And this is where I go back to buying music from iTunes.

I wanted to to begin with (so easy! Not particularly expensive! Lots of moral backpatting!) but since half the fun for me is doodling around remixing things or, cough, setting Doctor Who footage to them, DRM’d songs were useless useless useless to me.

Now if we can get then to add Bluetooth to ipods, we’ll really be getting somewhere.

Next step for itunes…..selling songs encoded in a lossless format like Apple Lossless, flac, or ape rather than lossy formats like mp3 or aac.

Next step for itunes…..selling songs encoded in a lossless format like Apple Lossless, flac, or ape rather than lossy formats like mp3 or aac.

That was actually the previous step. They’ve been doing that already, I think, at least for select songs.

nod Chet—the new iTunes Plus stuff is encoded at a higher bitrate.

I mostly buy MP3s from Amazon, because mp3s aren’t proprietary, but iTunes is tempting me now.

Great post. Recognizing the incompatibility of capitalism and genuinely free markets is central to converting squishy liberals to the left.

“it’s a real shame to me that people think that capitalism is the same thing as a free market”

Guilty as charged.

I mostly buy MP3s from Amazon, because mp3s aren’t proprietary, but iTunes is tempting me now.

Well, aac isn’t really proprietary either…unless you were referring to the drm situation rather than the file format.

Apple has fought against iTunes DRM reqirements from the outset. As the article points out, Apple gave away its simple pricing structure in exchange for DRM-free rights. The DRM-free songs they’d already been selling were a result of their agreement with EMI, which broke from the publishing pack some time ago.

Social Security reflects the job-hopping that Americans do that prevents us from having a coherent pension plan with any one employer.

It also represents the volatility of our economy where any one company may not be able to stay in business for 50 years.

I see a time very soon, if no National Health upsets it, where health insurance is more like dental insurance.  They agree to cover a portion of whatever they think the proper costs of a procedure is.  The doctor charges what s/he charges.  The insurance company reimburses you according to their rates, which have nothing to do with how much you really have to come up with out of pocket.  Insurance becomes more like a discount card for consumers, while continuing to stiff providers and stuff their own pockets.

I briefly paid for my own private insurance, and that’s exactly what individual plans are.  You pay $200 a month for the privilege of getting discounts on procedures, but all individual plans have huge deductibles and are essentially useless unless or until you get into a serious accident or are diagnosed with a very expensive disease.

The AAC format is an open standard, not owned by Apple, and is available for use at no cost. On the other hand, MP3 is a closed proprietary format which legally must be licensed and paid for by the users.  It gained prevalence over other formats due to the original Napster and music piracy. If you own a device that plays MP3s, you’ve paid a licensing fee.

Apple announced a long time ago it was the music labels who forced DRM, not them.  Amazon got permission to sell DRM-free tracks from the labels as a bargaining tool to force Apple into allowing multi-tier pricing.

I’m sure Apple would love to have a monopoly on music distribution, and then they could set it up so there’s not only DRM on every song, but that your account deletes it after a week, and you have to buy it again.

This statement seems odd to me, as Apple is currently the number one music store on the planet - and is removing DRM from their products.

Most of the so-called capitalists are really monopolists.  They want to become the very thing that they criticized in the Soviet Union; i.e., only one washing machine, only one airline, etc.

Capitalist theory requires that all actors, A) have perfect knowlege of the market, and, B) act always in their own enlightened best self-interest.  Without transperency and high wages, capitalism doesn’t work.  The “enlightened” part seems to be missing somewhere.  If you find it, please send it home.

See, I still won’t use be able to use the iTunes service, which sucks because I actually get more money per track or album sell from them then from any other digital distributor.  I won’t use it because, well, I don’t have an iPod and will never buy an iPod.  When Apple fixes that problem, we’ll talk.  The whole burning the CD then ripping thing isn’t an option because of quality, but if the tracks are at a good enough bit rate (as someone hinted above) it may have become an option.

See, I still won’t use be able to use the iTunes service, which sucks because I actually get more money per track or album sell from them then from any other digital distributor.  I won’t use it because, well, I don’t have an iPod and will never buy an iPod.

Without the DRM, you don’t need an iPod for iTunes.

Without the DRM, you don’t need an iPod for iTunes.

An iPod has never been needed for iTunes.  I ripped my entire collection of hundreds of CDs into iTunes, and have purchased albums from the iTunes store without owning an iPod.  You do, I believe, need iTunes to put music on an iPod.

But even in more sober-minded times, picking your health care provider rationally is not doable.  We don’t have stats on our doctors, and most of us go with one nearby that our HMOs let us see.  When we see specialists, it’s because of a referral.  There’s no free choice in any real sense.

This is a bit tangential, but recently one of NYT’s medical blogs talked about doctor-rating Web sites and the reporter, also an MD herself, expressed surprise and dismay that patients talk about doctors’ personalities and listening abilities but not their technical abilities or how well they diagnose a problem. What followed was several hundred comments asking her how the hell a lay person is supposed to know whether a doctor is a “good” doctor, other than by whether the doctor appears to listen to them. It’s made even more difficult by doctors and medical associations protecting - even if only through embarrassed silence - the docs they know don’t know their shit.

PIRATED MUSIC IS THE CANCER THAT IS KILLING /B/!

Oh, wait, wrong thread.

Oh, awesome!  I got an iTunes gift card for Christmas, so I’ll hold onto it a little longer until these changes go into effect.

That was actually the previous step. They’ve been doing that already, I think, at least for select songs.

nod Chet—the new iTunes Plus stuff is encoded at a higher bitrate.

Yes, Itunes plus encodes at a higher bitrate, but it is still encoded in a lossy format….just less loss than the standard format.  What I am hoping for is for them to encode at a lossless file format where the compression is done so that the files are of the same audio quality as the original CD….not less.

You have always needed an iPod to play the downloads from iTunes.  Yes, you can rip and do a hundred other fabulous things with the software, but you gotta have an iPod because no other music players will play the version of the MP4 format that Apple uses.

Consumer enlightenment only occurs because of government intervention to begin with. The ingredient list and nutritional information on the back of all food items isn’t there because the food industry thought it was an awesome idea, and it only shows what it is forced to show.

I’m sure Apple would love to have a monopoly on music distribution, and then they could set it up so there’s not only DRM on every song, but that your account deletes it after a week, and you have to buy it again.

This statement seems odd to me, as Apple is currently the number one music store on the planet - and is removing DRM from their products.

Right, they’re the biggest, but not a monopoly

You have always needed an iPod to play the downloads from iTunes.  Yes, you can rip and do a hundred other fabulous things with the software, but you gotta have an iPod because no other music players will play the version of the MP4 format that Apple uses.

Assuming no DRM was employed, you can convert Apple lossless or other non-DRMed file formats to other formats of your choosing in itunes.

Yes, Itunes plus encodes at a higher bitrate, but it is still encoded in a lossy format….just less loss than the standard format.  What I am hoping for is for them to encode at a lossless file format where the compression is done so that the files are of the same audio quality as the original CD….not less.

I’m not sure that you’ll be able to tell at the bit rates they’ll be encoding.

Right now, with perfect equipment in good conditions, you can tell differences between the various formats at 128kbs, but not necesarrily which is which. At 256kbs? In less than ideal conditions? I dunno…(certainly I can’t, with my hearing as it is now….)

I’m a bit of an audiophile myself, but I’m mostly comfy with 128kbs MP3s… of course, I prefer buying vinyl over CD format, because most records being sold now come with a download slip to get the whole album in MP3 format off of the production company’s website. So you get the quality and depth of analog with the vinyl, but the portability of the MP3.

While I applaud that Apple is finally going DRM free as Amazon has done, they’re actually charging extra for DRM free files.  You have to pay for the upgrade to DRM free.  I don’t see how that makes the situation any better, especially when you consider that per track you’d be paying more for an iTunes lossy song than a CD lossless one.  How does that make any economic sense?  No, thanks.

You have always needed an iPod to play the downloads from iTunes.  Yes, you can rip and do a hundred other fabulous things with the software, but you gotta have an iPod because no other music players will play the version of the MP4 format that Apple uses.

Well, there are a few that I know of. And as a few mentioned, you can convert to different formats with various software if you need to (including iTunes).

they’re actually charging extra for DRM free files.  You have to pay for the upgrade to DRM free.

Is that part of the upcoming deal, or are you referring to the current situation. Because currently, you have to pay to upgrade songs you’ve already purchased…but new songs that you buy that are already without drm are regular price (I believe).

T.J.: Well, aac isn’t really proprietary either…unless you were referring to the drm situation rather than the file format.

If I can execute “ffmpeg -i song.aac -f wav - | oggenc - -o song.ogg” without breaking the law, it doesn’t really matter how free the AAC format is; the music doesn’t have to stay in that format. And yes, I know there are generation losses, and doing the conversion only really makes sense if I’m going from ALAC (or APE, or whatever) to FLAC, but in principle, it’s not the same problem.

In a broader sense, it sure is nice to see the end of iTunes Minus.

Recognizing the incompatibility of capitalism and genuinely free markets

The two concepts are not incompatible.  You can be a capitalist in a free market; and the freer the market, the more incentive there is to establish monopolies and crowd out all competitors.  The problem is that a good society cannot allow a truly free market under a capitalist system; there must be controls in place to ensure that competition exists (except in cases of a natural monopoly, in which case there must be heavy regulation of the natural monopoly to prevent abuses).  What has happened over the past 8 years is that regulations of the free market were allowed to lapse or not be enforced.  As a consequence, capitalists were allowed to run hog wild and pretty much run the economy over a cliff while feathering their own nests.

How do we know what parts to put under government control?  Unfortunately, it’s not an ideological decision so much as a pragmatic decision.

It absolutely is an ideological decision.  The problem is that what one ideology sees as pragmatic another sees as ludicrous.  Societies must decide amongst themselves what the function of government is supposed to be; and that decision leads directly to what policies they will view as pragmatic.  Just as a simplistic example, Republicans see federal funding of public education as being an immense waste; much more pragmatic to them would be to give families vouchers enabling them to pick which school to send their children to, because that way the “market” rewards “good” schools and punishes “bad” ones, which would eventually either fix their problems or go out of “business.”  Democrats see federal funding of public education as being very pragmatic, because the solution to the problem of a bad school is not to deny it funding but to directly address its deficiencies (which might actually take MORE money not less), and because there are externalities (such as lack of reliable and safe transportation to a a"good” school) that are not accounted for in Republican reasoning that would have numerous negative effects.  These are ideological differences.

I have never used iTunes and don’t see myself using it in the future.  But it’s good to see them at long last give up on DRM (if that’s in fact what has happened).  You will attract more flies with the honey of improved and interesting products than with the vinegar of micromanaging controls and punishments.  That has always been true.

In my experience, Apple hasn’t actively pushed DRM.  When our indie album was initially added to the iTunes store, iTunes only sold DRM tracks, and our album was sold with DRM.  There wasn’t a choice.

But as soon as Apple began selling iTunes Plus (songs without DRM), they started selling our album without DRM.  They didn’t make us jump through hoops to do it, try to dissuade us, or heck, even confirm that we wanted them to—they just did it.  And this was well over a year ago.

Steve Jobs has a somewhat notorious open letter on the topic which you can locate through teh Google.  And while it may be self-serving posturing, it’s actually backed up by Apple’s actions, at least in our case (and likely everybody else who sells on iTMS through CD Baby).

Regarding the rest of the post, I think it misses a bigger issue—namely that a lot of people have bought the free-market dogma that economic self-interest in a free market will inexorably lead individuals or companies to provide the best solutions to consumers in every case.  This is despite the fact that relatively simple game theory shows this not to be true.

The issue isn’t that there’s “no free market to keep [whatever industry’s] worst impulses in check”—it’s that there are some cases where the free market actually kills off the options that are desirable to consumers. 

If it’s not in anyone’s economic interest to provide a given solution, then it doesn’t matter if consumers have the time and resources to make a rational decision.  Customers won’t be able to get the product or service they need unless a non-profit-motive entity decides to provide it, e.g. Government, or other non-market-based individual or organization.

If you wonder why the military is government-owned, look at the disaster that is Blackwater and you have your answer.

Also, Renaissance Italy.

I think private insurance companies will remain, but in a drastically reduced role. They would be a supplement or add-on to public health insurance (for gold-plated stuff), instead of a direct competitor to it.

I’m sure Apple would love to have a monopoly on music distribution, and then they could set it up so there’s not only DRM on every song, but that your account deletes it after a week, and you have to buy it again.  But they made this decision solely because they were facing competition, legitimate (Amazon) or not (file-sharing), and they didn’t have much of a choice. Because they were working in a free market and not in the ideal capitalist situation (where they have a monopoly), they had to cater to consumer demand.

To echo and expand on MFA, above, Apple has never wanted DRM. Apple makes money by selling hardware, not content owned by others. Itunes is a service designed to sell Ipods, but it has never been close to the driving factor in Ipod sales. If there is a monopoly that Apple desires, it is the monopoly of digital music players. The average Ipod owner has approx. 15 songs purchased from Apple on their Ipod - clearly DRM has never driven the uptake of Ipods and has therefore been of no value to Apple beyond enabling them to license the content from the content owners.

Farmboy: AAC requires a licensing fee paid to the owners of intellectual property which is the basis of the AAC standard. The specification is publicly available but commercialization of the standard requires a licensing fee to allow for legal commercial distribution. If you own a device which plays AAC you have paid a licensing fee (unless perhaps your device is some unknown brand out of China, in which case they may have neglected to pay the licensing fee). I’m not certain of the details, but there is a good possibility that Apple is one of the owners of intellectual property for AAC. It is certain that Apple is one of the owners of the MP4 file format intellectual property, which is the format used by the Itunes store (m4a).

I’m sure Apple would love to have a monopoly on music distribution, and then they could set it up so there’s not only DRM on every song, but that your account deletes it after a week, and you have to buy it again.

You may very well be “sure” of such a thing. And that’s why you don’t run a multi-billion dollar business.

I’m a bit of an audiophile myself, but I’m mostly comfy with 128kbs MP3s… of course, I prefer buying vinyl over CD format, because most records being sold now come with a download slip to get the whole album in MP3 format off of the production company’s website. So you get the quality and depth of analog with the vinyl, but the portability of the MP3.

It isn’t so much about being an audiophile as wondering why I should pay as much/more for lossy albums when I can get the same album on CD for as much/less with the CD and the album booklet/art.

In truth, the free market ideal is one where anyone is free to enter into the market and compete, and the natural tendency of corporations to stake out a monopoly is actively resisted by the government for the good of the consumer.

This.

The irony of the free market ideal, and one that is never acknowledged by those who espouse it, is that it takes massive amounts of government “interference” to maintain a truly free competitive market. Balancing the rights of the consumer against the natural tendency of businesses to monopolize and fuck the consumer is like balancing a nuclear submarine on the upturned blade of a common kitchen knife. That doesn’t just happen all by itself, as the ideological right-libertarians and Randroids claim.

The comments are really interesting here because about 2/3 of them are talking about technical issues relating to music distribution and the rest are talking about the health “insurance” system. Two fundamentally unrelated issues and yet there’s a common thread…

The comments are really interesting here because about 2/3 of them are talking about technical issues relating to music distribution and the rest are talking about the health “insurance” system.

That tells me that 2/3 of commenters are more interested in the music distribution implications of the iTunes policy shift, and 1/3 are more interested in the politics of market regulation.

The post was about 2/3 on markets and 1/3 on iTunes…

Next step for itunes…..selling songs encoded in a lossless format like Apple Lossless, flac, or ape rather than lossy formats like mp3 or aac.

As deliciously beautiful as FLAC is, I don’t think it will ever catch on as an end user trend.  Most software players (Winamp and WMP10 for example) require buggy plug ins to recognize FLAC, meaning that the plug and play people aren’t going to bother with it.  Also, to be fair, there’s only so much sound quality you can wring out of some of the older recordings.  FLAC is lovely for something recorded up to 10 years ago, but beyond that you’re working with a lossy recording process.

Assuming no DRM was employed, you can convert Apple lossless or other non-DRMed file formats to other formats of your choosing in itunes.

Or try FAAD. You’ll want “FAAD2v2.6.1 for Win32” or “FAAD 2 for MacOS X”

http://www.rarewares.org/aac-decoders.php

Also, to be fair, there’s only so much sound quality you can wring out of some of the older recordings.  FLAC is lovely for something recorded up to 10 years ago, but beyond that you’re working with a lossy recording process.

I assume you mean because the masters aren’t digital. But FLAC still makes sense, because then it’s just analog>digital rather than analog>digital>compressed.

I’m sure Apple would love to have a monopoly on music distribution, and then they could set it up so there’s not only DRM on every song, but that your account deletes it after a week, and you have to buy it again.

You may very well be “sure” of such a thing. And that’s why you don’t run a multi-billion dollar business.

What, CTD, are you an industry spokesperson here to tell us how much you love your customers? Because everybody knows that if you can get a monopoly, you make the best of it by squeezing your customers as hard as you can. (And per the RIAA, you sue the customers if they try to get around you.)

Most software players (Winamp and WMP10 for example) require buggy plug ins to recognize FLAC, meaning that the plug and play people aren’t going to bother with it.

That may be so. I don’t know about those plugins or any bugs.

VLC Media Player handles FLAC natively without any plugins. It runs pretty much everything you’ll ever download, actually.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

The irony of the free market ideal, and one that is never acknowledged by those who espouse it, is that it takes massive amounts of government “interference” to maintain a truly free competitive market…. That doesn’t just happen all by itself, as the ideological right-libertarians and Randroids claim.

That’s because, and it’s not limited to libertarians or people on the right either, that very often people staking out an ideological position haven’t bothered to look at the practicalities of trying to make their gloriously wonderful system work.  Anti-government libertarians provide a great example. 

“You don’t need government, things should be handled by contract!”

“Who enforces the contracts if one party decides to renege?”

“Than you take them to court!”

“Who runs the courts and enforces its decisions?”

“The gover…ummm.  Yeah”

Not that such folks provide the only examples by any means.

“Who runs the courts and enforces its decisions?”

“The gover…ummm.  Yeah”

One of their answers is that there will be independent for-profit arbitration courts that disputants can choose from.

Of course, there will be no way for a less powerful disputant to actually compel the more powerful to enter into any arbitration at all for any reason. Nor is there any reason to think that these for-profit courts will be disinterested or incorrupt. That’s not the point.

That the powerful will rule the weak is a feature, not a bug.

It isn’t so much about being an audiophile as wondering why I should pay as much/more for lossy albums when I can get the same album on CD for as much/less with the CD and the album booklet/art.

See, I see it the exact opposite: I gladly pay a little more per track to get just those tracks without a ton of songs that suck, plus the absurd physical husk called the “jewel case with CD art.” I wind up paying a lot less for music.

And iTunes tracks come with the art. Which looks great on my iPod Touch. Which I can make free phone calls on, now.

I wish you wouldn’t call it a free market. It might be a working market (people stop trading when the monopolists get too powerful), but it’s not really free. The whole notion of “free market” is a right-wing frame, because as soon as you ask “free from what” things pretty much fall apart. There’s freedom from disclosure rules or environmental regulations, freedom from fraud and coercive practices, freedom from intellectual-property restrictions, freedom from accounting standards, and so forth. When you say “free markets” everyone puts their own slant on what they want the market to be free from.

Working markets do a good job allocating good from producers willing to sell them to customers willing to but them, at a price that reasonably reflects the costs and benefits to each, and you don’t have to specify whether the whole thing is based on handshakes (plenty of local markets) or on huge government commissions setting every aspect of price and service (regulated monopolies).

Sorry about that.

See, I see it the exact opposite: I gladly pay a little more per track to get just those tracks without a ton of songs that suck, plus the absurd physical husk called the “jewel case with CD art.” I wind up paying a lot less for music.

And iTunes tracks come with the art. Which looks great on my iPod Touch. Which I can make free phone calls on, now.

To each their own. 

Personally, I’d be glad to pay for itunes plus songs if they were priced far less than what I’d pay for the CD album equivalent.  IMHO, $9.90 is far too high for most mainstream albums when I can purchase a new CD for around the same price/slightly more…..or buy a used CD in near new condition for far less.  Hopefully with more competition, Apple and other sites will be willing to substantially drop the price of said downloads….especially when production costs are already low to begin with….and seemingly decrease with each download sale as the supply is quite economically elastic. 

As for the songs on my ipod/digital music collection, all of them were ripped from my own CDs, local library CDs, and/or downloaded randomly off the net over several years.

IMHO, $9.90 is far too high for most mainstream albums when I can purchase a new CD for around the same price/slightly more…..or buy a used CD in near new condition for far less.

You know, I haven’t bought a CD in years but I remember them being much more expensive than that. I was paying at least $12-16 for CD’s, at least for popular new-release stuff. Yeah, I’m looking now - for instance Mariah Carey’s current album lists for $13.99, and it’s $11.99 at Target.com (for the physical CD), but iTunes has the whole album for $9.99.

Sure, you could get it used, but maybe it’s used and all scratched up, or used and the case is a mess, or used and the booklet is all torn up. Not a bad way to go, though, if you want the whole album.

But geez, you’re gonna have to rip it anyway. I mean it’s 2009. Who carries around a CD player?

Sorry, exholt. I’m not trying to talk you into anything. I don’t work for Apple or even care either way. Although my iPod is wicked cool, iTunes in Windows has some issues (like 100% CPU utilization of both cores just for downloads and syncing - absurd!) And like the XKCD guy says - if you pirate it, you own it forever.

context:

http://xkcd.com/488/

I was paying at least $12-16 for CD’s, at least for popular new-release stuff.

Yeah, I saw CDs for around that price at the beginning of my college career.  Being a student on a tight budget, I found that if one waited 2-5 months….a brand new release CD will almost always be available for much less on the used CD section. 

Sure, you could get it used, but maybe it’s used and all scratched up, or used and the case is a mess, or used and the booklet is all torn up. Not a bad way to go, though, if you want the whole album.

Only had the scratched CD issue once and the used CD place I bought it from had a 14 day return policy on their products.  Been very lucky that every other used CD I bought tended to be in almost new condition. 

Sorry, exholt. I’m not trying to talk you into anything. I don’t work for Apple or even care either way. Although my iPod is wicked cool, iTunes in Windows has some issues (like 100% CPU utilization of both cores just for downloads and syncing - absurd!) And like the XKCD guy says - if you pirate it, you own it forever.

Interesting.  I had no issues with ripping/syncing songs in itunes on a Pentium 3 box running XP Pro SP2 for a while.  Then again, most of my itunes usage these days tends to take place on one of my Pentium 4 based Hackintoshes running a variant of OSX86 version 10.5.6. 

As for piracy….most of the songs downloaded off the net are East Asian pop/folk songs that were not easy to find in the US during the mid-late 1990s….even in Boston or NYC.

“namely the difference between the free market and capitalism (which are erroneously conflated in our culture).”

Yes, this is hugely important. Capitalism is a description of a method of ownership of productive assets. Markets are a description of a means of exchange. The two are not the same at all. You can have decidedly non-capitalist organisations (workers co-operatives for example, like John Lewis in the UK or the Mondragon companies in Spain) which compete quite happily in markets. Or partnerships….like every law firm in the country. In fact, we have markets in methods of ownership and capitalism is only one of the models on offer. You’d be surprised at howmuch of teh economy isn’t in fact capitalist….even outside the pure government owned sector.

I had no issues with ripping/syncing songs in itunes on a Pentium 3 box running XP Pro SP2 for a while.

Oh, I don’t think it needs both cores 100%, I think it just takes them, because of poorly-written threading or something. iTunes on the Mac works just fine, in my experience.

The myth of the free market is based on the idea of well-informed consumers making rational decisions in their own best interest.  The advertising industry, which is by far the most dominating force in our capitalist society, exists entirely to work against this, keeping consumers as ill-informed as possible, forcing them to make decisions against their interests.

The myth of the free market is based on the idea of well-informed consumers making rational decisions in their own best interest.  The advertising industry, which is by far the most dominating force in our capitalist society, exists entirely to work against this, keeping consumers as ill-informed as possible, forcing them to make decisions against their interests.

Classic example: diamond engagement rings.  Considered the most successful advertising campaign in history because, within a generation, they made something that a few people did into an absolute social requirement.

Not that I’m against diamonds by any means: my employers benefit when people explore for such on the land they own.  I’m just highly bemused that my wife is rather insistent she’s still waiting for her big honking diamond ring (we had a rather untraditional engagement) when I’ve bought her jewelery that truly is unique and far rarer, and if she wants the sparkly I can get a a pound of cubic zirconia she can wear on her ringer that 99.9% of people would not be able to distinguish from cubic carbon.

The myth of the free market is based on the idea of well-informed consumers making rational decisions in their own best interest.

If that was the case, I doubt Microsoft could have become as successful as they have….especially considering the bugginess of their versions of windows….especially the first versions of Windows 95, Windows ME, and Vista.  Microsoft largely succeeded through a series of aggressive well-targeted marketing campaigns to corporations and the use of their monopolistic position when they gained it to squeeze/quash other competitors. 

Oh, I don’t think it needs both cores 100%, I think it just takes them, because of poorly-written threading or something. iTunes on the Mac works just fine, in my experience.

Not too surprised there. 

Not sure if it is necessarily indicative of poor Apple programmers so much as dealing with Microsoft Windows as I have found that the Mac version of Microsoft Office to be much more stable and reliable than its windows counterpart. 

Then again, my clients and friends have encountered more bugginess and stability issues with Mac OSX Leopard than with Tiger.  I’ve been lucky though as many of my OSX86 installations ended up being far more stable than their Mac OSX installations installed on genuine Macs. 

Out of curiosity, what OS are you running?

Regarding the multiple cores issue, I’m hardly an expert, but isn’t the encoding process inherently serial?  How does having multiple threads help anything?

Packman: Apple has never wanted DRM.

Sometimes, I really wish people would read my links. Other people have addressed this sort of thing.

Godless Heathen: As deliciously beautiful as FLAC is, I don’t think it will ever catch on as an end user trend.  Most software players (Winamp and WMP10 for example) require buggy plug ins to recognize FLAC, meaning that the plug and play people aren’t going to bother with it.

Lather, rinse, repeat for Vorbis audio, for Matroska containers, for Theora video, ad infinitum. It’s strongly doubtful that proprietary distributors will start including support for these things, though they could, as they’d just compete with their own proprietary formats. Sad, really, but there’s a bit of hope—the directshow filters for Vorbis, Speex, Theora and FLAC are now maintained directly by the Xiph.org foundation, which does a pretty good job of supporting things. They take bug reports, and in my experience, handle them reasonably well.

Of course, there’s still the “you need to download this codec” hump to get over, but I doubt that it’s fixable, no matter how much work the Xiph.org folks do. But people seem to figure out how to play DivX movies all right, even though that’s not directly supported. (Using VLC, described above, is another solution, but it’s not really designed to be a music player.)

The funny thing is, if you’re using Linux, all of these free formats are easier to deal with than the proprietary ones, due to all kinds of byzantine licensing concerns which hamstring the distribution of proprietary codecs.

Jose: Regarding the multiple cores issue, I’m hardly an expert, but isn’t the encoding process inherently serial?  How does having multiple threads help anything?

There are plenty of multithreaded encoder implementations out there, even for more complicated codecs. They may be difficult to parallelize, but apparently it can be done.

KeithM: “Who runs the courts and enforces its decisions?”

Why, Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo, of course! They’re a known military corporation of the High Beyond—if it’s a masquerade, then someone’s definitely living dangerously.

grendelkhan: Sometimes, I really wish people would read my links. Other people have addressed this sort of thing.

I’m not sure why I’m supposed to read your links when I never bothered to read your post in the first place, but your complaint is particularly odd considering your links turn out to have nothing to do with what I wrote.

I was pretty much rubbing my face reading this post.  So, allow me to do a definition from Dictionary.com:
An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.

Seriously, though, it is *not*:
Capitalism is a system where you try to give the least amount of service for the most amount of money in order to maximize profit.

*All* systems of commerce based on some sort of hedonism or utilitarianism does that.  Capitalism is distinct from other economic systems in the fact that it encourages accumulation—and puts a premium on the size of your assets that you control.  What is private is your profits.  The reason why it is a good thing is that it allows individuals and collectives to mobilize huge resources over space and time towards a goal, without non-economic actors like feudal lords simply seizing your profits, just because they are lords and have the right.  In a capitalist society, the government is bound only to take a portion of profits and reserves in a social contract setting, where government provides services.  This is all about sensibility.

I’m sorry to be pedantic, but I think it’s crucial that it’s crucial to understand what capitalism actually is.  It makes things much clearer when someone sez, privatising the profits, socialising the risks.  Or to recognize when someone is trying to sell you a bill of good marketed under a particular ideological framework.

Hmm, was thinking I should give an example why I think Amanda’s definition is dangerously murkey.

The practice of demanding protection money from a neighbor’s shops fits that definition, but it’s not anything recognizably capitalist.  You go around with a moneybag and demand money in return for “protection”.  It need not even be illusitory, if there are tons of gangs running around demanding money.  Just seeing to it that you’re the only person that the shopowner has to pay, is a service, and one that can be of pretty little effort. 

Capitalism makes possible trains and skyscrapers, or even the local grainbin.  The money that goes into the local thug’s bag just goes to girls, gambling, and weaponry and feudal payments.

Packman: I’m not sure why I’m supposed to read your links when I never bothered to read your post in the first place, but your complaint is particularly odd considering your links turn out to have nothing to do with what I wrote.

It’s more of a generalized complaint, and shouldn’t have been pointed directly at you. Standing athwart the tide of Apple fanboyism is as futile a task as one can imagine, and it sometimes makes me cranky.

Despite the repeated claims about Apple really not wanting to staple DRM to their systems, but having their hand forced by the evil, evil RIAA, it turns out that Apple is happy enough to let the crapness of DRM suffuse the rest of their systems, and to reuse the same DRM system that they, I quote, “never wanted”, to lock down their other products.

As Mark Pilgrim said in the link, “somewhere between then and now, Apple decided they liked it”. They don’t have some kind of special moral status—they’‘re just a company, and now that their interests are aligned with the media industry’s rather than yours, it’s no exaggeration to say that you are no longer their customer, you are their product.

Yes, their shiny toys are still pretty and fun to use, and all of this will make little or no difference to the average Mac user. It doesn’t make it any less true.