I concur. Free speech should mean exactly that. You own your mouth, and nobody else should be able to muzzle it under any circumstances (unless you are inside their house or other private domain).
So large companies can station people with bullhorns outside our restaurant to tell people the food inside is poisonous in order to drive you out of business? And The day before the election a news channel can run stories that are complete lies, including saying anything (for example McCain is dead and a vote for him is now going to elect Palin)? And so on the sly I can hire someone to call all the patients of a physician and tell them he's a child molester and rapes his patients in order to drum up business for my competing practice? After all he might hear about it eventually. Can I lie about the ingredients list on food I sell? How about crowded theaters? Is it now legal for me to scream about a fire or guy with a gun in order to start a panic and get people trampled to death?
I disagree with your assertion. Libel and slander and other laws that restrict free speech in the name of the public good are fairly necessary. They serve a purpose. We just need to be very conservative in our changes to these types of laws and in the creation of new laws.
They are very different products for very different uses...
I actually find they overlap pretty well for all the uses I put either product to.
try creating UML in OmniGraffle, for example; it's even more of an exercise in frustration than things involving UML usually are
You can use OmniGraffle for simple UML diagrams if you grab a template, but for the most part neither Visio or OmniGraffle is a proper tool for exporting UML for any production purposes. There are a number of good products for that purpose, but it's kind of like using Excel as a database to use Visio or OmniGraffle for UML.
Though not acquired in the past 5 years, Visio is still the best "Microsoft" product. It is the only one I wish I had, as the open source alternatives don't have the bells and whistles that make Visio a great product.
Visio is certainly usable and I might even grant you nicer than Dia. It is still not as nice as OmniGraffle which (while not OSS) blows Visio out of the water in many ways.
I've been able to get pro-Microsoft articles posted by kdawson...
The idea that articles would be pro or con seems insane to me. What ever happened to journalism? It seems like everyone has decided it is more profitable to have rabid, emotionally driven dichotomies to sell "news" rather than just strong, objective, fact-based journalism.
What about the ipod touch? if you put the two devices together then they do have a substantial market share.
Okay, so you're saying Apple might have overwhelming market share in the combined portable music player/smartphone markets? That's not really very likely nor is it what the courts would consider a proper market definition. Apple only has about 25% of the smartphone market. For them to get to the 70%+ needed for it to be a concern by adding the iPod is most unlikely. The fact that the media playing phone and iPod-like device markets were intermingled is why the EU declined to intervene when they looked into it before.
Your analogy didn't work. A crime is a crime. Circumstances come into play sometimes. You feel that anti-competitive behavior is only illegal for big companies. That's fine.
It doesn't have anything to do with big companies. That's like beating someone to death is only illegal for big strong people and not for infirm grandmothers. The size speaks to capability to commit the crime. An infirm grandmother can come up and punch me and that is not murder. If Mike Tyson does it, it may well be murder. It's not because the law treats boxers and grannies differently, it's just those people have different capabilities to commit the crime.
It doesn't mean we are uneducated. It merely means we differ in our ideas on monopolies, market, and government intervention.
No, it means you misunderstand what the crime is, and don't comprehend the reason for the crime.
What happens when Apple gets big, then we punish them? Is it fair to let them get bigger by being anti-competitive?
But that's just it, Apple is being competitive. They're competing against Dell and RIM and a dozen other companies. What they're doing is legal and in no way undermines the free market. Apple is rewarded and punished for their actions by the operation of the market. Some people will buy alternatives to the iPhone because they want more choice in browsers.
It is only when one company has overwhelming market share for a market that they aren't punished for breaking interoperability or reducing choice. In that case, capitalism is broken. So we made a law to prevent that from happening. Shouldn't you have learned all this in both history and economics classes?
Is it okay for a child to cheat on a test as long as it's not an IMPORTANT test?
That's not even the right question. Rather sometimes it legal but unethical to lie and sometimes it is illegal because it causes significant harm to society.
When does anti-competitive behavior become a crime- 17% market share for some markets is considered dominating. For others, 40% would be dominating, still others not until you have close to 60% or 80%. When is a company big enough to be capable of committing a crime?
Illegal anticompetitive action is measured when a company gains significant influence on a market and uses that to harm competition in another market. A rule of thumb for investigators is 70%, but it is the effect upon the market that determines the law. Can't you just go read the law you're discussing so you actually know this?
Get off your high horse and understand that not all of us just assume the government is right about everything. Some of us view it as our duty to question what the fed says.
Questioning is fine, but question from a position of knowledge with some useful suggestions. Once you understand the laws and the purpose, it makes a lot of sense. So what do you think is wrong with the law? Be specific. What do you propose to change?
"Apple, not having sufficient influence on any related market" I believe they're the top pick in the smartphone market right now.
Yeah, Apple has 25% or so market share. Regulators usually start investigating at about 70%.
Locking out a browser would probably be the same thing as Microsoft not allowing browsers on their machines, or saying that IE was "integrated" into Windows.
If Apple had 70% or more of the relevant market, and that market was already established in previous court cases, then it might be the same. There's a long way before we're there though.
Maybe it's not engaged in anti-competitive behaviour with its tiny smartphone market share, but aren't these apps also available on the iPod? There they have a much higher [wikipedia.org] market share (90% of the hard drive MP3 player market, and 70% of the entire market).
That depends a lot upon market definitions as the courts establish them. In the case of MS, the market definitions had already been established in previous court cases. For the iPod, the EU has once declined to intervene, deciding that (in the EU at least) cell phones were part of the same market as consumers buying digital music players often bought media capable cell phones instead of iPods. This was before the iPhone, which makes the market convergence even more clear. At this point it is still possible Apple could be ruled to have undue influence due to the iPod. It is somewhat plausible for the US because of cell phone/plan contracts (but we don't bother enforcing our laws). It is highly unlikely in the EU though.
Apple would be no more forced to apply by the same rules as Microsoft, than you are forced to spent the rest of your days in prison, just because someone else was sentenced that for their crime.
Or rather, because someone else was sentenced for the same crime you've committed.
It's sad to see comments like yours modded up because they simply indicate how prevalent and popular ignorance is. Your problem and the problem with everyone who modded you up is that you don't know what crime MS was convicted of, or at least what that crime is. MS was convicted of the crime of antitrust abuse, where they undermined the operation of the free market. Apple, not having sufficient influence on any related market, doesn't even have ability to commit this crime with regard to browsers.
Its like someone arguing everyone who goes to the range and fires a pistol should be arrested for murder because they believe murder means "shooting a gun" because someone who shot someone with a gun was convicted of murder. Additionally, they're too willfully ignorant to go educate themselves before spouting off.
We are NOT helpless. The government is I/O bound, just like every organization and company out there.
Wait what?!? Every single thing I've ever read has indicated the government has huge amounts of data and is restricted by its ability to process and intelligently make use of that data, not by getting data from disparate sources.
Now suppose you use Bing for search, your local ISP for email, Facebook for social, Open Office for letters, AIM for IM etc, then what? The government has to open an I/O channel to Microsoft for your search terms, then they have to open another I/O channel to read your mail with your ISP, then contact yet another company for I/O on your social links, etc.
The government is probably already sucking in massive quantities of information from all these major players en masse. The best hope of avoiding coming to their attention is to do business with small players they may not have bothered with and doing business with companies with competent security and strong ethics regarding sharing your data. That is to say, look for companies that actually tell the government "no" and require a warrant at least.
And with so many different companies and locations, each company has different policies about retention, backup, willingness to preserve privacy, etc.
Ummm, if the government is asking all of them for your data anyway, then maybe you should be focusing on the ones with the best data privacy policies.
Compare that with Google, where the special government backdoor allows uniform guarantees of simplicity and ease of access to your data. All the government needs is a single judge to say the word, and Google will comply.
Getting a judge to sign an order puts up a significant block to getting your data. Sure they can do it, but it takes time and leaves tracks. Requiring a judge to do that is actually a much larger stumbling block to invading your privacy than the majority of your listed companies require.
I have one of those and the video on the PCPer article shows the process on a MacBook Pro.
I read the PCPer article, but I don't recall any videos showing OS X. Are you referring to the process of switching graphics modes under Windows or under OS X?
They actually used to use the OSX spellchecker and stopped because it had major issues with dictionary support.
I know they claimed it worked at one point, but it never did for me. In the meantime, now Firefox doesn't know any of the words I've trained the my dictionary with, like all the tech specific acronyms I have to use. It works in everything else, just not Firefox. Likewise, as I said, there is no grammar checking. The bug you link to also mentions the lack of dictionary/thesaurus lookup. This extends to pretty much all system services from text translation to all my nice text manipulation scripts like fixing line endings from WordPad mangled text. Frankly, it sucks pretty badly compared to even average quality OS X apps. Is it really so hard to add a check box to let the user pick whether they want to use the Mozilla created spell checker or the OS X one?
Adding 10.4 support back to mozilla-central would mean switching back to ATSUI from Core Text...
Wait they're using Core Text and thy still can't get the native spell checker and grammar checker working? I assumed they were bypassing Core Text and that explained it. Now I don't have any idea how they could have broken text handling so badly.
Similarly, companies that close themselves to open source solutions operate at a competitive disadvantage. It's as simple as that.
There is a problem you're not addressing though. What about when MS makes choosing only them as a vendor the most economical business decision, despite their products being inferior from a technical perspective? This is not a normal problem, because most people assume a largely free market, but monopoly abuse is one (illegal but used) method of doing just that. Companies that only consider mafia run waste disposal companies are hamstringing themselves too, but any competitors that try to do otherwise mysteriously burn to the ground. Competitive disadvantage can be overcome by illegal actions, especially actions that undermine the free market.
I don't have the slightest doubt that the allegations are true, and can easily be proven. If I were a betting man, I'd be betting..... settlement.
The question of if the RIAA loses and if they make a settlement and on how favorable of terms probably has less to do with their guilt and the law than it has to do with who is running the show. The justice department is loaded with ex-employees of RIAA at the highest levels. Maybe that means they will know how to deal with these guys or maybe it means their buddies will get off with a slap on the wrist. Much of that may depend upon if Obama keeps his promises about not letting industry insiders provide favoritism to their friends from within his administration.
Given that they already stream to the Linux-based Roku, the barriers may not be what they appear on the surface.
It seems unlikely Roku will share their code with a competitor. There are two ways Roku could be managing their support. The most likely is by including one of the hardware chipsets that supports silverlight DRM natively (not an option for most Linux on the desktop users). The second method is with proprietary code, which Netflix would have to pay people to develop. 11 grand doesn't pay for a lot of programming these days.
I'm also given to believe that Moonlight 2 supports the DRM hooks of Silverlight, which would seem to enhance the possibilities available to Netflix.
Really, that's interesting. As of early last month, when asked moonlight developers said they had no commitment from MS and asked users to send e-mail to MS asking for MS to provide the needed information for legal support for the DRM components on Linux. I'm glad to hear this has changed if it has. Do you have a source?
Well, postage costs them about $0.37 by most knowledgeable estimates for three digit, machinable, bulk media mail. Streaming costs them between $0.06 and $0.10. So lets say they save $0.30 per movie and the average user watches 150 a year, that gives us 1000*.3*.25*150=$11,250.00. Compared to the cost of switching to an entirely new streaming system, or paying developers to port silverlight to Linux via moonlight, it is probably not really cost effective. These are all just napkin calculations of course and based upon the assumption that people order less movies through the mail because of streaming (not really true for me anyway). I think the streaming is more of a forward looking solution in any case. Until a quarter of the movies in my queue are available by streaming, I'm chalking the streaming service up as a value added incentive, rather than an actual way for Netflix to save on postage.
That's unlikely to sway them, but there is hope. Netflix can walk away from the Linux desktop/netbook market right now without any concern. They are very concerned, however, about the iPhone market. Since the iPhone is unlikely to support Silverlight or Flash anytime soon, that means Netflix is really interested in finding an alternative. The real stumbling block is their content providers are demanding DRM. So possible winning solutions for Linux include:
H.264 without DRM because they manage to push back at content providers enough.
H.264 with an open standard DRM (Dream or the like) that can be easily implemented on Linux desktop clients.
H.264 with Apple's DRM and Apple opens up their DRM because of antitrust concerns or as part of their move to Web services.
Ha, you know that's actually really funny because I've seen those ads too. And I use Google Chrome on a Mac! I'm thinking "Jeez, that's annoying, but even more so because I'm actually using the browser to view the ad!"
So basically, you're saying you're extra annoyed because ads for Google products are not very specifically targeted. They are not very specifically targeted because it is Google advertising using other advertising companies, instead of their own system. You've pretty much just made a comment that confirms Google's business model as valuable. Now all we need is for commercial ventures like Hulu to start letting Google handle which ad gets played for which user, so the ads will be more appropriate to you. Maybe you should send a note to the company playing the ads a suggestion.
There is already a solution out there and it is called javascript. 90% of the things you can do in flash can easily be done using javascript, jquery, or some other javascript framework.
The problem with your statement is you assume the Flash content creators are programmers with enough free time. In reality, many of them have degrees in communications or visual arts or are just programmers who want a quick and easy tool for throwing together some quick video/UI content for the Web. From what I've seen, the decently made tools to create such content are mostly created by Adobe and focused on Flash. Unless a company steps up and creates equivalent tools for HTML5 and javascript and those tools gain a significant market share and momentum and ecosystem, I see Flash remaining dominant, with MS gobbling up a smaller share.
"We predict that Acrobat Reader will be the top hacker target in 2010, and that is why we are distributing our report in a format that can only be viewed by using Acrobat Reader!"
It seems to be a standard PDF file that opens just fine in other PDF readers. What did you try opening it with? Or do you mean because you don't know there are other PDF readers you, personally, have to use Acrobat Reader?
And as usual you answer the part why Apple isn't forced to do this and omit the part why this just applies to IE and WMP and not the many other apps shipped with windows.
It applies to all applications and any other product for which there is a pre-existing separate market. It is usually only enforced, however, if it is causing significant problems for the government or in response to one or more complaints or civil suits from competitors in those other markets. Most companies in the, past upon coming close to monopoly influence in one market, break out that product into a separate divisions of the company with separate sales teams just to make sure they don't have any legal liability. If MS were a normal company interested in obeying the law instead of committing crime as a business model they would have broken the application and OS divisions apart years ago and sold app bundles to OEMs separate from Windows. Notepad and Outlook are very likely distributed in violation of the law, but no one has bothered to prosecute them for that yet.
“Now, when you enter a music-related query — like the name of a song, artist or album — your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners MySpace (MySpace) (which just acquired iLike)
Why go to Myspace when Google does this directly? Also, iLike seems to hang and fail whenever I look at one of their previews.
Has the Windows version of iTunes aver lacked feature parity with the Windows version?
I'll assume the second "Windows version" is a Mac version
You assume correctly.
yes, the Mac version has Applescript support.
Well, yes I suppose. The OS X version will also let you grammar check the search field, but both that and Applescript are services offered by the underlying OS. Obviously Apple isn't going to re-implement all of OS X on top of Windows. One could claim the converse by pointing out the superior audio mixing output options available to Windows iTunes users.
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I concur. Free speech should mean exactly that. You own your mouth, and nobody else should be able to muzzle it under any circumstances (unless you are inside their house or other private domain).
So large companies can station people with bullhorns outside our restaurant to tell people the food inside is poisonous in order to drive you out of business? And The day before the election a news channel can run stories that are complete lies, including saying anything (for example McCain is dead and a vote for him is now going to elect Palin)? And so on the sly I can hire someone to call all the patients of a physician and tell them he's a child molester and rapes his patients in order to drum up business for my competing practice? After all he might hear about it eventually. Can I lie about the ingredients list on food I sell? How about crowded theaters? Is it now legal for me to scream about a fire or guy with a gun in order to start a panic and get people trampled to death?
I disagree with your assertion. Libel and slander and other laws that restrict free speech in the name of the public good are fairly necessary. They serve a purpose. We just need to be very conservative in our changes to these types of laws and in the creation of new laws.
They are very different products for very different uses...
I actually find they overlap pretty well for all the uses I put either product to.
try creating UML in OmniGraffle, for example; it's even more of an exercise in frustration than things involving UML usually are
You can use OmniGraffle for simple UML diagrams if you grab a template, but for the most part neither Visio or OmniGraffle is a proper tool for exporting UML for any production purposes. There are a number of good products for that purpose, but it's kind of like using Excel as a database to use Visio or OmniGraffle for UML.
Though not acquired in the past 5 years, Visio is still the best "Microsoft" product. It is the only one I wish I had, as the open source alternatives don't have the bells and whistles that make Visio a great product.
Visio is certainly usable and I might even grant you nicer than Dia. It is still not as nice as OmniGraffle which (while not OSS) blows Visio out of the water in many ways.
I've been able to get pro-Microsoft articles posted by kdawson...
The idea that articles would be pro or con seems insane to me. What ever happened to journalism? It seems like everyone has decided it is more profitable to have rabid, emotionally driven dichotomies to sell "news" rather than just strong, objective, fact-based journalism.
What about the ipod touch? if you put the two devices together then they do have a substantial market share.
Okay, so you're saying Apple might have overwhelming market share in the combined portable music player/smartphone markets? That's not really very likely nor is it what the courts would consider a proper market definition. Apple only has about 25% of the smartphone market. For them to get to the 70%+ needed for it to be a concern by adding the iPod is most unlikely. The fact that the media playing phone and iPod-like device markets were intermingled is why the EU declined to intervene when they looked into it before.
Your analogy didn't work. A crime is a crime. Circumstances come into play sometimes. You feel that anti-competitive behavior is only illegal for big companies. That's fine.
It doesn't have anything to do with big companies. That's like beating someone to death is only illegal for big strong people and not for infirm grandmothers. The size speaks to capability to commit the crime. An infirm grandmother can come up and punch me and that is not murder. If Mike Tyson does it, it may well be murder. It's not because the law treats boxers and grannies differently, it's just those people have different capabilities to commit the crime.
It doesn't mean we are uneducated. It merely means we differ in our ideas on monopolies, market, and government intervention.
No, it means you misunderstand what the crime is, and don't comprehend the reason for the crime.
What happens when Apple gets big, then we punish them? Is it fair to let them get bigger by being anti-competitive?
But that's just it, Apple is being competitive. They're competing against Dell and RIM and a dozen other companies. What they're doing is legal and in no way undermines the free market. Apple is rewarded and punished for their actions by the operation of the market. Some people will buy alternatives to the iPhone because they want more choice in browsers.
It is only when one company has overwhelming market share for a market that they aren't punished for breaking interoperability or reducing choice. In that case, capitalism is broken. So we made a law to prevent that from happening. Shouldn't you have learned all this in both history and economics classes?
Is it okay for a child to cheat on a test as long as it's not an IMPORTANT test?
That's not even the right question. Rather sometimes it legal but unethical to lie and sometimes it is illegal because it causes significant harm to society.
When does anti-competitive behavior become a crime- 17% market share for some markets is considered dominating. For others, 40% would be dominating, still others not until you have close to 60% or 80%. When is a company big enough to be capable of committing a crime?
Illegal anticompetitive action is measured when a company gains significant influence on a market and uses that to harm competition in another market. A rule of thumb for investigators is 70%, but it is the effect upon the market that determines the law. Can't you just go read the law you're discussing so you actually know this?
Get off your high horse and understand that not all of us just assume the government is right about everything. Some of us view it as our duty to question what the fed says.
Questioning is fine, but question from a position of knowledge with some useful suggestions. Once you understand the laws and the purpose, it makes a lot of sense. So what do you think is wrong with the law? Be specific. What do you propose to change?
"Apple, not having sufficient influence on any related market" I believe they're the top pick in the smartphone market right now.
Yeah, Apple has 25% or so market share. Regulators usually start investigating at about 70%.
Locking out a browser would probably be the same thing as Microsoft not allowing browsers on their machines, or saying that IE was "integrated" into Windows.
If Apple had 70% or more of the relevant market, and that market was already established in previous court cases, then it might be the same. There's a long way before we're there though.
Maybe it's not engaged in anti-competitive behaviour with its tiny smartphone market share, but aren't these apps also available on the iPod? There they have a much higher [wikipedia.org] market share (90% of the hard drive MP3 player market, and 70% of the entire market).
That depends a lot upon market definitions as the courts establish them. In the case of MS, the market definitions had already been established in previous court cases. For the iPod, the EU has once declined to intervene, deciding that (in the EU at least) cell phones were part of the same market as consumers buying digital music players often bought media capable cell phones instead of iPods. This was before the iPhone, which makes the market convergence even more clear. At this point it is still possible Apple could be ruled to have undue influence due to the iPod. It is somewhat plausible for the US because of cell phone/plan contracts (but we don't bother enforcing our laws). It is highly unlikely in the EU though.
Apple would be no more forced to apply by the same rules as Microsoft, than you are forced to spent the rest of your days in prison, just because someone else was sentenced that for their crime.
Or rather, because someone else was sentenced for the same crime you've committed.
It's sad to see comments like yours modded up because they simply indicate how prevalent and popular ignorance is. Your problem and the problem with everyone who modded you up is that you don't know what crime MS was convicted of, or at least what that crime is. MS was convicted of the crime of antitrust abuse, where they undermined the operation of the free market. Apple, not having sufficient influence on any related market, doesn't even have ability to commit this crime with regard to browsers.
Its like someone arguing everyone who goes to the range and fires a pistol should be arrested for murder because they believe murder means "shooting a gun" because someone who shot someone with a gun was convicted of murder. Additionally, they're too willfully ignorant to go educate themselves before spouting off.
We are NOT helpless. The government is I/O bound, just like every organization and company out there.
Wait what?!? Every single thing I've ever read has indicated the government has huge amounts of data and is restricted by its ability to process and intelligently make use of that data, not by getting data from disparate sources.
Now suppose you use Bing for search, your local ISP for email, Facebook for social, Open Office for letters, AIM for IM etc, then what? The government has to open an I/O channel to Microsoft for your search terms, then they have to open another I/O channel to read your mail with your ISP, then contact yet another company for I/O on your social links, etc.
The government is probably already sucking in massive quantities of information from all these major players en masse. The best hope of avoiding coming to their attention is to do business with small players they may not have bothered with and doing business with companies with competent security and strong ethics regarding sharing your data. That is to say, look for companies that actually tell the government "no" and require a warrant at least.
And with so many different companies and locations, each company has different policies about retention, backup, willingness to preserve privacy, etc.
Ummm, if the government is asking all of them for your data anyway, then maybe you should be focusing on the ones with the best data privacy policies.
Compare that with Google, where the special government backdoor allows uniform guarantees of simplicity and ease of access to your data. All the government needs is a single judge to say the word, and Google will comply.
Getting a judge to sign an order puts up a significant block to getting your data. Sure they can do it, but it takes time and leaves tracks. Requiring a judge to do that is actually a much larger stumbling block to invading your privacy than the majority of your listed companies require.
I have one of those and the video on the PCPer article shows the process on a MacBook Pro.
I read the PCPer article, but I don't recall any videos showing OS X. Are you referring to the process of switching graphics modes under Windows or under OS X?
They actually used to use the OSX spellchecker and stopped because it had major issues with dictionary support.
I know they claimed it worked at one point, but it never did for me. In the meantime, now Firefox doesn't know any of the words I've trained the my dictionary with, like all the tech specific acronyms I have to use. It works in everything else, just not Firefox. Likewise, as I said, there is no grammar checking. The bug you link to also mentions the lack of dictionary/thesaurus lookup. This extends to pretty much all system services from text translation to all my nice text manipulation scripts like fixing line endings from WordPad mangled text. Frankly, it sucks pretty badly compared to even average quality OS X apps. Is it really so hard to add a check box to let the user pick whether they want to use the Mozilla created spell checker or the OS X one?
Adding 10.4 support back to mozilla-central would mean switching back to ATSUI from Core Text...
Wait they're using Core Text and thy still can't get the native spell checker and grammar checker working? I assumed they were bypassing Core Text and that explained it. Now I don't have any idea how they could have broken text handling so badly.
Similarly, companies that close themselves to open source solutions operate at a competitive disadvantage. It's as simple as that.
There is a problem you're not addressing though. What about when MS makes choosing only them as a vendor the most economical business decision, despite their products being inferior from a technical perspective? This is not a normal problem, because most people assume a largely free market, but monopoly abuse is one (illegal but used) method of doing just that. Companies that only consider mafia run waste disposal companies are hamstringing themselves too, but any competitors that try to do otherwise mysteriously burn to the ground. Competitive disadvantage can be overcome by illegal actions, especially actions that undermine the free market.
I don't have the slightest doubt that the allegations are true, and can easily be proven. If I were a betting man, I'd be betting..... settlement.
The question of if the RIAA loses and if they make a settlement and on how favorable of terms probably has less to do with their guilt and the law than it has to do with who is running the show. The justice department is loaded with ex-employees of RIAA at the highest levels. Maybe that means they will know how to deal with these guys or maybe it means their buddies will get off with a slap on the wrist. Much of that may depend upon if Obama keeps his promises about not letting industry insiders provide favoritism to their friends from within his administration.
Given that they already stream to the Linux-based Roku, the barriers may not be what they appear on the surface.
It seems unlikely Roku will share their code with a competitor. There are two ways Roku could be managing their support. The most likely is by including one of the hardware chipsets that supports silverlight DRM natively (not an option for most Linux on the desktop users). The second method is with proprietary code, which Netflix would have to pay people to develop. 11 grand doesn't pay for a lot of programming these days.
I'm also given to believe that Moonlight 2 supports the DRM hooks of Silverlight, which would seem to enhance the possibilities available to Netflix.
Really, that's interesting. As of early last month, when asked moonlight developers said they had no commitment from MS and asked users to send e-mail to MS asking for MS to provide the needed information for legal support for the DRM components on Linux. I'm glad to hear this has changed if it has. Do you have a source?
Well, postage costs them about $0.37 by most knowledgeable estimates for three digit, machinable, bulk media mail. Streaming costs them between $0.06 and $0.10. So lets say they save $0.30 per movie and the average user watches 150 a year, that gives us 1000*.3*.25*150=$11,250.00. Compared to the cost of switching to an entirely new streaming system, or paying developers to port silverlight to Linux via moonlight, it is probably not really cost effective. These are all just napkin calculations of course and based upon the assumption that people order less movies through the mail because of streaming (not really true for me anyway). I think the streaming is more of a forward looking solution in any case. Until a quarter of the movies in my queue are available by streaming, I'm chalking the streaming service up as a value added incentive, rather than an actual way for Netflix to save on postage.
To have a link here for the petition to Netflix requesting Linux support: http://www.petitiononline.com/Linflix/petition.html [petitiononline.com]
That's unlikely to sway them, but there is hope. Netflix can walk away from the Linux desktop/netbook market right now without any concern. They are very concerned, however, about the iPhone market. Since the iPhone is unlikely to support Silverlight or Flash anytime soon, that means Netflix is really interested in finding an alternative. The real stumbling block is their content providers are demanding DRM. So possible winning solutions for Linux include:
Ha, you know that's actually really funny because I've seen those ads too. And I use Google Chrome on a Mac! I'm thinking "Jeez, that's annoying, but even more so because I'm actually using the browser to view the ad!"
So basically, you're saying you're extra annoyed because ads for Google products are not very specifically targeted. They are not very specifically targeted because it is Google advertising using other advertising companies, instead of their own system. You've pretty much just made a comment that confirms Google's business model as valuable. Now all we need is for commercial ventures like Hulu to start letting Google handle which ad gets played for which user, so the ads will be more appropriate to you. Maybe you should send a note to the company playing the ads a suggestion.
There is already a solution out there and it is called javascript. 90% of the things you can do in flash can easily be done using javascript, jquery, or some other javascript framework.
The problem with your statement is you assume the Flash content creators are programmers with enough free time. In reality, many of them have degrees in communications or visual arts or are just programmers who want a quick and easy tool for throwing together some quick video/UI content for the Web. From what I've seen, the decently made tools to create such content are mostly created by Adobe and focused on Flash. Unless a company steps up and creates equivalent tools for HTML5 and javascript and those tools gain a significant market share and momentum and ecosystem, I see Flash remaining dominant, with MS gobbling up a smaller share.
"We predict that Acrobat Reader will be the top hacker target in 2010, and that is why we are distributing our report in a format that can only be viewed by using Acrobat Reader!"
It seems to be a standard PDF file that opens just fine in other PDF readers. What did you try opening it with? Or do you mean because you don't know there are other PDF readers you, personally, have to use Acrobat Reader?
And as usual you answer the part why Apple isn't forced to do this and omit the part why this just applies to IE and WMP and not the many other apps shipped with windows.
It applies to all applications and any other product for which there is a pre-existing separate market. It is usually only enforced, however, if it is causing significant problems for the government or in response to one or more complaints or civil suits from competitors in those other markets. Most companies in the, past upon coming close to monopoly influence in one market, break out that product into a separate divisions of the company with separate sales teams just to make sure they don't have any legal liability. If MS were a normal company interested in obeying the law instead of committing crime as a business model they would have broken the application and OS divisions apart years ago and sold app bundles to OEMs separate from Windows. Notepad and Outlook are very likely distributed in violation of the law, but no one has bothered to prosecute them for that yet.
is there a proper chrome build for mac yet?
Seriously? Four articles previous to this one: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/12/08/177232 is titled "Google Upgrades Chrome To Beta For OS X, Linux"
“Now, when you enter a music-related query — like the name of a song, artist or album — your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners MySpace (MySpace) (which just acquired iLike)
Why go to Myspace when Google does this directly? Also, iLike seems to hang and fail whenever I look at one of their previews.
Has the Windows version of iTunes aver lacked feature parity with the Windows version?
I'll assume the second "Windows version" is a Mac version
You assume correctly.
yes, the Mac version has Applescript support.
Well, yes I suppose. The OS X version will also let you grammar check the search field, but both that and Applescript are services offered by the underlying OS. Obviously Apple isn't going to re-implement all of OS X on top of Windows. One could claim the converse by pointing out the superior audio mixing output options available to Windows iTunes users.