One of my biggest frustrations, and the point I've often made to customers, is that just because something is based on Open Source, it doesn't mean that they are getting the benefits of using an Open Source model.
No one always gets all the benefits offered by any advantage in software or anything else. It is possible to have an open source software offering that is so obfuscated and encumbered by patents that there is basically no advantage to using it. That is not common in my experience. The point is not to ignore the potential advantages of a whole class of software because you don't understand the underlying business method.
Any commercial company, save perhaps a complete custom-development & integration shop, that provides any sort of standard support and maintenance services on a solution that has open source elements within, is going to want to limit their customers' ability to churn the software environment and negatively impact their ability to provide support.
While customizing software ourselves negates our support option for modified copies of that software, that does not remove the advantages brought by the fact that the software is OSS. We can make those modifications in the first place, if the business case supports it. We can get support contract from one of a dozen companies drastically reducing the cost.
no commercial vendor who wishes to make money on support can afford to have their customers randomly upgrading or enhancing the underlying code base upon which their support is based.
Umm, we submit enhancements to Apache and Linux all the time and that does not negate our support contract or undermine the companies that supply said contracts. Any company who relies entirely upon support for revenue is one you should be very careful doing business with. They have a vested interest in increasing your dependence upon that support which is opposed to your best interests. In the long term, that is no business model.
However, my paycheck doesn't come from an open source company (yet).
My paycheck does come from a company that develops open source software as well as closed source software. What most people don't understand is that OSS works as a business model for software users who want software to aid them in creating value in some endeavor and who are not in the business of creating or supporting that software. If you're in the business of selling photoshop, the OSS business model is a poor fit. If you're in the business of editing photos and you need a flexible tool for doing that, OSS can be a great fit, if you can get enough other players to buy into that model at the same time. Even if you're the early adopter, if you're large enough it can make a pretty reasonable long-term business case.
On the other hand quality of OSS software can be low, documentation often sucks and user friendliness...
Yeah and the documentation and user friendliness of closed source code often sucks too. Just because the software is open source is not some magical bullet. Gee the boss wanted a database but I downloaded a Web browser, but it's open source so that's okay right? It's not like you still don't have to perform due diligence when choosing software and evaluate every package based upon its merits and risks and your use cases. It is just that you have to recognize that open source software is an option for many use cases and often a very good one. The real issue is so many morons who can't understand that there is a different business model and you don't have to buy everything in order to use it.
Another problem I foresee for OSS software is that it may tend to mutate over time without strict controls or much in the way of accountability.
With open source software you have the code and can always compile it the way it used to be or hire someone to. You can hire someone to do a fork if you need to. With closed source software you just have to go along with whatever the vendor wants to do and if they don't want to keep offering an old version just for you or make some change you need you're screwed. Open source wins in this category and arguments that it doesn't seem absurd to me.
What works today may not work tomorrow and when things in your corporation start breaking whose throat are you going to choke?
Choke? When MS decides it no longer wants to support a given language or feature in the software you have whose throat are you going to choke? It makes no difference if you are using software from an organization, or paying from support from a given commercial entity or paying outright for it, except with open source you have a few more options. This situation is not different. If a product stops supporting what you need and is moving the wrong way, open or closed you look at other options and offerings. With open source you have the added option of paying some random contractor to keep the software you have running the way you want.
With MS products the same defects are there (though less so as it turns out (predictably)), but in their case at least we know who to blame and can expect the product to be fixed. With OSS I see no way to assure that.
With MS software you can report bugs and they may or may not be ignored. If you pay for support, they are less likely to be ignored. This is in no way different from open source software, except they tend to be better about fixing bugs in general and in a worst case scenario I can take bids from different people to solve the problem. I have several outstanding bugs with Adobe and they've been in the last three revisions of one of their products on every platform they support. When you do something the application crashes. My company spends significant money working around that flaw. The fact that they are closed source is helping us how? Unless we offer them significant money, they don't care. The only real difference is if it was an open source product, we could have an engineer internally fix it or we would have multiple choices of hiring someone else to fix it, thus costing us less.
The solution to the competitive model of OSS for the Big Vendors is very simple.
I think you're failing to understand the real wins of open source software.
EULAs and license numbers are not the biggest differentiators between OSS and closed source commercial software. OSS is fundamentally a more efficient model for users for software. With closed source software you're always somewhat locked into one vendor, even if it is only being locked into one vendor for improvements. With OSS you always can take competitive bids, thus getting better prices. With closed source software the vendor charges what they think will maxi
Although there are OSS licenses, that allow you an unlimited free use of the software, there are commercial licenses as well.
While your point is true, you're making a mistake as well. "Free as in beer" and "commercial' are not mutually exclusive. AOL ships a million "free as in beer" CDs all around the country, but it is still a commercial venture. The BSD and GPL licenses are well known and used by businesses to license software they create in order to make a profit. Just because that method is not selling licenses to use said code makes it no less commercial.
I don't get it. You get the Win for "free" (or less) due to the nagware installed.
Actually, the best estimates I've seen place Dell's price for an OEM copy of Windows Vista home at about twice the price Dell is paid for installing nagware. As the computer company you are dealing with gets smaller their Windows discount gets smaller and this delta grows even larger.
Why not just get the pc with linux-capable components, let the advertizers pay for your unused copy of windows, and install your favorite flavor of linux (or whatever you plan on using)?
Because if they could sell in volume without Windows it would be cheaper yet (drastically cheaper if they lined up Linux nagware) and because without the vendor pre-installing and testing Windows any guarantee that it is "linux capable" is subject to being an exaggeration or just plain wrong. For example, at a previous company we bought Dell towers in bulk that we destined to run Linux, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. We already owned a site license for Windows with plenty of free seats. We still had to pay for licenses for those machines even though we did not want them. Also, being Dell, despite having the same model number and being part of the same shipment, only about 1/3 of the machines actually had all parts that were the same as the test boxes we were shipped and had all the drivers we needed. Out of a few hundred machines we got 3 different video cards, several controllers, hard drives, CD-drives, etc.
I have yet to get a new pc I didn't re-image or install from scratch anyway. If I used linux I'm certain I wouldn't like the vendor's setup any more than I like their win installs. Too many custom setting to get these kinds of things to work they way we use them. If the windows is effectively free, and you have to do a reinstall anyway, why not just ignore it?
You and I are going to image anything we get. The average consumer does not know what an OS is and would never attempt to install one. More importantly, the vendor having to ship with Linux and support it insures all the hardware will have drivers and you have a source for those drivers.
Sure folks complain and I'm avoided like the plague at times. But lets see what non-maintenance down time have I needed? Zero. For me and my team the lines are clear cut and boundaries well established.
Thank you very much. Companies like yours are the reason companies like mine can hire brilliant and talented people away from bureaucratic nightmares and pay them 20% less while getting a significant amount more productivity from them. We have internal Web, IRC, chat, etc. servers. If your AOL IM is not working and it is stopping you from chatting with your girlfriend, IT is happy to help. They'll even grab you a beer from the fridge on the way to your desk. For smart people who know they'll spend a significant portion of their life at work, but who chose their work because they love it... there are companies like mine. You're treated like a real person instead of a cog. If you need to go home for the rest of the day while waiting for the plumber to come to your house, go ahead. Don't bother filling out paperwork or logging your time. So long as your work gets done, it's all to the good. If a friend is in town and stops by the office, go ahead and take a few hours to have a beer and play a video game with them in the lounge. Introduce them to your boss and coworkers.
We don't lock down Web access to any type of external site. We track everything, but the tracking system is open to all employees so if you want to see what your boss is doing, just log on and look. We don't seem to have a lot of IT emergencies either. Some of our old and out of date servers overheat or fall over now and again and we power cycle them. No big deal.
Every day I'm thankful I realized early in life that I did not want to take the top dollar offer for my work if it meant I had to put up with nonsense like you advocate. IT's job is not supposed to be to minimize the amount of work they need to do or even to prevent problems. It is supposed to be to facilitate the rest of the company getting work done. Happy employees work harder for the company and stay late to work on something or even come in on a weekend for some project. Happy employees do not quit and move to another company with no notice leaving the company in the lurch. Happy employees are not the largest and hardest to stop threat to the security of your network as they feel it is "wrong" to screw over the company and boss and people who treat them well and with understanding and who are their friends.
But by all means, keep making yourself hated and keep thinking your employees lives should stop and they should act like machines for 8 hours a day. We'll keep hiring away the smartest people you have.
Wikipedia creator Jimbo Wales may have started Wikia itself, the engine behind this and the other bajillion wikia out there, but he doesn't seem to be actually working on this particular wiki.
Yeah, he still lost oodles of credibility in my book when I looked at his first Wikia offerings and nothing seems to have improved. Wikipedia is smooth, fast, well designed, cross-platform, and easy on the eyes. All these wikia powered magazines are messy, behave unpredictably, and seem to have serious issues with several browsers including Opera and Safari. I mean if you write an engine and template you expect to be powering not just one wiki, but a whole series of wikis that are your company's only real business, don't you think you can at least test it in all the major browsers out there? What kind of a company has Web development as their only business and can't even do that acceptably? Maybe you need to get Sanger on board in order to come up with something usable.
Google's approach to growth right now resembles something like a gold rush, assuming that they know where the gold really is.
People made a lot of money in the gold rush. Google is not hiring any warm body they can find. They have been pretty selective and have the highest PhD count in the industry.
I dont think they do exactly, but are hedging their bets on a number of ideas. he search engine makes money, but Google knows that they will need to do more...
I think you're missing the point. Google makes money from advertising primarily. Advertising from their search engine needs to expand. So they move into IM, mapping, video, online applications, etc. etc. in order to expand their advertising base. These aren't random as some people seem to think, but all ways to leverage Google's existing revenue model into other markets.
...just gathering a lot of great programmers together under one unbrella does not guarantee innovation.
From what I've seen Google is gathering together great scientists, engineers, programmers, businessmen, and advertisers. They're gathering together people who can solve problems (their primary hiring criteria). For some reason a lot of people seem to assume Google is hiring up introverted geeks and sticking them in offices and hoping for the best. From what I've seen, that does not seem to be the case. They're hiring smart and flexible people who know how to work together and who have previously run successful businesses of their own. It's not like none of Google's hires understands how to make money or why that is important.
I think Microsoft proved that good programmers dont necessarily make great programs.
Microsoft has shown that thousands of programmers straight out of school and indoctrinated into the "one true way" by the senior engineers and then constantly overridden by marketing and business people whose goal is not to make great programs but to gouge people for as much money as possible, will not make great programs. I don't think that surprises anyone.
Every one of Google's businesses are cases of doing someone else's idea better.
So? That is true of almost every major player in the industry. I don't see how that is related to successful growth.
Cant wait to see what is coming, but for the moment, I cant see the fault in Ballmer's logic.
Ballmer did not present any logic. He expressed an unsupported opinion that may not even be what he truly believes since he has a direct financial interest in spreading doubt regarding Google. Ballmer is the last person we should be listening to in this regard.
They have to be in a full-on creative environment to do the truly impressive stuff. I think that the environment is slowly dissolving as Google loses it cohesion as a tight-knit company. They're growing incredibly fast, and I'm not sure they're really getting a good return on that growth. Obviously, only those inside the company can actually know that for sure, but it's not looking as good as it once did for those of us on the outside.
I'm not sure I can agree with this. Google is exploding in a number of directions from internet based application services to radio advertising to mapping services to hardware offerings to IM. They basically have hit upon the concept that advertising can be used to make money off of anything popular, so they have set about finding or creating things people want. They're investing in R&D and headcount and while some may argue that they won't get significant return on that, I don't see any evidence of that and I have to believe they keep track internally of how much revenue it looks like they're going to pull in from these things.
I know a few people at Google these days and they are bright, motivated guys. I'm not sure exactly what they're doing, but they're sure not sitting on their hands and both are top notch engineers with real world business experience as well. One of them founded a very successful and profitable startup I worked at. From the outside, it looks to me like they can't help but make cool stuff and money if they are made up of that caliber of people.
Well, kinda. The previous poster should have said "a password." You can always be forced to give up your password or assumed guilty if you don't. A good encryption setup encrypts a chunk of disk. When you enter on password it decrypts as a dummy directory (a few porn images or something). When you enter a different password it decrypts as your real data. This way you can say, "okay, okay my password is 'monkeypoop' I just didn't want my friends to know I looked at porn."
I agree with your points. My main beef with the anti-GM crowd is that they single out genetic manipulation in the lab, and not other forms of genetic manipulation (like selective breeding).
The real issue with genetic modification is the increases scope and speed of such changes. A person breeding corn might be able to breed to different strains to produce a new one and it could conceivable result in higher levels of some dangerous toxin corn naturally produces. But, given both strains of corn have existed for some time and have presumably been safe to eat, it is a lot less likely than if someone actually targets the genetic code that controls toxicity levels. GM opens up whole new avenues of change that selective breeding and random mutation are highly unlikely to ever touch and as such more caution is required.
Arguably there is no such thing as "natural corn" these days.
When people go to the store and buy a corn, they have expectations. Those expectations include that the corn is from one of the many strains that have been being consumed for a long time, or a combination of those strains. They don't expect that corn to have significant changes to its genetic code, and unless it has been exposed to a significant mutagen they are right. I'd argue that passing of corn that has been genetically modified or heavily exposed to mutagens as "normal" corn is not in their best interests and is deceitful. There is a real difference in the risk posed between "natural" corn and GM corn, although to most people educated on the subject that delta is pretty small. By being honest, however, companies investing in such products are motivated both to produce benefits end users care about and to make sure the testing process is thorough so that GM foods earn/develop a reputation for safety.
...idiots will use this as an argument against gm food in general
Perhaps, but a lot more people will rightfully use this as an argument against GM food as it is now being implemented in our society.
gm food promises to put vitamin A in rice, develop crops that grow in the desert, etc.: a benefit for mankind
Yeah, and the crack head that hangs out by the liquor store promises he'll pay me back a thousand dollars in a year if I lend him $50. I'm not interesting in what is being promised. I'm interested in what is the likelihood of certain things occurring and what are the results of those things. It is simple risk/reward.
...they think they live in the plot of a bad hollywood movie
In a bad hollywood movie things are simple and it always works out in the end. We have no such luxury. Things are complex. We have a system of patents that is allowing people to patent gene sequences in large numbers. GM takes money and none of the people with a lot of money seem very altruistic or interested in benefiting humanity as a whole. They are interested in making more money and gaining power. We can pretty much assume GM will be used in risky or dangerous ways and in ways that are detrimental to humanity as a whole in order to provide greater profit. Already companies have taken agricultural groups and removed the basic sustainability from their process. The grain they grow can't be replanted and anything it happens to breed with can't be replanted so they have to buy new seed to plant every year. That is not a benefit to humanity it is a benefit to whomever holds the patent.
The truth is GM could have some pretty serious negative consequences both by itself and in combination with corrupt governments and the powerful few that control most wealth. Already they have passed laws to make it legal to pass off GM food as non-GM food so people are not informed about what they are buying. You see most people did not want to buy GM food, so they simply passed a law that said it is okay to lie to the people in order to make money. I agree that used responsibly or altruistically genetic modification of food could bring us real benefits with very little risk. I'm just not naive to think this is what is or is likely to ever happen in the real world.
And yet you do not name this Mythical DVR - odd that.
I'm using an Elgato EyeTV.
TIVO has to license the Macrovision software in order to allow playback. When Macrovision revises it's license terms and renwal is needed TIVO has no choice but to bend over and do as they say or be sued for using unlicensed technology.
Wait a second. Are you honestly claiming that Tivo's decision to make it hard for people to enable 30 second skip and the fact that it is not a default setting is part of their macrovision license contract? Is that really what you're trying to convince me of?
Sorry, but TIVO is painted into a corner here as are all of the consumer devices that want to playback Macrovision protected content.
ReplayTV lets users skip commercials with a simple jump ahead button. So does Windows Media Center. So does my EyeTV. But Tivo being forced by macrovision licensing? I don't think so. They're being forced by giant, juicy sales contracts from Comcast.
BTW other than suing them what is TIVO's "direct relationship" with the cable industry?
They signed a deal two years ago with Comcast to make Tivo built DVRs for Comcast, who would ship them as part of their cable package effectively increasing Tivo's market share by 50%, easily.
If you'd been paying attention you'd realize that TIVO is attempting to compete with the cable industry not get into bed with them - ask Comcast about that
You mean the same Comcast that signed a giant distribution deal with them making them Tivo's biggest customer and partner? Tivo sold out years ago, you just did not notice.
This stuff isn't hard to find out if you'd bothered to keep up but instead you spew FUD....
Yeah this stuff isn't hard to find out. The deal with Comcast was announced in numerous major publications. Tivos are crippled and are unlikely to ever get better since Tivo got in bed with the Cable companies. It costs a fortune for program info you can get by looking at a banner ad online. It costs a fortune to get a model that can burn a simple DVD, which is crippled to not burn all shows and which has no ability to edit out commercials. It is a pain in the ass to get a simple export to mpeg. The 30 second skip is disabled by default.
If you want to believe this is because Tivo is incompetent technologically or can't seem to find a good lawyer unlike all the other DVR systems on the market, well you just go on thinking that. Honestly Tivo subscribers are less rational than any OS fanboy when it comes to emotionally defending their purchase choice and explaining away Tivo's actions. They're a business. They were offered a better deal than giving home users what they want.
What I want to know is can they possibly claim as the causative product of this toxicity. Certainly it cannot be the modification process itself, since it uses natural enzymes.
Umm, most plants produce natural toxins they use for biological warfare against other plants and animals. Most genetic modification is an attempt to either increase a toxin to kill a pest (rootworm) or increase a resistance to a toxin to fight another plant or a artificially introduced toxin. In this case the corn was designed to create a toxin (Bt-toxin (Cry3Bb1)) and as a byproduct also is said to create (Cry1Ab).
So the most probable indication is that one of those two toxins has more of a negative affect upon rats and thus possibly other mammals like humans than was previously believed. Greenpeace responsibly refrained from making specific claims about the intermediate causation as that is still not yet determined. There is, however, a reasonable amount of evidence that this strain of GM corn could be dangerous to humans and animals and should be investigated and possibly pulled from the market or at least labeled until the topic is fully investigated.
It just seems to me that Greenpeace is following the formula of the religions - find something that is mysterious and unsettling to the average person, vilify it, then profit.
Greenpeace is a bunch of marketing people for the most part. It is possible every tuesday night they gather beneath an abandoned monastery and eat human babies.That doesn't however, speak to the accuracy or implications of this research.
Genetic engineering is not a panacea, but nor is it a boogieman.
Genetic engineering is a science where people mess about with code without understanding the full implications of what that will result in. It's like modifying software while only having read and understood a small portion of the code and not the other code dependent upon it. As such, I think that while it is promising, extra caution and care needs to be exercised and I don't think the FDA or the commercial enterprises involved give a damn about anything but money and are uninterested in taking appropriate precautions.
Genetically modified foods still contain the same amino acids in their proteins as all the other foods, so unless you modify their biochemistry to an extent where they'll produce real toxins, they will be digested just the same.
Genetically modified foods almost all produce toxins. The question is did some change to the genetic structure cause it to create different ones or toxins in different levels and what does that mean for normal people? Another part of the problem is the food almost always appears to be the same as non-modified food and is often not labeled. Would you eat some random plant when you did not know if it was edible and no one had ever seen it before? Every GM food is one of those. Most are probably fine, just like most plants are. Some might be developing toxins that are harmful or concentrating something from their environment which is harmful. If we made it to other planets and found them with ecosystems very much like the earth, but separated by millions of years of evolution, would you trust that something that looks like corn has not adapted in such a way that it is poisonous? That's sort of what GM food is, a common food, modified not by evolution but by man in a way we don't fully understand the consequences of. Often the results are beneficial, but caution should be the byword and thorough testing and serious consideration of possible problems. The fact that this corn might be at the grocery store near you with no indication that it is not the natural corn most people expect it to be is a deception and needs to be considered.
It seems to me that AppArmor is still a much more suitable tool for MAC under Linux for 99% of the systems that need it.
The truth is, the vast majority of systems don't need either, but the concept is a nice security architecture to have in place for those rare instances where it is needed and as a built in part of security going forward.
Having used both SELinux and AppArmor I can say there's no comparison in terms of effectiveness. If a security tool it too complex to use it will be used incorrectly and can lead to even worse security problems. I would rather stick with a much simpler approach that still provides all the confinement of MAC but only where I need it.
If you're trying to secure a system today, you might be better of with AppArmor from what I understand. If you're trying to decide upon a MAC architecture that will be part of Linux going forward, SELinux looks like a much better bet. Ubiquitous application of MAC is a big win in the long run. Building on the best base and then creating in the tools to effectively use it seems like a wise approach to me. I foresee a time when MAC will play a vital role in securing desktop machines and I think most of the configuration woes are solvable by the addition of policies as part of applications and for application types and trust levels on a system by system basis. You don't want Joe Sixpack configuring this any more than you want him configuring a firewall, but instead it makes sense to present end users with a system that "just works" built upon SELinux.
They never did, but [Select] -> [Play] -> [Select] -> 3 -> 0 -> [Select] works fine on my Series3. Who cares if it's not "officially supported"?
This, my friends, is a dead canary in the mine. Here is a function almost every user wants. It is also a function the cable company would prefer you did not have. But you're Tivo's customer right, so they will obviously make this easy for you, right? Nope, because the cable companies are Tivo's customers too, and they're willing to commit to pushing crippled Tivos on everyone they can.
It's not kowtowing - they have to play by the media industry's rules to provide customers what they want, or (once again) risk getting the pants sued off them.
Your statement is pure propaganda, spread by Tivo themselves. There is no legal risk to Tivo if they do not implement some function to stop you from recording whatever you want, when you want, the same as VCR manufacturers. My PVR was made by a company that has no direct relationship with the cable industry and guess what, it lets me record what I want, when I want and does not let people delete things off my machine. Do you know what else it does? It lets me skip commercials without learning a secret code like I'm trying to get unlimited ammo in a first person shooter. You know what else it does? It lets me burn DVDs and VCDs and export mpegs of whatever I want. You know what else it does? It incorporates a simple editor to let me cut out commercials from my saved video and export it that way if I want. You know what else it does? It lets me pick my own programming schedule provider including ad supported Web interface ones that don't charge any monthly fee and save me a boatload of cash.
Tivo does not do these things because the cable companies are their biggest customers and Tivo sold out. Stop making excuses for them. Stop explaining away their actions that are favorable to the cable companies not to end users. It is time to move on to something that puts users first and cable companies second.
Yeah... but they aren't $800 upfront and $16/month (I think we pay $16/month for box rental and DVR service together)
How much are they really though? The cable company wants $58 a month from me for cable Internet or $50 a month for Cable internet and basic cable television. From this, I conclude that cable television actually costs them negative amounts of money.
The reality of the situation is that the cable TV companies have mostly raised cable rates higher and are using some of that money to subsidize their DVR rental business so which part of your bill it is listed under does not really matter. Technically, this is probably illegal, but realistically it is almost impossible to prove and no one has the cash to fight it out in court. As an end result, if you use the cable company DVR you're in effect being subsidized by everyone else who does not but who pays the higher rates anyway. So it is in your immediate financial interest to use the cable company supplied DVR. Of course it also means you're helping them to illegally destroy the DVR industry and dooming yourself to crappy feature set, lack of innovation, and exorbitant prices in the long run. The DVR of the future will be like the rental telephones available during Ma Bell's hay-day. I hope you enjoy paying every time you watch an episode of something, being unable to exercise your fair use rights to actually save a copy of the show you are watching, and being limited to the same set of really basic features forever.
This may come as a shock to you, but there are many people out there who don't have the time or desire to rip CD's and have no interest in pirated music. They want to buy legit music and there's simply no place witht the same terms and selection as iTunes to buy it for the other players.
Sure there are they account for less than 8% of people who even want to and do buy one track.
So some of those people will buy an iPod rather than another player because of iTunes even though there are other players that offer more features for the same price.
So again we're talking about a subset of 8% of which only 20% would be affected by removing DRM on these indy tracks (the action in question). So you're talking some number substantially lower than 2% of iPod buyers. That's the benefit to Apple.
So how many people are there who would like to buy an iPod and use it with the iTunes store, but they're fundamentally opposed to Apple's stance on DRM and this might make them reconsider? How many people simply have some sort of vague understanding that Apple's music is not "free" or "portable" and a few articles about Apple removing all DRM from the indy music would lead them to purchase an iPod? Is it more or less than that subset of 2% of current iPod users you're talking about? You don't know. I don't know. Apple probably doesn't even know. But are the chances that it is significantly beneficial to Apple to maintain DRM on those tracks and so Apple is maintaining that DRM in order to push an advantage probable? Is it more probable than the RIAA included a clause in their contract that says all music Apple sells has to be DRM'd? I don't think so and I think you're really, really, reaching to claim otherwise.
Obviously competitors wouldn't bother complaining about lock-in if they didn't believe it was hurting them.
Competitors are complaining about "lock-in" in general which applies to a full 8% of Apple's current iPod customers, a significant chunk of the overall market. The tracks in question are only a fraction of that and are what we're discussing. Please try to stay on the current topic.
Why not just use the cable company's DVR? At my parent's house they just use Time Warner's HD Cable Box. Has a good 160GB of storage, interface is fine, and the monthly price is comparable to TiVO. No need for cablecard/ir-blaster/etc and there are 2 tuners and on demand video (although they never use it)
There are two main reasons not to use a cable company DVR. First, they have the minimum feature set possible where that feature set is a conflict between what the user wants and what the cable company wants. Second, for strategic reasons if the cable companies are the ones providing the DVRs then the feature set will always be limited and it is just extending those company's regional monopolies and holding back progress.
Let me speak to the first point first. How easy is it to skip commercials on said DVR? How easy is it to burn a show to DVD, or better yet edit out the commercials then burn to DVD? Do any of the shows ever expire or refuse to record? Do you have to pay a monthly fee for use? Can you pick a different program subscription if you don't like the descriptions/accuracy of the one they provide? Can you save a show to an mpeg and easily copy it to your laptop for viewing on the plane when you don't have internet access and don't want to run down the battery using the DVD drive? Can you watch IPTV content like iTunes and YouTube?
Now, assuming you're supporting the cable comapny's bid to take over the DVR market think about the following questions. Has the cable company raised everyone's rates for cable and started overcharging in order to make the DVR seem cheaper than the competition? If they haven't why shouldn't they once most of the other DVR manufacturers go out of business? Do you think the cable company wants you to be able to skip commercials and will make that easier for you in future? Will the cable company ever support arbitrary content from TCP/IP knowing in undercuts their lock-in? Will the cable companies ever make archiving shows to DVD easy or would they rather you pay them per viewing for old shows you already paid for once? If at some point the program guide becomes inaccurate, can you switch to another service, or can you right now switch to a free service?
It all boils down to whether or not you are a "PC user" or a "Mac user" when it comes to your PVR needs. The former is more powerful and more flexible and more open and the latter is easy and well integrated for what few features it supports.
I think your analogy is a bit off. Being a Tivo user is more akin to being a Windows user. Tivo is mainstream and relatively easy to use for a subset of tasks and it is intentionally crippled by big business to make it hard for you to do things they don't like (burn DVDs and VCDs, skip commercials, use a free or even different programming schedule, save as an mpeg, or interoperate with other devices). Using MythTV is a lot like being a Linux user. If you know what you're doing you can put together something powerful and flexible, but it takes knowledge and you may end up with instability for a while with non-core features.
I think of myself as a "Mac User" kind of PVR guy and in fact my PVR is an old Mac with an EyeTV device attached. It was plug and play and burning a DVD is simple and easy and the commercial skip works as expected, but I needed to have a whole Mac computer (expense) to get it to work. I have no interest in spending time hacking a box, but I do have an interest in features those fat cats at the cable company don't want me to know about.
Tivo Corp has made too little progress & needs someone like MS or Apple to slap them around a bit.
Tivo has sold out... plain and simple. They started as a device to let regular people easily do things with their TV programming that the cable company was dead set against (like skip commercials). At some point they realized the cable companies had to much power to fight and the cable companies offered them huge sales contracts for branded set-top PVRs with as many of the features that did not benefit the cable company stripped out as possible. Tivo went for it (I can't blame them) but they aren't working just for the end user anymore and it shows. It is time for people to move on and realize the brand has changed and in a head to head comparison with other offerings, Tivo is seriously crippled.
...the bulk of iPod sales will be to new customers, so iPod market share could take a hit without a single current iPod customer switching players.
Or iPod sales could increase as a result of Apple ditching DRM for indy bands. You've provided no evidence or even logic to support either scenario. If Apple doesn't want to remove DRM from those files because of lock-in as you assert, how would getting rid of that lock-in make any difference to new sales, since those people won't be locked in in the first place?
It looks to me like you decided you know think you know what Apple's motivation is, and now you're struggling to find any evidence or even baseless conjecture to support your theory, instead of looking at all the evidence and forming an opinion based upon the facts and logic. Your credibility is on its way down a steep incline.
So I go into the store and start playing around with the Tivos on display while I'm shopping for a PVR solution. I'm looking at a few different options including building my own MythTV box, buying a Tivo, buying a Windows Media Center PC, buying some other appliance, and buying an add on for one of the boxes I have laying around the house.
I ask the sales guy, "so how do I skip a commercial?" After a long rant about how there is an easter egg that allows me to assign a 30 second skip ahead to a button that does not seem to labeled for that option if I push this particular sequence of controls, I'm thinking something is really wrong with this picture. (On the solution I ended up with I go to the preference section and insert the numbers I want in seconds for the skip ahead and skip back. I want to configure my device not learn how to shoot a fireball in Mortal Kombat XXII.)
Next I ask about saving video and making copies for on the road. I mean I can record a VCR tape, I should be able to record and burn a DVD, right? Well, yeah if you buy a model that cost another $500 dollars you can burn DVDs with it, but not all shows will burn. Huh? And it won't do VCDs at all for cheaper archives of stuff like news broadcasts and public access lectures from local professors. Hmm, that is annoying. And how easy is it for me to save it as a video file I can watch on my Mac laptop on the plane without wasting my battery on the DVD player? Really its that hard huh? At this point I have some real serious doubts. I mean, the interface is okay aside from the skip ahead, but why can't it do these simple tasks?
Then the sales guy starts talking about the subscription. Subscription? Why do I want to pay a monthly fee? For up to date program info, hmm, that is fair enough, but there are already like 20 free online Web services that offer that info supported by ads. Why should it cost you guys so much? Why not add a few ads? Oh you do have ads and it costs that much? Isn't that sort of gouging people? So what happens if that service is wrong or spotty or I just don't like it? Can I pay one of the other companies and pick the price/service that meets my needs best? No, I'm locked in huh? I was really not sold on this.
I ended up passing on Tivo because they seemed expensive and wanted to add in all sorts of artificial problems and limited behaviors for what seemed like no good reason but which, in retrospect looking at their big Cable TV partnerships, makes a lot of sense for them, just not for me as a customer. The solution I ended up using was the combination of an old, old mac tower I had sitting around, an Elgato EyeTV tuner+software, a new video card that would mirror to a monitor and TV, and a DVD burner for the tower. It cost me about 1/3 the upfront price of an equivalent Tivo (would be more for someone who needed to find an old mac) and the program info I use is free and ad supported and I can pick from among a variety of options. When I want to archive a few episodes of a TV show I can use the built in editor to delete the commercials and then click burn to DVD (or VCD) and it works, every time. I can skip ahead or back with the included remote with no problems. Playback of live TV or prerecorded , while burning a DVD and while recording something else causes no slowdown or stutter. Export to Mpegs for viewing on the plane is selecting the export menu item and then dragging it onto the auto-discovered shared laptop drive. It never crashes. It never fails to boot. If the power dies and the UPS dies it recovers just fine. I had a hard drive die once and swapped it out. Every now and again there will be a display problem for the video (every couple of weeks) and I have to quit and restart the application, which takes about 3 seconds. That's pretty much the only complaint I have.
I guess my point is, you can mock MythTV if you like, but it is just as easy to mock the artificial limits of Tivo. It makes tasks that should be easy, hard and task
Did MS and computer OEMs make their agreements public before the government stepped in? If the government suspects a problem, hiding behind a trade secret isn't going to help particularly if the only purpose of the trade secret is to limit competition.
The government only stepped in in that instance because they were investigating other antitrust abuses involving MS in response to civil suits from other companies about antitrust abuse. So unless someone else has grounds to sue and they can then show relevance the government won't be doing much of anything.
Wow, we're definitely in fan-boy-fantasy-land now.
What the hell are you talking about? I don't support Apple's DRM at all so I can hardly be called a "fan-boy." I don't even own an iPod. You did not address my statement at all. It isn't some wildly improbable theory it is simply debunking that the RIAA would not have taken this action because they are afraid of the courts. It is not so, as they've proven in the past.
Why not accept the simpler explanation: if iTunes offered non-DRM'd music they wouldn't have any excuse for not allowing it to play on other portable players.
Because that explanation makes little sense. The percentage of music on iPods that comes from the iTMS store is very small and so would such a resulting lock-in be. Further, Apple already fought the RIAA in order to get a "burn to CD" option for the DRM'd music before any other company managed to get such a concession, and that works directly against the belief that Apple values lock-in to the iPod as a motivation for their music sales. The bad PR Apple gets over this issue almost certainly results in more lost sales than they gain from making such a move of music to another player inconvenient.
If iTunes music could be played on competitors' players the iPod's market share would most definitely take a hit.
Wait you're honestly arguing that if the subset of music on ipods that is both purchased from the iTMS (~8% of iPods have music from iTMS) and from one of the indy labels (~20% of music sales are indy, so 20% of 8% is less than 2% of iPod users) was to be made DRM free such that users did not have to burn it to CD and re-rip that a significant number of people would abandon the iPod and move to other players? So that potential 2% of iPod sales that would actually be affected by such a move would result in a significant portion of that 2% moving to another player. And that number would be greater than the number who would then be motivated to buy an iPod by the good PR from Apple ditching that DRM? And you think that is less far-fetched than that the RIAA stipulated "DRM for all" in their contract?
You're the one who is reaching a long way from probability to try to explain the situation. Objectively, your proposed motivation for Apple is very, very unlikely. It is not even as likely as the possibility that Apple simply does not want to try to manage both DRM'd and non-DRM'd music downloads from their store because of the technical implementation details and expense of setting that up (which I think is also less likely than my proposed explanation).
This is news to me. Which source do you have this from.
I'm not the original poster, but I've read studies that indicated that windows media format is the most common DRM in use in both the US and Europe. For years the default player (WMP) in the only OS with any real market share (Windows) ripped all CDs to DRM'd Windows Media format and ripping form CD is still the most common way people acquire digital music on their computers. The market share of the iPod/iTunes/iTMS is pretty tiny in comparison.
iTunes is by far the most common DRM supplier, and going after Apple first therefore has the potential to do the most impact.
I wish I still had a link handy to provide statistics to the contrary, but perhaps you can provide evidence of your assertion? From everything I've read Music CD->Windows->WMP->Windows Media Format DRM is the largest supplier of DRM's music, followed by Hybrid Music Disc that looks like a CD-> Windows. Only after those two mechanism does DRM'd dowloads appear. Are you sure you're not neglecting DRM from CDs in your evaluation of DRM'd music? As far as I know iTunes is the largest single source of downloaded DRM'd music, but I don't see that it being downloaded or purchased in a store really makes any difference in the real problem.
If Kuneva is following the lead of other European countries, she would tell you that going after Apple is simply the first step. Other DRM suppliers would have to follow suit.
This seems like the most half-assed argument I've heard in a long time. Either you can be an idealist and work towards banning DRM to the benefit of all, or you can be strategic and try to help consumers by strategically attacking DRM purveyors. The problem is, Apple is not the largest supplier of DRM, Microsoft is. Also, Apple is leveraging a near monopoly on portable players, but MS is leveraging a well established monopoly on desktop operating systems and has already been convicted by the EU courts specifically with regard to their jukebox software. Strategically, taking down Apple would hand the entire music DRM market to Microsoft which would be a whole lot worse for consumers than the current state of affairs where Apple is "competing" with them and at least bringing some competitive advantages to said market and consumers. The idea of a strategic attack on Apple is seriously misguided as you either need to take out both MS and Apple at once, or you're just taking out the main force stopping a DRM monoculture with a single gatekeeper who has more money than god and a long history of abuse and political interference.
...attacking the DRM implementors is therefore more likely to succeed.
I think that is a false assumption, if the goal is to help consumers in the first place.
The music labels would be in deep antitrust trouble if they collectively made an agreement with Apple that locked-out smaller labels on any basis.
First, how would they be convicted of this if the only parties that know are Apple and the RIAA and it is a trade secret? Apple could risk their iTunes store and their market lead and their iPod business to bring this to light, but even if they did they would be opening themselves up to lawsuits and the courts are notoriously ineffective at actually providing reparations and it doesn't benefit Apple's shareholders at all.
Assuming there was such an agreement and Apple came forward, the RIAA could claim they just wanted to present a consistent experience to customers to avoid confusion and it is entirely possible the courts would buy it and Apple would have just sacrificed years of investment and building a music/player business for no real gain. And if you're thinking the RIAA wouldn't possibly take the risk, they've already been convicted of cartel abuses multiple times for actions a lot more blatant than this, like the price fixing and payola actions they have been convicted of.
Personally, I find it not only plausible that Apple's deal with the RIAA forbids them from selling any non DRM'd content from iTMS, but it seems likely and right in line with the RIAA's normal operating procedure.
Your point is moot. If for some reason the popularity of Linux on home PCs skyrocketed in one year and grabbed an incredible 20% market share, a "malware ecosystem" for Linux would soon follow as well.
Actually, that point is moot. If you look to the the most basic reason Windows does not become more secure, it is pretty clear it is a matter of motivation. MS does not significantly lose money when their customers are compromised because MS has a monopoly. A user's machine is compromised and becomes and unusable spam bot and in a fit of rage they run it over with their truck. The next day they go down to Walmart or Kmart or BestBuy to pick out a new one and every machine there comes with Windows installed. They don't even know they have another option and if they somehow learn about the existence of Linux, well guess what they still paid MS for a copy of Windows they now don't use. Where exactly is the motivation for MS to invest in better security instead of a token effort?
Now take a look at Linux. Linux is licensed in such a way that no Linux distribution is ever likely to wield monopoly influence in the market, since it can always be forked. That means if Linux grabbed a significant chunk of the market and malware authors targeted Linux just as much as they do Windows, Linux would immediately begin to adapt to the new situation and increase security. The developers of Linux are the users for the most part and thus security issues cut into their bottom line by stopping them from getting things done. The financial impact of security problems is direct and so is the motivation to fix them. Also, since Linux basically cannot lock people in due to the licensing, nothing is stopping users from migrating to whatever distro does implement better security and there is competition between them to motivate improvements.
If trojans and malware targeted Linux as heavily as Windows, Linux would quickly improve security, probably by adding a built in malware scanner that contacted numerous competing while/blacklists including free offerings. Then, they would probably make a sprint towards ubiquitous application of SELinux and adapt software to work within the bounds of such software easily. They'd probably implement more strict trust determination in conjunction with their repository system and whitelists. That would basically gut the malware ecosystem reducing it to a few phishing style attacks and trojans with really, really well designed social engineering aspects and which would take a lot more work and have much shorter lifespans. Basically the average user would be a lot better off.
Do you want to know what is really interesting about your hypothetical situation? If Linux had 20% or 30% of the home desktop, we'd probably see these exact same technologies applied to Windows as well (with more lock-in and no open standards). MS would suddenly have real, financial incentive to fix their security since they would not be able to rely upon their monopoly power to lock in customers. In summary, security on Windows is so poor, because MS is a monopoly and regardless of the current technologies in use, Linux will be relatively secure because they are not a monopoly, so they have to be secure; and MS will have relatively poor security until they are no longer a monopoly.
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No one always gets all the benefits offered by any advantage in software or anything else. It is possible to have an open source software offering that is so obfuscated and encumbered by patents that there is basically no advantage to using it. That is not common in my experience. The point is not to ignore the potential advantages of a whole class of software because you don't understand the underlying business method.
Any commercial company, save perhaps a complete custom-development & integration shop, that provides any sort of standard support and maintenance services on a solution that has open source elements within, is going to want to limit their customers' ability to churn the software environment and negatively impact their ability to provide support.While customizing software ourselves negates our support option for modified copies of that software, that does not remove the advantages brought by the fact that the software is OSS. We can make those modifications in the first place, if the business case supports it. We can get support contract from one of a dozen companies drastically reducing the cost.
no commercial vendor who wishes to make money on support can afford to have their customers randomly upgrading or enhancing the underlying code base upon which their support is based.Umm, we submit enhancements to Apache and Linux all the time and that does not negate our support contract or undermine the companies that supply said contracts. Any company who relies entirely upon support for revenue is one you should be very careful doing business with. They have a vested interest in increasing your dependence upon that support which is opposed to your best interests. In the long term, that is no business model.
However, my paycheck doesn't come from an open source company (yet).My paycheck does come from a company that develops open source software as well as closed source software. What most people don't understand is that OSS works as a business model for software users who want software to aid them in creating value in some endeavor and who are not in the business of creating or supporting that software. If you're in the business of selling photoshop, the OSS business model is a poor fit. If you're in the business of editing photos and you need a flexible tool for doing that, OSS can be a great fit, if you can get enough other players to buy into that model at the same time. Even if you're the early adopter, if you're large enough it can make a pretty reasonable long-term business case.
On the other hand quality of OSS software can be low, documentation often sucks and user friendliness...
Yeah and the documentation and user friendliness of closed source code often sucks too. Just because the software is open source is not some magical bullet. Gee the boss wanted a database but I downloaded a Web browser, but it's open source so that's okay right? It's not like you still don't have to perform due diligence when choosing software and evaluate every package based upon its merits and risks and your use cases. It is just that you have to recognize that open source software is an option for many use cases and often a very good one. The real issue is so many morons who can't understand that there is a different business model and you don't have to buy everything in order to use it.
Another problem I foresee for OSS software is that it may tend to mutate over time without strict controls or much in the way of accountability.
With open source software you have the code and can always compile it the way it used to be or hire someone to. You can hire someone to do a fork if you need to. With closed source software you just have to go along with whatever the vendor wants to do and if they don't want to keep offering an old version just for you or make some change you need you're screwed. Open source wins in this category and arguments that it doesn't seem absurd to me.
What works today may not work tomorrow and when things in your corporation start breaking whose throat are you going to choke?
Choke? When MS decides it no longer wants to support a given language or feature in the software you have whose throat are you going to choke? It makes no difference if you are using software from an organization, or paying from support from a given commercial entity or paying outright for it, except with open source you have a few more options. This situation is not different. If a product stops supporting what you need and is moving the wrong way, open or closed you look at other options and offerings. With open source you have the added option of paying some random contractor to keep the software you have running the way you want.
With MS products the same defects are there (though less so as it turns out (predictably)), but in their case at least we know who to blame and can expect the product to be fixed. With OSS I see no way to assure that.
With MS software you can report bugs and they may or may not be ignored. If you pay for support, they are less likely to be ignored. This is in no way different from open source software, except they tend to be better about fixing bugs in general and in a worst case scenario I can take bids from different people to solve the problem. I have several outstanding bugs with Adobe and they've been in the last three revisions of one of their products on every platform they support. When you do something the application crashes. My company spends significant money working around that flaw. The fact that they are closed source is helping us how? Unless we offer them significant money, they don't care. The only real difference is if it was an open source product, we could have an engineer internally fix it or we would have multiple choices of hiring someone else to fix it, thus costing us less.
The solution to the competitive model of OSS for the Big Vendors is very simple.
I think you're failing to understand the real wins of open source software.
EULAs and license numbers are not the biggest differentiators between OSS and closed source commercial software. OSS is fundamentally a more efficient model for users for software. With closed source software you're always somewhat locked into one vendor, even if it is only being locked into one vendor for improvements. With OSS you always can take competitive bids, thus getting better prices. With closed source software the vendor charges what they think will maxi
While your point is true, you're making a mistake as well. "Free as in beer" and "commercial' are not mutually exclusive. AOL ships a million "free as in beer" CDs all around the country, but it is still a commercial venture. The BSD and GPL licenses are well known and used by businesses to license software they create in order to make a profit. Just because that method is not selling licenses to use said code makes it no less commercial.
Actually, the best estimates I've seen place Dell's price for an OEM copy of Windows Vista home at about twice the price Dell is paid for installing nagware. As the computer company you are dealing with gets smaller their Windows discount gets smaller and this delta grows even larger.
Why not just get the pc with linux-capable components, let the advertizers pay for your unused copy of windows, and install your favorite flavor of linux (or whatever you plan on using)?Because if they could sell in volume without Windows it would be cheaper yet (drastically cheaper if they lined up Linux nagware) and because without the vendor pre-installing and testing Windows any guarantee that it is "linux capable" is subject to being an exaggeration or just plain wrong. For example, at a previous company we bought Dell towers in bulk that we destined to run Linux, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. We already owned a site license for Windows with plenty of free seats. We still had to pay for licenses for those machines even though we did not want them. Also, being Dell, despite having the same model number and being part of the same shipment, only about 1/3 of the machines actually had all parts that were the same as the test boxes we were shipped and had all the drivers we needed. Out of a few hundred machines we got 3 different video cards, several controllers, hard drives, CD-drives, etc.
I have yet to get a new pc I didn't re-image or install from scratch anyway. If I used linux I'm certain I wouldn't like the vendor's setup any more than I like their win installs. Too many custom setting to get these kinds of things to work they way we use them. If the windows is effectively free, and you have to do a reinstall anyway, why not just ignore it?You and I are going to image anything we get. The average consumer does not know what an OS is and would never attempt to install one. More importantly, the vendor having to ship with Linux and support it insures all the hardware will have drivers and you have a source for those drivers.
Thank you very much. Companies like yours are the reason companies like mine can hire brilliant and talented people away from bureaucratic nightmares and pay them 20% less while getting a significant amount more productivity from them. We have internal Web, IRC, chat, etc. servers. If your AOL IM is not working and it is stopping you from chatting with your girlfriend, IT is happy to help. They'll even grab you a beer from the fridge on the way to your desk. For smart people who know they'll spend a significant portion of their life at work, but who chose their work because they love it... there are companies like mine. You're treated like a real person instead of a cog. If you need to go home for the rest of the day while waiting for the plumber to come to your house, go ahead. Don't bother filling out paperwork or logging your time. So long as your work gets done, it's all to the good. If a friend is in town and stops by the office, go ahead and take a few hours to have a beer and play a video game with them in the lounge. Introduce them to your boss and coworkers.
We don't lock down Web access to any type of external site. We track everything, but the tracking system is open to all employees so if you want to see what your boss is doing, just log on and look. We don't seem to have a lot of IT emergencies either. Some of our old and out of date servers overheat or fall over now and again and we power cycle them. No big deal.
Every day I'm thankful I realized early in life that I did not want to take the top dollar offer for my work if it meant I had to put up with nonsense like you advocate. IT's job is not supposed to be to minimize the amount of work they need to do or even to prevent problems. It is supposed to be to facilitate the rest of the company getting work done. Happy employees work harder for the company and stay late to work on something or even come in on a weekend for some project. Happy employees do not quit and move to another company with no notice leaving the company in the lurch. Happy employees are not the largest and hardest to stop threat to the security of your network as they feel it is "wrong" to screw over the company and boss and people who treat them well and with understanding and who are their friends.
But by all means, keep making yourself hated and keep thinking your employees lives should stop and they should act like machines for 8 hours a day. We'll keep hiring away the smartest people you have.
Yeah, he still lost oodles of credibility in my book when I looked at his first Wikia offerings and nothing seems to have improved. Wikipedia is smooth, fast, well designed, cross-platform, and easy on the eyes. All these wikia powered magazines are messy, behave unpredictably, and seem to have serious issues with several browsers including Opera and Safari. I mean if you write an engine and template you expect to be powering not just one wiki, but a whole series of wikis that are your company's only real business, don't you think you can at least test it in all the major browsers out there? What kind of a company has Web development as their only business and can't even do that acceptably? Maybe you need to get Sanger on board in order to come up with something usable.
People made a lot of money in the gold rush. Google is not hiring any warm body they can find. They have been pretty selective and have the highest PhD count in the industry.
I dont think they do exactly, but are hedging their bets on a number of ideas. he search engine makes money, but Google knows that they will need to do more...I think you're missing the point. Google makes money from advertising primarily. Advertising from their search engine needs to expand. So they move into IM, mapping, video, online applications, etc. etc. in order to expand their advertising base. These aren't random as some people seem to think, but all ways to leverage Google's existing revenue model into other markets.
...just gathering a lot of great programmers together under one unbrella does not guarantee innovation.From what I've seen Google is gathering together great scientists, engineers, programmers, businessmen, and advertisers. They're gathering together people who can solve problems (their primary hiring criteria). For some reason a lot of people seem to assume Google is hiring up introverted geeks and sticking them in offices and hoping for the best. From what I've seen, that does not seem to be the case. They're hiring smart and flexible people who know how to work together and who have previously run successful businesses of their own. It's not like none of Google's hires understands how to make money or why that is important.
I think Microsoft proved that good programmers dont necessarily make great programs.Microsoft has shown that thousands of programmers straight out of school and indoctrinated into the "one true way" by the senior engineers and then constantly overridden by marketing and business people whose goal is not to make great programs but to gouge people for as much money as possible, will not make great programs. I don't think that surprises anyone.
Every one of Google's businesses are cases of doing someone else's idea better.So? That is true of almost every major player in the industry. I don't see how that is related to successful growth.
Cant wait to see what is coming, but for the moment, I cant see the fault in Ballmer's logic.Ballmer did not present any logic. He expressed an unsupported opinion that may not even be what he truly believes since he has a direct financial interest in spreading doubt regarding Google. Ballmer is the last person we should be listening to in this regard.
I'm not sure I can agree with this. Google is exploding in a number of directions from internet based application services to radio advertising to mapping services to hardware offerings to IM. They basically have hit upon the concept that advertising can be used to make money off of anything popular, so they have set about finding or creating things people want. They're investing in R&D and headcount and while some may argue that they won't get significant return on that, I don't see any evidence of that and I have to believe they keep track internally of how much revenue it looks like they're going to pull in from these things.
I know a few people at Google these days and they are bright, motivated guys. I'm not sure exactly what they're doing, but they're sure not sitting on their hands and both are top notch engineers with real world business experience as well. One of them founded a very successful and profitable startup I worked at. From the outside, it looks to me like they can't help but make cool stuff and money if they are made up of that caliber of people.
Well, kinda. The previous poster should have said "a password." You can always be forced to give up your password or assumed guilty if you don't. A good encryption setup encrypts a chunk of disk. When you enter on password it decrypts as a dummy directory (a few porn images or something). When you enter a different password it decrypts as your real data. This way you can say, "okay, okay my password is 'monkeypoop' I just didn't want my friends to know I looked at porn."
The real issue with genetic modification is the increases scope and speed of such changes. A person breeding corn might be able to breed to different strains to produce a new one and it could conceivable result in higher levels of some dangerous toxin corn naturally produces. But, given both strains of corn have existed for some time and have presumably been safe to eat, it is a lot less likely than if someone actually targets the genetic code that controls toxicity levels. GM opens up whole new avenues of change that selective breeding and random mutation are highly unlikely to ever touch and as such more caution is required.
Arguably there is no such thing as "natural corn" these days.When people go to the store and buy a corn, they have expectations. Those expectations include that the corn is from one of the many strains that have been being consumed for a long time, or a combination of those strains. They don't expect that corn to have significant changes to its genetic code, and unless it has been exposed to a significant mutagen they are right. I'd argue that passing of corn that has been genetically modified or heavily exposed to mutagens as "normal" corn is not in their best interests and is deceitful. There is a real difference in the risk posed between "natural" corn and GM corn, although to most people educated on the subject that delta is pretty small. By being honest, however, companies investing in such products are motivated both to produce benefits end users care about and to make sure the testing process is thorough so that GM foods earn/develop a reputation for safety.
...idiots will use this as an argument against gm food in generalPerhaps, but a lot more people will rightfully use this as an argument against GM food as it is now being implemented in our society.
gm food promises to put vitamin A in rice, develop crops that grow in the desert, etc.: a benefit for mankindYeah, and the crack head that hangs out by the liquor store promises he'll pay me back a thousand dollars in a year if I lend him $50. I'm not interesting in what is being promised. I'm interested in what is the likelihood of certain things occurring and what are the results of those things. It is simple risk/reward.
...they think they live in the plot of a bad hollywood movieIn a bad hollywood movie things are simple and it always works out in the end. We have no such luxury. Things are complex. We have a system of patents that is allowing people to patent gene sequences in large numbers. GM takes money and none of the people with a lot of money seem very altruistic or interested in benefiting humanity as a whole. They are interested in making more money and gaining power. We can pretty much assume GM will be used in risky or dangerous ways and in ways that are detrimental to humanity as a whole in order to provide greater profit. Already companies have taken agricultural groups and removed the basic sustainability from their process. The grain they grow can't be replanted and anything it happens to breed with can't be replanted so they have to buy new seed to plant every year. That is not a benefit to humanity it is a benefit to whomever holds the patent.
The truth is GM could have some pretty serious negative consequences both by itself and in combination with corrupt governments and the powerful few that control most wealth. Already they have passed laws to make it legal to pass off GM food as non-GM food so people are not informed about what they are buying. You see most people did not want to buy GM food, so they simply passed a law that said it is okay to lie to the people in order to make money. I agree that used responsibly or altruistically genetic modification of food could bring us real benefits with very little risk. I'm just not naive to think this is what is or is likely to ever happen in the real world.
I'm using an Elgato EyeTV.
TIVO has to license the Macrovision software in order to allow playback. When Macrovision revises it's license terms and renwal is needed TIVO has no choice but to bend over and do as they say or be sued for using unlicensed technology.Wait a second. Are you honestly claiming that Tivo's decision to make it hard for people to enable 30 second skip and the fact that it is not a default setting is part of their macrovision license contract? Is that really what you're trying to convince me of?
Sorry, but TIVO is painted into a corner here as are all of the consumer devices that want to playback Macrovision protected content.ReplayTV lets users skip commercials with a simple jump ahead button. So does Windows Media Center. So does my EyeTV. But Tivo being forced by macrovision licensing? I don't think so. They're being forced by giant, juicy sales contracts from Comcast.
BTW other than suing them what is TIVO's "direct relationship" with the cable industry?They signed a deal two years ago with Comcast to make Tivo built DVRs for Comcast, who would ship them as part of their cable package effectively increasing Tivo's market share by 50%, easily.
If you'd been paying attention you'd realize that TIVO is attempting to compete with the cable industry not get into bed with them - ask Comcast about thatYou mean the same Comcast that signed a giant distribution deal with them making them Tivo's biggest customer and partner? Tivo sold out years ago, you just did not notice.
This stuff isn't hard to find out if you'd bothered to keep up but instead you spew FUD....Yeah this stuff isn't hard to find out. The deal with Comcast was announced in numerous major publications. Tivos are crippled and are unlikely to ever get better since Tivo got in bed with the Cable companies. It costs a fortune for program info you can get by looking at a banner ad online. It costs a fortune to get a model that can burn a simple DVD, which is crippled to not burn all shows and which has no ability to edit out commercials. It is a pain in the ass to get a simple export to mpeg. The 30 second skip is disabled by default.
If you want to believe this is because Tivo is incompetent technologically or can't seem to find a good lawyer unlike all the other DVR systems on the market, well you just go on thinking that. Honestly Tivo subscribers are less rational than any OS fanboy when it comes to emotionally defending their purchase choice and explaining away Tivo's actions. They're a business. They were offered a better deal than giving home users what they want.
Umm, most plants produce natural toxins they use for biological warfare against other plants and animals. Most genetic modification is an attempt to either increase a toxin to kill a pest (rootworm) or increase a resistance to a toxin to fight another plant or a artificially introduced toxin. In this case the corn was designed to create a toxin (Bt-toxin (Cry3Bb1)) and as a byproduct also is said to create (Cry1Ab).
So the most probable indication is that one of those two toxins has more of a negative affect upon rats and thus possibly other mammals like humans than was previously believed. Greenpeace responsibly refrained from making specific claims about the intermediate causation as that is still not yet determined. There is, however, a reasonable amount of evidence that this strain of GM corn could be dangerous to humans and animals and should be investigated and possibly pulled from the market or at least labeled until the topic is fully investigated.
It just seems to me that Greenpeace is following the formula of the religions - find something that is mysterious and unsettling to the average person, vilify it, then profit.Greenpeace is a bunch of marketing people for the most part. It is possible every tuesday night they gather beneath an abandoned monastery and eat human babies.That doesn't however, speak to the accuracy or implications of this research.
Genetic engineering is not a panacea, but nor is it a boogieman.Genetic engineering is a science where people mess about with code without understanding the full implications of what that will result in. It's like modifying software while only having read and understood a small portion of the code and not the other code dependent upon it. As such, I think that while it is promising, extra caution and care needs to be exercised and I don't think the FDA or the commercial enterprises involved give a damn about anything but money and are uninterested in taking appropriate precautions.
Genetically modified foods still contain the same amino acids in their proteins as all the other foods, so unless you modify their biochemistry to an extent where they'll produce real toxins, they will be digested just the same.Genetically modified foods almost all produce toxins. The question is did some change to the genetic structure cause it to create different ones or toxins in different levels and what does that mean for normal people? Another part of the problem is the food almost always appears to be the same as non-modified food and is often not labeled. Would you eat some random plant when you did not know if it was edible and no one had ever seen it before? Every GM food is one of those. Most are probably fine, just like most plants are. Some might be developing toxins that are harmful or concentrating something from their environment which is harmful. If we made it to other planets and found them with ecosystems very much like the earth, but separated by millions of years of evolution, would you trust that something that looks like corn has not adapted in such a way that it is poisonous? That's sort of what GM food is, a common food, modified not by evolution but by man in a way we don't fully understand the consequences of. Often the results are beneficial, but caution should be the byword and thorough testing and serious consideration of possible problems. The fact that this corn might be at the grocery store near you with no indication that it is not the natural corn most people expect it to be is a deception and needs to be considered.
The truth is, the vast majority of systems don't need either, but the concept is a nice security architecture to have in place for those rare instances where it is needed and as a built in part of security going forward.
Having used both SELinux and AppArmor I can say there's no comparison in terms of effectiveness. If a security tool it too complex to use it will be used incorrectly and can lead to even worse security problems. I would rather stick with a much simpler approach that still provides all the confinement of MAC but only where I need it.If you're trying to secure a system today, you might be better of with AppArmor from what I understand. If you're trying to decide upon a MAC architecture that will be part of Linux going forward, SELinux looks like a much better bet. Ubiquitous application of MAC is a big win in the long run. Building on the best base and then creating in the tools to effectively use it seems like a wise approach to me. I foresee a time when MAC will play a vital role in securing desktop machines and I think most of the configuration woes are solvable by the addition of policies as part of applications and for application types and trust levels on a system by system basis. You don't want Joe Sixpack configuring this any more than you want him configuring a firewall, but instead it makes sense to present end users with a system that "just works" built upon SELinux.
This, my friends, is a dead canary in the mine. Here is a function almost every user wants. It is also a function the cable company would prefer you did not have. But you're Tivo's customer right, so they will obviously make this easy for you, right? Nope, because the cable companies are Tivo's customers too, and they're willing to commit to pushing crippled Tivos on everyone they can.
It's not kowtowing - they have to play by the media industry's rules to provide customers what they want, or (once again) risk getting the pants sued off them.Your statement is pure propaganda, spread by Tivo themselves. There is no legal risk to Tivo if they do not implement some function to stop you from recording whatever you want, when you want, the same as VCR manufacturers. My PVR was made by a company that has no direct relationship with the cable industry and guess what, it lets me record what I want, when I want and does not let people delete things off my machine. Do you know what else it does? It lets me skip commercials without learning a secret code like I'm trying to get unlimited ammo in a first person shooter. You know what else it does? It lets me burn DVDs and VCDs and export mpegs of whatever I want. You know what else it does? It incorporates a simple editor to let me cut out commercials from my saved video and export it that way if I want. You know what else it does? It lets me pick my own programming schedule provider including ad supported Web interface ones that don't charge any monthly fee and save me a boatload of cash.
Tivo does not do these things because the cable companies are their biggest customers and Tivo sold out. Stop making excuses for them. Stop explaining away their actions that are favorable to the cable companies not to end users. It is time to move on to something that puts users first and cable companies second.
How much are they really though? The cable company wants $58 a month from me for cable Internet or $50 a month for Cable internet and basic cable television. From this, I conclude that cable television actually costs them negative amounts of money.
The reality of the situation is that the cable TV companies have mostly raised cable rates higher and are using some of that money to subsidize their DVR rental business so which part of your bill it is listed under does not really matter. Technically, this is probably illegal, but realistically it is almost impossible to prove and no one has the cash to fight it out in court. As an end result, if you use the cable company DVR you're in effect being subsidized by everyone else who does not but who pays the higher rates anyway. So it is in your immediate financial interest to use the cable company supplied DVR. Of course it also means you're helping them to illegally destroy the DVR industry and dooming yourself to crappy feature set, lack of innovation, and exorbitant prices in the long run. The DVR of the future will be like the rental telephones available during Ma Bell's hay-day. I hope you enjoy paying every time you watch an episode of something, being unable to exercise your fair use rights to actually save a copy of the show you are watching, and being limited to the same set of really basic features forever.
Sure there are they account for less than 8% of people who even want to and do buy one track.
So some of those people will buy an iPod rather than another player because of iTunes even though there are other players that offer more features for the same price.So again we're talking about a subset of 8% of which only 20% would be affected by removing DRM on these indy tracks (the action in question). So you're talking some number substantially lower than 2% of iPod buyers. That's the benefit to Apple.
So how many people are there who would like to buy an iPod and use it with the iTunes store, but they're fundamentally opposed to Apple's stance on DRM and this might make them reconsider? How many people simply have some sort of vague understanding that Apple's music is not "free" or "portable" and a few articles about Apple removing all DRM from the indy music would lead them to purchase an iPod? Is it more or less than that subset of 2% of current iPod users you're talking about? You don't know. I don't know. Apple probably doesn't even know. But are the chances that it is significantly beneficial to Apple to maintain DRM on those tracks and so Apple is maintaining that DRM in order to push an advantage probable? Is it more probable than the RIAA included a clause in their contract that says all music Apple sells has to be DRM'd? I don't think so and I think you're really, really, reaching to claim otherwise.
Obviously competitors wouldn't bother complaining about lock-in if they didn't believe it was hurting them.Competitors are complaining about "lock-in" in general which applies to a full 8% of Apple's current iPod customers, a significant chunk of the overall market. The tracks in question are only a fraction of that and are what we're discussing. Please try to stay on the current topic.
There are two main reasons not to use a cable company DVR. First, they have the minimum feature set possible where that feature set is a conflict between what the user wants and what the cable company wants. Second, for strategic reasons if the cable companies are the ones providing the DVRs then the feature set will always be limited and it is just extending those company's regional monopolies and holding back progress.
Let me speak to the first point first. How easy is it to skip commercials on said DVR? How easy is it to burn a show to DVD, or better yet edit out the commercials then burn to DVD? Do any of the shows ever expire or refuse to record? Do you have to pay a monthly fee for use? Can you pick a different program subscription if you don't like the descriptions/accuracy of the one they provide? Can you save a show to an mpeg and easily copy it to your laptop for viewing on the plane when you don't have internet access and don't want to run down the battery using the DVD drive? Can you watch IPTV content like iTunes and YouTube?
Now, assuming you're supporting the cable comapny's bid to take over the DVR market think about the following questions. Has the cable company raised everyone's rates for cable and started overcharging in order to make the DVR seem cheaper than the competition? If they haven't why shouldn't they once most of the other DVR manufacturers go out of business? Do you think the cable company wants you to be able to skip commercials and will make that easier for you in future? Will the cable company ever support arbitrary content from TCP/IP knowing in undercuts their lock-in? Will the cable companies ever make archiving shows to DVD easy or would they rather you pay them per viewing for old shows you already paid for once? If at some point the program guide becomes inaccurate, can you switch to another service, or can you right now switch to a free service?
I think your analogy is a bit off. Being a Tivo user is more akin to being a Windows user. Tivo is mainstream and relatively easy to use for a subset of tasks and it is intentionally crippled by big business to make it hard for you to do things they don't like (burn DVDs and VCDs, skip commercials, use a free or even different programming schedule, save as an mpeg, or interoperate with other devices). Using MythTV is a lot like being a Linux user. If you know what you're doing you can put together something powerful and flexible, but it takes knowledge and you may end up with instability for a while with non-core features.
I think of myself as a "Mac User" kind of PVR guy and in fact my PVR is an old Mac with an EyeTV device attached. It was plug and play and burning a DVD is simple and easy and the commercial skip works as expected, but I needed to have a whole Mac computer (expense) to get it to work. I have no interest in spending time hacking a box, but I do have an interest in features those fat cats at the cable company don't want me to know about.
Tivo Corp has made too little progress & needs someone like MS or Apple to slap them around a bit.Tivo has sold out... plain and simple. They started as a device to let regular people easily do things with their TV programming that the cable company was dead set against (like skip commercials). At some point they realized the cable companies had to much power to fight and the cable companies offered them huge sales contracts for branded set-top PVRs with as many of the features that did not benefit the cable company stripped out as possible. Tivo went for it (I can't blame them) but they aren't working just for the end user anymore and it shows. It is time for people to move on and realize the brand has changed and in a head to head comparison with other offerings, Tivo is seriously crippled.
...the bulk of iPod sales will be to new customers, so iPod market share could take a hit without a single current iPod customer switching players.Or iPod sales could increase as a result of Apple ditching DRM for indy bands. You've provided no evidence or even logic to support either scenario. If Apple doesn't want to remove DRM from those files because of lock-in as you assert, how would getting rid of that lock-in make any difference to new sales, since those people won't be locked in in the first place?
It looks to me like you decided you know think you know what Apple's motivation is, and now you're struggling to find any evidence or even baseless conjecture to support your theory, instead of looking at all the evidence and forming an opinion based upon the facts and logic. Your credibility is on its way down a steep incline.
Disclaimer: I don't use MythTV or a Tivo.
So I go into the store and start playing around with the Tivos on display while I'm shopping for a PVR solution. I'm looking at a few different options including building my own MythTV box, buying a Tivo, buying a Windows Media Center PC, buying some other appliance, and buying an add on for one of the boxes I have laying around the house.
I ask the sales guy, "so how do I skip a commercial?" After a long rant about how there is an easter egg that allows me to assign a 30 second skip ahead to a button that does not seem to labeled for that option if I push this particular sequence of controls, I'm thinking something is really wrong with this picture. (On the solution I ended up with I go to the preference section and insert the numbers I want in seconds for the skip ahead and skip back. I want to configure my device not learn how to shoot a fireball in Mortal Kombat XXII.)
Next I ask about saving video and making copies for on the road. I mean I can record a VCR tape, I should be able to record and burn a DVD, right? Well, yeah if you buy a model that cost another $500 dollars you can burn DVDs with it, but not all shows will burn. Huh? And it won't do VCDs at all for cheaper archives of stuff like news broadcasts and public access lectures from local professors. Hmm, that is annoying. And how easy is it for me to save it as a video file I can watch on my Mac laptop on the plane without wasting my battery on the DVD player? Really its that hard huh? At this point I have some real serious doubts. I mean, the interface is okay aside from the skip ahead, but why can't it do these simple tasks?
Then the sales guy starts talking about the subscription. Subscription? Why do I want to pay a monthly fee? For up to date program info, hmm, that is fair enough, but there are already like 20 free online Web services that offer that info supported by ads. Why should it cost you guys so much? Why not add a few ads? Oh you do have ads and it costs that much? Isn't that sort of gouging people? So what happens if that service is wrong or spotty or I just don't like it? Can I pay one of the other companies and pick the price/service that meets my needs best? No, I'm locked in huh? I was really not sold on this.
I ended up passing on Tivo because they seemed expensive and wanted to add in all sorts of artificial problems and limited behaviors for what seemed like no good reason but which, in retrospect looking at their big Cable TV partnerships, makes a lot of sense for them, just not for me as a customer. The solution I ended up using was the combination of an old, old mac tower I had sitting around, an Elgato EyeTV tuner+software, a new video card that would mirror to a monitor and TV, and a DVD burner for the tower. It cost me about 1/3 the upfront price of an equivalent Tivo (would be more for someone who needed to find an old mac) and the program info I use is free and ad supported and I can pick from among a variety of options. When I want to archive a few episodes of a TV show I can use the built in editor to delete the commercials and then click burn to DVD (or VCD) and it works, every time. I can skip ahead or back with the included remote with no problems. Playback of live TV or prerecorded , while burning a DVD and while recording something else causes no slowdown or stutter. Export to Mpegs for viewing on the plane is selecting the export menu item and then dragging it onto the auto-discovered shared laptop drive. It never crashes. It never fails to boot. If the power dies and the UPS dies it recovers just fine. I had a hard drive die once and swapped it out. Every now and again there will be a display problem for the video (every couple of weeks) and I have to quit and restart the application, which takes about 3 seconds. That's pretty much the only complaint I have.
I guess my point is, you can mock MythTV if you like, but it is just as easy to mock the artificial limits of Tivo. It makes tasks that should be easy, hard and task
The government only stepped in in that instance because they were investigating other antitrust abuses involving MS in response to civil suits from other companies about antitrust abuse. So unless someone else has grounds to sue and they can then show relevance the government won't be doing much of anything.
Wow, we're definitely in fan-boy-fantasy-land now.What the hell are you talking about? I don't support Apple's DRM at all so I can hardly be called a "fan-boy." I don't even own an iPod. You did not address my statement at all. It isn't some wildly improbable theory it is simply debunking that the RIAA would not have taken this action because they are afraid of the courts. It is not so, as they've proven in the past.
Why not accept the simpler explanation: if iTunes offered non-DRM'd music they wouldn't have any excuse for not allowing it to play on other portable players.Because that explanation makes little sense. The percentage of music on iPods that comes from the iTMS store is very small and so would such a resulting lock-in be. Further, Apple already fought the RIAA in order to get a "burn to CD" option for the DRM'd music before any other company managed to get such a concession, and that works directly against the belief that Apple values lock-in to the iPod as a motivation for their music sales. The bad PR Apple gets over this issue almost certainly results in more lost sales than they gain from making such a move of music to another player inconvenient.
If iTunes music could be played on competitors' players the iPod's market share would most definitely take a hit.Wait you're honestly arguing that if the subset of music on ipods that is both purchased from the iTMS (~8% of iPods have music from iTMS) and from one of the indy labels (~20% of music sales are indy, so 20% of 8% is less than 2% of iPod users) was to be made DRM free such that users did not have to burn it to CD and re-rip that a significant number of people would abandon the iPod and move to other players? So that potential 2% of iPod sales that would actually be affected by such a move would result in a significant portion of that 2% moving to another player. And that number would be greater than the number who would then be motivated to buy an iPod by the good PR from Apple ditching that DRM? And you think that is less far-fetched than that the RIAA stipulated "DRM for all" in their contract?
You're the one who is reaching a long way from probability to try to explain the situation. Objectively, your proposed motivation for Apple is very, very unlikely. It is not even as likely as the possibility that Apple simply does not want to try to manage both DRM'd and non-DRM'd music downloads from their store because of the technical implementation details and expense of setting that up (which I think is also less likely than my proposed explanation).
I'm not the original poster, but I've read studies that indicated that windows media format is the most common DRM in use in both the US and Europe. For years the default player (WMP) in the only OS with any real market share (Windows) ripped all CDs to DRM'd Windows Media format and ripping form CD is still the most common way people acquire digital music on their computers. The market share of the iPod/iTunes/iTMS is pretty tiny in comparison.
iTunes is by far the most common DRM supplier, and going after Apple first therefore has the potential to do the most impact.I wish I still had a link handy to provide statistics to the contrary, but perhaps you can provide evidence of your assertion? From everything I've read Music CD->Windows->WMP->Windows Media Format DRM is the largest supplier of DRM's music, followed by Hybrid Music Disc that looks like a CD-> Windows. Only after those two mechanism does DRM'd dowloads appear. Are you sure you're not neglecting DRM from CDs in your evaluation of DRM'd music? As far as I know iTunes is the largest single source of downloaded DRM'd music, but I don't see that it being downloaded or purchased in a store really makes any difference in the real problem.
If Kuneva is following the lead of other European countries, she would tell you that going after Apple is simply the first step. Other DRM suppliers would have to follow suit.This seems like the most half-assed argument I've heard in a long time. Either you can be an idealist and work towards banning DRM to the benefit of all, or you can be strategic and try to help consumers by strategically attacking DRM purveyors. The problem is, Apple is not the largest supplier of DRM, Microsoft is. Also, Apple is leveraging a near monopoly on portable players, but MS is leveraging a well established monopoly on desktop operating systems and has already been convicted by the EU courts specifically with regard to their jukebox software. Strategically, taking down Apple would hand the entire music DRM market to Microsoft which would be a whole lot worse for consumers than the current state of affairs where Apple is "competing" with them and at least bringing some competitive advantages to said market and consumers. The idea of a strategic attack on Apple is seriously misguided as you either need to take out both MS and Apple at once, or you're just taking out the main force stopping a DRM monoculture with a single gatekeeper who has more money than god and a long history of abuse and political interference.
...attacking the DRM implementors is therefore more likely to succeed.I think that is a false assumption, if the goal is to help consumers in the first place.
First, how would they be convicted of this if the only parties that know are Apple and the RIAA and it is a trade secret? Apple could risk their iTunes store and their market lead and their iPod business to bring this to light, but even if they did they would be opening themselves up to lawsuits and the courts are notoriously ineffective at actually providing reparations and it doesn't benefit Apple's shareholders at all.
Assuming there was such an agreement and Apple came forward, the RIAA could claim they just wanted to present a consistent experience to customers to avoid confusion and it is entirely possible the courts would buy it and Apple would have just sacrificed years of investment and building a music/player business for no real gain. And if you're thinking the RIAA wouldn't possibly take the risk, they've already been convicted of cartel abuses multiple times for actions a lot more blatant than this, like the price fixing and payola actions they have been convicted of.
Personally, I find it not only plausible that Apple's deal with the RIAA forbids them from selling any non DRM'd content from iTMS, but it seems likely and right in line with the RIAA's normal operating procedure.
Actually, that point is moot. If you look to the the most basic reason Windows does not become more secure, it is pretty clear it is a matter of motivation. MS does not significantly lose money when their customers are compromised because MS has a monopoly. A user's machine is compromised and becomes and unusable spam bot and in a fit of rage they run it over with their truck. The next day they go down to Walmart or Kmart or BestBuy to pick out a new one and every machine there comes with Windows installed. They don't even know they have another option and if they somehow learn about the existence of Linux, well guess what they still paid MS for a copy of Windows they now don't use. Where exactly is the motivation for MS to invest in better security instead of a token effort?
Now take a look at Linux. Linux is licensed in such a way that no Linux distribution is ever likely to wield monopoly influence in the market, since it can always be forked. That means if Linux grabbed a significant chunk of the market and malware authors targeted Linux just as much as they do Windows, Linux would immediately begin to adapt to the new situation and increase security. The developers of Linux are the users for the most part and thus security issues cut into their bottom line by stopping them from getting things done. The financial impact of security problems is direct and so is the motivation to fix them. Also, since Linux basically cannot lock people in due to the licensing, nothing is stopping users from migrating to whatever distro does implement better security and there is competition between them to motivate improvements.
If trojans and malware targeted Linux as heavily as Windows, Linux would quickly improve security, probably by adding a built in malware scanner that contacted numerous competing while/blacklists including free offerings. Then, they would probably make a sprint towards ubiquitous application of SELinux and adapt software to work within the bounds of such software easily. They'd probably implement more strict trust determination in conjunction with their repository system and whitelists. That would basically gut the malware ecosystem reducing it to a few phishing style attacks and trojans with really, really well designed social engineering aspects and which would take a lot more work and have much shorter lifespans. Basically the average user would be a lot better off.
Do you want to know what is really interesting about your hypothetical situation? If Linux had 20% or 30% of the home desktop, we'd probably see these exact same technologies applied to Windows as well (with more lock-in and no open standards). MS would suddenly have real, financial incentive to fix their security since they would not be able to rely upon their monopoly power to lock in customers. In summary, security on Windows is so poor, because MS is a monopoly and regardless of the current technologies in use, Linux will be relatively secure because they are not a monopoly, so they have to be secure; and MS will have relatively poor security until they are no longer a monopoly.