Every three months or so, a rival of Apple's talk to the press and say that they are evil and should open up their operation, usually flaunting deliberate half-truths like "Apple's proprietary AAC format" (which is really the MPEG standard AAC format with Apple's proprietary FairPlay DRM, as opposed to Microsoft's proprietary WMA format with Microsoft's proprietary PlaysForSure DRM, but never mind). Creative and SanDisk have made lasting impressions in this genre of PR with Harmony and the mud-flinging ad campaign, respectively. The point is this - they don't *really* want to empower the consumer, they just saw a market share chart and they want Apple to look bad or tossing them some crumbs in order to not look bad.
What's great about this is that there are consumer organizations behind this. They are taking a genuine interest in the consumer. Up and until now, we've been complaining and representatives have been able to get off the hook by saying things to the effect of "no one outside of Slashdot really cares" (also a deliberate half-truth, I should add; no consumer who knows about DRM likes it). The more exposure this gets from the right people, the better. The best thing about this is that any consumer organization with a clue is not going to take WMA for an answer.
In case you haven't noticed, you also kill people, sail using a talking boat, shoot frogs in cyclones with arrows... it's a fucking game! Pedophile-friendly? Even if you don't desperately want to hate that game and are running out of real excuses, your argumentation certainly makes it sounds like it. (A "toddler" he's not, by the way - you can't swing a master sword on Outset Island without hitting smaller kids by far, and they look to be about 5 years old.)
I agree with you that Tingle is the biggest pain in the ass in Zelda ever (I did mention how I hated Majora's Mask), but knowing how the rest of the game plays and how little you actually need to interact with him, it's not worth being blinded by that and miss out on the rest of the game.
I completely agree with what you're on about regarding Nintendo's franchises. Up until very recently, they've done nothing but re-release old versions of their games (this started just before the original GBA's launch and has been going on ever since). However, a few months ago, they've actually started cutting down on the retro crap. I like retro too, but I don't like it being the only thing shoved down my throat with nary an improvement as the only alternative.
What they've done instead is go for some nice sequels - or at least games in the same series. Yes, yes, they are sequels. I don't hate sequels, I hate *bad* sequels, just as I hate bad games that are the first in their series. And Nintendo's certainly had its share of bad sequels (apparently I'm alone in thinking Majora's Mask a turd, but there are other better examples). But these new games really show a spark that I haven't seen since... well, since early N64 for the Wii, and since Super Nintendo for the DS.
Super Mario Galaxy looks to be based more on the back to basics stages than the arduous Shine-hunting from Sunshine. Yoshi's Island 2 looks to not drag in the touch screen just for the hell of it. Super Princess Peach (some people will laugh now - their loss) looks absolutely amazing, like the Yoshi's Island for the DS. New SMB - what I've been holding out for for years; a new 2D Mario platformer! (Was that so fucking hard?)
For once, they've also got some strong third party support, especially with Red Steel, Need for Speed, Medal of Honor and *two* Square Enix RPGs. And for once, Nintendo's trying to create new games that don't necessarily look like stereotypical Nintendo games with Disaster: Day of Crisis, Excite Truck and Wii Sports.
(As for Wind Waker being "for children", I'm replaying it for the third time and I'm enjoying it way more than I did Ocarina of Time (N64), Link's Awakening (GB) or even A Link to the Past (SNES). I should note that I never liked the graphics in OoT either, but the reasons I like Wind Waker go far beyond the graphics. I don't own one game in which the controller feels painful, which is not saying that it isn't in SSX. I'm just saying that it's never been sub-par in the games I do own.)
To sum it up, I think that Nintendo's finally coming out of their slump. I was going to skip the DS entirely, but with the new games, I'm not so sure anymore. The new games may mostly reuse the old characters and ideas, and it's an issue of personal taste as to whether you think that's still a good idea. Some of the new games may even shoehorn in the Wiimote and the DS touching where none of it was needed, and that's not good either. But at the end of the day I think the new wave of games will be fundamentally better than what we've seen in a long time from Nintendo, and that's what matters.
The whole ruling is interesting reading, but towards the end (page 62 and forward) we find these very interesting lines, which I suppose sum up best why Apple lost the case:
"The publication here bears little resemblance to that in Bunner, which disclosed a sort of meta-secret, the whole purpose of which was to protect the plaintiff's members' products from unauthorized distribution. Here, no proprietary technology was exposed or compromised. There is no suggestion that anything in petitioners' articles could help anyone to build a product competing with Asteroid. Indeed there is no indication that Asteroid embodied any new technology that could be compromised. Apple's own slide stack, as disclosed in sealed declarations which we have examined, included a table comparing Asteroid to existing, competing products; there is no suggestion that it embodies any particular technical innovation, except perhaps in the fact that it would integrate closely with Apple's own home recording software--a feature reflecting less a technical advance than a prerogative of one who markets both hardware and software.
The newsworthiness of petitioners' articles thus resided not in any technical disclosures about the product but in the fact that Apple was planning to release such a product, thereby moving into the market for home recording hardware.
[..]
Publishing a computer manufacturer's proprietary code may thus be compared to publishing a miller's secret recipe for a breakfast cereal. What occurred here was more like publicizing a secret plan to release a new cereal. Such a secret plan may possess the legal attributes of a trade secret; that is a question we are not here required to decide. But it is of a different order than a secret recipe for a product. And more to the point, the fact of its impending release carries a legitimate interest to the public that a recipe is unlikely to possess."
So what you're saying is that they should expel the guy who wrote stuff in his private weblog outside of school time on his own premises because other people that are more violent do not get expelled? What kind of example would this set? "Sure, bring a knife to school, just don't keep your web site updated from home."?
If there's a pendulum that needs to swing back, it would seem to me that it would swing back on the people that actually did something wrong.
Wouldn't it have been more intelligent to send astronauts trained to be oil drillers to the moon to deal with the asteroid instead of sending up oil drillers trained to be astronauts?
I don't think we're having this discussion because Andrew hates monolithic kernels explicitly, I think it's because Andrew propagates a design which many think can't be as effective as a monolithic kernel and he wants to prove them wrong. I don't think hate for A is his motivation more than love for B. I see nothing wrong here, and I'd certainly do that too if I was in his situation.
Didn't Andrew just list a bunch of microkernels in TFA and address points like yours specifically? (He points out exactly that OS X and NT are not microkernel-based, for example.)
I for one am very interested in how MINIX-3 will turn out. Actually, I can't even believe this discussion is being held - if MINIX-3 does turn out to be a good alternative, we all win, right? And if it doesn't, no harm done, right? In any case the world knows more about how microkernels work and don't work, and can apply those lessons to, say, Linux.
I use emacs. *However* I don't use emacs because it has 'every keystroke bound to some ridiculous command', but because it's as close to an actual sane editor that I can get. I get how some people can get along just fine and probably be more productive with vi than with emacs, but I'm not one of them.
What I want is this: pico/nano with regex search and replace. Does anyone have any idea of where to get that?
Let's see. 20 years ago, computers were not ubiquitous. If you bought a computer, you either had to use it or were very interested in doing so. Today, computers *are* ubiquitous.
I'm willing to contend that a bigger fraction of the overall population programs, but obviously it shows up as a smaller fraction when compared to "everyone that uses a computer", because the group that just use a computer because they have to have expanded enormously compared to 20 years ago.
Shake isn't yet available in a Universal binary (version that runs on both Intel and PowerPC). Rightly or not (impossible for three pregnant women to deliver a baby in three months, and so on), it wouldn't surprise me if they had transferred a lot of people there simply for extra engineering resources.
Let's also not forget that Aperture is just a few months old at this point. It always takes a significant amount of people around each point release, and especially before the veryfirst. Following 1.0, they've been putting out bug fixes and working on the most common pitfalls (read: most of the minuses in Ars Technica's review) for 1.1, and now Apple can afford to let a few people go. I'm willing to bet a large amount of money that there's still a very real Aperture team, if not as large as it was two months ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started hiring or transferring more people there when they ramp up to 2.0.
And of course, Aperture is not dying. Apple just put out 1.1, it's featured as the sole app on the big new 17" MacBook Pro on apple.com, and because of popular demand or wildly inebriated marketers last time around, it's now at $299, $200 less than when it was released and aimed at pro photographers. Apple want *more* people to use it, not less.
I'm among the last people to praise Bush for doing anything, but I think that his speech hit spot on.
The gist of his speech was that research - any kind of research - is pivotal to creating and helping develop new technology, and that often new technology that's exciting in its own right ends up being used in totally different ways, many of which are also useful (and many times more useful than what it was originally invented for), and he used the iPod and Internet (if your reply concerns Al Gore because of that word, don't even bother).
You just can't argue with that kind of logic, because it's absolutely true. This is the essence of the saying "greater than the sum of its parts" and it's a very good way to back up added funds for research, which Bush advocates (doubled funds, if I recall correctly).
I didn't think anyone would be malicious enough to graft it into "Bush claims government invented iPod". I think that those who're doing that needs to watch that portion of the speech and ask themselves if he's really saying that, or if you just wish that he did say that because then you could ridicule him. I'm all about ridiculing Bush, but there's plenty of legitimate cases to choose from, and the truth of the matter is that this isn't one of them.
how about my right to do what I want with my voice (and scream at them) or email server (and email flood them) or botnet (and DDOS them)? It's my property, you know?
But by pingflooding or shouting, you are intruding on someone else's property.
Yes, and that was his point. Argumentation through showing the absurdness of the opposing position. (You conveniently cut out the part where he said that *if* we wanted to go into a certain territory, this is what would happen - he never personally argued for it.)
Now, I'm no expert, but it also might have something to do with the fact that Microsoft concluded that their IE team was good and that they could use good people on projects that made money. Some previous IE team members went to MSN for OS X (which has since been put down) and at the very least Tantek Çelik (who wrote a lot of the Tasman rendering engine, in its day amazing) found out about IE being EOLed by it being in the news.
Basically, Microsoft decided that they had won the browser wars and they stopped trying and put their resources elsewhere - both on Mac and Windows. There were some plans to start trying again on the Mac (recall that it took longer before the Win/IE team rose from the ashes), but Microsoft quickly embraced Safari instead. The sad part is that some Mac users still use Mac/IE, despite it being antique. (This is probably why Apple stopped shipping it in OS X 10.4.)
Microsoft's stated reason isn't a lie, but taking it as the definitive truth about how web browsers are made or why Microsoft stopped IE is a mistake.
The "one box" is the part on some Google results where you get the News (like searching for "italian election"), or the Calculator ("500 mph in km/h"), or the Image results (can't think of a good one) etc, on the top, before the search results, because they're likely what you're looking for.
This announcement looks to be the integration of some relevant services (and possibly your own - I didn't watch the video, and the weblog post is mum on details) into the search appliance Google has been offering for quite a while - in other words, the "one box" feature brought to the appliance, not a new box altogether, as one might (logically) infer. (They *did* launch a new version of the "Mini" search appliance, however.)
Bart flicks a pocket knife open and closed repeatedly Man: You call that a knife? This is a knife. Bart: That's not a knife, that's a spoon. Man: All right, all right, you win, heh. I see you've played Knifey-Spooney before.
I agree. The keyboard on my Powerbook G4 is better than any other laptop keyboard I've ever used. Depth is good, the keys themselves - with the sole exceptions of the arrow keys and the top row - are actually reasonably sized, and they're not spongy. Additionally, the letters are *not* painted on, but parts of the keys that are not painted. Other than allowing the backlighting to work, it's holding up extremely well to wear and tear, in my experience.
This is stupid. Part of the industry has kept making these predictions ever since the iPod and iTMS came out (respectively). I don't blame them for having those thoughts in the beginning, since neither was immediately successful, and Apple hasn't had similar success in the past. But despite being proven wrong by facts constantly, they keep predicting the same thing over and over. At this point, it's not unlike making the prediction that in three months, we'll all use Macs, and I'm not sure anyone here would take that even slightly seriously.
The only part of these predictions that might turn out correct is that mobile phones that can play music are on the rise. This is only true because more and more mobile phones now have the ability to play music, not because the same percentage of mobile phones can play music and more and more people are taking the extra steps to hunt out them specifically - it's like claiming more and more people do supercomputing because more and faster computers are being sold. Additionally, sales of dedicated music players - like the iPod - are *also* going up with a vengeance, so if there's market being stolen here by either side from the other, I for one don't see it.
This is how I imagine the part of the industry that keeps making these predictions working:
WMA-based music stores (or hell, any other music store) will suddenly and violently overturn iTunes Music Store (currently at around 70-80% market share) at the drop of a hat, mobile phones with the ability to play audio will suddenly and violently take over half the market for iPods, and all other music players will suddenly and violently take over the other half of the market for iPods, all going almost completely contrary to documented recent developments and general momentum, and it'll all happen... Nnnnnnnow!
Okay. Good. Didn't happen. We were early. Forward-thinking. But I swear, it's gonna happen! Nnnnnnnnnnow!
Slashdot Mirror
Every three months or so, a rival of Apple's talk to the press and say that they are evil and should open up their operation, usually flaunting deliberate half-truths like "Apple's proprietary AAC format" (which is really the MPEG standard AAC format with Apple's proprietary FairPlay DRM, as opposed to Microsoft's proprietary WMA format with Microsoft's proprietary PlaysForSure DRM, but never mind). Creative and SanDisk have made lasting impressions in this genre of PR with Harmony and the mud-flinging ad campaign, respectively. The point is this - they don't *really* want to empower the consumer, they just saw a market share chart and they want Apple to look bad or tossing them some crumbs in order to not look bad.
What's great about this is that there are consumer organizations behind this. They are taking a genuine interest in the consumer. Up and until now, we've been complaining and representatives have been able to get off the hook by saying things to the effect of "no one outside of Slashdot really cares" (also a deliberate half-truth, I should add; no consumer who knows about DRM likes it). The more exposure this gets from the right people, the better. The best thing about this is that any consumer organization with a clue is not going to take WMA for an answer.
In case you haven't noticed, you also kill people, sail using a talking boat, shoot frogs in cyclones with arrows... it's a fucking game! Pedophile-friendly? Even if you don't desperately want to hate that game and are running out of real excuses, your argumentation certainly makes it sounds like it. (A "toddler" he's not, by the way - you can't swing a master sword on Outset Island without hitting smaller kids by far, and they look to be about 5 years old.)
I agree with you that Tingle is the biggest pain in the ass in Zelda ever (I did mention how I hated Majora's Mask), but knowing how the rest of the game plays and how little you actually need to interact with him, it's not worth being blinded by that and miss out on the rest of the game.
I completely agree with what you're on about regarding Nintendo's franchises. Up until very recently, they've done nothing but re-release old versions of their games (this started just before the original GBA's launch and has been going on ever since). However, a few months ago, they've actually started cutting down on the retro crap. I like retro too, but I don't like it being the only thing shoved down my throat with nary an improvement as the only alternative.
What they've done instead is go for some nice sequels - or at least games in the same series. Yes, yes, they are sequels. I don't hate sequels, I hate *bad* sequels, just as I hate bad games that are the first in their series. And Nintendo's certainly had its share of bad sequels (apparently I'm alone in thinking Majora's Mask a turd, but there are other better examples). But these new games really show a spark that I haven't seen since... well, since early N64 for the Wii, and since Super Nintendo for the DS.
Super Mario Galaxy looks to be based more on the back to basics stages than the arduous Shine-hunting from Sunshine. Yoshi's Island 2 looks to not drag in the touch screen just for the hell of it. Super Princess Peach (some people will laugh now - their loss) looks absolutely amazing, like the Yoshi's Island for the DS. New SMB - what I've been holding out for for years; a new 2D Mario platformer! (Was that so fucking hard?)
For once, they've also got some strong third party support, especially with Red Steel, Need for Speed, Medal of Honor and *two* Square Enix RPGs. And for once, Nintendo's trying to create new games that don't necessarily look like stereotypical Nintendo games with Disaster: Day of Crisis, Excite Truck and Wii Sports.
(As for Wind Waker being "for children", I'm replaying it for the third time and I'm enjoying it way more than I did Ocarina of Time (N64), Link's Awakening (GB) or even A Link to the Past (SNES). I should note that I never liked the graphics in OoT either, but the reasons I like Wind Waker go far beyond the graphics. I don't own one game in which the controller feels painful, which is not saying that it isn't in SSX. I'm just saying that it's never been sub-par in the games I do own.)
To sum it up, I think that Nintendo's finally coming out of their slump. I was going to skip the DS entirely, but with the new games, I'm not so sure anymore. The new games may mostly reuse the old characters and ideas, and it's an issue of personal taste as to whether you think that's still a good idea. Some of the new games may even shoehorn in the Wiimote and the DS touching where none of it was needed, and that's not good either. But at the end of the day I think the new wave of games will be fundamentally better than what we've seen in a long time from Nintendo, and that's what matters.
The whole ruling is interesting reading, but towards the end (page 62 and forward) we find these very interesting lines, which I suppose sum up best why Apple lost the case:
"The publication here bears little resemblance to that in Bunner, which disclosed a sort of meta-secret, the whole purpose of which was to protect the plaintiff's members' products from unauthorized distribution. Here, no proprietary technology was exposed or compromised. There is no suggestion that anything in petitioners' articles could help anyone to build a product competing with Asteroid. Indeed there is no indication that Asteroid embodied any new technology that could be compromised. Apple's own slide stack, as disclosed in sealed declarations which we have examined, included a table comparing Asteroid to existing, competing products; there is no suggestion that it embodies any particular technical innovation, except perhaps in the fact that it would integrate closely with Apple's own home recording software--a feature reflecting less a technical advance than a prerogative of one who markets both hardware and software.
The newsworthiness of petitioners' articles thus resided not in any technical disclosures about the product but in the fact that Apple was planning to release such a product, thereby moving into the market for home recording hardware.
[..]
Publishing a computer manufacturer's proprietary code may thus be compared to publishing a miller's secret recipe for a breakfast cereal. What occurred here was more like publicizing a secret plan to release a new cereal. Such a secret plan may possess the legal attributes of a trade secret; that is a question we are not here required to decide. But it is of a different order than a secret recipe for a product. And more to the point, the fact of its impending release carries a legitimate interest to the public that a recipe is unlikely to possess."
So what you're saying is that they should expel the guy who wrote stuff in his private weblog outside of school time on his own premises because other people that are more violent do not get expelled? What kind of example would this set? "Sure, bring a knife to school, just don't keep your web site updated from home."?
If there's a pendulum that needs to swing back, it would seem to me that it would swing back on the people that actually did something wrong.
Wouldn't it have been more intelligent to send astronauts trained to be oil drillers to the moon to deal with the asteroid instead of sending up oil drillers trained to be astronauts?
Don't knock it. It worked. :)
I don't think we're having this discussion because Andrew hates monolithic kernels explicitly, I think it's because Andrew propagates a design which many think can't be as effective as a monolithic kernel and he wants to prove them wrong. I don't think hate for A is his motivation more than love for B. I see nothing wrong here, and I'd certainly do that too if I was in his situation.
Didn't Andrew just list a bunch of microkernels in TFA and address points like yours specifically? (He points out exactly that OS X and NT are not microkernel-based, for example.)
I for one am very interested in how MINIX-3 will turn out. Actually, I can't even believe this discussion is being held - if MINIX-3 does turn out to be a good alternative, we all win, right? And if it doesn't, no harm done, right? In any case the world knows more about how microkernels work and don't work, and can apply those lessons to, say, Linux.
Wow, I never saw that. Thanks!
I use emacs. *However* I don't use emacs because it has 'every keystroke bound to some ridiculous command', but because it's as close to an actual sane editor that I can get. I get how some people can get along just fine and probably be more productive with vi than with emacs, but I'm not one of them.
What I want is this: pico/nano with regex search and replace. Does anyone have any idea of where to get that?
And be rather pungent.
At least it's better than MacBook Con. ;)
Boot Camp. It's the first pre-announced part of OS X 10.5 ("Leopard"). It's available in beta now, but it'll be "1.0" in 10.5.
Let's see. 20 years ago, computers were not ubiquitous. If you bought a computer, you either had to use it or were very interested in doing so. Today, computers *are* ubiquitous.
I'm willing to contend that a bigger fraction of the overall population programs, but obviously it shows up as a smaller fraction when compared to "everyone that uses a computer", because the group that just use a computer because they have to have expanded enormously compared to 20 years ago.
It's all well and good until you realize it's inserting "`fsck`;" every time you say the F word. :)
Shake isn't yet available in a Universal binary (version that runs on both Intel and PowerPC). Rightly or not (impossible for three pregnant women to deliver a baby in three months, and so on), it wouldn't surprise me if they had transferred a lot of people there simply for extra engineering resources.
Let's also not forget that Aperture is just a few months old at this point. It always takes a significant amount of people around each point release, and especially before the veryfirst. Following 1.0, they've been putting out bug fixes and working on the most common pitfalls (read: most of the minuses in Ars Technica's review) for 1.1, and now Apple can afford to let a few people go. I'm willing to bet a large amount of money that there's still a very real Aperture team, if not as large as it was two months ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started hiring or transferring more people there when they ramp up to 2.0.
And of course, Aperture is not dying. Apple just put out 1.1, it's featured as the sole app on the big new 17" MacBook Pro on apple.com, and because of popular demand or wildly inebriated marketers last time around, it's now at $299, $200 less than when it was released and aimed at pro photographers. Apple want *more* people to use it, not less.
I'm among the last people to praise Bush for doing anything, but I think that his speech hit spot on.
The gist of his speech was that research - any kind of research - is pivotal to creating and helping develop new technology, and that often new technology that's exciting in its own right ends up being used in totally different ways, many of which are also useful (and many times more useful than what it was originally invented for), and he used the iPod and Internet (if your reply concerns Al Gore because of that word, don't even bother).
You just can't argue with that kind of logic, because it's absolutely true. This is the essence of the saying "greater than the sum of its parts" and it's a very good way to back up added funds for research, which Bush advocates (doubled funds, if I recall correctly).
I didn't think anyone would be malicious enough to graft it into "Bush claims government invented iPod". I think that those who're doing that needs to watch that portion of the speech and ask themselves if he's really saying that, or if you just wish that he did say that because then you could ridicule him. I'm all about ridiculing Bush, but there's plenty of legitimate cases to choose from, and the truth of the matter is that this isn't one of them.
Now, I'm no expert, but it also might have something to do with the fact that Microsoft concluded that their IE team was good and that they could use good people on projects that made money. Some previous IE team members went to MSN for OS X (which has since been put down) and at the very least Tantek Çelik (who wrote a lot of the Tasman rendering engine, in its day amazing) found out about IE being EOLed by it being in the news.
Basically, Microsoft decided that they had won the browser wars and they stopped trying and put their resources elsewhere - both on Mac and Windows. There were some plans to start trying again on the Mac (recall that it took longer before the Win/IE team rose from the ashes), but Microsoft quickly embraced Safari instead. The sad part is that some Mac users still use Mac/IE, despite it being antique. (This is probably why Apple stopped shipping it in OS X 10.4.)
Microsoft's stated reason isn't a lie, but taking it as the definitive truth about how web browsers are made or why Microsoft stopped IE is a mistake.
The "one box" is the part on some Google results where you get the News (like searching for "italian election"), or the Calculator ("500 mph in km/h"), or the Image results (can't think of a good one) etc, on the top, before the search results, because they're likely what you're looking for.
This announcement looks to be the integration of some relevant services (and possibly your own - I didn't watch the video, and the weblog post is mum on details) into the search appliance Google has been offering for quite a while - in other words, the "one box" feature brought to the appliance, not a new box altogether, as one might (logically) infer. (They *did* launch a new version of the "Mini" search appliance, however.)
You, you probably don't even know what France is.
Bart flicks a pocket knife open and closed repeatedly
Man: You call that a knife? This is a knife.
Bart: That's not a knife, that's a spoon.
Man: All right, all right, you win, heh. I see you've played Knifey-Spooney before.
I agree. The keyboard on my Powerbook G4 is better than any other laptop keyboard I've ever used. Depth is good, the keys themselves - with the sole exceptions of the arrow keys and the top row - are actually reasonably sized, and they're not spongy. Additionally, the letters are *not* painted on, but parts of the keys that are not painted. Other than allowing the backlighting to work, it's holding up extremely well to wear and tear, in my experience.
Or, in other words: "Stop trying to hit me and hit me!"
This is stupid. Part of the industry has kept making these predictions ever since the iPod and iTMS came out (respectively). I don't blame them for having those thoughts in the beginning, since neither was immediately successful, and Apple hasn't had similar success in the past. But despite being proven wrong by facts constantly, they keep predicting the same thing over and over. At this point, it's not unlike making the prediction that in three months, we'll all use Macs, and I'm not sure anyone here would take that even slightly seriously.
The only part of these predictions that might turn out correct is that mobile phones that can play music are on the rise. This is only true because more and more mobile phones now have the ability to play music, not because the same percentage of mobile phones can play music and more and more people are taking the extra steps to hunt out them specifically - it's like claiming more and more people do supercomputing because more and faster computers are being sold. Additionally, sales of dedicated music players - like the iPod - are *also* going up with a vengeance, so if there's market being stolen here by either side from the other, I for one don't see it.
This is how I imagine the part of the industry that keeps making these predictions working:
WMA-based music stores (or hell, any other music store) will suddenly and violently overturn iTunes Music Store (currently at around 70-80% market share) at the drop of a hat, mobile phones with the ability to play audio will suddenly and violently take over half the market for iPods, and all other music players will suddenly and violently take over the other half of the market for iPods, all going almost completely contrary to documented recent developments and general momentum, and it'll all happen... Nnnnnnnow!
Okay. Good. Didn't happen. We were early. Forward-thinking. But I swear, it's gonna happen! Nnnnnnnnnnow!
Uh... nnnnnnow! Damn it! Nnnnnnnnnnnnnow!
Nnnnnnnnow! Nnnow! Nnnnow!