Lady in street: I loved your performance, thank you, lovely music. I'll be on my way now.

Singer: But... I need food... please give me some money....

Lady in street: You greedy asshole? How dare you ask me for money?! Music should be done for the love of it!!! Performing for my pleasure while I eat should BE your food!!!! Now sing and stop begging!!!! If you want money go and get a real job!

Jonathan Coulton was talking about this a few months ago in the TWiT podcast.

Streaming services pay garbage to independent artists because the big studios (the old boss) bullied them into accepting horrible terms or literally take them out of business.

Make no mistake; the big studios get a generous split of the Spotify profits. But for Spotify to survive with such a "generous" deal, they had to screw someone else: the indie musician that "can't really bully" them.

Mind you, in some ways, if all indies got together and left Spotify, they would suffer (right now they average their profits with a mixture of indie and big studio playbacks.)

I would not be shocked if the studios want it to work this way, to discourage the next gen of artists from pursuing an indie career.

Unless you disabled automated draft saving... yea.

This is just a stunt. This is the second article from IBM CIO I read today with him trying to scare people of allowing Apple devices in the workplace. Fear mongering, that's all it is.

Kill their revenue stream? Every minute it's down, it's a minute they are not selling ads.

Given how few drugs are meant to save lives, and most are just to make conditions bearable or alleviate temporary effects (and in most cases just to fix patient negligence that cause things like diabetes) I think more people would die due to lack of drug testing than from lack of the drugs in question.

There were many many bad things done with the Zune, but the first was attempting to do an "iPod Killer". They also abandoned the brand with the XBox and look how big of a success it has been. Thing is, the XBox was not done to mimic or copy a competitor, it simply was another console, and to be fair, one with loads of soul behind it.

I'm thinking more about their stupid Windows RT naming for tablets and Windows Phone name. I think Metro Phone and Metro Tablet may have been much more marketable names for people that hear Windows and think "that thing I use at work."

Windows for PC should remain what it is, and the number system seems to be working very nicely in that realm (the year convention makes things feel old too fast and the random letter scheme, like XP, is just horrible.) But keep it there, Microsoft does not have to name every single product they make "Windows."

I'm not saying Microsoft needs to abandon Windows, but keep the product being itself and don't shoehorn it everywhere.

There is no reason for their phone OS to be called "Windows Phone", it's not just not App compatible, it does not even have the feature the OS was named after. The same applies for their upcoming Arm Tablet approach.

But no... They feel forced to market the Phone using Windows and Office brands. They think that big Microsoft Office tile in the home screen, and the Windows name, will sell their phones. It's already proven it won’t.

Even between Microsoft fans that love PCs, no one I ever met seems to think Windows is "cool" or desirable. They feel "windows" is that thing that runs in PCs and Office is a work requirement, not a fun toy. Windows fans, if anything, may feel more love for Direct X than the OS its part off.

BTW separate note: Apple appears to have about ~10% of the current PC market, not huge, but not a joke either. There may be a much larger PC install base, but a lot of those are not actually active. That's also part of the point: Ballmer is allowing OSX to gain too much traction.

The Xbox division is indeed doing great, but Ballmer seems to undermine it every time he can. There were some big losses last year due to some acquisitions (Skype? not sure...) and they "balanced the books" by punishing a lot of divisions, the Xbox division I understand was hit hard and would had shined had they not done that.

It's like Ballmer is ashamed of anything that does not have a big Windows brand in the box, when perhaps he should be doing the opposite.

Can you imagine how well Apple would had fared had they called their iPhone a MacPhone instead? I bet it would have been a flop just due to the horrible unmarketable name.

It’s time Microsoft realizes their future is in the Metro/Xbox brands, not in the Windows/Office ones. Ballmer's resistance is slowly going to kill Microsoft.

Huge issue: biggest chunk of apps moving in mobile markets are games. These games either need as much performance as possible (that can only be achieved with native code) or are forced to use hacks here and there that end up making them depend heavily on browser differences.

Not that this matters much here, I bet BB10 will have some form of support for native apps, and this HTML5 deal is just a way to make it easier on some to develop simple apps.

Side note: in theory you can write HTML5 apps for iOS and Android. All you need is to make a very small "shell" app with a browser view controller and redirect it to your internal HTML code.

Like the Weekly World News, once in a while, they do get lucky and print a real story.

In its own tax filings, Apple reported these tax rate figures paid in the last three years: “approximately 24.2%, 24.4% and 31.8% for 2011, 2010 and 2009, respectively.”

You can only do this if you are a registered developer (I know because I am one.)

You can only install your friend's app if he adds you to he too is a developer certificate.

Actually, you can install his stuff (if he is a developer that added your device under his provisioning profile) even if you are not a developer, but you cant install your own stuff without you being a developer yourself.

Heck, even if you are a developer you must add your own devices to your profile, and there is a limit to how many devices you can add (arguably it's high enough to have all your friends devices registered.)

You can't just download software written by strangers and add it to your device, though.

Oh, if you are a corporation with a much more expensive (although not prohibitive) corporate program, you don't have a device limit (either that or its a frigging large limit) and you can even remotely push software and updates, but this is not in the realm of the common guy and still subject to Apple's blessing.

No you can’t, not without hammering down the OS with a jailbreak. That's like saying banks allow anyone to withdraw as much money as they want with a bit of dynamite placing on the vault.

As a developer I can actually install any app (I compile and sign myself) but even that will be limited to the certificate lifetime.

Article is talking WinRT, which is the equivalent of iOS.

iOS IS restrictive, and Microsoft is aiming exactly for that. Actually... not exactly. From what I read, Microsoft will allow third party browsers, with third party HTML and JavaScript engines (something Apple does not allow.) The issue is in restricting some APIs required for JIT, and that will give third party browsers a heavy performance penalty.

So as much as I tend to be on Apple's side, this is nowhere near as restrictive as Apple's stance.