMusic tech support was oblivious to this.
The problem with the BuyMusic solution is that once again, there's so many companies providing a piece of the service, and they don't communicate with each other, that when you have problems, the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing... BuyMusic says, "this isn't our problem, blame Roxio" and when mp3 players don't work, they go "this isn't our problem, blame Creative" or "blame Microsoft"... this thing is so cobbled together and impossible to have REAL resolution when you have problems.
4X does not mean that whatever length of video you have divided by 4 to burn to disc. In fact, the "speed ratings" as well as the capacity rating (120 minutes, etc) on DVD writing drives and DVD media is all rather arbitrary.
With CD audio, CD-R capacity could be expressed as 74 minute or 80 minute because there really was only one way to encode audio onto compliant audio CDs.
With video, everything depends on compression ratios. MPEG2 bitrate can scale between (realistically) one hour and two hours of video on a single 4.7 GB DVD. Granted, quality also scales with bitrate... compressing 120 minutes of video to fit on a 4.7 DVD-R would probably be borderline quality.
Considering that, the speed rating of the drive (1X, 2X, 4X) is arbitrary and doesn't tell you the whole story. That speed rating was determined so that (roughly) a 4.7 GB DVD-R could be written in 60 minutes a 1x. In my experience, this is a good measure to go by. My 4X DVR-A05 takes about 15 minutes to write a full DVD at full speed.
Burning a 2 hour movie at 4X would take at least 15 minutes. There are of course other factors to consider. The encoding of a 2 hour movie into MPEG2 would be much longer than the time it takes to burn the disc.
Take for example BBedit. BBedit is a very cleanly written Carbon application, and it runs very very fast in OS X. It takes advantage of a whole bunch of Mac OS X only goodies like live dragging everything, services, and it behaves well among other OS X apps... yet its Carbon all the way through.
Good Carbon applications can be written... i guess its just a question of the ease at which it is written. It may be easier and faster to write a good Cocoa application that it is to write a good Carbon application.
Slashdot Mirror
Human interface design, however, is something else entirely, in my opinion... there is still much innovation to be had in this area... its been a long time since anyone's released anything really revolutionary...
I argue that because of Microsoft, many many steps back have been taken backward in interfaces... all starting with when they thought it was a neat idea to surf your hard drive with your web browser... been downhill ever since.
Apple, on the other hand might be working on some pretty remarkable innovations, take Expose for example.
He actually has (presumably his own) 20th Anniversary Macintosh ( a black flat panel Mac with a Bose sound system and cost $10,000 back in 1997 ). It was there till the series ended. He never had a windows machine on his desk.
As for your comment on brushed Aluminum...
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
http://www.apple.com/powerbook/
apple support
My Email:
Their Response:Apple, on the other hand, has a form on their support page that specifically deals with cases where a computer goes down for the count, or where the user sells or formats the computer forgetting to deauthorize it.
http://www.info.apple.com/usen/musicstore/musicsto re.html?topic=computer_authorization
I'm really really surprised that BuyMusic put absolutely NO thought into what would happen if a user loses his computer, or decides its time to retire it. This is not some obscure issue that will never come up for most people. Upgrading one's computer is the one constant of using a PC, really! Its making very little sense to use this at all compared to going to a store and picking up the CD.
Emphasis on being cheaper than iTMS, from a marketing standpoint, yes. Practically speaking, no. Most songs are still 99 cents, some greater at 1.29, and with vastly shadier DRM rules than Apple.
for the big 5, these couple of months between a mac and windows versions is an experiment period. They let Apple be as liberal as possible with DRM to see if it takes off and if there are any major hurdles... A couple months down the road, when they are more confident with the buying public, and Apple's abilities to handle the store, they will allow for a windows version.
This is not a case of Apple trying to cater to Mac users exclusively. This is a situation where the music industry is trying to be VERY cautious.
IF, for example, Apple did not have the success that they did, selling a million songs in the 1st week, and averaging about half a million a week since then... if they performed like BuyMusic had their first week, the recording industry would have let it die... but iTunes is becoming more and more the poster boy of buying music online, even moreso after this half rate imitator.
It may not have been their software, but they are responsible for it.
follow this link... you'll have to use IE 5.0 on a windows machine, or turn off javascript in your browser to view it. http://www.buymusic.com/support/help.aspx#Howto_Bu rn
I quote.
She SAID that she was using Windows 2000 as her "primary" licensed machine. According to the FAQ, she had but ONE choice, Roxio CD Burning, and BuyMusic tech support was oblivious to this. The problem with the BuyMusic solution is that once again, there's so many companies providing a piece of the service, and they don't communicate with each other, that when you have problems, the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing... BuyMusic says, "this isn't our problem, blame Roxio" and when mp3 players don't work, they go "this isn't our problem, blame Creative" or "blame Microsoft"4X does not mean that whatever length of video you have divided by 4 to burn to disc. In fact, the "speed ratings" as well as the capacity rating (120 minutes, etc) on DVD writing drives and DVD media is all rather arbitrary. With CD audio, CD-R capacity could be expressed as 74 minute or 80 minute because there really was only one way to encode audio onto compliant audio CDs. With video, everything depends on compression ratios. MPEG2 bitrate can scale between (realistically) one hour and two hours of video on a single 4.7 GB DVD. Granted, quality also scales with bitrate... compressing 120 minutes of video to fit on a 4.7 DVD-R would probably be borderline quality. Considering that, the speed rating of the drive (1X, 2X, 4X) is arbitrary and doesn't tell you the whole story. That speed rating was determined so that (roughly) a 4.7 GB DVD-R could be written in 60 minutes a 1x. In my experience, this is a good measure to go by. My 4X DVR-A05 takes about 15 minutes to write a full DVD at full speed. Burning a 2 hour movie at 4X would take at least 15 minutes. There are of course other factors to consider. The encoding of a 2 hour movie into MPEG2 would be much longer than the time it takes to burn the disc.
Take for example BBedit. BBedit is a very cleanly written Carbon application, and it runs very very fast in OS X. It takes advantage of a whole bunch of Mac OS X only goodies like live dragging everything, services, and it behaves well among other OS X apps... yet its Carbon all the way through. Good Carbon applications can be written... i guess its just a question of the ease at which it is written. It may be easier and faster to write a good Cocoa application that it is to write a good Carbon application.