Jason Reindorp of Microsoft and His Shitty Response to Steve Jobs Thoughts on DRM

So Jason Reindorp of Microsoft decided to say something dumb today:

Jason Reindorp, marketing director for Zune at Microsoft, said Mr. Jobs’s call for unrestricted music sales was “irresponsible, or at the very least naïve,” adding, “It’s like he’s on top of the mountain making pronouncements, while we’re here on the ground working with the industry to make it happen.”

“He’s certainly a master of the obvious,” Mr. Reindorp said, adding that “the stars were already aligning” to loosen the restrictions.

So just tell us: What in fuck's sake are you doing about it? In fact, it seems that at every turn, the Zune has given in to copy protection. The music labels want a piece of the hardware action? Well, let's give 'em a chunk'a change for every Zune sold. The music labels want to restrict the wifi sharing so that they can 'protect' their digital content? Well, hey, let's make it so that you can only have the song for up to 3 days or can only play it up to 3 times. Oh, and us ML boys want to stop some of those artists that are being sold from your pesky Zune store to NOT be sharable. Guess what Microsoft said to that one? Did they say implementing it would be anti-consumerist? No, of course not, because they're all "here on the ground working with the industry to make it happen".

Yeah, and shit can turn into gold if you look at it hard enough.

MacWorld 2007 Outcome: The New Apple

This was a bad year for my predictions. I was just as bad as last year. :p

Regardless of my predictions, this year's January Macworld was a stunner. It marked the end of Apple Computer Inc. and the beginning of Apple Inc. Beyond further iterations and cheaper versions of the iPhone, and actual Apple televisions with integrated Apple TVs, I can't actually think what else Apple might make. The next 5 years should be very interesting. :)

As usual, I shall give my thoughts on what was announced in bullet-point form.

Macs

• The Vista ad is a good addition to Apple's current lineup of Get A Mac ads. Plus, it's considerably funnier than the last batch they introduced a month or so ago.
  
• No iWork '07? No iLife '07? Fucking Christ, the sky's falling. (I'm sure these will get released later in the year)
• Absolutely nothing on Leopard. Man, I want to know what some of those "top-secret" features are.
• Oh man, the new AirPort Extreme is sweet.
  
• Something that alot of people haven't talked about in the wake of the iPhone: 50% of the Macs Apple are selling in the United States through all channels are new to Mac. Pretty damn sweet. I'm definitely looking forward to 4th quarter results.
• Aside from the above comments, Apple didn't say anything else about the Mac. For some reason, people are unnerved by this.

Apple TV

• The solution they came up with is not the best solution, but is alot better then just streaming the video. Essentially the device has a 40GB HD inside of it, and that's used to send content to it from one computer using iTunes. Then, with the Apple TV you can just traverse through the content. The Apple TV can also sync with the computer much like an iPod so that it constantly stays up to date according to your specifications. On top of that, it can also do streaming from up to 5 other computers.
  
• I wonder if OS X is running on this, like the iPhone is.
• What's the use in an HDMI-out when there's no HD content on iTunes. I'm thinking we'll see HD content on iTunes one month after Apple TV starts shipping (in February) at the very latest. Well, there's another prediction that'll die I bet. :p

I'll have more on the iPhone in a later post.

Wireless Power?

Physics promises wireless power

The answer the team came up with was "resonance", a phenomenon that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applied.

"When you have two resonant objects of the same frequency they tend to couple very strongly," Professor Soljacic told the BBC News website.

Very intriguing.