He said he planned to make changes as his analysis progressed, rather than waiting until the end of his review.
Because it's always better to start doing something before you finish understanding everything, than waiting till the end when you can make changes based on an accurate understanding of the entire process.
Oh sure, thanks Fredomy (can't be using French anything) now that you mentioned that it's working in Europe and that it's something to emulate, congress will never do it. Just because we paid for it once & didn't get it, everyone else in the developed world is ahead of us, and there is a viable way to get it that doesn't involve handing money to people who've already screwed us, is no reason not to allow the US Telcos to have what they want.
Eminent domain buddy, eminent domain... it used to apply to land & public services, but hey, if private developers can claim it (thanks SCOUS), there's no reason that the Telcos (as public utilities) can't expand on that to claim your paycheck - it's for the greater good you understand.
Having publicly admitted to having never watched Bladerunner, I motion that AviLazar's geek liscense be revoked...
Shees, next it's going to be 2001, The Time Machine, and Ice Pirates... where will it end...think of the children...
Wait, wrong argument...
where will it end - check
think of the children - skip
work of terrorists - skip
violation of civil rights - check ^H^H - skip
end of civilization - change civ to cult - check
OK, back....
to allow this affrontery to continue will undoubtably lead to the end of Western Culture as we know it, for without due veneration of our classical arts, we shall indeed be doomed to an eternity of Jerry Springer and Teletubbies. Oh the humanity of it all.
Vacuum/Helium boxes to work in solve that problem - I recommend Helium, vacuum gloves are a pain to work with. Takes about 1 sheet of plexiglass, $10 of fittings and a $20 baloon canister of helium.
And the right of first sale has been upheld repeatedly to grant you the right to sell your book - although converting it to confeti might make it a derivative work in which case it's not legal.... Unless it's a parody of the work at that point...
My brain hurts now... I'll go kill some pixels before they start liscencing the images so I can only view them once....
Microtome blades for Transmition Electron Microscopy are either made from cracked glass (cheap & disposable, but I used to do 2 or 3 at a pop to get one with a clean break) or gemstone (emerald, saphire, and diamond) cleaves (longer lasting but fragile and pricy).
Oh and for nigh-trivial - check out National Geographic segments on this - it's a bitch & a half to get a consistant & usable blade (something sharp to accidently cut yourself with appears much easier).
If you prohibit transfer, the copyright becomes economically worthless, or at least much more difficult to use. That which cannot be transferred cannot be sold.
Not at all. That's the whole deal with liscensing. I own the copywrite to The Greatest Novel Ever but I will, for a certain fee & percentage of profits, allow you to publish it. Oh, you want to do a second printing? Um, Company B just offered me $obscene and 3%. Can you beat it?
Tying the copywrite to the actual creators of the work does not inhibit the financial incentives at all. You just can't play as many games. Of course - what do you do with works for pay?
No the biggest [ok debabably] problem with copywrites right now is that the 'automatic' copywrite system that's in place in combination with the near permanent copywrite term, has created a [blink size=bigger than screen]huge[/blink] pile of works that are orphans. Nobody can determine who exactly owns the copywrite for the work, so it's in a legal limbo - rationally it should be public domain, but instead it's just an oddity nobody can use.
You want to cut down on this crap? Reinstate copywrite registration, along with periodic renewal. You don't renew your copywrite every 5 years, it goes PD. And for the record, owning the rights to something for 75 years after I die is not really an incentive for me to create something. And extending the copywrite to 99 years for corperate owned copywrites does nothing for the Public domain.
That's the old way of thinking. Maximizing investment is all about long term planning & very little to do with todays market price. Unfortunately todays 'investment strategy' is pump & dump & move on. You only get to inflate so much before things go pop. The vast majority of people who buy individual stocks (not the investment houses) have & will never attend a shareholder meeting - most will never even return the proxie forms.
You'll also see a difference in the old investment firms vs the new ones. The older firms tend to think & act long term - they'll take a moderate steady growth stock with dividends over a spiky fabulous performer with none. Why? Long term thinking - steady growth companies usually outperform ones that have sharp ups & downs in the stock prices. Also, dividends are proof the company is actually turning a real world profit - very important in a long term investment.
That's the real difference in old & new thinking. The whole idea of shares and investing was that you & 10 other people give me money to start this business, and I'll split the profit 12 ways. The dividends were supposed to be the mean of receiving a return on your investment. Now you watch people flipping stocks so fast they never actually get any dividends. When the dividend is the means of receiving a ROI, you want the company to perform well in the long haul. When you get your ROI by reselling the stock, you don't care about the long term, just that it goes up today - who cares if the company goes belly up next week.
If it's declared private, and protected as private under relevant TOS & municiple code, it shouldn't matter if it's on the internet or not. Military sites are on the internet, and even though some are open - no password - going into them to look for things is criminal computer tresspass - remember they are extraditing the UK UFO nutjob over exactly that.
I have a private web server up - it's technically part of the internet. If you come in on an IP address I havn't approved you get bounced to the please go away page. Are you telling me that if the govt wants to, they have every right to come in & check the data on the server just 'because it's connected to the internet.'?
As for your statement that "they simply accessed what he put up for the world to see" - declaring it private is an act which explicitly states that he did not "put it up for the world to see"
I agree that if this is an actual occurance, then the use of the PATRIOT ACT for things as trivial as a job interview are a fullfillment of the worst fears people had about it at the time it was originally passed.
When has there ever been a divergence between shareholders and customers? No one is out saying, "Let's screw this customer today, and if we do, our share price might go up 20 cents." They're just not doing it.
Um, I was once told that "Customer's rate companies better on customer service if they have a few small inconviences that are quickly resolved, than if they have no problems, so we are going to start delaying mail server maintenance."
Where does that fall in the 'just not doing it' scheme?
Companies live and die by the stock price - not sure why because after they sell it, they don't get any more money from the stock - and anything that might get it to nudge up just a little - without causing an open rebellion from the customers is going to be tried. If they loose some customers - the thought is that the better report numbers will generate new ones. Let's face it, for most businesses customers are just as replaceable as the employees.
If that passion is the one which his managers look for then I am certain that your 'Bob' would find himself well rewarded.
For a lot of companies that would really depend on Bob's ass kissing skills. If Bob sit's in his cube & makes magical code flow across the screen like water over Niagra Falls, but tells the manager he's wrong, why he's wrong, and offers proof of why he's wrong, chances are he's going to sit in his cube until they take his caffeene pickled corpse out. But Dave, who grovels, says yes to anything no matter how stupid, and can't code "hello world" in any language without 6 hours of debugging, will probably get promoted to a glass office somewhere.
I've dealt with a slew of managers in different industries. Some actually cared what you had to say, most only cared about what they thought. I had one who insisted that something be done one way because 'it would work better'. When it took a production line down for a week, he was screaming about how nobody listened to him, until someone dropped his Emails & all the responces sent to him warning about what would happen on his bosses desk.
I worked at one company shifting from family ownership to trying to go public - long term planning and projects were both thrown out the window in the name of next month's proffit. 300% profit specialty products were ditched in favor of 1% high volume products - with a projection that the margin would narrow as the market saturated. IIRC that gave them a 2 year NP increase of about 5% and they are still chasing old accounts trying to get back to where they were.
After reading the artical, and I hope there is some more real data somewhere as it's a piece of fluff, what I think they did was take a chunk of different web stacks using portals and compare them. That - to a degree - is fair. If I want to impliment a new setup, the first thing I am going to do is see what everyone else is running & how it works. Duplicating their setup and running a benchmark for web serving is a reasonable way to do that.
Can I run exactly the same benchmark against the different portals - no because the portals themselves are different.
Does the database choice influence the performace - absolutely, but it's not a matter of optimizing here - it's what is common in production.
Does the build of linux/apache effect the results - not so much within the same kernel build - distro choice is not going to make a huge difference.
Does the choice of 'P' effect the results - yes - they say as much by puting in a note that PHP is not designed for performance and better performance could probably be garnered from Zend tech.
The problem that bothered me was that they didn't tune anything. That's part of the test - they used essentially default settings for the whole LAMP/WAMP/WNet stack. That's where I think the major issue is going to be located. Tuning Apache is certainly an art, but the basics are fairly well defined. The configuration needed to run a high volume - dynamic page server is very different from a casual server on a junk box in the basement, and different still from a high volume static page server. This follows through with the SQL server and the script interpreter also - tuning is important to get the type of performance an enterprise is going to need/want.
The artical points out that they feel the major benifit of the WNet stack is the tight integration of the components - and thus the complimentary configurations and expectations of the components. I would like to see 2 more stages for this benchmarking. First, the default vs the tuned performance of the various configurations. Second, a mix & match of the MP components to get an idea of how exactly the various combinations of SQL servers and Script languages interact.
People are very funny in some ways. There is a large group of people who will get the message from Windows update that their OS is no longer supported and freak. Nothing's changed between yesterday & today, but they'll absolutely freak. Now when these people go out & get a new WinXP system this month, and the OEMs start shipping Vista in the fall, they are going to be pissed.
I think that's the big thing I see as a failure here, everyone knows that Vista is coming out, sometime... so what do they do? Wait 3-6 months for Vista, or buy now & be pissed when the new OS comes out? I think this was part of the original scheduling, get Vista shipped, then cancell support for 98/ME. The problem is with the constant push back of Vista, they had to draw the line somewhere. Look at the timing, there are 3 major times PC's get purchased in large numbers:
Start of school year (late Aug/early Sept)
Christmass season (Nov/Dec)
Tax time
Vista should be shipping this month to the OEMs & in stores the first week of Aug to catch the School rush - it's not going to.
Vista needs to ship in Late Sept and be in stores by mid October to get all the Xmass rush - it's iffy and probably going to be buggy.
Vista needs to ship in Feb & be in stores by Mid March to catch the biggest rush of tax refunds - it's supposed to be there by then.
Cancelling support for 98/ME now (July), drives a 'need' for Vista in August - just in time for school - only Vista's not ready. So your next cutoff is Sept to drive the Xmass rush, but you can't really be sure you're going to be ready for it then either. January? Why wait 6 more months to trash something you've already extended by 2 years?
Other people have made some very good comments that the majority of the 50-70M installs of 9X/Me are not going to change overnight. There's no reason for it. Most of them are tied to specific custom/niche software in businesses, or in the homes of people who use them as 'internet appliances' - email/light browsing. In both cases, people are happy with them & won't change unless the hardware breaks and they need to - in some cases with specialty software/hardware they will scavenge through the junk piles to build another box that will run it.
Other people have commented that people won't go to linux because it's slow & crappy on older hardware. I have to say that if you use the default install of everything - yeah linux is a dog. Get rid of MySQL & Postgress running simultaniously when neither are used, and the other dozen services running in the background, and they run fine. I put Ubuntu on a Compaq P2 333 w/ 64K and the only hardware not detected was the integrated soundcard. A crappy Soundblaster from the box-o-junk and it was fine. Stripped down with no extra services, and running in single user mode, it's just fine.
For the guy running the 75 mhz P1, not a problem - a bit of work perhaps, but DSL or Slackware will still run on a 386.
You might also want to remember that in 1912, Civil War veterans were still being wed to 14 year old girls in arranged marrages.
For all of the screaming you hear about the sacred institution of marriage, it was strictly a political and financial arrangement up until about a hundred years ago or so. The only use the church has for marriage is that it allows tracking of a paternal lineage by creating a 'blessed' family tree - allowing inconvienent bastards to be tossed asside unless extrememly useful.
Um, yawn.... If it's on a chunk of silicon, it can be extracted. The documents on how to retrieve the key have to be available to make the MB - that means any cracker with the time on his hands can make an interface to read the data on the chip. Once you have the key, it's easy enough to pass that key back to the OS when you are creating the VM. That's the whole point of VM - you are creating a virtual machine for each of the guest OS's - the trust key is just another driver module.
Um let's look at this one....
Current PSP comes in black only....
New white PSP is coming out....
Sex sells.....
Attitude sells...
Lets mix black, white, sex, and attitude in one commercial...
Instant racism. Now that's synergy of ideas working for you.
It's cheaper to make a declaritory statement saying "This is public domain, this is how to do it, and this is why it works. Have a nice day, thank you."
The end result is it's public domain. Patented it costs 3-5 grand vs a PDF on a website.
They just make a deal with the music cartels to let them do this at minimal or zero cost.
On the other hand if MS gets involved, there's competition for Apple and that provides more leverage for the cartels to negotiate price. That is, they can threaten to give MS better pricing if Apple doesn't behave like they want.
2 words - 'Anti-Trust' and 'legislation'
The **AA members are the only source for the materials - and they generally do collective barganing for reimbursment - I believe Apple went through RIAA for their deal - not through each member. That makes the barganier a monopoly. One monopoly backing another that's been identified multiple times as a 'Criminal Monopoly' isn't going to fly very far. Also, you don't generally get to make deal like this any more. If I sell Bob a CD for $12 I have to sell another copy of the CD to Alice for $12. I can make price breaks for volume, cupons, etc. but, they have to be available to everyone.
Apple currently has a contract with the content providers, one which the providers felt didn't compensate them enough as it is. I don't think that even to break Apple's market share, that they would cut a 'better' deal with MS. Remember, it's all about the money and fair compensation - they say so every week so it has to be true.
So, I don't think you are going to see the MS system be any cheaper than the Apple one.
The other part that concerns me is MS paying the cartels for all the songs you bought from Apple - I smell another anti-trust suit in the making there.
My personal favorite was the color cycling add, from black to white through the spectrum & back.
Hmm, wait, maybey it was the jittery add I couldn't read when I tried to figure out how to shut it down.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh sure, thanks Fredomy (can't be using French anything) now that you mentioned that it's working in Europe and that it's something to emulate, congress will never do it. Just because we paid for it once & didn't get it, everyone else in the developed world is ahead of us, and there is a viable way to get it that doesn't involve handing money to people who've already screwed us, is no reason not to allow the US Telcos to have what they want. ... it used to apply to land & public services, but hey, if private developers can claim it (thanks SCOUS), there's no reason that the Telcos (as public utilities) can't expand on that to claim your paycheck - it's for the greater good you understand.
Eminent domain buddy, eminent domain
Shees, next it's going to be 2001, The Time Machine, and Ice Pirates
Wait, wrong argument
- where will it end - check
- think of the children - skip
- work of terrorists - skip
- violation of civil rights - check ^H^H - skip
- end of civilization - change civ to cult - check
OK, back....to allow this affrontery to continue will undoubtably lead to the end of Western Culture as we know it, for without due veneration of our classical arts, we shall indeed be doomed to an eternity of Jerry Springer and Teletubbies. Oh the humanity of it all.
Vacuum/Helium boxes to work in solve that problem - I recommend Helium, vacuum gloves are a pain to work with. Takes about 1 sheet of plexiglass, $10 of fittings and a $20 baloon canister of helium.
And the right of first sale has been upheld repeatedly to grant you the right to sell your book - although converting it to confeti might make it a derivative work in which case it's not legal.... Unless it's a parody of the work at that point... ... I'll go kill some pixels before they start liscencing the images so I can only view them once....
My brain hurts now
Um from the comments I saw, yes, all 3 were on billboards. Not right next to each other, but all were displayed at the same time IIRC.
Actually, as someone else linked there are 3 billboards. Nice pics too.
Microtome blades for Transmition Electron Microscopy are either made from cracked glass (cheap & disposable, but I used to do 2 or 3 at a pop to get one with a clean break) or gemstone (emerald, saphire, and diamond) cleaves (longer lasting but fragile and pricy).
Oh and for nigh-trivial - check out National Geographic segments on this - it's a bitch & a half to get a consistant & usable blade (something sharp to accidently cut yourself with appears much easier).
Tying the copywrite to the actual creators of the work does not inhibit the financial incentives at all. You just can't play as many games. Of course - what do you do with works for pay?
No the biggest [ok debabably] problem with copywrites right now is that the 'automatic' copywrite system that's in place in combination with the near permanent copywrite term, has created a [blink size=bigger than screen]huge[/blink] pile of works that are orphans. Nobody can determine who exactly owns the copywrite for the work, so it's in a legal limbo - rationally it should be public domain, but instead it's just an oddity nobody can use.
You want to cut down on this crap? Reinstate copywrite registration, along with periodic renewal. You don't renew your copywrite every 5 years, it goes PD. And for the record, owning the rights to something for 75 years after I die is not really an incentive for me to create something. And extending the copywrite to 99 years for corperate owned copywrites does nothing for the Public domain.
That's the old way of thinking. Maximizing investment is all about long term planning & very little to do with todays market price. Unfortunately todays 'investment strategy' is pump & dump & move on. You only get to inflate so much before things go pop. The vast majority of people who buy individual stocks (not the investment houses) have & will never attend a shareholder meeting - most will never even return the proxie forms.
You'll also see a difference in the old investment firms vs the new ones. The older firms tend to think & act long term - they'll take a moderate steady growth stock with dividends over a spiky fabulous performer with none. Why? Long term thinking - steady growth companies usually outperform ones that have sharp ups & downs in the stock prices. Also, dividends are proof the company is actually turning a real world profit - very important in a long term investment.
That's the real difference in old & new thinking. The whole idea of shares and investing was that you & 10 other people give me money to start this business, and I'll split the profit 12 ways. The dividends were supposed to be the mean of receiving a return on your investment. Now you watch people flipping stocks so fast they never actually get any dividends. When the dividend is the means of receiving a ROI, you want the company to perform well in the long haul. When you get your ROI by reselling the stock, you don't care about the long term, just that it goes up today - who cares if the company goes belly up next week.
Yeah, but can they abuse even power?
If it's declared private, and protected as private under relevant TOS & municiple code, it shouldn't matter if it's on the internet or not. Military sites are on the internet, and even though some are open - no password - going into them to look for things is criminal computer tresspass - remember they are extraditing the UK UFO nutjob over exactly that.
I have a private web server up - it's technically part of the internet. If you come in on an IP address I havn't approved you get bounced to the please go away page. Are you telling me that if the govt wants to, they have every right to come in & check the data on the server just 'because it's connected to the internet.'?
As for your statement that "they simply accessed what he put up for the world to see" - declaring it private is an act which explicitly states that he did not "put it up for the world to see"
I agree that if this is an actual occurance, then the use of the PATRIOT ACT for things as trivial as a job interview are a fullfillment of the worst fears people had about it at the time it was originally passed.
When has there ever been a divergence between shareholders and customers? No one is out saying, "Let's screw this customer today, and if we do, our share price might go up 20 cents." They're just not doing it.
Um, I was once told that "Customer's rate companies better on customer service if they have a few small inconviences that are quickly resolved, than if they have no problems, so we are going to start delaying mail server maintenance."
Where does that fall in the 'just not doing it' scheme?
Companies live and die by the stock price - not sure why because after they sell it, they don't get any more money from the stock - and anything that might get it to nudge up just a little - without causing an open rebellion from the customers is going to be tried. If they loose some customers - the thought is that the better report numbers will generate new ones. Let's face it, for most businesses customers are just as replaceable as the employees.
For a lot of companies that would really depend on Bob's ass kissing skills. If Bob sit's in his cube & makes magical code flow across the screen like water over Niagra Falls, but tells the manager he's wrong, why he's wrong, and offers proof of why he's wrong, chances are he's going to sit in his cube until they take his caffeene pickled corpse out. But Dave, who grovels, says yes to anything no matter how stupid, and can't code "hello world" in any language without 6 hours of debugging, will probably get promoted to a glass office somewhere.
I've dealt with a slew of managers in different industries. Some actually cared what you had to say, most only cared about what they thought. I had one who insisted that something be done one way because 'it would work better'. When it took a production line down for a week, he was screaming about how nobody listened to him, until someone dropped his Emails & all the responces sent to him warning about what would happen on his bosses desk.
I worked at one company shifting from family ownership to trying to go public - long term planning and projects were both thrown out the window in the name of next month's proffit. 300% profit specialty products were ditched in favor of 1% high volume products - with a projection that the margin would narrow as the market saturated. IIRC that gave them a 2 year NP increase of about 5% and they are still chasing old accounts trying to get back to where they were.
After reading the artical, and I hope there is some more real data somewhere as it's a piece of fluff, what I think they did was take a chunk of different web stacks using portals and compare them. That - to a degree - is fair. If I want to impliment a new setup, the first thing I am going to do is see what everyone else is running & how it works. Duplicating their setup and running a benchmark for web serving is a reasonable way to do that.
Can I run exactly the same benchmark against the different portals - no because the portals themselves are different.
Does the database choice influence the performace - absolutely, but it's not a matter of optimizing here - it's what is common in production.
Does the build of linux/apache effect the results - not so much within the same kernel build - distro choice is not going to make a huge difference.
Does the choice of 'P' effect the results - yes - they say as much by puting in a note that PHP is not designed for performance and better performance could probably be garnered from Zend tech.
The problem that bothered me was that they didn't tune anything. That's part of the test - they used essentially default settings for the whole LAMP/WAMP/WNet stack. That's where I think the major issue is going to be located. Tuning Apache is certainly an art, but the basics are fairly well defined. The configuration needed to run a high volume - dynamic page server is very different from a casual server on a junk box in the basement, and different still from a high volume static page server. This follows through with the SQL server and the script interpreter also - tuning is important to get the type of performance an enterprise is going to need/want.
The artical points out that they feel the major benifit of the WNet stack is the tight integration of the components - and thus the complimentary configurations and expectations of the components. I would like to see 2 more stages for this benchmarking. First, the default vs the tuned performance of the various configurations. Second, a mix & match of the MP components to get an idea of how exactly the various combinations of SQL servers and Script languages interact.
I think that's the big thing I see as a failure here, everyone knows that Vista is coming out, sometime... so what do they do? Wait 3-6 months for Vista, or buy now & be pissed when the new OS comes out? I think this was part of the original scheduling, get Vista shipped, then cancell support for 98/ME. The problem is with the constant push back of Vista, they had to draw the line somewhere. Look at the timing, there are 3 major times PC's get purchased in large numbers:
- Start of school year (late Aug/early Sept)
- Christmass season (Nov/Dec)
- Tax time
Vista should be shipping this month to the OEMs & in stores the first week of Aug to catch the School rush - it's not going to.Vista needs to ship in Late Sept and be in stores by mid October to get all the Xmass rush - it's iffy and probably going to be buggy.
Vista needs to ship in Feb & be in stores by Mid March to catch the biggest rush of tax refunds - it's supposed to be there by then.
Cancelling support for 98/ME now (July), drives a 'need' for Vista in August - just in time for school - only Vista's not ready. So your next cutoff is Sept to drive the Xmass rush, but you can't really be sure you're going to be ready for it then either. January? Why wait 6 more months to trash something you've already extended by 2 years?
Other people have made some very good comments that the majority of the 50-70M installs of 9X/Me are not going to change overnight. There's no reason for it. Most of them are tied to specific custom/niche software in businesses, or in the homes of people who use them as 'internet appliances' - email/light browsing. In both cases, people are happy with them & won't change unless the hardware breaks and they need to - in some cases with specialty software/hardware they will scavenge through the junk piles to build another box that will run it.
Other people have commented that people won't go to linux because it's slow & crappy on older hardware. I have to say that if you use the default install of everything - yeah linux is a dog. Get rid of MySQL & Postgress running simultaniously when neither are used, and the other dozen services running in the background, and they run fine. I put Ubuntu on a Compaq P2 333 w/ 64K and the only hardware not detected was the integrated soundcard. A crappy Soundblaster from the box-o-junk and it was fine. Stripped down with no extra services, and running in single user mode, it's just fine.
For the guy running the 75 mhz P1, not a problem - a bit of work perhaps, but DSL or Slackware will still run on a 386.
You might also want to remember that in 1912, Civil War veterans were still being wed to 14 year old girls in arranged marrages.
For all of the screaming you hear about the sacred institution of marriage, it was strictly a political and financial arrangement up until about a hundred years ago or so. The only use the church has for marriage is that it allows tracking of a paternal lineage by creating a 'blessed' family tree - allowing inconvienent bastards to be tossed asside unless extrememly useful.
Um, yawn.... If it's on a chunk of silicon, it can be extracted. The documents on how to retrieve the key have to be available to make the MB - that means any cracker with the time on his hands can make an interface to read the data on the chip. Once you have the key, it's easy enough to pass that key back to the OS when you are creating the VM. That's the whole point of VM - you are creating a virtual machine for each of the guest OS's - the trust key is just another driver module.
Hmm, didn't know about the penguins, did know about dolphins, eagles, and wolves.
Um let's look at this one.... ..... ... ...
Current PSP comes in black only....
New white PSP is coming out....
Sex sells
Attitude sells
Lets mix black, white, sex, and attitude in one commercial
Instant racism. Now that's synergy of ideas working for you.
It's cheaper to make a declaritory statement saying "This is public domain, this is how to do it, and this is why it works. Have a nice day, thank you."
The end result is it's public domain. Patented it costs 3-5 grand vs a PDF on a website.
2 words - 'Anti-Trust' and 'legislation'
The **AA members are the only source for the materials - and they generally do collective barganing for reimbursment - I believe Apple went through RIAA for their deal - not through each member. That makes the barganier a monopoly. One monopoly backing another that's been identified multiple times as a 'Criminal Monopoly' isn't going to fly very far. Also, you don't generally get to make deal like this any more. If I sell Bob a CD for $12 I have to sell another copy of the CD to Alice for $12. I can make price breaks for volume, cupons, etc. but, they have to be available to everyone.
Apple currently has a contract with the content providers, one which the providers felt didn't compensate them enough as it is. I don't think that even to break Apple's market share, that they would cut a 'better' deal with MS. Remember, it's all about the money and fair compensation - they say so every week so it has to be true.
So, I don't think you are going to see the MS system be any cheaper than the Apple one.
The other part that concerns me is MS paying the cartels for all the songs you bought from Apple - I smell another anti-trust suit in the making there.
LOL, my wife was bitching about this the other day. Nice to see it wasn't something simple I missed trying to fix it.
duh, nobody uses 'password' for their password anymore, it's 'changeme' - nobody will ever guess that.
My personal favorite was the color cycling add, from black to white through the spectrum & back.
Hmm, wait, maybey it was the jittery add I couldn't read when I tried to figure out how to shut it down.