Apple had $2 billion in the bank and was worth many billions of dollars when Microsoft paid for $150 million in stock.
$2,000,000,000 vs $150,000,000.
Apple didn't need Microsoft's money, which it exchanged for stock worth more than Microsoft paid, but rather a vote of confidence in the market, and a public committment that Microsoft wouldn't continually use the threat of dropping Office for Mac as a constant weapon against Apple. That threat no longer exists.
Microsoft sold its Apple stock at a profit, but not nearly the profit it would have made had it held it until now.
So no, Microsoft doesn't own any significant part of Apple, it just makes a lot of money developing Mac software.
I am sure there are lots of examples we'll never hear about, but can you provide any known examples of this?
Obviously Apple has to protect its trademarks and copyright, and uses patents to protect its inventions, just like every other company, but when I tried to find recent examples of Apple killing viable products with nonsense patents (which was the premise of the press release issued about the Billion Dollar Patent), I couldn't find any.
Clearly, Apple could have used iPod patents to attack Creative first and finish off the Zen proactively, but the point I made was that doing so isn't in the interests of companies that are able to sell. It's companies who have been broadsided or become irrelevant who sue over patents offensively. That's why I included the example of Apple's look and feel lawsuit, and remarked about how Apple could have benefitted from their position rather than squandering it with drawn out litigation.
I think that experience clarified reality for Apple and other companies who watched and learned. Patent suit are generally used by have-nots. I also brought up Linux because it faces credible threats from Microsoft, who'd prefer Linux not exist. As Linux gains ground, Microsoft will be in a have-not position and will likely pull out its patents in order to disrupt things. Without patents of its own, Linux defenders would be screwed.
Dell's prices are often absurdly low in specific areas. It's called a loss leader. If you have a business relationship will Dell, they will commonly offer you free laser printers just to get your company to standardize on buying other stuff from them, including, of course, toner carts.
So you're picking out a Dell loss leader, particularly in an area of highly visible, extreme price sensationalism, in exchange for comparing real PC prices.
In reality, Dell PC systems are very similar to Apple's pricing, because both use the same components. Dell, like most PC makers, often also targets the low end with older technology in its cheapest machines, something Apple doesn't do (because it would canabalize the finite sales of the Mac market). So Dell offers a wider range, something that is an advantage for a lot of its customers. That doesn't make their mainstream and higher end PC's cost less however. In fact, on the high end, the Apple Mac Pro currently costs signficantly less.
Apple sells its high end 30" displays as a profitable product accessory, while Dell chooses to sell its big displays at razor thin margins. Good for them! Both PC and Mac users can buy Dell's displays, which are not only pretty much technically identical, but often also offer analog circuits so they can be used like a TV as well. The only major difference is that Dell's published display tech specs are wildly optimistic, while Apple's are just plain accurate.
Hi - Thanks for the A. I described patent law and Apple's disasterous pit of litigation in 1988-1994 to answer the claim that Apple will, as the patent attorney says, convert from a hardware company to a patent lawsuit machine.
The www.roughlydrafteded.com site is censored by Digg, not because stories are ranked poorly, but because the system automatically bars URL submissions from sites that have had a given number of submitted articles buried.
The anonymous poster of your link (ba01162.googlepages) is "Lackawack," a Digg user who announced he would set up a "vigalante army" of fake accounts on Digg and take down any articles that had been submitted from RoughlyDrafted. That was in response to unflattering reviews and general taunting of the Zune.
That resulted in Lackawack getting his user banned on Digg, but he immediately resurfaced as lackawack2 and started buring old articles that had been on the front page. He also attacked everyone digging any RDM articles. He started keeping a McCarthy list of "suspicious Digg users" who digg RDM articles, which is the page you advertise in your post.
Of course, if any of those users were fake, lackawack2 could have just submitted them to Digg and the site would ban them. Since he couldn't do that, he just raised a FUD screen of "sounds suspicious!!!" and kept working to bury old stories until enough articles on Digg had been sequentially banned so that Digg blocked further submissions.
That mechanism is designed to prevent domains from dumping a bunch of junk into Digg, but it is entirely worthless, as plenty of spam anonyblog domains caputure Digg's front page. All the "top 10 lists of stuff you already know" that link to anonymous googlepages full of Adsense, or domains all run by the same group of pay for say astroturfers (some of which have been outted on RDM) happily consume much of Digg's bandwidth.
The thing is, if you need to repress someone else's speech with your own noise, you're probably lying. I try to contribute original, worthwhile writing on subjects to balance the sensationalist and often poorly thought out press release regurgiations that are much easier and profitable to do. If you don't like my stuff, you can ignore it, but presenting a liar's troll campaign as a credable attack is just lame.
The vast majority of comments on RDM articles on Digg were very positive. It is only the miniority of anonymous trolls there who want to censor opinions that fail to hail everythign from Microsoft with effusive kowtowing. Digg just has systems in place that allows that type of abuse. That's making it increasingly less interesting to use Digg.
Are there any titles that make use of the potential for using the DS as an input/controller for the Wii yet (or any planned)? I've seen Nintendo chat up the potential, but haven't seen any actual examples of titles that use the DS as a microphone/drawing tablet/distributed console accessory yet.
Remember that in "HD vs not HD," resolution isn't the only factor in video quality.
Anyone can release a good DVD or a really bad DVD of the same content. It's not a difference of resolution, but in compression and other factors. Cable and satellite feeds that are Standard Def are commonly compressed to the point of being blocky, just so they can force as many channels as possible through the pipe. They might be the same nominal resolution as DVD, but that doesn't mean they deliver the same (or the potential) video quality of that resolution.
HD obviously has higher potential quality, but a poorly mastered Blu-ray could easily be no better than DVD; consider the source quality and the technical expertise dedicated to it (shovelware) as potential factors.
Since broadcast is heavily compressed, the low-end of Standard Def programming can approach VHS quality. Since those same opperators want to sell HD, they can make the difference look far more dramatically different by providing decent HD and poor SD feeds. Conversely, until there is a huge demand for BR or HD-DVD, they won't necessarily offer some huge leap in quality over DVD, particularly since the majority of TV watchers don't have high end HD capacity anyway.
The market also has a reputation for settling on "good enough." Standards fixated on overshooting good enough have a long history of going nowhere.
BetaMax was technically and mechanically superior in certain ways to VHS. LaserDisc was clearly and obviously superior to VHS. CD offered outstandingly superior sound over cassette tape, but didn't catch on for many years (82-89) SACD, DVD audio, and DAT offered various advantages that were overwhelmed by excessive DRM and a general disinterest in the high end.
I find it hard to believe that Nike+Apple didn't pay for this research.
Shoe tracking surveillance is a serious threat to runners everywhere. The spooks will know how many times your shoes hit the ground without actaully having to run around behind you counting. Clearly, this is an attempt by Apple and Nike to track perhaps thousands of individuals who are a) athletes b) unaware that Nike+ is a wireless system and c) concerned that other people will have access to the information they upload to the web.
What's next from Apple, a way to publically advertise personal details through web pages (say, iWeb)? How many people will unwittingly publish their social security number, mother's maden name, and perhaps their secret affinity for a specific type of cheese, creating clear and obvious vulnerabilities from the phishing scammers and spooks out to poison them. THE WEB IS PUBLICLY AVAILABLE PEOPLE!!!
Don't say you haven't been warned. When the machines rise, the first to go will be hot chicks wearing tight Nike clothes and cheese eaters. Oh the humanity.
"Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams recently blogged that America needs an atheist and rational thinker for president, and he's picked Bill Gates. The idea has become a popular subject in technical circles, which are commonly irreligious and tend to be more socially liberal. But as they say: be careful what you wish for, you might get it."
[...]
"not only is Gates an unproven leader, anti-consumer rights, anti-open software, and anti-competition, but he's also swept up in dirty politics already, a right-wing leaning pal of the existing establishment and a client to the ultra conservative religious right wing machine that his supposed atheism is intended to counter."
If they did that, the public would know what a Zune is.
By continuing to advertise the iPod, its customers will be thinking about iPods instead of something from Microsoft.
Remember that your mom probably doesn't even know what a Zune is.
The Secret Failures of Microsoft The big corporations partering with Microsoft suggest that the company knows what it's doing, but real the secret is that Microsoft hasn't ever earned significant profits in the consumer hardware business. Here's why DRM is the least of the Zune's worries!
Well that was obviously Microsoft's plan: promise the Zune profits it doesn't yet have to Universal to in order to create a tax on all players, a tax that would be most expensive for the only company selling them: Apple. Microsoft can't compete on a level playing field.
Of course, today the playing field isn't tilting toward Microsoft; it has only manged to sell enough Zunes to eat into PlaysForSure players in week 1; it has since dropped off the charts.
Anyone who thinks Universal can pull its content out of the iTMS and be the victor is smoking crack. The iTunes Store isn't selling everyone their music; its only selling to a small segment regularly. Everyone else is buying CDs or using the iPod to listen to their own music. The iPod has no lock with iTunes Music, you can fill it any way you like.
The labels somehow think that consumers should repurchase their entire music library in electronic form, and when PlaysForSure stores and the iTunes Store didn't, they were puzzled. What is happening is that a small minority of people are paying for music in the iTunes Store, far more than are using any other online system (apart from piracy of course).
If Universal pulls out of the only system that works, it will be left to watch its sales slow down right when online sales through iTunes are the only growing market left for commercial music.
Apple can't afford to be too arrogant, but neither can Universal. Right now, Apple is handing Universal the vast majority of the profits it collects from iTunes sales. If Universal poisons the deal, they're only screwing themselves. The iPod and iTunes aren't going away, and the Zune isn't going to funnel any money to Universal at all.
In the big picture, Universal is desperate for sales, and iTunes is the only system offering something that works. Apple is building that into a movie business, too.
Steve Jobs has connections in music, movies, and TV - how long before Apple begins commissioning original programming? Here's a look at the music, movie and TV business, and why Apple's involvement in each is far larger than the mainstream media seems to understand.
I drew a parallel between Apple and Microsoft; as you point out, Microsoft also had a parallel set of events between Cairo (announced 1991, not really devliered in 1997...) and Longhorn (announced 2001 not really delivered in 2007..).
Analogies are not absolute, they just provide useful comparisons.
Re:The War of the News & Products
on
The Zune Cometh
·
· Score: 1
Haydur Agha, you undermine your own credibility by posting a smear you know is inaccurate.
Apple was never described as having more market share that they do. Instead, the article in question Market Share Myth: Nailed! pointed out that:
Apple holds a 23% second place share of the US education market
Apple has a 15.2% leading share of the European education market
Apple's share of the US retail PC market is around 6.6%
Apple's share of the entire US PC market is at 4.6%
The article also pointed out that Apple's percentage hides the fact that the company makes the whole widget, while Dell and HP have to share their profits with Microsoft.
It's the Microsoft enthusiasts who like to assign the company 98% of the global market, and at the same time give HP and Dell ~30%.
Is there 130% to hand out, Haydur Agha?
For somebody running a website with the banner: "Steve Jobs' a greedy bastard. Bill Gates is the man!" You sure are full of facts, they're just all bullshit and lies. So does Microsoft pay you to astroturf, or are you just sucking up to the machine for free?
Oh but you forget the decade of slack. Apple in *1995* was making craploads of money, had lots of cash in the bank, and was doodling around with profitless new hardware projects such as the Newton, a TV set top box, hardware licensing and the Pippin console. Win95 didn't come out until the final days of the year, and everyone at Apple was joking about how Win95 was Mac '89.
Today, Microsoft is similarly loaded, and Windows is under fundamental attack from POSIX, both with Mac OS X on the desktop and Linux on the server. Microsoft similarly has been doodling around inneffectually with a series of failures: Xbox barely outsold the GameCube, the Xbox 360 couldn't even outsell the 5 year old PlayStation 2 this last year (6 million vs 11 million). Everything else, from MSN TV to WinCE PDAs (dead market with no growth) and smartphones (Microsoft has 5% of that market with no hope of gaining against Symbian and Linux) to Tablet PCs and Oragami can't be sold at any price.
Microsoft is on deathwatch, and you're complaining that Apple is making record profits on the iPod, a product Microsoft's PlaysForSure couldn't touch in the last five years? Apple sold 60 million iPods, and that's bad? It's all a marketing ruse? Why can't Microsoft spin marketing? Why can't they deliver a consumer electronics product anyone wants? The Zune is a huge joke. $36 Billion should buy something, right?
Is Microsoft paying you to shill, or are you supporting a failed dinosaur--working to poke the world in the eye--on your on time, just for fun?
"In an almost spooky series of events, Microsoft has shadowed Apple's brush with death, making the exact same set of moves exactly ten years after Apple:
In the mid 90s, Microsoft rapidly built upon its past success with MS-DOS to establish Windows as a vast empire...just as Apple used the success of the Apple II as a stepping stone to launch the Mac in the mid 80s.
From 1995 to 2001, Microsoft rapidly delivered advancements to its desktop Windows product...just as Apple rapidly advanced the Mac System Software from 1985-1991.
In 2001, Microsoft began announcing technologies that would be released as part of Longhorn and later Blackcomb...just as Apple described new technologies intended for Copland and Gershwin a decade prior.
From 2002-2006, Microsoft dropped features, changed plans, and started over several times in protracted efforts to ship Longhorn...just as Apple had fumbled around with Copland ten years earlier.
By 2006, it was obvious that Microsoft's Longhorn was not going to live up to the hype, and would really be just a refresh of the existing Windows XP...just as Copland had been gutted in 1996 and its salvaged remains delivered as the optimistically named Mac OS 8.
Microsoft outed Blackcomb as vaporware...just as Apple admitted that Gershwin had never been anything but a list of deferred goals ten years earlier.
What's Next?
The only difference between Apple and Microsoft is that today, in the final days of 2006, there is no equivalent to a 1996 NeXT waiting in the wings to swoop down and fix Microsoft's mess. Leopard vs Vista 5: Development Challenges
As an early critic of the Zune, RoughlyDrafted caught a lot of flack, but it's delicious to watch Microsoft stumbling, not just because its a big company, but because the Zune was such a horrible, arrogant product. It was simply insulting that people were expected run to order Zune KoolAid. The company is so out of touch with reality that it thinks people will be giddy to pay hundreds of dollars for Vista, which is years late and underdelivering on its promises. Who is excited about Vista again? Who is excited about buying overpriced products from Microsoft?
Even the Xbox 360 is hyped out of control. It barely sold 7 million units in a year--it was actually outsold by the five year old PlayStation 2, which sold 11 million units in the same time period.
The Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii both jumped into the game console ring to compete against Microsoft's Xbox 360. Who is going to win? A half decade ago, many analysts projected a close race between the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube, but they were wrong. Here's how things turned out, and what's changed.
Five primary factors will determine the winner in the new generation of consoles. Here 's a look at the obvious differentiators between Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, and Nintento's Wii, and how each company plays out a unique strategy in the bid to sell the most consoles
You are forgetting that NeXTSTEP has improved at Apple. It was at v 4 when Apple bought NeXT in the final days of 1996.
Rhapsody, 10.0, 10.1 = v 5 10.2 = v 6 10.3 = v 7 10.4 Tiger = v 8
10.5 Leopard = v 9
Mac OS X gets the ten from its legacy of Mac versions leading up to it, but Apple uses the NeXTSTEP version numbering system to version Darwin, the core OS. The major version of ten indicates the version of the new platform (i.e. Tiger's Darwin is v 8, and todays' 10.4.8 is Darwin 8.8).
So when you see the version number system for Mac OS X, every number has meaning:
Tiger 10.4.8=
10th generation of Mac system software 4th major revision of this generation's platform, and the n revision of NeXTSTEP + 4 = 8th generation of NeXT's NS based platform. 8th minor revision.
I thought I would hate the glossy screens, but after working with a lot of MacBooks at work (I've been buying them to replace out Dell laptops to run Windows!) I found that I REALLY like the glossy screen.
I traded in my MBP for a glossy one and love it. It is so vividly sharp, and the glare I imagined would be a problem has never bothered me -- I've never even noticed it as a problem in actual use.
But the glossy screen is so sharp and high contrast that I can't use it with to a standard matte finish display -- other displays pale in comparison. I even gave up using an external 30" display because the flat matte screen looks so dull compared to the laptop display.
Thanks for calling me a young kid. I've been feeling like an old man for a while now, so that makes me smile.
I've used Macs since 1984 (although I was just drawing pictures then), and before that I played on the Vic20, Apple II's, the ST, the Amiga, an Apple IIGS.
I've managed million dolllar IT budgets for Microsoft enraptured dotcoms as they went under, and I followed NeXT while they whimpered out into irrelevance.
I was a developer through the move to Rhapsody and Mac OS X, and I'm a bit happy to see somebody with vision and a pulse injecting a challenge into the waters of IT.
Apple has also pushed POSIX (the same Linux/UNIX platform) into the mainstream, and helped Linux to challenge the NT monoculture.
So fogive me if I bubble enthusiastically about seeing a product I like be popularized by a fascinating company with interesting personalities and class and charm.
Also, if you are going to blow stink about my "inaccuracies," please lay them out instead of just making unfounded bullshit claims. I think you really are just bitter because you have nothing really interesting to say.
And for what its worth, I've written well over a hundred articles this year, and three have been posted to Slashdot in my lifetime. EVER. THREE EVER. So don't rain on my parade just because you have nothing to contribute to the world but your worthless trolling.
I understand that vendor lock in = vendor + lock in.
What I was pointing out is that the glorious idea of music that lasts forever for generations by being enshrined in the perfect medium is simply a fallacy. Every decade of the previous several generations has music locked up in a format that is basically obsolete.
Quick, find an 8-track, I want to listen to the Carpenters. Oh fuck it, I'll save time and effort downloading it from iTunes for $0.99.
You can talk about multiple vendors of record players, but realistically, its easier to run Amiga software today than it is to find a record player and use it to put your LP music on your iPod. Ten years ago, proprietary Amiga software was impossible to run on a PC; now it can be run easily in some spare cycles of an emulator. No barrier.
Ten years from now, Fairplay will be no larger barrier to playback than having your music in MP3 or Ogg. In fact, I predict it will be far easier to playback 2006's pop music, bought from iTunes, than it will be to figure out how to find a way to play back your perfectly ripped Ogg files. And very possibly, it will be tough to find a working CD player.
The attacks on the CD were unreasonable and prevented normal and fair use. The great potential of technologies like DAT and MD were totally squandered by paranoid media companies who thought they could contain reality under a draconian license. The CD-ROM blew away everything they tried to accomplish, just as P2P file sharing did a few years later, and just as Fairplay did to WMA.
I believe Fairplay is fair. Try to destroy decoy DRM it at your own peril. There is no real mainstream market possible in music and movies that can be easily distributed at no cost and with infinite restrictions. P2P users have proven that. Give me 30 GB of MP3 music and I'll hapilly enjoy it all without thinking about the artists who wrote and performed it. Am I bad? Probably. Fairplay means I'll pay for music, just as the clerk at 7-11 emsures I pay for my candy bars, and just like the inventory tags prevent me from shoplifting from big conglomerate retail corporations.
Anyone who thinks DRM can only be bad is just a simple person trying to live in a much simpler world than we actually do.
- because in the 70s, our songs weren't locked into 8-tracks and LPs
- because in the 80s, our songs weren't locked into cassettes (and taping records introduced no sound quality loss)
- because in the 90s, our songs weren't locked into CDs (and recording CDs to tape introduced no sound quality loss)
- because since the CD, music hasn't come under attack from the draconian DRM forced into DAT, MiniDisc, DVD-Audio, WMA and ATRAC.
Please stop repeating the bullshit that iTunes feather-weight DRM is breaking your back. You are either an industry shill pining for real DRM, or a clueless communist who demands that the world entertain them for free. Either way, you're wasting valuable oxygen just to spew out the same old myths repeatedly.
The RIAA labels sign artists to weighted contracts that ensure the majority will get very little, but the minority will be rocketed to stardom, just like pro athletes. They run a business designed to profit from promoting artists. Artists who don't want to gamble their future on stardom can sign with CD Baby or other systems that are more communal but offer less exposure and little chance at stardom. Different choices.
allofmp3 is run by russian mafia thugs who sell music they haven't licensed. No money goes to any artists, ever. Anyone "using" allofmp3 is throwing money away, since they could just as well be pirating music off a warez site or torrent for free. Its like paying SCO for a Linux license instead of RedHat, because "RedHat doens't contribute all its revenues to the "developers" and wastes all kinds of money on overhead and operations". Complete bullshit idiocy by raving stupid communists who don't know how things work, balanced by advice to do something pointed retarded in a completely fucked up and backward way that makes no sense.
It belongs in the same box with the diatribes about how DRM is a single entity that can only be bad. Simple minded rhetoric for simple minded people, who feel smart repeating the same tired crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple had $2 billion in the bank and was worth many billions of dollars when Microsoft paid for $150 million in stock.
$2,000,000,000 vs $150,000,000.
Apple didn't need Microsoft's money, which it exchanged for stock worth more than Microsoft paid, but rather a vote of confidence in the market, and a public committment that Microsoft wouldn't continually use the threat of dropping Office for Mac as a constant weapon against Apple. That threat no longer exists.
Microsoft sold its Apple stock at a profit, but not nearly the profit it would have made had it held it until now.
So no, Microsoft doesn't own any significant part of Apple, it just makes a lot of money developing Mac software.
--
The Secrets of Pink, Taligent and Copland
I am sure there are lots of examples we'll never hear about, but can you provide any known examples of this?
Obviously Apple has to protect its trademarks and copyright, and uses patents to protect its inventions, just like every other company, but when I tried to find recent examples of Apple killing viable products with nonsense patents (which was the premise of the press release issued about the Billion Dollar Patent), I couldn't find any.
Clearly, Apple could have used iPod patents to attack Creative first and finish off the Zen proactively, but the point I made was that doing so isn't in the interests of companies that are able to sell. It's companies who have been broadsided or become irrelevant who sue over patents offensively. That's why I included the example of Apple's look and feel lawsuit, and remarked about how Apple could have benefitted from their position rather than squandering it with drawn out litigation.
I think that experience clarified reality for Apple and other companies who watched and learned. Patent suit are generally used by have-nots. I also brought up Linux because it faces credible threats from Microsoft, who'd prefer Linux not exist. As Linux gains ground, Microsoft will be in a have-not position and will likely pull out its patents in order to disrupt things. Without patents of its own, Linux defenders would be screwed.
--
PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360 vs. Nintendo Wii
Dell's prices are often absurdly low in specific areas. It's called a loss leader. If you have a business relationship will Dell, they will commonly offer you free laser printers just to get your company to standardize on buying other stuff from them, including, of course, toner carts.
So you're picking out a Dell loss leader, particularly in an area of highly visible, extreme price sensationalism, in exchange for comparing real PC prices.
In reality, Dell PC systems are very similar to Apple's pricing, because both use the same components. Dell, like most PC makers, often also targets the low end with older technology in its cheapest machines, something Apple doesn't do (because it would canabalize the finite sales of the Mac market). So Dell offers a wider range, something that is an advantage for a lot of its customers. That doesn't make their mainstream and higher end PC's cost less however. In fact, on the high end, the Apple Mac Pro currently costs signficantly less.
Apple sells its high end 30" displays as a profitable product accessory, while Dell chooses to sell its big displays at razor thin margins. Good for them! Both PC and Mac users can buy Dell's displays, which are not only pretty much technically identical, but often also offer analog circuits so they can be used like a TV as well. The only major difference is that Dell's published display tech specs are wildly optimistic, while Apple's are just plain accurate.
That has nothing to do with the price difference between Macs and PCs, and repeating The Myth of Apple's Expensive Macintoshes doesn't make it a truth.
Of course, the price of hardware is pretty much negligable in IT compared to the costs of support and software.
Hi - Thanks for the A. I described patent law and Apple's disasterous pit of litigation in 1988-1994 to answer the claim that Apple will, as the patent attorney says, convert from a hardware company to a patent lawsuit machine.
The www.roughlydrafteded.com site is censored by Digg, not because stories are ranked poorly, but because the system automatically bars URL submissions from sites that have had a given number of submitted articles buried.
The anonymous poster of your link (ba01162.googlepages) is "Lackawack," a Digg user who announced he would set up a "vigalante army" of fake accounts on Digg and take down any articles that had been submitted from RoughlyDrafted. That was in response to unflattering reviews and general taunting of the Zune.
That resulted in Lackawack getting his user banned on Digg, but he immediately resurfaced as lackawack2 and started buring old articles that had been on the front page. He also attacked everyone digging any RDM articles. He started keeping a McCarthy list of "suspicious Digg users" who digg RDM articles, which is the page you advertise in your post.
Of course, if any of those users were fake, lackawack2 could have just submitted them to Digg and the site would ban them. Since he couldn't do that, he just raised a FUD screen of "sounds suspicious!!!" and kept working to bury old stories until enough articles on Digg had been sequentially banned so that Digg blocked further submissions.
That mechanism is designed to prevent domains from dumping a bunch of junk into Digg, but it is entirely worthless, as plenty of spam anonyblog domains caputure Digg's front page. All the "top 10 lists of stuff you already know" that link to anonymous googlepages full of Adsense, or domains all run by the same group of pay for say astroturfers (some of which have been outted on RDM) happily consume much of Digg's bandwidth.
The thing is, if you need to repress someone else's speech with your own noise, you're probably lying. I try to contribute original, worthwhile writing on subjects to balance the sensationalist and often poorly thought out press release regurgiations that are much easier and profitable to do. If you don't like my stuff, you can ignore it, but presenting a liar's troll campaign as a credable attack is just lame.
The vast majority of comments on RDM articles on Digg were very positive. It is only the miniority of anonymous trolls there who want to censor opinions that fail to hail everythign from Microsoft with effusive kowtowing. Digg just has systems in place that allows that type of abuse. That's making it increasingly less interesting to use Digg.
NewsFactor looks interesting.
Are there any titles that make use of the potential for using the DS as an input/controller for the Wii yet (or any planned)? I've seen Nintendo chat up the potential, but haven't seen any actual examples of titles that use the DS as a microphone/drawing tablet/distributed console accessory yet.
PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360 vs. Nintendo Wii
5 Success Factors for Next Generation Game Consoles
Remember that in "HD vs not HD," resolution isn't the only factor in video quality.
Anyone can release a good DVD or a really bad DVD of the same content. It's not a difference of resolution, but in compression and other factors. Cable and satellite feeds that are Standard Def are commonly compressed to the point of being blocky, just so they can force as many channels as possible through the pipe. They might be the same nominal resolution as DVD, but that doesn't mean they deliver the same (or the potential) video quality of that resolution.
HD obviously has higher potential quality, but a poorly mastered Blu-ray could easily be no better than DVD; consider the source quality and the technical expertise dedicated to it (shovelware) as potential factors.
Since broadcast is heavily compressed, the low-end of Standard Def programming can approach VHS quality. Since those same opperators want to sell HD, they can make the difference look far more dramatically different by providing decent HD and poor SD feeds. Conversely, until there is a huge demand for BR or HD-DVD, they won't necessarily offer some huge leap in quality over DVD, particularly since the majority of TV watchers don't have high end HD capacity anyway.
The market also has a reputation for settling on "good enough." Standards fixated on overshooting good enough have a long history of going nowhere.
BetaMax was technically and mechanically superior in certain ways to VHS.
LaserDisc was clearly and obviously superior to VHS.
CD offered outstandingly superior sound over cassette tape, but didn't catch on for many years (82-89)
SACD, DVD audio, and DAT offered various advantages that were overwhelmed by excessive DRM and a general disinterest in the high end.
The Danger of DRM
5 Success Factors for Next Generation Game Consoles
iPod vs Zune: A Buyer's Guide
I find it hard to believe that Nike+Apple didn't pay for this research.
Shoe tracking surveillance is a serious threat to runners everywhere. The spooks will know how many times your shoes hit the ground without actaully having to run around behind you counting. Clearly, this is an attempt by Apple and Nike to track perhaps thousands of individuals who are a) athletes b) unaware that Nike+ is a wireless system and c) concerned that other people will have access to the information they upload to the web.
What's next from Apple, a way to publically advertise personal details through web pages (say, iWeb)? How many people will unwittingly publish their social security number, mother's maden name, and perhaps their secret affinity for a specific type of cheese, creating clear and obvious vulnerabilities from the phishing scammers and spooks out to poison them. THE WEB IS PUBLICLY AVAILABLE PEOPLE!!!
Don't say you haven't been warned. When the machines rise, the first to go will be hot chicks wearing tight Nike clothes and cheese eaters. Oh the humanity.
iPod vs Zune: Microsoft's Slippery Astroturf
Bill Gates for President? No Thanks.
The worst response to a passive terrorist threat is to publicize it - by putting it on Slashdot.
Bill Gates for President? No Thanks.
"Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams recently blogged that America needs an atheist and rational thinker for president, and he's picked Bill Gates. The idea has become a popular subject in technical circles, which are commonly irreligious and tend to be more socially liberal. But as they say: be careful what you wish for, you might get it."
[...]
"not only is Gates an unproven leader, anti-consumer rights, anti-open software, and anti-competition, but he's also swept up in dirty politics already, a right-wing leaning pal of the existing establishment and a client to the ultra conservative religious right wing machine that his supposed atheism is intended to counter."
If they did that, the public would know what a Zune is.
By continuing to advertise the iPod, its customers will be thinking about iPods instead of something from Microsoft.
Remember that your mom probably doesn't even know what a Zune is.
The Secret Failures of Microsoft
The big corporations partering with Microsoft suggest that the company knows what it's doing, but real the secret is that Microsoft hasn't ever earned significant profits in the consumer hardware business. Here's why DRM is the least of the Zune's worries!
Well that was obviously Microsoft's plan: promise the Zune profits it doesn't yet have to Universal to in order to create a tax on all players, a tax that would be most expensive for the only company selling them: Apple. Microsoft can't compete on a level playing field.
Of course, today the playing field isn't tilting toward Microsoft; it has only manged to sell enough Zunes to eat into PlaysForSure players in week 1; it has since dropped off the charts.
Anyone who thinks Universal can pull its content out of the iTMS and be the victor is smoking crack. The iTunes Store isn't selling everyone their music; its only selling to a small segment regularly. Everyone else is buying CDs or using the iPod to listen to their own music. The iPod has no lock with iTunes Music, you can fill it any way you like.
The labels somehow think that consumers should repurchase their entire music library in electronic form, and when PlaysForSure stores and the iTunes Store didn't, they were puzzled. What is happening is that a small minority of people are paying for music in the iTunes Store, far more than are using any other online system (apart from piracy of course).
If Universal pulls out of the only system that works, it will be left to watch its sales slow down right when online sales through iTunes are the only growing market left for commercial music.
Apple can't afford to be too arrogant, but neither can Universal. Right now, Apple is handing Universal the vast majority of the profits it collects from iTunes sales. If Universal poisons the deal, they're only screwing themselves. The iPod and iTunes aren't going away, and the Zune isn't going to funnel any money to Universal at all.
In the big picture, Universal is desperate for sales, and iTunes is the only system offering something that works. Apple is building that into a movie business, too.
How Original Content Will Change Entertainment
Steve Jobs has connections in music, movies, and TV - how long before Apple begins commissioning original programming? Here's a look at the music, movie and TV business, and why Apple's involvement in each is far larger than the mainstream media seems to understand.
Doesn't 1994 fit into the mid-90s?
I drew a parallel between Apple and Microsoft; as you point out, Microsoft also had a parallel set of events between Cairo (announced 1991, not really devliered in 1997...) and Longhorn (announced 2001 not really delivered in 2007..).
Analogies are not absolute, they just provide useful comparisons.
Apple was never described as having more market share that they do. Instead, the article in question Market Share Myth: Nailed! pointed out that:
The article also pointed out that Apple's percentage hides the fact that the company makes the whole widget, while Dell and HP have to share their profits with Microsoft.
It's the Microsoft enthusiasts who like to assign the company 98% of the global market, and at the same time give HP and Dell ~30%.
Is there 130% to hand out, Haydur Agha?
For somebody running a website with the banner: "Steve Jobs' a greedy bastard. Bill Gates is the man!" You sure are full of facts, they're just all bullshit and lies. So does Microsoft pay you to astroturf, or are you just sucking up to the machine for free?
Today, Microsoft is similarly loaded, and Windows is under fundamental attack from POSIX, both with Mac OS X on the desktop and Linux on the server. Microsoft similarly has been doodling around inneffectually with a series of failures: Xbox barely outsold the GameCube, the Xbox 360 couldn't even outsell the 5 year old PlayStation 2 this last year (6 million vs 11 million). Everything else, from MSN TV to WinCE PDAs (dead market with no growth) and smartphones (Microsoft has 5% of that market with no hope of gaining against Symbian and Linux) to Tablet PCs and Oragami can't be sold at any price.
Microsoft is on deathwatch, and you're complaining that Apple is making record profits on the iPod, a product Microsoft's PlaysForSure couldn't touch in the last five years? Apple sold 60 million iPods, and that's bad? It's all a marketing ruse? Why can't Microsoft spin marketing? Why can't they deliver a consumer electronics product anyone wants? The Zune is a huge joke. $36 Billion should buy something, right?
Is Microsoft paying you to shill, or are you supporting a failed dinosaur--working to poke the world in the eye--on your on time, just for fun?
Why Microsoft Can't Compete With iTunes
Apple and Microsoft in Platform Crisis: The Tentacles of Legacy
"In an almost spooky series of events, Microsoft has shadowed Apple's brush with death, making the exact same set of moves exactly ten years after Apple:
- In the mid 90s, Microsoft rapidly built upon its past success with MS-DOS to establish Windows as a vast empire
...just as Apple used the success of the Apple II as a stepping stone to launch the Mac in the mid 80s.
- From 1995 to 2001, Microsoft rapidly delivered advancements to its desktop Windows product
...just as Apple rapidly advanced the Mac System Software from 1985-1991.
- In 2001, Microsoft began announcing technologies that would be released as part of Longhorn and later Blackcomb
...just as Apple described new technologies intended for Copland and Gershwin a decade prior.
- From 2002-2006, Microsoft dropped features, changed plans, and started over several times in protracted efforts to ship Longhorn
...just as Apple had fumbled around with Copland ten years earlier.
- By 2006, it was obvious that Microsoft's Longhorn was not going to live up to the hype, and would really be just a refresh of the existing Windows XP
...just as Copland had been gutted in 1996 and its salvaged remains delivered as the optimistically named Mac OS 8.
- Microsoft outed Blackcomb as vaporware
...just as Apple admitted that Gershwin had never been anything but a list of deferred goals ten years earlier.
What's Next? The only difference between Apple and Microsoft is that today, in the final days of 2006, there is no equivalent to a 1996 NeXT waiting in the wings to swoop down and fix Microsoft's mess. Leopard vs Vista 5: Development ChallengesWin95 offered a 'good enough' GUI and API advantages, while the Mac's nicer looks couldn't make up for its architectural problems.
The Secrets of Pink, Taligent and Copland
Today however, the tables are turned. Mac OS X offers development advantages and looks nicer both.
Apple's Mac OS X Leopard and Microsoft's Vista 5: Development Challenges
Even the Xbox 360 is hyped out of control. It barely sold 7 million units in a year--it was actually outsold by the five year old PlayStation 2, which sold 11 million units in the same time period.
Microsoft is fooling itself; it's time for the company to get real and start competing, because its empire is declining. Remember that Apple was also making craploads of cash deep into the late Sculley Era, when it was obvious that the company was about to crash. Microsoft has shadowed Apple's brush with death, making the exact same set of moves exactly ten years after Apple.
10 Ways Microsoft can Salvage their iPod Killer
10 iPod vs Zune Myths
10 More Myths of Zune Why Microsoft Can't Compete With iTunes
Strike 3: Why Zune will Bomb this Winter
The Two Faced Monster Inside Zune
PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360 vs. Nintendo Wii
The Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii both jumped into the game console ring to compete against Microsoft's Xbox 360. Who is going to win? A half decade ago, many analysts projected a close race between the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube, but they were wrong. Here's how things turned out, and what's changed.
5 Success Factors for Next Generation Game Consoles
Five primary factors will determine the winner in the new generation of consoles. Here 's a look at the obvious differentiators between Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, and Nintento's Wii, and how each company plays out a unique strategy in the bid to sell the most consoles
Windows XP Home
Windows XP Media Center
Windows XP Pro
and perhaps other versions of Windows XP.
10 Ways Microsoft can Salvage their iPod Killer
10 iPod vs Zune Myths
Why Microsoft Can't Compete With iTunes
Strike 3: Why Zune will Bomb this Winter
The Two Faced Monster Inside Zune
You are forgetting that NeXTSTEP has improved at Apple. It was at v 4 when Apple bought NeXT in the final days of 1996.
Rhapsody, 10.0, 10.1 = v 5
10.2 = v 6
10.3 = v 7
10.4 Tiger = v 8
10.5 Leopard = v 9
Mac OS X gets the ten from its legacy of Mac versions leading up to it, but Apple uses the NeXTSTEP version numbering system to version Darwin, the core OS. The major version of ten indicates the version of the new platform (i.e. Tiger's Darwin is v 8, and todays' 10.4.8 is Darwin 8.8).
So when you see the version number system for Mac OS X, every number has meaning:
Tiger 10.4.8=
10th generation of Mac system software
4th major revision of this generation's platform, and the n revision of NeXTSTEP + 4 = 8th generation of NeXT's NS based platform.
8th minor revision.
I thought I would hate the glossy screens, but after working with a lot of MacBooks at work (I've been buying them to replace out Dell laptops to run Windows!) I found that I REALLY like the glossy screen.
I traded in my MBP for a glossy one and love it. It is so vividly sharp, and the glare I imagined would be a problem has never bothered me -- I've never even noticed it as a problem in actual use.
But the glossy screen is so sharp and high contrast that I can't use it with to a standard matte finish display -- other displays pale in comparison. I even gave up using an external 30" display because the flat matte screen looks so dull compared to the laptop display.
Thanks for calling me a young kid. I've been feeling like an old man for a while now, so that makes me smile.
I've used Macs since 1984 (although I was just drawing pictures then), and before that I played on the Vic20, Apple II's, the ST, the Amiga, an Apple IIGS.
I've managed million dolllar IT budgets for Microsoft enraptured dotcoms as they went under, and I followed NeXT while they whimpered out into irrelevance.
I was a developer through the move to Rhapsody and Mac OS X, and I'm a bit happy to see somebody with vision and a pulse injecting a challenge into the waters of IT.
Apple has also pushed POSIX (the same Linux/UNIX platform) into the mainstream, and helped Linux to challenge the NT monoculture.
So fogive me if I bubble enthusiastically about seeing a product I like be popularized by a fascinating company with interesting personalities and class and charm.
Also, if you are going to blow stink about my "inaccuracies," please lay them out instead of just making unfounded bullshit claims. I think you really are just bitter because you have nothing really interesting to say.
And for what its worth, I've written well over a hundred articles this year, and three have been posted to Slashdot in my lifetime. EVER. THREE EVER. So don't rain on my parade just because you have nothing to contribute to the world but your worthless trolling.
I understand that vendor lock in = vendor + lock in.
What I was pointing out is that the glorious idea of music that lasts forever for generations by being enshrined in the perfect medium is simply a fallacy. Every decade of the previous several generations has music locked up in a format that is basically obsolete.
Quick, find an 8-track, I want to listen to the Carpenters. Oh fuck it, I'll save time and effort downloading it from iTunes for $0.99.
You can talk about multiple vendors of record players, but realistically, its easier to run Amiga software today than it is to find a record player and use it to put your LP music on your iPod. Ten years ago, proprietary Amiga software was impossible to run on a PC; now it can be run easily in some spare cycles of an emulator. No barrier.
Ten years from now, Fairplay will be no larger barrier to playback than having your music in MP3 or Ogg. In fact, I predict it will be far easier to playback 2006's pop music, bought from iTunes, than it will be to figure out how to find a way to play back your perfectly ripped Ogg files. And very possibly, it will be tough to find a working CD player.
The attacks on the CD were unreasonable and prevented normal and fair use. The great potential of technologies like DAT and MD were totally squandered by paranoid media companies who thought they could contain reality under a draconian license. The CD-ROM blew away everything they tried to accomplish, just as P2P file sharing did a few years later, and just as Fairplay did to WMA.
I believe Fairplay is fair. Try to destroy decoy DRM it at your own peril. There is no real mainstream market possible in music and movies that can be easily distributed at no cost and with infinite restrictions. P2P users have proven that. Give me 30 GB of MP3 music and I'll hapilly enjoy it all without thinking about the artists who wrote and performed it. Am I bad? Probably. Fairplay means I'll pay for music, just as the clerk at 7-11 emsures I pay for my candy bars, and just like the inventory tags prevent me from shoplifting from big conglomerate retail corporations.
Anyone who thinks DRM can only be bad is just a simple person trying to live in a much simpler world than we actually do.
READRDM!
www.roughlydrafted.com
we all know it doesn't.
The iTunes Vendor lock-in myth:
- because in the 70s, our songs weren't locked into 8-tracks and LPs
- because in the 80s, our songs weren't locked into cassettes (and taping records introduced no sound quality loss)
- because in the 90s, our songs weren't locked into CDs (and recording CDs to tape introduced no sound quality loss)
- because since the CD, music hasn't come under attack from the draconian DRM forced into DAT, MiniDisc, DVD-Audio, WMA and ATRAC.
Please stop repeating the bullshit that iTunes feather-weight DRM is breaking your back. You are either an industry shill pining for real DRM, or a clueless communist who demands that the world entertain them for free. Either way, you're wasting valuable oxygen just to spew out the same old myths repeatedly.
10 iPod vs Zune Myths
10 Ways Microsoft can Salvage their iPod Killer
Why Microsoft Can't Compete With iTunes
lesser evil?
The RIAA labels sign artists to weighted contracts that ensure the majority will get very little, but the minority will be rocketed to stardom, just like pro athletes. They run a business designed to profit from promoting artists. Artists who don't want to gamble their future on stardom can sign with CD Baby or other systems that are more communal but offer less exposure and little chance at stardom. Different choices.
allofmp3 is run by russian mafia thugs who sell music they haven't licensed. No money goes to any artists, ever. Anyone "using" allofmp3 is throwing money away, since they could just as well be pirating music off a warez site or torrent for free. Its like paying SCO for a Linux license instead of RedHat, because "RedHat doens't contribute all its revenues to the "developers" and wastes all kinds of money on overhead and operations". Complete bullshit idiocy by raving stupid communists who don't know how things work, balanced by advice to do something pointed retarded in a completely fucked up and backward way that makes no sense.
It belongs in the same box with the diatribes about how DRM is a single entity that can only be bad. Simple minded rhetoric for simple minded people, who feel smart repeating the same tired crap.