They would create an ebay like system directly in iTunes that would allow me to sell my music to other people.
Creating such a marketplace and policing it would take considerable time and effort. Just figuring out how to track how many times a song had been sold (and making that count hack-resistant) would be a big task. The margins would be lower than the iTunes Music Store, and there would be all kinds of litigation just waiting to be sprung on their ass.
Plus, there's already an 800-lb gorilla in the online auction world. They're called eBay, and they've already shown that they'll squash anyone who tries to enter that market.
Such a marketplace might be nice for a few consumers, but I doubt that most music lovers would be interested in bidding on individual songs. The genius of the Apple Music Store is that it makes it ludicrously easy to purchase, download, and use music. Adding more complexity to the equation would erase that advantage and confuse their customers.
1) Microsoft isn't interested in what is good government and what is bad government. They are interested in what keeps competitors from threatening their global monopoly.
2) "A government's only job is to defend individual rights" is an absurdly simplistic statement. Ask any ten people in any ten countries what the primary role of government is, and you're likely to get ten answers. Americans right now might tell you the primary role of government is to safeguard its citizens. Thirty years ago, they might have told you it was to provide every citizen an equal opportunity to succeed. A hundred years ago, they might have told you it was to provide law and order. Ask someone in South Korea right now, and they may say it's to prevent war. Ask someone in China, and they might say it's to raise the standard of living.
3) There is no truly free market, though as a libertarian I'm sure you would love it to be that way. Microsoft and other high-tech companies in the US receive tremendous tax benefits and the powerful backing of government agencies and elected officials, who apply pressure on other nations during trade negotiations. It would be fantastic if there were true globalization and dropping of subsidies and barriers worldwide. But that's not the reality. Microsoft is not acting alone. They have the support of the most powerful government on earth.
4) The US government considers weapons systems used by the US military to be of strategic importance. That's why, with few exceptions, almost all key American weapons systems are built by American companies, even when there are sometimes better alternatives produced in allied nations such as Germany, Britain, Italy, or France. What would happen, for example, if the French chose to stop supplying the US with weapons systems? Now imagine yourself making decisions about the security of any country on earth other than the US. The Americans have shown how sophisticated computer-driven information systems can reduce the fog of war and create staggeringly effective results. Would you want all of your own systems to be run by American-produced computer systems that you couldn't get the source code to? Wouldn't you be worried just as the French revealed the inner workings of the air defence systems they sold Iraq, Microsoft wouldn't do the same or worse to you?
Even close allies spy on each other. Why give the overwhelmingly most powerful nation on earth an open door into the heart of everything you're doing? Sure, that might be a paranoid conclusion. But if you're in charge of a nation's security, your job is to be paranoid.
Leaders in other countries are beginning to realize that software is not just an economic issue, it's an issue of much broader strategic importance.
You make it sound as though Apple came from out of nowhwere and decided to start working with schools. Apple was founded in 1976, and by 1979 **24 years ago**, they had established the Apple Education Foundation.
Apple was founded by a couple of guys who believed in the power of computing to transform education. They put a lot of emphasis in the education market in the early days of Apple because it was something they were both passionate about, and because they believed it was a good way to grow the company. You could in fact argue that the early emphasis on the education market was counterproductive, in that it sapped their ability to compete in the corporate world.
Microsoft only got seriously involved in education market once they'd already conquered the corporate market. In the mean time, they let PC vendors do the work of beating Apple in education.
Doesn't the current "What do you see?" marketing campaign from Microsoft strike you as absurdly self-serving? Apple's long history in the education market has been riddled with mistakes and ups and downs, but the company has never been as mercenary about education as Microsoft.
This is a peaceful gesture, like when the IRA was granted amnesty as part of the peace accords. Or when illegal immigrants in the US were offered amnesty to ease tensions with Mexico. And now the RIAA is allowing Americans amnesty. How nice of them.:-)
Spammers are more than jerks. A jerk is someone who honks at you for only going 70 mph in the slow lane. A jerk is someone who throws trash on the street or makes a big scene in a restaurant when the wine isn't to his liking.
A spammer is someone who comes to your house every day and rings the doorbell every 37 seconds. He makes it difficult for you to go outside because when you do, he'll pin advertisements for Viagra and get-rich-quick schemes all over your clothes. After a while, your mail carrier may not even show up at your house, for fear of this miscreant.
Spammers hide behind legalities, but they are profoundly immoral, in the sense that they don't give a damn about what their actions do to the larger community. The irony is that they are busy bringing down the very edifice that allows them to conduct these activities.
Alchoholics are sick people who can be cured.
Political dissidents may have views I disagree with, but they're not forcing me to listen to them.
Spammers are just people who don't give a damn about anyone else, and are willing to make money off of crippling a mechanism that millions of people depend on every day.
The first person shooter's premise is that the central character's mission in life is to shoot his way out of difficult situations. Yes, yes, there are puzzles and so on, but let's be serious. The name of the game is shooting. Imagine a game that incorporated heavy-duty dialogue, even open-ended dialogue, in such a way as to allow for a true FPS/RPG that would be as good or better than pencil and paper RPGs?
You may laugh and say that you can't make such a game, but when I first saw Pong I never thought it would lead to Halo, either.
The industry goes after formula-driven profits, but at some point this will have to change if we're ever to see the kind of games that will truly eclipse film.
"Why use a book when x,y,z is available for free on the Internet?
Well, crap. Why *ever* use a book when the information is already available in electronic form? Why read Tom Sawyer in book form when you can read it on your Palm Zire? Why read the printed newspaper at the coffee shop, when it would be far more efficient to bring your laptop, look for a Wi-Fi network, and read the news online?
My point is that sometimes online sources are hampered by the medium. The book for all its faults is a wonderful information vector. It's not always best, but it's often worth paying money for; even in the digital age.
kollivier is right on the money IMO. There's a huge difference between the Apple approach and the MS approach, which many in the "alll GUIs are the same" crowd misses.
The Windows interface just keeps getting more and more wizard-driven, while the Mac interface eschews wizards in favor of consistently applied methods of controlling the computer.
One of the additional advantages of a consistent interface is that it allows beginning users to get things done, while also allowing more advanced users to adapt the OS to their needs. For example, most Mac users don't take advantage of all of the customization capabilities of the Dock. But once you delve into it, you realize that the Dock can do far more than just serve as an shortcut repository.
This fundamental accomodation of beginning and more advanced users is a strength of the MacOS that isn't often discussed, but as MS continues to make Windows more and more task-based (i.e.: wizard-driven), the advantages of the Mac approach will become even more apparent.
Having worked in a federal government agency for a while before coming to my senses, I can tell you that the US government is obsessed with quantitative analysis.
In order for an initiative (say, helping the homeless) to succeed inside a government agency, the quantification process has to lay the groundwork first. Someone (usually outside the agency, like a legislator) develops an idea. It gets brought into a committee, where it is debated for a long time. The idea is then spun out to a team that is supposed to identify quantitatively what's really going on out there "in the field."
Based on their exhaustive and time-consuming quantitative analysis, another group slowly puts together a series of recommended courses of action. If the project still has political backing inside and outside the agency, the planning group builds "evaluation" protocols into whatever action plan they come up with. In some cases, the evaluation aspects of the project can gobble up a quarter of the total resources.
At some point, the project finally launches, and data is collected at every juncture. By this time the underlying nature of the problem supposedly being addressed has changed, but the agency now has tons of quantitative data to analyze. After a year or two, initial data will roll out of the analysis factory, and decisionmakers will have solid (albeit 2 years old) information about what the program is doing.
Unfortunately, program contracting organizations "on the ground" across the country will be seeking to zealously guard their funding source, since a federal contract is usually the be-all end-all for a non-profit government contractor. So the information available will be skewed by the built-in bias of all involved parties to present the program in the best light (since it took so long, involved so much labor for everyone, and is in the best interests of the program managers and contractors).
Obviously these progams could be run more effectively. But that's the nature of government. It's slow to act, but once a program gets going, it's difficult to stop it. Everyone involved knows this, which is part of the reason they're so timid in the early stages. Ultimately their best recourse is to quantify everything possible, so they can always point to the numbers and say, "Well, the numbers told us this...."
These guys are so wedded to a business model based on cheating customers that they don't even see the irony inherent in a statement like, "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."
The fact that fast-communicating audiences are "scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns" doesn't register to the movie moguls as MAKE BETTER MOVIES. Talk about living in your own pocket universe.
Dude, that is SO true! In fact, Apple has been dying since 1985, if not earlier. It's been a long, slow, miserable death with nothing to show for it.
Forget all of the things Apple has brought to computing. Forget the Music Store. Forget the G5s. Forget OS X. Forget the XServe. Forget their pro apps. Forget that they're making money while everyone else but Dell is losing money.
Well, let's see. Maybe because of articles like this one.
1) It's juvenile, which fits right in with the stereotype that all video game players are 15 year-old boys.
2) It's sexist, which not only reinforces (1) but also leads people to believe that video games are not for women.
3) It focuses on violent video games, which might lead a reader to believe that all video games have violent themes. Come to think of it, the vast majority of them do. Perhaps it's because game companies now cater almost exclusively to 15 year-old boys.
4) It is poorly written, sophomoric in the extreme, and housed at a URL that indicates the respect the author has for the writing.
Yes, yes yes. I know. I'm just a bitter old man. The guy who wrote the article was just joking around. But isn't everyone getting *just a bit* tired of first-person shooters dominating the market? Games like EverCrack have shown that other genres can make it, but these days truly creative and daring games get steamrollered by shoot-em-ups. Why? Because like Hollywood, the video game producers know that they can make boatloads of money off of the one demographic that has tons of time and disposable income.
Is that *really* all that videogames have to offer the world? Tits, guns, and meyhem?
As this opinion piece from 1996 indicates, the education market is a market that will never be more than a niche in the overall computer industry, much less in the whole "information'' sector.
The author lambastes Apple for putting too much emphasis on the education market, and misunderstanding that the opportunity cost of dominating that market was too high.
This is a troll? How is suggesting that SCO's "pump and dump" management be sent to jail a troll? Does anyone really think that these guys are just plain ol' honest businessmen?
And not some pansy-ass white collar jail. Real jail. The kind populated by guys with no discernable necks, and a penchant for "breaking in" the newbies.
Given that the governor of California (whomever that will wind up being) only has the authority to influence about 30% of the state's budget (because the rest of it has already been earmarked by ballot measures over the years - per The Economist), do you think that ANY governor can actually have much of a positive effect on the economic situation in California?
Also, do you feel that the elected governor is assisted or confounded by the slew of ballot initiatives that come through every election cycle? If elected, would you seek to expand this participatory government because it empowers the people, keep it at the same level, or rein it in because it makes effective long-term strategy so difficult?
Pay reasonable prices and try to buy only things that are made in the USA. Remember that you're going to get what you pay for.
Hell yeah! That's why I buy only American. Because everyone knows that:
* At Ford, "Quality is Job One!", while those cheezy Nissans, Toyotas, and Hondas are always in the shop
* The Linux kernel, started by an effite European, is vastly inferior to the quality server OSes cranked out by innovative Microsoft
* There are no more American TV manufacturers any more, because although they were of tremendously high quality, they were done in by the shoddy workmanship and underhanded tricks of foreign manufacturers.
Protectionism serves nobody. It pampers weak companies, maintains artificially high prices, and keeps less-developed nations from gaining economic self-sufficiency. Protectionism is not patriotic. It's just a fearful reaction to economic change.
As for your assertion that paying a logical price to get something good means fewer and better tech support calls, I fully agree, which is why I use a Mac and Apple software almost exclusively.
That my friend is what most people just don't seem to understand. Less tech support, fewer hardware problems, and a system that just works should logically cost more than a combination of hardware made cheaply and software made with a "get the features out first, worry about the bugs later" mentality.
It's a constant source of amazement to me that more people don't understand this.
The "War on Terror" is to the 2000s as the "War on Drugs" was to the 1990s. It can be used to justify almost anything, from depriving people of their civil liberties, to propping up corrupt regimes, to supporting big business.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Drugs can be a threat to society. Terrorists can be a threat to society. But is our only response always bound to be a blunt-instrument, simpleminded "war"? Non-Americans often perceive us as politically naiive and unrealistic, for good reason.
Slashdot Mirror
And as we all know, quantity DOES equal quality - especially in the world o' blogs. ;-)
It was topical humor. Right now there's no comic strip artist of Breathed's stature doing for the 00s what he did for the 80s.
Satire is a sign of a healthy democracy. We need it right now more than ever.
As for longevity, my Bloom County collection does a better job of reminding me what the 80s were all about than any other media relics from that era.
Creating such a marketplace and policing it would take considerable time and effort. Just figuring out how to track how many times a song had been sold (and making that count hack-resistant) would be a big task. The margins would be lower than the iTunes Music Store, and there would be all kinds of litigation just waiting to be sprung on their ass.
Plus, there's already an 800-lb gorilla in the online auction world. They're called eBay, and they've already shown that they'll squash anyone who tries to enter that market.
Such a marketplace might be nice for a few consumers, but I doubt that most music lovers would be interested in bidding on individual songs. The genius of the Apple Music Store is that it makes it ludicrously easy to purchase, download, and use music. Adding more complexity to the equation would erase that advantage and confuse their customers.
2) "A government's only job is to defend individual rights" is an absurdly simplistic statement. Ask any ten people in any ten countries what the primary role of government is, and you're likely to get ten answers. Americans right now might tell you the primary role of government is to safeguard its citizens. Thirty years ago, they might have told you it was to provide every citizen an equal opportunity to succeed. A hundred years ago, they might have told you it was to provide law and order. Ask someone in South Korea right now, and they may say it's to prevent war. Ask someone in China, and they might say it's to raise the standard of living.
3) There is no truly free market, though as a libertarian I'm sure you would love it to be that way. Microsoft and other high-tech companies in the US receive tremendous tax benefits and the powerful backing of government agencies and elected officials, who apply pressure on other nations during trade negotiations. It would be fantastic if there were true globalization and dropping of subsidies and barriers worldwide. But that's not the reality. Microsoft is not acting alone. They have the support of the most powerful government on earth.
4) The US government considers weapons systems used by the US military to be of strategic importance. That's why, with few exceptions, almost all key American weapons systems are built by American companies, even when there are sometimes better alternatives produced in allied nations such as Germany, Britain, Italy, or France. What would happen, for example, if the French chose to stop supplying the US with weapons systems? Now imagine yourself making decisions about the security of any country on earth other than the US. The Americans have shown how sophisticated computer-driven information systems can reduce the fog of war and create staggeringly effective results. Would you want all of your own systems to be run by American-produced computer systems that you couldn't get the source code to? Wouldn't you be worried just as the French revealed the inner workings of the air defence systems they sold Iraq, Microsoft wouldn't do the same or worse to you?
Even close allies spy on each other. Why give the overwhelmingly most powerful nation on earth an open door into the heart of everything you're doing? Sure, that might be a paranoid conclusion. But if you're in charge of a nation's security, your job is to be paranoid.
Leaders in other countries are beginning to realize that software is not just an economic issue, it's an issue of much broader strategic importance.
Apple was founded by a couple of guys who believed in the power of computing to transform education. They put a lot of emphasis in the education market in the early days of Apple because it was something they were both passionate about, and because they believed it was a good way to grow the company. You could in fact argue that the early emphasis on the education market was counterproductive, in that it sapped their ability to compete in the corporate world.
Microsoft only got seriously involved in education market once they'd already conquered the corporate market. In the mean time, they let PC vendors do the work of beating Apple in education.
Doesn't the current "What do you see?" marketing campaign from Microsoft strike you as absurdly self-serving? Apple's long history in the education market has been riddled with mistakes and ups and downs, but the company has never been as mercenary about education as Microsoft.
Oh, wait.
The RIAA only thinks they're a sovereign nation.
A spammer is someone who comes to your house every day and rings the doorbell every 37 seconds. He makes it difficult for you to go outside because when you do, he'll pin advertisements for Viagra and get-rich-quick schemes all over your clothes. After a while, your mail carrier may not even show up at your house, for fear of this miscreant.
Spammers hide behind legalities, but they are profoundly immoral, in the sense that they don't give a damn about what their actions do to the larger community. The irony is that they are busy bringing down the very edifice that allows them to conduct these activities.
Alchoholics are sick people who can be cured.
Political dissidents may have views I disagree with, but they're not forcing me to listen to them.
Spammers are just people who don't give a damn about anyone else, and are willing to make money off of crippling a mechanism that millions of people depend on every day.
You may laugh and say that you can't make such a game, but when I first saw Pong I never thought it would lead to Halo, either.
The industry goes after formula-driven profits, but at some point this will have to change if we're ever to see the kind of games that will truly eclipse film.
"Why use a book when x,y,z is available for free on the Internet?
Well, crap. Why *ever* use a book when the information is already available in electronic form? Why read Tom Sawyer in book form when you can read it on your Palm Zire? Why read the printed newspaper at the coffee shop, when it would be far more efficient to bring your laptop, look for a Wi-Fi network, and read the news online?
My point is that sometimes online sources are hampered by the medium. The book for all its faults is a wonderful information vector. It's not always best, but it's often worth paying money for; even in the digital age.
The Windows interface just keeps getting more and more wizard-driven, while the Mac interface eschews wizards in favor of consistently applied methods of controlling the computer.
One of the additional advantages of a consistent interface is that it allows beginning users to get things done, while also allowing more advanced users to adapt the OS to their needs. For example, most Mac users don't take advantage of all of the customization capabilities of the Dock. But once you delve into it, you realize that the Dock can do far more than just serve as an shortcut repository.
This fundamental accomodation of beginning and more advanced users is a strength of the MacOS that isn't often discussed, but as MS continues to make Windows more and more task-based (i.e.: wizard-driven), the advantages of the Mac approach will become even more apparent.
In order for an initiative (say, helping the homeless) to succeed inside a government agency, the quantification process has to lay the groundwork first. Someone (usually outside the agency, like a legislator) develops an idea. It gets brought into a committee, where it is debated for a long time. The idea is then spun out to a team that is supposed to identify quantitatively what's really going on out there "in the field."
Based on their exhaustive and time-consuming quantitative analysis, another group slowly puts together a series of recommended courses of action. If the project still has political backing inside and outside the agency, the planning group builds "evaluation" protocols into whatever action plan they come up with. In some cases, the evaluation aspects of the project can gobble up a quarter of the total resources.
At some point, the project finally launches, and data is collected at every juncture. By this time the underlying nature of the problem supposedly being addressed has changed, but the agency now has tons of quantitative data to analyze. After a year or two, initial data will roll out of the analysis factory, and decisionmakers will have solid (albeit 2 years old) information about what the program is doing.
Unfortunately, program contracting organizations "on the ground" across the country will be seeking to zealously guard their funding source, since a federal contract is usually the be-all end-all for a non-profit government contractor. So the information available will be skewed by the built-in bias of all involved parties to present the program in the best light (since it took so long, involved so much labor for everyone, and is in the best interests of the program managers and contractors).
Obviously these progams could be run more effectively. But that's the nature of government. It's slow to act, but once a program gets going, it's difficult to stop it. Everyone involved knows this, which is part of the reason they're so timid in the early stages. Ultimately their best recourse is to quantify everything possible, so they can always point to the numbers and say, "Well, the numbers told us this... ."
The fact that fast-communicating audiences are "scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns" doesn't register to the movie moguls as MAKE BETTER MOVIES. Talk about living in your own pocket universe.
I wonder if they'll figure out a way to make a (drumroll, please) P-R-O-F-I-T with any of the companies they're likely to bankroll.
Companies built around a single technology in search of a profitable business model. It's gonna be just like back in the old days of '99!
Dude, that is SO true! In fact, Apple has been dying since 1985, if not earlier. It's been a long, slow, miserable death with nothing to show for it.
Forget all of the things Apple has brought to computing. Forget the Music Store. Forget the G5s. Forget OS X. Forget the XServe. Forget their pro apps. Forget that they're making money while everyone else but Dell is losing money.
They are done! Toast! Finished!
1) It's juvenile, which fits right in with the stereotype that all video game players are 15 year-old boys.
2) It's sexist, which not only reinforces (1) but also leads people to believe that video games are not for women.
3) It focuses on violent video games, which might lead a reader to believe that all video games have violent themes. Come to think of it, the vast majority of them do. Perhaps it's because game companies now cater almost exclusively to 15 year-old boys.
4) It is poorly written, sophomoric in the extreme, and housed at a URL that indicates the respect the author has for the writing.
Yes, yes yes. I know. I'm just a bitter old man. The guy who wrote the article was just joking around. But isn't everyone getting *just a bit* tired of first-person shooters dominating the market? Games like EverCrack have shown that other genres can make it, but these days truly creative and daring games get steamrollered by shoot-em-ups. Why? Because like Hollywood, the video game producers know that they can make boatloads of money off of the one demographic that has tons of time and disposable income.
Is that *really* all that videogames have to offer the world? Tits, guns, and meyhem?
The author lambastes Apple for putting too much emphasis on the education market, and misunderstanding that the opportunity cost of dominating that market was too high.
Ironic, innit?
If these fuggers ever actually did real time in a real prison, we'd see a lot less of this sort of crap in the future.
Choice is good.
Also, do you feel that the elected governor is assisted or confounded by the slew of ballot initiatives that come through every election cycle? If elected, would you seek to expand this participatory government because it empowers the people, keep it at the same level, or rein it in because it makes effective long-term strategy so difficult?
Good point. I should have said, "protectionism in the long run does not truly help the American economy or the global economy."
Hell yeah! That's why I buy only American. Because everyone knows that:
* At Ford, "Quality is Job One!", while those cheezy Nissans, Toyotas, and Hondas are always in the shop
* The Linux kernel, started by an effite European, is vastly inferior to the quality server OSes cranked out by innovative Microsoft
* There are no more American TV manufacturers any more, because although they were of tremendously high quality, they were done in by the shoddy workmanship and underhanded tricks of foreign manufacturers.
Protectionism serves nobody. It pampers weak companies, maintains artificially high prices, and keeps less-developed nations from gaining economic self-sufficiency. Protectionism is not patriotic. It's just a fearful reaction to economic change.
That my friend is what most people just don't seem to understand. Less tech support, fewer hardware problems, and a system that just works should logically cost more than a combination of hardware made cheaply and software made with a "get the features out first, worry about the bugs later" mentality.
It's a constant source of amazement to me that more people don't understand this.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Drugs can be a threat to society. Terrorists can be a threat to society. But is our only response always bound to be a blunt-instrument, simpleminded "war"? Non-Americans often perceive us as politically naiive and unrealistic, for good reason.