I would expect that, when the last record label looks at the sales figures, and sees that non-DRMed files are selling and his are not, and that he can get a premium for higher encoding rates that essentially cost him nothing, then you may find iTunes for Linux.
DRM is NOT identifying the track as bought by you. DRM, that euphemism of "digital rights management" means copy protection through the uses of encryption, which is based on the pairing of the music as downloaded by to the MAC addresses of 5 computers you're allowed to play it. Removing that protection is a great boon to the computer.
However, your rights are still not unlimited. Embedded e-mail address or ripped from a CD, they still don't want you to put your music on a P2P, so 10,000 or so copies can be made of it.
In the end, there will be very simple editors to remove this id, or change it. If I run it through Fission, now, it comes up as "edited by Fission," even though all I've done is one "Save As..."
There may still be legitimate reasons for iTunes to know whether you downloaded the copy from iTunes, and under which account. One: they may update the tracks again, in some way. Only "Purchased tracks," likely, would be eligible. Or it may change other things, like the suggestions in, "You might also like..."
Will it also mean that a track you copy from a friend -- not P2P, a friend letting you copy the McCartney album from his purchased tracks to yours? I don't know, and interestingly, nobody who's written these exercises in paranoia has either. I see only some record of some people "wondering". Well, read the damn EULA. Do some tests. Change the purchaser's id in a file or two. Does anything change about how the file is treated?
It looks like our computer blog-heads are as bad as, you know, millionaire journalists for laziness. You're supposed to be the scientists, the hackers, the ones with definitive answers. Do your frickin' job, then. Test it. Is it "DRM"? Prove it.
What a simple and wonderful idea. Of course it's true, and it's a good response to the libertarian argument. They reject taxes as inherently unjust, and therefore government itself is an oppression. That's wrong, and this explains why. If you tax everybody for a service, it must serve everybody. The costs are proportionately shared by the public, so the benefits must be too.
Conservative orthodoxy has those '30s-era rules in the media on the ropes here in the U.S., and even our PBS has well, you've got to call them commercials. Plus, they're always begging for money in those disheartening fundraising weeks they constantly have to have now. Repeats are more frequent. And you know that millions see PBS news and opinion every day, right? And maybe 300,000 see O'Reilly. But he's a millionaire. Somebody tell me why.
No copyright for the BBC. That makes it MORE valuable in a way only the public sector can provide.
I'd say the way the public sector shouldn't primarily regulate, but it has to "compete" is by offering an open medium and an important I worked for about 15 years with the CBC, and that is a precious public asset that is different from for-profit TV. For profit organizes information completely differently: to seduce, excite and program the viewer. It corrupts networks, too: our networks are linked to a global weapons dealer (NBC), a junk bond dealer (CBS), and the Disney germ warfare operation -- whoops, just kidding. Then there's Rupert with his page three girls reading the daily propaganda.
The real media revoltuion is finding programming like you google. No more dictatorial programming chiefs. And every public station should have a killer web interface for on demand over the public broadband they make their money from.
One of the most effective anti-copying methods is putting a splash screen up with the original owner's name. Okay, you just register a copy under a different name. Or you find a way to strip it out or replace it. But still, the thought of your computer pantsing you is surprisingly effective.
I had gotten tired of AT&T delivering on the "high speed" DSL they had offered, 3 Mb/s, out of which I was lucky to get 1.7. I asked several times, and was told only that the phone lines in my neighborhood had to be upgraded. So I went and dropped the DSL account, for the first time since 1998, and got a cable modem. It actually said 3 Mb/s, and I got 2987 or thereabouts.So I phoned up AT&T to quit a couple of days later, and they said, "But U-Verse is available in your area as of May 1."
I'd get fiber to the door, and initially I could get 6 Mb/s lines. So that was the "line upgrade" they talked about. And then, there were the cable TV offereings. Yawn. Any thoughts I had of cancelling the cable modem and switching back came to an abrupt end.
I agree with the previous posters: the company that delivers a-la-carte programming first will win this whole market. It could take many forms. Adding just the channels you want might be part of it. But even better would be the finest-grain solution possible: I'll take the Daily Show, Frontline, etc., and nothing else. Maybe a decent basic tier plus my favorite shows. Oh, and the odd movie as it becomes available, as long as I can burn it to DVD and keep it.
Or with windows fanatics. Or linux freeks. Or Sun worshippers.
Windows is still the number one vector for all kinds of malware. The reasons are historical. Their drive to keep their monopoly meant that, with the Internet fundamentally changing what a computer is, they were completely desktop-bound. So they concentrated for at least the next five years in putting paint on the pig. Crush Netscape. Crush java. Crush any standards but their own. Support ALL motherboards, all graphics cards, everything. DLL's R Us. Lots of flaws induced by that. Then push Explorer out the door, integrated in the OS for economic, not technological reasons, and enable every scripting language you can imagine, including the ability, with Active X, of executing exe code from outside the computer. Push your standards above all. Keep everything you can proprietary and closed. Release XP, finally, with raw sockets and no default software firewall.
What put Windows there was greed, and the desire to maintain a monopoly. It wasn't code that done 'em in.
They have pulled up their socks, recently, but with Vista, the layers of security are so tight that it's, well, a pain in the ass. You just don't know who they're working for -- is it YOUR security, or the copyright holders?
Not that this particular item isn't (likely) true, but hasn't anybody noticed that the first source of the story, no matter where it's linked to, is "News of the World"? In Britain, that's a rag that has about the same believability as, say, the National Enquirer, which is to say, sometimes, if you put out enough unverified crap, some of it turns out to be sort of true.
I freely concede that CDs are more pure in sound that 128-bit AAC. Than 256-bit AAC? Not so clear, at least to my 60-year-old, rock-concert-damaged hearing.
However, a CD is 600 MB. If you buy one of those, for 9.99, say, you take a few hours to download it. Millions downloading CD-quality from iTunes? The price has to go up to cover the bandwidth.
I'd say, if you want pure fidelity, by DVD-Audio. CD is a compromise by itself.
In the future, when we all have a minimum of 10 Mb/s broadband, and iTunes will be free to use some variation of BitTorrent for its downloading, the price and time involved can come down. Until then, we're dealing with compromise.
Got to say, one of John Dvorak's truthful statements -- and there are some -- is that "the list" is a way to spin a story out of nothing. Thus, the "50 best," or the "10 worst." If you read the list, you see what actually happened: an editorial meeting was held, there were four or five people with their agendas, and they slap together a list out of their own preferences and fallible memories, and there it is, as if it actually meant something. The same goes for comparisons like this. Some people, those who have been using OS X for a while, will much prefer it (I agree!), whereas those who have been using Windows will prefer that. Otherwise, they'd be using the other, wouldn't they? I read somewhere where somebody thought that Windows was more "intuitive" than OS X. What were they smoking, the Mac user in me said.
So CNET held an editorial meeting, and then a photo shoot, and compared the two OSes. Is anybody surprised they found it a "tie"? They had to. They want to bring in all users, after all. But they don't want to start flame wars.
Actually, the Mac platform has the major advantage now of running OS X all you want, and then either rebooting or firing up Paralells -- or soon, VMWare -- and running Windows or Linux or what you will.
that everybody says they want in the iPod. Well, how have the other players with a radio in them sold? Not well. So people, in general, don't want a crappy radio.
I'm sure they can offer a sub service as well as the others. Right now they're in heavy negotiation with the labels, and they've got to at least pretend they don't want it.
Yes, some people will want a sub service. I think they'll eventually get it, as part of... prices tiered by actual value to the consumer, not the whim of marketing departments.
The guy that the independent investigation said did it, who was forced to take some time with his family, kaff, kaff, who now has settled for millions to avoid a civil trial, wouldn't have any motivation to backstab his old boss, would he? If it's against Jobs, you apparently don't need any proof. Who's running Slashdot, Nancy friggin' Grace?
Has anybody said, "evidence"? A denunciation timed to take attention from your own admission of misdeeds doesn't qualify as evidence, just an assertion. The only response would be, "Jobs denies the assertion."
Are Slashdotters wishing for a Trial by Ordeal? "Here, Mr. Jobs, is a copy of Vista. You will use this as your sole OS for the next 30 days. If you don't poke your eyes out during that time, you are cleared of all charges because God has obviously given you the grace to overcome this ordeal."
Not Borg Bad.
How about cowardice, monopoly and brainlessness? They're not virtues, but sadly, they seem to be permanent fixtures on the human landscape.
You think you need a membership card to join the Plaid-Wearers Club. And if somebody who think they might want to buy a copy of Windows because occasionally they need to run this or that app, for which you will back MS's desire for an extra couple of hundred bucks. "For security."
It's really not that bad of an operating system, but its lack of taste and its user's arrogance is really something.
is, of course, Windows Genuine Advantage. (Isn't that name terrible? Perfectly accurate if by "Genuine" your mean "Real" and by "Advantage" you mean "Pain in the Ass."
Parallels worked fine with Boot Camp. It even took a second install for the virtual machine version in Parallels. Both authenticated or "sucked up to teacher," or whatever you call it. But then, Parallels came out with the Beta for the version that worked from your boot camp install, and used the coherence trick, so I could now run the CNN player, for example, floating on top of OS X, with no Windows in sight. Yippee. Only-- each time a new Beta arrived, Windows thought it had been installed on a new machine, and started freaking out. Well, four beta versions later, and two phone calls to get the 25-digit number, everything quieted down. Now, I threw away my virtual hard drive and just booted into XP, or ran OS X but kept access to Windows apps from the Boot Camp partition. No additional installs, right? One install runs it all. Good?
But then the new VMware for the Mac arrives Mac Fusion Beta, and this too supports boot camp. I hesitated, thinking it might screw up the Parallels boot, but it didn't. I booted right up into Boot Camp in VMWare -- but wait a minute, what's this? You got it: Windows Genuine Advantage thinks I'm moved it to another machine. So I booted into boot camp, and found that I was a button press away from authentication. Panic forestalled.
Users should simply not accept this degree of pain in the ass. If y'all crusade about music and movies and DRM, you're just letting Microsoft ream you. This is ridiculous.
Apple sells 100 million iPods, joining a consumer electronics club with only the Sony Walkman and the Nintendo whatever, and of course Slashdotters can't deal with it. My original 5 GB had a battery go bad a few months after I lost it for about a month, and thus didn't recharge it. Should we strike that off the list, so it's only 99,999,999? Well, actually, I spent $30, replaced the battery, and then sold it when I bought my 20 GB model. That worked fine, but I replaced it with the 30 GB video iPod. I sold the 20 GB model. Since I sold them to friends, who were happy to get a cheap, $100 iPod in both cases, should you add the resold models?
The accountants added up all the sales and came up with 100 million. What's so hard to believe about that?
You know, President Bush has an iPod, and they released his playlists except for the top-secret podcasts he gets from Jesus. Do you hate America?
Standard def for an NTSC encoded DVD is 720 x 480, which is a lot more than what Apple's selling now. Also the bitrate is 4000 bps encoding, which is a LOT more than the iTunes store sells.
I went into an Apple store and noticed the problem immediately. Ironically, some of the podcasts show up very nicely. And go, modders! I want BitTorrent and Internet access on it.
All the caterwauling about DRM (which I agreed with) and how Steve Jobs is Satan (which I don't.) Oh, yes, and how low-quality this music is. (Semi-agree: my ears aren't what they're used to, and my big old '80s stereo just doesn't get played so much anymore.)
Anyway, now the big announcement, and is anybody happy? No. Their player doesn't support AAC. (Many do, including the Zune, and compatibility is just a reasonable license fee away -- not paid to Apple, but to Dolby Labs, by the way. With Microsoft's loss of that case to Alcatel, mp3 maybe isn't the universal, cheap codec that it once was, anyway. Dolby OWNS AAC.) Oh, and if anybody would like to pay the licensing fee for wma that Microsoft would charge Apple, they are welcome to do so. How about this scenario. You buy an iPod. You get iTunes. Your (unprotected) wma tracks are converted to aac. Then, you can upgrade all your EMI tracks, at the moment, for.30.
NOW how long before the indie labels are offered the same deal? Any other labels? I predict that EMI will make a bundle. Others will jump in. DRM, and the whole DRM business model, is on its way to extinction. Once Apple goes DRM-free, who's going to be any different? There goes Microsoft's whole business model. They will continue to sell 10,000 Zunes a year and paying a piracy tax to the crazy Bronfman kid.
One thing I predict, once the tracks are all available as cheap, protected tracks or slightly more expensive unprotected tracks: there will be browsers for the iTunes haters to interact with the unprotected part of the store.
Now get out there and buy uprotected tracks! Drive a nail in the DRM model! (If the other labels see a huge increase in EMI sales, the "we'll lose all our money" argument is shot.)
I'd be tremendously disappointed if the iPod stays forever the same. The video iPod hasn't been remodeled in a long time, and everybody who has one wants a bigger screen and longer battery life. The iPhone may be at the top, but how's about a video iPod sans phone, with a large screen and hard drive? Huh? Would it "kill" the iPod? I don't think so. This is the same company which took its highest seller, the iPod mini, and retired it for the nano. The video iPod will also be replaced. But for a serious iPod person, even 8 GB on memory just doesn't cut it. I understand that flash ram is getting bigger and bigger. A nice 32 GB Flash iPod with big screen would be more watchable, and Flash doesn't have the same battery problems as a hard drive.
"We notice you've made a lot of money and are therefore wise. We also notice you're not getting any younger, and you're giving away money. If you see anything you'd like to endow, please be in touch."
Slashdot Mirror
I would expect that, when the last record label looks at the sales figures, and sees that non-DRMed files are selling and his are not, and that he can get a premium for higher encoding rates that essentially cost him nothing, then you may find iTunes for Linux.
DRM is NOT identifying the track as bought by you. DRM, that euphemism of "digital rights management" means copy protection through the uses of encryption, which is based on the pairing of the music as downloaded by to the MAC addresses of 5 computers you're allowed to play it. Removing that protection is a great boon to the computer. However, your rights are still not unlimited. Embedded e-mail address or ripped from a CD, they still don't want you to put your music on a P2P, so 10,000 or so copies can be made of it. In the end, there will be very simple editors to remove this id, or change it. If I run it through Fission, now, it comes up as "edited by Fission," even though all I've done is one "Save As..." There may still be legitimate reasons for iTunes to know whether you downloaded the copy from iTunes, and under which account. One: they may update the tracks again, in some way. Only "Purchased tracks," likely, would be eligible. Or it may change other things, like the suggestions in, "You might also like..." Will it also mean that a track you copy from a friend -- not P2P, a friend letting you copy the McCartney album from his purchased tracks to yours? I don't know, and interestingly, nobody who's written these exercises in paranoia has either. I see only some record of some people "wondering". Well, read the damn EULA. Do some tests. Change the purchaser's id in a file or two. Does anything change about how the file is treated? It looks like our computer blog-heads are as bad as, you know, millionaire journalists for laziness. You're supposed to be the scientists, the hackers, the ones with definitive answers. Do your frickin' job, then. Test it. Is it "DRM"? Prove it.
What a simple and wonderful idea. Of course it's true, and it's a good response to the libertarian argument. They reject taxes as inherently unjust, and therefore government itself is an oppression. That's wrong, and this explains why. If you tax everybody for a service, it must serve everybody. The costs are proportionately shared by the public, so the benefits must be too. Conservative orthodoxy has those '30s-era rules in the media on the ropes here in the U.S., and even our PBS has well, you've got to call them commercials. Plus, they're always begging for money in those disheartening fundraising weeks they constantly have to have now. Repeats are more frequent. And you know that millions see PBS news and opinion every day, right? And maybe 300,000 see O'Reilly. But he's a millionaire. Somebody tell me why. No copyright for the BBC. That makes it MORE valuable in a way only the public sector can provide. I'd say the way the public sector shouldn't primarily regulate, but it has to "compete" is by offering an open medium and an important I worked for about 15 years with the CBC, and that is a precious public asset that is different from for-profit TV. For profit organizes information completely differently: to seduce, excite and program the viewer. It corrupts networks, too: our networks are linked to a global weapons dealer (NBC), a junk bond dealer (CBS), and the Disney germ warfare operation -- whoops, just kidding. Then there's Rupert with his page three girls reading the daily propaganda. The real media revoltuion is finding programming like you google. No more dictatorial programming chiefs. And every public station should have a killer web interface for on demand over the public broadband they make their money from.
Nice little electronics business you have there, LG. It'd be a shame if something were to HAPPEN to it, you know what I mean?
The commercials make me think that if the iPhone is as cool as it looks in the commercial, I want one.
One of the most effective anti-copying methods is putting a splash screen up with the original owner's name. Okay, you just register a copy under a different name. Or you find a way to strip it out or replace it. But still, the thought of your computer pantsing you is surprisingly effective.
I had gotten tired of AT&T delivering on the "high speed" DSL they had offered, 3 Mb/s, out of which I was lucky to get 1.7. I asked several times, and was told only that the phone lines in my neighborhood had to be upgraded. So I went and dropped the DSL account, for the first time since 1998, and got a cable modem. It actually said 3 Mb/s, and I got 2987 or thereabouts.So I phoned up AT&T to quit a couple of days later, and they said, "But U-Verse is available in your area as of May 1."
I'd get fiber to the door, and initially I could get 6 Mb/s lines. So that was the "line upgrade" they talked about. And then, there were the cable TV offereings. Yawn. Any thoughts I had of cancelling the cable modem and switching back came to an abrupt end.
I agree with the previous posters: the company that delivers a-la-carte programming first will win this whole market. It could take many forms. Adding just the channels you want might be part of it. But even better would be the finest-grain solution possible: I'll take the Daily Show, Frontline, etc., and nothing else. Maybe a decent basic tier plus my favorite shows. Oh, and the odd movie as it becomes available, as long as I can burn it to DVD and keep it.
Or with windows fanatics. Or linux freeks. Or Sun worshippers. Windows is still the number one vector for all kinds of malware. The reasons are historical. Their drive to keep their monopoly meant that, with the Internet fundamentally changing what a computer is, they were completely desktop-bound. So they concentrated for at least the next five years in putting paint on the pig. Crush Netscape. Crush java. Crush any standards but their own. Support ALL motherboards, all graphics cards, everything. DLL's R Us. Lots of flaws induced by that. Then push Explorer out the door, integrated in the OS for economic, not technological reasons, and enable every scripting language you can imagine, including the ability, with Active X, of executing exe code from outside the computer. Push your standards above all. Keep everything you can proprietary and closed. Release XP, finally, with raw sockets and no default software firewall. What put Windows there was greed, and the desire to maintain a monopoly. It wasn't code that done 'em in. They have pulled up their socks, recently, but with Vista, the layers of security are so tight that it's, well, a pain in the ass. You just don't know who they're working for -- is it YOUR security, or the copyright holders?
Not that this particular item isn't (likely) true, but hasn't anybody noticed that the first source of the story, no matter where it's linked to, is "News of the World"? In Britain, that's a rag that has about the same believability as, say, the National Enquirer, which is to say, sometimes, if you put out enough unverified crap, some of it turns out to be sort of true.
So, Engadget runs a fake e-mail. Would it have occurred to them to wait and call Apple to see if it's true first?
Gosh, that Steve Jobs is such an ogre about the Journamelists who cover Apple. Control freak!
Or maybe we see why.
I freely concede that CDs are more pure in sound that 128-bit AAC. Than 256-bit AAC? Not so clear, at least to my 60-year-old, rock-concert-damaged hearing.
However, a CD is 600 MB. If you buy one of those, for 9.99, say, you take a few hours to download it. Millions downloading CD-quality from iTunes? The price has to go up to cover the bandwidth.
I'd say, if you want pure fidelity, by DVD-Audio. CD is a compromise by itself.
In the future, when we all have a minimum of 10 Mb/s broadband, and iTunes will be free to use some variation of BitTorrent for its downloading, the price and time involved can come down. Until then, we're dealing with compromise.
Got to say, one of John Dvorak's truthful statements -- and there are some -- is that "the list" is a way to spin a story out of nothing. Thus, the "50 best," or the "10 worst." If you read the list, you see what actually happened: an editorial meeting was held, there were four or five people with their agendas, and they slap together a list out of their own preferences and fallible memories, and there it is, as if it actually meant something. The same goes for comparisons like this. Some people, those who have been using OS X for a while, will much prefer it (I agree!), whereas those who have been using Windows will prefer that. Otherwise, they'd be using the other, wouldn't they? I read somewhere where somebody thought that Windows was more "intuitive" than OS X. What were they smoking, the Mac user in me said.
So CNET held an editorial meeting, and then a photo shoot, and compared the two OSes. Is anybody surprised they found it a "tie"? They had to. They want to bring in all users, after all. But they don't want to start flame wars.
Actually, the Mac platform has the major advantage now of running OS X all you want, and then either rebooting or firing up Paralells -- or soon, VMWare -- and running Windows or Linux or what you will.
that everybody says they want in the iPod. Well, how have the other players with a radio in them sold? Not well. So people, in general, don't want a crappy radio.
I'm sure they can offer a sub service as well as the others. Right now they're in heavy negotiation with the labels, and they've got to at least pretend they don't want it.
Yes, some people will want a sub service. I think they'll eventually get it, as part of... prices tiered by actual value to the consumer, not the whim of marketing departments.
Nonsense! No way he's as big a prick as Jack Welch.
The guy that the independent investigation said did it, who was forced to take some time with his family, kaff, kaff, who now has settled for millions to avoid a civil trial, wouldn't have any motivation to backstab his old boss, would he? If it's against Jobs, you apparently don't need any proof. Who's running Slashdot, Nancy friggin' Grace? Has anybody said, "evidence"? A denunciation timed to take attention from your own admission of misdeeds doesn't qualify as evidence, just an assertion. The only response would be, "Jobs denies the assertion." Are Slashdotters wishing for a Trial by Ordeal? "Here, Mr. Jobs, is a copy of Vista. You will use this as your sole OS for the next 30 days. If you don't poke your eyes out during that time, you are cleared of all charges because God has obviously given you the grace to overcome this ordeal."
Not Borg Bad. How about cowardice, monopoly and brainlessness? They're not virtues, but sadly, they seem to be permanent fixtures on the human landscape.
God, you Windows snobs are insufferable.
You think you need a membership card to join the Plaid-Wearers Club. And if somebody who think they might want to buy a copy of Windows because occasionally they need to run this or that app, for which you will back MS's desire for an extra couple of hundred bucks. "For security."
It's really not that bad of an operating system, but its lack of taste and its user's arrogance is really something.
is, of course, Windows Genuine Advantage. (Isn't that name terrible? Perfectly accurate if by "Genuine" your mean "Real" and by "Advantage" you mean "Pain in the Ass." Parallels worked fine with Boot Camp. It even took a second install for the virtual machine version in Parallels. Both authenticated or "sucked up to teacher," or whatever you call it. But then, Parallels came out with the Beta for the version that worked from your boot camp install, and used the coherence trick, so I could now run the CNN player, for example, floating on top of OS X, with no Windows in sight. Yippee. Only-- each time a new Beta arrived, Windows thought it had been installed on a new machine, and started freaking out. Well, four beta versions later, and two phone calls to get the 25-digit number, everything quieted down. Now, I threw away my virtual hard drive and just booted into XP, or ran OS X but kept access to Windows apps from the Boot Camp partition. No additional installs, right? One install runs it all. Good? But then the new VMware for the Mac arrives Mac Fusion Beta, and this too supports boot camp. I hesitated, thinking it might screw up the Parallels boot, but it didn't. I booted right up into Boot Camp in VMWare -- but wait a minute, what's this? You got it: Windows Genuine Advantage thinks I'm moved it to another machine. So I booted into boot camp, and found that I was a button press away from authentication. Panic forestalled. Users should simply not accept this degree of pain in the ass. If y'all crusade about music and movies and DRM, you're just letting Microsoft ream you. This is ridiculous.
Apple sells 100 million iPods, joining a consumer electronics club with only the Sony Walkman and the Nintendo whatever, and of course Slashdotters can't deal with it. My original 5 GB had a battery go bad a few months after I lost it for about a month, and thus didn't recharge it. Should we strike that off the list, so it's only 99,999,999? Well, actually, I spent $30, replaced the battery, and then sold it when I bought my 20 GB model. That worked fine, but I replaced it with the 30 GB video iPod. I sold the 20 GB model. Since I sold them to friends, who were happy to get a cheap, $100 iPod in both cases, should you add the resold models?
The accountants added up all the sales and came up with 100 million. What's so hard to believe about that?
You know, President Bush has an iPod, and they released his playlists except for the top-secret podcasts he gets from Jesus. Do you hate America?
Standard def for an NTSC encoded DVD is 720 x 480, which is a lot more than what Apple's selling now. Also the bitrate is 4000 bps encoding, which is a LOT more than the iTunes store sells. I went into an Apple store and noticed the problem immediately. Ironically, some of the podcasts show up very nicely. And go, modders! I want BitTorrent and Internet access on it.
All the caterwauling about DRM (which I agreed with) and how Steve Jobs is Satan (which I don't.) Oh, yes, and how low-quality this music is. (Semi-agree: my ears aren't what they're used to, and my big old '80s stereo just doesn't get played so much anymore.) Anyway, now the big announcement, and is anybody happy? No. Their player doesn't support AAC. (Many do, including the Zune, and compatibility is just a reasonable license fee away -- not paid to Apple, but to Dolby Labs, by the way. With Microsoft's loss of that case to Alcatel, mp3 maybe isn't the universal, cheap codec that it once was, anyway. Dolby OWNS AAC.) Oh, and if anybody would like to pay the licensing fee for wma that Microsoft would charge Apple, they are welcome to do so. How about this scenario. You buy an iPod. You get iTunes. Your (unprotected) wma tracks are converted to aac. Then, you can upgrade all your EMI tracks, at the moment, for .30.
NOW how long before the indie labels are offered the same deal? Any other labels? I predict that EMI will make a bundle. Others will jump in. DRM, and the whole DRM business model, is on its way to extinction. Once Apple goes DRM-free, who's going to be any different? There goes Microsoft's whole business model. They will continue to sell 10,000 Zunes a year and paying a piracy tax to the crazy Bronfman kid.
One thing I predict, once the tracks are all available as cheap, protected tracks or slightly more expensive unprotected tracks: there will be browsers for the iTunes haters to interact with the unprotected part of the store.
Now get out there and buy uprotected tracks! Drive a nail in the DRM model! (If the other labels see a huge increase in EMI sales, the "we'll lose all our money" argument is shot.)
That was his last yarn that made me slap my forehead. I just find him a comedian.
I'd be tremendously disappointed if the iPod stays forever the same. The video iPod hasn't been remodeled in a long time, and everybody who has one wants a bigger screen and longer battery life. The iPhone may be at the top, but how's about a video iPod sans phone, with a large screen and hard drive? Huh? Would it "kill" the iPod? I don't think so. This is the same company which took its highest seller, the iPod mini, and retired it for the nano. The video iPod will also be replaced. But for a serious iPod person, even 8 GB on memory just doesn't cut it. I understand that flash ram is getting bigger and bigger. A nice 32 GB Flash iPod with big screen would be more watchable, and Flash doesn't have the same battery problems as a hard drive.
Are you listening, Steve?
"We notice you've made a lot of money and are therefore wise. We also notice you're not getting any younger, and you're giving away money. If you see anything you'd like to endow, please be in touch."
Look on the store. There's lots more than just Disney. Paramount and Lion's Gate come to mind.
They are not exhibiting the same caution elsewhere. There are many failing video stores that use the Windows DRM.