Apparently you have this wrong. The $15.99 Battlestar Galactica album is the 2003 miniseries, not the current season. The current season is still $1.99 per episode.

We take the Letter from the CEO and dedicated it to this Faux Paux by SONY in the December 2005 issue of macCompanion with lots of links and the MediaMax revelation and what to do about it if the Mac has been compromised. It isn't so much the XCP, but the MediaMax thing that bugs me - and many others. And what else hans't been revealed yet?

Only 400%! Apple is doomed :) Try comparing the stock price of Apple and Dell over the past 6 months..... Hopefully, the Intel transition will sustain growth as iPod sales begin to saturate.

I'd love to see a day when ALL potential TV pilots are posted for free download on iTunes and then voted on by viewers. The networks won't decide what shows we watch anymore, we will. And I especially like Marc's idea of viewers producing thier own PayTV channels.

Sadly, if nothing blows up I don't play it, so can't be of much help here :P

i got an ipod nano but it stratches really easily so i would recommend buying a case with it :) But apart from that they are really good.

Or Apple will just license out their dock connector to other mp3 players. It doesn't really harm them. Opens up the peripheral market to other players. And everyone is making iPod compatible attachments. And Microsofts "Standard" goes away or What I'd like to see is they always say Apple has sold 30 million ipods. How many total other mp3 players have been sold? How many are used? I'm sure there's a ton of old 128 and 512 k mp3 players that have gone by the wayside.

All well and good, but we're talking about Microsoft here and their intent is surely to wrest away control of the mp3 player market from Apple. Right now, its as if Apple was to introduce the ADB interface as a competitor to USB.... Apple does not need to oppose this. They will simply ignore it.

Who says that they're only going to put it in iPods? A nice big FlashRam disk inside an iMac (for remembering pre-translated Rosetta binaries) may well push performance through the roof...

"What they really want is a system they can manipulate to send signals about what songs are worth, and thus what songs you should buy." Well, that may be the signal the studios want to send, but it's not one that I, as a consumer, will acknowledge. The only signal the mixed pricing sends me is that the higher priced songs are either newer or more popular, and lower priced ones are older or less popular. In either case, I'll make up my own mind whether the price is justified, based on my perception of the music itself. I think consumers have moved beyond the point of being manipulated by commodity pricing. They'll decide if the product is worth the price, rather than being convinced by the price that the product is worthy. As far as ITMS is concerned, I'm fine with charging more for the latest or most popular stuff, provided the price of everything else is reduced in like fashion.

They are still nothing when compared to taking apart of a PowerBook 2400c.

Just today sat with a friend, a former Apple reseller and tech as he replaced my iBook hard drive. Scary how many screws the thing has, and how tightly packed. Even with the best of manuals I don't think I'm going to attempt iBook surgery.

Virtual PC work fine on the PowerPC, it will work great on the Intel Macs and since MSFT now makes VPC you will see a simple integration/interface [remember Mac Switcher?]-- win/win for MSFT/Apple -- lose/lose/lose/etc. for the clones. BTW, VPC w/OS retails for much more than the similar OS for clones... MSFT will make >> profit with every MacIntel sold!

I agree with Peter. Selling pilots would be a great marketing strategy for the studios, and a MUCH better gauge for the networks of potential popularity than focus groups. Too many shows have got a huge following shortly before they were cancelled. This sort of thing would give a much better gauge than most of the ratings and assessments used to date. BW

I always thought Pandora was a part of Apple... Because of that iTunes link. It was part of an explanation on their music licensing scheme. Do you have any idea on how they license their music? Because if the link sometimes miss... That would mean that they basically have a bigger catalog than Apple (wich is basically everything minus Sony I think...) - Do you have any info on the company per se?

Marcel writes: "Did you forget that Apple publishes an application for Windows and for Macs?" Ah, but the patent mentions Linux as well. While it's possible they would want to cover all their potential bases in the patent, I highly doubt Apple has any intention or desire to produce a Linux port of iTunes, and I'm not sure why it would be necessary to mention Windows and Linux if the patent is about iTunes. On the other hand, it's entirely likely that people will be installing Windows and Linux on their x86 Macs. Which is why I think it's basically about protecting the protection of OS X when another OS is running on the machine.

Regardless of what Apple does w/ it's new hardware and tamper-resistant-code, if given the chance to run Windows on my Mac I would have to ask WHY? The only reason I even have a copy of Windows on my desktop is because it is still slow to run Flash in Wine. Other than that you will never see me running Windows. As for my Mac Laptop, I wouldn't mine putting Linux on it but why when its a BSD core and I can just use X11 and fink to get most any Linux program I would need. If anything should come of this it would hopefully be a decrease in the Windows dominace in the desktop market. I for one and tired of fixing infected Windows machines on our network. So I say let Mac move into the windows world and give me some more free time.

The rapid uptake of DVDs, consumer enthusiasm for owning programmes on DVD -- particularly TV series -- the growth in PayTV, digital recording, PVRs, and podcasting and the Internet in general, have all been pointing in the same directing for some time now; users are exerting more control over the entertainment media they consume, and shifting to more direct relationships with content and service producers. All of these changes chip away at the traditionally imposed schedules; major films see simultaneous international cinema releases due to the Internet, as opposed to the up-to six month wait previously endured; DVD series sales are now advertised during the free-to-air airing of programmes; and in the context of consumers long calling for PayTV operators to unbundle their channel-based content offerings, it's easy to see that a la carte, and programme-specific subscription models will be of interest to consumers. Of course there are still a lot of pieces to fall into place, and the aggregators (e.g. the TV/PayTV channels) still have some time, and some plays of their own, e.g. consumers constructing their own personalised PayTV channel, from a pool of available shows, as one simple option. There are numerous examples of listener/viewer-supported content struggling in the *broad*cast market, and at this point it seems pretty inevitable that more creative output will be delivered in a podcast-like model, itself just an evolution of the subscription concept, according to current technical limitations.

Consider that studios submit pilot episodes to networks. Network execs go through these to try to decide what would be a good show. For the ones they like, they'll make an offer to the studio which produces it. I think the format is a little bit different, now that studios own networks or vice-versa (ABC/Disney, NBC/Universal, CBS/Paramount) but the concept is the same. Since the studio, not the network, owns the show, build buzz for the show before the decision is made by offering it online for $1.99. The studio could then take some sales figures into a pitch meeting with the network. Heck, they might recoup some of the losses made on producing the pilot episode.

I don't agree that this is a smart analysis of the patent. If you really read the patent, you'll notice that it doesn't speak about a "user selecting an operating system". This is Sandy's pure fiction. The patent only says that the *user of the patented method* (which means a developer or an application) could select between different operating systems. This means the described strategy to protect program code can be used in a platform-independent manner. Yes, this could be a method to protect the boot code of Mac OS X. But this could also be something very different. Did you forget that Apple publishes an application for Windows and for Macs? It is called "iTunes" and it uses a sophisticated DRM mechanism which limits the usage of purchased music in a heterogeneous network of Macs and Windows PCs. And did you notice that the patent was filed on April 30, 2004? This was the time when Apple changed some technical specifications of iTMS network sharing in iTunes 4.5...

Bandmassa: The answer is *games*. That's the only reason why I would want to run Windows apps on my Mac. Wine doesn't have full blown Direct X support out of the box. We need a Transgaming/Cedega solution, or a virtual machine running XP/Vista.

If Apple and Microsoft are smart, which I guess they are, they would strenghten the relationship they already have. Microsoft would let Apple sell computers with Windows preinstalled and Apple would let Microsoft tune Windows for the Mac hardware so that it would run without flaws. A customer would then choose if OS when it buys the computer. With help of Intels new virtualiztion processors you could then run both OS's at the same time.

Then again, who needs Windows on a Mactel? An Apple version of Wine (www.winehq.com www.darwine.com) integrated into the Finder offers a much more elegant solution.

These are interesting perspectives on this Apple patent. I've posted more thoughts about this here: http://namedb.net/2005/11/06/mactel-strategy-includes-windows-and-linux/ Essentially, I still think this is just simply a way for Apple to cover their butt's, and not the underlying strategy (in the direct sense noted in this blog posting as well as in some of the comments) to overthrow Microsofts slow and heavy handed approach to their new OS. I could see a broader strategy on Apple's part by cleanly providing a method for Windows to be installed on an Apple boxen, but that seems to be a bigger and better plan then just to attack the slow to market Vista.

This is about money, my friends. If the only thing stopping you from switching, is using Windows only programs, not the price... then being able to run windows programs within the osx os, at a good speed even... then the adoption rate of OSX increases, riding the iPod wave... pushing marketshare further. Add to this, very few PC manuf. can touch Apple's style and ergonomics. Dell's XPS line looks like shite compared to g5's, iAnythings and Powerbooks. OEM manufacturers should be looking at Samsung and Panasonic for their laptop design cues... and hardly anyone but Apple makes a nice looking desktop (you can build your own with a LianLi case btw). Msoft is stumbling, they fumbled an entire generation of their OS by wasting years on Longhorn. Now they are trying to do what Apple did with the initial version of OSX, like 4-5 years late in the game (IIRC), with hardware requirements that let you know just how inefficient their BEST ideas are. Sorry, Bill, time to cash out and move on. $