I don't see how that's flamebait. I visit video game forums all the time, and never once have I met someone who actually wants to play homebrew games on the PSP -- they're talking about homebrew for emulators. A visit to any PSP development site pretty much confirms that the development exists for emulation, not actual new content, as the emulation sections are huge, with constant updates, while the "games" sections usually consist of a basic line game that serves little more than a proof of concept.
Well, the advantage of having it be a full operating system rather than an embedded OS is that it's relatively simple to set up some transcoding software to shrink down movies.
As I said in my post, I've got an AV420 which has a 20 gig drive and plays divx, xvid, and other formats. I can easily fit about 15 or more movies on the thing -- more if I really want to shrink 'em down. The screen is small enough that I can live with the lesser quality, which means that smaller file sizes are actually something to shoot for.
So no, I don't think you could store your full movie library on the thing, but I do think it'd be quite easy to keep a store of 10 movies that you really like, some TV shows, and swap with what you have on your main computer as the need arises.
Similarly, most people tend to install programs once, and are at home for it. After I've got a computer ready to go, I tend to install very few programs, especially from CD, and as the OQO has wireless built into it, you can just download patches or anything else as the need arises.
It's not a desktop killer, mind, and I'm not saying that this would be someone's only computer. But as a portable device, its functionality kicks the pants off the competition because it is a full computer. I can transfer video from a friend's computer to my AV420, or copy photos to it from a memory stick for photo backup or viewing. But that's the end of it -- I can't actually DO anything with the stuff on there once it's there. That's true for most devices. Usually you need a laptop. And this is, essentially, a laptop so small that it competes with the portable device market.
So I apologize if I wasn't clear with my movie statement -- for someone looking for a device to take movies as files around, and who isn't afraid to spend some time transcoding stuff, this really would be sweet for video. Especially since, as you're preparing for a trip in, say, a month, you could just load up the files on the device and transcode on it while using your full computer for your regular affairs. It won't be super fast but it'll get the job done, say, a movie every day or so.
Well, if by non-evil purposes you mean "Allow people to play bootleg ROMs of games they downloaded off the internet on their PSP."
I don't think people are excited over the ability to play various asteroids clones on their PSP. Oh, maybe they're holding out for that killer homebrew Blackjack game, or they're really hoping they can downgrade their version to play Pong with their $250 device.
No, I think pretty much everyone just wants to run emulators of NES, SNES, and Genesis games for free.
Now that it has more RAM and storage space, it really is a pretty sweet pocket computer. I especially like that it has both USB and Firewire, as a nod that it can function quite well as a portable device and a full computer in its own right. Very attractive for anyone looking for an ultra-portable laptop that's not totally gimped.
Of course, the downside is that it's kind of pricey. But, given what else is out there, it seems to sit nicely among its peers -- it costs more, but it seems to offer a lot more as well.
I have a small portable video device, an Archos 420, and while I got it pretty much just for the portable video and photo abilities, I do know it would be nice to hop on the internet for various reasons without having to stow my laptop -- after all, that's why I got the small portable video thing in the first place.
Something like this that not only can play video, but also surf the web and do pretty much anything a decent computer can do is great for portability. But kudos to the company for an ultra-small, high-functionality computer that doesn't skimp.
It's because if there are obvious competitors with well-known clients, they can no longer force un-important upgrades on users at their whim -- they need to plan them, market them, and make them worthwhile.
If they have a monopoly, or a near-monopoly with no real competition, then they can do what they want. As soon as there's a real competitor, they need to actually compete. There's generally less money when you have to actually compete.
Sure, parts cost that much. Does anyone honestly believe that the rest of that is pure profit?
Of course, R&D costs nothing, fabrication is free, paying employees for design and support is volunteer based, and filing the patents and copyrights by lawyers are all pro bono.
How is this useful? So now we know how much the pure hardware costs for the Nano? Big deal. It's probably on par with pretty much any MP3 player, especially flash based ones. Is this supposed to convince people that "Oh noes, look, Apple really DOES make money on its hardware!"
Duh. We know Apple makes money on its hardware. So does every other company that makes hardware. But this says nothing for the actual cost to Apple of the device, without consideration for, you know, actually designing and creating the thing.
You don't need an owner's permission for fair use. That's the whole point of fair use. That it's "fair to use the works without the copyright holder's permission."
Exactly. The use of copyright is a benefit, and a priviledge. The benefit is that an individual can hold the rights to copying the works and being paid for the copies. The priviledge is that it's entirely a legal standing, and can change or be revoked through legal means.
So "fair use" isn't avoidable -- it's part of the entire package. If you want to use the restrictions of copyright on your works, you need to allow for fair use of your works as well. You can't pick and choose.
Yep, the law of nostalgia. Think back 5 years, and the stuff you remember is the good stuff. The stuff you forgot by now is all bad. The ratio stays pretty much the same, but the fact that people don't remember bad things (rightly so, after all, why remember trivial stuff you don't like?) means that "x years ago stuff was better" is always, to the individual making the statement, true.
It's just that it's not made as an historical statement; it's pure opinion. Look at people talking about computer games, or books, or whatever. The stuff you remember fondly is always great. The new stuff you haven't bothered to look into and sift the good from the bad is collectively "bad" thanks to the presense of all that bad stuff.
Anyway, that's a too-long response to essentially a "hear hear!" So I'll stop rambling.
While I do agree that the artists who sign into RIAA contracts are partly to blame, a lot of the tactics used by RIAA to get those people to sign the contracts are downright sleazy. Promising big bucks, "no strings attached" and large budgets, keeping the pressure on and pushing the "you don't want a small label -- you want to play music for a living, right? Those small labels are just going to keep you at a day job, so you can make ends meet" arguments. For a lot of people, that's hard to resist. And then, once you sign, and the album gets made, they overcharge everything since they own the studio and submit the bill to the band putting them in debt until they play enough live shows to pay it off, and then if they pay it off the label says "well, we've got a contract for 5 albums, but the first didn't sell as well as we thought, so we're just going to shelve any future work of yours, but good job on that first one, but we own your name and your future work."
It would be hard to find other businesses that entice their employees with such pie-in-the-sky dreams just so they can get them to sign a restrictive contract reliquishing them of future control.
I don't think that justifies piracy, but I don't think that bad contracts and the artists that fall for them is the fault of the victim -- the tactics used to get them to sign the contracts is really the problem that keeps those shitty contracts and screwed artists around.
I agree entirely with the shortening of copyright, and one factor that I don't think you touched on. Copyright gives authors the rights over copying their work onces published, meaning that they submit their work to "public approval," and if the public approves the author is paid for their work appropriately.
By limiting the publics use, well, that's abusing the public who are responsible for the popularity of the piece in the first place. After all, there's also plenty of privately traded things -- plenty of artists will sell a piece entirely for one lump sum, in private (paintings do this, as well as individuals who sell the rights to their works). But by publishing works, they're saying "Hey, public! We put this out for you! If you like it, you should support the dude who made it!"
And the public responds as it feels it should. But the screwy thing is that these companies and many of the authors feel that these works should be heirlooms, or part of a family's history. And that's just wrong for published work. Once published, it's hardly the family's at all -- heck, it's barely the original authors. Nothing's stopping me from reading a book and telling my friends all about it -- it was published for public use, and the public should be able to use it as it sees fit. Limiting that so that lucky families can get rich off of works just abuses the system, and ruins it for individuals who get screwed in the system -- those who don't get rich, and have their work owned by a corporation, never to be re-released for the next hundred years.
Combined with signs that Google is where new graduates wish to work, Microsoft may not be able to hire the best and brightest to innovate anymore.
Don't forget that typically those tech companies can pay the new grads significantly less than what they're really worth AND work them more than their older employees, this isn't that surprising that losing that market could hurt the company.
There's a lot of auto makers, though, and not all of them do very well. Sure, most turn a modest profit, but they're not the big movers, and many will fluctuate between profit and not from quarter to quarter.
The analogy is poor, though, because one of the reasons Microsoft is able to pull in such a great amount of money is that the near dominance of the OS market means that their other products are both easier to maintain (only need to code one "real" version) and a nearly sure bet (if you make the main applications, you can kill off the competition easier by adjusting for code changes far in advance, rather than waiting for new APIs to be released).
However, the thing that really interests me in the article, that I think you're missing, is that a technology company tends to maintain dominance by continuous innovation. What it sounds like to me is that Microsoft is starting to get too many managers and they're losing the good designers and developers.
The other major catch that differentiates the OS and software market from the car market (and numerous other markets) is that for cars, a single company will come out with numerous models. So if Toyota's SUV models are selling poorly, their car models might pick up the difference so they still do well. If Microsoft releases a flop, even just one, well, what's the alternative? An old application that they don't get money from anymore? People sticking with the old apps they already have, also not contributing to MS's bottom line? If Vista doesn't have many new people picking it up, the past 5 years of development will be relativly worthless. Similarly, new versions of their programs that utilize key features of Vista but run nearly identical to the older versions when placed on old operating systems? Those probably won't do as well either.
I don't think that Microsoft is going to disappear anytime soon, and honestly I hope that they don't -- even if they lose marketshare, I still think it's good to have their influence on the OS and app market. But if their apps end up overdesigned and overmanaged and people don't buy them, well, they don't have nearly as much fallback as companies that deal with hardware or other consumer goods. They get to rely on savings. Of course, they have enough savings to hold them over for quite a long time, but a slip can start a downward trend that's impossible to completely recover from.
Not to mention that all of those managers probably get paid more than the developers and designers...
It makes you wonder about all other markets where there's more than one competitor. Comcast is, what, the largest cable company around, so obviously all other cable companies are failures. Toyota and Honda sell the most cars, so all those American car companies are failures. Starbucks sells more coffee than Local Coffee Shop that's never going to close, but Local Coffee Shop is obviously the failure.
Competition is healthy, especially so for video games and media. When the NES was king, sure, there were some great games. But there were also tons of really, really, really awful games that simply jumped on the bandwagon because Nintendo was king. Sega came out with some truly inspiring games simply because they were competing with Nintendo. Do you think we would've seen all of the successful PS1 games if we were locked in to N64s? Do you think Nintendo would be pushing wireless online play if Microsoft didn't push Live?
So yeah, if the Gamecube is a failure, that speaks volumes for how twisted the video game market is. It's a success. It's still on shelves, games are still coming out, people are buying them. It's making money. It's not as successful, and there are some well-deserved criticisms, but it's a far cry from a "failure."
It is funny, though, how the Anti-MS monopoly Slashdot crowd is calling Nintendo's current offering a failure due to the fact that it's no longer a monopoly... The fact that it's not a monopoly anymore is the reason we're getting the innovative games and systems. I'd rather see Nintendo thrive in its niche!
Anyone who's serious about fighting games owns an arcade-style joystick of some sort. I don't mean that as a troll -- the fighting game genre is a specific niche, where someone into the genre will own a great deal of fighting games, and someone who doesn't care won't even register the genre's existence. It has a somewhat limited appeal, especially with the lack of online play in the majority of titles, and the 1v1 aspect of play (playing with a group is generally more fun nowadays).
For those who are still serious about the genre, though, using a joystick just makes sense. Buttons are easier to hit in combination, joystick is easier to use precisely, and you tend to break them a lot less often as well. Not to mention that they're easier to use for non-gamers for fighting games.
As Nintendo has stated quite a few times in the past day that they will have peripherals and "cases" for this controller to either snap onto or be slid into, I wouldn't be surprised at all if an arcade-style joystick came out for fighting games.
A lot of people don't really round, I've found -- they just truncate. That's the theory behind the "99 cents" -- that people just chop off the non-dollar, and look at the first number. The further you go, the less significant the numbers appear to be.
It's not a universal, mind, as you point out yourself. But it is quite common, and exceedingly easy to get caught in the truncating trap.
Well, I think this is why Cingular is the company that's supporting the ROKR. I have Cingular and really like some of the basic features. Yeah, they charge per kb, but I can just point the browser at any.mid or.mp3 file and download it and use it as a ringtone. That's nice. I just plugged it into my Mac and I can sync up my address book. It doesn't have a camera, so I don't know about that.
Plus that rollover thing is nice;D
So yeah, I do think it's a good sign that Cingular supports the phone, as it probably explains many of the features that are built into it. But I'm also not that surprised that they, or any company, would encourage the phone to do everything people really want.
You make the assumption that it's Apple that put the limitations or "not iPod" features on the phone.
It could very well be Cingular, stating that they want people to still buy ringtones from Cingular for $4 a pop, or that they don't want to worry about multiple versions (which cost money to produce) so they just release one that can hold 100 songs and say "no more" so they don't have to expand that in the near future, or allow people to swap out their own cards.
Phone companies hate when consumers are allowed to do what they want with their phones. I'm sure it took a lot of tooth pulling from Apple to simply get Cingular on board to transfer songs for free from the computer -- look how many phones have intentionally crippled the bluetooth functionality so you can't move pictures or ringtones between computer and phone!
If Apple really wanted to make an iPod phone that worked like an iPod with a phone attached, they would be forced into the cellular business themselves -- not a wise move. This is Cingular getting in on the iPod business, not the other way around.
There's no reason that Cingular couldn't have pushed to get this in a RAZR body with the same capacity as a Shuffle for songs, same functionality, with the advantages of a big screen and the cell phone features that are part of a RAZR standard. But those extra features are big bucks for the cellular companies -- you're fooling yourself if you think they're putting cameras on their free phones because they want people to take pictures at no cost. They want people to pay through the nose for everything.
If anything, that's the only thing that truly makes the iTunes phone unique -- it doesn't cost anything extra to use the iTunes functionality. Personally I'm shocked, and I think that's the ultimate result of Apple being involved -- people own the device, own the songs, and they should be able to use it. Not charged for transfers, or hit with hidden fees. I'm not at all surprised that Cingular didn't go for the extra features that would've really made it a winner; it would've sold the hardware, perhaps, but it would've eaten into their monthly fees.
I think DVD players have done a fine job of killing off CD players. Why buy a 5 disc CD stereo component when for a few bucks more you can get one that plays DVDs? Why buy a CD-ROM drive when you can get a DVD-burning drive?
Similarly, the camera+phone thing WOULD be great, if the cell phone companies didn't intentionally gimp it. The idea of carrying a super-small camera is already popular. Merging that into a phone, something that people keep on them all the time already, is a good idea. But charging per picture just to get it off the phone?
And yes, I agree that even if the cell companies managed to release a camera phone that didn't screw the customer, there would still be a solid digital camera market, but I do think it would affect the "ultra-small, low quality" digicam market.
The catch is that the converged devices are often more expensive than an individual device, so people who aren't sure about buying the converged device will buy one thing, and then decide to buy the other thing. For instance, my iPod functions as a music player. But I also own an Archos portable video player. It can play music, but since I already have the iPod, I don't bother with the Archos's music capabilities -- I use it pretty much just for photo storage and video. I could, mind, but I already own the iPod, and I really like iTunes, so why not?
If I already owned a thumb drive, I would probably keep using that for transfering stuff to and from work, but since I own the iPod I just use that as my thumbdrive.
So it's not like convergence doesn't exist. To me, it's best when it's not really noticed, because it means that the designers and developers did it right. A lot of times they screw it up, like Kodak sticking an FM radio onto its cameras (wtf?), but other times it's a subtle feature that makes purchasing extra electronics redundant.
Because like a lot of software, a new OS can fix bugs, offer improved features, and more. Of course, you could come back and say that people who want those features are obviously not happy with what they currently have, and will upgrade.
I suppose that my point, which I did not do a great job of illustrating in my previous post, is that anyone using a piece of software, or, heck, using any product, if you've got customers using your product, you have a potential future sale. People regularly update free software even at the minor releases. It's easy to do cos it's free. When money's involved, getting those stalwart "I'm happy with what I have" individuals to upgrade is the challenge. You can ignore them, only catering to new customers, or you can appease them in some way, or offer some enticing incentive. Lots of software companies do this by saying "you bought the previous version, upgrade to the new version for %50 of the price," or similar deals. They encourage people who otherwise don't care to buy the upgrade, by trying to make the feature set compelling and the price manageable for those with an already working copy.
Forcing all of those individuals to buy entirely new hardware AND offering no discounts or incentives for upgrades other than "it's got some new features" just doesn't jive with those people who don't really care. You slough off the criticisms of Vista stating that it's no big deal, but those people who just use a computer to get some work done, well, they're also the ones who are responsible for Window's monopoly.
Personally, despite all the talk about "Window's Monopoly," I'd be more interested in seeing the breakdown of current computers running all the various Windows operating systems. It'd be interesting to see if the monopoly is based on XP now or Windows 98 or similar. Why? Because XP still ran on most of the computers that run the older operating systems. Sure 98 runs on a pentium 100, but the 233's and 333's came out in, what, 97? And XP runs on those. Those are all computers that *could* run XP, but choose not to. If the only computers that can run Vista are those sold in the last 6 months, well, that puts a slight damper on the future of the operating system.
While I agree that as time marches on, what we find outrageous today will be mundane tomorrow, there does start to be a point of diminishing returns regarding a great deal of computer hardware.
I've been stuck at 1.8ghz for 3 years now. I got a 1.8 AMD 3 years ago for a computer I put together. Twas pretty fancy at the time. Then I upgraded to a 1.8ghz Barton core AMD. No increase in clock speed, but an increase in L2 cache and the chip ran cooler (and the fans quieter).
1.5 years ago I bought a dual 1.8ghz Powermac. 1 year ago I bought a 1.8ghz AMD 64 laptop.
There are a lot of chips out there that are quite a bit faster than 1.8ghz. Yet I've felt little purpose moving to them. My computers do a LOT of things, very quickly, and while I've increased their RAM, storage space, and peripherals... they still chug along happily at 1.8ghz.
Sure, I'd be able to render video a little faster on my Powermac if I upgraded, but is a 20% increase worth $3000? Not to me. Similarly, there was a time when running a basic word processing application and surfing the web at the same time would be straining on a computer. The computers of today do that kind of stuff easily, yet there are plenty of people who still just use word processing software and surf the web.
My parents are on an old 800mhz machine. All I do is format it every once in a while to get rid of all of their spyware and viruses (which hasn't been so bad lately, after making them use Firefox and having a free anti-virus installed that didn't chew up resources). I keep trying to talk them into getting a Mac of some sort, because I think they would use the computer for more than just surfing the web... But they decline politely each time, saying that what they have surfs the web just fine. They even went from cable back to dial up.
So no, my parents are not representative of "everyone." But there are a great deal of people who use a computer to just do a few things. As technology marches on and requirements skyrocket for some things... they stay the same for many others. Linux has had a great deal of graphical advancements over just the past few years, yet you can still do a great many things on the system with a truly ancient machine. Enough for what most people use their computers for.
Just because gamers get new video cards every year doesn't mean the majority of people are just fine viewing 2d graphics for their work.
I agree. Wasn't long ago that every year or so, even without OS updates, I was itching to get some new "thing" for my computer to speed it up a bit. These were home built, and not top of the line, so it wasn't that expensive, but I was convinced that a faster chip, or more ram, or something would make the computer faster. And it did, slightly.
About a year and a half ago, I took the dive and got a dual 1.8 powermac. I bought it shortly after 10.3 came out, and was working on 10.2 at work. A noticeable difference in overall usability, but it wasn't until the upgrade to 10.4 that I noticed what other mac users had been saying for a while -- getting a newer OS on a mac tends to make better.
Of course, it's not drastic or anything, but it is there. The base requirements may be "made within the last 5 years," but that's a really wide range of computers. Why can Apple, a smaller company, write an OS that feels faster, with more features, on the same computer, while Windows requires significantly faster hardware than its predecesor, despite Microsoft's supposedly vast resources?
The automated execution and propagation is what truly makes a virus a virus, is it not?
An applescript that does something malicious is really no different than tricking a coworker or friend into typing "sudo rm -rf" at/, true?
However, I can tell you that Applescript is fine for individual use, or when rolled out across a controlled network, but scales poorly across different versions of applications. We use applescripts for numerous tasks at my workplace, and we need to get in there and tweak the source every time we update the OS or the applications.
Still, I don't see how "malicious script that triggers when clicked" is equivalent to a self-propagating virus.
I DO know exactly how easy it is to willfully destroy an OS X system, even on Tiger. I've taken the OS X 'help desk' class where the last test is where you run an applescript that destroys the system. It freezes the boot process, causes the loginwindow system to kick the user out after 30 seconds, changes all the user passwords, and more, and the "test" is to fix it all. Like most viruses, it is fixable with the proper knowledge, but it's truly a pain in the butt.
But, as I said above, convincing a user to run a malicious script just doesn't seem like a virus to me. In fact, it's not:In computer security technology, a virus is a self-replicating program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents (for a complete definition: see below).
I don't see how that makes us "very wrong." Nothing that you say has anything to do with a virus. Just malicious scripting. Yes, a virus could trigger a malicious script, but those are two separate actions -- the virus that infects and propagates and delivers the payload. The payload is the script, which runs and corrupts the system.
I agree completely. Everyone talks about "virus this, virus that." Even on Windows, the virus problem didn't get out of hand until the writers discovered how easy it was to exploit system-level services that allowed for easy propagation across a network, and then extended that for internet use. Having a spammer send out a virus-laden email is one thing, but having a virus send out its own virus-laden email based on the people in the address book on the program it finds?
So not only would Mail.app have to have an exploit, but it would have to be able to flush the entire contents of the address book (which is a separate program entirely, and the app queries as a user process based on what's typed in to the respective fields in a new email) into a "to" field, and then send itself out using SMTP which is disabled by default on a mac. And that's just for an email virus to propagate. It would have to also find a way to infect the system from Mail.app, which doesn't run as a low-level process in any way nor give a user any access to other applications directly through the application. Sure, it interacts smartly with other applications, but that's because of the OS handling user preferences.
If my memory serves me correctly, a lot of the major Windows viruses were exploits of very basic services that had ridiculous security settings for their access. The Blaster worm propagating through a port that was open by default? WTF! Why would a default open port have such open access to the system? It's stuff like that that's caused Windows problems, not its marketshare.
Nope, as not only as the hardware changed drastically since then, the entire OS architecture has as well.
Plus, don't macro viruses infect applications that the macro is related to? If you have a word macro virus, but you don't run Word, it's not going to do much to the system. Even back then.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how that's flamebait. I visit video game forums all the time, and never once have I met someone who actually wants to play homebrew games on the PSP -- they're talking about homebrew for emulators. A visit to any PSP development site pretty much confirms that the development exists for emulation, not actual new content, as the emulation sections are huge, with constant updates, while the "games" sections usually consist of a basic line game that serves little more than a proof of concept.
As I said in my post, I've got an AV420 which has a 20 gig drive and plays divx, xvid, and other formats. I can easily fit about 15 or more movies on the thing -- more if I really want to shrink 'em down. The screen is small enough that I can live with the lesser quality, which means that smaller file sizes are actually something to shoot for.
So no, I don't think you could store your full movie library on the thing, but I do think it'd be quite easy to keep a store of 10 movies that you really like, some TV shows, and swap with what you have on your main computer as the need arises.
Similarly, most people tend to install programs once, and are at home for it. After I've got a computer ready to go, I tend to install very few programs, especially from CD, and as the OQO has wireless built into it, you can just download patches or anything else as the need arises.
It's not a desktop killer, mind, and I'm not saying that this would be someone's only computer. But as a portable device, its functionality kicks the pants off the competition because it is a full computer. I can transfer video from a friend's computer to my AV420, or copy photos to it from a memory stick for photo backup or viewing. But that's the end of it -- I can't actually DO anything with the stuff on there once it's there. That's true for most devices. Usually you need a laptop. And this is, essentially, a laptop so small that it competes with the portable device market.
So I apologize if I wasn't clear with my movie statement -- for someone looking for a device to take movies as files around, and who isn't afraid to spend some time transcoding stuff, this really would be sweet for video. Especially since, as you're preparing for a trip in, say, a month, you could just load up the files on the device and transcode on it while using your full computer for your regular affairs. It won't be super fast but it'll get the job done, say, a movie every day or so.
I don't think people are excited over the ability to play various asteroids clones on their PSP. Oh, maybe they're holding out for that killer homebrew Blackjack game, or they're really hoping they can downgrade their version to play Pong with their $250 device.
No, I think pretty much everyone just wants to run emulators of NES, SNES, and Genesis games for free.
Of course, the downside is that it's kind of pricey. But, given what else is out there, it seems to sit nicely among its peers -- it costs more, but it seems to offer a lot more as well.
I have a small portable video device, an Archos 420, and while I got it pretty much just for the portable video and photo abilities, I do know it would be nice to hop on the internet for various reasons without having to stow my laptop -- after all, that's why I got the small portable video thing in the first place.
Something like this that not only can play video, but also surf the web and do pretty much anything a decent computer can do is great for portability. But kudos to the company for an ultra-small, high-functionality computer that doesn't skimp.
If they have a monopoly, or a near-monopoly with no real competition, then they can do what they want. As soon as there's a real competitor, they need to actually compete. There's generally less money when you have to actually compete.
Of course, R&D costs nothing, fabrication is free, paying employees for design and support is volunteer based, and filing the patents and copyrights by lawyers are all pro bono.
How is this useful? So now we know how much the pure hardware costs for the Nano? Big deal. It's probably on par with pretty much any MP3 player, especially flash based ones. Is this supposed to convince people that "Oh noes, look, Apple really DOES make money on its hardware!"
Duh. We know Apple makes money on its hardware. So does every other company that makes hardware. But this says nothing for the actual cost to Apple of the device, without consideration for, you know, actually designing and creating the thing.
You don't need an owner's permission for fair use. That's the whole point of fair use. That it's "fair to use the works without the copyright holder's permission."
So "fair use" isn't avoidable -- it's part of the entire package. If you want to use the restrictions of copyright on your works, you need to allow for fair use of your works as well. You can't pick and choose.
It's just that it's not made as an historical statement; it's pure opinion. Look at people talking about computer games, or books, or whatever. The stuff you remember fondly is always great. The new stuff you haven't bothered to look into and sift the good from the bad is collectively "bad" thanks to the presense of all that bad stuff.
Anyway, that's a too-long response to essentially a "hear hear!" So I'll stop rambling.
It would be hard to find other businesses that entice their employees with such pie-in-the-sky dreams just so they can get them to sign a restrictive contract reliquishing them of future control.
I don't think that justifies piracy, but I don't think that bad contracts and the artists that fall for them is the fault of the victim -- the tactics used to get them to sign the contracts is really the problem that keeps those shitty contracts and screwed artists around.
By limiting the publics use, well, that's abusing the public who are responsible for the popularity of the piece in the first place. After all, there's also plenty of privately traded things -- plenty of artists will sell a piece entirely for one lump sum, in private (paintings do this, as well as individuals who sell the rights to their works). But by publishing works, they're saying "Hey, public! We put this out for you! If you like it, you should support the dude who made it!"
And the public responds as it feels it should. But the screwy thing is that these companies and many of the authors feel that these works should be heirlooms, or part of a family's history. And that's just wrong for published work. Once published, it's hardly the family's at all -- heck, it's barely the original authors. Nothing's stopping me from reading a book and telling my friends all about it -- it was published for public use, and the public should be able to use it as it sees fit. Limiting that so that lucky families can get rich off of works just abuses the system, and ruins it for individuals who get screwed in the system -- those who don't get rich, and have their work owned by a corporation, never to be re-released for the next hundred years.
Don't forget that typically those tech companies can pay the new grads significantly less than what they're really worth AND work them more than their older employees, this isn't that surprising that losing that market could hurt the company.
The analogy is poor, though, because one of the reasons Microsoft is able to pull in such a great amount of money is that the near dominance of the OS market means that their other products are both easier to maintain (only need to code one "real" version) and a nearly sure bet (if you make the main applications, you can kill off the competition easier by adjusting for code changes far in advance, rather than waiting for new APIs to be released).
However, the thing that really interests me in the article, that I think you're missing, is that a technology company tends to maintain dominance by continuous innovation. What it sounds like to me is that Microsoft is starting to get too many managers and they're losing the good designers and developers.
The other major catch that differentiates the OS and software market from the car market (and numerous other markets) is that for cars, a single company will come out with numerous models. So if Toyota's SUV models are selling poorly, their car models might pick up the difference so they still do well. If Microsoft releases a flop, even just one, well, what's the alternative? An old application that they don't get money from anymore? People sticking with the old apps they already have, also not contributing to MS's bottom line? If Vista doesn't have many new people picking it up, the past 5 years of development will be relativly worthless. Similarly, new versions of their programs that utilize key features of Vista but run nearly identical to the older versions when placed on old operating systems? Those probably won't do as well either.
I don't think that Microsoft is going to disappear anytime soon, and honestly I hope that they don't -- even if they lose marketshare, I still think it's good to have their influence on the OS and app market. But if their apps end up overdesigned and overmanaged and people don't buy them, well, they don't have nearly as much fallback as companies that deal with hardware or other consumer goods. They get to rely on savings. Of course, they have enough savings to hold them over for quite a long time, but a slip can start a downward trend that's impossible to completely recover from.
Not to mention that all of those managers probably get paid more than the developers and designers...
Competition is healthy, especially so for video games and media. When the NES was king, sure, there were some great games. But there were also tons of really, really, really awful games that simply jumped on the bandwagon because Nintendo was king. Sega came out with some truly inspiring games simply because they were competing with Nintendo. Do you think we would've seen all of the successful PS1 games if we were locked in to N64s? Do you think Nintendo would be pushing wireless online play if Microsoft didn't push Live?
So yeah, if the Gamecube is a failure, that speaks volumes for how twisted the video game market is. It's a success. It's still on shelves, games are still coming out, people are buying them. It's making money. It's not as successful, and there are some well-deserved criticisms, but it's a far cry from a "failure."
It is funny, though, how the Anti-MS monopoly Slashdot crowd is calling Nintendo's current offering a failure due to the fact that it's no longer a monopoly... The fact that it's not a monopoly anymore is the reason we're getting the innovative games and systems. I'd rather see Nintendo thrive in its niche!
For those who are still serious about the genre, though, using a joystick just makes sense. Buttons are easier to hit in combination, joystick is easier to use precisely, and you tend to break them a lot less often as well. Not to mention that they're easier to use for non-gamers for fighting games.
As Nintendo has stated quite a few times in the past day that they will have peripherals and "cases" for this controller to either snap onto or be slid into, I wouldn't be surprised at all if an arcade-style joystick came out for fighting games.
It's not a universal, mind, as you point out yourself. But it is quite common, and exceedingly easy to get caught in the truncating trap.
Plus that rollover thing is nice ;D
So yeah, I do think it's a good sign that Cingular supports the phone, as it probably explains many of the features that are built into it. But I'm also not that surprised that they, or any company, would encourage the phone to do everything people really want.
It could very well be Cingular, stating that they want people to still buy ringtones from Cingular for $4 a pop, or that they don't want to worry about multiple versions (which cost money to produce) so they just release one that can hold 100 songs and say "no more" so they don't have to expand that in the near future, or allow people to swap out their own cards.
Phone companies hate when consumers are allowed to do what they want with their phones. I'm sure it took a lot of tooth pulling from Apple to simply get Cingular on board to transfer songs for free from the computer -- look how many phones have intentionally crippled the bluetooth functionality so you can't move pictures or ringtones between computer and phone!
If Apple really wanted to make an iPod phone that worked like an iPod with a phone attached, they would be forced into the cellular business themselves -- not a wise move. This is Cingular getting in on the iPod business, not the other way around.
There's no reason that Cingular couldn't have pushed to get this in a RAZR body with the same capacity as a Shuffle for songs, same functionality, with the advantages of a big screen and the cell phone features that are part of a RAZR standard. But those extra features are big bucks for the cellular companies -- you're fooling yourself if you think they're putting cameras on their free phones because they want people to take pictures at no cost. They want people to pay through the nose for everything.
If anything, that's the only thing that truly makes the iTunes phone unique -- it doesn't cost anything extra to use the iTunes functionality. Personally I'm shocked, and I think that's the ultimate result of Apple being involved -- people own the device, own the songs, and they should be able to use it. Not charged for transfers, or hit with hidden fees. I'm not at all surprised that Cingular didn't go for the extra features that would've really made it a winner; it would've sold the hardware, perhaps, but it would've eaten into their monthly fees.
I think DVD players have done a fine job of killing off CD players. Why buy a 5 disc CD stereo component when for a few bucks more you can get one that plays DVDs? Why buy a CD-ROM drive when you can get a DVD-burning drive?
Similarly, the camera+phone thing WOULD be great, if the cell phone companies didn't intentionally gimp it. The idea of carrying a super-small camera is already popular. Merging that into a phone, something that people keep on them all the time already, is a good idea. But charging per picture just to get it off the phone?
And yes, I agree that even if the cell companies managed to release a camera phone that didn't screw the customer, there would still be a solid digital camera market, but I do think it would affect the "ultra-small, low quality" digicam market.
The catch is that the converged devices are often more expensive than an individual device, so people who aren't sure about buying the converged device will buy one thing, and then decide to buy the other thing. For instance, my iPod functions as a music player. But I also own an Archos portable video player. It can play music, but since I already have the iPod, I don't bother with the Archos's music capabilities -- I use it pretty much just for photo storage and video. I could, mind, but I already own the iPod, and I really like iTunes, so why not?
If I already owned a thumb drive, I would probably keep using that for transfering stuff to and from work, but since I own the iPod I just use that as my thumbdrive.
So it's not like convergence doesn't exist. To me, it's best when it's not really noticed, because it means that the designers and developers did it right. A lot of times they screw it up, like Kodak sticking an FM radio onto its cameras (wtf?), but other times it's a subtle feature that makes purchasing extra electronics redundant.
But people do like their redundancy.
I suppose that my point, which I did not do a great job of illustrating in my previous post, is that anyone using a piece of software, or, heck, using any product, if you've got customers using your product, you have a potential future sale. People regularly update free software even at the minor releases. It's easy to do cos it's free. When money's involved, getting those stalwart "I'm happy with what I have" individuals to upgrade is the challenge. You can ignore them, only catering to new customers, or you can appease them in some way, or offer some enticing incentive. Lots of software companies do this by saying "you bought the previous version, upgrade to the new version for %50 of the price," or similar deals. They encourage people who otherwise don't care to buy the upgrade, by trying to make the feature set compelling and the price manageable for those with an already working copy.
Forcing all of those individuals to buy entirely new hardware AND offering no discounts or incentives for upgrades other than "it's got some new features" just doesn't jive with those people who don't really care. You slough off the criticisms of Vista stating that it's no big deal, but those people who just use a computer to get some work done, well, they're also the ones who are responsible for Window's monopoly.
Personally, despite all the talk about "Window's Monopoly," I'd be more interested in seeing the breakdown of current computers running all the various Windows operating systems. It'd be interesting to see if the monopoly is based on XP now or Windows 98 or similar. Why? Because XP still ran on most of the computers that run the older operating systems. Sure 98 runs on a pentium 100, but the 233's and 333's came out in, what, 97? And XP runs on those. Those are all computers that *could* run XP, but choose not to. If the only computers that can run Vista are those sold in the last 6 months, well, that puts a slight damper on the future of the operating system.
I've been stuck at 1.8ghz for 3 years now. I got a 1.8 AMD 3 years ago for a computer I put together. Twas pretty fancy at the time. Then I upgraded to a 1.8ghz Barton core AMD. No increase in clock speed, but an increase in L2 cache and the chip ran cooler (and the fans quieter).
1.5 years ago I bought a dual 1.8ghz Powermac. 1 year ago I bought a 1.8ghz AMD 64 laptop.
There are a lot of chips out there that are quite a bit faster than 1.8ghz. Yet I've felt little purpose moving to them. My computers do a LOT of things, very quickly, and while I've increased their RAM, storage space, and peripherals... they still chug along happily at 1.8ghz.
Sure, I'd be able to render video a little faster on my Powermac if I upgraded, but is a 20% increase worth $3000? Not to me. Similarly, there was a time when running a basic word processing application and surfing the web at the same time would be straining on a computer. The computers of today do that kind of stuff easily, yet there are plenty of people who still just use word processing software and surf the web.
My parents are on an old 800mhz machine. All I do is format it every once in a while to get rid of all of their spyware and viruses (which hasn't been so bad lately, after making them use Firefox and having a free anti-virus installed that didn't chew up resources). I keep trying to talk them into getting a Mac of some sort, because I think they would use the computer for more than just surfing the web... But they decline politely each time, saying that what they have surfs the web just fine. They even went from cable back to dial up.
So no, my parents are not representative of "everyone." But there are a great deal of people who use a computer to just do a few things. As technology marches on and requirements skyrocket for some things... they stay the same for many others. Linux has had a great deal of graphical advancements over just the past few years, yet you can still do a great many things on the system with a truly ancient machine. Enough for what most people use their computers for.
Just because gamers get new video cards every year doesn't mean the majority of people are just fine viewing 2d graphics for their work.
About a year and a half ago, I took the dive and got a dual 1.8 powermac. I bought it shortly after 10.3 came out, and was working on 10.2 at work. A noticeable difference in overall usability, but it wasn't until the upgrade to 10.4 that I noticed what other mac users had been saying for a while -- getting a newer OS on a mac tends to make better.
Of course, it's not drastic or anything, but it is there. The base requirements may be "made within the last 5 years," but that's a really wide range of computers. Why can Apple, a smaller company, write an OS that feels faster, with more features, on the same computer, while Windows requires significantly faster hardware than its predecesor, despite Microsoft's supposedly vast resources?
An applescript that does something malicious is really no different than tricking a coworker or friend into typing "sudo rm -rf" at /, true?
However, I can tell you that Applescript is fine for individual use, or when rolled out across a controlled network, but scales poorly across different versions of applications. We use applescripts for numerous tasks at my workplace, and we need to get in there and tweak the source every time we update the OS or the applications.
Still, I don't see how "malicious script that triggers when clicked" is equivalent to a self-propagating virus.
I DO know exactly how easy it is to willfully destroy an OS X system, even on Tiger. I've taken the OS X 'help desk' class where the last test is where you run an applescript that destroys the system. It freezes the boot process, causes the loginwindow system to kick the user out after 30 seconds, changes all the user passwords, and more, and the "test" is to fix it all. Like most viruses, it is fixable with the proper knowledge, but it's truly a pain in the butt.
But, as I said above, convincing a user to run a malicious script just doesn't seem like a virus to me. In fact, it's not: In computer security technology, a virus is a self-replicating program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents (for a complete definition: see below). I don't see how that makes us "very wrong." Nothing that you say has anything to do with a virus. Just malicious scripting. Yes, a virus could trigger a malicious script, but those are two separate actions -- the virus that infects and propagates and delivers the payload. The payload is the script, which runs and corrupts the system.
So not only would Mail.app have to have an exploit, but it would have to be able to flush the entire contents of the address book (which is a separate program entirely, and the app queries as a user process based on what's typed in to the respective fields in a new email) into a "to" field, and then send itself out using SMTP which is disabled by default on a mac. And that's just for an email virus to propagate. It would have to also find a way to infect the system from Mail.app, which doesn't run as a low-level process in any way nor give a user any access to other applications directly through the application. Sure, it interacts smartly with other applications, but that's because of the OS handling user preferences.
If my memory serves me correctly, a lot of the major Windows viruses were exploits of very basic services that had ridiculous security settings for their access. The Blaster worm propagating through a port that was open by default? WTF! Why would a default open port have such open access to the system? It's stuff like that that's caused Windows problems, not its marketshare.
Plus, don't macro viruses infect applications that the macro is related to? If you have a word macro virus, but you don't run Word, it's not going to do much to the system. Even back then.