it would be so computationally expensive that no ISP could afford to actually implement it. Agreed. The discussed uses of this kind of technology were for sites like YouTube and MySpace. The key difference is, an ISP would somehow have to do the same filtering in realtime.
Of course, leaving asaide the issue of trying to match tracks without having more than snippets of the data. The reality of many P2P technologies is that pieces of the file are fetched in a more or less random order. Not particularly conducive to any prospective filtering.
More than likely, the IFPI would want wholesale blocking of, say, the Gnutella network, and consider that a job well done. As far as I'm concerned, anyone still using Gnutella at this point almost deserves what's coming to them.
The thing is, in your two cases of VHS and 8-track manufacturers, they're tied to the format. The media companies, on the other hand, generally couldn't care less, except in the case of a market being fractured by many competing formats.
The RIAA almost certainly made immediate gains from the switch from vinyl to CD, since CD's cost much less to produce. In the same vein, what does the MPAA care that Blu-ray will eventually (possibly) overtake DVD? They're not DVD manufacturers, they make money no matter what the format of the media.
Now, there'll possibly be a depression in total video media sales as people are more reluctant to buy soon-to-be-obsolete discs, but also don't yet wish to upgrade to Blu-ray. Then again, Blu-ray players will play DVDs, so maybe that won't be the case.
At any rate, the comments referenced in the article were about box office sales, not video.
Technically, the RIAA can't sue anyone, since it's primarily just a lobbying organization with a few other duties thrown in, but the RIAA doesn't own any copyrights it can sue over.
Even though the lawsuits are obviously coordinated by the RIAA (same lawyers and tactics amongst all the various member labels) the settlement and damage money all goes to the individual labels. The RIAA itself is really just a phantom, it doesn't have any power that I know of to control the actions of the labels, it's merely a convenient umbrella organization to do things the various music industry giants consider mutually beneficial, such as pressuring college students into settlement deals.
plus another $10,000 in punitive damages, "just because the judge said so". Actually the $10,000 was statutory damages, meaning that the amount was prescribed by law, in this case for "willful infringement."
No punitive damages were awarded in this case, and it is a relatively rare occasion that they are ever awarded.
You read all the details, but perhaps a shade too quickly...
Geosynchronous and geostationary orbits are obtained at the same radius from the Earth, about, as you say, 35,786 km above sea level. The defining factor that differentiates between geosynchronous and geostationary is the plane of the Earth the orbit is positioned over. A geosynchronous orbit that is directly aligned with the Equator is "geostationary" since it will always stay above the same position on the Earth. Plain "geosynchronous" orbits are simply aligned differently.
From the JAXA site about Kizuna:
"Scheduled orbit: Geostationary orbit at 143 degrees East longitude and at an altitude of about 36,000 km"
It is, even though the summarizer slipped up a bit (technically the term is correct, but somewhat misleading), destined for geostationary orbit.
As many people have pointed out, even if you refuse the government's services, you still get charged the same amount of taxes. Saying that the only way to "refuse the services" is to just leave the country, and that this still can be reasonably called a proper "contract" is what seems disingenuous.
That being said, I disagree strongly with the many posters who want to "opt out" of taxes for services they don't use. That, as they know, isn't how taxes work. If everyone wants to just pay for exactly what they use, we might as well abolish the government and hand over control of all public resources and services to different corporations. I don't think I want to live in a country where only drivers pay for the roads and only parents pay for the schools. I'd rather not see a situation where only megacorporations like Microsoft can get road improvements, because they're the only ones who can pay. Eliminate the leveling effect of common taxes, and you'll get even more of an aristocracy of the rich than we have now.
At some level, people just need to accept that an improvement in conditions for others helps them too. Good schools will raise your property value (which will, in turn raise your taxes again, but that's another story.)
I'm a student at Virginia Tech, and we have a similar situation here.
The early 1000-level CS courses are Intro to OO Programming I and II, and use Java. The 2000-level courses are Data Structures I and II, taught in C++, and Computer Organization, which uses MIPS assembly.
The courses I am taking this semester are Operating Systems, which uses C and MIT's Pintos OS, and Human-Computer Interaction, which allows students to use any language, with C# recommended.
The downside to using several different languages is that classes have to give time for students to adjust, with the plus being that the curriculum is much more language-neutral. I think the situation in our CpE department is much more focused on C++ only.
Of course, news updates are ads themselves, it's just that they're advertising the local news broadcast. Most things masquerading as "updates" contain no information except some kind of teaser, and more major news tends to lead to a break in programming altogether.
Station identification, while indeed required by the FCC, is essentially always worked in to some other aspect of the broadcast, such as the aforementioned news ads, other promos for the station, or simply superimposed on the screen at some point.
The 44 minute "rule" is most likely an act of self-preservation by the networks. Any significant increase in ad time could easily be offset by loss of viewers. Exceptions include sports like football, where "official timeouts" are inserted in every break of the action to allow for full commercial breaks, and other special cases like that new "Duel" game show on ABC. The first episode of that show felt like it was veering dangerously close to 50% commercials, not to mention all the time wasted away during the show itself.
...buy your mainstream music second hand... It's being sold legally yet they don't get a penny and they'd ban it if they could. It's probably second on their list next to the removal of fair use. Fortunately for them (and unfortunately for everyone else), DRM serves both of those purposes. Aside from restricting what you personally can do with it, DRM'd music also can't be resold.
It's a neat little racket they've got going, and just a few of the many reasons the industry wants to abandon the CD.
This is an issue that deserves some thought. Fair use isn't the only pro-consumer doctrine that can be routed around by some combination of legislation and technology (I'm looking at you, DVD Forum).
Basically, the attitude (which I agree with) is that you have to, at some point, apply some pressure if you want adherence with the standards. If browsers rejected non-compliant documents from the beginning, you can bet developers would be sure to have their syntax correct (especially since they wouldn't even be able to preview their pages). Even though I wouldn't classify HTML as a programming language, no other language just silently ignores your syntax errors and tries to "guess" what you meant to do. Unless the procedure for "guessing" is the same everywhere, it's a nightmare for portability, as we see with HTML today (along with other quirks like inconsistencies in every other aspect of the presentation).
I can't really complain about this enough. You drop a semicolon or parenthesis in C or Java, your compiler lets you know about it, and doesn't proceed until you feed it something that makes sense. Same generally applies for scripting languages. Why browser writers in the early days of the web decided otherwise boggles the mind, and we're still paying for that decision today. You can't just cut out "quirks mode" et al. without breaking large swaths of the web.
I see the W3C's specification of well-formedness on XHTML as the way forward, the light at the end of the tunnel. Since it only applies to the fairly recent XHTML, there's really no need to sweat about the effects on legacy documents. If someone's got noncompliant XHTML floating around and doesn't care to fix it, nuts to them. On the subject of uncooperative ad servers, if you as a developer can't get them to serve you compliant XHTML, just drop them. It's not as if there's really a shortage of advertising services out there. This won't have to go on very long before every company will fall into line.
Of course this all only applies if well-formedness is actually enforced by all browsers, and only if XHTML actually catches on. Similar strictness on the part of HTML 5, if it ever arrives and becomes dominant, could perform the same function too.
We are a republic, and I'm not sure if it's right to force some state (say Utah) to recognize a gay marriage performed in California or Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the Constitution disagrees, at least on its face.
"Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State."
The application of this to same-sex marriage between states is pretty controversial at the moment.
Pixar does this strategy, not releasing a movie until it is completely finished
I always hate when I'm watching a movie and the projector crashes right after the opening credits. Stupid muliplexes always forget to apply the latest patches.
I wasn't trying to imply necessarily that using the manufacturer's batteries wasn't the way to go, I was more noting that they take advantage of their position. They know the public naturally has a distrust for non-manufacturer items now, and they capitalize on that. While it's very likely they use higher-quality (and compatible) components, the kinds of price premiums they charge can range into the absurd. Thus, the thriving market for knockoffs.
I'm not sure I would call Windows XP a "leap." Sure, compared to the last version marketed to consumers, the ever-lampooned Windows Me, it was a huge improvement, but you were talking about development costs.
Windows XP is basically Windows 2000 with a new theme engine, added wireless support, and a few other things (also personal favorites like ClearType). The switchover for consumers from the 9x series to the much better NT/2000 kernel and core brought most of the noticeable improvements, like actually useful networking, USB, and multi-user support, not to mention the huge increase in stability. I would have to say that Windows Vista is much more of an investment for Microsoft than XP was. After all, they had to be doing some work to break all that backwards compatibility, right?
Why should anyone be allowed to sell a product that is known to have a higher chance of malfunctioning? Capitalism at work. There's clearly at least some market for cheaper, lower-quality components, and many companies (who don't outright lie like Shentech is accused of doing) occupy that space.
Hey, if people want to buy third-party components like batteries, more power to 'em. Manufacturers will usually fleece you for things like replacement batteries, but you're reasonably assured that they'll work correctly. You can often find reasonably-priced third-party batteries that have higher capacity or other advantages, but you give up the peace of mind you get with the "official" replacement. Still, as long as the chance of failure isn't negligently high (which in this specific case might be true), I don't really see a problem with it.
Now, printing IBM on the products is a different story, and takes the batteries from "third-party" to counterfeit. It's also possible that Shentech bought from a shoddy supplier that gave them counterfeits, but the end result is the same.
On a related note, game websites really need to stop grading on an "out of 10" or 100 scale. It seems to remind reviewers of standard grading scales, where everything below 60% is failing, and so every review site and magazine seems to live within the 6 to 10 range of the scale. If you really thought a game sucked, was derivative, had bugs, etc., slap that sucker with a 2. Movie reviewers and their 5 or 4-star system don't seem to have a problem with throwing out zeroes and ones when appropriate.
The impetus for this complaint is that the linked Metacritic site to illustrate how the game's been getting "hammered by reviewers" shows a 65, or "Mixed or average reviews." This only seems to fly as "getting hammered" in a world where the scale is hoplessly skewed. It's like the media-stereotype "Asian parent" grading scale: anything below an A is an abject failure.
It's what's technically called a "reply." Sure, Bearpaw failed to use italics or quote tags, and that last line with the link looks like a sig at first glance, but I thought it was pretty obvious.
Whether the company makes a profit is definitely -not- a major concern for most gamers.
I've always had trouble understanding the people who engage in arguments about which game company has the better business model, as if that made some difference. I owned a GameCube and currently own a Wii, but I didn't buy them because I knew Nintendo was making a profit on my console purchase (if anything, it makes me think they could afford a price drop).
However, while I'm acutely aware of the relative unpopularity of the GameCube among the consoles of the last generation (hey, it beat the Dreamcast), I have to disagree with your statement that the Wii already has more "good" games than the 'Cube had. I would say that the Wii's current Mario and Zelda offerings (Galaxy and Twilight Princess) beat those for the GC (Sunshine and Windwaker), and possibly the GameCube's best game, Resident Evil 4, has already gotten a quick Wii port, the GameCube still wins for now. Talk to me again after Super Smash Bros. Brawl comes out and we'll talk. The GameCube had a number of excellent games (Resident Evil 4 would've been an absolute coup for the console if it had arrived earlier and had stayed exclusive), and I only feel that I can place Mario Galaxy, Zelda, and Metroid Prime 3 in that category so far for the Wii.
Hopefully, the sheer number of Wii consoles in the hands of consumers will save the Wii from what I feel was the GameCube's undoing, a lack of attention from 3rd party developers. Nintendo, as of late, has had increasing focus on their 1st and 2nd party offerings, and while I have a deep abiding love for Zelda and Mario games, I'm also a console RPG, sports game, and driving game fan, among other things. On the GC, you could find inferior ports of sports and driving games pretty easily, but the RPG-type games I was looking for were mostly absent (curse you, PlayStation, you stole my Square games!). I've already had some bad cross-platform Wii experiences, such as with the ubiquitous EA Sports games, but it looks somewhat like developers are taking notice. Now to get them to realize that the Wii isn't only owned by casual gamers...
Once I pull off that trick, I can move on to convincing publishers to release games for Linux by the time Fallout 3 is released...
Well, Super Mario World, the game the grandparent referred to, was a SNES game, not an NES game, but New Super Mario Bros. indeed does have fairly significantly improved graphics over what was on the SNES.
Incidentally, it also wins the award for "Least Original Game Title Ever". It's barely sufficient as a codename for the game, "that new Super Mario Bros. game we're making." Even the crappy Nintendo practice of putting the title of the system in the game title, i.e., "Super Mario Bros. DS" would've been a little better.
cheap korean/chinese iPod knock-off I hate to break it to you, but iriver's current hard disk offerings (except the clix) are mostly cheap-ish Korean iPod knockoffs. That being said, I would still prefer an iriver to an iPod (my SlimX was the best CD player I ever bought), but I give the nod right now to Cowon and/or Archos at the moment.
I wouldn't be so sure that the Zune is eternally doomed to failure, either. If Microsoft ever gets the nerve to uncripple some of its more unique features, or further leverage the penetration of the 360, it could become a formidable market player.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, leaving asaide the issue of trying to match tracks without having more than snippets of the data. The reality of many P2P technologies is that pieces of the file are fetched in a more or less random order. Not particularly conducive to any prospective filtering.
More than likely, the IFPI would want wholesale blocking of, say, the Gnutella network, and consider that a job well done. As far as I'm concerned, anyone still using Gnutella at this point almost deserves what's coming to them.
The thing is, in your two cases of VHS and 8-track manufacturers, they're tied to the format. The media companies, on the other hand, generally couldn't care less, except in the case of a market being fractured by many competing formats. The RIAA almost certainly made immediate gains from the switch from vinyl to CD, since CD's cost much less to produce. In the same vein, what does the MPAA care that Blu-ray will eventually (possibly) overtake DVD? They're not DVD manufacturers, they make money no matter what the format of the media. Now, there'll possibly be a depression in total video media sales as people are more reluctant to buy soon-to-be-obsolete discs, but also don't yet wish to upgrade to Blu-ray. Then again, Blu-ray players will play DVDs, so maybe that won't be the case. At any rate, the comments referenced in the article were about box office sales, not video.
Technically, the RIAA can't sue anyone, since it's primarily just a lobbying organization with a few other duties thrown in, but the RIAA doesn't own any copyrights it can sue over.
Even though the lawsuits are obviously coordinated by the RIAA (same lawyers and tactics amongst all the various member labels) the settlement and damage money all goes to the individual labels. The RIAA itself is really just a phantom, it doesn't have any power that I know of to control the actions of the labels, it's merely a convenient umbrella organization to do things the various music industry giants consider mutually beneficial, such as pressuring college students into settlement deals.
No punitive damages were awarded in this case, and it is a relatively rare occasion that they are ever awarded.
You read all the details, but perhaps a shade too quickly...
Geosynchronous and geostationary orbits are obtained at the same radius from the Earth, about, as you say, 35,786 km above sea level. The defining factor that differentiates between geosynchronous and geostationary is the plane of the Earth the orbit is positioned over. A geosynchronous orbit that is directly aligned with the Equator is "geostationary" since it will always stay above the same position on the Earth. Plain "geosynchronous" orbits are simply aligned differently.
From the JAXA site about Kizuna:
"Scheduled orbit: Geostationary orbit at 143 degrees East longitude and at an altitude of about 36,000 km"
It is, even though the summarizer slipped up a bit (technically the term is correct, but somewhat misleading), destined for geostationary orbit.
Maybe we could re-de-double-un-export Persepolis from France/to them?
As many people have pointed out, even if you refuse the government's services, you still get charged the same amount of taxes. Saying that the only way to "refuse the services" is to just leave the country, and that this still can be reasonably called a proper "contract" is what seems disingenuous.
That being said, I disagree strongly with the many posters who want to "opt out" of taxes for services they don't use. That, as they know, isn't how taxes work. If everyone wants to just pay for exactly what they use, we might as well abolish the government and hand over control of all public resources and services to different corporations. I don't think I want to live in a country where only drivers pay for the roads and only parents pay for the schools. I'd rather not see a situation where only megacorporations like Microsoft can get road improvements, because they're the only ones who can pay. Eliminate the leveling effect of common taxes, and you'll get even more of an aristocracy of the rich than we have now.
At some level, people just need to accept that an improvement in conditions for others helps them too. Good schools will raise your property value (which will, in turn raise your taxes again, but that's another story.)
Why do you think they call me Dr. Quinn?
I thought it was a nickname, like "Dr. Dre." East si-ide.
no gorram way...
I'm a student at Virginia Tech, and we have a similar situation here.
The early 1000-level CS courses are Intro to OO Programming I and II, and use Java. The 2000-level courses are Data Structures I and II, taught in C++, and Computer Organization, which uses MIPS assembly.
The courses I am taking this semester are Operating Systems, which uses C and MIT's Pintos OS, and Human-Computer Interaction, which allows students to use any language, with C# recommended.
The downside to using several different languages is that classes have to give time for students to adjust, with the plus being that the curriculum is much more language-neutral. I think the situation in our CpE department is much more focused on C++ only.
Of course, news updates are ads themselves, it's just that they're advertising the local news broadcast. Most things masquerading as "updates" contain no information except some kind of teaser, and more major news tends to lead to a break in programming altogether.
Station identification, while indeed required by the FCC, is essentially always worked in to some other aspect of the broadcast, such as the aforementioned news ads, other promos for the station, or simply superimposed on the screen at some point.
The 44 minute "rule" is most likely an act of self-preservation by the networks. Any significant increase in ad time could easily be offset by loss of viewers. Exceptions include sports like football, where "official timeouts" are inserted in every break of the action to allow for full commercial breaks, and other special cases like that new "Duel" game show on ABC. The first episode of that show felt like it was veering dangerously close to 50% commercials, not to mention all the time wasted away during the show itself.
...buy your mainstream music second hand... It's being sold legally yet they don't get a penny and they'd ban it if they could. It's probably second on their list next to the removal of fair use. Fortunately for them (and unfortunately for everyone else), DRM serves both of those purposes. Aside from restricting what you personally can do with it, DRM'd music also can't be resold.It's a neat little racket they've got going, and just a few of the many reasons the industry wants to abandon the CD.
This is an issue that deserves some thought. Fair use isn't the only pro-consumer doctrine that can be routed around by some combination of legislation and technology (I'm looking at you, DVD Forum).
Basically, the attitude (which I agree with) is that you have to, at some point, apply some pressure if you want adherence with the standards. If browsers rejected non-compliant documents from the beginning, you can bet developers would be sure to have their syntax correct (especially since they wouldn't even be able to preview their pages). Even though I wouldn't classify HTML as a programming language, no other language just silently ignores your syntax errors and tries to "guess" what you meant to do. Unless the procedure for "guessing" is the same everywhere, it's a nightmare for portability, as we see with HTML today (along with other quirks like inconsistencies in every other aspect of the presentation).
I can't really complain about this enough. You drop a semicolon or parenthesis in C or Java, your compiler lets you know about it, and doesn't proceed until you feed it something that makes sense. Same generally applies for scripting languages. Why browser writers in the early days of the web decided otherwise boggles the mind, and we're still paying for that decision today. You can't just cut out "quirks mode" et al. without breaking large swaths of the web.
I see the W3C's specification of well-formedness on XHTML as the way forward, the light at the end of the tunnel. Since it only applies to the fairly recent XHTML, there's really no need to sweat about the effects on legacy documents. If someone's got noncompliant XHTML floating around and doesn't care to fix it, nuts to them. On the subject of uncooperative ad servers, if you as a developer can't get them to serve you compliant XHTML, just drop them. It's not as if there's really a shortage of advertising services out there. This won't have to go on very long before every company will fall into line.
Of course this all only applies if well-formedness is actually enforced by all browsers, and only if XHTML actually catches on. Similar strictness on the part of HTML 5, if it ever arrives and becomes dominant, could perform the same function too.
"Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State."
The application of this to same-sex marriage between states is pretty controversial at the moment.
You'd need some kind of transmogrifier gun to make sense of that one.
I really do hate when those companies say "MP4 player" even when they can't play .mp4 files.
I always hate when I'm watching a movie and the projector crashes right after the opening credits. Stupid muliplexes always forget to apply the latest patches.
I wasn't trying to imply necessarily that using the manufacturer's batteries wasn't the way to go, I was more noting that they take advantage of their position. They know the public naturally has a distrust for non-manufacturer items now, and they capitalize on that. While it's very likely they use higher-quality (and compatible) components, the kinds of price premiums they charge can range into the absurd. Thus, the thriving market for knockoffs.
I'm not sure I would call Windows XP a "leap." Sure, compared to the last version marketed to consumers, the ever-lampooned Windows Me, it was a huge improvement, but you were talking about development costs.
Windows XP is basically Windows 2000 with a new theme engine, added wireless support, and a few other things (also personal favorites like ClearType). The switchover for consumers from the 9x series to the much better NT/2000 kernel and core brought most of the noticeable improvements, like actually useful networking, USB, and multi-user support, not to mention the huge increase in stability. I would have to say that Windows Vista is much more of an investment for Microsoft than XP was. After all, they had to be doing some work to break all that backwards compatibility, right?
Hey, if people want to buy third-party components like batteries, more power to 'em. Manufacturers will usually fleece you for things like replacement batteries, but you're reasonably assured that they'll work correctly. You can often find reasonably-priced third-party batteries that have higher capacity or other advantages, but you give up the peace of mind you get with the "official" replacement. Still, as long as the chance of failure isn't negligently high (which in this specific case might be true), I don't really see a problem with it.
Now, printing IBM on the products is a different story, and takes the batteries from "third-party" to counterfeit. It's also possible that Shentech bought from a shoddy supplier that gave them counterfeits, but the end result is the same.
On a related note, game websites really need to stop grading on an "out of 10" or 100 scale. It seems to remind reviewers of standard grading scales, where everything below 60% is failing, and so every review site and magazine seems to live within the 6 to 10 range of the scale. If you really thought a game sucked, was derivative, had bugs, etc., slap that sucker with a 2. Movie reviewers and their 5 or 4-star system don't seem to have a problem with throwing out zeroes and ones when appropriate.
The impetus for this complaint is that the linked Metacritic site to illustrate how the game's been getting "hammered by reviewers" shows a 65, or "Mixed or average reviews." This only seems to fly as "getting hammered" in a world where the scale is hoplessly skewed. It's like the media-stereotype "Asian parent" grading scale: anything below an A is an abject failure.
It's what's technically called a "reply." Sure, Bearpaw failed to use italics or quote tags, and that last line with the link looks like a sig at first glance, but I thought it was pretty obvious.
I've always had trouble understanding the people who engage in arguments about which game company has the better business model, as if that made some difference. I owned a GameCube and currently own a Wii, but I didn't buy them because I knew Nintendo was making a profit on my console purchase (if anything, it makes me think they could afford a price drop).
However, while I'm acutely aware of the relative unpopularity of the GameCube among the consoles of the last generation (hey, it beat the Dreamcast), I have to disagree with your statement that the Wii already has more "good" games than the 'Cube had. I would say that the Wii's current Mario and Zelda offerings (Galaxy and Twilight Princess) beat those for the GC (Sunshine and Windwaker), and possibly the GameCube's best game, Resident Evil 4, has already gotten a quick Wii port, the GameCube still wins for now. Talk to me again after Super Smash Bros. Brawl comes out and we'll talk. The GameCube had a number of excellent games (Resident Evil 4 would've been an absolute coup for the console if it had arrived earlier and had stayed exclusive), and I only feel that I can place Mario Galaxy, Zelda, and Metroid Prime 3 in that category so far for the Wii.
Hopefully, the sheer number of Wii consoles in the hands of consumers will save the Wii from what I feel was the GameCube's undoing, a lack of attention from 3rd party developers. Nintendo, as of late, has had increasing focus on their 1st and 2nd party offerings, and while I have a deep abiding love for Zelda and Mario games, I'm also a console RPG, sports game, and driving game fan, among other things. On the GC, you could find inferior ports of sports and driving games pretty easily, but the RPG-type games I was looking for were mostly absent (curse you, PlayStation, you stole my Square games!). I've already had some bad cross-platform Wii experiences, such as with the ubiquitous EA Sports games, but it looks somewhat like developers are taking notice. Now to get them to realize that the Wii isn't only owned by casual gamers...
Once I pull off that trick, I can move on to convincing publishers to release games for Linux by the time Fallout 3 is released...
Well, Super Mario World, the game the grandparent referred to, was a SNES game, not an NES game, but New Super Mario Bros. indeed does have fairly significantly improved graphics over what was on the SNES. Incidentally, it also wins the award for "Least Original Game Title Ever". It's barely sufficient as a codename for the game, "that new Super Mario Bros. game we're making." Even the crappy Nintendo practice of putting the title of the system in the game title, i.e., "Super Mario Bros. DS" would've been a little better.
I wouldn't be so sure that the Zune is eternally doomed to failure, either. If Microsoft ever gets the nerve to uncripple some of its more unique features, or further leverage the penetration of the 360, it could become a formidable market player.