These stories are becoming a daily (or more often) thing here on Bashdot. After reading more than a few of these thinly-disguised anti-Apple pieces I'm starting to see some common themes. They're all using half-truths and outright lies to promote their point - but what point are they trying to prove?
Among the first to get involved were Adobe employees. They started by identifying themselves but they're still at it and working more covertly. Read the messages carefully and you'll see the Adobe party line being espoused. What they're after is to keep people dependent on Flash - it's partly profit motive but more of a control thing. Adobe wants to control the market for web video and other fluff. As long as they're on every machine they can attract developers to target their player. But their control is slipping and they're fighting back in any and every way they can. Here's a tip for the less well informed: Flash plays H.264 video; keep that in mind.
Next we have the so-called developers who can slap together an "application" in Action Script and put it on the web. We've all seen the results of their "efforts" and once again, it's pure self-interest - they can't compete with real programmers and when they're facing that possibility they're kicking and screaming. The iPhone and iPad are a significant deal and there's big money to be made in coding apps - those Flash "codere" are not going to get a piece of that pie and they're pissed off.
Then there's the "big software company" representatives enjoying the furor and tossing in their little barbs to stir things up a little more. If you think there aren't paid shills for this company posting here you're not paying very good attention. Their music player failed - yeah, they sold a few but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really count. And they have been in phone operating systems for several years and - well, they might as well have stayed home. They don't see these market failures as being their fault; they prefer to blame the competition and anything they can do to take the market leader down will improve their fortunes - or so they think. Remember "Plays for sure" and MSN music? What happened there? Consider this carefully before trotting out complaints about lock-in and DRM.
And then there's the usual cast of trolls who delight in mayhem - here's a hot topic, let's jump in and spread some half-truths and lies just for fun.
Let's not forget the open source zealots who hate anything that's proprietary. They make quite a noise but fail to recognize that they represent a very, very small slice of the population. They'd like to control Apple and make them conform to their idea of what the software world should be like. That's a valid opinion - but only an opinion. They can kill a few days trying to get their box to play some audio file and feel it's worth it because it's FREE - but the rest of us just want to listen to a tune and don't want to have to recompile the kernel before we can get the music to play.
Recently, we're hearing about antitrust concerns because Apple insists on certain compilers to compile apps for their mobile devices. Oh noes, that must be a proprietary lock-in, right? Has anyone ever looked at what that requirement actually says? It's not as restrictive as you might think. No, I'm not going to tell you - go look it up and be better informed.
That brings me to the one thing that all of these groups have in common - they've never owned or handled the devices they're talking about. They're having so much fun with their trollish day in the sun that little things like truth or knowing what you're talking about aren't important. I've got to say that my opinion of some people has been readjusted after seeing what's been written over the last month. If you have an opinion - that's valid and every bit as important as anyone else's opinion. But it's not a fact - and this is where so many intellectually dishonest people reveal their true nature: there are opinions, and there are facts. Try not to confuse t
Maybe not that exact problem - but maybe what he outlined was so narrowly described to fulfill a personal agenda? Take a look at his charts and see how Teredo is faring - and keep in mind that is the Microsoft solution for XP (The most commonly used operating system).
If it's an article about how OS design is blocking the adoption of IPV6 then I'd submit that a non-functional implementation is just as bad if not worse than an imperfect implementation. Sometimes I wonder who writes the articles; concerned people, or industry shills.
They won't have enough of that elusive "common sense" until they're 12 or so. There's a lot that we commonly talk about that a 5 year old is unaware of.
All of the speech recognition systems to date try to fake it - essentially all they do is match speech waveforms to their library and some do some very simple syntax checking. This is useful for situations where the vocabulary is small and the number of human speakers is also small. These systems don't work like we do and to achieve significantly better results a very difficult problem will have to be "solved" first.
Our method of communicating is both more and less than it appears. At a basic level, what we're communicating is not contained in the words we use - we use words as symbols and the listener "looks up" that symbol and applies meaning to the word. So when I say "horse" you access your knowledge of horse and that provides the meaning to the word. If you'd never seen or heard of a horse then this communication would fail.
It's shared knowledge - literally "common sense" that makes verbal communication possible. Our brains devote a lot of "processing" to this task - they have to not only recognize the word symbols, they have to cross-reference them to memory and do it in real time. We continue to make strides in increasing the amount of CPU power we can devote to problems like this one and we'll probably reach "human equivalent" processing power in our lifetimes. Even so, the machines won't be able to converse with us because they won't have the "common sense" needed to understand what the symbols mean. Without that, they can't make any kind of valid judgements about sentence structure or what meaning a particular word is using at the moment. You can buffalo Buffalo all you want but the machine has trouble with to, too, and two.
There's been some cute demonstrations made using huge rule sets that almost work - but they quickly fall apart when you try to converse with them. Even the very best of speech recognition systems suffers from not knowing anything about what's being talked about. When we can equip future machines with the knowledge of a 12 year old human they'll be able to talk with us - and we'll have solved a lot of other related problems at the same time. Until then, computer speech recognition is an AI trick - heavy on the A.
I don't care much for the way Apple acts too. But I do like some of their products. A few years back I bought an iPod Nano (1st Generation) to use as a portable music player. I was impressed by how small and thin it was but the ear buds it came with weren't very good. So I bought some Etymotic in-ear headphones. With those, it sounded great and I used it every day for a little over two years.
Then the battery wouldn't hold much of a charge. I checked to see what it'd cost to replace it and Apple wanted $100 to replace it. They wanted nearly as much as the Nano cost new; no deal. After thinking about what to do for a replacement for a while I decided to give them another chance and bought a first generation iPod Touch. That little gizmo is still working and holding a charge just fine. I like it a lot; the "point and drool" interface made it possible to leaf through a multi-thousand song library in moments. I didn't need all the added functions but over time I found some of them to be very useful. What it brought me was a way to have all of my favorite music in my pocket. I could play them in the car through the car stereo with an inexpensive cassette adapter, and on my (or someone else's) home stereo. No more dragging a bundle of CDs around.
I would have bought an iPhone instead of the Touch but I had too much experience with AT&T's so-called phone coverage and the price was too high - so my cell phone is a Blackberry. That's been an eye-opening experience - it's so full of software bugs that I have to pull the battery to reset it every few days. I'll try an Android phone next - as soon as the contract on the Blackberry is done.
When the iPad came out I saw it as a way to have all of my music library and a bunch of e-books in a portable package. Once again, I bought a first generation Apple product and I've been using the iPad for almost a month now. So far, so good - right now it's got over 5,000 songs on it as well as over 3000 e-books and there's still room for lots more. Is it perfect? Nope. But it does what it was designed to do and I'm very pleased with it's performance and stability.
That said, I still don't have any love for Apple. But knowing their products I don't totally agree with the claims of "locked down" and "control". All of those songs were MP3 files from here and there and the e-books were converted from PDF files using Calibre. None of those songs or books were purchased from Apple and they didn't stop me from loading whatever I wanted from whatever source onto the Touch or the iPad - that's a freedom that many other media players don't offer.
I'm not an Apple zealot; I just appreciate a well-designed piece of equipment. Those who want the iPad to be a general purpose computer and find fault with it because it isn't one are missing the point entirely. It's not that and it's not a giant-sized iPod Touch either. Slashdot may have "spoken" but after reading those threads and knowing the product it's clear to me that most of the people don't have any idea what they're talking about. Nothing new there. The thing that I wonder about, though - is how many people listen to the hate tales and never think to give one of these gizmos a try?
There's a couple of problems with that idea: the first is that YouTube isn't the only video hosting site and the other is that if Microsoft ships IE with H.264 only - and Apple, which has already made the same move - well, think about it for a minute: would GooTube switch to VP8 when virtually all browsers don't support it? Remember that GooTube already does H.264. Sure, there'll be VP8 (and other) plug-ins but the vast majority of people will just go with what came with their box.
It's much more likely that if GooTube switches to VP8 then they'll lose most of their traffic. Remember, we're IT geeks here - the vast majority of people browsing the web would just decide that GooTube was broken and get their videos somewhere else. And ask any professional web developer and see what they say. Given a choice of using the format that's supported by more than 90% of viewers or some other (arguably more worthy) format that is only natively supported by a few open source browsers - what format would you choose to use? What's much more likely is that the other browsers will have to support H.264 to stay relevant.
There was a time when you needed the Xing codec to view web videos. Then it was Real Video that was dominant. Then Flash was the dominant video player but that's changing already. There's been millions and millions of iPhones and iPod Touches sold over the last three years and they've been playing videos all along using H.264. In fact, YouTube was one of the first to support these "new and different" devices.
Here's a much more likely scenario than the one you describe: GooTube sticks with H.264 and replaces Flash videos with VP8 videos. That'll fulfil the need for a free player for those older or open source browsers that can't / don't want to deal with licensing H.264. Everyone ends up happy; Google has their free codec that they can use as they please and Microsoft can add it to their list and use Silverlight for the other stuff. The only real loser is Adobe; when this game of musical chairs finishes, Flash will be out of the game.
No company (including Apple) is obligated or required to design their products to suit the whim, desire, or profit motive of some third party. If Adobe, Xiph, or the FSF doesn't like the way that Apple's products are designed, then they are free to purchase some other company's products or to purchase nothing at all. These simple truths should be obvious to anyone. There's far too many comments from various companies, industry pundits, and posters here that complain about Apple being controlling - because Apple doesn't design their products the way that the commenter wants. Think about this for a moment - who is being controlling here? And just exactly what basis do any of them have for dictating the way that Apple should design their products?
That includes you, the one with your cursor hovering over the reply button.
All of this nonsense sounds very much like a bunch of children complaining that they didn't get to blow the whistle when the train left the station. If you don't like company X's products - don't buy them. Buy something you like better or design a better product yourself. Company X isn't forcing you to do anything no matter how you try to claim they are. Those who wished to supply some piece for Company X's new product but were not invited to are welcome to try selling it to someone else; maybe Company X didn't need or want it, or maybe it's junk and they rejected it for that reason. Whatever the reason, those are the breaks. Nothing any wanna-be supplier can say will make their products or company look better or improve their public image one tiny bit.
And for goodness sakes, try to keep things a bit more civil. Raving doesn't improve the way you're perceived or make your point more valid.
I can't believe what I'm reading here today. The video codec "war" is over; Google doesn't really even have a horse in the race. Apple devices support H.264 and Microsoft is putting it into the next IE version. Between Apple and Microsoft that covers an overwhelming majority of the video players and that's what any sensible web site will be using to encode their video files.
VP8 may be very cool and Theora is nice, too. But see the above and realize that even if all of the "me too" web browsers use open source codecs exclusively they'll insure that they'll remain a "me too" browser. I'm sure that the Firefox users here (like me) have noticed the (still) large number of web sites that are reduced in function or unusable to that browser. If those sites can't even be troubled to write HTML that works on all browsers, what makes anyone think they'll maintain multiple copies (encoded in multiple formats) of each video file so that when some uncommon / open source web browser comes along it'll be able to view the videos? Even mighty Google isn't in a position where they can force a video codec on us.
If open source zealots want to engage in battles like this, they need to pick their battles better. And those intellectually dishonest postings trying to blame Apple for the way things are don't serve anyone. Put some of that time and effort into making a difference instead, OK?
Here's something to think about: is it possible to write a codec that plays H.264 files without infringing any patents? Don't assume it's impossible - it could very well be possible and that could lead to an open source codec that is compatible with what the big boys use. That's a worthy goal; who's going to give it a try?
There's long years of history regarding those companies that entered into agreements with Microsoft. As usual, it's a company with technology that Microsoft does not have. Grab your bowl of popcorn and enjoy the show - but don't be distracted by the Google / Apple / MS bickering. HTC is the company to watch as they learn what so many others have over the years. Very few (if any) companies survive making technology deals with Microsoft.
In the past, I owned / operated a small electronic sales / service store in a smaller American town. Life was good, but the revenue from TV repairs wasn't quite enough to keep the business going. People were asking for high-end car stereos so I looked into becoming a dealer for a Japanese manufacturer. The requirements and restrictions they wanted were unacceptable and the wholesale pricing they offered was far too high.
What ended up being the solution was to purchase this company's products in Britain at retail and have them shipped to this country. Even after the currency exchange fees and shipping the cost was about half of what the company wanted me to pay for those items. That was fine with me and I sold them on to end customers at just under what that company wanted me to pay them as the wholesale cost.
It wasn't too many months until an electronics dealer in another town discovered that I was selling these car stereos for less than he was paying for them. He contacted the manufacturer and complained and they sent me a letter demanding that I conform to the minimum selling price or face losing their wholesale pricing. In my reply to them, I believe I suggested that they do something sexually improbable to themselves. When they threatened to sue, I just put their letters in the trash - I had no contract with them and didn't purchase anything from them so they could just go F themselves as far as I was concerned. I never revealed where I was getting their products and a lot of happy customers bought and enjoyed them.
Was I doing something wrong? I suppose it would depend on who you ask. I was happy; the additional profits were most welcome. And the customers were happy because they got a great deal on their new car stereo. Anyway, those stereos were what is commonly called "gray market" goods. That's a curious designation - the only "law" that was being violated was a dealer agreement that I wasn't a party to. If that manufacturer would have had their own way, my customers would have paid twice as much for their car stereos. Some might say that the stereo manufacturer was engaging in price fixing.
The whole idea of a producer of goods being able to dictate what those goods sell for at retail is a curious concept. It's legal and American law allows "minimum selling price" agreements. But is it good for consumers? Or is it just another way that corporations take advantage? That stereo manufacturer was happy to take the British price for those stereos but somehow when I sold them in the USA at a profit they felt that they were being harmed.
These anti-consumer agreements are everywhere - but nobody will tell you about them. Next time you're shopping for a deal on some item and notice that it's exactly the same price at every dealer you check - you're looking at a "minimum selling price" item. Nobody will give you a discount because if they do their source of supply will be cut off. So when you buy an Apple product - or a Timex watch - or hundreds of other items you're paying a higher price than the dealer might offer you. What does it mean for competition when all competitors have to sell at the same price?
There's no such thing as a "free market" when a third party to a sales transaction can dictate the terms of that transaction. Look around you and you'll see this kind of consumer abuse everywhere. We've been putting up with this for a long time - it's time for a change and I hope Costco can make a start at changing this situation.
We're already much of the way towards this end. It was just a few short years ago that any competent notebook would cost $3000 or more. Now you can get competent notebooks for $600 and the prices continue to slide; it's another race to the bottom. When laptops get there, they'll be in the province of Wal-Mart and KMart.
You might be surprised to find that there's more to the "illegal immigrant" problem than just Mexicans who slipped across the border. I don't have all the figures, but here's something to think about: there's over 9 million Filipinos in this country illegally. Our immigration procedures are somewhat of a joke to them; they know that what they should do is just come into the country on a visitor's visa then drop off the radar and work / live here. There's plenty of jobs for illegal immigrants - forget those laws, nobody's paying attention and those illegals work cheap.
Arizona is trying to do something useful, but it's not what needs to be done. As long as there are businessmen and corporations that will hire illegal immigrants then they'll be coming to fill those jobs. Forget that minimum wage; a dollar a day looks like riches to someone who is used to working for that much per week. Cut off the supply of these under-the-table jobs and you'll cut illegal immigration substantially.
But consider who benefits from cheap labor - those businesses depend on breaking these laws and they won't give up their supply of cheap labor easily. Those H1B workers are just more of the same under a "gentleman's agreement". It's all about cheap labor and as long as it's in demand we'll have illegals streaming across our borders.
And just watching it on TV is free. That's a big difference, too. But that's not what's really going on - as you and others will discover after the gloves come off.
I'd submit that there's a significant difference between growing and suicidal behavior. There's a lot of things Microsoft could do with those hundreds of millions that would be more productive and create real growth for their company.
One needs to keep in mind that the publicity they desire is largely controlled by the news media. They're good friends to have and very bad enemies to have - and they all watch each other's back. Remember, the difference between a strong leader and a despotic dictator can be nothing more than the spin applied by the people publishing your public relations notices...
I think he's speaking about the effect that the free discussion of the truth has on him hiding the crimes that he, personally, has been involved in. Something that people keep minimizing and apologizing for is the long string of felonious assaults upon children perpetrated by priests of the church. The pope knew about these crimes and chose to conceal them from the authorities - in most civilized countries, that makes him a felon, too. This isn't some malcontents having fun - it's a long string of felonies committed by Catholic priests AND the pope.
I don't know if you understand what I'm saying, so let me be perfectly clear here: numerous priests and officials of the Catholic church have engaged in a continuing string of sexual assaults upon the children of their communities. The current pope was the man in charge of the internal investigations and he ordered that these crimes be concealed. You might be able to excuse this, but there is a vast majority of the public that will not excuse it - these are some of the most serious crimes that can be committed and it's been done hundreds of times. The current pope not only concealed these crimes, he put the perpetrators in positions where they could continue their crimes against another group of children.
Would removing the pope make things OK? No, it wouldn't. There's another more insidious problem that strikes at the heart of the church: the pope, who is said to be the moral authority of the church is plainly guilty of numerous serious crimes. What he did by concealing the crimes and allowing them to continue is not something that can be easily ignored. Now, there's a question - is the church corrupt? The longer the pope insists he is blameless and holds the throne the more apparent it becomes that the church IS corrupt. If this is who you choose as the leader of your faith then I hope you know what you've chosen for yourself and your children. Nothing will make the injured children whole again - but their memory will always be fresh while this pope sits on the throne. If he was as good as you and others say, he'd see this and step down voluntarily.
Forgiveness is divine, of course - and if you can forgive the pope's transgressions you're a better person than the average person. We can leave the discussions about the calm acceptance of evil for a future date. Evil sits on the throne of Paul and what does this say about the people defending it? Good luck, you're going to need it.
For some reason, corporations seem to feel the need to compete in areas where they're clearly outmatched no matter what. So we'll see Google, Microsoft, Apple and whoever else steps up to the plate slug it out for a chance to lose millions chasing a train that left the station years ago.
Bing is a prime example of this kind of dysfunctional behavior. Microsoft has even gone to the extreme of paying people to use Bing and they're still not going to make it. In the world of web search, Google has years of experience doing it and they're getting better every day. Microsoft can't catch up no matter how much money they throw at it - in the final analysis, the general public reaches for Google when they want to search. I suppose Bing can slug it out with Alta Vista and Yahoo! for the "also ran" prize. If Microsoft would put all this money and effort into improving the things they're strong in - but no, we'll suffer along with bug-ridden Windows and Office while Microsoft chases the Google butterfly.
Google is doing it too - diverting resources from their core competency to compete in operating systems. Android looks like it has a chance because the competition phoned in their submission (Windows CE, WTF?), but the Chrome OS will be fighting an uphill battle all the way. It's good, but not as good as Sugar and that's a non-starter. They can park the wreck of Chrome OS next to the burned out husks of BeOS, Next, AmigaOS, and others in the scrapheap of history. That doesn't mean they won't "sell" a bunch of copies - but taking Microsoft on in the OS space is every bit as insane as Microsoft taking Google on in the search space and in the end it'll all count for nothing.
Right now, Apple has arguably the best cell phone OS in existence. It's much more polished than Android and - Windows CE doesn't count. Windows Mobile 7 is vaporware and while the demos look great the reality when they finally ship copies is almost certain to follow their past performances and be a giant disappointment. Apple doesn't have a free ride in this mess either - they're caught up in that "We sold a lot of units so we must be something special" nonsense. They're going to have to stop thinking they're superior and get busy; iPhone was very nice, but the competition is working on their game and despite their constant attempts to fail one of them is going to get it right one of these days.
The next few years should be very interesting. From here, it looks like Google will continue to own web search (and advertising) and Microsoft will continue to own operating systems and "office" applications. Apple, despite their desperately dysfunctional leadership will be worth more than either one (if not both) of them - only because they avoided throwing money away trying to bury Google or Microsoft. But they're not immune from the need to destroy themselves - watch the news and see what kind of lunacy they take part in as their superiority complex becomes blatantly obvious.
There's some problems with the stories being told about this incident. Apparently it starts with some Apple engineer taking a prototype of an unreleased product out clubbing and he apparently left it behind when he left a bar. First question: did this Apple employee have authorization to take that prototype out of the Apple facility? This whole "oops, left it at a bar" story is weak.
Where things get really odd is when this prototype came to be purchased by Giz staff. It's said that they paid $5000 for the prototype - so who did they give this money to? It's clear that the Giz editor didn't just find it at the bar and take it - someone else did, then sold it to the Giz guy. So who "stole" the prototype? And at what point did the Giz editor discover that the prototype was "stolen"?
If Apple wants to call the prototype a trade secret, then how can they reconcile that claim with the fact that the prototype was left in a public place where anyone could see and examine it? It was left there by an Apple employee - this trade secret was "revealed" by that Apple employee.
Could Giz have handled this situation better? Probably. Apple's response is extremely unwise; they're used to using "overwhelming force" to deal with problem employees but this time they've taken it to the news media and they've created their own "Streisand moment". Unhappy with a report about an upcoming product? Send the swat team to make a night raid and be sure to take anything and everything possible. Seizing paperwork and computers from a journalist is unwise - but what were they thinking to seize vehicles, too? Yeah, what they were thinking is to show that guy who has the power - mess with Apple and we'll come for you in the night and wreck your life.
Apple has yet to realize that attacks against the news media like this are like playing global thermonuclear war - the only winning move is not to play.
The history you speak of is full of situations like this. What has happened time and time again is that the real criminals are very hard to catch and the enforcers will be under pressure to show results. That means the easy targets are the ones they go after - that means Joe Schmoe who downloaded a couple of MP3 files. This will be especially true in this unholy alliance between the media cartels and Federal law enforcement. Where do you think the Federal officers will get their tips and evidence from?
It's true that the benefits you describe may come from this - but if you think that's all this "tool" is going to be used for you need to go back to those history books again. When you see the RIAA stormtroopers kicking grandma's door in on TV then remember what you said here today; those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
If you carry a cell phone - you're carrying a radio transmitter that broadcasts its serial number to any interested receiver. That serial number is directly tied to your account at the cell service provider; name, address, bank info, you name it. This is just the way things are.
So what's with the dog and pony show from some writer that doesn't know what he's talking about? And finding the name that goes with a phone number isn't what you should be worried about - consider instead that your friendly government can tell where your cell phone is at any time they desire. Since that's usually in your pocket / purse, that means your location, your movements, and who you meet with. This is more real than the linked article and a lot more troubling.
Automated inventory programs seem like the answer to a prayer. Unfortunately, the reality is that they're kinda disappointing. The big problem with this stuff is that it isn't psychic. Some very important pieces of information (like the physical location of the machine) can't be automatically determined. I see someone getting ready to reply with something about IP addresses; that's not as useful as you might imagine - IP addresses tend to change over time. The best you can do with IP addresses is determining what facility the machine is currently in - if you assign different subnets to each facility. That doesn't get you the detail you want, but at least you can see from the machine's IP address that it's in the data center subnet. That tells you it's in the data center, but not precisely where it's located.
There's also the machines that are shut down or off the network for whatever reason; the automated tool won't find them. And you'll find that these inventory tools can't even reliably tell what services / programs are running on a particular machine - they can only identify the ones that they know about. There's a lot of programs / services in use that will show up as *unknown* if they show up at all.
The big issue: there is much info that you need that can't be discovered by your magical inventory tool. Those things can only be discovered by a human being at the machine so they can write it down and then type it into the inventory program. You might be better off just to stop at the "write it down" stage and keep paper records instead. In either case, the success of the process depends upon the human beings collecting all the manual data accurately and updating those records each and every time they add / move / change a machine or the software running on it as well as make any changes in the network topology that might change the network address of a machine.
I've been the guy that got stuck making something like this work several times; management really wants this information (in colorful presentations) and your accounting department needs to know when you scrap a machine so they don't keep paying property tax on it. What I've discovered time and time again: everyone who touches those machines in any way needs to log everything they do to any machine or the network. In the real world, those folks will be in too big a hurry, forget to log the change, or log the change inaccurately. And the inventory programs are somewhat less than perfect: every one I've tested would miss or incorrectly indentify machines and software. Even better, I've seen phantom machines show up in the inventory program listings. A very popular gotcha: to work around the problem of turned off machines the inventory program will hold onto that listing even though it doesn't detect that machine - it might come back online in an hour or two. What happens in the real world is someone (or something) renames the machine. Now the inventory program see it and thinks it's a new machine and adds it to the database. The old listing is still there and you've got a phantom machine. Keeping track of software licenses sounds good and most of these programs promise to do that. But far too many are unable to tell an Excel viewer from Excel.
Here's what you need to know about these automated inventory tools: if you currently keep accurate paper records and everyone faithfully updates them with every change, then an inventory program can provide some value - as a way to verify the paper records and generate colorful presentations for management. But if (like most companies) you don't have paper records or they're badly out of date or incomplete because people change things and don't record the changes then an inventory program will not work for you; garbage in, garbage out. Remember that those same people will be updating the inventory program with the data it can't find by itself and if they weren't doing it before the program, they won't do it afterwards either. Also, you can not trust the output of the program - i
Most of the packaging tasks that this machine performs are done by third-world workers who earn less than $5000 a year. Especially technology items: your new Microsoft mouse or iPod was packaged in China by workers who live at the factory and work long, long hours
That fancy robotic pick & place machine is impressive and it's much faster than a human. But it's not faster than a bunch of humans and when those humans are Chinese they cost much, much less than the robot (and its custom "workplace") does. The Chinese workers are so overworked that their ten minute breaks are used as an opportunity to get a few minutes of sleep. Here's the pick and place machine that packs Microsoft mice: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1266643/Microsofts-Chinese-workforce-tired-stay-awake.html They're just the tip of the iceberg, there's over 500,000 Chinese "pick and place" machines in service today.
And there are some business concerns that the robot can't address; it can't see or do anything it wasn't programmed for and the real world isn't quite that neat and tidy. And when there's a "failure" you'll have to wait for the robot technician - and hope that he has the parts on hand. If you're using Chinese workers they don't have these problems; humans are very, very good at dealing with the unexpected - and if one gets sick or hurt you just put another worker in that position and the line continues to operate.
In the Windows world - the media cartels cut a deal with Microsoft: prevent copying and distribution or else we won't let you have decryption keys for our content. This is old news and when news of locking parts of Windows came out there was a big furor and they backed off - then quietly started slipping pieces of the Palladium concept into Windows builds. Their goal: Windows as a media consumption platform only, protect the interests of the media cartels. Prevent IP infringements and if that doesn't stop them, positively identify the original source of "leaked" content. Remember the fuss about processor serial numbers? That turned out to not be too workable - but TPM was and unless you're running some old dinosaur computer there's a TPM module on the motherboard. The slow, silent progress towards Palladium started with XP; it's got some of the basic routines in place but they don't cause anyone any trouble.
Vista brought us the main thrust - protected video path (as you noted) and protected audio path. With their "tilt bits" and constant self-checking they burn up about 10% of your CPU cycles. There's some other parts to Palladium that didn't get implemented or got implemented badly - ever wonder why it takes so long to copy a file? The protected driver storage and signed drivers arrived then, too. Windows 7 cleaned things up a bit and the lock down is complete - but not activated yet. So far, it's not causing anyone any problems and that's the way it'll stay until they can get enough systems moved off of XP and onto the newer operating systems. The best way to boil a frog is to heat the water gradually, right?
Once the move is mostly complete then people will discover what has been done under their noses. The various "cartel approved" media containers have flags - currently unused, but when those flags are set the protection systems come to life. At that point, Windows will be no more "open" than any other media player and you'll even be prevented from copying protected files. This day is coming - before we're ready. You mentioned that you could write your own drivers and get them "approved" - true enough, but if your driver touches any part of any protected media path than any protected media will only play in a seriously degraded fashion. The only way to play that media and get full resolution / fidelity is if all of your hardware and software is certified and approved and when full lock down comes you'll find that getting drivers certified is suddenly a whole lot more difficult and expensive.
So in the future we'll have a choice; general purpose machines running mass market operating systems which will play most media and do anything you want as long as you don't want to do anything that might offend our corporate overlords. Then we'll have nice open machines running open source which will do whatever you want without complaint - but won't be able to play any protected media. Or you could use something like an iPad to handle your media consumption and that open source machine to do serious work. In the meantime, start up a Blu-Ray movie on your Windows 7 box and while it's playing start up something like a debugger. Surprise! It'll get worse...
Slashdot Mirror
These stories are becoming a daily (or more often) thing here on Bashdot. After reading more than a few of these thinly-disguised anti-Apple pieces I'm starting to see some common themes. They're all using half-truths and outright lies to promote their point - but what point are they trying to prove?
Among the first to get involved were Adobe employees. They started by identifying themselves but they're still at it and working more covertly. Read the messages carefully and you'll see the Adobe party line being espoused. What they're after is to keep people dependent on Flash - it's partly profit motive but more of a control thing. Adobe wants to control the market for web video and other fluff. As long as they're on every machine they can attract developers to target their player. But their control is slipping and they're fighting back in any and every way they can. Here's a tip for the less well informed: Flash plays H.264 video; keep that in mind.
Next we have the so-called developers who can slap together an "application" in Action Script and put it on the web. We've all seen the results of their "efforts" and once again, it's pure self-interest - they can't compete with real programmers and when they're facing that possibility they're kicking and screaming. The iPhone and iPad are a significant deal and there's big money to be made in coding apps - those Flash "codere" are not going to get a piece of that pie and they're pissed off.
Then there's the "big software company" representatives enjoying the furor and tossing in their little barbs to stir things up a little more. If you think there aren't paid shills for this company posting here you're not paying very good attention. Their music player failed - yeah, they sold a few but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really count. And they have been in phone operating systems for several years and - well, they might as well have stayed home. They don't see these market failures as being their fault; they prefer to blame the competition and anything they can do to take the market leader down will improve their fortunes - or so they think. Remember "Plays for sure" and MSN music? What happened there? Consider this carefully before trotting out complaints about lock-in and DRM.
And then there's the usual cast of trolls who delight in mayhem - here's a hot topic, let's jump in and spread some half-truths and lies just for fun.
Let's not forget the open source zealots who hate anything that's proprietary. They make quite a noise but fail to recognize that they represent a very, very small slice of the population. They'd like to control Apple and make them conform to their idea of what the software world should be like. That's a valid opinion - but only an opinion. They can kill a few days trying to get their box to play some audio file and feel it's worth it because it's FREE - but the rest of us just want to listen to a tune and don't want to have to recompile the kernel before we can get the music to play.
Recently, we're hearing about antitrust concerns because Apple insists on certain compilers to compile apps for their mobile devices. Oh noes, that must be a proprietary lock-in, right? Has anyone ever looked at what that requirement actually says? It's not as restrictive as you might think. No, I'm not going to tell you - go look it up and be better informed.
That brings me to the one thing that all of these groups have in common - they've never owned or handled the devices they're talking about. They're having so much fun with their trollish day in the sun that little things like truth or knowing what you're talking about aren't important. I've got to say that my opinion of some people has been readjusted after seeing what's been written over the last month. If you have an opinion - that's valid and every bit as important as anyone else's opinion. But it's not a fact - and this is where so many intellectually dishonest people reveal their true nature: there are opinions, and there are facts. Try not to confuse t
Maybe not that exact problem - but maybe what he outlined was so narrowly described to fulfill a personal agenda? Take a look at his charts and see how Teredo is faring - and keep in mind that is the Microsoft solution for XP (The most commonly used operating system).
If it's an article about how OS design is blocking the adoption of IPV6 then I'd submit that a non-functional implementation is just as bad if not worse than an imperfect implementation. Sometimes I wonder who writes the articles; concerned people, or industry shills.
Microsoft's implementations. I guess if it didn't work at all, they didn't report on it.
They won't have enough of that elusive "common sense" until they're 12 or so. There's a lot that we commonly talk about that a 5 year old is unaware of.
All of the speech recognition systems to date try to fake it - essentially all they do is match speech waveforms to their library and some do some very simple syntax checking. This is useful for situations where the vocabulary is small and the number of human speakers is also small. These systems don't work like we do and to achieve significantly better results a very difficult problem will have to be "solved" first.
Our method of communicating is both more and less than it appears. At a basic level, what we're communicating is not contained in the words we use - we use words as symbols and the listener "looks up" that symbol and applies meaning to the word. So when I say "horse" you access your knowledge of horse and that provides the meaning to the word. If you'd never seen or heard of a horse then this communication would fail.
It's shared knowledge - literally "common sense" that makes verbal communication possible. Our brains devote a lot of "processing" to this task - they have to not only recognize the word symbols, they have to cross-reference them to memory and do it in real time. We continue to make strides in increasing the amount of CPU power we can devote to problems like this one and we'll probably reach "human equivalent" processing power in our lifetimes. Even so, the machines won't be able to converse with us because they won't have the "common sense" needed to understand what the symbols mean. Without that, they can't make any kind of valid judgements about sentence structure or what meaning a particular word is using at the moment. You can buffalo Buffalo all you want but the machine has trouble with to, too, and two.
There's been some cute demonstrations made using huge rule sets that almost work - but they quickly fall apart when you try to converse with them. Even the very best of speech recognition systems suffers from not knowing anything about what's being talked about. When we can equip future machines with the knowledge of a 12 year old human they'll be able to talk with us - and we'll have solved a lot of other related problems at the same time. Until then, computer speech recognition is an AI trick - heavy on the A.
I don't care much for the way Apple acts too. But I do like some of their products. A few years back I bought an iPod Nano (1st Generation) to use as a portable music player. I was impressed by how small and thin it was but the ear buds it came with weren't very good. So I bought some Etymotic in-ear headphones. With those, it sounded great and I used it every day for a little over two years.
Then the battery wouldn't hold much of a charge. I checked to see what it'd cost to replace it and Apple wanted $100 to replace it. They wanted nearly as much as the Nano cost new; no deal. After thinking about what to do for a replacement for a while I decided to give them another chance and bought a first generation iPod Touch. That little gizmo is still working and holding a charge just fine. I like it a lot; the "point and drool" interface made it possible to leaf through a multi-thousand song library in moments. I didn't need all the added functions but over time I found some of them to be very useful. What it brought me was a way to have all of my favorite music in my pocket. I could play them in the car through the car stereo with an inexpensive cassette adapter, and on my (or someone else's) home stereo. No more dragging a bundle of CDs around.
I would have bought an iPhone instead of the Touch but I had too much experience with AT&T's so-called phone coverage and the price was too high - so my cell phone is a Blackberry. That's been an eye-opening experience - it's so full of software bugs that I have to pull the battery to reset it every few days. I'll try an Android phone next - as soon as the contract on the Blackberry is done.
When the iPad came out I saw it as a way to have all of my music library and a bunch of e-books in a portable package. Once again, I bought a first generation Apple product and I've been using the iPad for almost a month now. So far, so good - right now it's got over 5,000 songs on it as well as over 3000 e-books and there's still room for lots more. Is it perfect? Nope. But it does what it was designed to do and I'm very pleased with it's performance and stability.
That said, I still don't have any love for Apple. But knowing their products I don't totally agree with the claims of "locked down" and "control". All of those songs were MP3 files from here and there and the e-books were converted from PDF files using Calibre. None of those songs or books were purchased from Apple and they didn't stop me from loading whatever I wanted from whatever source onto the Touch or the iPad - that's a freedom that many other media players don't offer.
I'm not an Apple zealot; I just appreciate a well-designed piece of equipment. Those who want the iPad to be a general purpose computer and find fault with it because it isn't one are missing the point entirely. It's not that and it's not a giant-sized iPod Touch either. Slashdot may have "spoken" but after reading those threads and knowing the product it's clear to me that most of the people don't have any idea what they're talking about. Nothing new there. The thing that I wonder about, though - is how many people listen to the hate tales and never think to give one of these gizmos a try?
There's a couple of problems with that idea: the first is that YouTube isn't the only video hosting site and the other is that if Microsoft ships IE with H.264 only - and Apple, which has already made the same move - well, think about it for a minute: would GooTube switch to VP8 when virtually all browsers don't support it? Remember that GooTube already does H.264. Sure, there'll be VP8 (and other) plug-ins but the vast majority of people will just go with what came with their box.
It's much more likely that if GooTube switches to VP8 then they'll lose most of their traffic. Remember, we're IT geeks here - the vast majority of people browsing the web would just decide that GooTube was broken and get their videos somewhere else. And ask any professional web developer and see what they say. Given a choice of using the format that's supported by more than 90% of viewers or some other (arguably more worthy) format that is only natively supported by a few open source browsers - what format would you choose to use? What's much more likely is that the other browsers will have to support H.264 to stay relevant.
There was a time when you needed the Xing codec to view web videos. Then it was Real Video that was dominant. Then Flash was the dominant video player but that's changing already. There's been millions and millions of iPhones and iPod Touches sold over the last three years and they've been playing videos all along using H.264. In fact, YouTube was one of the first to support these "new and different" devices.
Here's a much more likely scenario than the one you describe: GooTube sticks with H.264 and replaces Flash videos with VP8 videos. That'll fulfil the need for a free player for those older or open source browsers that can't / don't want to deal with licensing H.264. Everyone ends up happy; Google has their free codec that they can use as they please and Microsoft can add it to their list and use Silverlight for the other stuff. The only real loser is Adobe; when this game of musical chairs finishes, Flash will be out of the game.
No company (including Apple) is obligated or required to design their products to suit the whim, desire, or profit motive of some third party. If Adobe, Xiph, or the FSF doesn't like the way that Apple's products are designed, then they are free to purchase some other company's products or to purchase nothing at all. These simple truths should be obvious to anyone. There's far too many comments from various companies, industry pundits, and posters here that complain about Apple being controlling - because Apple doesn't design their products the way that the commenter wants. Think about this for a moment - who is being controlling here? And just exactly what basis do any of them have for dictating the way that Apple should design their products?
That includes you, the one with your cursor hovering over the reply button.
All of this nonsense sounds very much like a bunch of children complaining that they didn't get to blow the whistle when the train left the station. If you don't like company X's products - don't buy them. Buy something you like better or design a better product yourself. Company X isn't forcing you to do anything no matter how you try to claim they are. Those who wished to supply some piece for Company X's new product but were not invited to are welcome to try selling it to someone else; maybe Company X didn't need or want it, or maybe it's junk and they rejected it for that reason. Whatever the reason, those are the breaks. Nothing any wanna-be supplier can say will make their products or company look better or improve their public image one tiny bit.
And for goodness sakes, try to keep things a bit more civil. Raving doesn't improve the way you're perceived or make your point more valid.
I can't believe what I'm reading here today. The video codec "war" is over; Google doesn't really even have a horse in the race. Apple devices support H.264 and Microsoft is putting it into the next IE version. Between Apple and Microsoft that covers an overwhelming majority of the video players and that's what any sensible web site will be using to encode their video files.
VP8 may be very cool and Theora is nice, too. But see the above and realize that even if all of the "me too" web browsers use open source codecs exclusively they'll insure that they'll remain a "me too" browser. I'm sure that the Firefox users here (like me) have noticed the (still) large number of web sites that are reduced in function or unusable to that browser. If those sites can't even be troubled to write HTML that works on all browsers, what makes anyone think they'll maintain multiple copies (encoded in multiple formats) of each video file so that when some uncommon / open source web browser comes along it'll be able to view the videos? Even mighty Google isn't in a position where they can force a video codec on us.
If open source zealots want to engage in battles like this, they need to pick their battles better. And those intellectually dishonest postings trying to blame Apple for the way things are don't serve anyone. Put some of that time and effort into making a difference instead, OK?
Here's something to think about: is it possible to write a codec that plays H.264 files without infringing any patents? Don't assume it's impossible - it could very well be possible and that could lead to an open source codec that is compatible with what the big boys use. That's a worthy goal; who's going to give it a try?
There's long years of history regarding those companies that entered into agreements with Microsoft. As usual, it's a company with technology that Microsoft does not have. Grab your bowl of popcorn and enjoy the show - but don't be distracted by the Google / Apple / MS bickering. HTC is the company to watch as they learn what so many others have over the years. Very few (if any) companies survive making technology deals with Microsoft.
Loads and loads of "famous maker" refurbished smart phones.
In the past, I owned / operated a small electronic sales / service store in a smaller American town. Life was good, but the revenue from TV repairs wasn't quite enough to keep the business going. People were asking for high-end car stereos so I looked into becoming a dealer for a Japanese manufacturer. The requirements and restrictions they wanted were unacceptable and the wholesale pricing they offered was far too high.
What ended up being the solution was to purchase this company's products in Britain at retail and have them shipped to this country. Even after the currency exchange fees and shipping the cost was about half of what the company wanted me to pay for those items. That was fine with me and I sold them on to end customers at just under what that company wanted me to pay them as the wholesale cost.
It wasn't too many months until an electronics dealer in another town discovered that I was selling these car stereos for less than he was paying for them. He contacted the manufacturer and complained and they sent me a letter demanding that I conform to the minimum selling price or face losing their wholesale pricing. In my reply to them, I believe I suggested that they do something sexually improbable to themselves. When they threatened to sue, I just put their letters in the trash - I had no contract with them and didn't purchase anything from them so they could just go F themselves as far as I was concerned. I never revealed where I was getting their products and a lot of happy customers bought and enjoyed them.
Was I doing something wrong? I suppose it would depend on who you ask. I was happy; the additional profits were most welcome. And the customers were happy because they got a great deal on their new car stereo. Anyway, those stereos were what is commonly called "gray market" goods. That's a curious designation - the only "law" that was being violated was a dealer agreement that I wasn't a party to. If that manufacturer would have had their own way, my customers would have paid twice as much for their car stereos. Some might say that the stereo manufacturer was engaging in price fixing.
The whole idea of a producer of goods being able to dictate what those goods sell for at retail is a curious concept. It's legal and American law allows "minimum selling price" agreements. But is it good for consumers? Or is it just another way that corporations take advantage? That stereo manufacturer was happy to take the British price for those stereos but somehow when I sold them in the USA at a profit they felt that they were being harmed.
These anti-consumer agreements are everywhere - but nobody will tell you about them. Next time you're shopping for a deal on some item and notice that it's exactly the same price at every dealer you check - you're looking at a "minimum selling price" item. Nobody will give you a discount because if they do their source of supply will be cut off. So when you buy an Apple product - or a Timex watch - or hundreds of other items you're paying a higher price than the dealer might offer you. What does it mean for competition when all competitors have to sell at the same price?
There's no such thing as a "free market" when a third party to a sales transaction can dictate the terms of that transaction. Look around you and you'll see this kind of consumer abuse everywhere. We've been putting up with this for a long time - it's time for a change and I hope Costco can make a start at changing this situation.
We're already much of the way towards this end. It was just a few short years ago that any competent notebook would cost $3000 or more. Now you can get competent notebooks for $600 and the prices continue to slide; it's another race to the bottom. When laptops get there, they'll be in the province of Wal-Mart and KMart.
You might be surprised to find that there's more to the "illegal immigrant" problem than just Mexicans who slipped across the border. I don't have all the figures, but here's something to think about: there's over 9 million Filipinos in this country illegally. Our immigration procedures are somewhat of a joke to them; they know that what they should do is just come into the country on a visitor's visa then drop off the radar and work / live here. There's plenty of jobs for illegal immigrants - forget those laws, nobody's paying attention and those illegals work cheap.
Arizona is trying to do something useful, but it's not what needs to be done. As long as there are businessmen and corporations that will hire illegal immigrants then they'll be coming to fill those jobs. Forget that minimum wage; a dollar a day looks like riches to someone who is used to working for that much per week. Cut off the supply of these under-the-table jobs and you'll cut illegal immigration substantially.
But consider who benefits from cheap labor - those businesses depend on breaking these laws and they won't give up their supply of cheap labor easily. Those H1B workers are just more of the same under a "gentleman's agreement". It's all about cheap labor and as long as it's in demand we'll have illegals streaming across our borders.
And just watching it on TV is free. That's a big difference, too. But that's not what's really going on - as you and others will discover after the gloves come off.
I'd submit that there's a significant difference between growing and suicidal behavior. There's a lot of things Microsoft could do with those hundreds of millions that would be more productive and create real growth for their company.
One needs to keep in mind that the publicity they desire is largely controlled by the news media. They're good friends to have and very bad enemies to have - and they all watch each other's back. Remember, the difference between a strong leader and a despotic dictator can be nothing more than the spin applied by the people publishing your public relations notices...
I think he's speaking about the effect that the free discussion of the truth has on him hiding the crimes that he, personally, has been involved in. Something that people keep minimizing and apologizing for is the long string of felonious assaults upon children perpetrated by priests of the church. The pope knew about these crimes and chose to conceal them from the authorities - in most civilized countries, that makes him a felon, too. This isn't some malcontents having fun - it's a long string of felonies committed by Catholic priests AND the pope.
I don't know if you understand what I'm saying, so let me be perfectly clear here: numerous priests and officials of the Catholic church have engaged in a continuing string of sexual assaults upon the children of their communities. The current pope was the man in charge of the internal investigations and he ordered that these crimes be concealed. You might be able to excuse this, but there is a vast majority of the public that will not excuse it - these are some of the most serious crimes that can be committed and it's been done hundreds of times. The current pope not only concealed these crimes, he put the perpetrators in positions where they could continue their crimes against another group of children.
Would removing the pope make things OK? No, it wouldn't. There's another more insidious problem that strikes at the heart of the church: the pope, who is said to be the moral authority of the church is plainly guilty of numerous serious crimes. What he did by concealing the crimes and allowing them to continue is not something that can be easily ignored. Now, there's a question - is the church corrupt? The longer the pope insists he is blameless and holds the throne the more apparent it becomes that the church IS corrupt. If this is who you choose as the leader of your faith then I hope you know what you've chosen for yourself and your children. Nothing will make the injured children whole again - but their memory will always be fresh while this pope sits on the throne. If he was as good as you and others say, he'd see this and step down voluntarily.
Forgiveness is divine, of course - and if you can forgive the pope's transgressions you're a better person than the average person. We can leave the discussions about the calm acceptance of evil for a future date. Evil sits on the throne of Paul and what does this say about the people defending it? Good luck, you're going to need it.
For some reason, corporations seem to feel the need to compete in areas where they're clearly outmatched no matter what. So we'll see Google, Microsoft, Apple and whoever else steps up to the plate slug it out for a chance to lose millions chasing a train that left the station years ago.
Bing is a prime example of this kind of dysfunctional behavior. Microsoft has even gone to the extreme of paying people to use Bing and they're still not going to make it. In the world of web search, Google has years of experience doing it and they're getting better every day. Microsoft can't catch up no matter how much money they throw at it - in the final analysis, the general public reaches for Google when they want to search. I suppose Bing can slug it out with Alta Vista and Yahoo! for the "also ran" prize. If Microsoft would put all this money and effort into improving the things they're strong in - but no, we'll suffer along with bug-ridden Windows and Office while Microsoft chases the Google butterfly.
Google is doing it too - diverting resources from their core competency to compete in operating systems. Android looks like it has a chance because the competition phoned in their submission (Windows CE, WTF?), but the Chrome OS will be fighting an uphill battle all the way. It's good, but not as good as Sugar and that's a non-starter. They can park the wreck of Chrome OS next to the burned out husks of BeOS, Next, AmigaOS, and others in the scrapheap of history. That doesn't mean they won't "sell" a bunch of copies - but taking Microsoft on in the OS space is every bit as insane as Microsoft taking Google on in the search space and in the end it'll all count for nothing.
Right now, Apple has arguably the best cell phone OS in existence. It's much more polished than Android and - Windows CE doesn't count. Windows Mobile 7 is vaporware and while the demos look great the reality when they finally ship copies is almost certain to follow their past performances and be a giant disappointment. Apple doesn't have a free ride in this mess either - they're caught up in that "We sold a lot of units so we must be something special" nonsense. They're going to have to stop thinking they're superior and get busy; iPhone was very nice, but the competition is working on their game and despite their constant attempts to fail one of them is going to get it right one of these days.
The next few years should be very interesting. From here, it looks like Google will continue to own web search (and advertising) and Microsoft will continue to own operating systems and "office" applications. Apple, despite their desperately dysfunctional leadership will be worth more than either one (if not both) of them - only because they avoided throwing money away trying to bury Google or Microsoft. But they're not immune from the need to destroy themselves - watch the news and see what kind of lunacy they take part in as their superiority complex becomes blatantly obvious.
There's some problems with the stories being told about this incident. Apparently it starts with some Apple engineer taking a prototype of an unreleased product out clubbing and he apparently left it behind when he left a bar. First question: did this Apple employee have authorization to take that prototype out of the Apple facility? This whole "oops, left it at a bar" story is weak.
Where things get really odd is when this prototype came to be purchased by Giz staff. It's said that they paid $5000 for the prototype - so who did they give this money to? It's clear that the Giz editor didn't just find it at the bar and take it - someone else did, then sold it to the Giz guy. So who "stole" the prototype? And at what point did the Giz editor discover that the prototype was "stolen"?
If Apple wants to call the prototype a trade secret, then how can they reconcile that claim with the fact that the prototype was left in a public place where anyone could see and examine it? It was left there by an Apple employee - this trade secret was "revealed" by that Apple employee.
Could Giz have handled this situation better? Probably. Apple's response is extremely unwise; they're used to using "overwhelming force" to deal with problem employees but this time they've taken it to the news media and they've created their own "Streisand moment". Unhappy with a report about an upcoming product? Send the swat team to make a night raid and be sure to take anything and everything possible. Seizing paperwork and computers from a journalist is unwise - but what were they thinking to seize vehicles, too? Yeah, what they were thinking is to show that guy who has the power - mess with Apple and we'll come for you in the night and wreck your life.
Apple has yet to realize that attacks against the news media like this are like playing global thermonuclear war - the only winning move is not to play.
The history you speak of is full of situations like this. What has happened time and time again is that the real criminals are very hard to catch and the enforcers will be under pressure to show results. That means the easy targets are the ones they go after - that means Joe Schmoe who downloaded a couple of MP3 files. This will be especially true in this unholy alliance between the media cartels and Federal law enforcement. Where do you think the Federal officers will get their tips and evidence from?
It's true that the benefits you describe may come from this - but if you think that's all this "tool" is going to be used for you need to go back to those history books again. When you see the RIAA stormtroopers kicking grandma's door in on TV then remember what you said here today; those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
If you carry a cell phone - you're carrying a radio transmitter that broadcasts its serial number to any interested receiver. That serial number is directly tied to your account at the cell service provider; name, address, bank info, you name it. This is just the way things are.
So what's with the dog and pony show from some writer that doesn't know what he's talking about? And finding the name that goes with a phone number isn't what you should be worried about - consider instead that your friendly government can tell where your cell phone is at any time they desire. Since that's usually in your pocket / purse, that means your location, your movements, and who you meet with. This is more real than the linked article and a lot more troubling.
Automated inventory programs seem like the answer to a prayer. Unfortunately, the reality is that they're kinda disappointing. The big problem with this stuff is that it isn't psychic. Some very important pieces of information (like the physical location of the machine) can't be automatically determined. I see someone getting ready to reply with something about IP addresses; that's not as useful as you might imagine - IP addresses tend to change over time. The best you can do with IP addresses is determining what facility the machine is currently in - if you assign different subnets to each facility. That doesn't get you the detail you want, but at least you can see from the machine's IP address that it's in the data center subnet. That tells you it's in the data center, but not precisely where it's located.
There's also the machines that are shut down or off the network for whatever reason; the automated tool won't find them. And you'll find that these inventory tools can't even reliably tell what services / programs are running on a particular machine - they can only identify the ones that they know about. There's a lot of programs / services in use that will show up as *unknown* if they show up at all.
The big issue: there is much info that you need that can't be discovered by your magical inventory tool. Those things can only be discovered by a human being at the machine so they can write it down and then type it into the inventory program. You might be better off just to stop at the "write it down" stage and keep paper records instead. In either case, the success of the process depends upon the human beings collecting all the manual data accurately and updating those records each and every time they add / move / change a machine or the software running on it as well as make any changes in the network topology that might change the network address of a machine.
I've been the guy that got stuck making something like this work several times; management really wants this information (in colorful presentations) and your accounting department needs to know when you scrap a machine so they don't keep paying property tax on it. What I've discovered time and time again: everyone who touches those machines in any way needs to log everything they do to any machine or the network. In the real world, those folks will be in too big a hurry, forget to log the change, or log the change inaccurately. And the inventory programs are somewhat less than perfect: every one I've tested would miss or incorrectly indentify machines and software. Even better, I've seen phantom machines show up in the inventory program listings. A very popular gotcha: to work around the problem of turned off machines the inventory program will hold onto that listing even though it doesn't detect that machine - it might come back online in an hour or two. What happens in the real world is someone (or something) renames the machine. Now the inventory program see it and thinks it's a new machine and adds it to the database. The old listing is still there and you've got a phantom machine. Keeping track of software licenses sounds good and most of these programs promise to do that. But far too many are unable to tell an Excel viewer from Excel.
Here's what you need to know about these automated inventory tools: if you currently keep accurate paper records and everyone faithfully updates them with every change, then an inventory program can provide some value - as a way to verify the paper records and generate colorful presentations for management. But if (like most companies) you don't have paper records or they're badly out of date or incomplete because people change things and don't record the changes then an inventory program will not work for you; garbage in, garbage out. Remember that those same people will be updating the inventory program with the data it can't find by itself and if they weren't doing it before the program, they won't do it afterwards either. Also, you can not trust the output of the program - i
Most of the packaging tasks that this machine performs are done by third-world workers who earn less than $5000 a year. Especially technology items: your new Microsoft mouse or iPod was packaged in China by workers who live at the factory and work long, long hours
That fancy robotic pick & place machine is impressive and it's much faster than a human. But it's not faster than a bunch of humans and when those humans are Chinese they cost much, much less than the robot (and its custom "workplace") does. The Chinese workers are so overworked that their ten minute breaks are used as an opportunity to get a few minutes of sleep. Here's the pick and place machine that packs Microsoft mice: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1266643/Microsofts-Chinese-workforce-tired-stay-awake.html They're just the tip of the iceberg, there's over 500,000 Chinese "pick and place" machines in service today.
And there are some business concerns that the robot can't address; it can't see or do anything it wasn't programmed for and the real world isn't quite that neat and tidy. And when there's a "failure" you'll have to wait for the robot technician - and hope that he has the parts on hand. If you're using Chinese workers they don't have these problems; humans are very, very good at dealing with the unexpected - and if one gets sick or hurt you just put another worker in that position and the line continues to operate.
In the Windows world - the media cartels cut a deal with Microsoft: prevent copying and distribution or else we won't let you have decryption keys for our content. This is old news and when news of locking parts of Windows came out there was a big furor and they backed off - then quietly started slipping pieces of the Palladium concept into Windows builds. Their goal: Windows as a media consumption platform only, protect the interests of the media cartels. Prevent IP infringements and if that doesn't stop them, positively identify the original source of "leaked" content. Remember the fuss about processor serial numbers? That turned out to not be too workable - but TPM was and unless you're running some old dinosaur computer there's a TPM module on the motherboard. The slow, silent progress towards Palladium started with XP; it's got some of the basic routines in place but they don't cause anyone any trouble.
Vista brought us the main thrust - protected video path (as you noted) and protected audio path. With their "tilt bits" and constant self-checking they burn up about 10% of your CPU cycles. There's some other parts to Palladium that didn't get implemented or got implemented badly - ever wonder why it takes so long to copy a file? The protected driver storage and signed drivers arrived then, too. Windows 7 cleaned things up a bit and the lock down is complete - but not activated yet. So far, it's not causing anyone any problems and that's the way it'll stay until they can get enough systems moved off of XP and onto the newer operating systems. The best way to boil a frog is to heat the water gradually, right?
Once the move is mostly complete then people will discover what has been done under their noses. The various "cartel approved" media containers have flags - currently unused, but when those flags are set the protection systems come to life. At that point, Windows will be no more "open" than any other media player and you'll even be prevented from copying protected files. This day is coming - before we're ready. You mentioned that you could write your own drivers and get them "approved" - true enough, but if your driver touches any part of any protected media path than any protected media will only play in a seriously degraded fashion. The only way to play that media and get full resolution / fidelity is if all of your hardware and software is certified and approved and when full lock down comes you'll find that getting drivers certified is suddenly a whole lot more difficult and expensive.
So in the future we'll have a choice; general purpose machines running mass market operating systems which will play most media and do anything you want as long as you don't want to do anything that might offend our corporate overlords. Then we'll have nice open machines running open source which will do whatever you want without complaint - but won't be able to play any protected media. Or you could use something like an iPad to handle your media consumption and that open source machine to do serious work. In the meantime, start up a Blu-Ray movie on your Windows 7 box and while it's playing start up something like a debugger. Surprise! It'll get worse...