It remains to be seen exactly what Apple will do with the assets they acquired when they purchased Lala. Since most companies don't make purchases without intending to use them (Assuming Apple didn't buy the company just to keep it out of the hands of Google.) in some manner, it's likely that they have something planned. There's always the possibility that those plans won't come to fruition, but Apple seems to have been executing well lately.
It would be nice if they incorporated some of Lala's features (e.g. full song previews, web access to purchased songs.) into iTunes in the near future. I liked being able to use Lala to preview an album that I wanted to hear before buying, but I never bought anything from Lala itself. Web access to purchased music (They offered 25 free web-access songs if you registered an account.) was nice, but only really useful if you forget to bring your portable music player or other device with your music collection along.
I think that this just highlights that issue with renting music rather than actually purchasing it. If you don't actually own the music, you're completely at the mercy of the other party. We've already seen other music stores with the rental or DRM model vanish, leaving their customers stranded. I don't know if Lala was profitable, so it's entirely possible that their web service would have vanished of its own accord without Apple pulling the plug. Anyone who actually paid the full $.89 to download the mp3 won't have any problems. At least Apple is giving users some form of credit (Albeit to their own store, so it's not exactly the most selfless act.) which is more than most users get when a company goes out of business or discontinues a service.
Not to take the side of Activision (I despise them personally.) on this issue, but I could file a lawsuit against them tomorrow for twice as much money for any claims that I could care to come up with. Just because someone files a lawsuit doesn't always mean that it's reasonable or anywhere near an indication of the truth.
My personal belief is that Activision fucked the IW developers out of money owed to them, but I don't know the full story and this could just as easily be a publicity ploy from the former IW employees. I honestly hope that if nothing else they get some of their CoD IP back, if for no other reason than Activision are a bunch of undeserving, money-grubbing pricks; of course that's hardly any basis for a legal opinion and I don't possess an intimate knowledge of the contracts that were signed between the two parties or the local, state, or federal laws which may be applicable in this case.
So while it's certainly popular to jump on Activision (May they burn in hell.) at the moment, it's possible that they're not guilty of anything (Aside from being first class douches.) under the law or that this lawsuit has any merit at all.
Nah. The Apple apologists will apologize, the Apple haters will hate, and I'll wonder why in the hell this worthless story is on Slashdot in the first place.
My daughter . . . would gladly hug the nice homeless man who is yelling at god and drinking a paper bag.
If anyone ever needed a hug, it would probably be that guy.
I can understand that your daughter's condition wouldn't have exactly been advantageous during the time of the Huns, but today she'd probably fit in all right and would be a great person to know and be around.
This'll just spread the crime to include cell phone theft. Then the government will need to set up some program to keep track of stolen phones and make sure they're deactivated and all the mess that comes along with that.
Even outside of the privacy concerns and other issues, this is a terrible idea that doesn't even approach solving the problem. It's a stupid ploy so that some asshat can claim they're trying to crack down on crime without really cracking down on crime.
I don't know about your phone, but mine has a nice little timestamp for every text I've received and all that calls I've made. It's fairly easy to look at the log and show that I wasn't texting or on the phone. If they suspect that I tampered with the logs, the phone company likely has logs as well.
The victimization will work well until they fine some innocent person who successfully sues the hell out of them and raises a huge stink. The racism angle makes it even more likely that someone will get a nice settlement and that law enforcement will be a hell of a lot more careful in the future.
If a cop wants to pull you over they'll find several other bullshit reasons for doing it anyhow. I've had one pull me over because he said it looked like I was swerving a lot. Once he talked to me and realized that there was absolutely no good reason he could search my vehicle or suspect me of wrongdoing, he left. This happened years and years ago before I even had a cell phone so it's not like things are suddenly going to change.
There's also an Anand Tech review which is pretty good and has plenty of different benchmarks. It has the added benefit of testing a 480 SLI configuration which produces some interesting results. It also presents some benchmarks that help to show off nVidia's GPGPU performance as well, which is something that they've been using to hype these new cards.
In my own opinion, ATI still has a competitive advantage, especially considering that they can always drop their price if they feel threatened. nVidia is lucky that they have the ION and Tegra to fall back on, because it doesn't seems as though they don't have a pot to piss in right now in terms of high-end desktop graphics offerings. The 480 seems to be about equal to similarly priced ATI offerings and doesn't give them the edge in performance that they're accustomed to having.
By the time IE8 came out and managed to catch up with Firefox, Opera, Safari, and all of the other browsers it was chasing, they had already moved on and further improved performance and standards compliance. IE9 will help bring MS closer to parity again.
Windows Mobile hasn't been worth talking about since the original iPhone came out and since then both Palm and Google have come out with phone platforms that also blow Microsoft's offerings out of the water.
They also really don't have an answer to the iPad or Android tablets currently shipping either. The slate computers Balmer talked about at CES are a completely different type of product, which hasn't taken off in the past and doesn't show great signs of doing it in the future. The Courier is their answer to the iPad and other tablet devices. They have nothing right now, but it doesn't hurt to talk about their future offerings.
Natal (And for that matter, Sony's Move.) are answers to the runaway success of the Wii. 360 and PS3 sales have been fairly similar, whereas the Wii has exploded and looks like it will easily go on to outsell the PS2 and become the best selling console of all time. Makes sense for Microsoft to chase after that.
Microsoft has nothing in those market spaces worth selling right now. They can build brand excitement by at least talking about their upcoming offerings and if nothing else delay some consumers from purchasing a competitors product. This is pretty much the strategy that worked so well for the company back in the 90's. At least now they're more likely to actually ship a product eventually. I think they've realized that if they keep hyping vaporware, they'll become even less relevant in the tech industry.
So if you were to 'wrong' me in some fashion I could stab you in the face as there's no more wrong? Just because someone else acts like a dick doesn't absolve you if you should choose to follow suit. Two wrongs make more wrong than just one wrong. Things can always get worse.
Would that also include banning the radio PSA reminding women to take folic acid during pregnancy (or when planning to become pregnant) to reduce the rate of birth defects? How about the ones urging teens not to commit suicide? Though not exactly drugs in the traditional sense, they do pertain to health and probably constitute a fifth class, but they may share some overlap with the other types of ads mentioned.
I also fail to see the issue with the first category of add. A lot of over-the-counter drugs are relatively harmless and are about as similar as different brands of shampoo. If three different cough medicine companies want to advertise their brand, that's entirely their business. Not all types of medicine are something that requires the expert opinion of a doctor. Sometimes common sense or a basic understanding of disease and medicine is enough to treat something like a common cough.
I share your sentiments regarding the effects of a lot of this advertisement, but not your solution. As tepples pointed out, advertisement can serve as a form of education for the public. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Personally I think MS should have completely removed the browser from the operating system and not used this system. If for no other reason than to comply with the regulation while giving the other browser manufacturers a big middle finger. They could have left it up to the hardware manufacturers to put a browser of their choice on it. Considering the amount of other crap that they usually put on PCs it probably won't be a big deal. Then MS could just pay them to include IE as the default.
I wouldn't say that your statement is true. It's possible for a defect introduced in the requirements or design stages of development to find its way into the code, but occasionally a programmer makes an error in a loop that leads to a problem; perhaps they meant to use greater than or equal to, but only used greater than.
What process error is that other than human error? There's almost no way to ensure that human error will ever occur regardless of what type of process is being used. You can argue that proper testing should catch the bug, but not all software has the luxury of complete testing, and once again its possible that due to human error a test case is left out. I suppose that you could require the software use a formal methods to get around that, but at that point time and cost are going to become a large issue.
You can't stomp out all of the bugs during development, especially if you have some non-trivial system. One of the major benefits of open source is that third parties can and do spot bugs of this nature and can correct them or notify the developers. It's a recognition of the fact that developers aren't perfect and neither is their code.
I've had similar experiences. I've actually purchased more music now that its easy to listen to an entire album through music services such as iLike or Lala. 30 second previews don't do it for me and I can't be bothered to hunt down crappy YouTube videos containing every song, if they even exist. I honestly don't even care to take the time to find a good torrent of the album any longer either. These streaming services made it terribly convenient for me to find new music and listen to different bands. If they take that away, I'm not even going to bother with their product.
They're correct in saying that they're not going to make any money from the streaming service directly, but it definitely helps to drive sales. The pretzel place at the mall doesn't make any money from the free samples they handout, but I bet they get a lot of people to buy a pretzel because they could get a free sample.
The PS3 will be able to accommodate the spec as per Sony's announcement at CES last month. It's all a mater of when Sony pushes out the update for it. Apparently, the bigger problem is that you'll likely need a new TV from what I've been able to find. There are some models that are apparently capable of supporting it, but it seems fairly sparse.
As far as I know there isn't a lot of content out there to take advantage of either. Avatar is a nice example, but I can't think of anything else off of the top of my head that's mainstream or will be ready any time soon.
20 character passwords aren't hard if you use a passphrase. They're just as easy to memorize (if not easier) and vastly more secure. The only reason I don't use them for everything is that some online services put a limit on maximum password length. It's not really any harder to type in 20 characters than it is to type in 8 if you're good at typing. I understand that people are lazy, but good security doesn't need to be a string of 20 random characters, numbers, and symbols that are difficult to remember.
Actually both AMD and Intel have chips currently clocked over 3 GHz. Some of the newer Intel chips also have something they call Turbo Boost where the chip essentially overclocks itself if it's not using all of its cores. It also looks like AMD has a 3.6 GHz Phenom II X4 chip slated to be released soon. It would appear that the companies found solutions to whatever ceilings may have existed. VIA doesn't target the high-end of the market so I don't think that they're producing any chips that would run at those clock speeds.
I would tend to disagree at least for me. I've found that taking notes in class vastly helped learning the material. For whatever reason, I'm better at remembering things which I've physically written down on paper. There are some classes where note taking wasn't necessary, but for anything involving rote memorization and regurgitation of definitions, note taking was way better for me.
Personally, my favorite classes were the ones were tests weren't emphasized. The classes were focused on group discussion and exploring ideas and concepts. They weren't the types of classes where simply regurgitating information was useful. However not all classes can easily be taught like that. General chemistry is easier to teach to and grade for 500 students, most of whom aren't interested in the class, if it's focused heavily on regurgitating information and applying basic formulas.
We don't have a say in someone else's art if that other person doesn't want us to have one, but regardless we can be critical of it. If you happened to see it, feel free to critique it. A natural part of that may be suggesting how it could have been done better.
Also, how are we supposed to know whether or not we'll like something until we actually see it? We might have past experiences that can lead us to form an impression, but until we actually see it for ourselves our assumption is based on second hand opinions and our own preconceived notions. Sometimes those are horribly wrong. For example, based on the original trilogy, people would have good reason to think that they would like Episode 1. Many of those people found out that they thought wrong.
H.265 has an estimated release of 2012. We're just trading on MPEG LA standard for another, but they may offer free licensing of it for a while as well. Personally, I don't think they should be able to charge content providers squat. They can sell users an encoder and charge for decoders in products, but what anyone does after that shouldn't be any business of the MPEG LA.
I bitched about the ribbons and having everything moved around, but after getting used to it, I'd say that it's a better UI than the old office. I don't have to go digging through some sub-sub-menu to find what I want. Almost everything the average user will need is immediately available on the ribbon. I have some disagreements over which tab certain items are place on, but for the most part it's a fairly sane design.
Compared to all of the other problems that Word (Or any other MS Office application.) has, the ribbon is the least of my reasons to dislike the software. For whatever reason they make it an absolute pain in the ass to mix portrait and landscape pages together and have functional page numbering. Yeah, yeah, it's not a layout editor, but the majority of graduate students do their thesis in Word and it's a pain to support because it fails to 'just work' in so many ways.
Open Office would be a better product if they used the same UI. For people like you who prefer the old method or can't be bothered to learn the new ones they can provide the classic view. Everybody wins.
Apple doesn't have the same clout with publishers as they do with the music industry. Until their announcement, Apple wasn't selling books and there were already several established players in the market. The same wasn't true with the music industry where Apple was one of the first operators of a legal digital music store. When the dust settled, Apple was the dominant party and could dictate terms or at least put a lot of weight behind them. They were also more interested in selling high-margin iPods than selling low-margin music, but low cost music would definitely help to sell a lot more iPods than high cost music, even if that high-cost music would get them a better profit on music.
Apple isn't an established player in the e-book business so they're more at the mercy of the publishers than the other way around. It's likely that the publishers want to drive up their profits by selling at a higher price. Amazon doesn't want to do that. Their plan was to take a smaller profit for each individual sale, but to make up for that with a larger volume. They also wanted a larger share of the profits of their sale, which they adjusted to be more favorable to the publishers just before Apple's announcement. Apple just wants to get into the game at this point so they're more likely to agree to whatever terms allow them to get into the game, even if it puts them at a disadvantage in terms of price when compared to a competitor.
Amazon didn't want to cave in because it would lessen their dominance. Now that they've caved, it's likely that other publishers will be able to dictate the terms of the relationship instead of Amazon. That's not something that Amazon wanted to happen, but the alternative was not having a major publishers titles available. Until Apple came along, the publishers didn't have anyone else to use as leverage against Amazon. Now they do. Odds are Apple doesn't give two shits whether the books cost $9.99 or $14.99. They just want to have all of them in their store so that people have a compelling reason to purchase their hardware, which is where they make their money.
Until we get to a point where authors are directly selling to consumers, there is going to be some number of middlemen that are all self-interested. Their interests may take different shapes, but they all want to maximize their benefits compared to one and other. Apple isn't necessarily evil and Amazon isn't necessarily good, or vice versa. They just want different things, which are different from what the publishers want. It's also different from what consumers want. I don't think that this is the best solution (for consumers), but this is new ground and different companies need to test out different ideas in the market. In the end, the idea which fares best in the market will tend to win out. Usually this works out well for consumers, but it's not a guarantee.
The only other comic that I enjoyed as much as Calvin and Hobbes was The Far Side. Both were wildly imaginative and highly creative. They transformed what would have otherwise been a boring comic section into something fascinating. I have the complete works of both on my bookshelf and would highly recommend them to anyone. If you want to inspire a sense of wonder, curiosity, and beauty in a child, I can't think of anything better than those two comics.
Slashdot Mirror
It remains to be seen exactly what Apple will do with the assets they acquired when they purchased Lala. Since most companies don't make purchases without intending to use them (Assuming Apple didn't buy the company just to keep it out of the hands of Google.) in some manner, it's likely that they have something planned. There's always the possibility that those plans won't come to fruition, but Apple seems to have been executing well lately.
It would be nice if they incorporated some of Lala's features (e.g. full song previews, web access to purchased songs.) into iTunes in the near future. I liked being able to use Lala to preview an album that I wanted to hear before buying, but I never bought anything from Lala itself. Web access to purchased music (They offered 25 free web-access songs if you registered an account.) was nice, but only really useful if you forget to bring your portable music player or other device with your music collection along.
I think that this just highlights that issue with renting music rather than actually purchasing it. If you don't actually own the music, you're completely at the mercy of the other party. We've already seen other music stores with the rental or DRM model vanish, leaving their customers stranded. I don't know if Lala was profitable, so it's entirely possible that their web service would have vanished of its own accord without Apple pulling the plug. Anyone who actually paid the full $.89 to download the mp3 won't have any problems. At least Apple is giving users some form of credit (Albeit to their own store, so it's not exactly the most selfless act.) which is more than most users get when a company goes out of business or discontinues a service.
Not to take the side of Activision (I despise them personally.) on this issue, but I could file a lawsuit against them tomorrow for twice as much money for any claims that I could care to come up with. Just because someone files a lawsuit doesn't always mean that it's reasonable or anywhere near an indication of the truth.
My personal belief is that Activision fucked the IW developers out of money owed to them, but I don't know the full story and this could just as easily be a publicity ploy from the former IW employees. I honestly hope that if nothing else they get some of their CoD IP back, if for no other reason than Activision are a bunch of undeserving, money-grubbing pricks; of course that's hardly any basis for a legal opinion and I don't possess an intimate knowledge of the contracts that were signed between the two parties or the local, state, or federal laws which may be applicable in this case.
So while it's certainly popular to jump on Activision (May they burn in hell.) at the moment, it's possible that they're not guilty of anything (Aside from being first class douches.) under the law or that this lawsuit has any merit at all.
Nah. The Apple apologists will apologize, the Apple haters will hate, and I'll wonder why in the hell this worthless story is on Slashdot in the first place.
Ah– kdawson. That explains it.
That and the front-facing camera should show up in version 2. Everyone knows not to buy version 1 of an Apple product :P
My daughter . . . would gladly hug the nice homeless man who is yelling at god and drinking a paper bag.
If anyone ever needed a hug, it would probably be that guy.
I can understand that your daughter's condition wouldn't have exactly been advantageous during the time of the Huns, but today she'd probably fit in all right and would be a great person to know and be around.
This'll just spread the crime to include cell phone theft. Then the government will need to set up some program to keep track of stolen phones and make sure they're deactivated and all the mess that comes along with that.
Even outside of the privacy concerns and other issues, this is a terrible idea that doesn't even approach solving the problem. It's a stupid ploy so that some asshat can claim they're trying to crack down on crime without really cracking down on crime.
I don't know about your phone, but mine has a nice little timestamp for every text I've received and all that calls I've made. It's fairly easy to look at the log and show that I wasn't texting or on the phone. If they suspect that I tampered with the logs, the phone company likely has logs as well.
The victimization will work well until they fine some innocent person who successfully sues the hell out of them and raises a huge stink. The racism angle makes it even more likely that someone will get a nice settlement and that law enforcement will be a hell of a lot more careful in the future.
If a cop wants to pull you over they'll find several other bullshit reasons for doing it anyhow. I've had one pull me over because he said it looked like I was swerving a lot. Once he talked to me and realized that there was absolutely no good reason he could search my vehicle or suspect me of wrongdoing, he left. This happened years and years ago before I even had a cell phone so it's not like things are suddenly going to change.
There's also an Anand Tech review which is pretty good and has plenty of different benchmarks. It has the added benefit of testing a 480 SLI configuration which produces some interesting results. It also presents some benchmarks that help to show off nVidia's GPGPU performance as well, which is something that they've been using to hype these new cards.
In my own opinion, ATI still has a competitive advantage, especially considering that they can always drop their price if they feel threatened. nVidia is lucky that they have the ION and Tegra to fall back on, because it doesn't seems as though they don't have a pot to piss in right now in terms of high-end desktop graphics offerings. The 480 seems to be about equal to similarly priced ATI offerings and doesn't give them the edge in performance that they're accustomed to having.
I don't think that book needed even one movie.
What else do you expect them to do or talk about?
By the time IE8 came out and managed to catch up with Firefox, Opera, Safari, and all of the other browsers it was chasing, they had already moved on and further improved performance and standards compliance. IE9 will help bring MS closer to parity again.
Windows Mobile hasn't been worth talking about since the original iPhone came out and since then both Palm and Google have come out with phone platforms that also blow Microsoft's offerings out of the water.
They also really don't have an answer to the iPad or Android tablets currently shipping either. The slate computers Balmer talked about at CES are a completely different type of product, which hasn't taken off in the past and doesn't show great signs of doing it in the future. The Courier is their answer to the iPad and other tablet devices. They have nothing right now, but it doesn't hurt to talk about their future offerings.
Natal (And for that matter, Sony's Move.) are answers to the runaway success of the Wii. 360 and PS3 sales have been fairly similar, whereas the Wii has exploded and looks like it will easily go on to outsell the PS2 and become the best selling console of all time. Makes sense for Microsoft to chase after that.
Microsoft has nothing in those market spaces worth selling right now. They can build brand excitement by at least talking about their upcoming offerings and if nothing else delay some consumers from purchasing a competitors product. This is pretty much the strategy that worked so well for the company back in the 90's. At least now they're more likely to actually ship a product eventually. I think they've realized that if they keep hyping vaporware, they'll become even less relevant in the tech industry.
So if you were to 'wrong' me in some fashion I could stab you in the face as there's no more wrong? Just because someone else acts like a dick doesn't absolve you if you should choose to follow suit. Two wrongs make more wrong than just one wrong. Things can always get worse.
Would that also include banning the radio PSA reminding women to take folic acid during pregnancy (or when planning to become pregnant) to reduce the rate of birth defects? How about the ones urging teens not to commit suicide? Though not exactly drugs in the traditional sense, they do pertain to health and probably constitute a fifth class, but they may share some overlap with the other types of ads mentioned.
I also fail to see the issue with the first category of add. A lot of over-the-counter drugs are relatively harmless and are about as similar as different brands of shampoo. If three different cough medicine companies want to advertise their brand, that's entirely their business. Not all types of medicine are something that requires the expert opinion of a doctor. Sometimes common sense or a basic understanding of disease and medicine is enough to treat something like a common cough.
I share your sentiments regarding the effects of a lot of this advertisement, but not your solution. As tepples pointed out, advertisement can serve as a form of education for the public. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Personally I think MS should have completely removed the browser from the operating system and not used this system. If for no other reason than to comply with the regulation while giving the other browser manufacturers a big middle finger. They could have left it up to the hardware manufacturers to put a browser of their choice on it. Considering the amount of other crap that they usually put on PCs it probably won't be a big deal. Then MS could just pay them to include IE as the default.
I wouldn't say that your statement is true. It's possible for a defect introduced in the requirements or design stages of development to find its way into the code, but occasionally a programmer makes an error in a loop that leads to a problem; perhaps they meant to use greater than or equal to, but only used greater than.
What process error is that other than human error? There's almost no way to ensure that human error will ever occur regardless of what type of process is being used. You can argue that proper testing should catch the bug, but not all software has the luxury of complete testing, and once again its possible that due to human error a test case is left out. I suppose that you could require the software use a formal methods to get around that, but at that point time and cost are going to become a large issue.
You can't stomp out all of the bugs during development, especially if you have some non-trivial system. One of the major benefits of open source is that third parties can and do spot bugs of this nature and can correct them or notify the developers. It's a recognition of the fact that developers aren't perfect and neither is their code.
I've had similar experiences. I've actually purchased more music now that its easy to listen to an entire album through music services such as iLike or Lala. 30 second previews don't do it for me and I can't be bothered to hunt down crappy YouTube videos containing every song, if they even exist. I honestly don't even care to take the time to find a good torrent of the album any longer either. These streaming services made it terribly convenient for me to find new music and listen to different bands. If they take that away, I'm not even going to bother with their product.
They're correct in saying that they're not going to make any money from the streaming service directly, but it definitely helps to drive sales. The pretzel place at the mall doesn't make any money from the free samples they handout, but I bet they get a lot of people to buy a pretzel because they could get a free sample.
It seems to me that right about the time a government passes such a ridiculous law it's time for it to be overthrown.
The PS3 will be able to accommodate the spec as per Sony's announcement at CES last month. It's all a mater of when Sony pushes out the update for it. Apparently, the bigger problem is that you'll likely need a new TV from what I've been able to find. There are some models that are apparently capable of supporting it, but it seems fairly sparse.
As far as I know there isn't a lot of content out there to take advantage of either. Avatar is a nice example, but I can't think of anything else off of the top of my head that's mainstream or will be ready any time soon.
20 character passwords aren't hard if you use a passphrase. They're just as easy to memorize (if not easier) and vastly more secure. The only reason I don't use them for everything is that some online services put a limit on maximum password length. It's not really any harder to type in 20 characters than it is to type in 8 if you're good at typing. I understand that people are lazy, but good security doesn't need to be a string of 20 random characters, numbers, and symbols that are difficult to remember.
Actually both AMD and Intel have chips currently clocked over 3 GHz. Some of the newer Intel chips also have something they call Turbo Boost where the chip essentially overclocks itself if it's not using all of its cores. It also looks like AMD has a 3.6 GHz Phenom II X4 chip slated to be released soon. It would appear that the companies found solutions to whatever ceilings may have existed. VIA doesn't target the high-end of the market so I don't think that they're producing any chips that would run at those clock speeds.
I would tend to disagree at least for me. I've found that taking notes in class vastly helped learning the material. For whatever reason, I'm better at remembering things which I've physically written down on paper. There are some classes where note taking wasn't necessary, but for anything involving rote memorization and regurgitation of definitions, note taking was way better for me.
Personally, my favorite classes were the ones were tests weren't emphasized. The classes were focused on group discussion and exploring ideas and concepts. They weren't the types of classes where simply regurgitating information was useful. However not all classes can easily be taught like that. General chemistry is easier to teach to and grade for 500 students, most of whom aren't interested in the class, if it's focused heavily on regurgitating information and applying basic formulas.
We don't have a say in someone else's art if that other person doesn't want us to have one, but regardless we can be critical of it. If you happened to see it, feel free to critique it. A natural part of that may be suggesting how it could have been done better.
Also, how are we supposed to know whether or not we'll like something until we actually see it? We might have past experiences that can lead us to form an impression, but until we actually see it for ourselves our assumption is based on second hand opinions and our own preconceived notions. Sometimes those are horribly wrong. For example, based on the original trilogy, people would have good reason to think that they would like Episode 1. Many of those people found out that they thought wrong.
H.265 has an estimated release of 2012. We're just trading on MPEG LA standard for another, but they may offer free licensing of it for a while as well. Personally, I don't think they should be able to charge content providers squat. They can sell users an encoder and charge for decoders in products, but what anyone does after that shouldn't be any business of the MPEG LA.
I bitched about the ribbons and having everything moved around, but after getting used to it, I'd say that it's a better UI than the old office. I don't have to go digging through some sub-sub-menu to find what I want. Almost everything the average user will need is immediately available on the ribbon. I have some disagreements over which tab certain items are place on, but for the most part it's a fairly sane design.
Compared to all of the other problems that Word (Or any other MS Office application.) has, the ribbon is the least of my reasons to dislike the software. For whatever reason they make it an absolute pain in the ass to mix portrait and landscape pages together and have functional page numbering. Yeah, yeah, it's not a layout editor, but the majority of graduate students do their thesis in Word and it's a pain to support because it fails to 'just work' in so many ways.
Open Office would be a better product if they used the same UI. For people like you who prefer the old method or can't be bothered to learn the new ones they can provide the classic view. Everybody wins.
I think you're off the mark.
Apple doesn't have the same clout with publishers as they do with the music industry. Until their announcement, Apple wasn't selling books and there were already several established players in the market. The same wasn't true with the music industry where Apple was one of the first operators of a legal digital music store. When the dust settled, Apple was the dominant party and could dictate terms or at least put a lot of weight behind them. They were also more interested in selling high-margin iPods than selling low-margin music, but low cost music would definitely help to sell a lot more iPods than high cost music, even if that high-cost music would get them a better profit on music.
Apple isn't an established player in the e-book business so they're more at the mercy of the publishers than the other way around. It's likely that the publishers want to drive up their profits by selling at a higher price. Amazon doesn't want to do that. Their plan was to take a smaller profit for each individual sale, but to make up for that with a larger volume. They also wanted a larger share of the profits of their sale, which they adjusted to be more favorable to the publishers just before Apple's announcement. Apple just wants to get into the game at this point so they're more likely to agree to whatever terms allow them to get into the game, even if it puts them at a disadvantage in terms of price when compared to a competitor.
Amazon didn't want to cave in because it would lessen their dominance. Now that they've caved, it's likely that other publishers will be able to dictate the terms of the relationship instead of Amazon. That's not something that Amazon wanted to happen, but the alternative was not having a major publishers titles available. Until Apple came along, the publishers didn't have anyone else to use as leverage against Amazon. Now they do. Odds are Apple doesn't give two shits whether the books cost $9.99 or $14.99. They just want to have all of them in their store so that people have a compelling reason to purchase their hardware, which is where they make their money.
Until we get to a point where authors are directly selling to consumers, there is going to be some number of middlemen that are all self-interested. Their interests may take different shapes, but they all want to maximize their benefits compared to one and other. Apple isn't necessarily evil and Amazon isn't necessarily good, or vice versa. They just want different things, which are different from what the publishers want. It's also different from what consumers want. I don't think that this is the best solution (for consumers), but this is new ground and different companies need to test out different ideas in the market. In the end, the idea which fares best in the market will tend to win out. Usually this works out well for consumers, but it's not a guarantee.
The only other comic that I enjoyed as much as Calvin and Hobbes was The Far Side. Both were wildly imaginative and highly creative. They transformed what would have otherwise been a boring comic section into something fascinating. I have the complete works of both on my bookshelf and would highly recommend them to anyone. If you want to inspire a sense of wonder, curiosity, and beauty in a child, I can't think of anything better than those two comics.