Small indie labels really need some kind of recommendation system. Genres aren't enough. What really needs to happen is indie labels should band together and set up something like Pandora, but designed for their own marketing. Like, maybe you start by entering in some bands that you like, and it starts recommending some songs. As you hear songs, you give them a "yes" or "no", and it tries to refine the selection based on that. If you find something you really like, the site gives you a link to download/buy.
Honestly, I have a hard time finding anything that I like because there's such a high noise:signal ratio. A tool to direct people to other music they might like would go a long way.
It's really not clear that it's going to be a "when they were young" movie. It's not as though Matt Damon, Adrien Brody and Gary Sinise are teenagers. It might just be a "before they were old" movie, meaning a rewrite of the original series.
It's called marketing. 20 songs per iPod sold, sure, but that doesn't literally mean that each iPod owner actually has only bought 20 songs. Let's imagine your 5 iPods/person scenario again, but also that only 50% of iPod users use iTMS. That's 200 songs/person. Now, in reality that won't be evenly distributed, so you'll get some people buying 10 songs and some people buying a thousand songs.
Now, it might be that there at 20% of iPod users who are heavy iTunes purchasers, and some of those 20% might not have purchased the iPod if not for iTunes. Also, on top of the fact that some people wouldn't have bought an iPod if not for the iTMS, there are others who wouldn't have bought an iPod if not for hype coming from some of the iTMS customers. There are some who wouldn't have bought an iPod if not for all the accessories that are available; the massive number of accessories only exist because of the market share generated by others.
So, you really get something like a snowball effect. More owners mean more accessories and more hype, which in turn generates more owners. Every little bit helps, and consider this: Even if only 10% of iPod purchases were generated by the iTMS, that's still something like 9 million units. Given Apple's profit margin on iPods, it'd be worth operating the iTMS even if they lost a couple million on it.
The RIAA didn't care when Real was replicating Fairplay because the RIAA wants to screw Apple. However, I'm quite sure the RIAA cared when the Hymn project broke Fairplay. Jobs is claiming that opening the DRM to anyone means exposing how the DRM works, which will make the DRM inherently breakable.
Let's just imagine, for example, that Apple provides an open-source player for the DRMed AAC files. How long would it take for someone to turn that into a DRM-stripper?
Nobody is asking that question because nobody uses the Zune DRM. For most people, iTMS is their only exposure to obvious DRM. Yes, people use DVDs, but all they really understand about DVD DRM is that "DVDs are hard to copy".
Also there is some astroturfing going on by the record industry. Apple keeping prices low, so they want other routes to sell DRMed music for iPods. There's some crazy s%#* going on here.
Part of the problem here is that products are getting more complicated, and users are finding themselves needing to do less to get more. Those sound like good things, and they probably are, but not for creating a society of Mr. Fixits.
For example, cars now have computers in them, so it's not necessarily the case that a mechanically-minded person can dig in and figure it out. Sure, you were repairing TVs when you were a kid, but I suspect that, at the time, those CRT TVs were considerably easier to repair with common everyday tools than today's HDTV plasma displays.
Also, like I said, they can get more while doing/knowing less. I'll take an example from my own experience: playing video games. I remember back in the old DOS days when you had to rewrite your autoexec.bat and config.sys for each game you wanted to play. You had to set up your sound card and video card for each game. You had to know terms like "IRQ" and "HIMEM.SYS". These days, all you have to know is how to click "next" on an install wizard.
Well, *you* wouldn't obviously. But the record/ringtone companies likely figure (probably rightly) that enough people will buy the ringtone, either because they're stupid (don't know that it's possible to rip, or don't know how) or are simply lazy.
Yes, I, for one, am lazy-- and I believe most people are stupid. In fact, you have to figure that a high percentage of people are either stupid and spend their money on things they could do themselves if they were smarter, or else smart and have disposable income and feel it's worth spending a couple dollars to save some time. This is exactly where the RIAA should be making their money: by making it easy and convenient to purchase and listen to music.
However, they seem somehow intent on not using this business model. Instead, they're making it harder and less convenient to use their product legally. No wonder piracy is such a problem!
Yes, I think it's just not going to happen. I think there is a much greater chance that over-the-air broadcast will be made entirely obsolete by network content distribution before the feds ever throw the switch on NTSC.
So it's a race, which will happen more quickly: HDTVs will become ubiquitous -or- the big OTA networks will give up on their business model. Which do you think will happen sooner?
I also think that the claim that SDTVs will simply not be manufactured anymore rests on the faulty assumption that NTSC broadcasts will be turned off.
No, it's based on the assumption that the price of HDTVs will continue downwards to the point where they're comparable (more or less) in price to today's SDTVs, at which time there will be little point in SDTVs anymore. HDTVs can display a SDTV picture, so there's not really much of a downside to HDTV except price, and that price keeps coming down.
What, do you think it's just not going to happen? It's only a matter of time before SDTVs aren't being built anymore, and then only a matter of time before the gross majority of households are using HDTV.
Clearly the FCC did a poor job at estimating a timetable and expected HDTV prices to drop much faster than they have, but I see no reason to think that SDTV broadcasts aren't going away eventually.
I said that they can be made to run on a Dell, which is absolutely true. I never claimed that making them run on a Dell was legal, nor have I claimed that it's worthwhile, but only that it can be done.
I've also been thinking about all this recently from the standpoint of the expense of resources. The use of natural resources, the expense of pollution, the expense of the distribution chain, internet bandwidth, and even hard drive space. It's odd to think about in these terms, since it's usually painted as an issue of consumer rights vs. corporate profitability, or as the desires of the audience vs. the needs of the consumer.
However, the pictures changes if, for a moment, we re-imagine it as a problem for society to solve: how do we efficiently manage the distribution of recorded arts? For the sake of argument, lets disregard the other concerns, such as managing who is authorized to view what, or financial reimbursements to artists. Just think of the problem of distribution of information, as though it's assumed that the information is free.
Suddenly it becomes clear that physical distribution, in this day and age, is *stupid*. We have this huge network at our fingertips, and we're going to waste materials on manufacturing millions of CDs? Many of those CDs are going to ripped to MP3 and then sit on a shelf. For what purpose? We use land and materials to build physical record stores (and Best Buy), we use the materials for the actual media, we pay people to search/maintain the inventory, there's the trucks and the shipping, and all that crap. Think of all the man-time and materials wasted.
Also, users needing to rely on the hard drives in their home computer to store a specific copy of a top-40 hit or a Hollywood movie is nonsense. Right now, the top movie on iTMS is "The Prestige". Consider for a moment if I had bought that movie from iTunes 20 minutes before my hard drive died. Now, why should I need to keep a copy on my local hard drive? The movie has already been ripped, and the data exists elsewhere on the Internet. In order for me to download the movie again would only cost in used bandwidth, but those costs can be mitigated, ironically, by the sheer number of people downloading it. I'm sure that it's obvious to everyone here that the solution is P2P (bittorrent).
It's become clear to me that for a society concerned with using resources efficiently, sharing information via P2P networks is a solution that's almost too good to be true. I'm not just talking about hippy-talk "conservation" in the environmentalist sense. I'm talking about the human resources, the expense of intellectual thought, and the money spent. Overall, those resources, too, would be more efficiently managed through P2P distribution.
Now, some people would complain that jobs would be lost, but that's inherent in using human resources efficiently. Some of the human resources currently spent on these distribution issues are being spent unnecessarily. That we don't break windows makes less work for the window-makers, but breaking windows does not generate wealth. (Yes, I guess I'm suggesting that the MPAA/RIAA have become an example of the broken-window fallacy, and therefore create a net-loss for society)
Legally, no, because it's only licensed to run on Apple machines. My point, however, is that the basic OS is an open-sourced BSD derivative, which is how people are able to hack it to run on a Dell.
If you're in favor of a free market, maybe we should open up the radio spectrum for anyone to broadcast whatever they want, and maybe we should let everyone put data networks wherever they want whenever they want however they want.
Of course, when your street has been dug up for the 5th time to lay down cable, or cable hasn't been laid at all because the investment isn't worth the risk without some guarantee of a semi-monopoly, and when your local police departments, ambulances, and TV stations can't get a signal through all the interference, your opinion might change.
If there's one part of the private sector that I think the needs governmental regulation these days, it's our data infrastructure. Our ability to connect to the internet and communicate is becoming too important to have a company hindering the progress, dragging their feet, because they haven't figured out how change will effect their bottom line.
Most of these are fairly minor relative to what others are doing. I repeat: they are no more proprietary than Windows. They are in fact less so.
Yes, Apple chooses not to license their technology so that people can make shoddy knock-offs. Still you can install OSX on non-Apple systems-- because their OS is basically open source. People just replace the pieces that require Apple hardware, and bingo, OSX runs on Dells.
Is the Windows kernel open source? Can Windows XP connect to NFS/AFP shares out of the box? Does Microsoft offer WMA/WMV codecs for other operating systems? Can I run Microsoft's "URGE" software, download songs, and play the DRMed songs in OSX?
ADC is even arguably a better connector. It allows for a single cable going from the computer to the monitor with no need to run power. Yes, sometimes Apple tries to push an approach they think is better rather than going with "what everyone else is doing". But once DVI really caught on and became common-place, they switched to DVI anyway.
These things just aren't that bad. No, Apple isn't making completely open-source software, and so they have some restrictions on how you can use it. They have to use DRM because the record industry requires it. All in all, it's still not bad enough to warrant the sort of anger you're displaying.
I don't know. I used to work for a company with software developers under the direction of the Engineering group who regularly tried to take charge of IT decision, and that was a horribly bad thing. I don't know about you, personally, or your company, but we had to lock down the software engineers tighter than anyone else to keep them from bringing the network to its knees.
Part of the problem here is that being a software developer doesn't necessarily qualify you to be a network/systems admin. No, it doesn't. You might know loads about logic, how software is written, and how computers are supposed to work, but that isn't the same as doing desktop/network/systems support on a large scale. Enterprise-level IT is a whole different beast than running your home network or writing software. Put the shoe on the other foot for a second-- do you want your desktop support person (even a very good desktop support person) coding your operating system? No, so how about we all stick with what we're good at.
That being said, we had separate machines for our software engineers. They weren't connected to our network, hardware was purchased through a separate budget, the software guys could do whatever we want in the lab, and our IT department wasn't required to support the Engineering systems.
But maybe for your company and your position, it you need more than that. I don't know. But generally, in my experience, there need to be some centralized standards and control to maintain security and stability.
I've had similar experiences. I've run into a couple people who actually do know a thing or two about computers and network administration, and they wanted absolutely nothing to do with fixing their own computer or installing their own software. Their attitude was more like, "Hey, I don't want your job. You do what you have to to get it working for me, because I don't want to fix the damned thing."
And then at every job there's some dumb user who set up his own home network, has an MCSE for some reason, and is very insistant that he should be able to have admin rights over everything. When you ask what he wants to do, he wants to install some POS application with spyware because it will sync his clock, which is done through the domain controller anyhow.
I swear, it's usually the people who don't really know much that demand special priviledges. People who know enough about computer to be a proper admin should (rightly) hate computers enough to not want to be the admin unless they have to. People always say to me, "So, you're in IT? You like computers, then?"
I say, "Nope. I hate computers. That's why I'm good at my job."
It's not terribly relevant, but I've used a Motorola Q. And various Palm Treo models, lots of different Blackberries, and other assorted smart phones. They're all terrible. The interface is bad, and unresponsive, too. Trying to use them as MP3 players is absurd.
You can like it, though. I'm not claiming to know that those devices are bad for you, for your purposes. I'm just saying that I've tried to use them and found them to be utterly unacceptable. I'm guessing that Apple will do a better job.
As far as the PS3, I just haven't seen anything so far that makes it worth the money (for me). For a couple hundred dollars less, I could get a 360 and have very similar capabilities to the PS3. I can get the Wii for less than half the price, and though I acknowledge that it's not quite the same thing, it will keep me entertained with fun games.
I guess my point is just that value is relative to what you need and what you get. If you really want a blu-ray DVD player and high-end graphics, a Wii won't be worth much. If you just want to play some fun games, the PS3 will seem like a rip-off. Likewise, if you want Exchange connectivity and Windows Mobile applications, the iPhone will look like a hunk of junk to you. If you want your iPod/phone/e-mail in a small, easy to use device, I suspect the iPhone will be very satisfying.
Some kinds of doctoring can be found by expert analysis. I'm not sure how definitive it can be, though. However, I believe that there are restrictions on what kind of pictures and video can be used in court. I've heard, for example, digital security camera footage might not be usable unless it's gathered/stored in a system that is fairly tamper-proof, so that the chain of custody can be demonstrated. (IANAL)
I think you're absolutely correct. I keep tell people this (I know a couple people in record companies and related jobs). The reason why iTunes has been successful, in my opinion, is that it's very convenient and not too-ridiculously-expensive. But the convenience is key! The only possible reason for anyone to buy a song from an online store is convenience.
If you can buy something online, that means you already have an internet connection fast enough to download music. This means you have the option of pirating. Therefore everyone is deciding to buy the song rather than downloading for free-- and why? Because when you pirate music, you need to know how. You need to know what sites to go to, which P2P apps to use, how to use bittorrent, etc. It's not the easiest and most convenient method of finding things, but it is getting easier all the time. Therefore, if you want people to purchase music, you must make your store easier.
Another problem with piracy is that you can't always be sure you're downloading what you really want. Sometimes songs are mislabled, and the actual audio isn't what the filename suggests. Sometimes the quality is bad for some reason, the file is corrupted, or it was just ripped with too low of a bitrate for your tastes. Therefore, an online store should provide better methods for you to find something worth purchasing, assurances that you're buying what you intend to buy, and a known-good quality level.
The final problem with piracy is just that it's illegal, and there's a small chance of punishment. Therefore (and this is a no-brainer) there should be no threat to people using online stores that they'll be punished for buying from the online store. This means the software can't have spyware or kill-switches that attempt to varify your songs are legitimate or tries to punish you for having illegitamate songs. This also means, to my mind, that online stores shouldn't have vendor lock-in or DRM which punish consumers for trying to adhere to the law and purchase music legally. There should be no greater restriction on legal downloads than there are restrictions on illegal downloads.
Of course, the main thing that will always discourage legal downloads is price. As long as it costs *something*, it will cost more than illegal downloads. Therefore, songs should be priced to reflect the level of convenience offered, and not to some arbitrary perceived value of the song itself. People will always pay something for convenience.
Beyond that, what happens when people stop burning audio CDs altogether? With the AppleTV, Windows MCE, Xbox 360, etc., how long before we stop using physical media for audio and video? I don't own a stereo or CD player. I have a computer hooked to speakers, and it plays MP3s. I have an iPod.
So 5-10 years from now, will there be any physical medium specifically associated with audio/video? I have my doubts. And if not, what sense does it make to tax physical media? I don't think it's a good solution.
Personally, I've never had a problem with the sentiment, "We want to make our product so good that $600 will seem cheap." That's great. As a matter of fact, I can afford to blow more than $600 in a year for some gadget, and the real question is, "Will it be worth it?"
The problem I have with the PS3 isn't necessarily the $600 price tag, nor is it the attitude that Sony *wanted* to make the product so good that I would rush out to spend $600 on it. The problem that I, personally, have with the PS3 is that I haven't seen anything so far that would make it worth $600. My impression so far is that the Wii is more fun to play for much less money.
On the other hand, if I could buy an 8GB flash iPod with a built in phone and the ability to fetch my e-mail, would that be worth $600? Sure.
See, $600 isn't, in itself, "too much money". It depends on what product you're talking about. $600 for a mansion in NYC would be cheap, while $600 for a stick of gum is expensive.
With all the proprietary gimmicks Apple tries to shove down customer's throats...
Which gimmicks are those? Granted, not all Apple's software is open source, but they're not very proprietary either. Large portions of their OS are Unix. Unlike Microsoft, Apple supports (and pushes) standard MPEG formats (h264+AAC instead of WMV and WMA). Their iWork formats are XML. OSX supports NFS and SMB. For server-end software, they offer FTP, Samba, SSH, Apache, MySQL, Jabber, etc.
Really, when you look at Apple is doing, they're generally using real standards, common protocols, and even loads of standard open-source packages. The only way that they could be more open/less proprietary would be to open all their source, and they're certainly no more "proprietary" than Microsoft.
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Small indie labels really need some kind of recommendation system. Genres aren't enough. What really needs to happen is indie labels should band together and set up something like Pandora, but designed for their own marketing. Like, maybe you start by entering in some bands that you like, and it starts recommending some songs. As you hear songs, you give them a "yes" or "no", and it tries to refine the selection based on that. If you find something you really like, the site gives you a link to download/buy.
Honestly, I have a hard time finding anything that I like because there's such a high noise:signal ratio. A tool to direct people to other music they might like would go a long way.
It's really not clear that it's going to be a "when they were young" movie. It's not as though Matt Damon, Adrien Brody and Gary Sinise are teenagers. It might just be a "before they were old" movie, meaning a rewrite of the original series.
It's called marketing. 20 songs per iPod sold, sure, but that doesn't literally mean that each iPod owner actually has only bought 20 songs. Let's imagine your 5 iPods/person scenario again, but also that only 50% of iPod users use iTMS. That's 200 songs/person. Now, in reality that won't be evenly distributed, so you'll get some people buying 10 songs and some people buying a thousand songs.
Now, it might be that there at 20% of iPod users who are heavy iTunes purchasers, and some of those 20% might not have purchased the iPod if not for iTunes. Also, on top of the fact that some people wouldn't have bought an iPod if not for the iTMS, there are others who wouldn't have bought an iPod if not for hype coming from some of the iTMS customers. There are some who wouldn't have bought an iPod if not for all the accessories that are available; the massive number of accessories only exist because of the market share generated by others.
So, you really get something like a snowball effect. More owners mean more accessories and more hype, which in turn generates more owners. Every little bit helps, and consider this: Even if only 10% of iPod purchases were generated by the iTMS, that's still something like 9 million units. Given Apple's profit margin on iPods, it'd be worth operating the iTMS even if they lost a couple million on it.
The RIAA didn't care when Real was replicating Fairplay because the RIAA wants to screw Apple. However, I'm quite sure the RIAA cared when the Hymn project broke Fairplay. Jobs is claiming that opening the DRM to anyone means exposing how the DRM works, which will make the DRM inherently breakable.
Let's just imagine, for example, that Apple provides an open-source player for the DRMed AAC files. How long would it take for someone to turn that into a DRM-stripper?
Nobody is asking that question because nobody uses the Zune DRM. For most people, iTMS is their only exposure to obvious DRM. Yes, people use DVDs, but all they really understand about DVD DRM is that "DVDs are hard to copy".
Also there is some astroturfing going on by the record industry. Apple keeping prices low, so they want other routes to sell DRMed music for iPods. There's some crazy s%#* going on here.
Part of the problem here is that products are getting more complicated, and users are finding themselves needing to do less to get more. Those sound like good things, and they probably are, but not for creating a society of Mr. Fixits.
For example, cars now have computers in them, so it's not necessarily the case that a mechanically-minded person can dig in and figure it out. Sure, you were repairing TVs when you were a kid, but I suspect that, at the time, those CRT TVs were considerably easier to repair with common everyday tools than today's HDTV plasma displays.
Also, like I said, they can get more while doing/knowing less. I'll take an example from my own experience: playing video games. I remember back in the old DOS days when you had to rewrite your autoexec.bat and config.sys for each game you wanted to play. You had to set up your sound card and video card for each game. You had to know terms like "IRQ" and "HIMEM.SYS". These days, all you have to know is how to click "next" on an install wizard.
That's kind of a technicality that doesn't remove my point-- either you have to buy a new TV, or buy a tuner. Owning an HDTV removes the issue.
Well, *you* wouldn't obviously. But the record/ringtone companies likely figure (probably rightly) that enough people will buy the ringtone, either because they're stupid (don't know that it's possible to rip, or don't know how) or are simply lazy.
Yes, I, for one, am lazy-- and I believe most people are stupid. In fact, you have to figure that a high percentage of people are either stupid and spend their money on things they could do themselves if they were smarter, or else smart and have disposable income and feel it's worth spending a couple dollars to save some time. This is exactly where the RIAA should be making their money: by making it easy and convenient to purchase and listen to music.
However, they seem somehow intent on not using this business model. Instead, they're making it harder and less convenient to use their product legally. No wonder piracy is such a problem!
Yes, I think it's just not going to happen. I think there is a much greater chance that over-the-air broadcast will be made entirely obsolete by network content distribution before the feds ever throw the switch on NTSC.
So it's a race, which will happen more quickly: HDTVs will become ubiquitous -or- the big OTA networks will give up on their business model. Which do you think will happen sooner?
I also think that the claim that SDTVs will simply not be manufactured anymore rests on the faulty assumption that NTSC broadcasts will be turned off.
No, it's based on the assumption that the price of HDTVs will continue downwards to the point where they're comparable (more or less) in price to today's SDTVs, at which time there will be little point in SDTVs anymore. HDTVs can display a SDTV picture, so there's not really much of a downside to HDTV except price, and that price keeps coming down.
What, do you think it's just not going to happen? It's only a matter of time before SDTVs aren't being built anymore, and then only a matter of time before the gross majority of households are using HDTV.
Clearly the FCC did a poor job at estimating a timetable and expected HDTV prices to drop much faster than they have, but I see no reason to think that SDTV broadcasts aren't going away eventually.
I said that they can be made to run on a Dell, which is absolutely true. I never claimed that making them run on a Dell was legal, nor have I claimed that it's worthwhile, but only that it can be done.
I've also been thinking about all this recently from the standpoint of the expense of resources. The use of natural resources, the expense of pollution, the expense of the distribution chain, internet bandwidth, and even hard drive space. It's odd to think about in these terms, since it's usually painted as an issue of consumer rights vs. corporate profitability, or as the desires of the audience vs. the needs of the consumer.
However, the pictures changes if, for a moment, we re-imagine it as a problem for society to solve: how do we efficiently manage the distribution of recorded arts? For the sake of argument, lets disregard the other concerns, such as managing who is authorized to view what, or financial reimbursements to artists. Just think of the problem of distribution of information, as though it's assumed that the information is free.
Suddenly it becomes clear that physical distribution, in this day and age, is *stupid*. We have this huge network at our fingertips, and we're going to waste materials on manufacturing millions of CDs? Many of those CDs are going to ripped to MP3 and then sit on a shelf. For what purpose? We use land and materials to build physical record stores (and Best Buy), we use the materials for the actual media, we pay people to search/maintain the inventory, there's the trucks and the shipping, and all that crap. Think of all the man-time and materials wasted.
Also, users needing to rely on the hard drives in their home computer to store a specific copy of a top-40 hit or a Hollywood movie is nonsense. Right now, the top movie on iTMS is "The Prestige". Consider for a moment if I had bought that movie from iTunes 20 minutes before my hard drive died. Now, why should I need to keep a copy on my local hard drive? The movie has already been ripped, and the data exists elsewhere on the Internet. In order for me to download the movie again would only cost in used bandwidth, but those costs can be mitigated, ironically, by the sheer number of people downloading it. I'm sure that it's obvious to everyone here that the solution is P2P (bittorrent).
It's become clear to me that for a society concerned with using resources efficiently, sharing information via P2P networks is a solution that's almost too good to be true. I'm not just talking about hippy-talk "conservation" in the environmentalist sense. I'm talking about the human resources, the expense of intellectual thought, and the money spent. Overall, those resources, too, would be more efficiently managed through P2P distribution.
Now, some people would complain that jobs would be lost, but that's inherent in using human resources efficiently. Some of the human resources currently spent on these distribution issues are being spent unnecessarily. That we don't break windows makes less work for the window-makers, but breaking windows does not generate wealth. (Yes, I guess I'm suggesting that the MPAA/RIAA have become an example of the broken-window fallacy, and therefore create a net-loss for society)
Legally, no, because it's only licensed to run on Apple machines. My point, however, is that the basic OS is an open-sourced BSD derivative, which is how people are able to hack it to run on a Dell.
If you're in favor of a free market, maybe we should open up the radio spectrum for anyone to broadcast whatever they want, and maybe we should let everyone put data networks wherever they want whenever they want however they want.
Of course, when your street has been dug up for the 5th time to lay down cable, or cable hasn't been laid at all because the investment isn't worth the risk without some guarantee of a semi-monopoly, and when your local police departments, ambulances, and TV stations can't get a signal through all the interference, your opinion might change.
If there's one part of the private sector that I think the needs governmental regulation these days, it's our data infrastructure. Our ability to connect to the internet and communicate is becoming too important to have a company hindering the progress, dragging their feet, because they haven't figured out how change will effect their bottom line.
Most of these are fairly minor relative to what others are doing. I repeat: they are no more proprietary than Windows. They are in fact less so.
Yes, Apple chooses not to license their technology so that people can make shoddy knock-offs. Still you can install OSX on non-Apple systems-- because their OS is basically open source. People just replace the pieces that require Apple hardware, and bingo, OSX runs on Dells.
Is the Windows kernel open source? Can Windows XP connect to NFS/AFP shares out of the box? Does Microsoft offer WMA/WMV codecs for other operating systems? Can I run Microsoft's "URGE" software, download songs, and play the DRMed songs in OSX?
ADC is even arguably a better connector. It allows for a single cable going from the computer to the monitor with no need to run power. Yes, sometimes Apple tries to push an approach they think is better rather than going with "what everyone else is doing". But once DVI really caught on and became common-place, they switched to DVI anyway.
These things just aren't that bad. No, Apple isn't making completely open-source software, and so they have some restrictions on how you can use it. They have to use DRM because the record industry requires it. All in all, it's still not bad enough to warrant the sort of anger you're displaying.
I don't know. I used to work for a company with software developers under the direction of the Engineering group who regularly tried to take charge of IT decision, and that was a horribly bad thing. I don't know about you, personally, or your company, but we had to lock down the software engineers tighter than anyone else to keep them from bringing the network to its knees.
Part of the problem here is that being a software developer doesn't necessarily qualify you to be a network/systems admin. No, it doesn't. You might know loads about logic, how software is written, and how computers are supposed to work, but that isn't the same as doing desktop/network/systems support on a large scale. Enterprise-level IT is a whole different beast than running your home network or writing software. Put the shoe on the other foot for a second-- do you want your desktop support person (even a very good desktop support person) coding your operating system? No, so how about we all stick with what we're good at.
That being said, we had separate machines for our software engineers. They weren't connected to our network, hardware was purchased through a separate budget, the software guys could do whatever we want in the lab, and our IT department wasn't required to support the Engineering systems.
But maybe for your company and your position, it you need more than that. I don't know. But generally, in my experience, there need to be some centralized standards and control to maintain security and stability.
I've had similar experiences. I've run into a couple people who actually do know a thing or two about computers and network administration, and they wanted absolutely nothing to do with fixing their own computer or installing their own software. Their attitude was more like, "Hey, I don't want your job. You do what you have to to get it working for me, because I don't want to fix the damned thing."
And then at every job there's some dumb user who set up his own home network, has an MCSE for some reason, and is very insistant that he should be able to have admin rights over everything. When you ask what he wants to do, he wants to install some POS application with spyware because it will sync his clock, which is done through the domain controller anyhow.
I swear, it's usually the people who don't really know much that demand special priviledges. People who know enough about computer to be a proper admin should (rightly) hate computers enough to not want to be the admin unless they have to. People always say to me, "So, you're in IT? You like computers, then?"
I say, "Nope. I hate computers. That's why I'm good at my job."
It's not terribly relevant, but I've used a Motorola Q. And various Palm Treo models, lots of different Blackberries, and other assorted smart phones. They're all terrible. The interface is bad, and unresponsive, too. Trying to use them as MP3 players is absurd.
You can like it, though. I'm not claiming to know that those devices are bad for you, for your purposes. I'm just saying that I've tried to use them and found them to be utterly unacceptable. I'm guessing that Apple will do a better job.
As far as the PS3, I just haven't seen anything so far that makes it worth the money (for me). For a couple hundred dollars less, I could get a 360 and have very similar capabilities to the PS3. I can get the Wii for less than half the price, and though I acknowledge that it's not quite the same thing, it will keep me entertained with fun games.
I guess my point is just that value is relative to what you need and what you get. If you really want a blu-ray DVD player and high-end graphics, a Wii won't be worth much. If you just want to play some fun games, the PS3 will seem like a rip-off. Likewise, if you want Exchange connectivity and Windows Mobile applications, the iPhone will look like a hunk of junk to you. If you want your iPod/phone/e-mail in a small, easy to use device, I suspect the iPhone will be very satisfying.
Some kinds of doctoring can be found by expert analysis. I'm not sure how definitive it can be, though. However, I believe that there are restrictions on what kind of pictures and video can be used in court. I've heard, for example, digital security camera footage might not be usable unless it's gathered/stored in a system that is fairly tamper-proof, so that the chain of custody can be demonstrated. (IANAL)
But then, who will tell Matt Lauer that he doesn't know about the history of "depression"?!
I think you're absolutely correct. I keep tell people this (I know a couple people in record companies and related jobs). The reason why iTunes has been successful, in my opinion, is that it's very convenient and not too-ridiculously-expensive. But the convenience is key! The only possible reason for anyone to buy a song from an online store is convenience.
If you can buy something online, that means you already have an internet connection fast enough to download music. This means you have the option of pirating. Therefore everyone is deciding to buy the song rather than downloading for free-- and why? Because when you pirate music, you need to know how. You need to know what sites to go to, which P2P apps to use, how to use bittorrent, etc. It's not the easiest and most convenient method of finding things, but it is getting easier all the time. Therefore, if you want people to purchase music, you must make your store easier.
Another problem with piracy is that you can't always be sure you're downloading what you really want. Sometimes songs are mislabled, and the actual audio isn't what the filename suggests. Sometimes the quality is bad for some reason, the file is corrupted, or it was just ripped with too low of a bitrate for your tastes. Therefore, an online store should provide better methods for you to find something worth purchasing, assurances that you're buying what you intend to buy, and a known-good quality level.
The final problem with piracy is just that it's illegal, and there's a small chance of punishment. Therefore (and this is a no-brainer) there should be no threat to people using online stores that they'll be punished for buying from the online store. This means the software can't have spyware or kill-switches that attempt to varify your songs are legitimate or tries to punish you for having illegitamate songs. This also means, to my mind, that online stores shouldn't have vendor lock-in or DRM which punish consumers for trying to adhere to the law and purchase music legally. There should be no greater restriction on legal downloads than there are restrictions on illegal downloads.
Of course, the main thing that will always discourage legal downloads is price. As long as it costs *something*, it will cost more than illegal downloads. Therefore, songs should be priced to reflect the level of convenience offered, and not to some arbitrary perceived value of the song itself. People will always pay something for convenience.
Beyond that, what happens when people stop burning audio CDs altogether? With the AppleTV, Windows MCE, Xbox 360, etc., how long before we stop using physical media for audio and video? I don't own a stereo or CD player. I have a computer hooked to speakers, and it plays MP3s. I have an iPod.
So 5-10 years from now, will there be any physical medium specifically associated with audio/video? I have my doubts. And if not, what sense does it make to tax physical media? I don't think it's a good solution.
Personally, I've never had a problem with the sentiment, "We want to make our product so good that $600 will seem cheap." That's great. As a matter of fact, I can afford to blow more than $600 in a year for some gadget, and the real question is, "Will it be worth it?"
The problem I have with the PS3 isn't necessarily the $600 price tag, nor is it the attitude that Sony *wanted* to make the product so good that I would rush out to spend $600 on it. The problem that I, personally, have with the PS3 is that I haven't seen anything so far that would make it worth $600. My impression so far is that the Wii is more fun to play for much less money.
On the other hand, if I could buy an 8GB flash iPod with a built in phone and the ability to fetch my e-mail, would that be worth $600? Sure.
See, $600 isn't, in itself, "too much money". It depends on what product you're talking about. $600 for a mansion in NYC would be cheap, while $600 for a stick of gum is expensive.
With all the proprietary gimmicks Apple tries to shove down customer's throats...
Which gimmicks are those? Granted, not all Apple's software is open source, but they're not very proprietary either. Large portions of their OS are Unix. Unlike Microsoft, Apple supports (and pushes) standard MPEG formats (h264+AAC instead of WMV and WMA). Their iWork formats are XML. OSX supports NFS and SMB. For server-end software, they offer FTP, Samba, SSH, Apache, MySQL, Jabber, etc.
Really, when you look at Apple is doing, they're generally using real standards, common protocols, and even loads of standard open-source packages. The only way that they could be more open/less proprietary would be to open all their source, and they're certainly no more "proprietary" than Microsoft.