The rotary motion developed for our vehicles can last on its own for about 5 years... if you are constantly putting pure fuel into it, changing the lubrication and performing other maintenance. Then you start replacing parts, then major parts fail and the entire system eventually has to be replaced.
The mechanics and engineering of building something the only needs to run for a few years are quite different from the engineering required to develop units that would self-repair, self-maintain, self-fuel and self-clean. In the wild, they also need to reproduce. None of those features are addressed very well by a motion system that relies on extremely high heat and large, heavy moving parts that need to withstand that type of heat and pressure.
The wheel, drive train, and engine are all at odds with the engineering principles required of living creatures.
Yes, panic because WPA might be snooped, recorded and the encryption hammered off at an off site super computer by a l33t haxxor.
Or you can panic because, for the last 40 years, paper copies of your credit card transactions, with your signature, card number, exp date and purchase details, have always been available to the legions of underpaid service people who handle your retail/resturant/telephone purchases. Carbon copies were often left in the trash.
Seriously, if you think introducing wireless technology to the credit card transaction is opening things up for fraud, you are seriously shroomin. It's already fantastically easy to obtain your information.
But it is entertaining to hear such panic mongering from someone who has undoubtedly made telephone credit card purchases, and we all know how secure the POTS network is.
Ecommerce was a buzzword that the story was trying to exploit for adclicks. The idea is just to collect sales taxes for purchases that buyers are currently unlikely to report, and so the focus is being targeted on the sellers. There are also many fewer sellers than buyers in these sales, so it makes more sense for them to go after hundreds of big stores rather than millions of customers.
Sales are currently taxed if the selling company does business in the state where the buyer lives (or is ordering from). So if I buy from Suffonline.com with a HQ in Texas, and I live in California, I skirt both state's taxes, unless Stuffonline.com also has offices in California, in which case I'd pay CA tax (I'd never have to pay TX's tax).
Most foreign companies wouldn't also be doing business in my state; if they were, they wouldn't really be foreign businesses, and/or their location wouldn't matter. I don't currently have to pay CA sales tax for Canadian purchases, but how frequently do I buy from foreign countries?
Additionally, there are other problems with foreign sales that relate to further variations of tax law, such as the CDN and European GST/VAT type taxes, that make the issue more complicated, and basically deter companies from selling abroad. That's one part of why Apple's iTunes Music Store has separate stores for each region (of course, selling music is further encumbered by other regional complexifications).
MSN is the default IE browser homepage. Yahoo the default browser homepage for many DSL providers, including SBC.
Both are the "choice" of people who don't make choices.
Google is a default homepage for people who choose to download Firefox. Google is also clearly what most people are using to search the web (webmasters, check your web stats - its 85% Google referrals)
So Google is the choice for people who actually choose.
Looking at Yahoo/MSN vs Google's approach makes that pretty obvious: Google is a tool to use, while Yahoo/MSN is for tools to use.
Are you imagining porno theaters are getting their stuff rated by Nova Scotia instead of the MPAA?
I'd imagine the NS censor counsel doesn't have the resources to sit through every hard core porn made, to determine whether it warrants a red stop sign or a purple triangle, but then again there probably isn't much else to do up there.
Originally the MPAA labeled movies G, GP (later changed to PG), R and X. There was a Catholic organization that rated films as well, labeling them with various levels of "reservation," and giving some an O for "offensive," that meant catholics weren't supposed to watch them. At one time, being labeled O meant a lot of people were not going to see your movie.
Indiana Jones III in 1984 got a new PG-13 rating to create something that sounded edgier than PG but not quite R, something that older teens could be expected to watch. It featured the scene where the voodoo guy rips out a beating heart from a living person and bites it.
Later, filmmakers asked for a renamed rating for "mature" subjects that were considered "more than R" to disassociate mature with the porn stigma attached to "X Rated"
So to accommodate mature, non porn films, the MPAA re-branded the X rating as NC-17, and some non-porn feature films actually got released as NC-17. Very few "X rated" mainstream films that had ever been released before. The X rating didn't necessarily mean sex and nudity, but in reality it generally did; when people heard X they associated it with hardcore porn. Before NC-17, films getting an X rating that weren't porn simply edited things down to get an R rating.
Porn theaters had long done the opposite: they marketed their content (much of which was not really feature length movies, but just sex, and so not even officially ever "rated") as "Triple XXX!!!" There is no such thing as an XXX rating. There is no such thing as an XXX rating. There is no such thing as an XXX rating. That sink in yet?
Any theater choosing to show NC-17 movies would be risking the taint of being labeled a porn-house, likely incur the wrath and bad publicity of morality/family interest/religious groups, and for all that trouble only show limited run movies with a narrow appeal. How would that be a good business decision?
Theaters already are unlikely to show independent movies without guaranteed draws that deliver profits efficiently. If you are puzzled as to why a theater, and particularly a huge chain designed to make money fastest, would not (or rarely ever) show NC-17 rated films, then you must also be wondering why WalMart doesn't sell latex suits, dildoes and, buttfucking slings.
Radical Islam doesn't have the oil that's sponsoring terrorism. It's America's partners - the friendly (albeit civil rights hostile) Saudi Kingdom, that was the source of the hijackers who blew up the WTC, and members of Bush family friends (trained by the CIA) who planned the attacks.
Also, Iraq was never radical islam - at best, a corrupt dictatorship that was nominally islamic.
It's like a rich family got mugged by the son of their rich neighbor, so they blame the poor kids from the bad side of town.
In Iraq's case, the rich neighbors went and burned the ghetto, creating more angry radicals, while doing nothing about the real problems in their own neighborhood.
Wikipedia and Amazon may have differing goals, but the incentive of contributors (the topic under discussion) is the same: people want to add their two cents, inform, enlighten, or just blab.
Nobody needs Amazon, and nobody needs Wikipedia. But both serve useful purposes when searching for information. I frequently use Amazon to shop or look up products that I intend to buy elsewhere.
I think if you peruse comments on Amazon, you'll realize the rest of the world isn't so demanding of a socialist-paradise return on their contributions to society. I doubt if many people have a burning desire to help anyone at all, but clearly Wikipedia and Amazon are benefiting from the minority of people who have time to spend adding their ideas, without regard to being paid back for pitching in, whether or not the entity they are contributing to is benefitting financially or not.
There is a good likelihood of finding an open network because of housing density in SF, but the network you linked to pretty clearly does not serve very much of the City. Look at the map: half of the nodes are listed as unreachable, and it looks like 90% of the "system" is a few neighbors in twin peaks and the marina.
SF needs a comprehensive network you can get most everywhere, run by somebody with accountability. Neighbors move and change their mind.
Also, there are some legal issues with providing your own free internet access that makes it a risky thing for individuals to try to do as a grass roots plan.
I was thinking about Google and their mostly free services, and it occurred to me that Google is the 21st century equivalent to the Hearsts and other newspaper empires of a century ago. They provided free or mostly free access to information using advertiser's money. In doing so, they informed the world and lubricated the economy while making money themselves.
It's good to see Google trying to get rich providing free services, not trying to ding individuals into PPV $2 ring tones and other bullshit like expiring songs like Sony, Microsoft and the cell phone companies.
Choosing not to buy something that's available and updated regularly is not the same as having no upgrade path available.
And of course you're just wrong too: Mac users have not had to wait more than three months for a update over the last five years. And Apple delivered a whole new version every 12 months for the last 4 years. Based on the upgrade statistics, not may Mac users have been waiting to upgrade.
Preferably, the feature updates come out fast and furious, but remain compatible enough, so that you don't have to upgrade until you chose to do so. So, you can live without Tiger unless you want a some of the latest wizzy apps and features.
Microsoft has given its users no major upgrades since XP in 2001. "XP Server" slipped to 2003. Longhorn/Vista was promised and delayed in 2004, 2005, and 2006. What does ship will be XP with some Tiger features.
In the same timeframe, Apple has shipped four major OS upgrades and over 15 free "service pack" style upgrades that involve significant OS retooling, much faster performance on the same hardware, and lots of significant UI and API improvements. Including, of course, much of what Microsoft had promised in Vista.
During that time, Microsoft has continuously redefined its planned feature set in Longhorn, lopping off promised features and extending the delivery date over half a decade.
So Apple's limp restrictions in Fairplay are supposed to be equal to Sony's installing of rootkit on Window's users PCs?
And MS is going to save the world? How exactly?
MS lead the push for unreasonable DRM in their WMA products, and looked certain to foist "subscription services" that nobody wanted and that the market has since largely ignored. WMA promised to deliver DiviX style CDs that crap out after a play and other consumer-hateful services.
All companies are trying to make money; its just that Microsoft and Sony have so many customers that they don't fear pissing them off, or think that the world will eat whatever crap they decide to serve. It's good to see that the public has a little aversion to being cheated still. Lately, everyone seems ready to roll over and take it.
Syphilis is easily curable and doesn't require a lifetime of noxious drugs to maintain non-death, making it more of an annoyance than a crippling problem, so your analogy is fairly accurate.
Content owners are unlikely to say "screw DRM" because their customers are unwilling to say "screw piracy." The media moguls "don't have respect for me and my wishes as a customer" because the public at large has demonstrated no respect for companies and their wishes. That ain't too hard to figure out.
Its easy to complain about verification, DRM and serial numbers (which all suck from a customer's perspective), but if you actually sell IP, you see things differently.
I myself don't sell software or creative content, but I'm also not so simple that I can't understand the viewpoint of those who do, and who are tired of being ripped off by wankers who sing about how "all information should be free," but do nothing to contribute to free information, and everything to exploit other's work.
All the Slashdot style DRM complaints carry little weight in the real world. It starts to sound like a bunch of dirty hippies crying about locked doors, and how it prevents them from using your bathroom when you're away, and that's why they had to defecate on your step, because there was no other recourse available to them. Boo fucking hoo.
Consumers hate onerous restrictions, and vendors hate unbridled P2P style "sharing." The best alternatives so far is community sharing for indie artists, and limited DRM (iTMS-style) for big commercial pop. I doubt commerce will whither and die because an commune of P2P sharers boycott buying DRM protected music, since they weren't paying for anything anyways, but it looks like it will kill off the worst offenders of DRM-hell: Sony's ATRAC and Microsoft's WMA.
Wow, how did you come up with that factoid? My iPods all hold more than 100 songs, yet they use FairPlay DRM.
The 100 song limitation is quite obviously an artificial way to keep cell phones from overlapping into iPod territory. There isn't even any mystery involved.
Steve Jobs imposes a style of not doing things until he feels they can be done "as desired." He panned video on the iPod until they had a screen and chipset that made video decently possible. Somewhat similarly, the both the Mac and the NeXT hardware were monocrome until high quality color was available. It wasn't that color couldn't be done, it was that it couldn't be done well (Compare 256 color PCs of the time). The iPod Photo could sorta do video, but it wouldn't have done it "right," so it was artificially limited from doing it at all.
Phones are not close enough to Apple's radar for them to be interested in doing a phone of their own. I'll bet that will change as Apple increases their reach into new markets. However, with the pressure to have "iPod" features on a phone, Apple did the smartest thing possible: they brought in a partner to manage all the risk, gave them enough rope to release "an iPod phone product" but distanced themselves enough to allow Motorola's meah-quality phone to do down without doing much damage to the iPod.
There's no secret conspiracy at work, it's just obvious protection of their assets. Apple has learned not to license off their profitable markets after the Mac Clone experiment resulted in the company subsidizing software development for other's (including Motorola's) profitable hardware sales, to the detriment of Apple's own high-end (and most profitable) sales.
I would imagine that Apple won't ever try to license out designs for hardware again (like Microsoft attempts to do; even MS is floundering in trying to sell designs for tablets, handhelds, wma players, etc). Anyone who licenses Apple technology has got to know that if Apple's not selling it themselves, it's because they don't think they can make money on it, AND, that if Apple's licensing it away, it is going to be neutered enough so as not to compete directly with things they are selling.
Can you imagine Microsoft licensing away the Xbox? And they're not even making money on Xbox hardware sales.
Anyone who thinks Apple is interested in licensing away their hardware revenues on the iPod, the Mac or in relation to Intel Macs (including running Mac OS X on standard PCs) hasn't been paying attention. In particular, Apple's not likely to auction off their gold egg laying geese while their new hardware sales are growing nearly 3x as fast as Dell & HP, and while they are selling their own hardware as fast as China can build it for them.
The MS monopoly in commercial desktop operating systems means that anyone who buys a Mac is NOT buying a Windows PC, and so HAS switched from the default behavior open to them. Even if they also continue to use a PC.
If there were heterogeneous variety available in computing, as there was in the early 80s, it would be hard to equate an Apple sale with a Microsoft loss, since the buyer could have also bought an machine running Atari, Commodore, DR-DOS or whatever. But since the PC world has been held captive by Microsoft over the last decade, I think it is pretty fair to say that any Mac purchase (including grandma's first computer) is one less Windows PC, because that was the alternative.
If you have 5 PCs and buy a Mac, you've switched from buying only PCs. One less PC was sold, one less copy of Windows (unless you were going to assemble a PC from Frys parts).
Since Apple significantly outpaced the new PC unit growth (~43% vs ~17% increases by Dell & HP), there is clearly some major switching going on.
Short answer: The reason there is no G5 Powerbook is the same as why Dell isn't selling Xeon laptops.
Rant answer: "G5" alphabetically follows "G4," but that does not automatically mean that a given processor architecture, hidden behind a simplistic marketing name, is appropriate for all uses.
The designation of G3/G4/G5 were arbitrary marketing simplifications for consumers. Each G# referred to a family of chips, some of which are appropriate for mobile, some of which aren't. Demanding a "G5 Powerbook" is one of the simplest knee jerk, ignorant battle cries I've heard in a while. Apple could have called the latest rev of Powerbooks the "G5 series" and been done with it.
Hell why not play like Netscape (or iTunes) and skip 5.0 entirely, and call the current band of anemic Powerbooks G6?
WHO THE FUCK CARES WHAT NUMBER IS ASSIGNED TO A MODEL?
Silly answer: Having the current PowerMac G5 CPU bolted onto a PowerBook would provide 30 minutes of lap scorching fun.
Dell is now in the position of trying to find new markets for the same old PCs. They rely upon Microsoft to for OS software innovation, and have no real software development efforts that will spur new hardware sales. They rely on MS' WMA to run their mobile music products, and WMA has failed dramatically. PocketPC has also done poorly, as have tablet PCs and everything else MS has offered its licensees lately.
If MS scores big with the XBox, it may turn into strong competition for gamer PCs, which comprise a significant chunk of Dell's high end PC sales. Dell can't be happy to have MS competing with its bread and butter while they rely on MS for their OS.
Apple grew PC sales of ~43% vs Dells ~17% this last quarter, and made higher margins on each sale. Plus, Apple's hardware sells new copies of OS X, and Apple software: low end iLife, and pro apps ($500-$1000 apps) like Logic, FCP, Soundtrack Pro and Aperture, which in turn sell 30" displays. iPods sell Macs, Macs sell iPods. iPods sell iTMS music tracks. Macs sell.Mac subscriptions.
All of Apple's software/services add profits that Dell will never see, because Dell sells no software. And that software buys customer loyalty.
Dell is in a huge pinch because anyone who buys a Dell does so because the price is OK. If HP or CompUSA offers a cheaper PC 3 years down the road, that customer has no reason to stick with Dell.
Apple customers, three years down the road, would have to find replacements for all their software in order to buy a PC from another vendor. Plus their stuff wouldn't work swimmingly together as it does now. Dell customers have loyalty as long as Dell is cheap.
Dell's drive into new markets has involved disposable printers with proprietary toner carts, and home theater. But who wants a Dell home theater? They have massive competition in the TV space, and its difficult to differentiate in that market. Dell is competing in price with Apple in the large flat panel display space, but there's nothing but TV to drive PC sales of 22 to 30" displays. Apple has an entire new wing of Pro apps that take advantage of dual 30" displays.
Dell: no obvious growth markets beholden to Microsoft to supply its vision and leadership into new markets competing with major PC vendors and retail outlets selling commodity PCs, and home built parts PCs competing with cutthroat TV / home theater makers competing with cutthroat printer makers
Apple: obvious growth markets:
- owns 75% of music downloads, music players, owns podcasts, and poised to take over portable video
- owns UNIX on the desktop (promising markets in higher ed, biotech, super computing servers, film) controls its own vision and leadership in developing new markets isolated from competition
- owns its own PC designs, its own OS, its own web development and software dev)
- mostly sells premium hardware (powermacs, powerbooks, xserves)
- popular hardware for Linux users
- great reputation for quality and reliability, good service owns its own growing fleet of high fashion retail stores owns the youth market with the iPod, and sells them the popular iMac / iBooks / Mac minis
So yes, you're right. The story is that the tables have turned: Dell was selling lots of PCs while they took over the market, but now Dell is in trouble and Apple is just getting started.
Apple isn't hiding this TPM in the kernel. The kernel is open sourced, and will happily run on PCs today.
The lock is on Apple's proprietary WindowManager : the closed source Quartz Compositor display system and the Q-2D drawing engine, and possibly across many other higher level libraries, which have never been open and which very few people know anything about.
It will be far easier for Apple to keep Mac OS X a tough-to-crack, moving target compared other attempts to lock media or software. When DVDs were cracked, there was no easy way to re-lock DVDs, because they still had to work with existing players and any new players would have to play existing DVDs. As Apple demonstrated with iTMS, since they control the whole widget, they can relock the system after it gets cracked. And you can similarly expect Mac OS X to get "fixed" really quick with a software update just as soon as any work around is found to the TPM lock.
Windows XP, Photoshop and all the other software with "call home" verification is instantly pirated because it's also offered in a "corporate" edition with no verification, for large clients to install in Enterprise environments, where verification and serial numbers are a huge hassle. These corp versions get leaked so fast, it makes one wonder why Adobe, Microsoft and the rest all force their customers to deal with super annoying verification systems that generally end up requiring a call to India to resolve any problems when upgrading or reinstalling machines.
Apple will not have to offer such an undefended version, since corporations who want Mac OS X can buy the same version of the software to run on any Mac (Intel or PPC), and the software link to Mac hardware doesn't get in the way in a per machine fashion. In fact, the only people worried about Mac OS X's link to real Mac hardware will be people trying to run Mac OS X on PCs.
Since Apple's business plan currently makes no effort to bring Mac OS X to the unwashed masses of PCs, which would require supporting all that crap hardware with undocumented flaws and incompatibilities, and which has only ever really been designed to work well with Windows (WinModems and USB Cams and PS/2 bridges and Centronics Zip drives and serial port Palm cradles and the like), there won't be a retail version anytime soon (just as Apple never sold a software version of the iPod for Palm/WinCE devices).
So not only will Mac OS X's link to Mac hardware be very hard to crack, but there won't be any easy "pants down" way to get around it, as there is for nearly all other software out there.
Hopefully, Apple will continue their permissive licensing that allows users to apply an upgrade as liberally as their conscience will stand. That serves to keep more Mac users on the latest version of Mac OS X, while allowing honest people to vote for Mac OS X development with their dollars. And me, I like Mac hardware, and as much as I'd like to run Mac OS X on PCs, I can only begin to imagine what a huge task it would be to duplicate huge scope of work Microsoft goes through to support the smorgasboard of hardware out there.
It would be a huge effort for Apple just to support, say, Dell Optiplex machines built since 2004. It would take Herculean efforts to support a small selection of the top, major brand name PCs: Dell, HP/Compaq, and (who's #3?). And that would only piss off all the PC users who bought crap PCs from CompUSA to save a few bucks, or built their own from Fry's.
All the people who think throwing Mac OS X to the PC masses for free to let people try to get it working themselves, in an attempt to create a Microsoft-like monopoly upon hoodwinked piracy, fail to get that Apple makes most of its money from hardware. Even if Apple could sell 20 software retail boxes for every lost Mac sale, they'd only bury themselves in supporting software for unhappy users who can't understand why their new Dell keyboard doesn't launch Safari when they push the Internet Button.
Bigger isn't always better. By growing organically, Apple can sell more Mac hardware (they sold already 43% more Mac this quarter, compared to ~17% for HP and Dell) to happier customers and build loyalty that sells new iPods, more Apple software, updates, and.Mac services.
First off, suggesting "liquid crystal" makes a watch face unscratchable... liquid crystal is the LC in LCD, it's not the face of the watch, it's the display, and there is nothing hard about it. It's behind glass. Pinch an LCD hard enough and that liquid crystal will spooge out and no longer work.
Even worse is the reply that "sapphire crystals are better for hardening the display" earned a "5 insightful" mod. WTF?
That's the crystal fragment in the watch's oscillator, used to keep time. If your watch face was made out of a semi precious gem, it would probably be rather expensive.
What's up with doing free association of ideas and then sharing your brain dump like it's a collection of facts? Sheesh.
Hardness is also not "inherently expensive."
In any case, I'd rather have an iPod with a relatively soft plastic outside that scratches, but can be polished, rather than a glass (or wtf, gem) iPod that cracked or shattered.
If you read the comment, it sounds like syndicates aren't complaining about iTMS selling TV as much as ABC doing deals that don't include them.
The reason syndicates weren't involved was because the deal was supposed to be secret "Apple Event" news.
Still, the syndicates run their business as customers beholden to the interests of a channel of programming, something like dealerships for a car company. (That's also as far as that analogy works.)
Sure, free publicity for the shows they are broadcasting is a win for syndicates, but nobody likes to delegate their life and death decisions away to third parties, particularly if they don't share the same interests.
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How is an encumbered DVD, with its CSS DRM that you can bypass with DeCSS, different from Apple's AVC (H.264) with FairPlay DRM, which can be similarly bypassed?
With a DVD, you'd have to rip it, then reencode it into DIVIX or something appropriate for a portable, which takes a LONG time. Apple's solution seems rather smart, and looks like a very natural extension of the iTMS.
I like options:
If you want high quality media, you continue buying CDs and DVDs, and rip them yourself at whatever bitrate makes you happy.
If you want the convenience of an online store (the new "Just for you - Beta" looks pretty cool) and instant access to lots of pop content, you can pay a small fee and download smallish, ready to go files.
Apple is offering both options to fit the desires of a broad swath of people.
Compare this to Microsoft's WMP, which sought to kill MP3s entirely, and replace them with locked up WMA files with brutal restrictions, and very limited playback options.
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The rotary motion developed for our vehicles can last on its own for about 5 years... if you are constantly putting pure fuel into it, changing the lubrication and performing other maintenance. Then you start replacing parts, then major parts fail and the entire system eventually has to be replaced.
The mechanics and engineering of building something the only needs to run for a few years are quite different from the engineering required to develop units that would self-repair, self-maintain, self-fuel and self-clean. In the wild, they also need to reproduce. None of those features are addressed very well by a motion system that relies on extremely high heat and large, heavy moving parts that need to withstand that type of heat and pressure.
The wheel, drive train, and engine are all at odds with the engineering principles required of living creatures.
Yes, panic because WPA might be snooped, recorded and the encryption hammered off at an off site super computer by a l33t haxxor.
Or you can panic because, for the last 40 years, paper copies of your credit card transactions, with your signature, card number, exp date and purchase details, have always been available to the legions of underpaid service people who handle your retail/resturant/telephone purchases. Carbon copies were often left in the trash.
Seriously, if you think introducing wireless technology to the credit card transaction is opening things up for fraud, you are seriously shroomin. It's already fantastically easy to obtain your information.
But it is entertaining to hear such panic mongering from someone who has undoubtedly made telephone credit card purchases, and we all know how secure the POTS network is.
Ecommerce was a buzzword that the story was trying to exploit for adclicks. The idea is just to collect sales taxes for purchases that buyers are currently unlikely to report, and so the focus is being targeted on the sellers. There are also many fewer sellers than buyers in these sales, so it makes more sense for them to go after hundreds of big stores rather than millions of customers.
Sales are currently taxed if the selling company does business in the state where the buyer lives (or is ordering from). So if I buy from Suffonline.com with a HQ in Texas, and I live in California, I skirt both state's taxes, unless Stuffonline.com also has offices in California, in which case I'd pay CA tax (I'd never have to pay TX's tax).
Most foreign companies wouldn't also be doing business in my state; if they were, they wouldn't really be foreign businesses, and/or their location wouldn't matter. I don't currently have to pay CA sales tax for Canadian purchases, but how frequently do I buy from foreign countries?
Additionally, there are other problems with foreign sales that relate to further variations of tax law, such as the CDN and European GST/VAT type taxes, that make the issue more complicated, and basically deter companies from selling abroad. That's one part of why Apple's iTunes Music Store has separate stores for each region (of course, selling music is further encumbered by other regional complexifications).
MSN is the default IE browser homepage.
Yahoo the default browser homepage for many DSL providers, including SBC.
Both are the "choice" of people who don't make choices.
Google is a default homepage for people who choose to download Firefox.
Google is also clearly what most people are using to search the web (webmasters, check your web stats - its 85% Google referrals)
So Google is the choice for people who actually choose.
Looking at Yahoo/MSN vs Google's approach makes that pretty obvious: Google is a tool to use, while Yahoo/MSN is for tools to use.
Are you imagining porno theaters are getting their stuff rated by Nova Scotia instead of the MPAA?
I'd imagine the NS censor counsel doesn't have the resources to sit through every hard core porn made, to determine whether it warrants a red stop sign or a purple triangle, but then again there probably isn't much else to do up there.
Originally the MPAA labeled movies G, GP (later changed to PG), R and X. There was a Catholic organization that rated films as well, labeling them with various levels of "reservation," and giving some an O for "offensive," that meant catholics weren't supposed to watch them. At one time, being labeled O meant a lot of people were not going to see your movie.
Indiana Jones III in 1984 got a new PG-13 rating to create something that sounded edgier than PG but not quite R, something that older teens could be expected to watch. It featured the scene where the voodoo guy rips out a beating heart from a living person and bites it.
Later, filmmakers asked for a renamed rating for "mature" subjects that were considered "more than R" to disassociate mature with the porn stigma attached to "X Rated"
So to accommodate mature, non porn films, the MPAA re-branded the X rating as NC-17, and some non-porn feature films actually got released as NC-17. Very few "X rated" mainstream films that had ever been released before. The X rating didn't necessarily mean sex and nudity, but in reality it generally did; when people heard X they associated it with hardcore porn. Before NC-17, films getting an X rating that weren't porn simply edited things down to get an R rating.
Porn theaters had long done the opposite: they marketed their content (much of which was not really feature length movies, but just sex, and so not even officially ever "rated") as "Triple XXX!!!" There is no such thing as an XXX rating. There is no such thing as an XXX rating. There is no such thing as an XXX rating. That sink in yet?
Any theater choosing to show NC-17 movies would be risking the taint of being labeled a porn-house, likely incur the wrath and bad publicity of morality/family interest/religious groups, and for all that trouble only show limited run movies with a narrow appeal. How would that be a good business decision?
Theaters already are unlikely to show independent movies without guaranteed draws that deliver profits efficiently. If you are puzzled as to why a theater, and particularly a huge chain designed to make money fastest, would not (or rarely ever) show NC-17 rated films, then you must also be wondering why WalMart doesn't sell latex suits, dildoes and, buttfucking slings.
Radical Islam doesn't have the oil that's sponsoring terrorism. It's America's partners - the friendly (albeit civil rights hostile) Saudi Kingdom, that was the source of the hijackers who blew up the WTC, and members of Bush family friends (trained by the CIA) who planned the attacks.
Also, Iraq was never radical islam - at best, a corrupt dictatorship that was nominally islamic.
It's like a rich family got mugged by the son of their rich neighbor, so they blame the poor kids from the bad side of town.
In Iraq's case, the rich neighbors went and burned the ghetto, creating more angry radicals, while doing nothing about the real problems in their own neighborhood.
Wikipedia and Amazon may have differing goals, but the incentive of contributors (the topic under discussion) is the same: people want to add their two cents, inform, enlighten, or just blab.
Nobody needs Amazon, and nobody needs Wikipedia. But both serve useful purposes when searching for information. I frequently use Amazon to shop or look up products that I intend to buy elsewhere.
I think if you peruse comments on Amazon, you'll realize the rest of the world isn't so demanding of a socialist-paradise return on their contributions to society. I doubt if many people have a burning desire to help anyone at all, but clearly Wikipedia and Amazon are benefiting from the minority of people who have time to spend adding their ideas, without regard to being paid back for pitching in, whether or not the entity they are contributing to is benefitting financially or not.
its like wikipedia - you ad what you know, and benefit from what other people have added.
explaining why feedback from others might be useful to you is difficult, because it should already be obvious.
There is a good likelihood of finding an open network because of housing density in SF, but the network you linked to pretty clearly does not serve very much of the City. Look at the map: half of the nodes are listed as unreachable, and it looks like 90% of the "system" is a few neighbors in twin peaks and the marina.
SF needs a comprehensive network you can get most everywhere, run by somebody with accountability. Neighbors move and change their mind.
Also, there are some legal issues with providing your own free internet access that makes it a risky thing for individuals to try to do as a grass roots plan.
I was thinking about Google and their mostly free services, and it occurred to me that Google is the 21st century equivalent to the Hearsts and other newspaper empires of a century ago. They provided free or mostly free access to information using advertiser's money. In doing so, they informed the world and lubricated the economy while making money themselves.
It's good to see Google trying to get rich providing free services, not trying to ding individuals into PPV $2 ring tones and other bullshit like expiring songs like Sony, Microsoft and the cell phone companies.
Choosing not to buy something that's available and updated regularly is not the same as having no upgrade path available.
And of course you're just wrong too: Mac users have not had to wait more than three months for a update over the last five years. And Apple delivered a whole new version every 12 months for the last 4 years. Based on the upgrade statistics, not may Mac users have been waiting to upgrade.
Preferably, the feature updates come out fast and furious, but remain compatible enough, so that you don't have to upgrade until you chose to do so. So, you can live without Tiger unless you want a some of the latest wizzy apps and features.
Microsoft has given its users no major upgrades since XP in 2001. "XP Server" slipped to 2003. Longhorn/Vista was promised and delayed in 2004, 2005, and 2006. What does ship will be XP with some Tiger features.
In the same timeframe, Apple has shipped four major OS upgrades and over 15 free "service pack" style upgrades that involve significant OS retooling, much faster performance on the same hardware, and lots of significant UI and API improvements. Including, of course, much of what Microsoft had promised in Vista.
During that time, Microsoft has continuously redefined its planned feature set in Longhorn, lopping off promised features and extending the delivery date over half a decade.
It'll be a a cold day in hell when executives are charged with infridgement!
So Apple's limp restrictions in Fairplay are supposed to be equal to Sony's installing of rootkit on Window's users PCs?
And MS is going to save the world? How exactly?
MS lead the push for unreasonable DRM in their WMA products, and looked certain to foist "subscription services" that nobody wanted and that the market has since largely ignored. WMA promised to deliver DiviX style CDs that crap out after a play and other consumer-hateful services.
All companies are trying to make money; its just that Microsoft and Sony have so many customers that they don't fear pissing them off, or think that the world will eat whatever crap they decide to serve. It's good to see that the public has a little aversion to being cheated still. Lately, everyone seems ready to roll over and take it.
Syphilis is easily curable and doesn't require a lifetime of noxious drugs to maintain non-death, making it more of an annoyance than a crippling problem, so your analogy is fairly accurate.
Content owners are unlikely to say "screw DRM" because their customers are unwilling to say "screw piracy." The media moguls "don't have respect for me and my wishes as a customer" because the public at large has demonstrated no respect for companies and their wishes. That ain't too hard to figure out.
Its easy to complain about verification, DRM and serial numbers (which all suck from a customer's perspective), but if you actually sell IP, you see things differently.
I myself don't sell software or creative content, but I'm also not so simple that I can't understand the viewpoint of those who do, and who are tired of being ripped off by wankers who sing about how "all information should be free," but do nothing to contribute to free information, and everything to exploit other's work.
All the Slashdot style DRM complaints carry little weight in the real world. It starts to sound like a bunch of dirty hippies crying about locked doors, and how it prevents them from using your bathroom when you're away, and that's why they had to defecate on your step, because there was no other recourse available to them. Boo fucking hoo.
Consumers hate onerous restrictions, and vendors hate unbridled P2P style "sharing." The best alternatives so far is community sharing for indie artists, and limited DRM (iTMS-style) for big commercial pop. I doubt commerce will whither and die because an commune of P2P sharers boycott buying DRM protected music, since they weren't paying for anything anyways, but it looks like it will kill off the worst offenders of DRM-hell: Sony's ATRAC and Microsoft's WMA.
Wow, how did you come up with that factoid? My iPods all hold more than 100 songs, yet they use FairPlay DRM.
The 100 song limitation is quite obviously an artificial way to keep cell phones from overlapping into iPod territory. There isn't even any mystery involved.
Steve Jobs imposes a style of not doing things until he feels they can be done "as desired." He panned video on the iPod until they had a screen and chipset that made video decently possible. Somewhat similarly, the both the Mac and the NeXT hardware were monocrome until high quality color was available. It wasn't that color couldn't be done, it was that it couldn't be done well (Compare 256 color PCs of the time). The iPod Photo could sorta do video, but it wouldn't have done it "right," so it was artificially limited from doing it at all.
Phones are not close enough to Apple's radar for them to be interested in doing a phone of their own. I'll bet that will change as Apple increases their reach into new markets. However, with the pressure to have "iPod" features on a phone, Apple did the smartest thing possible: they brought in a partner to manage all the risk, gave them enough rope to release "an iPod phone product" but distanced themselves enough to allow Motorola's meah-quality phone to do down without doing much damage to the iPod.
There's no secret conspiracy at work, it's just obvious protection of their assets. Apple has learned not to license off their profitable markets after the Mac Clone experiment resulted in the company subsidizing software development for other's (including Motorola's) profitable hardware sales, to the detriment of Apple's own high-end (and most profitable) sales.
I would imagine that Apple won't ever try to license out designs for hardware again (like Microsoft attempts to do; even MS is floundering in trying to sell designs for tablets, handhelds, wma players, etc). Anyone who licenses Apple technology has got to know that if Apple's not selling it themselves, it's because they don't think they can make money on it, AND, that if Apple's licensing it away, it is going to be neutered enough so as not to compete directly with things they are selling.
Can you imagine Microsoft licensing away the Xbox? And they're not even making money on Xbox hardware sales.
Anyone who thinks Apple is interested in licensing away their hardware revenues on the iPod, the Mac or in relation to Intel Macs (including running Mac OS X on standard PCs) hasn't been paying attention. In particular, Apple's not likely to auction off their gold egg laying geese while their new hardware sales are growing nearly 3x as fast as Dell & HP, and while they are selling their own hardware as fast as China can build it for them.
The MS monopoly in commercial desktop operating systems means that anyone who buys a Mac is NOT buying a Windows PC, and so HAS switched from the default behavior open to them. Even if they also continue to use a PC.
If there were heterogeneous variety available in computing, as there was in the early 80s, it would be hard to equate an Apple sale with a Microsoft loss, since the buyer could have also bought an machine running Atari, Commodore, DR-DOS or whatever. But since the PC world has been held captive by Microsoft over the last decade, I think it is pretty fair to say that any Mac purchase (including grandma's first computer) is one less Windows PC, because that was the alternative.
If you have 5 PCs and buy a Mac, you've switched from buying only PCs. One less PC was sold, one less copy of Windows (unless you were going to assemble a PC from Frys parts).
Since Apple significantly outpaced the new PC unit growth (~43% vs ~17% increases by Dell & HP), there is clearly some major switching going on.
Short answer: The reason there is no G5 Powerbook is the same as why Dell isn't selling Xeon laptops.
Rant answer:
"G5" alphabetically follows "G4," but that does not automatically mean that a given processor architecture, hidden behind a simplistic marketing name, is appropriate for all uses.
The designation of G3/G4/G5 were arbitrary marketing simplifications for consumers. Each G# referred to a family of chips, some of which are appropriate for mobile, some of which aren't. Demanding a "G5 Powerbook" is one of the simplest knee jerk, ignorant battle cries I've heard in a while. Apple could have called the latest rev of Powerbooks the "G5 series" and been done with it.
Hell why not play like Netscape (or iTunes) and skip 5.0 entirely, and call the current band of anemic Powerbooks G6?
WHO THE FUCK CARES WHAT NUMBER IS ASSIGNED TO A MODEL?
Silly answer:
Having the current PowerMac G5 CPU bolted onto a PowerBook would provide 30 minutes of lap scorching fun.
No it tells the same tale:
.Mac subscriptions.
Dell's performance has passed - five years back.
Dell is now in the position of trying to find new markets for the same old PCs. They rely upon Microsoft to for OS software innovation, and have no real software development efforts that will spur new hardware sales. They rely on MS' WMA to run their mobile music products, and WMA has failed dramatically. PocketPC has also done poorly, as have tablet PCs and everything else MS has offered its licensees lately.
If MS scores big with the XBox, it may turn into strong competition for gamer PCs, which comprise a significant chunk of Dell's high end PC sales. Dell can't be happy to have MS competing with its bread and butter while they rely on MS for their OS.
Apple grew PC sales of ~43% vs Dells ~17% this last quarter, and made higher margins on each sale. Plus, Apple's hardware sells new copies of OS X, and Apple software: low end iLife, and pro apps ($500-$1000 apps) like Logic, FCP, Soundtrack Pro and Aperture, which in turn sell 30" displays. iPods sell Macs, Macs sell iPods. iPods sell iTMS music tracks. Macs sell
All of Apple's software/services add profits that Dell will never see, because Dell sells no software. And that software buys customer loyalty.
Dell is in a huge pinch because anyone who buys a Dell does so because the price is OK. If HP or CompUSA offers a cheaper PC 3 years down the road, that customer has no reason to stick with Dell.
Apple customers, three years down the road, would have to find replacements for all their software in order to buy a PC from another vendor. Plus their stuff wouldn't work swimmingly together as it does now. Dell customers have loyalty as long as Dell is cheap.
Dell's drive into new markets has involved disposable printers with proprietary toner carts, and home theater. But who wants a Dell home theater? They have massive competition in the TV space, and its difficult to differentiate in that market. Dell is competing in price with Apple in the large flat panel display space, but there's nothing but TV to drive PC sales of 22 to 30" displays. Apple has an entire new wing of Pro apps that take advantage of dual 30" displays.
Dell:
no obvious growth markets
beholden to Microsoft to supply its vision and leadership into new markets
competing with major PC vendors and retail outlets selling commodity PCs, and home built parts PCs
competing with cutthroat TV / home theater makers
competing with cutthroat printer makers
Apple:
obvious growth markets:
- owns 75% of music downloads, music players, owns podcasts, and poised to take over portable video
- owns UNIX on the desktop (promising markets in higher ed, biotech, super computing servers, film)
controls its own vision and leadership in developing new markets
isolated from competition
- owns its own PC designs, its own OS, its own web development and software dev)
- mostly sells premium hardware (powermacs, powerbooks, xserves)
- popular hardware for Linux users
- great reputation for quality and reliability, good service
owns its own growing fleet of high fashion retail stores
owns the youth market with the iPod, and sells them the popular iMac / iBooks / Mac minis
So yes, you're right. The story is that the tables have turned: Dell was selling lots of PCs while they took over the market, but now Dell is in trouble and Apple is just getting started.
Apple isn't hiding this TPM in the kernel. The kernel is open sourced, and will happily run on PCs today.
.Mac services.
The lock is on Apple's proprietary WindowManager : the closed source Quartz Compositor display system and the Q-2D drawing engine, and possibly across many other higher level libraries, which have never been open and which very few people know anything about.
It will be far easier for Apple to keep Mac OS X a tough-to-crack, moving target compared other attempts to lock media or software. When DVDs were cracked, there was no easy way to re-lock DVDs, because they still had to work with existing players and any new players would have to play existing DVDs. As Apple demonstrated with iTMS, since they control the whole widget, they can relock the system after it gets cracked. And you can similarly expect Mac OS X to get "fixed" really quick with a software update just as soon as any work around is found to the TPM lock.
Windows XP, Photoshop and all the other software with "call home" verification is instantly pirated because it's also offered in a "corporate" edition with no verification, for large clients to install in Enterprise environments, where verification and serial numbers are a huge hassle. These corp versions get leaked so fast, it makes one wonder why Adobe, Microsoft and the rest all force their customers to deal with super annoying verification systems that generally end up requiring a call to India to resolve any problems when upgrading or reinstalling machines.
Apple will not have to offer such an undefended version, since corporations who want Mac OS X can buy the same version of the software to run on any Mac (Intel or PPC), and the software link to Mac hardware doesn't get in the way in a per machine fashion. In fact, the only people worried about Mac OS X's link to real Mac hardware will be people trying to run Mac OS X on PCs.
Since Apple's business plan currently makes no effort to bring Mac OS X to the unwashed masses of PCs, which would require supporting all that crap hardware with undocumented flaws and incompatibilities, and which has only ever really been designed to work well with Windows (WinModems and USB Cams and PS/2 bridges and Centronics Zip drives and serial port Palm cradles and the like), there won't be a retail version anytime soon (just as Apple never sold a software version of the iPod for Palm/WinCE devices).
So not only will Mac OS X's link to Mac hardware be very hard to crack, but there won't be any easy "pants down" way to get around it, as there is for nearly all other software out there.
Hopefully, Apple will continue their permissive licensing that allows users to apply an upgrade as liberally as their conscience will stand. That serves to keep more Mac users on the latest version of Mac OS X, while allowing honest people to vote for Mac OS X development with their dollars. And me, I like Mac hardware, and as much as I'd like to run Mac OS X on PCs, I can only begin to imagine what a huge task it would be to duplicate huge scope of work Microsoft goes through to support the smorgasboard of hardware out there.
It would be a huge effort for Apple just to support, say, Dell Optiplex machines built since 2004. It would take Herculean efforts to support a small selection of the top, major brand name PCs: Dell, HP/Compaq, and (who's #3?). And that would only piss off all the PC users who bought crap PCs from CompUSA to save a few bucks, or built their own from Fry's.
All the people who think throwing Mac OS X to the PC masses for free to let people try to get it working themselves, in an attempt to create a Microsoft-like monopoly upon hoodwinked piracy, fail to get that Apple makes most of its money from hardware. Even if Apple could sell 20 software retail boxes for every lost Mac sale, they'd only bury themselves in supporting software for unhappy users who can't understand why their new Dell keyboard doesn't launch Safari when they push the Internet Button.
Bigger isn't always better. By growing organically, Apple can sell more Mac hardware (they sold already 43% more Mac this quarter, compared to ~17% for HP and Dell) to happier customers and build loyalty that sells new iPods, more Apple software, updates, and
The US defends the interest of corporations, not people.
American corporations have interests aligned with patent law.
Get it?
First off, suggesting "liquid crystal" makes a watch face unscratchable... liquid crystal is the LC in LCD, it's not the face of the watch, it's the display, and there is nothing hard about it. It's behind glass. Pinch an LCD hard enough and that liquid crystal will spooge out and no longer work.
Even worse is the reply that "sapphire crystals are better for hardening the display" earned a "5 insightful" mod. WTF?
That's the crystal fragment in the watch's oscillator, used to keep time. If your watch face was made out of a semi precious gem, it would probably be rather expensive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oscillators.
What's up with doing free association of ideas and then sharing your brain dump like it's a collection of facts? Sheesh.
Hardness is also not "inherently expensive."
In any case, I'd rather have an iPod with a relatively soft plastic outside that scratches, but can be polished, rather than a glass (or wtf, gem) iPod that cracked or shattered.
If you read the comment, it sounds like syndicates aren't complaining about iTMS selling TV as much as ABC doing deals that don't include them.
The reason syndicates weren't involved was because the deal was supposed to be secret "Apple Event" news.
Still, the syndicates run their business as customers beholden to the interests of a channel of programming, something like dealerships for a car company. (That's also as far as that analogy works.)
Sure, free publicity for the shows they are broadcasting is a win for syndicates, but nobody likes to delegate their life and death decisions away to third parties, particularly if they don't share the same interests.
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Breathing chlorine vapors all night will probably be worse than exposure to some spores. I just use my immune system.
How is an encumbered DVD, with its CSS DRM that you can bypass with DeCSS, different from Apple's AVC (H.264) with FairPlay DRM, which can be similarly bypassed?
With a DVD, you'd have to rip it, then reencode it into DIVIX or something appropriate for a portable, which takes a LONG time. Apple's solution seems rather smart, and looks like a very natural extension of the iTMS.
I like options:
If you want high quality media, you continue buying CDs and DVDs, and rip them yourself at whatever bitrate makes you happy.
If you want the convenience of an online store (the new "Just for you - Beta" looks pretty cool) and instant access to lots of pop content, you can pay a small fee and download smallish, ready to go files.
Apple is offering both options to fit the desires of a broad swath of people.
Compare this to Microsoft's WMP, which sought to kill MP3s entirely, and replace them with locked up WMA files with brutal restrictions, and very limited playback options.