jemmons

Economic factors are the only indicators most copyright holders care about when it comes to DRM. The moment they can sell more copies without DRM than with, they'll drop DRM. And not a moment before.

Also note this nonsense is very acceptable to the majority of consumers, myself included. If you want to vote with your wallet and not buy the Kindle/iPhone/Zune until it drops DRM, more power to you. But you'll have to wait until those of us who are happy with the current arrangement have bought our fill and Amazon/Apple/Microsoft have to start looking for niche markets. Your complaining in the mean time is not likely to make an impact.

Fixed that for you.

Love to see evidence to the contrary, though. It's sure to be juicy stuff.

Yes. Exactly. I'd say "not as good", but whatever you like.

But remember, Apple out-competed their iPod opponents by making not just a hardware MP3 player, but also a best-of-class jukebox and wholly innovative online music marketplace and integrating them all together. This integration has been shown time and time again to be the force that gives iPod an edge over competitors. In short, iPod "just works".

Enter the Palm Pre which is just a device. No jukebox. No music store. At this point, if Palm wants to compete, it could invest in building its own media jukebox and online store. Instead, it decides to use 2/3s of the technology of the product it's supposedly competing against by masquerading as the competitor itself.

It's as if you take a Boxter, replace the steering wheel, and then call yourself a competitor to Porsche. At best you are partners with Porsche, and at worst you're ripping them off. In either case, it hardly looks like the level competitive playing field you call for.

Like seemingly everything related to Apple, if you don't perceive -- or just aren't interested in paying for -- the difference in quality, don't buy it. But also please at least consider not insulting the intelligence of those who do and are by claiming the cost isn't justifiable.

I think it's far from obvious when you've been unable to point to one concrete (even biased and opinionated!) example of why you think a Macintosh computer is inferior to the technology you choose to use.

I'm not trying to convince you of anything. The burden of proof lies with you.

Read the facts. Windows has what, like 86% of the desktop market?

I think you might be confusing facts with statistics? In any market you choose to look at, you can find a high-quality alternative to the commodity product offering that has a minority of the market share. BMW is the oft-quoted example in the automobile industry. It would be a mistake to claim "A BMW clearly doesn't outperform a Ford Taurus because there are so many more Fords on the road." Their relative market share clearly has no bearing on their respective performance.

If for Internet Explorer to ape Mozilla/4.0 compatibility, it had to momentarily change its name, icon, and all user-facing interfaces to match Firefox so that one could not distinguish between an actual instance of Firefox and the "IE-in-fox's-clothing", you can bet that the Mozilla foundation would be peeved. Aside from legal considerations, what if IE-with-firefox-dress crashed all the time and people wrongfully blamed Firefox for this sorry state of affairs?

I'm going to go ahead and call shenanigans on your post. I don't think it holds up to scrutiny.

Now if you want to make an argument about how Microsoft hid APIs in it's operating system so that its office suite or browser performed better than anyone else's, or how it bundled its browser to try to use it's OS monopoly to strangle competition in another market, you'd have a point. But it should be clear how those are vastly different circumstances that cannot meaningfully be applied to the case of media jukebox made by company "A" and random hardware media player made by company "B".

That you happened to be right is no vindication when the odds were 50/50 and you put forth no model for predicting the outcome.

For you to do so is not just rude, it insults our intelligence (do you honestly think anyone here doesn't know what free software is? If we're not using it, it's because we've been there and found it lacking. Deal.)

Today saw the announcement of ... something I’ve wanted for quite some time; an ... OS with the web and Google’s services as its backbone.

Why do you want this? Is there something wrong with your current method of accessing Google's apps? What is it? What do you expect this new OS to improve?

The move by Google is sure to leave Apple and Microsoft shaking in their boots

Why?

I’m certain this is the beginning of the end for Ubuntu.

Why?

Since the increasing development and improvement of Google Apps, the increased speed of Chrome, the release of Android and now, the Google OS. I’m left torn.

Why? What do these technologies have to do with one another? Do they interoperate? What do they offer you that you didn't have before?

My current commitment to Google Apps has left me ... entertaining ideas of what it would be like to truly incorporate all my primary web services into an operating system

What would that be like? What benefit would it offer? Why do you want this?

I’m left wondering what Apple can bring to the table between now and Google’s OS release

What should they bring? What does the new Google OS offer that you think Apple should incorporate in OS X? Why would that improve it?

The point is this. As long as Google and web applications continue to improve at the rate they are, [Apple is] going to have to start thinking far more Google-like.

For love of all that's good, why?! What does it mean to think more google-like? What is wrong with how Apple is thinking now? What improvements is google making? How are those superior the improvements Apple's making (if, indeed, they are not completely orthogonal).

this is the beginning of an era of Google dominance, the likes of which we’ve never seen before

Why?

The company is slowly but surely taking over every aspect of our lives ... for some its scary, for me... I’m excited.

Why?

And for now at least, the one company I want to see step up to Google’s surge in dominance is Apple

W-H-Y?

and I predict they will, but its not going to be easy.

Predictably: why?

I propose a new rule. If you're considering posting something to HN, think how a fifth grade teacher would mark it up. If there would be more red than black on the page by the end, maybe give it a miss?

I don't doubt what you say, but anecdotal claims are not very interesting -- nor do they convince me I should be awaiting Microsoft's next innovation with baited breath, if that's your intent.

Second, didn't we just have a post reminding us not to use numbers in the title of submissions?

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

Note that if one follows the guidelines and renames the post to simply "Login Forms", the banality of the title alone serves as warning that this should not be submitted.

As to memory management: given that Cocoa's retain/release/autorelease is not painful and my most agonizing debugging sessions with java all seem to revolve around theorizing WTF the garbage collector is doing and why... Well I think the productivity opinion is arguable as well.

Oh, and go Dean Cain!