Worms ripped apart Unix in the 80s, and despite what has been hardened since, the methodologies which ripped Unix apart in the 80s mostly are still being used in Windows development.
Which worms are we talking about here?
I honestly hope open source has something to compete for their future desktop environments, or else desktop Linux could be relegated to processors too slow to deal with the overhead.
Please rest assured that, by the time longhorn ships - as well as between today and that point - "open source" will offer plenty of competition.
The iPod is the Top of the Game now - in terms of sales as well as mindshare. Everyone in town - Glaser, Karmazin, et al - would love to leverage the iPod halo, or - like Napster, Rhapsody, etc, use iTunes own momentum against it.
Mr. Jobs is as firmly in the driver's seat here as he's ever been with any product in his life (pretty much at Pixar, too, but that's OT). He's a smart guy, and it won't be a matter of "loving" or "hating" a product or model when it comes to it: it'll be a matter of his - recently, at least - impeccable market timing and business intuition to say "It's time to offer an iTunes Subscription Service, too," and "It's time for an XMPod / SiriusPod." and 3 to 6 months later, he'll have the most lucrative deals as well as fantastically-designed products available.
His barrier to entry for a subscription service is going to be minimal; he'll actually be making money to product a SatelliPod (as Sirius or XM will pay him to do so if the timing's right).
I understand taking issue with the collection of "personal data," its storage and its usage to target you without your express consent(1). Most of the loudest (and most highly-moderated) voices here seem to have the biggest problems with the Advertisements themselves.
NB: I nether use DoubleClick as a publisher or am a "fanboy" of them as a company. That said, the protests seem to miss the point that without online advertising - and therefore, DoubleClick - a good portion of the content we have available to us on the web would NOT be available to us on the web for "free."
This is a minority opinion - and no, I'm not new around here - but what's with all the contempt for a business proposition that lets DoubleClick to make a buck, web publishers to make a buck, and consumers to get content inexpensively or "freely?" Do you find the ads themselves that odious? Do they get in the way of what you're working to achieve in any appreciable way? (non-rhetorical questions)
Advertising in any medium is 99% horsecrap(2), but it's basically why the media exist: take away the ads and most of your favorite TV & radio shows, magazines, newspapers and web sites will go away. End of story.
IMO, the backlash seen here is not in proportion to the offense.
(1) - Users provide implicit concent when they visit sites with advertising run by DCLK or any ad network that'll track them with cookies.
(2) - And that leaves the ~1% that's actually entertaining and / or informative.
Dave - You've used CNN to back up a point stating, in essence, the Iraqis are better off because of the actions of the american military under the present administration?
... it can be viewed as an element of a DoS. Imagine a political website that has content they want to freely distribute. Infecting a number of site visitors with something, that as one of its effects, screws up copying or saving that content, is likely to be taken by most of the site's visitors as just a case of the site not having its HTML up to par. The site is effectively under an attack which it may never know happened, unless it gets enough visitor complaints.
This is a good point and a decent analogy, IMO, but if you're working to prevent folks from distributing content you feel is objectionable, and you've got sufficient access to the site it's posted on to place your feature-disabling.css up there, why not simply remove the content? Or alter it in such a way that it doesn't seem altered and yet changes the message sufficiently to now not be objectionable to you?
This is another arrow in the quivver of those who would do harm, I'd agree, but the quivver exists already.
The point has been made here several times, and several times more w/r/t iTune's DRM: It's reasonable. It keeps the Publishers happy and enables users to avail of a useful service, as Google Printing is.
There's never likely to be "unbreakable DRM," but if innovative service providers make a reasonable effort - and "content owners" agree it's reasonable, my hope is we continue to see useful services such as this.
w/r/t the tech behond the useful service, it's some clever shite. And the ensuing "arms race" kicked off by it is very interesting stuff from a technological as well as "rights" (copyright holder; user; tech provider) standpoint.
This is a shame, as I trust and admire Yahoo as a content provider: while I don't know if I'd subscribe to their service, I'd certainly check it out if it was available for me to do so.
Even if their service turned out not to be for me, I can still apreciate the competition they offer (though, not if they don't compete for Mac users, BSD users, Linux users, etc.).
Industry consolidation is somewhat healthy (for consumers) in this instance. Apple, MSFT and Real have some traction - it's good (for consumers) for those corps. to have competition. MusicMatch now has more muscle behind it -
w/r/t Yahoo, they've always considered themselves more "directory" than search engine. They're a portal play, and a good one at that. Perhaps they're no longer as in favor with the slashdot crowd as they might have been, but - through Fantasy Football, a great spam account, and other better-than-average offerings - mostly gratis - for broadband users (e.g. radio; financial info) they're nothing to sneeze at.
Their generosity with The Community shouldn't be overlooked, either: they employ a number of FreeBSD* committers and contribute back to FreeBSD. The volume of traffic they handle with an infrastructure based on open standards in enviable.
* - It's this other OS with an OSI-approved licensing scheme. You should give it a look sometime.
Just like the actions of the Swift Boat Veterans group should be turning off a bunch of Republicans, but you haven't heard much from anyone there other than John McCain condemning the actions of that group.
I agree with your first part: Republicans should note that the SBVeterans group against Kerry are their own voice.
The story here is that people are allowed to have their opinions - it sucks when they're astrotuf-like "opinions," but the parent article is about one group of folks trying to keep other groups from getting their word out: that's not dissent, that's a gagging - Where's the ACLU (and ACLU-like attitude) here?
From the tinfoiled perspective, ebooks can't take off until the readers themselves or their user manuals consume enough tree product to keep the Paper Lobby empowered and happy.
Semi joking aside, it's compelling content - and lots of it, frequently updated - that's required before widespread, mainstream acceptance. This has already been noted many times here and elsewhere.
In my own experience, I've been reading shorter-form ebook content for years. AvantGo is my primary news source, and Richard Lawrence's excellent AvantSlash is a main way I read summaries and comments on Slashdot.
I have never read a novel with an ereader.
Of a more niche front, I'd love to see e content that's more easily annotated: when reading articles, white papers, etc., I'd like to be able to note, quickly and easily, the ideas that hit me at the time. I'd like those ideas to be linked to the passages that spurred them. These annotations should be syncable to a desktop app for further editing and printing.
Per the parent post, it's good to see Mobireader can see at least some of this. I'll check it out.
Perhaps they are releasing this seemingly significant chunk of code under the GPL because "licensing SOC's IP" and accepting a few billion from MSFT made them feel dirty.
Novell's stock has shot up from around $3 last ~July (pre-GNU/Linux-geared acquisitions) to around $10 today. They were ~$14 for awhile this year. I'll be purchasing additional shares.
Since they've acquired Ximian and SuSe and have been making many of the Right Moves w/r/t both the F/OSS community as well as corporate users, Wall Street has been looking kindly on them. IMO, they have much additional value to provide (especially in user and meta directory services).
As others here have pointed out, the possible revenues they can make in services outweighs anything they might "leave on the table" w/r/t the previously ~$30 downloads they've abandoned.
Are any of these moves calculated to foster good will in the F/OSS community? I don't know, but these guys are smart and I'm happy to reap the rewards of their work and generosity.
If your point was that 99.44% of what individuals self-published was crap, I agree - and further agree that the same percentage of stuff done with tools like Audacity will likely suffer the same percentages. That said, putting the tools in the hands of the masses is Good for the masses as well as the folks who build the tools.
The Audacity team has had a fine product out there for some time; I'm sure 1.2 will be that much better, and will push the level of expectation for "entry level" up for users and software producers alike.
Before the advent of vanity sites and blogs, desktopPub was what certain creative-types used to do with their time to get their bitching and moaning "heard."
This is excellent news - Audacity's been useful for awhile and, as it gets further polish, it'll be that much better for folks who can use this kind of audio tool.
Per many of the comments already posted, that audience is growing well beyond traditional musicians - this is an Excellent Thing as it means more people can do more interesting - and better sounding - things.
Tools like this, and GarageBand (yes; only for OS X) enable a musician to flesh out ideas and create good sounding demos to share with friends. It also let's "non-traditional musicians" to play with loops, cutting & pasting of sound files, and generally mucking around with sound to have fun.
It shouldn't be taken lightly - it's akin to desktop and web publishing capabilities that began to explode as the tools got better and easier to use.
It wasn't just CIT's stuff that was confiscated and / or shut down, but EVERYTHING in the datacenter where CIT's stuff happened to be; everything included my hosting provider, as well.
N.B. - I am typically all for law enforcement and would rather err on the side of caution - esp if CIT was "reasonably believed" to have been stalling or destroying data.
... iTunes and Napster are in the same boat as far as DRM, but since iTunes is/. favorite, most people tend to overlook their DRM
For most of the informed readers, it not a matter of overlooking Apple's DRM, but a matter of recognizing its fairness and utility to users: iTunes Music Store's "FairPlay" is pretty consumer-friendly.
While I don't know all the details of Napster's DRM (I use iTMS), I do know that WindowsMediaPlayer is *not* as consumer friendly as iTunes - a prime example being that WMediaPlayer will burn a disc in WMA format by default rather than something most CD players or computers could handle (e.g. an audio cd or mp3)
Others'MMV, but I've owned / used / beaten to near-death 4 different Palms since the III (c.1998) and I can count on my fingers & toes the number of crashes I recall. The preponderance of those are recent*.
When I say "owned / used..." I'm talking every day, shutting the thing on and off probably 20 times each day, taking meeting notes (~40 WPM with Graffitti), and reading AvantGo news and PDFs as well as playing games. This in addition to the calandar and To Dos tracking I originally intended.
Never have any of them (III, IIIx, IIIxe, Tungsten T) locked up in the middle of doing these things - they've locked up when syncing, when Finding (searching) against "bad apps," when attempting to switch from a live "Arkanoid" game, but never in the middle of real usage.
*- Also, at least in recent Tungsten memory, when I have reset it, it hasn't lost a damn thing - Not a Note, not a To Do, nor a Calendar entry.
OS 6 - architected and built by the BeOS engineers - looks interesting. I use it much more for "traditional PDA" stuff, but the BeOS was always smart and ass-kicking.
Check out ffmpegX. It's a native OS X front end to some great Unix MPEG tools. It's got a number of pre-sets for export to VCD, SVCD, and DVD, and you can tweak to your heart's content. It'll read, directly, the.mov file produced by iMovie (I used to think I had to export to a self-contained.mov file, but the way iMovie / QuickTime allows for resource linking, you point it at the [small] native iMovie file and the tools do the work for you).
w/r/t needing to spend an extra grand - you're referring to Final Cut Pro, I presume; also check out Final Cut Express (~$250 or free [beer] if you can dig up a Premiere install disc somewhere). FCExpress works with widescreen aspect ratios.
I agree, but do you think we could encourage Apple to support The GIMP (which runs decently over X11 on OS X already)? It would give people a choice and Adobe the competition they need to do improve their UI.
What Apple's given back to the community is undeniable, as is what they've received from it. The GIMP seems like it could be a great tool in the vein of iMovie and iPhoto if there was weight thrown to develop it in that direction.
I very recently got a Tungsten T - it's great, and I love the fact it can play MP3s; even with a 128MB SD card, though, and using RealOne (transfer rates to the TT suck donk otherwise), it's still a little tweaky: That is, I can't use it to, e.g., read AvantGo offline (a 'core PDA function,' IMO) and listen to tunes seamlessly. Page scrolling slows. Music drops out. Timeouts shut the thing off completely.
Playing music is certainly a non-core function for a PDA, but it *wouldn't* be if the TT handled it to where I didn't have to be concerned about it.
Holy crap - this whole discussion is en re a MacWhispers column written by a guy who's time and again (macTable; envestco, etc.) been proven to be so full of shit his eyes are brown.
It wouldda been good to see evil carrot's post further up the thread...
If it is for real, great - considering the source, though, doesn't fill me with hope. The article was convincing with all the "inside scoop" from the part OEMs -
Slashdot Mirror
Which worms are we talking about here?
I honestly hope open source has something to compete for their future desktop environments, or else desktop Linux could be relegated to processors too slow to deal with the overhead.
Please rest assured that, by the time longhorn ships - as well as between today and that point - "open source" will offer plenty of competition.
Awww; still pissed you spent that c-note on your 32MB Rio?
Sorry, man ...
(btw - try an iPod with different headphones next time ... it really is near audiophile-quality.
Mr. Jobs is as firmly in the driver's seat here as he's ever been with any product in his life (pretty much at Pixar, too, but that's OT). He's a smart guy, and it won't be a matter of "loving" or "hating" a product or model when it comes to it: it'll be a matter of his - recently, at least - impeccable market timing and business intuition to say "It's time to offer an iTunes Subscription Service, too," and "It's time for an XMPod / SiriusPod." and 3 to 6 months later, he'll have the most lucrative deals as well as fantastically-designed products available.
His barrier to entry for a subscription service is going to be minimal; he'll actually be making money to product a SatelliPod (as Sirius or XM will pay him to do so if the timing's right).
Greetings -
I understand taking issue with the collection of "personal data," its storage and its usage to target you without your express consent(1). Most of the loudest (and most highly-moderated) voices here seem to have the biggest problems with the Advertisements themselves.
NB: I nether use DoubleClick as a publisher or am a "fanboy" of them as a company. That said, the protests seem to miss the point that without online advertising - and therefore, DoubleClick - a good portion of the content we have available to us on the web would NOT be available to us on the web for "free."
This is a minority opinion - and no, I'm not new around here - but what's with all the contempt for a business proposition that lets DoubleClick to make a buck, web publishers to make a buck, and consumers to get content inexpensively or "freely?" Do you find the ads themselves that odious? Do they get in the way of what you're working to achieve in any appreciable way? (non-rhetorical questions)
Advertising in any medium is 99% horsecrap(2), but it's basically why the media exist: take away the ads and most of your favorite TV & radio shows, magazines, newspapers and web sites will go away. End of story.
IMO, the backlash seen here is not in proportion to the offense.
(1) - Users provide implicit concent when they visit sites with advertising run by DCLK or any ad network that'll track them with cookies.
(2) - And that leaves the ~1% that's actually entertaining and / or informative.
Dave - You've used CNN to back up a point stating, in essence, the Iraqis are better off because of the actions of the american military under the present administration?
How the hell did CNN let that slip through?
This is a good point and a decent analogy, IMO, but if you're working to prevent folks from distributing content you feel is objectionable, and you've got sufficient access to the site it's posted on to place your feature-disabling .css up there, why not simply remove the content? Or alter it in such a way that it doesn't seem altered and yet changes the message sufficiently to now not be objectionable to you?
This is another arrow in the quivver of those who would do harm, I'd agree, but the quivver exists already.
The point has been made here several times, and several times more w/r/t iTune's DRM: It's reasonable. It keeps the Publishers happy and enables users to avail of a useful service, as Google Printing is.
There's never likely to be "unbreakable DRM," but if innovative service providers make a reasonable effort - and "content owners" agree it's reasonable, my hope is we continue to see useful services such as this.
w/r/t the tech behond the useful service, it's some clever shite. And the ensuing "arms race" kicked off by it is very interesting stuff from a technological as well as "rights" (copyright holder; user; tech provider) standpoint.
This is a shame, as I trust and admire Yahoo as a content provider: while I don't know if I'd subscribe to their service, I'd certainly check it out if it was available for me to do so.
Even if their service turned out not to be for me, I can still apreciate the competition they offer (though, not if they don't compete for Mac users, BSD users, Linux users, etc.).
w/r/t Yahoo, they've always considered themselves more "directory" than search engine. They're a portal play, and a good one at that. Perhaps they're no longer as in favor with the slashdot crowd as they might have been, but - through Fantasy Football, a great spam account, and other better-than-average offerings - mostly gratis - for broadband users (e.g. radio; financial info) they're nothing to sneeze at.
Their generosity with The Community shouldn't be overlooked, either: they employ a number of FreeBSD* committers and contribute back to FreeBSD. The volume of traffic they handle with an infrastructure based on open standards in enviable.
* - It's this other OS with an OSI-approved licensing scheme. You should give it a look sometime.
No ActiveX required.
No iPod or iTunes required, neither. Props to "Hard N' Phirm."
Regards and Yee Haw -
Per your second part, perhaps you haven't heard dissenting Republican voices other than Sen. McCain's, but millions of others likely have in pieces like this one printed in the Wall St. Journal and, likely, elsewhere.
The story here is that people are allowed to have their opinions - it sucks when they're astrotuf-like "opinions," but the parent article is about one group of folks trying to keep other groups from getting their word out: that's not dissent, that's a gagging - Where's the ACLU (and ACLU-like attitude) here?
Semi joking aside, it's compelling content - and lots of it, frequently updated - that's required before widespread, mainstream acceptance. This has already been noted many times here and elsewhere.
In my own experience, I've been reading shorter-form ebook content for years. AvantGo is my primary news source, and Richard Lawrence's excellent AvantSlash is a main way I read summaries and comments on Slashdot.
I have never read a novel with an ereader.
Of a more niche front, I'd love to see e content that's more easily annotated: when reading articles, white papers, etc., I'd like to be able to note, quickly and easily, the ideas that hit me at the time. I'd like those ideas to be linked to the passages that spurred them. These annotations should be syncable to a desktop app for further editing and printing.
Per the parent post, it's good to see Mobireader can see at least some of this. I'll check it out.
Think you should reconsider all the caffiene, Kaffiene:
My post was an attempt at humor; while, arguably, I failed, your (over)reaction is a bit more than was warranted.
Chill out, man -
Perhaps they are releasing this seemingly significant chunk of code under the GPL because "licensing SOC's IP" and accepting a few billion from MSFT made them feel dirty.
Since they've acquired Ximian and SuSe and have been making many of the Right Moves w/r/t both the F/OSS community as well as corporate users, Wall Street has been looking kindly on them. IMO, they have much additional value to provide (especially in user and meta directory services).
As others here have pointed out, the possible revenues they can make in services outweighs anything they might "leave on the table" w/r/t the previously ~$30 downloads they've abandoned.
Are any of these moves calculated to foster good will in the F/OSS community? I don't know, but these guys are smart and I'm happy to reap the rewards of their work and generosity.
The Audacity team has had a fine product out there for some time; I'm sure 1.2 will be that much better, and will push the level of expectation for "entry level" up for users and software producers alike.
And you of all people should know desktop publishing gave us 'zines, comix, as well as homegrown amateur pornography.
Before the advent of vanity sites and blogs, desktopPub was what certain creative-types used to do with their time to get their bitching and moaning "heard."
Oh, yeah - it also kinda became a multi-billion dollar industry that begat other multi-billion-dollar industries.
yr pal -
s mcnally
Per many of the comments already posted, that audience is growing well beyond traditional musicians - this is an Excellent Thing as it means more people can do more interesting - and better sounding - things.
Tools like this, and GarageBand (yes; only for OS X) enable a musician to flesh out ideas and create good sounding demos to share with friends. It also let's "non-traditional musicians" to play with loops, cutting & pasting of sound files, and generally mucking around with sound to have fun. It shouldn't be taken lightly - it's akin to desktop and web publishing capabilities that began to explode as the tools got better and easier to use.
It wasn't just CIT's stuff that was confiscated and / or shut down, but EVERYTHING in the datacenter where CIT's stuff happened to be; everything included my hosting provider, as well. N.B. - I am typically all for law enforcement and would rather err on the side of caution - esp if CIT was "reasonably believed" to have been stalling or destroying data.
For most of the informed readers, it not a matter of overlooking Apple's DRM, but a matter of recognizing its fairness and utility to users: iTunes Music Store's "FairPlay" is pretty consumer-friendly.
While I don't know all the details of Napster's DRM (I use iTMS), I do know that WindowsMediaPlayer is *not* as consumer friendly as iTunes - a prime example being that WMediaPlayer will burn a disc in WMA format by default rather than something most CD players or computers could handle (e.g. an audio cd or mp3)
Others'MMV, but I've owned / used / beaten to near-death 4 different Palms since the III (c.1998) and I can count on my fingers & toes the number of crashes I recall. The preponderance of those are recent*.
..." I'm talking every day, shutting the thing on and off probably 20 times each day, taking meeting notes (~40 WPM with Graffitti), and reading AvantGo news and PDFs as well as playing games. This in addition to the calandar and To Dos tracking I originally intended.
When I say "owned / used
Never have any of them (III, IIIx, IIIxe, Tungsten T) locked up in the middle of doing these things - they've locked up when syncing, when Finding (searching) against "bad apps," when attempting to switch from a live "Arkanoid" game, but never in the middle of real usage.
*- Also, at least in recent Tungsten memory, when I have reset it, it hasn't lost a damn thing - Not a Note, not a To Do, nor a Calendar entry.
OS 6 - architected and built by the BeOS engineers - looks interesting. I use it much more for "traditional PDA" stuff, but the BeOS was always smart and ass-kicking.
S
w/r/t needing to spend an extra grand - you're referring to Final Cut Pro, I presume; also check out Final Cut Express (~$250 or free [beer] if you can dig up a Premiere install disc somewhere). FCExpress works with widescreen aspect ratios.
I agree, but do you think we could encourage Apple to support The GIMP (which runs decently over X11 on OS X already)? It would give people a choice and Adobe the competition they need to do improve their UI.
What Apple's given back to the community is undeniable, as is what they've received from it. The GIMP seems like it could be a great tool in the vein of iMovie and iPhoto if there was weight thrown to develop it in that direction.
What's that in bogomips?
The Vonage service doesn't require that your PeeCee is on; the phone device itself is hooked directly to your router.
...)
(I don't have one, but have kept an interested eye open toward it
S
SonyStyle says the Clié has a"High Performance CPU (200 MHz);" Is that really enough for video?
I very recently got a Tungsten T - it's great, and I love the fact it can play MP3s; even with a 128MB SD card, though, and using RealOne (transfer rates to the TT suck donk otherwise), it's still a little tweaky: That is, I can't use it to, e.g., read AvantGo offline (a 'core PDA function,' IMO) and listen to tunes seamlessly. Page scrolling slows. Music drops out. Timeouts shut the thing off completely.
Playing music is certainly a non-core function for a PDA, but it *wouldn't* be if the TT handled it to where I didn't have to be concerned about it.
If you're watching video on your new Clié, are you doing it because you Can, or because it Works?
Holy crap - this whole discussion is en re a MacWhispers column written by a guy who's time and again (macTable; envestco, etc.) been proven to be so full of shit his eyes are brown.
...
...
It wouldda been good to see evil carrot's post further up the thread
If it is for real, great - considering the source, though, doesn't fill me with hope. The article was convincing with all the "inside scoop" from the part OEMs -
Oh, well - I just bought a dual 867 anyway