Newsworthy? Pretty much only hand-in-hand with price drop analysis. Although I guess financial news of any stripe is under consideration in this economy.

It's still trying to get cheap. And ostensibly aim for "small" at some point in its life, the way the PSOne and PS2 Slim did. It's just unfortunately the path to doing so take them through those annoying territories, like "not including as much silicon" (PS2 chips being how the launch models and the previous 80GB unit retained much of the backward compatibility) and "not having as many ports."

Perhaps the future will bring proper software compatibility to all PS2 titles (thereby bringing it to all PS3s), and enough cuts otherwise that we can see the return of USB and memory card ports (the way the PS2 Slim added some ports and capability), but for the moment the path is soggy.

You realize how much a sack of crap that is, right? The biggest worker expenditure difference between auto workers in US auto maker plants versus foreign auto makers comes from the pension past workers have built up from... you know... manufacturing here for the better past of a decade. (Whereas foreign auto maker plants haven't been here long enough to build up a worker pension pool yet.)

Subtract that bullshit additional claim to the "BOO HOO TEH UNIONS!!!" shouting, and what's the difference...? About $4 an hour, or under-a-10% salary delta. But that doesn't doesn't make waves and just MIIIIGHT get people saying "whatever, dudes, make better cars and better market decisions on your lineup," so therefore they had to trot out out that asinine $70+ figure.

...and of course, when it comes right down to it, worker salary and pension and all that rigmarole amounts to less than 10% of what the companies expend in general, so... Just MAYBE there are other places they need to tighten ship as well?

Certainly some unions can cause problems, but is the auto worker union making the US car manufacturers fail? Not even close. Pension aside, the "total hourly compensation" comes to something like $52 versus $48, and while it's true UAW has been able to lobby for more valuable pensions as well, the difference is simply that of size and time. US auto manufacturers have a pension pool that's been built up by MANY more workers in MANY more plants that have been in operation since the dawn of the 20th century. (Or, I suppose, when and how they started providing pensions.)

The "competition gap" would certainly make a couple percent different all told in the long run, but that's in no way why they've all gone belly-up and are in need of bailing out now.

Why, because sites like Hulu or networks hosting their own full episodes are remotely accessible by anything not supporting Flash 9? (Which is very few, and even fewer of them "well.") Because if they were really concerned about mobile appeal for those sites they couldn't do exactly what YouTube did, which uses not a stitch of Flash, yet is accessable from even the simplest mobile browsers? (Though you'd best have a good data plan...)

The loss is mainly annoying for random, not-always-YouTube embedded videos in the middle of websites, but "Flash support" doesn't really help much with that anyway, considering the sheer number of different kinds of embedded players and that websites are prone to use, so... Heck, not all desktop BROWSERS handle it properly, but we think it can wedge into the even broader mobilescape, what with the complete lack of plug-ins and expandability.

It's asininely fragmented, and for no good reason anymore, considering the simplicity of what they're trying to serve.

AAC isn't proprietary, it's a license-free ISO standard included in MPEG specifications. And pretty much the only reason they went there is because you couldn't attach DRM to MP3, so they adopted an open standard to stick FairPlay onto. The other option was... like... WMV. Would that have been an improvement?

...and while a lot of people around these parts grouse about Ogg and FLAC and such, those are in "competition" kind of the way Opera is on the browser market. Most players ignore them, some players plucked them in, but a miniscule percentage of the media-player-purchasing public knows or cares about them, so they're simply shrugged at by the industry at large.

I'm sure they didn't really WANT to support Exchange either, but what were their other options for gaining any traction in the business world? It's not like RIM would be opening up their NOC to iPhones, so... ActiveSync is pretty much the only other player. I'm sure if there were a larger non-proprietary option they'd rather go that way, but serious... what is there?

Same thing with Microsoft documents and PDF and the like; they're intrinsic, and it would be retarded to ignore them. It's not like Google Docs or Open Office or anything which also supports OpenDocument does, eh? Sometimes you have no option.

In this case, however, they do. The mobile web is only starting to catch up on full HTML standards, and most devices still can't handle that. They're not even yet supporting the CRIPPLED version of Flash and Java and the like usefully, and certainly not in an "attached to their browser" way. (A lot seem to be rolling in support from side apps that are dedicated to video streaming, or the like.)

Basically, while Flash is intrinsic on the desktop side, it is NOT on the mobile side, and it's also not well designed for it. The PSP "supports" Flash, but it's crappy, battery-hungry, and so memory-hungry it crashes on most things but short clips. The situation is not better on most cell phones and even smartphones, which are driving the mobile environment. (There are dedicated "internet surfing devices" that are beefy and more expensive and more powerful that do it well, but those are few and far between, and pretty much irrelevant.)

Basically, the tasks Flash was tapped for for convenience's sake on the desktop--where resources are liberal and power is no issue--are BAD on the mobile side, where resources are "as low as can be gotten away with" and power is to be conserved as much as possible. (People already bitch to high heaven about the iPhone's battery life, and Apple has already been ignoring other battery-draining tasks like taking video clips, so they're not terribly eager to bog down their browser with yet another thing that will look bad on battery benchmarks.)

Basically, 95% of what people want out of Flash is "to watch videos" anyway. We have better options! I don't really care to see a pointless, inefficient, proprietary standard brute-forced into the mobile arena simply because it's not annoying on desktops. Another 4% want "to be able to see the fancy stuff on other websites," which we STILL have better options for. Personally, I think it's the best shot we'll have to get away from being bogged down.

But no, ultimately Apple doesn't have a "non-proprietary agenda." It does behoove them to get away from others' where possible, however, and since Apple doesn't have the capability to drive their own (excepting FairPlay, which is how they're going to protect things that people demand be DRM'd), so that primarily means they'll aim at open, license-free standards. Which is fine by me.

I do wish they'd pick up some others that they seem to be ignoring, but as with their hardware selection, their format selection tends to be sparse, waiting for the demand to already be there.

Admittedly the mini DisplayPort end is new so others haven't made adapters for it yet, but I have no doubt that Monoprice will have it for a few bucks in short order.

In this case they're "pushing them" indirectly by ignoring the proprietary ones. "Mobile pages" being built already bypass load-heavy things, and if a mobile device with a full-fledge browser but without Flash or Java support should become massively popular? If said company should (among other high-profile companies) provide better looking, better performing, and extremely capable examples of websites using only open web standards instead of other proprietary platforms and convince others to follow...? I'm sure they wouldn't object.

Flash's case in particular, Adobe's been pretty neglectful in supporting OS X in general, and Apple has no control over what Adobe does with it, so... That certainly can't help Apple wanting to go out of their way to support them while the world moves more and more mobile and Flash (among others) shows weakness in that arena.

I remember the days were the was people who could really use grammar and type, after seeing this post I think this is a site for online people who think their too gooder for the typing already. Sigh.

Um... what overall restrictions are Apple and Microsoft placing on their operating systems that makes the software available on them "objectionable" in the same way as DRM? Certainly some companies will use DRM schemes to try to safeguard their software from piracy (...as if that works) to annoying extent, but isn't that a problem with those particular companies and those particular pieces of software, not the OS that runs it?

Linux is perfectly fine for most anyone's needs (though a bit hard for neophytes to get help with when problems arise), but I don't quite get your "logic" in how DRM applies to the "content" sold on an operating system... which is to say, "software."

iTunes in general? Sure. The whole damn software platform...?

It is not necessary, and in this case it is downright illogically aimed, as harming Apple is specifically what the Big Three labels want to do by keeping the DRM-laden purchasable tracks still on there, but not anywhere else. Hence it is simply ENCOURAGING that last vestige of DRM bullshit.

Same here, for right now. Especially since I discovered that on Amazon--which I use all the time--you can pretty much get ANY CD for, like, $4-5 if you don't care about getting it right away, and are fine with going through the "used and new" links. There's still a huge CD aftermarket, and as I've never got anything more than a single scratch on the jewel case so far to make me think the CD was anything but "new..."

I do have a personal boycott right now, though, but that's just for the Big Three labels themselves, so long as they're continuing to play DRM shennanigans at all, anywhere (excepting subscription services), which includes on iTunes. Once they drop that, if I choose to go digital, I'll probably buy from a place like Lulu or Amazon MP3... eMusic seems to be a nice "subscription + ownership" model to support as well, even though there are fewer options.

I guess I'd rather know what online store offers the best returns to the artist, though (if and how it works through those complex label agreements). If I'm biting the bullet and choosing to pay more for a low-quality, less-versatile digital copy anyway, I'd rather give more of that money to the people I think deserve it most.

...including iTunes itself, amusingly.

Precisely. I'm an ENORMOUS geek, but there's a limit to "what I can really give a shit about." And it does not extend to iPod stuff.

(Of course specifically in this case it also doesn't extend to "illogical boycotts."

I'm sure we will miss it and regret it sorely, because obviously it is a high-quality, genre-defying, paradigm-shifting awesomeness that we cannot possibly comprehend.

...

Ok, right. While there are some things that are still bugging me about the iPhone SDK rollout (specifically that the talked-about "push" tags and labels still aren't there, which can give "background process-by-proxy" capabilities to most apps that would be 90% as serviceable as running in the background for most tasks), it's hard not to see that the model is a successful one and a solid one.

Firmware 2.0 had some issues, but as of 2.1 it's been rock-solid, and while the geek in me wants to play with the innards at all costs, the "tired of constantly cleaning up, watching performance degrade, and dealing with instability" part of me appreciates that to build a solid foundation you can't open the floodgates from the beginning; you have to start out pretty closed, then open up what you can that you know won't topple the rest.

I miss some stuff, but there's a crap-ton of awesome out there, so I don't ultimately think I'm missing a whole LOT... And I know I can hack the firmware at any point, so...?

BFD

DRM is already gone on music, excepting that the same kind folks who brought it to you in the first place are the ones still keeping it on iTunes.

Why does it seem like you're pissed at Apple specifically?