Then be prepared to pay $19.99 per year for each website, even if you plan to view only one page on that site, because you are unwilling to pay for bundles of multiple sites. Look at 50 different sites one month? That'll be a thousand dollars.

It's actually a good strategy for MS, I think, and I believe Ballmer screwed up by not following this strategy.

For other companies, it only works in the short term because their competitors win in the long term because without good employees, the company can't develop new products. However, for MS, this just isn't a concern. They're a monopoly in many markets, especially in business software; companies aren't going to suddenly stop buying Windows, Exchange, Office/Outlook, etc. MS can milk their existing customers for a couple of decades I think, and could easily jack up prices greatly.

I think MS (and their products) will get worse before this gets better.

Doesn't matter, people will still buy MS products no matter what. Businesses aren't going to wean themselves from MS's enterprise software anytime soon. This was a good decision: the research efforts were costing money which wasn't being made up in new sales.

MS's best course of action is to cut out as much R&D as possible and other bottom-line costs, and then try to extract as much money from existing customers as possible by jacking up prices. Thanks to their monopoly position in several markets, this shouldn't be hard.

That's a really good point. But I guess they could just disable bluetooth. I'm starting to wonder if today's Apple is as incredibly stupid as Sony was 10-15 years ago. Though, Apple might actually be right: the people who buy Apple stuff are such sheep they, unlike Sony's prospective customers a decade ago when they tried to push proprietary audio formats, might actually buy into Apple's proprietary junk.

The rich don't need good service. They'll pay their $9k each, get pissed off, and the site will be down after a couple of years due to non-renewals; meanwhile, the site founders will have made $10-20 million (2,000 people, your numbers, times $9k = $18M) and can retire quite comfortably.

I wish I had thought of it....

Actually, it's pretty clever. Make up something lame, call it "exclusive", and sell it to people with more money than brains. It reminds me of some company that made fancy, massively-overpriced cellphones to sell to rich people (with sapphire mechanisms in the buttons, no less) back when the iPhone v1 was revolutionizing smartphones.

This thing doesn't have to become a giant commercial success, it just has to make a bunch of money before the owners bail out and it collapses.

>The answer to this will be 'No'. The obvious way Apple is going is to change the audio output jack to the headphone to something proprietary like Lightning.

So what? At some point, the signal has to be converted to analog so that it can drive transducers and produce listenable sound. Anyone with a soldering iron can tap into the signal at that point and record it with very good quality.

> I don't remember the what the video tech is called, but newer DVD players and TVs won't display videos that have a specific watermark embedded in it. That DRM hasn't been cracked yet. In theory DRM is impossible, but in reality they only need to stay ahead of the hackers. That's not too difficult.

It's not that easy either. Basically it's an arms race between the two interests. The media interests have money on their side (which can be used to hire engineers to come up with difficult-to-crack schemes), whereas the crackers have on their side the fact that a crack only needs to be found once, and then distributed via the internet, and then the whole scheme is useless. However, the crackers have limited resources and interest, so they only bother if it's really worth their time. So any DRM that hasn't been cracked yet can likely be attributed to it not being worthwhile enough to bother with. Playing DVDs on Linux was seen as worthwhile enough because 1) it wasn't too hard to crack and 2) DVDs were (and still are) by far the dominant method of recording/viewing movies. Yes, streaming video has made a big dent, but not that much; there's still tons of stuff not available on Netflix instant play. And Blu-Rays were supposed to supercede DVDs, but in reality that hasn't happened.

There's plenty of protection schemes that haven't been cracked, but many times that's because no one really cares enough to bother with it. Some proprietary music format that only U2 uses, on one kind of player, will probably be ignored by crackers.

>I remember the days when I would put one radio recording a cassette tape in front of another radio playing a cassette tape and whalla - instant duplicate. No it may not be the same thing as a digitally equivalent copy of an mp3, but it certainly could be pirated.

Yes, but that sounds like crap. However, it is possible to get very, very good copies using analog recording: even if Apple somehow made it ridiculously difficult to make digital copies of U2 music and made it so it would only play on an iPhone/iPad, are they going to eliminate the analog headphone jack too? It's easy to copy music by plugging a cable from a headphone jack into a line-in jack on another computer. Even if they eliminate the headphone jack and make you buy digitally-connected headphones which use encryption, at some point there's a DAC and an amplifier to play the analog sound into your ears, so anyone handy with electronics could tap into the amplifier output.

However, all of this is bound for failure: what kind of moron would buy a song that can only be played on one device? Apple does not completely control the music market, and there's a lot more Android phones sold now than iPhones. Any proprietary Apple scheme won't work on Android.

Yes, but Dre is a respected musician, so his opinion is given far greater weight than some yahoo on Slashdot who has no musical credentials whatsoever.

As a user of Xubuntu who brings out the GIMP at least twice a week, I'm interested in how you'd name them better.

• What better name would you suggest for the GNU Image Manipulation Program? It "at least tries to vaguely describe the function of the program".
• How is Blender (English for "food processor", referring to a 3D modeling app) any better than Ubuntu (Zulu for "humankind", referring to a Linux distribution)? Is it just that English is historically more prestigious than Zulu as a naming language?
• Xfce (XForms Common Environment) used to be descriptive back when it used XForms, but it became an artifact title once Xfce switched to GTK+. The X part can be reinterpreted to refer to the X Window System, but then the F needs a meaning, a problem that it shares with FVWM (Something Virtual Window Manager).