Actually, I do my CD burning at work, where I have a G4 Mac running OS X. CD burning capability is built into the OS; it's really quite sweet. You mount the blank CD as if it were a drive, drag files to it to que them, and when you are ready to eject the CD, it burns it. All at the OS level. Very nice.
Except for one thing... As it's copying files to the que, it increases the time to make a CD by a factor of 1/2. Ugh. Not fun if you've got a lot of CD's you want to burn (and no, you can't copy the files directly to the que yourself). And, IIRC, there's no verification (someone correct me on this).
Toast is still the preferred way to burn CD's on a Mac, IMO. It's fast, it verifies, it has a wide variety of options.
I know that if I was a shareholder of ROXI, I'd be pissed right about now. They are taking on a battle that they don't need to fight, and treating the customer as a criminal.
The only thing this is going to result in is a decrease in sales for Roxio, as people turn to alternative CD burning apps. As a management decision, it's just plain stupid and somebody needs to be fired.
Well, duh, of course you're going to need a processor upgrade if you're going to install a commercial OS that's 5 years newer than the system you're installing it on if you want it to run at reasonable speeds.
What exactly is your point? You whine about Apple's restrictions, and then point out that they are entirely circumnavigatable. Either you can or you can't, end of story.
One thing I've always liked about Mac OS (before X) was that the OS was extremely portable. Can't install on one system? Install a universal System Folder on another Mac, copy it onto a Zip or CD, copy it onto the new target. Not a lot of hacking and trickery there.
Well, there's trade-offs to every choice you make. Buy Windows to use all of the available software, and you open yourself to numerous security holes. Install Linux, and spend your time ranting about the lack of software. Buy a Mac and you have fewer hardware options available.
However, Mac has something that you won't find elsewhere... the ability to run OS X concurrently with any x86 OS natively on top of an x86 emulator. Linux has a clunky Windows emulator, and Windows has a clunky (now useless) Mac emulator, but only on a Mac could you run any actual PPC or x86 OS.
actually the address is on http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/k95.html most of the way down, under the "buy now" stuff
I still don't believe it. The name "King George" isn't anywhere on that page. It would take some human intelligence to associate the name from a different page with the address.
It's a gag by a bored keyboardist. Move along, folks, there's nothing to see here....
Look, the market will shake things out, and everything is going to be just fine. If there are true and significant costs savings to these airplanes, they will find their way into the marketplace en masse; if not, then they won't. If the current airlines can't afford to buy new planes (which is silly, they buy new planes all the time; they can't very well fly a plane until the wings fall off), then new airlines will rise up in the marketplace, sieze the opportunity to offer the same service at lower rates, and force out the old carriers.
It's possible that a new airline would even adopt the Southwest model. Southwest only buys one kind of airplane. All the other carriers have a wide variety of aircraft, so they have to train their mechanics on multiple types, and they have to stock parts for every type (tying up a lot of cash). Southwest, having only one model of aircraft, is highly efficient in their maintenence; everyone is trained on one aircraft design, and the maintenence departments only have to stock parts for one type of aircraft. A new carrier entering the marketplace could have a) a much more cost-efficent airplane, and b) a much more efficient maintence model, if they only bought this one kind of plane.
I could easily see such an airline rising to prominence in very short order, in spite of the current economic climate in commercial aviation.
Frankly, I don't see the corrolation between your analogy and what Gator is doing. If you tape the show at your friend's house, you're still going to watch all of the commercials that SF Channel airs during the show. I think you're really stretching it.
Besides, all the plaintiff needs to show, IMHNLO (in my humble non-lawyer's opinion), is that Gator is overly aggressive in installing itself on users computers (i.e., without the express permission of the user), and that it tries to obscure the true nature of what the program is doing. And then show that users can't remove Gator when they no longer want the service.
Those things shouldn't be too difficult to prove. Not at all.
Once you have that, then you have a very large installed base of users who did not request that Gator replace banner ads on web pages.
And once you prove that, then your permission-based defense turns to dust.
Ads on web sites are part of a commercial for-profit venture. Gator's replacing those ads are an attempt to directly interfere with the revenue stream of the site, which I believe is illegal.
Also, there may be some copyright issues. Every page on the Washington Post is copyrighted by them, and the ads are copyrighted by the various advertisers. It is illegal for someone to take a copyrighted work, modify it and resell it. That is essentially what Gator is doing. They are, in essence, modifying a copyrighted page for the express purpose of reselling the ad space.
Personally, I hope they body-slam Gator, and it sends a chill through the spyware community. More likely, though, spyware companies will feel emboldened by whatever decsion comes down, feeling that the court is establishing rules for their legitimate operation.
The funniest though, has to be the fact that they say Atari systemS. Sorry folks, but other than the venerable VCS/2600, Atari didn't really do squat in the marketplace.
I think that's the point they were getting at. The 2600 represents the pinnacle of Atari's achievements in the console market. After that, they were fairly irrelevant.
This isn't an academic exercise. There are reports that a dozen or so Kuwaiti nationals, who were in Afghanistan doing Peace Corps-type work, are currently incarcerated in Camp X-Ray as suspected members of Al Qaeda. Diplomacy has thus far failed, and they can't even talk to a lawyer in order to clear their names.
That's why they are awaiting trial. Assuming this is true, Kuwaitis aren't US citizens, and therefore aren't entitled to Constitutional protections afforded to US citizens.
If they aren't Al-Qaeda, then they will have an opportunity to demonstrate that in court.
the law clearly states that if you join a foreign army, you renounce your American citizenship. I realize that al-Queda is a nationless army, but we have declared war on them nonetheless.
What is the strict definition of "foreign army," I wonder...
All three companies make losses on their hardware products, but make up those losses with sales of higher-margin software.
Of course, only Microsoft is losing money on the X-Box, but the myth that all console makers routinely sell their hardware at a loss is pervasive. It just ain't so.
then it doesn't really matter which DVD-R you buy. I predict that within another generation or two of drives, the price should be so cheap that the only way manufacturers will be able to differentiate their drives from the rest of the pack will be to add in compatibility for the other DVD-R formats.
After all, look at 56k modems... two incompatible standards when they first came out, but now every 56k modem supports 56k-Flex and X2. Similar situation with CD-RW drives; the format is incompatible with CD-R, but manufacturers quickly saw the importance of selling burners that support both formats.
There was an article on the front page of the WSJ this morning about how Disney is cutting costs in their animation department. Gone are the days when money was no object in putting together a great film. They had gradually been spending more and more on their films and revenue was continually shrinking. I believe it said that they spent $50 mil. to produce The Lion King, which raked in over $1 bil worldwide, but by the time they got to Tarzan, they spent $100 mil on it just to see it break even. As a result, in their latest film, Lilo & Stitch, they wouldn't even do things like giving Lilo's teenage sister a fancy wardrobe or put a flower in Lilo's hair because of the extra time involved animating more complex objects. Fascinating article about the work flows and budgetary concerns of a major animation studio.
Anyway, not to get off track here... I believe the switch to Linux has a lot to do with slashing costs.
Check out this spam email a bunch of people in my office got yesterday:
-=-=-=-=- Return-Path: postmaster@salisbury.net Received: from salisbury.net (12.152.4.9) by myoffice.com with ESMTP (Eudora
Internet Mail Server 3.0.3); Wed, 12 Jun 2002 23:08:21 -0400 Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 23:09:46 -0400 Message-Id: 200206122309.AA2564817116@salisbury.net Mime-Vers ion: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii From: "postmaster " postmaster@salisbury.net Reply-To: postmaster@salisbury.net To: people in my office Subject: WARNING: YOU WERE SENT A VIRUS X-Mailer: X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
On 06/12/2002 at 23:09:45 Our special virus software on our servers at salisbury.net reported that your were sent an Email Virus containing the Unknown Virus in the Unknown File attachment. The subject of the E-mail was "L Specifies the length". The E-mail containing the virus from kbndl@salisbury.net has been quarantined on our servers to prevent further damage. The virus never made it to your mailbox. (emphasis mine)
Internet Of Salisbury, Inc. provides this service free to our customers while other providers charge a monthly fee. Though this software should catch up to 99 percent of viruses, a new virus could make it in. If you are not running Anti-Virus software you should ASAP!
Please Contact N-Techsolutions @ 704-638-2422 or visit their website at: http://www.n-techsolutions.com Look for the Norton Anti Virus Special! (emphasis mine)
Please do not call Internet Of Salisbury, Inc. -=-=-=-=-
Not that there was ever any question about sleazy spammers being out there, but this one takes the cake.
It seems to me that the bigger impact of charging for excess bandwidth is going to be on the gamers and on the people listening to internet radio. Those two probably chew up more bandwidth on the average Slashdotter's connection than anything else.
Between the battle in Congress over royalties and a potentially significant drop in broadband users, internet radio is heading for some tough times.
why should a corporation I dont care about make 5 times the money the writer does.
Because of the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.
Does it seem unfair? Sure, until you think about the alternative: Artists establishing a hit record without the record companies and without borrowing money.
Yes, the cost of capital to the bands are outrageous. However, given the fact that creating a hit band is a longshot at best, there is a high level of risk on the money loaned. The higher the risk, the higher the cost of capital. That's how capitalism works.
Of course, that's what makes the internet so great when it comes to music distribution. Like Bowie said, bands have a chance to elimnate the record company completely and build their audiences via word of mouth and downloands on the net. We are a long ways off from that becoming a viable model, though.
An online game that I've been playing for a veeeery long time (Tanarus) used to be subscription-based, went free for a year, and has just in the last month gone back to a Pay-To-Play model.
Why?
Well, server costs and bandwidth costs, sure. But, this game is 6 years old, so the server costs are SIGNIFICANTLY less than they were when the game was in open beta in 1996. And, this game is owned by the same company that makes EverCrack; they've got bandwidth to spare.
Business issues aside, I think the major reason they went back to a Pay-To-Play model is that the cheating was getting out of hand. We see it in every other game; the older a game is, the more the code has been hacked, and the more cheats there are available. Verant wasn't terribly attentive to the Tanarus community once the game was released comercially, but one thing they *did* do was to issue regular patches to block cheaters. The big problem was, they wanted to just set up the server and move on to other things. However, the cheaters required them to commit some ongoing development time. And this past year, the cheating has been worse than I've ever seen it in the game.
They dealt with the cheaters in a very direct manner -- they canceled the person's login account, erasing their scores, and banned their IP when possible. The big problem was that most cheaters would simply recreate another free account, and use a different IP to log in (obviously, not a problem for dial-up or most cable modem users). I remember one guy saying that he had been banned 36 times in two days. Yikes!
The solution for Verant was to crank up the subscription model again. They aren't charging that much ($7/mo., but they bundle two other games with that). Credit card is required, no checks and no debit cards. Immediately, most of the unsupervised kids are gone (for better or worse) since they don't have CC's. Secondly, no spoofing of account information; you have to give accurate billing information, and you are now traceable through your credit card company; entering fraudulent info here could get you in trouble with the CC companies, who have deep legal pockets. Third, you are limited to the number of accounts you can launch by the number of credit cards you are able to use that have different names on them; no more infinite #'s of accounts. Fourth, Verant now has an easier time with legal recourse. IANAL, but I believe the fact that money in changing hands undeniably establishes that the player has entered into a contractual agreement with Verant to abide by the Terms of Service. There has always been a TOS screen that everyone has to click through in order to join the game, but I honestly don't know how that would stand up in court by itself.
We would all like for online gaming to be free, but charging for games, even if it's just a token amount, is a powerful tool for game companies to crack down on the hackers. The era of free online gaming will be drawing to a close in the near future, and not just because of profits. Hackers are pushing the game companies to it.
Why can't we just colonize these planets for the good of mankind AS all of mankind. Why do we need more invisible lines in space?
Nice rhetoric, but who determines what's good for all mankind? The US? China? Romainia? Cuba? We're still trying to convince a lot of nations that a free market economy and freedom of the press are good things. Are they (or we, for that matter) just going to toss away stubbornly held beliefs?
As in many technological breakthroughs these days, there are political, ethical and social implications that are not resolved before pressing forward, and it generally only leads to more conflict.
And Yahoo! Pager sells advertisements, not subscriptions.
So Apple should completely rework their QT business model just to finance a Linux player of dubious financial value?
You have to understand though, Yahoo has a significant portion of their business in online advertising. Apple doesn't, and probably doesn't want to be in that business.
To my knowledge, Apple has only had one foray into online advertising, and that was with the Sherlock web search utility. For whatever reason, it was short-lived; the banner ad is still there, but now it's all Apple.com ads. I'm guessing one of two things happened: a) they found that the expense in setting up an advertising department was more than the potential revenue, or b) decided that the advertising business was not the business they were in, nor did they want to be in it, which is great; they should focus on the stuff they know how to do, and leave stuff they don't know how to do to everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I do my CD burning at work, where I have a G4 Mac running OS X. CD burning capability is built into the OS; it's really quite sweet. You mount the blank CD as if it were a drive, drag files to it to que them, and when you are ready to eject the CD, it burns it. All at the OS level. Very nice.
Except for one thing... As it's copying files to the que, it increases the time to make a CD by a factor of 1/2. Ugh. Not fun if you've got a lot of CD's you want to burn (and no, you can't copy the files directly to the que yourself). And, IIRC, there's no verification (someone correct me on this).
Toast is still the preferred way to burn CD's on a Mac, IMO. It's fast, it verifies, it has a wide variety of options.
I know that if I was a shareholder of ROXI, I'd be pissed right about now. They are taking on a battle that they don't need to fight, and treating the customer as a criminal.
The only thing this is going to result in is a decrease in sales for Roxio, as people turn to alternative CD burning apps. As a management decision, it's just plain stupid and somebody needs to be fired.
Well, duh, of course you're going to need a processor upgrade if you're going to install a commercial OS that's 5 years newer than the system you're installing it on if you want it to run at reasonable speeds.
What exactly is your point? You whine about Apple's restrictions, and then point out that they are entirely circumnavigatable. Either you can or you can't, end of story.
One thing I've always liked about Mac OS (before X) was that the OS was extremely portable. Can't install on one system? Install a universal System Folder on another Mac, copy it onto a Zip or CD, copy it onto the new target. Not a lot of hacking and trickery there.
I was disappointed, though, that I didn't see any Yodites (or whatever the heck they're called).
You go back 4,000 years, and the technology is already there for droids.
Makes me think that technological research must have been completely stagnated by the time of the movies.
Well, there's trade-offs to every choice you make. Buy Windows to use all of the available software, and you open yourself to numerous security holes. Install Linux, and spend your time ranting about the lack of software. Buy a Mac and you have fewer hardware options available.
However, Mac has something that you won't find elsewhere... the ability to run OS X concurrently with any x86 OS natively on top of an x86 emulator. Linux has a clunky Windows emulator, and Windows has a clunky (now useless) Mac emulator, but only on a Mac could you run any actual PPC or x86 OS.
I am not exactly partial to the way that Apple locks it's customers into upgrading entire machines just for the sake of running new software.
That's not entirely true. Everything on a Mac is upgradeable except for the motherboard.
they would have bought them 6 months ago, but PayPal had frozen eBay's account.
actually the address is on
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/k95.html
most of the way down, under the "buy now" stuff
I still don't believe it. The name "King George" isn't anywhere on that page. It would take some human intelligence to associate the name from a different page with the address.
It's a gag by a bored keyboardist. Move along, folks, there's nothing to see here....
Look, the market will shake things out, and everything is going to be just fine. If there are true and significant costs savings to these airplanes, they will find their way into the marketplace en masse; if not, then they won't. If the current airlines can't afford to buy new planes (which is silly, they buy new planes all the time; they can't very well fly a plane until the wings fall off), then new airlines will rise up in the marketplace, sieze the opportunity to offer the same service at lower rates, and force out the old carriers.
It's possible that a new airline would even adopt the Southwest model. Southwest only buys one kind of airplane. All the other carriers have a wide variety of aircraft, so they have to train their mechanics on multiple types, and they have to stock parts for every type (tying up a lot of cash). Southwest, having only one model of aircraft, is highly efficient in their maintenence; everyone is trained on one aircraft design, and the maintenence departments only have to stock parts for one type of aircraft. A new carrier entering the marketplace could have a) a much more cost-efficent airplane, and b) a much more efficient maintence model, if they only bought this one kind of plane.
I could easily see such an airline rising to prominence in very short order, in spite of the current economic climate in commercial aviation.
Frankly, I don't see the corrolation between your analogy and what Gator is doing. If you tape the show at your friend's house, you're still going to watch all of the commercials that SF Channel airs during the show. I think you're really stretching it.
Besides, all the plaintiff needs to show, IMHNLO (in my humble non-lawyer's opinion), is that Gator is overly aggressive in installing itself on users computers (i.e., without the express permission of the user), and that it tries to obscure the true nature of what the program is doing. And then show that users can't remove Gator when they no longer want the service.
Those things shouldn't be too difficult to prove. Not at all.
Once you have that, then you have a very large installed base of users who did not request that Gator replace banner ads on web pages.
And once you prove that, then your permission-based defense turns to dust.
Ads on web sites are part of a commercial for-profit venture. Gator's replacing those ads are an attempt to directly interfere with the revenue stream of the site, which I believe is illegal.
Also, there may be some copyright issues. Every page on the Washington Post is copyrighted by them, and the ads are copyrighted by the various advertisers. It is illegal for someone to take a copyrighted work, modify it and resell it. That is essentially what Gator is doing. They are, in essence, modifying a copyrighted page for the express purpose of reselling the ad space.
Personally, I hope they body-slam Gator, and it sends a chill through the spyware community. More likely, though, spyware companies will feel emboldened by whatever decsion comes down, feeling that the court is establishing rules for their legitimate operation.
The funniest though, has to be the fact that they say Atari systemS. Sorry folks, but other than the venerable VCS/2600, Atari didn't really do squat in the marketplace.
I think that's the point they were getting at. The 2600 represents the pinnacle of Atari's achievements in the console market. After that, they were fairly irrelevant.
This isn't an academic exercise. There are reports that a dozen or so Kuwaiti nationals, who were in Afghanistan doing Peace Corps-type work, are currently incarcerated in Camp X-Ray as suspected members of Al Qaeda. Diplomacy has thus far failed, and they can't even talk to a lawyer in order to clear their names.
That's why they are awaiting trial. Assuming this is true, Kuwaitis aren't US citizens, and therefore aren't entitled to Constitutional protections afforded to US citizens.
If they aren't Al-Qaeda, then they will have an opportunity to demonstrate that in court.
the law clearly states that if you join a foreign army, you renounce your American citizenship. I realize that al-Queda is a nationless army, but we have declared war on them nonetheless.
What is the strict definition of "foreign army," I wonder...
From the Yahoo/Reuters report:
All three companies make losses on their hardware products, but make up those losses with sales of higher-margin software.
Of course, only Microsoft is losing money on the X-Box, but the myth that all console makers routinely sell their hardware at a loss is pervasive. It just ain't so.
then it doesn't really matter which DVD-R you buy. I predict that within another generation or two of drives, the price should be so cheap that the only way manufacturers will be able to differentiate their drives from the rest of the pack will be to add in compatibility for the other DVD-R formats.
After all, look at 56k modems... two incompatible standards when they first came out, but now every 56k modem supports 56k-Flex and X2. Similar situation with CD-RW drives; the format is incompatible with CD-R, but manufacturers quickly saw the importance of selling burners that support both formats.
It'll happen, I guarantee it.
There was an article on the front page of the WSJ this morning about how Disney is cutting costs in their animation department. Gone are the days when money was no object in putting together a great film. They had gradually been spending more and more on their films and revenue was continually shrinking. I believe it said that they spent $50 mil. to produce The Lion King, which raked in over $1 bil worldwide, but by the time they got to Tarzan, they spent $100 mil on it just to see it break even. As a result, in their latest film, Lilo & Stitch, they wouldn't even do things like giving Lilo's teenage sister a fancy wardrobe or put a flower in Lilo's hair because of the extra time involved animating more complex objects. Fascinating article about the work flows and budgetary concerns of a major animation studio.
Anyway, not to get off track here... I believe the switch to Linux has a lot to do with slashing costs.
Check out this spam email a bunch of people in my office got yesterday:
s ion: 1.0
-=-=-=-=-
Return-Path: postmaster@salisbury.net
Received: from salisbury.net (12.152.4.9) by myoffice.com with ESMTP (Eudora
Internet Mail Server 3.0.3); Wed, 12 Jun 2002 23:08:21 -0400
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 23:09:46 -0400
Message-Id: 200206122309.AA2564817116@salisbury.net
Mime-Ver
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
From: "postmaster " postmaster@salisbury.net
Reply-To: postmaster@salisbury.net
To: people in my office
Subject: WARNING: YOU WERE SENT A VIRUS
X-Mailer:
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
On 06/12/2002 at 23:09:45 Our special virus software on our servers at salisbury.net
reported that your were sent an Email Virus containing the Unknown Virus in the Unknown File attachment.
The subject of the E-mail was "L Specifies the length". The E-mail containing the virus from kbndl@salisbury.net has been quarantined on our servers to prevent further damage. The virus never made it to your mailbox. (emphasis mine)
Internet Of Salisbury, Inc. provides this service free to our customers while other providers charge
a monthly fee. Though this software should catch up to 99 percent of viruses, a new virus could make it in.
If you are not running Anti-Virus software you should ASAP!
Please Contact N-Techsolutions @ 704-638-2422 or visit their website at:
http://www.n-techsolutions.com Look for the Norton Anti Virus Special! (emphasis mine)
Please do not call Internet Of Salisbury, Inc.
-=-=-=-=-
Not that there was ever any question about sleazy spammers being out there, but this one takes the cake.
It seems to me that the bigger impact of charging for excess bandwidth is going to be on the gamers and on the people listening to internet radio. Those two probably chew up more bandwidth on the average Slashdotter's connection than anything else.
Between the battle in Congress over royalties and a potentially significant drop in broadband users, internet radio is heading for some tough times.
why should a corporation I dont care about make 5 times the money the writer does.
Because of the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.
Does it seem unfair? Sure, until you think about the alternative: Artists establishing a hit record without the record companies and without borrowing money.
Yes, the cost of capital to the bands are outrageous. However, given the fact that creating a hit band is a longshot at best, there is a high level of risk on the money loaned. The higher the risk, the higher the cost of capital. That's how capitalism works.
Of course, that's what makes the internet so great when it comes to music distribution. Like Bowie said, bands have a chance to elimnate the record company completely and build their audiences via word of mouth and downloands on the net. We are a long ways off from that becoming a viable model, though.
An online game that I've been playing for a veeeery long time (Tanarus) used to be subscription-based, went free for a year, and has just in the last month gone back to a Pay-To-Play model.
Why?
Well, server costs and bandwidth costs, sure. But, this game is 6 years old, so the server costs are SIGNIFICANTLY less than they were when the game was in open beta in 1996. And, this game is owned by the same company that makes EverCrack; they've got bandwidth to spare.
Business issues aside, I think the major reason they went back to a Pay-To-Play model is that the cheating was getting out of hand. We see it in every other game; the older a game is, the more the code has been hacked, and the more cheats there are available. Verant wasn't terribly attentive to the Tanarus community once the game was released comercially, but one thing they *did* do was to issue regular patches to block cheaters. The big problem was, they wanted to just set up the server and move on to other things. However, the cheaters required them to commit some ongoing development time. And this past year, the cheating has been worse than I've ever seen it in the game.
They dealt with the cheaters in a very direct manner -- they canceled the person's login account, erasing their scores, and banned their IP when possible. The big problem was that most cheaters would simply recreate another free account, and use a different IP to log in (obviously, not a problem for dial-up or most cable modem users). I remember one guy saying that he had been banned 36 times in two days. Yikes!
The solution for Verant was to crank up the subscription model again. They aren't charging that much ($7/mo., but they bundle two other games with that). Credit card is required, no checks and no debit cards. Immediately, most of the unsupervised kids are gone (for better or worse) since they don't have CC's. Secondly, no spoofing of account information; you have to give accurate billing information, and you are now traceable through your credit card company; entering fraudulent info here could get you in trouble with the CC companies, who have deep legal pockets. Third, you are limited to the number of accounts you can launch by the number of credit cards you are able to use that have different names on them; no more infinite #'s of accounts. Fourth, Verant now has an easier time with legal recourse. IANAL, but I believe the fact that money in changing hands undeniably establishes that the player has entered into a contractual agreement with Verant to abide by the Terms of Service. There has always been a TOS screen that everyone has to click through in order to join the game, but I honestly don't know how that would stand up in court by itself.
We would all like for online gaming to be free, but charging for games, even if it's just a token amount, is a powerful tool for game companies to crack down on the hackers. The era of free online gaming will be drawing to a close in the near future, and not just because of profits. Hackers are pushing the game companies to it.
Why can't we just colonize these planets for the good of mankind AS all of mankind. Why do we need more invisible lines in space?
Nice rhetoric, but who determines what's good for all mankind? The US? China? Romainia? Cuba? We're still trying to convince a lot of nations that a free market economy and freedom of the press are good things. Are they (or we, for that matter) just going to toss away stubbornly held beliefs?
As in many technological breakthroughs these days, there are political, ethical and social implications that are not resolved before pressing forward, and it generally only leads to more conflict.
Star Wars, coming soon to a planet near you.
And Yahoo! Pager sells advertisements, not subscriptions.
So Apple should completely rework their QT business model just to finance a Linux player of dubious financial value?
You have to understand though, Yahoo has a significant portion of their business in online advertising. Apple doesn't, and probably doesn't want to be in that business.
To my knowledge, Apple has only had one foray into online advertising, and that was with the Sherlock web search utility. For whatever reason, it was short-lived; the banner ad is still there, but now it's all Apple.com ads. I'm guessing one of two things happened: a) they found that the expense in setting up an advertising department was more than the potential revenue, or b) decided that the advertising business was not the business they were in, nor did they want to be in it, which is great; they should focus on the stuff they know how to do, and leave stuff they don't know how to do to everyone else.
Ah, but it's not just about making sales to earn revenue.
Silly rabbit. It's always about making sales to earn revenue. Brand loyalty doesn't mean squat if you can't translate that into a positive cash flow.