Is belligerently ensuring that anything produced by them requires their technology:-
a). anti-competitive behaviour
b). viral ?
The correct answer drawn randomly will receive a copy of Windows XP...
You missed one other crucial grouping - the artists.
Frankly, I don't give much of a shit about how I pay for my music or whether it's DRMed to the max, or what system I can or can't play it on.
All I care is that the greater proportion of earnings from songs goes to the artists who create them. My perfect online tunes store is the one whose success is based on the decisions of artists and fans, and not fat media companies telling me what to listen to. I think more people would be happy to pay for music if they knew that most of the money was going to the creator (or at least that the creator controlled most of the money).
Telcos have been talking about 'convergence' for years (one network for data/voice, effectively). Of course it won't be free - same way water and electricity aren't free. But hopefully it will mean that the cellular providers can reduce the data strain on their networks (piggybacking onto internet) and eventually pass the cost saving off onto the consumer.
Let's face it folks, nothing in technology is free. But such innovations in a competitive environment will benefit us all eventually.
Let's face it, now google have floated, they have a public obligation (albeit minor) to innovate, to grow beyond search. Given their infrastructure, a webOS has been the most obvious suggestion. Just as any modern OS needs the key comms tools: email (asynchronous) and IM (synchronous text/voice/vid), so does a webOS.
The sooner we stop these ludicrous closed IM systems, the better. Could you imagine having 4 phones in your house for different telcos?
Nono, what's sad is that there are still media giants out there floating on their own froth and whining about artists' rights, while plundering them to run their own circuses.
It's good to see that U2 acknowledge the only recourse is to pre-release through legit media - no lawsuits or rantings, just a choice for the die-hard fans to purchase a quality version.
The more artists take control of their own distribution, the better chance of a fair music industry , with fewer fatcats pushing sugar-water pop onto easily-blinged teenagers, and an industry more in tune with the demands of its consumers.
When will they learn? The essential power of IM is not just in the current text medium, but in its potential as a multimedia realtime browser. See iChat for a glimpse into the future.
You see who is currently online (the realtime bit), then decide on how you want to interact: voice, video or text. Easy-peasy. Except 1. it's part of AIM and 2. AIM on PCs doesn't do vid or voice.
So once again, it's the big boys trying to carve up their own piece of the internet. IT'S NOT REAL ESTATE, IT'S VIRTUAL ESTATE!
And therein lies the problem with XP - the registry. While the principle of a registry is sound, the unix approach is still better: EVERYTHING is a file. No mixed metaphors, no uninstallable, poorly-written software. Just files. Not cleverly pseudo-object-oriented, but simple and fast. Searches in current OSX run as fast as spotlight: you start typing, and results start appearing.
Also, a critical difference that is akin to consoles: with macs, what you see demoed is what you get. The performance and driver discrepancies between software and hardware are not nearly as bad as in Wintel land because the OS is built for the specific hardware and thoroughly tested. So I know that my powerbook will run Halo perfectly, without having to know my gigahertz from my gigabytes.
Hands up: who wants to watch movies on a pocket PC/Palm/Mobile phone/iPod-sized screen??
This would not be a mass market product, it would be a tech-heads bragging product.
The perfection of the ipod is as much in what it doesn't try to be: a pda, a phone, a movie machine, a games machine. It's just a music player, and a damn good one. The rest is incidental.
Uh, actually, no. That was the Brits in real life, and in fact the inspiration for my little bout of movie humour. British sense of humour, y'see. What the rest of the world like to (often mis-)label 'irony'. As a faithful/.er I prefer the word 'droll'. Keep watching the Monty Python...;o)
I'm waiting for 'Colossus' the movie, starring a daring team of americans at Bletchley who single-handedly invent Colossus, run Ultra and crack the codes just in time, all the while undermined by those stuck-up brits who always try to spoil everything by saying "You bloody yanks can't just storm in here and expect to win the war in a week!".
An old ex-empire Britain may be, but they were the first empire to dismantle itself (for the most part), and every territory they lost was made, by and large, in their image. The english civil war was over 50 years before the french revolution - they created the first democracy in europe (by killing their king - can you imagine usurping your own president?), and the american ideals of democracy were descended from this. Oh, and industry? The brits invented that too - Adam Smith was no yank!
My point is that every empire has its day, even with the best will in the world. And when your time comes you can either acceed to the rising benevolent power (US, not Nazi), or have power wrestled from you.
Microsoft never made 'standards' as such. They just do stuff, or borrow stuff that becomes standard because they have 95% of the market!
The whole idea of a market economy is that standards are mostly agreed by participants in an industry, and only by government as a last resort. That's fine if the industry is mature, with a handful of evenly matched competitors - like the car industry, or oil, or pharmaceuticals.
This is not the case in software, though, because it is dominated by a single 800lb gorilla. Depending on your viewpoint, it may be a benign gorilla or an evil gorilla, but it's still a fucking gorilla...!
I always thought that M$ should be sued for trade mis-descriptions. They don't sell you an OS, they sell you OS + whatever crap they like. If you could legally define the difference between an OS and an application, you could REALLY peg them back.
Think of it as a read-only PDA, with massive storage, that happens to play excellent sound quality music. It's also easy to sync across multiple machines.
Slashdot Mirror
a). anti-competitive behaviour
b). viral ?
The correct answer drawn randomly will receive a copy of Windows XP...
Frankly, I don't give much of a shit about how I pay for my music or whether it's DRMed to the max, or what system I can or can't play it on.
All I care is that the greater proportion of earnings from songs goes to the artists who create them. My perfect online tunes store is the one whose success is based on the decisions of artists and fans, and not fat media companies telling me what to listen to. I think more people would be happy to pay for music if they knew that most of the money was going to the creator (or at least that the creator controlled most of the money).
Let's face it folks, nothing in technology is free. But such innovations in a competitive environment will benefit us all eventually.
The sooner we stop these ludicrous closed IM systems, the better. Could you imagine having 4 phones in your house for different telcos?
It's good to see that U2 acknowledge the only recourse is to pre-release through legit media - no lawsuits or rantings, just a choice for the die-hard fans to purchase a quality version.
The more artists take control of their own distribution, the better chance of a fair music industry , with fewer fatcats pushing sugar-water pop onto easily-blinged teenagers, and an industry more in tune with the demands of its consumers.
You see who is currently online (the realtime bit), then decide on how you want to interact: voice, video or text. Easy-peasy. Except 1. it's part of AIM and 2. AIM on PCs doesn't do vid or voice.
So once again, it's the big boys trying to carve up their own piece of the internet. IT'S NOT REAL ESTATE, IT'S VIRTUAL ESTATE!
Also, a critical difference that is akin to consoles: with macs, what you see demoed is what you get. The performance and driver discrepancies between software and hardware are not nearly as bad as in Wintel land because the OS is built for the specific hardware and thoroughly tested. So I know that my powerbook will run Halo perfectly, without having to know my gigahertz from my gigabytes.
This would not be a mass market product, it would be a tech-heads bragging product.
The perfection of the ipod is as much in what it doesn't try to be: a pda, a phone, a movie machine, a games machine. It's just a music player, and a damn good one. The rest is incidental.
Uh, actually, no. That was the Brits in real life, and in fact the inspiration for my little bout of movie humour. British sense of humour, y'see. What the rest of the world like to (often mis-)label 'irony'. As a faithful /.er I prefer the word 'droll'. Keep watching the Monty Python... ;o)
I'm waiting for 'Colossus' the movie, starring a daring team of americans at Bletchley who single-handedly invent Colossus, run Ultra and crack the codes just in time, all the while undermined by those stuck-up brits who always try to spoil everything by saying "You bloody yanks can't just storm in here and expect to win the war in a week!".
An old ex-empire Britain may be, but they were the first empire to dismantle itself (for the most part), and every territory they lost was made, by and large, in their image. The english civil war was over 50 years before the french revolution - they created the first democracy in europe (by killing their king - can you imagine usurping your own president?), and the american ideals of democracy were descended from this. Oh, and industry? The brits invented that too - Adam Smith was no yank!
My point is that every empire has its day, even with the best will in the world. And when your time comes you can either acceed to the rising benevolent power (US, not Nazi), or have power wrestled from you.
The whole idea of a market economy is that standards are mostly agreed by participants in an industry, and only by government as a last resort. That's fine if the industry is mature, with a handful of evenly matched competitors - like the car industry, or oil, or pharmaceuticals.
This is not the case in software, though, because it is dominated by a single 800lb gorilla. Depending on your viewpoint, it may be a benign gorilla or an evil gorilla, but it's still a fucking gorilla...!
I always thought that M$ should be sued for trade mis-descriptions. They don't sell you an OS, they sell you OS + whatever crap they like. If you could legally define the difference between an OS and an application, you could REALLY peg them back.
Think of it as a read-only PDA, with massive storage, that happens to play excellent sound quality music. It's also easy to sync across multiple machines.