They'd be no secret about what I'd be doing if I was running the Internet Explorer 8 team. Here's a few things I'd do:
6. Look for a new job because they fired me.
MS doesn't want those fixed. Seriously, they make money by ensuring that other browsers can't compete because the Web is broken to conform to IE's modifications of the standards. In this way they lock people into their platform. If IE was standard compliant, then soon Web apps would be standard compliant, and then why the hell would big companies stick with IE and an expensive OS, when they can just run Linux for free?
Microsoft is a text-book example of a market failure. Nearly every other browser has Internet Explorer boxed off in terms of functionality, security and speed. The only reason it is the world's number one browser is because it comes pre-installed with WIndows.
IE will never have the same functionality, at least in terms of standards compliance, as other browsers as long as MS is allowed to bundle it without also bundling competitors. The Web will remain broken so long as MS is allowed to abuse their monopoly and numerous other markets will be broken as well, with innovation intentionally slowed for their profit. It is long past time the government enforced the fucking laws against MS, despite all the campaign contributions they made to both parties.
The problem is that PDFs are difficult or impossible to read when scaled to a small screen, and scrolling both horizontally and vertically to read it makes it very awkward. As it is, I detest PDF files that are two columns since I have to scroll back to the top when reading a single page, and this is on a computer screen.
The problem you're describing is a limitation of your PDF viewing software, not of the format, though. It is fairly trivial for a reader to reformat the text to fit a different screen size, even if it means half of each line goes on a new line. All the content is there in the PDF. Look, every PDF reader allows you to copy and paste the text, how hard, exactly, do you suppose it is to do that in an automated way half the width of the page, and redisplay when you use existing PDF libraries?
PDF is a poor format for eBooks because everything is pre-formatted, usually for a much larger screen.
Some PDF readers allow you to adjust content of PDF onto smaller pages, now. It is not a limitation of the format, just how it is usually used, that is to say to create documents designed to be viewed and printed exactly as the creator intended. Most readers focus on that aspect of it.
The MOBI format is much better for such devices, since it lets the device adjust the formatting to fit the screen rather than already defining a single format.
.mobi files are a proprietary modification of PalmDoc files. They are not standardized and technically only one piece of closed source software can legally create them, software controlled by a single vendor. HTML is better choice than.mobi. The.mobi format does not support annotation and officially does not support vector graphics. Heck, it is basically a text file, with some HTML like tags added (but not proper HTML) and then zipped with a proprietary compression scheme so they can DRM some of them. No thanks.
You already have the device (iPod/iPhone) that has a proven interface, reliability, and the hip/cool/somehow-still-elitist-even-though-everybody-has-one factor.
This is true, but because Apple is a master of only do the things you can do really well. Is the interface on the iPhone appropriate for an ebook?
1. Partner with Google, Project Gutenberg, that University whose-name-escapes-me (and I'm too lazy to look it up), and any others who are already digitizing books, most of which need no DRM, that you can toss in to iTunes (for free if you want, just to get the populace on board).
Of those, only project Gutenberg has content that is legal to republish the entire work. The others could be cool for helping to discover books, and for getting an ebook version if the publisher is willing to sign on.
Crank out an e-book reader for your i-Devices that will support your DRM scheme for copyrighted materials. Also make sure your devices can read PDFs natively. If you're going to do this, do it right.
I don't see this as a big stumbling block, what I see as the issue is if there is really a market for ebook readers yet.
4. Profit!!!
I think you're right that Apple's established channel for content sales and delivery and devices could go a long way here. I think what you're missing is Apple's real advantage for a gestalt effect. If instead of just making an ebook reader with a good interface that works as well as the others on the market, what if they made an iPod-(book edition). Replace the display on an iPhone touch with a low power e-ink type display for better reading and lower power use. Then Apple can sell three kinds of books:
audio books (they sell these now)
ebooks with just text and maybe illustrations
hybrid ebook/audio books so you can listen in the car and then switch back to text mode when you get somewhere.
There is even some potential for convergence with the iPhone down the road. The one main thing I think they'd need to do, however, is create a new standard format for such books and provide a backup to DVD option, so users don't have to worry about their library disappearing if the computer dies. I could really see this being a winner. Maybe if their rumored, new ultra-portable blends a bit of the iPod and a bit of the MacBook technology sets, this could be a real possibility.
PDFs are a difficult format to deal with, since a PDF is already layed out and designed typically for a 8.5x11 sheet of paper (or A4). They don't lend themselves very well to smaller displays since they come pre-formatted.
Umm, what? PDFs can be any size and in the event that you download one formatted for an 8.5X11, PDF are all vector graphics and fonts so they scale seamlessly. PDFs are an open standard with free licensing and tons of existing, free code for manipulating them. They are a hell of a lot easier to deal with on small displays than any other format that mixes graphics and text, except, perhaps HTML, if the graphics are all SVG (which they never are since MS refuses to implement it in IE). I mean really, what formats do you know that allow you to scale the graphics and text as vectors other than PDF that don't have a bunch of crazy limitations?
Much of the technology in the XO is developed using open source technology licenses that make it difficult for engineers employed by commercial software companies like Microsoft to work directly on the project.
Umm, since when do commercial software developers have trouble working on OSS projects? IBM doesn't seem to have a problem. Neither does HP, Sun, Apple, or Sony. Maybe MS just needs to review their policies if they're finding them too restrictive?
It would be interesting to know the percentage of Macs in the UK as I suspect that will be much lower than in the rest of Europe, as I suspect is probably the case with Linux also.
The last numbers I see specifically on the UK show it having 6.8%, only about 1.4% lower than the US. Personally, I've been working the network security field for quite a while and it is bloody hard to miss Apple' presence there. If you go to BlackHat or DefCon or one of the other big conferences Macs make up about half of the laptops you'll see. I've only been to London once and don't really recall seeing or not seeing Macs however, I do know one of the top security guys for BT and he has a MacBook Pro.
I live in the states right by two large universities, so I realize the number of Macs I see daily is unusual because of their larger presence in education, but the last time I went to the coffee shop down the street, Macs made up about half of the machines there as well. But I don't rely upon just my observations, which is where formal studies and surveys from analysts come in. Regardless of how many you or I see daily, the best evidence indicates they make up about 7% of all the computers in the UK and 8% in the US and the numbers have been increasing by a percentage or two each year for several years now.
What planet are you on??? Over here in Europe, I've worked in IT/Telecoms support for 20+ years now, have a whole heap of friends in the computer industry and I have seen or heard of someone owning a Mac a total of ***THREE*** times
Gartner reports Apple took 20% of the education market in Europe for 2007 so far. That is significantly more than their market share for EU, 7% so far in 2007. They did much better with this technique in the early days before MS started emulating it. Anyway, if you've only seen 3 Macs, ever and they make up 7% of computers in Europe, maybe you're in a specialized field or simply don't get out much? Or maybe you live in part of Europe that is impoverished and a bit backwards technologically?
Actually there is a difference between what you can access and what documents a really good doctor has available.
Oh, I'm aware, but it only matters if your doctor takes the time to actually read and understand that material. I'm currently being treated at a research hospital that has an experimental non-FDA approved treatment for the malady they think I have, although they don't understand what causes it. My doctor, despite having performed this treatment, still does not understand it well enough to know how it theoretically works and what the ramifications the particulars of my case have on that. And she is the best of the doctors I've seen so far.
I think the root of the problem is that medicine is considered prestigious and a ticket to wealth, so it tends to attract the greedy and those looking for recognition (the arrogant); instead of people who are the most talented or most dedicated. When I think of some of the incompetent jackasses I know who went to prestigious medical schools I shudder for the profession. One I know who was attending John-Hopkins, got a flat tire one day and called his mother to ask what one was supposed to do in such a situation. I understand being a unworldly academic who can't change a tire, but being so incompetent you can't call roadside service when your AAA card is in your wallet... hopeless. It has gotten to the point where I'm looking at citizenship in a country with sane, socialized healthcare. There are a lot to choose from with better average lifespans than the US and luckily my skills are somewhat in demand around the world.
It amazes me how arrogant MS is in this matter. These are laptops designed to be perfect for kids and to educate them and facilitate their access to communications. How does MS think Windows compares? These laptops all mesh seamlessly with one another, using zeroconf to auto-discover other OLPCs and share pictures and music, chat, collaborate on compositions, writings, programs, drawings, and educational games, and share network access. MS hasn't even managed to implement zeroconf in Vista, despite it being a well established standard in use on every other OS, by printers and hardware, and even implemented by specific applications running in Windows (Adobe CS3, Trillian, iTunes). There is even a free reference implementation for.Net, but they haven't bothered to incorporate it. Hey geniuses, why don't you catch up in your core market for a change, instead of trying to destroy competition and innovation in a different one, especially one as important as educating kids.
ON my medical application, I coined the new word "Google-gnosis" describing the problem with people self-diagnosing based on information found on the internet, making the point that Doctors are now going to have to make more of an effort to know what information and misinformation is out there, and how Doctors are going to have to spend more time teaching people correct information to dispel popular myths that get spread around.
Sadly the verdict is still out on whether or not taking the first Google result is significantly less accurate than going to the doctor, and doctors are increasingly turning to Google themselves to help diagnose patients. The last study I saw placed Google's accuracy at about 65% and doctors at 69% for a first diagnosis. As someone who has spent much of the last year going to what are supposedly some of the better hospitals in the nation with little luck, my faith in the medical community is pretty much obliterated. Most any rational person would turn to Google and research their symptoms and possible diagnosis. The sad part is when you go back to the doctor and realize they spent half an hour reading one of the many articles you did and they are unable to answer any additional questions and don't even know some of the information you do. Taking a look at studies of how long it takes to be properly diagnosed if you have anything unusual (several years of seeing doctors) is just depressing.
Personally, I wish doctors would ignore what information their patient knows or thinks they know, but I sure wish they'd do some research themselves and actually have a fucking clue what they're talking about after you spend a week playing phone tag while violently ill, only to find out they haven't bothered to do their homework on your condition.
The reason we as web developers can not simply code to the standards, and then point fingers at the browsers when problems happen is because we'd all be out of jobs if we tried that.
True, for the most part. That is the problem that needs to be solved and why we need to be vocal about it.
Clients, employers, and end-users don't want to sit around and wait for browser makers to fix a bug so they can see a website - they want it to work.
In a free market, they'd all just use one of the several browsers where that is not an issue and if there was some rare problem, it would be found in testing. We're not talking about a rare problem though and we're not talking about a free market. We're talking about a monopoly bundling an intentionally broken and noncompliant browser for the purpose of breaking the Web so it does not threaten their profits.
They usually get what they pay for. The problem is, if you coded exactly and only for the standards, your page would be no better than the one produced by that buzzed-on-sugar 10 year old, because the end user's experience would be just as bad.
My ten year old niece can assemble her christmas toys this year because they conform to standards and she doesn't have to get out a micrometer and measure the size and angle of the grooves on the end of each screw. She can just pick up a philips screwdriver of about the right size and put it together. Personally I don't see any problem with that and it is not like she is threatening the jobs of professional auto-mechanics. Making things work right and according to standards is in everyone's best interests.
Going back to the often over-used automotive analogy, it would be like a gasoline company formulating their product for the "theoretical optimum performance", and then when they notice that it makes a car's fuel line melt, telling their customers "This is perfect gasoline, and it is flawless. Your fuel line melted because it had flaws, and that's the car maker's responsibility to fix. We still think you should buy and use our gas though, and we're not going to change it."
Sigh, if you insist on a car analogy, I'll correct it to make it accurate to the situation. Imagine there was one company that had a monopoly on building homes for the entire world. They built homes to last about 8 years, then you needed a new one. You could not hire anyone to build a house except that one company, although you could get a build your own house hobby kit and one other company sold very large houses but only if you were willing to buy them on large chunks of waterfront land. Now this one company that built homes, also gave away a free car with each home. They, were not the only source of cars, but since every home came with one, most people just used those cars. Finally, imagine that all the car makers sat down together to decide on one standard for gasoline for the gas makers to produce and together they all agreed one one for "theoretical optimum performance" and all the car makers implemented the gasoline as such, except our monopolist who decided their home building monopoly was in danger from the RV industry and so repeatedly changed what kinds of gas their cars could take and intentionally made theirs unable to use much of the gasoline on the market in order to force gas stations to carry an inferior version and to artificially degrade the performance of all cars.
At this point your analogy is at least close to accurate. Tell me now, as a gasoline producer and Gas station operator, don't you think you should be complaining as loudly about the monopolist as possible in the hopes that they will be pressured by car buyers and by the government to adhere to standard gasoline?
Yes, it's more standards compliant, but that doesn't make it the golden child. Every browser has a long way to go, and we really need to SERIOUSLY push all these companies to follow them.
From my Web development experience, IE is the only real problem. Sure other browsers have quirks, but they all follow standards well enough that if you code to standards 99.99% of the time the result is just fine. I think I've had a Safari specific bug once and a Firefox specific bug twice when my code was actually in compliance with the standards. On the other hand, I have a problem with IE almost every time I programatically create a page.
Frankly, we have a long ways to go and this idle bitching isn't helping.
What isn't helping is one company who is breaking the law and breaking standards for profit. What also isn't helping is apologists who try to point out how other browsers have problems too, when realistically the problem is orders of magnitude smaller, and different in nature because none of those other browsers are bundled with an OS that monopolizes the market.
The message from the developer community and from the techie community in general should not be muddled with minor points. It should be crystal clear. IE is the single largest problem with the Web. It is illegal and it is hurting society and technological progress and it needs to be fixed yesterday!
PDF can be implemented right up until Adobe threatens to sue you if you implement it.
Here's an experiment for you. Go make a PDF file that Reads, "Dear Mr. Shantanu Narayen, I have planted explosives in your building and you are all going to die." Sign it with your name and address and e-mail it to Adobe. When the police come for you, try to explain to everyone how the PDF format is not really standard because when you use it to violate criminal laws, Adobe sends the cops after you. MS was violating antitrust law by trying to leverage their existing monopoly into a new, healthy market, the market for PDF tools. More importantly than the inclusion of PDF tools was the inclusion of XPS tools. The fact that PDF tools were part of the violation had nothing to do with the PDF specification any more than my previous example.
1) Anyone who wants to time-shift their DVD collection already does it, albeit to the chagrin of the MPAA;
I assume you mean format shift, which is what moving it into iTunes would do? In that case, I think you're dead wrong. DVDs are the same place CDs were before the iPod. It was possible to rip your CD collection and transfer it to your computer and portable player and buy music directly online and move it to your portable. The problem was, this process was too confusing and too cumbersome for the average user, so only techies did it. I know people who installed iTunes only to rip their music collection then went back to WinAmp. I know a few people who came over to my place to use my Mac to rip their collection.
Ripping DVDs is not easy. The software to do it does not come with your portable player or computer and normal people don't even try.
2) The MPAA would never go for any format that is devoid of some copy protection;
Yup, which is why they will be fairplay DRM'd.
3) The MPAA doesn't want to strengthen Apple any more than it currently is;
True, but they do want access to iPod users and iTunes users to sell to, and the only DRM supported in the iPod or iTunes is controlled by Apple. The rumor I heard was that this is a compromise. Apple lets the MPAA charge differential pricing for movies in iTunes, and in exchange they start including iPod ready files on DVDs, which lets users rip their DVDs into iTunes, thus selling more iPods and AppleTVs.
4) This compromise would only really mean something if it were applied to HD-DVD and Blu-ray, which we know will never happen.
Why not and why does it matter? The average person still doesn't care about either of the new formats and is not going to go buy a new TV. I think you're living in techie world and are out of touch with Joe Sixpack.
I know many French people, and they're opposed to proprietary software becoming an ISO standard, especially with patent and copyright as it stands now here in the US.
What? This is about the PDF format becoming a standard not about any proprietary software. If we called it PDF ala XPDF the free and open source PDF reader, would the French be more in support of it? As for copyright and patent, there is a free as in beer license that provides patent protection for anyone making PDF tools that adhere to the standard.
o, now the "not" so "portable document format" gains further acceptance.
Umm, what isn't portable about PDFs?
I'll grant that it has it's uses but until the full version of Adobe is available for free, or even less expensive, to the masses, it seems to be not quite right.
First, I assume you're talking about Adobe Acrobat, since Adobe is a company, not a product. The whole point of standards is that they do not rely upon any given implementation and anyone and everyone can make their own. Don't like Adobe's free product, get someone else's. I have both free and payware PDF tools from both Adobe and other companies. Do you want better free PDF tools, go ahead and code them, the standard is right there and the licensing to the patents is free. Heck there's even good set of GPL PDF libraries and code from the XPDF project.
I'd also certainly rather have a format that is a lot less file size intensive.
You can make pretty small PDFs, depending upon what you put in them. Or, if you want smaller file sizes and are willing to sacrifice features, use postscript, it's been a standard for a long time.
To all mail users...no, you can't keep all of those emails with pdf's in your inbox without going over your quota.
Mail quotas are so mid 90s. Disk space is cheap and so long as you're not using Exchange (which insists on keeping sometimes hundreds of versions of the same file around, since it is too stupid to just keep one copy for everyone) it is not like attachments are much of an issue anymore.
Does your public library have unlimited books on all topics you want? Because my local ones were awful (at least, last time I checked), and they aren't even near... I'd much rather pay a monthly amount.
Actually my local libraries are pretty good for selection, the only problem being the rate of lost and stolen books and video. I think of the library as a credit union, when compared to a pay book rental service, which is more like a traditional bank. They work the same, but one has to pay a cut to the shareholders and is trying to make as much money as possible, while the other is trying to give you the best service as cheaply as possible. Do you donate money to your local library? If just 5% of people who are interested in a renatal service instead donated that same amount to the local library, the selection would be a lot better. The only real issue I have is more and more of the library is being taken up by DVDs, and while I like DVDs, I'd much rather that money were spent on books. In fact, I'd donate more to the library if they allowed you to donate to just books or just video and computing.
They already did this, remember? What was it now? Subscription music? It's all well and good, except that the licenses will expire at random, and then what are you left with? A half-read book that you need to buy to read the rest of. No, people rather own the books than depend on a shaky subscription service.
I disagree. Generally music is something you want to listen to over and over and over again, so your entire collection expiring at some point in the future if you stop paying is a huge problem. Video rental, on the other hand, are mostly shows you want to see once, then never see again, which is why NetFlix does so well compared to DVD sales. I don't want to own the first season of "Transformers" I just though it would be fun to watch some night while drunk off my ass with a bunch of hooligan bikers. I'll gladly pay $1.50 to have it for a night, but I would not pay even $5.00 to own it outright.
Books fall somewhere in between video and music. There are more books I want to reread than there are movies I want to re-watch. On the balance, however, most books are something I want to read once, either for entertainment or reference or self improvement; and then I will never read them again. Exceptions to this, well I'll buy a nice hardbound copy and stick it in my library (when I finish building it).
Like I said, Yahoo Music Unlimited and Rhapsody (and napster) share a very small market - and even that is shrinking. I doubt it'll be around for long...
Agreed, but books are not music and are consumed differently.
The Zune may support AAC, but oddly enough, Windows Media Player does not, and there's no obvious way that I've found to get the codecs for it from Microsoft.
According to the Wikipedia entry for WMP, it does support AAC, although not AAC with Fairplay DRM. I'd check personally but I don't feel like firing up Windows just for that.
WMA does have better audio quality than MP3, by a factor of 1.5 to 2 times.
The latest versions of WMA have better compression rates than the most recent MP3 encoders. That is not quite the same thing you said, but I think it is what you meant.
And this is a good thing as all decoding chips in portable music players all have WMA support, unless it is crippled like the iPod.
This is nonsense. You might as well argue that all portable players have support for MP4 unless they are crippled like the Sansa Shaker. You have to pay a licensing fee to ship a device that plays either WMA or MP4, so not including it, even if it is on the chipset, saves the developer money. Note, by market share MP4 is the standard by a huge margin over WMA (though not MP3).
WMA does not inherently use or need DRM, and MS themselves don't push DRM, so it is just as free to copy and decode as MP3.
Umm MS does push the DRM by selling DRM'ed music from multiple online services they run or are partners in. They've also been convicted of using their influence to illegally retard the adoption of open formats through illegal contracts with player manufacturers.
He said specifically until the providers stop limiting access to downloaded music that people should just buy CDs if possible to force them to move to a DRM free online model. (And this is right after Zune 1.0 came out.)
And yet his company is still selling DRM'ed downloads while several other players have dropped them.
I guess this can be taken as good news, since the alternative was presumably some DRM'd format.
Well it sure beats WMA, but MP4 is a strong contender supported now on the vast majority of market offerings. In fact, only some older Sansa players are really still relevent and lacking support among portables. I'm a little surprised by the lack of adoption of MP4 by download services other than Apple. I figured when DRM was no longer a requirement it would be a done deal. MP4 files are smaller for the same quality compared to MP3, saving bandwidth costs, and there are no licensing costs for encoding and shipping that format, unlike MP3.
The only reason I'd really be interested in buying music digitally would be in cases where the music is out of print. Why buy it as a download, when my very first act after downloading it would be to burn it onto a CD as a backup?
I can see the appeal of not paying for shipping, lower costs (in a few cases), or not having to drive to the store and still getting instant access. I once bought a DRM encumbered file from Apple, because someone at a party I was throwing wanted to hear it, and what is $.99 these days? For the most part though, I agree CDs are a better deal and open standards for video and audio would be very nice. I wish Apple had chosen to champion DRM encumbered OGG back in the day, but they may have had some good reasons to go with the tried and true MPEG standard.
If you pay them, sure... although I suspect very few people have no moved on to a newer version by now. As I mentioned, InfoSpan, the leading provider of Firefox support, officially lists 0.9 as one of their supported versions. Without any prior relationship you can call them today for phone support for Firefox 0.9 and while they'll bill you for each call, they'll try to solve your problem.
The closest analog here I think is the issue of anonymous Pamphleteering. As I recall the common law is that you can do so anonymously. But there's also no right to that anonymity. That is, the Government or whom ever is not prevented from piercing your anonymity if they can.
That is pretty close, but there are a few fundamental differences between anonymous pamphleteering and internet publication. Pamphleteering rarely occurs across national boundaries, bringing in the laws of multiple jurisdictions. Secondly, and more importantly, the government has not established strict regulations as to who can distribute pamphlets, but they have restricted access to providing network access by regulating the wireless spectrum and by restricting who can lay lines in the public right of ways to each house. Further, the government has subsidized the creation of a few major networks, breaking free trade and making it uneconomical for anyone else to enter the market.
Basically, the US government has involved themselves so much in the telecom industry, it can no longer be considered a free market and what is done by those private companies has to be considered in constitutional terms as if the it was the government doing them, much as pamphleteering, via the US postal service 20 years ago was restricted in that the post office could not just tell anyone who asked where the pamphlets were mailed from and to.
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They'd be no secret about what I'd be doing if I was running the Internet Explorer 8 team. Here's a few things I'd do:
6. Look for a new job because they fired me.
MS doesn't want those fixed. Seriously, they make money by ensuring that other browsers can't compete because the Web is broken to conform to IE's modifications of the standards. In this way they lock people into their platform. If IE was standard compliant, then soon Web apps would be standard compliant, and then why the hell would big companies stick with IE and an expensive OS, when they can just run Linux for free?
Microsoft is a text-book example of a market failure. Nearly every other browser has Internet Explorer boxed off in terms of functionality, security and speed. The only reason it is the world's number one browser is because it comes pre-installed with WIndows.IE will never have the same functionality, at least in terms of standards compliance, as other browsers as long as MS is allowed to bundle it without also bundling competitors. The Web will remain broken so long as MS is allowed to abuse their monopoly and numerous other markets will be broken as well, with innovation intentionally slowed for their profit. It is long past time the government enforced the fucking laws against MS, despite all the campaign contributions they made to both parties.
The problem you're describing is a limitation of your PDF viewing software, not of the format, though. It is fairly trivial for a reader to reformat the text to fit a different screen size, even if it means half of each line goes on a new line. All the content is there in the PDF. Look, every PDF reader allows you to copy and paste the text, how hard, exactly, do you suppose it is to do that in an automated way half the width of the page, and redisplay when you use existing PDF libraries?
PDF is a poor format for eBooks because everything is pre-formatted, usually for a much larger screen.Some PDF readers allow you to adjust content of PDF onto smaller pages, now. It is not a limitation of the format, just how it is usually used, that is to say to create documents designed to be viewed and printed exactly as the creator intended. Most readers focus on that aspect of it.
The MOBI format is much better for such devices, since it lets the device adjust the formatting to fit the screen rather than already defining a single format..mobi files are a proprietary modification of PalmDoc files. They are not standardized and technically only one piece of closed source software can legally create them, software controlled by a single vendor. HTML is better choice than .mobi. The .mobi format does not support annotation and officially does not support vector graphics. Heck, it is basically a text file, with some HTML like tags added (but not proper HTML) and then zipped with a proprietary compression scheme so they can DRM some of them. No thanks.
This is true, but because Apple is a master of only do the things you can do really well. Is the interface on the iPhone appropriate for an ebook?
1. Partner with Google, Project Gutenberg, that University whose-name-escapes-me (and I'm too lazy to look it up), and any others who are already digitizing books, most of which need no DRM, that you can toss in to iTunes (for free if you want, just to get the populace on board).Of those, only project Gutenberg has content that is legal to republish the entire work. The others could be cool for helping to discover books, and for getting an ebook version if the publisher is willing to sign on.
Crank out an e-book reader for your i-Devices that will support your DRM scheme for copyrighted materials. Also make sure your devices can read PDFs natively. If you're going to do this, do it right.I don't see this as a big stumbling block, what I see as the issue is if there is really a market for ebook readers yet.
4. Profit!!!I think you're right that Apple's established channel for content sales and delivery and devices could go a long way here. I think what you're missing is Apple's real advantage for a gestalt effect. If instead of just making an ebook reader with a good interface that works as well as the others on the market, what if they made an iPod-(book edition). Replace the display on an iPhone touch with a low power e-ink type display for better reading and lower power use. Then Apple can sell three kinds of books:
There is even some potential for convergence with the iPhone down the road. The one main thing I think they'd need to do, however, is create a new standard format for such books and provide a backup to DVD option, so users don't have to worry about their library disappearing if the computer dies. I could really see this being a winner. Maybe if their rumored, new ultra-portable blends a bit of the iPod and a bit of the MacBook technology sets, this could be a real possibility.
Umm, what? PDFs can be any size and in the event that you download one formatted for an 8.5X11, PDF are all vector graphics and fonts so they scale seamlessly. PDFs are an open standard with free licensing and tons of existing, free code for manipulating them. They are a hell of a lot easier to deal with on small displays than any other format that mixes graphics and text, except, perhaps HTML, if the graphics are all SVG (which they never are since MS refuses to implement it in IE). I mean really, what formats do you know that allow you to scale the graphics and text as vectors other than PDF that don't have a bunch of crazy limitations?
Umm, since when do commercial software developers have trouble working on OSS projects? IBM doesn't seem to have a problem. Neither does HP, Sun, Apple, or Sony. Maybe MS just needs to review their policies if they're finding them too restrictive?
The last numbers I see specifically on the UK show it having 6.8%, only about 1.4% lower than the US. Personally, I've been working the network security field for quite a while and it is bloody hard to miss Apple' presence there. If you go to BlackHat or DefCon or one of the other big conferences Macs make up about half of the laptops you'll see. I've only been to London once and don't really recall seeing or not seeing Macs however, I do know one of the top security guys for BT and he has a MacBook Pro.
I live in the states right by two large universities, so I realize the number of Macs I see daily is unusual because of their larger presence in education, but the last time I went to the coffee shop down the street, Macs made up about half of the machines there as well. But I don't rely upon just my observations, which is where formal studies and surveys from analysts come in. Regardless of how many you or I see daily, the best evidence indicates they make up about 7% of all the computers in the UK and 8% in the US and the numbers have been increasing by a percentage or two each year for several years now.
Gartner reports Apple took 20% of the education market in Europe for 2007 so far. That is significantly more than their market share for EU, 7% so far in 2007. They did much better with this technique in the early days before MS started emulating it. Anyway, if you've only seen 3 Macs, ever and they make up 7% of computers in Europe, maybe you're in a specialized field or simply don't get out much? Or maybe you live in part of Europe that is impoverished and a bit backwards technologically?
Oh, I'm aware, but it only matters if your doctor takes the time to actually read and understand that material. I'm currently being treated at a research hospital that has an experimental non-FDA approved treatment for the malady they think I have, although they don't understand what causes it. My doctor, despite having performed this treatment, still does not understand it well enough to know how it theoretically works and what the ramifications the particulars of my case have on that. And she is the best of the doctors I've seen so far.
I think the root of the problem is that medicine is considered prestigious and a ticket to wealth, so it tends to attract the greedy and those looking for recognition (the arrogant); instead of people who are the most talented or most dedicated. When I think of some of the incompetent jackasses I know who went to prestigious medical schools I shudder for the profession. One I know who was attending John-Hopkins, got a flat tire one day and called his mother to ask what one was supposed to do in such a situation. I understand being a unworldly academic who can't change a tire, but being so incompetent you can't call roadside service when your AAA card is in your wallet... hopeless. It has gotten to the point where I'm looking at citizenship in a country with sane, socialized healthcare. There are a lot to choose from with better average lifespans than the US and luckily my skills are somewhat in demand around the world.
It amazes me how arrogant MS is in this matter. These are laptops designed to be perfect for kids and to educate them and facilitate their access to communications. How does MS think Windows compares? These laptops all mesh seamlessly with one another, using zeroconf to auto-discover other OLPCs and share pictures and music, chat, collaborate on compositions, writings, programs, drawings, and educational games, and share network access. MS hasn't even managed to implement zeroconf in Vista, despite it being a well established standard in use on every other OS, by printers and hardware, and even implemented by specific applications running in Windows (Adobe CS3, Trillian, iTunes). There is even a free reference implementation for .Net, but they haven't bothered to incorporate it. Hey geniuses, why don't you catch up in your core market for a change, instead of trying to destroy competition and innovation in a different one, especially one as important as educating kids.
Sadly the verdict is still out on whether or not taking the first Google result is significantly less accurate than going to the doctor, and doctors are increasingly turning to Google themselves to help diagnose patients. The last study I saw placed Google's accuracy at about 65% and doctors at 69% for a first diagnosis. As someone who has spent much of the last year going to what are supposedly some of the better hospitals in the nation with little luck, my faith in the medical community is pretty much obliterated. Most any rational person would turn to Google and research their symptoms and possible diagnosis. The sad part is when you go back to the doctor and realize they spent half an hour reading one of the many articles you did and they are unable to answer any additional questions and don't even know some of the information you do. Taking a look at studies of how long it takes to be properly diagnosed if you have anything unusual (several years of seeing doctors) is just depressing.
Personally, I wish doctors would ignore what information their patient knows or thinks they know, but I sure wish they'd do some research themselves and actually have a fucking clue what they're talking about after you spend a week playing phone tag while violently ill, only to find out they haven't bothered to do their homework on your condition.
...and your computer is running Windows and WMP.
True, for the most part. That is the problem that needs to be solved and why we need to be vocal about it.
Clients, employers, and end-users don't want to sit around and wait for browser makers to fix a bug so they can see a website - they want it to work.In a free market, they'd all just use one of the several browsers where that is not an issue and if there was some rare problem, it would be found in testing. We're not talking about a rare problem though and we're not talking about a free market. We're talking about a monopoly bundling an intentionally broken and noncompliant browser for the purpose of breaking the Web so it does not threaten their profits.
They usually get what they pay for. The problem is, if you coded exactly and only for the standards, your page would be no better than the one produced by that buzzed-on-sugar 10 year old, because the end user's experience would be just as bad.My ten year old niece can assemble her christmas toys this year because they conform to standards and she doesn't have to get out a micrometer and measure the size and angle of the grooves on the end of each screw. She can just pick up a philips screwdriver of about the right size and put it together. Personally I don't see any problem with that and it is not like she is threatening the jobs of professional auto-mechanics. Making things work right and according to standards is in everyone's best interests.
Going back to the often over-used automotive analogy, it would be like a gasoline company formulating their product for the "theoretical optimum performance", and then when they notice that it makes a car's fuel line melt, telling their customers "This is perfect gasoline, and it is flawless. Your fuel line melted because it had flaws, and that's the car maker's responsibility to fix. We still think you should buy and use our gas though, and we're not going to change it."Sigh, if you insist on a car analogy, I'll correct it to make it accurate to the situation. Imagine there was one company that had a monopoly on building homes for the entire world. They built homes to last about 8 years, then you needed a new one. You could not hire anyone to build a house except that one company, although you could get a build your own house hobby kit and one other company sold very large houses but only if you were willing to buy them on large chunks of waterfront land. Now this one company that built homes, also gave away a free car with each home. They, were not the only source of cars, but since every home came with one, most people just used those cars. Finally, imagine that all the car makers sat down together to decide on one standard for gasoline for the gas makers to produce and together they all agreed one one for "theoretical optimum performance" and all the car makers implemented the gasoline as such, except our monopolist who decided their home building monopoly was in danger from the RV industry and so repeatedly changed what kinds of gas their cars could take and intentionally made theirs unable to use much of the gasoline on the market in order to force gas stations to carry an inferior version and to artificially degrade the performance of all cars.
At this point your analogy is at least close to accurate. Tell me now, as a gasoline producer and Gas station operator, don't you think you should be complaining as loudly about the monopolist as possible in the hopes that they will be pressured by car buyers and by the government to adhere to standard gasoline?
From my Web development experience, IE is the only real problem. Sure other browsers have quirks, but they all follow standards well enough that if you code to standards 99.99% of the time the result is just fine. I think I've had a Safari specific bug once and a Firefox specific bug twice when my code was actually in compliance with the standards. On the other hand, I have a problem with IE almost every time I programatically create a page.
Frankly, we have a long ways to go and this idle bitching isn't helping.What isn't helping is one company who is breaking the law and breaking standards for profit. What also isn't helping is apologists who try to point out how other browsers have problems too, when realistically the problem is orders of magnitude smaller, and different in nature because none of those other browsers are bundled with an OS that monopolizes the market.
The message from the developer community and from the techie community in general should not be muddled with minor points. It should be crystal clear. IE is the single largest problem with the Web. It is illegal and it is hurting society and technological progress and it needs to be fixed yesterday!
Here's an experiment for you. Go make a PDF file that Reads, "Dear Mr. Shantanu Narayen, I have planted explosives in your building and you are all going to die." Sign it with your name and address and e-mail it to Adobe. When the police come for you, try to explain to everyone how the PDF format is not really standard because when you use it to violate criminal laws, Adobe sends the cops after you. MS was violating antitrust law by trying to leverage their existing monopoly into a new, healthy market, the market for PDF tools. More importantly than the inclusion of PDF tools was the inclusion of XPS tools. The fact that PDF tools were part of the violation had nothing to do with the PDF specification any more than my previous example.
I assume you mean format shift, which is what moving it into iTunes would do? In that case, I think you're dead wrong. DVDs are the same place CDs were before the iPod. It was possible to rip your CD collection and transfer it to your computer and portable player and buy music directly online and move it to your portable. The problem was, this process was too confusing and too cumbersome for the average user, so only techies did it. I know people who installed iTunes only to rip their music collection then went back to WinAmp. I know a few people who came over to my place to use my Mac to rip their collection.
Ripping DVDs is not easy. The software to do it does not come with your portable player or computer and normal people don't even try.
2) The MPAA would never go for any format that is devoid of some copy protection;Yup, which is why they will be fairplay DRM'd.
3) The MPAA doesn't want to strengthen Apple any more than it currently is;True, but they do want access to iPod users and iTunes users to sell to, and the only DRM supported in the iPod or iTunes is controlled by Apple. The rumor I heard was that this is a compromise. Apple lets the MPAA charge differential pricing for movies in iTunes, and in exchange they start including iPod ready files on DVDs, which lets users rip their DVDs into iTunes, thus selling more iPods and AppleTVs.
4) This compromise would only really mean something if it were applied to HD-DVD and Blu-ray, which we know will never happen.Why not and why does it matter? The average person still doesn't care about either of the new formats and is not going to go buy a new TV. I think you're living in techie world and are out of touch with Joe Sixpack.
Most of them, since according to Gartner's last report, MS Exchange was in second place behind IBM's Lotus in worldwide market share.
What? This is about the PDF format becoming a standard not about any proprietary software. If we called it PDF ala XPDF the free and open source PDF reader, would the French be more in support of it? As for copyright and patent, there is a free as in beer license that provides patent protection for anyone making PDF tools that adhere to the standard.
Umm, what isn't portable about PDFs?
I'll grant that it has it's uses but until the full version of Adobe is available for free, or even less expensive, to the masses, it seems to be not quite right.First, I assume you're talking about Adobe Acrobat, since Adobe is a company, not a product. The whole point of standards is that they do not rely upon any given implementation and anyone and everyone can make their own. Don't like Adobe's free product, get someone else's. I have both free and payware PDF tools from both Adobe and other companies. Do you want better free PDF tools, go ahead and code them, the standard is right there and the licensing to the patents is free. Heck there's even good set of GPL PDF libraries and code from the XPDF project.
I'd also certainly rather have a format that is a lot less file size intensive.You can make pretty small PDFs, depending upon what you put in them. Or, if you want smaller file sizes and are willing to sacrifice features, use postscript, it's been a standard for a long time.
To all mail users...no, you can't keep all of those emails with pdf's in your inbox without going over your quota.Mail quotas are so mid 90s. Disk space is cheap and so long as you're not using Exchange (which insists on keeping sometimes hundreds of versions of the same file around, since it is too stupid to just keep one copy for everyone) it is not like attachments are much of an issue anymore.
Actually my local libraries are pretty good for selection, the only problem being the rate of lost and stolen books and video. I think of the library as a credit union, when compared to a pay book rental service, which is more like a traditional bank. They work the same, but one has to pay a cut to the shareholders and is trying to make as much money as possible, while the other is trying to give you the best service as cheaply as possible. Do you donate money to your local library? If just 5% of people who are interested in a renatal service instead donated that same amount to the local library, the selection would be a lot better. The only real issue I have is more and more of the library is being taken up by DVDs, and while I like DVDs, I'd much rather that money were spent on books. In fact, I'd donate more to the library if they allowed you to donate to just books or just video and computing.
I disagree. Generally music is something you want to listen to over and over and over again, so your entire collection expiring at some point in the future if you stop paying is a huge problem. Video rental, on the other hand, are mostly shows you want to see once, then never see again, which is why NetFlix does so well compared to DVD sales. I don't want to own the first season of "Transformers" I just though it would be fun to watch some night while drunk off my ass with a bunch of hooligan bikers. I'll gladly pay $1.50 to have it for a night, but I would not pay even $5.00 to own it outright.
Books fall somewhere in between video and music. There are more books I want to reread than there are movies I want to re-watch. On the balance, however, most books are something I want to read once, either for entertainment or reference or self improvement; and then I will never read them again. Exceptions to this, well I'll buy a nice hardbound copy and stick it in my library (when I finish building it).
Like I said, Yahoo Music Unlimited and Rhapsody (and napster) share a very small market - and even that is shrinking. I doubt it'll be around for long...Agreed, but books are not music and are consumed differently.
According to the Wikipedia entry for WMP, it does support AAC, although not AAC with Fairplay DRM. I'd check personally but I don't feel like firing up Windows just for that.
The latest versions of WMA have better compression rates than the most recent MP3 encoders. That is not quite the same thing you said, but I think it is what you meant.
And this is a good thing as all decoding chips in portable music players all have WMA support, unless it is crippled like the iPod.This is nonsense. You might as well argue that all portable players have support for MP4 unless they are crippled like the Sansa Shaker. You have to pay a licensing fee to ship a device that plays either WMA or MP4, so not including it, even if it is on the chipset, saves the developer money. Note, by market share MP4 is the standard by a huge margin over WMA (though not MP3).
WMA does not inherently use or need DRM, and MS themselves don't push DRM, so it is just as free to copy and decode as MP3.Umm MS does push the DRM by selling DRM'ed music from multiple online services they run or are partners in. They've also been convicted of using their influence to illegally retard the adoption of open formats through illegal contracts with player manufacturers.
He said specifically until the providers stop limiting access to downloaded music that people should just buy CDs if possible to force them to move to a DRM free online model. (And this is right after Zune 1.0 came out.)And yet his company is still selling DRM'ed downloads while several other players have dropped them.
Well it sure beats WMA, but MP4 is a strong contender supported now on the vast majority of market offerings. In fact, only some older Sansa players are really still relevent and lacking support among portables. I'm a little surprised by the lack of adoption of MP4 by download services other than Apple. I figured when DRM was no longer a requirement it would be a done deal. MP4 files are smaller for the same quality compared to MP3, saving bandwidth costs, and there are no licensing costs for encoding and shipping that format, unlike MP3.
The only reason I'd really be interested in buying music digitally would be in cases where the music is out of print. Why buy it as a download, when my very first act after downloading it would be to burn it onto a CD as a backup?I can see the appeal of not paying for shipping, lower costs (in a few cases), or not having to drive to the store and still getting instant access. I once bought a DRM encumbered file from Apple, because someone at a party I was throwing wanted to hear it, and what is $.99 these days? For the most part though, I agree CDs are a better deal and open standards for video and audio would be very nice. I wish Apple had chosen to champion DRM encumbered OGG back in the day, but they may have had some good reasons to go with the tried and true MPEG standard.
If you pay them, sure... although I suspect very few people have no moved on to a newer version by now. As I mentioned, InfoSpan, the leading provider of Firefox support, officially lists 0.9 as one of their supported versions. Without any prior relationship you can call them today for phone support for Firefox 0.9 and while they'll bill you for each call, they'll try to solve your problem.
That is pretty close, but there are a few fundamental differences between anonymous pamphleteering and internet publication. Pamphleteering rarely occurs across national boundaries, bringing in the laws of multiple jurisdictions. Secondly, and more importantly, the government has not established strict regulations as to who can distribute pamphlets, but they have restricted access to providing network access by regulating the wireless spectrum and by restricting who can lay lines in the public right of ways to each house. Further, the government has subsidized the creation of a few major networks, breaking free trade and making it uneconomical for anyone else to enter the market.
Basically, the US government has involved themselves so much in the telecom industry, it can no longer be considered a free market and what is done by those private companies has to be considered in constitutional terms as if the it was the government doing them, much as pamphleteering, via the US postal service 20 years ago was restricted in that the post office could not just tell anyone who asked where the pamphlets were mailed from and to.