Only in countries where Apple markets heavily, so clearly it's not the 'quality' of the system per se.

I wasn't talking about manufacturers, I was talking about users; I've yet to meet a single person who wants their non-iPod player to have iTunes support, and in fact I've only seen a handful of iPod owners that even *like* the iTunes support they already have.

Really? let's see Apple offer manual music management, and see how many remain with iTunes for more than a week. People don't switch merely for the huge cost of changing MP3 players *and* online stores along with it, but if they could I'm betting most iToy owners would drop iTunes in a heartbeat.

And you don't understand what a "smartphone" is, particularly the part where they differ from regular phones (ie, true appliances).

Or alternately, with a non-iPod device:

1) Connect media player to the computer
2) Drag & Drop music collection to the computer
3) Go on with your life.

Advantages include not having to think about making backups (you and I may find them obvious, but aunt Tilly doesn't), working in case of unexpected disk failure and not just planned reinstalls, and working like every other goddamned device on the face of planet Earth. But I guess those are inconsequential when faced against the prettiness and the shiny.

And I'd go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of people want to deal with iTunes even less than Explorer, being already used to the latter through... well, every other action on Windows, and of the few that still do so is merely because they believe dealing with it is less of a pain than switching to an iToy's competitor.

Though the fact that there's so little demand for other devices to be supported by iTunes is a testament to that fact, so maybe it's not so much going out on a limb.

And other than showing your poor grasp of logic, what does that prove?

Would you claim Canonical open-sourced the Linux kernel, then?

The... what? have you even played a Prince of Persia game in your life? I've heard "easy", "linear" and more than a few that disliked the art style, but you're the first person I've ever seen calling PoP 08 "complex".

Besides, it wasn't the only game: the first Assassin's Creed game also had only a disk check on the retail version and relegated itself to whatever DRM, if any, was used on DD stores and Ubisoft still saw a sales increase with AC2 and AC:B. I'd love to see your excuse for *that* one.

No, only for spreading old and stale FUD against Google.

Obviously, since you can't post and mod at the same time. Other people however have addressed the point many times in the past: you don't get patent indemnification *anywhere* else in the industry, and that's because large corporations don't remain large by being naive enough to think that judges are infallible and would never avail the insane demands of a patent troll.

That's what they thought three years ago, they tested that theory, and it failed.

They don't even have to assume, they already tried the opposite approach.

Kind of sad to think that we'd have gotten rid of the nasty trash that's DRM by now if only gamers had actually bought the game instead of pirating it shamelessly, but I guess it's one of the problems of being the rare adult in a teenager-oriented market.

Not really. You see, the Orwellian DRM was tried only *after* they tried putting games out there without any copy protection whatsoever, and saw sales figures tank as a result.

Sucks to be us, but we've nobody to blame for this one other than our fellow gamers.

Kinda hard to take you seriously, though, when you seem to confuse Ruby on Rails with the Ruby language it's built upon. Or just ignorantly generalize from one to the other.

Then again, as someone with formal training in Software Engineering, I hold a much lower opinion on Anonymous Cowards of all kinds than I do of people proficient in Ruby, Rails or Javascript ;)

No, what he's saying is that if you tell "fuck you" to someone else, you shouldn't be arrested for attempted rape.

Wrong. Perhaps it was luck that you didn't meet any of them, or perhaps it's just your rose-tinted glasses, but there were no shortage back then just as there are now, whether you think they were justified or not.

I haven't read the proposed standard (mostly because, not being a sound engineer, I suspect I wouldn't understand a thing), but wouldn't the problem be solved by limiting not the maximum, but the average instead? us Classical fans get our cannon shots just as Tchaikovsky intended, while mainstream Rock music stops sounding like someone fucking your ear with an ice pick, it's win/win. And as a bonus, anyone wanting to have their music louder would have to have more quiet parts to compensate, meaning they'd be encouraged to utilize the full dynamic range instead of pushing everything to the maximum.