what happens if my ipod is stolen with all watermarked (i.e. linked to me) songs? the thieve publishes to some p2p networks, and I am liable for millions of copies (i.e. billions of dollars)?
I'd think if anything water marking would make it easier to track down your iPod. Most likely the RIAA would still pursue distributors in court, regardless of whether or not the music bore their watermark. If you reported your iPod stolen immediately, and the RIAA soon found one source distributing a lot of music with your watermark, they've probably found the person who stole your iPod. If your music has found it's way to half the internet before the RIAA picks up on it, you'd better have filed a report, but if there are a few people with a few of your songs and one person with all of your songs, the water-marking may end up finding the person who stole your iPod.
The hardware has been better than any other system I've put Linux on. I had to do a little bit of work to get resolution configured properly, and I had to activate my swap partition (though they claim this has been corrected for new systems). I got the cheapest laptop they had and I've not been disappointed. Hibernate and suspend work great, beryl works wonderfully and doesn't conflict with hibernate or suspend at all (it does on one of my other systems).
As far as support they've been awesome. There was a small issue and subsequent delay with regard to my order, so they bumped up my shipping a notch for free. I had a little trouble with resolution and my swap partition. I posted these to their forum on ubuntuforums.org, but I had solved the problems before a solution was posted (the solution was posted the following morning, I posted my question in the late afternoon), and I believe they are working on a widespread fix for both of these issues at the moment.
Right now, I'm doing some troubleshooting because my hotkeys (sound control, touchpad toggle, etc.) cease functioning after suspend and don't come back until I reboot. Based on past experience, I'd guess there will be an official fix for this by Wednesday afternoon.
The system didn't work straight out of the box quite as well as I had hoped, but it's the best experience I've had with a Linux machine so far. You'll know you're getting Linux compatible hardware, and the support staff is committed to getting things working for you. I would certainly recommend it.
Can anyone here at/. come up with a different solution for them?
Sure, provide a higher quality product.
For starters, let me make one thing clear: I am not a pirate. I don't try and get a free ride on music and movies, and almost all of my software is Open Source.
Let's ignore pricing for a minute. On iTunes, I can get a song encoded in AAC audio at a bitrate of 128 kbps, and I can only play it on up to 5 computers and iPods, or burn it to a CD. Again, I'm not a pirate, but I've been under the impression that on a p2p network, if I'm willing to do some looking around, I can get the same song encoded with the codec of my choice at the bitrate of my choice, I can play it on every capable device that I own. The pirates offer a better product. Most of my friends would be willing to pay at least $.99 a song if it didn't have DRM and was encoded at a higher bitrate than iTunes, but they don't get that option - it's either accept the DRM, or pirate.
CD's are an option, but they're note as simple. Generally, I'm in the mood to buy music when I have a specific song stuck in my head and I want to buy it and listen to it. I'm not going to drive to the nearest music store and hope they happen to have the CD I want in stock. Thus online availability becomes part of the quality measure.
Movies are pretty much the same story. Movies have been available on p2p networks for a long time, but they've only been appearing on legitimate download services in the past year or so. p2p networks offer ripped DVDs you can burn to DVD or watch on any computer. The download services are generally lower quality than DVDs just available for Windows and don't allow you to burn to DVD, so you're stuck watching your media on a computer monitor, unless you have a media-pc connected to your entertainment system. DVDs are also fairly limited, as you can't (legally) copy them to your hard drive, and you can't even play them on your computer if your OS of choice is Linux (though this looks like it may change soon).
As things are right now, piracy provides the best product. If the *IAA wants to compete, they'd do well to provide a product at least equivalent to what the pirates are providing. They might be surprised what people will pay for.
DRM may be on the way out, but watermarking will be on the way in.
Personally, I'd love to see watermarking replace DRM. There will be no artificial limitations on what people can do with their media - I could copy all my DVDs to my computer (and play them on Linux) and have a great media center without having to worry about violating the DMCA, yet the media companies would still have a way of pursuing actual copyright violators. I think it's quite reasonable for the media industry to want to protect their investment, and water marking allows them to do just that while allowing the consumer to use their media the way they want it.
Read this bug report/feature request for an example; it's been almost five years and we've STILL waiting for some very basic statistical functionality in Calc.
Thank you for actually citing a problem you have with OpenOffice. Most people simply leave it at "OpenOffice sucks and that's all there is to it" without supporting their assertion in anyway.
While I will grant that OpenOffice has its shortcomings, its still more than lots of people need. I use OpenOffice, and aside from some formatting issues when opening MS Office files, it's always done what I need it to do. Personally, I'm more likely to need to put mathematical formulas in my documents, and OpenOffice makes that easier than MS Office does. My mother also uses OOo for writing the occasional letter, or making lists in Excel. My girlfriend's office needs are also met by Open Office.
If you need the more advanced features, you may have to buy a nicer office suite. I don't see many people claiming that OpenOffice is superior to MS Office, but for many users it is a satisfactory office suite, and I see no reason it shouldn't be offered as an alternative.
Very true. Plus Dell gets paid to pre-install crapware on your computer (see requests 2, 4, and 6 at the moment) to offset some of the costs of the computer. If they're bundling Free software, they won't sell as much crapware, probably raising the cost of the computer.
To add to that, I bought a Gazelle a couple weeks ago and I love it. It had a few configuration hitches to work out initially, but the driver support is superb.
HOWEVER, this story is misleading, as the "No Extra Software" (on Windows) is divided into two different options, and if vote were combined, would be about 80% of the Linux option. So, it's decidedly not 2:1.
Actually if you look at it, slots 2 and 4 are no extra software, but 1, 5, and 6 all make mention of Linux. At the time of this writing, options 1, 5, and 6 total 23,535 votes, options 2 and 4 total 14,243, a ratio of 1.65:1.
As a user who just bought a System76 laptop, which ships with Ubuntu, I'd like to comment. In part, I agree - my computer came with a widescreen monitor and no option for any wide-screen resolution, it took a while to get that straightened out. The swap partition also had not been activated. I don't know that a non-technical user would have noticed either of these, let alone be bothered by them, but I did think it was a bit irresponsible of the distributors.
On the flipside, I have the comfort of knowing that there are open source drivers for every piece of hardware in my box. My other laptop took hours to get my graphics card and wireless card configured - and the wireless card still can't make use of 802.11 g.
While I wouldn't mind getting a box blank, I want to be damn sure it has well supported hardware. I would prefer to have something that just works (and is supported) out of the box, but is customizable for those with more experience.
I agree. If someone is unable to do their job and unwilling to try to change, I don't think the employer should have to keep paying them. I can understand a requirement that an employer not fire an employee who is going through some legitimate form of rehab for an addiction, but if the employee isn't doing anything about their problem, the employer shouldn't have to put up with it.
I've long said that I have no problem with DRM in cases like Napster, where the music is provided under a subscription contract, because it's not realistic to believe someone will delete their DRM-free music when a contract expires. If people want to rent music or movies, DRM is necessary. I don't want to rent music, but I will agree that there is a potential market for that. Suggesting, however, that DRM from iTunes increases the consumer value for that reason is stupid.
If I rent something, I have no problem with it expiring after a certain period. If I buy something, I want it to be mine. If I get tired of it, I want to be able to sell it to somebody else. I want to be able to play it on any platform technically capable of playing it. If it's mine, I should be able to do these things.
On media distributed on the Internet, it's certainly reasonable that purchased media could be DRM-free while rental media could contain DRM. I believe that that the physical rental services, at least in the united states, are vast enough to justify printing DVD's for Blockbuster, libraries, etc. that have DRM, while printing DRM-free DVD's for stores.
Lots of problems with those ideas. Often, products are developed by fairly large research teams. If the patent is under the name of that one individual, he could defect and take the patent and work of his former co-workers with him, then sue the company that paid him to develop it.
I would agree with software patents having a limit of 5 years, but 5 years certainly isn't right for everything, and I'm not sure I like the idea of having to categorize items, as every so often there is something so new and original, it may not fit into existing categories.
The worst idea is making the government liable for up to $500k. Do you know where the government gets its money? From you, (or at least me) the tax payer. I'd certainly be inclined to hold the offending party liable for large legal costs, but if the government foots the bill, it effects everyone. Certainly some incentive is needed to make sure less legitimate patents don't get through, but making the people pay out for every bad lawsuit is unreasonable.
Probably true, but it will still be a fairly significant cost to the OEMs who have the action taken against them, and they will try to satisfy their customers to avoid the class action rather than say "Our EULA says we don't really have to give you Vista."
I agree. Server power consumption may have doubled over the past 5 years, but what has the increase in data throughput been? Using a mutilated version of Moore's law, I'll assume that each server is doubling it's throughput every 18 months. 5 years is 60 months, so each server should have doubled 3 and 1/3 times, meaning each server is over 8 times more productive than they were 5 years ago (it's closer to 10, but we'll round down, as I'm trying to make this a conservative estimate).
It's also safe to say that there are "more" servers than there were 5 years ago, but I'm not even going to venture a guess on how many more. Assuming we have the exact same number of servers we did 5 years ago, we'd be processing 8 times more data per kilowatt-hour, meaning the cost of processing data has fallen by 75%. My estimates of data throughput may be high, and my server quantity estimate is definitely low, but I'm guessing 75% is a low end estimate.
Even if we are using more energy, we're getting more bang for our buck. I'd rather have data traveling through servers than on planes and trucks in the form of mail. I'd rather have documents be stored in mass on hard drives than have millions of pages of paper going to waste. Suggesting that this increase of power consumption is alarming is absurd.
If they deny people the upgrade, there will be class action suits without a doubt, and such a license agreement won't hold up in just about any court. Personally, I couldn't care less. One more reason I use linux.
Try putting it on a Zune/Creative Zen/Non-iPod mp3 player/Linux. If you want to do that, you'll have to buy it on another format, rip it from a CD and lose quality, or use illegal methods of removing the DRM.
A better question would be - since nothing has changed, what is the point of the article?
Because something has changed. While there's not going to be a change as far as graphics drivers between Edgy and Feisty, this is a change from the previously discussed course of Ubuntu. We frequently heard about Microsoft dropping new features from Windows Vista before it was released, and this is no different.
Anybody who has used much virtualization knows it's not as good as running the OS on hardware. Apple could permit OSX to run on virtual machines so people could get a taste of it without having to buy new hardware, but buying new hardware would have enough benefits that I don't see this cutting in to Mac sales.
The flipside though is that people may try OSX on a Virtual Machine, not realizing that VMs cut performance significantly, decide that OSX is slow and useless, then stick with Windows. I guess I can see either way.
I agree. Using that logic, you could return anything you don't like, whether or not it's really defective. It completely absolves the customer of any accountability for doing research prior to making a purchase.
If a movie is bad, I still pay for it. If I should be upset with anyone, it's whoever suggested I see it in the first place, not the movie theatre. If there were kids crying through an entire R-rated movie because someone didn't want to pay for a baby-sitter and the theatre didn't want to kick them out, I might ask for a refund. If it happens again, I probably won't return to that theatre.
If I buy a piece of software and it doesn't do what I want, I'm stuck with it. For example, if I bought a music editor, I couldn't return it because it doesn't edit photos. If it doesn't do what it advertised I might look for a refund.
If I buy music from iTunes and don't like that I can't play it on Linux, I have the choice of burning and ripping, finding an illegal alternative method of removing the DRM, or forgetting about the music. If I buy a song from iTunes and it won't play on my iPod, I'd pursue a refund.
In short, company's should only have to provide what they tell you they're selling you. If they misrepresent the product, you should be able to get your money back. If you don't do anything to make sure you know what you're buying, I have no pity.
As much as I'd like to access the iTMS on Ubuntu, it's not going to happen any time soon (unless Apple actually drops DRM and allows 3rd party clients to access the store). First, this would require admitting that there are Windows alternatives other than OSX, which would be bad for business. Second, development and support would be pretty fairly costly, and as anti-drm as many Linux users are, the user base would be fairly insignificant. So for now I use Amarok for managing my iPod, and buy CDs to get my music. I've found quite a bit of good music buying CDs for one or two songs that I wouldn't have found if I'd just bought the songs I knew I wanted from iTunes, so I can't say I miss it too much.
I'm not trying to argue in favor of DRM at all. What I'm arguing is that the average user isn't very aware of the DRM because it isn't restrictive enough for them to notice. As a current Linux user and former iTMS user, I find it to be a complete pain in the ass.
That old canard is getting very tired. When compared to equivalent hardware and bundles, Macs are very competitive.
Macs are competitively priced for the hardware, but they still require you to change your hardware. Apple started their Switch campaign a few months after I bought my current laptop. Had they started earlier, I probably would have bought a Mac, but as the timing stood, I had a PC and it was going to be a few years before I thought about replacing it. During that time I grew incredibly tired of Windows, and decided to try out Linux, which I was able to put on my current hardware. Earlier this week, I decided it's time for a new laptop, and settled on a System76 Gazelle. Apple missed their chance - I was looking for a new operating system, and would have gladly dropped $200 or so to put it on my current hardware, but it wasn't in my budget to pay $1049 for a MacBook. By the time I was looking for a new system, I was hooked on Linux.
What IS true is that the least expensive mac is more expensive than the least expensive PC. But, of course, the least expensive PC is invariably a cheap piece of crap one step up from a calculator.
That's not completely true. I was able to build a nice Linux box for myself for about $500, $200 of which was spent on a couple of TV tuners for using MythTV, and most of the rest was spent on my 400 GB RAID. The remainder of the system, (case, RAM, mobo, cpu & fan), cost only $120 after some rebates. I spent $15 on a serial IR port for my MythTV setup, and programmed it to use a remote I already had. It's both cheaper and more functional than a mac mini, though it does have a larger footprint.
Macs also tend to come with everything you could possibly need, whether or not you really need it. The Mac Mini comes with WiFi, Bluetooth, a remote, digital audio, and DVI by default, but many desktop users are going to use Cat5, a wired keyboard and mouse, regular speakers, the VGA-DVI adapter, and lose the remote in a drawer somewhere. It would be nice to be able to choose from the features you want from your computer and be able to save a few bucks.
I think Apple would do well to have some commodity hardware. A tower with specs similar to a mini would be quite a bit cheaper, since they don't have to be as compact to be just as functional. Their laptops aren't going to get much cheaper without sacrificing performance, but I don't think it would hurt to have something they could sell at $800 rather than over $1000 for the cheapest laptop. Drop Bluetooth, DVI and the built in iSight, and you're well within that price range.
In short, switching to a Mac is an expensive proposition because it requires that you get new hardware, and you'll likely get more than you'll really use. I realize Apple has a reputation to maintain as a high quality computer vendor, but it's a far stretch to say that it's not expensive to switch to a mac.
I completely agree. I'm a Kubuntu user, and I try to keep as much as I can Free, but if I need something proprietary for entertainment, work, school, etc. I install it.
I use the open source radeon drivers instead of the binary drivers. I chose Firefox over Opera. I use kvpnc and vpnc instead of Cisco's VPN client. However I also use Adobe Flash, Google Earth, and on very rare occasions I'll load up VMWare Player to use Windows. I want to get the most out of my computer, and there are projects I've given time and money to for the sake of improving the available software.
Having a computer with Free software doesn't have to be boolean. I once heard someone ask "If you're going to run a binary video driver, why don't you just use Windows?", as if running one proprietary application (admittedly in kernel space) were as bad as using 100% proprietary applications on every level. Personally I'd rather have a system that was 95% free and as friendly as possible than 100% free and a pain in the ass, (or 100% proprietary and a pain in the ass, as is often the case with Windows). I'm not saying people who want to keep their computer 100% Free shouldn't do so, but I try to find a happy medium between Free and functional.
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I'd think if anything water marking would make it easier to track down your iPod. Most likely the RIAA would still pursue distributors in court, regardless of whether or not the music bore their watermark. If you reported your iPod stolen immediately, and the RIAA soon found one source distributing a lot of music with your watermark, they've probably found the person who stole your iPod. If your music has found it's way to half the internet before the RIAA picks up on it, you'd better have filed a report, but if there are a few people with a few of your songs and one person with all of your songs, the water-marking may end up finding the person who stole your iPod.
As far as support they've been awesome. There was a small issue and subsequent delay with regard to my order, so they bumped up my shipping a notch for free. I had a little trouble with resolution and my swap partition. I posted these to their forum on ubuntuforums.org, but I had solved the problems before a solution was posted (the solution was posted the following morning, I posted my question in the late afternoon), and I believe they are working on a widespread fix for both of these issues at the moment.
Right now, I'm doing some troubleshooting because my hotkeys (sound control, touchpad toggle, etc.) cease functioning after suspend and don't come back until I reboot. Based on past experience, I'd guess there will be an official fix for this by Wednesday afternoon.
The system didn't work straight out of the box quite as well as I had hoped, but it's the best experience I've had with a Linux machine so far. You'll know you're getting Linux compatible hardware, and the support staff is committed to getting things working for you. I would certainly recommend it.
And now I get modded off-topic. Oh well.
Sure, provide a higher quality product.
For starters, let me make one thing clear: I am not a pirate. I don't try and get a free ride on music and movies, and almost all of my software is Open Source.
Let's ignore pricing for a minute. On iTunes, I can get a song encoded in AAC audio at a bitrate of 128 kbps, and I can only play it on up to 5 computers and iPods, or burn it to a CD. Again, I'm not a pirate, but I've been under the impression that on a p2p network, if I'm willing to do some looking around, I can get the same song encoded with the codec of my choice at the bitrate of my choice, I can play it on every capable device that I own. The pirates offer a better product. Most of my friends would be willing to pay at least $.99 a song if it didn't have DRM and was encoded at a higher bitrate than iTunes, but they don't get that option - it's either accept the DRM, or pirate.
CD's are an option, but they're note as simple. Generally, I'm in the mood to buy music when I have a specific song stuck in my head and I want to buy it and listen to it. I'm not going to drive to the nearest music store and hope they happen to have the CD I want in stock. Thus online availability becomes part of the quality measure.
Movies are pretty much the same story. Movies have been available on p2p networks for a long time, but they've only been appearing on legitimate download services in the past year or so. p2p networks offer ripped DVDs you can burn to DVD or watch on any computer. The download services are generally lower quality than DVDs just available for Windows and don't allow you to burn to DVD, so you're stuck watching your media on a computer monitor, unless you have a media-pc connected to your entertainment system. DVDs are also fairly limited, as you can't (legally) copy them to your hard drive, and you can't even play them on your computer if your OS of choice is Linux (though this looks like it may change soon).
As things are right now, piracy provides the best product. If the *IAA wants to compete, they'd do well to provide a product at least equivalent to what the pirates are providing. They might be surprised what people will pay for.
Personally, I'd love to see watermarking replace DRM. There will be no artificial limitations on what people can do with their media - I could copy all my DVDs to my computer (and play them on Linux) and have a great media center without having to worry about violating the DMCA, yet the media companies would still have a way of pursuing actual copyright violators. I think it's quite reasonable for the media industry to want to protect their investment, and water marking allows them to do just that while allowing the consumer to use their media the way they want it.
Thank you for actually citing a problem you have with OpenOffice. Most people simply leave it at "OpenOffice sucks and that's all there is to it" without supporting their assertion in anyway.
While I will grant that OpenOffice has its shortcomings, its still more than lots of people need. I use OpenOffice, and aside from some formatting issues when opening MS Office files, it's always done what I need it to do. Personally, I'm more likely to need to put mathematical formulas in my documents, and OpenOffice makes that easier than MS Office does. My mother also uses OOo for writing the occasional letter, or making lists in Excel. My girlfriend's office needs are also met by Open Office.
If you need the more advanced features, you may have to buy a nicer office suite. I don't see many people claiming that OpenOffice is superior to MS Office, but for many users it is a satisfactory office suite, and I see no reason it shouldn't be offered as an alternative.
Very true. Plus Dell gets paid to pre-install crapware on your computer (see requests 2, 4, and 6 at the moment) to offset some of the costs of the computer. If they're bundling Free software, they won't sell as much crapware, probably raising the cost of the computer.
To add to that, I bought a Gazelle a couple weeks ago and I love it. It had a few configuration hitches to work out initially, but the driver support is superb.
Actually if you look at it, slots 2 and 4 are no extra software, but 1, 5, and 6 all make mention of Linux. At the time of this writing, options 1, 5, and 6 total 23,535 votes, options 2 and 4 total 14,243, a ratio of 1.65:1.
On the flipside, I have the comfort of knowing that there are open source drivers for every piece of hardware in my box. My other laptop took hours to get my graphics card and wireless card configured - and the wireless card still can't make use of 802.11 g.
While I wouldn't mind getting a box blank, I want to be damn sure it has well supported hardware. I would prefer to have something that just works (and is supported) out of the box, but is customizable for those with more experience.
I agree. If someone is unable to do their job and unwilling to try to change, I don't think the employer should have to keep paying them. I can understand a requirement that an employer not fire an employee who is going through some legitimate form of rehab for an addiction, but if the employee isn't doing anything about their problem, the employer shouldn't have to put up with it.
If I rent something, I have no problem with it expiring after a certain period. If I buy something, I want it to be mine. If I get tired of it, I want to be able to sell it to somebody else. I want to be able to play it on any platform technically capable of playing it. If it's mine, I should be able to do these things.
On media distributed on the Internet, it's certainly reasonable that purchased media could be DRM-free while rental media could contain DRM. I believe that that the physical rental services, at least in the united states, are vast enough to justify printing DVD's for Blockbuster, libraries, etc. that have DRM, while printing DRM-free DVD's for stores.
I would agree with software patents having a limit of 5 years, but 5 years certainly isn't right for everything, and I'm not sure I like the idea of having to categorize items, as every so often there is something so new and original, it may not fit into existing categories.
The worst idea is making the government liable for up to $500k. Do you know where the government gets its money? From you, (or at least me) the tax payer. I'd certainly be inclined to hold the offending party liable for large legal costs, but if the government foots the bill, it effects everyone. Certainly some incentive is needed to make sure less legitimate patents don't get through, but making the people pay out for every bad lawsuit is unreasonable.
Probably true, but it will still be a fairly significant cost to the OEMs who have the action taken against them, and they will try to satisfy their customers to avoid the class action rather than say "Our EULA says we don't really have to give you Vista."
It's also safe to say that there are "more" servers than there were 5 years ago, but I'm not even going to venture a guess on how many more. Assuming we have the exact same number of servers we did 5 years ago, we'd be processing 8 times more data per kilowatt-hour, meaning the cost of processing data has fallen by 75%. My estimates of data throughput may be high, and my server quantity estimate is definitely low, but I'm guessing 75% is a low end estimate.
Even if we are using more energy, we're getting more bang for our buck. I'd rather have data traveling through servers than on planes and trucks in the form of mail. I'd rather have documents be stored in mass on hard drives than have millions of pages of paper going to waste. Suggesting that this increase of power consumption is alarming is absurd.
If they deny people the upgrade, there will be class action suits without a doubt, and such a license agreement won't hold up in just about any court. Personally, I couldn't care less. One more reason I use linux.
Try putting it on a Zune/Creative Zen/Non-iPod mp3 player/Linux. If you want to do that, you'll have to buy it on another format, rip it from a CD and lose quality, or use illegal methods of removing the DRM.
Because something has changed. While there's not going to be a change as far as graphics drivers between Edgy and Feisty, this is a change from the previously discussed course of Ubuntu. We frequently heard about Microsoft dropping new features from Windows Vista before it was released, and this is no different.
Anything you want to know about how to interface with slashdot you can learn from slashcode. The wonders of open source.
The flipside though is that people may try OSX on a Virtual Machine, not realizing that VMs cut performance significantly, decide that OSX is slow and useless, then stick with Windows. I guess I can see either way.
If a movie is bad, I still pay for it. If I should be upset with anyone, it's whoever suggested I see it in the first place, not the movie theatre. If there were kids crying through an entire R-rated movie because someone didn't want to pay for a baby-sitter and the theatre didn't want to kick them out, I might ask for a refund. If it happens again, I probably won't return to that theatre.
If I buy a piece of software and it doesn't do what I want, I'm stuck with it. For example, if I bought a music editor, I couldn't return it because it doesn't edit photos. If it doesn't do what it advertised I might look for a refund.
If I buy music from iTunes and don't like that I can't play it on Linux, I have the choice of burning and ripping, finding an illegal alternative method of removing the DRM, or forgetting about the music. If I buy a song from iTunes and it won't play on my iPod, I'd pursue a refund.
In short, company's should only have to provide what they tell you they're selling you. If they misrepresent the product, you should be able to get your money back. If you don't do anything to make sure you know what you're buying, I have no pity.
As much as I'd like to access the iTMS on Ubuntu, it's not going to happen any time soon (unless Apple actually drops DRM and allows 3rd party clients to access the store). First, this would require admitting that there are Windows alternatives other than OSX, which would be bad for business. Second, development and support would be pretty fairly costly, and as anti-drm as many Linux users are, the user base would be fairly insignificant. So for now I use Amarok for managing my iPod, and buy CDs to get my music. I've found quite a bit of good music buying CDs for one or two songs that I wouldn't have found if I'd just bought the songs I knew I wanted from iTunes, so I can't say I miss it too much.
I'm not trying to argue in favor of DRM at all. What I'm arguing is that the average user isn't very aware of the DRM because it isn't restrictive enough for them to notice. As a current Linux user and former iTMS user, I find it to be a complete pain in the ass.
Macs are competitively priced for the hardware, but they still require you to change your hardware. Apple started their Switch campaign a few months after I bought my current laptop. Had they started earlier, I probably would have bought a Mac, but as the timing stood, I had a PC and it was going to be a few years before I thought about replacing it. During that time I grew incredibly tired of Windows, and decided to try out Linux, which I was able to put on my current hardware. Earlier this week, I decided it's time for a new laptop, and settled on a System76 Gazelle. Apple missed their chance - I was looking for a new operating system, and would have gladly dropped $200 or so to put it on my current hardware, but it wasn't in my budget to pay $1049 for a MacBook. By the time I was looking for a new system, I was hooked on Linux.
That's not completely true. I was able to build a nice Linux box for myself for about $500, $200 of which was spent on a couple of TV tuners for using MythTV, and most of the rest was spent on my 400 GB RAID. The remainder of the system, (case, RAM, mobo, cpu & fan), cost only $120 after some rebates. I spent $15 on a serial IR port for my MythTV setup, and programmed it to use a remote I already had. It's both cheaper and more functional than a mac mini, though it does have a larger footprint.
Macs also tend to come with everything you could possibly need, whether or not you really need it. The Mac Mini comes with WiFi, Bluetooth, a remote, digital audio, and DVI by default, but many desktop users are going to use Cat5, a wired keyboard and mouse, regular speakers, the VGA-DVI adapter, and lose the remote in a drawer somewhere. It would be nice to be able to choose from the features you want from your computer and be able to save a few bucks.
I think Apple would do well to have some commodity hardware. A tower with specs similar to a mini would be quite a bit cheaper, since they don't have to be as compact to be just as functional. Their laptops aren't going to get much cheaper without sacrificing performance, but I don't think it would hurt to have something they could sell at $800 rather than over $1000 for the cheapest laptop. Drop Bluetooth, DVI and the built in iSight, and you're well within that price range.
In short, switching to a Mac is an expensive proposition because it requires that you get new hardware, and you'll likely get more than you'll really use. I realize Apple has a reputation to maintain as a high quality computer vendor, but it's a far stretch to say that it's not expensive to switch to a mac.
I use the open source radeon drivers instead of the binary drivers. I chose Firefox over Opera. I use kvpnc and vpnc instead of Cisco's VPN client. However I also use Adobe Flash, Google Earth, and on very rare occasions I'll load up VMWare Player to use Windows. I want to get the most out of my computer, and there are projects I've given time and money to for the sake of improving the available software.
Having a computer with Free software doesn't have to be boolean. I once heard someone ask "If you're going to run a binary video driver, why don't you just use Windows?", as if running one proprietary application (admittedly in kernel space) were as bad as using 100% proprietary applications on every level. Personally I'd rather have a system that was 95% free and as friendly as possible than 100% free and a pain in the ass, (or 100% proprietary and a pain in the ass, as is often the case with Windows). I'm not saying people who want to keep their computer 100% Free shouldn't do so, but I try to find a happy medium between Free and functional.