Actually you can polish a turd, it was a surprising result from a Mythbusters episode a while back. Denser turds turn out especially shiny.
Otherwise your post was spot on. I think the concept behind.Net can be very useful in the Enterprise environment, primarily in areas where efficient memory/processor management of apps from multiple vendors is required. This particular case seems more suited to the pure process effeciency you get with C and C++. The only thing that seems strange is the cost disparity..NET apps are usually much cheaper to develop, and the hardware costs would have to be astronomical to make up the difference were that the case. Obviously something about the structure of.Net did not fit the application and had to be worked around in a big way. Of course I've also seen projects whose primary costs have nothing to do with actually engineering or delivering the system.
Anyone can use open source in their profit-generating business, it's only newsworthy when a major player makes a significant contribution back to the community whose shoulders it stands upon.
It is this type of thinking that prevents Linux from moving beyond being the behind the scenes "muscle" in an enterprise-level environment. Microsoft, on the other hand, wants as many people as possible to use their systems, and verious memo and powerpoint leaks over the years have shown that internally they focus on keeping their customers as satisfied as possible. Obviously, they fail sometimes (i.e. TFA), but overall this focus has allowed them to maintain their dominance, whereas Linux has somewhat plateaued lately.
What you really should be doing is celebrating each and every user - be it an individual or a whole enterprise environment - because every new user of Linux increases the incentive for developers to develop for Linux in addition to, and maybe eventually instead of, Windows.
Having spent better part of the last decade engaged in a sysephian struggle to clean a house inhabited by three children and two working adults...
If you think that's impressive, I recently organized my house without throwing much of anything away. It doesn't sound that impressive at first, but it's about like a super-massive black hole suddenly spitting out a solar system all orderly and primed for life.
Except that black holes woudln't turn it in to a diamond, it would do the opposite. It would take your bag of sugar/salt and atomize it while burning it, leaving you with nothing but waste heat. That is a definite increase in entropy - if you think about it for a second you'll realize that all matter has a higher potential for entropy than all radiation, because it has more structure that can be broken down. Black holes are very good at breaking down structures.
They are related but not the same, they are describing different facets of the same issue. "Heat Death" refers to the ultimate state of entropy - that all the energy in the universe had moved from a high concentration to a low concentration, which results in a perfect equilibrium.
"Cold Death" happens long before heat death, it referse to the point when the expansion of the universe spreads the stars so far apart that new stars can not be re-formed from the gasses of dead stars/systems. Once all stars have consumed all their fuel and no new stars can be formed, life in the universe is no longer possible. That is the cold death of the universe.
Basically, heat death will happen hundreds of billions of years after cold death happens - the Universe will have reached a completely uniform 0 degrees kelvin and it will be completely dead.
I suppose I disagree with classifying GNOME as a vital system component, and I am pretty sure nobody is talking about using C# for writing core OS components either. That would be foolish for a lot more reasons than patent confusion.
You already need a C compiler to install -anything- in Linux, why would you have a problem with including C#?
I'm not sure I see what is insane about it, since you need to do the exact same thing with another language already. In fact a great many Linux programs also require Python and other languages to be installed. Given the modular nature of Linux, I don't see why doing something like that with a program like Gnome would be a concern.
What is the reasoning behind the objection, other than "Oh noes! C# means Micro$oft!"? If the license is compatible (from what I understand, it is, it's.NET that isn't atm), what is the problem?
Exactly, Stallman believes in forced sharing, which is not freedom. "Freedom" in his mind is giving one person the right to take the hard work of another person and use it for themselves, regardless of whether or not the original creator wanted to share his work.
When this philosophy of sharing is volunteer based, it works pretty well. You end up with the open source community we have today, which is strong and happy and one can easilly see the benefits to society as a whole. However, when the philosophy becomes imposed upon people who disagree, the happy system breaks down and becomes a bitter system. If Stallman ever gets his way in regards to forcing all software to be "free", the software landscape will more than likely mirror what happened to Soviet Russia, where the best and brightest may have a future but the average programmer will have little incentive to create their own small innovations. Software in general will suffer greatly for it.
I encourage RMS to convert as many programmers as he can to open source, but if he is ever allowed to make policy he will fuck up the whole system. Honestly, he's an ass who doesn't care about anybody else's opinions but his own, and he has zero class. This is starting to ramble, but I recently watched the speech he gave after Linus and the Linux Foundation donated something like sixty thousand dollars to the GNU project, and Stallman had the nerve to get up and say Linux wasn't really Linux, it was GNU using the Linux kernel. Technically correct, but that was an asshole thing to say. The kernel just happens to be the most important and most difficult piece, without which you have no operating system. It has been over twenty years since the GNU project started, and the GNU HURD kernel is still not even close to being finished, despite the fact that the rest of GNU was in place after only a few years.
Do you actually understand what Perl is? Or did you just try to use it some time and didn't like it?
Perl is a very old (it gets updated, obviously) server scripting language that has been pretty much standard on all unix based servers for 20 years now (guesstimate there). The court system's document database is almost certainly a Unix based system.
Since he can obviously easily run a Perl script on the government machine by using the tools on the machine itself (thereby not illegally installing software on it) to automate the task. Seriously, I doubt this task was more than a line or two of Perl, what moron would use anything else?
Seriously, it's using the right tool for the job. Just because you don't like a scripting language does not mean it is not the best language to use in a given situation. Obviously this guy has the programming know-how and the flexible skill-set to actually use the best tool for a job, rather than bitch about a language he may or may not like.
"Colitas" refers to Colita de Rata, also known as Antelope sage. Warm smells are pleasant smells, and the reference was in the part of the song talking about how irresistably inviting California is at first.
They may have been talking about pot, but it seems like a stretch.
We still have VMS servers in operation, and we can't get rid of them. Damn things are critical to the business and it would mean replacing whole process controls systems (hundreds of millions of dollars) to replace the frickin things. It's a pain in the ass because we only have a couple people left who knows how to troubleshoot them.
This whole notion of cloud computing is completely irrelevant for me though, so meh.
The system libraries can and do change, usually not often, but they do over time. That is completely out of the developer's control.
What MS has done is instead of having 20 different virtually identical.dlls with different names (which would mean thousands more.dll files to store for compatibility), they put all the.dlls of a particular type into one file, and give an XML that allows the program to access the correct version.
Because his savings has a rebate plan, whereby that $25 will earn him $1.25.
In other words, he's just looking for something to complain about and what Staples did was 100% legitimate. They never said they would send him $25 cash, and most people know sending cash in the mail is incredibly foolish. Generally speaking sending the cards is much safer than sending cash or even a money order, and depending on Staples' deal with VISA may be cheaper also.
These attacks completely avoid the problem, you'd have to drop the IP for several days to mitigate this attack. It is hundreds of linux boxes tagging a target and waiting a while before hitting it again. It's a slow brute force attack because no individual bot attacks a particular target more than once or twice in a given time period, maybe several minutes, maybe even several hours. The frequency of this attack was about 1500 attacks per day total, which is only two attacks per machine in the 770 bot network in a single day.
Implimenting your strategy to prevent these attacks would also mean you would be locking out legitimate users who mis-type a password for a day or more. That is not going to work in any environment I am aware of.
The brilliance of this attack is that while a bot is only attacking a particular machine once or twice a day, there is nothing stopping it from attacking other machines in the mean time. A bot can still send out thousands of attacks per day, they are just sending them to thousands of machines instead of one. Well coordinated it certainly has the same potential for building a large botnet as normal brute force methods. The downside of course is your odds of getting a particular machine are terrible, you're playing statistics to get a large botnet.
Any more imagined issues with the provided APIs that you'd like to invent?
Ok, Apple does not provide an API at all, do you know what an API is? You might want to look it up. An XML file with configuration/database information is not an API. Now, were Apple to provide a structure to pass commands to iTunes via XML tags, that would be an API. Apple does not do this, and if they did Palm would not need to spoof the iPod and Blackberry would not need a separate sync app.
Which doesn't matter, because you can still build 1-button sync. Who cares whether the button is in iTunes or in some other application? It certainly doesn't matter to me when I sync my BlackBerry.
I'm not sure how you get one button sync when you have to open a second app first, that's pretty frickin magical. And I care, it's annoying to have to use two programs to organize and sync my music. That was pretty much the deciding factor when I bought a new iPod recently. Just because YOU are fine with extra, needless annoyances doesn't mean I should be.
That can be done by scripting iTunes, if you want to do it. (Yes, I've done it.)
Not trying to be rude or argumentative (I know I'm starting to sound like I am by now), but I could care less what you've done, honestly. Blackberry hasn't done it, iTunes hasn't either (obviously), and I don't feel like doing it myself. The whole point of what Palm did with the Pre was to make it so that you plug it in and oh my god, it works. No separate app necessary, no scripting bullshit, just plug it in.
Wrong. iTunes updates the XML file automatically whenever something is added to the library. In fact, the XML file is how other Apple applications such as iMovie access the iTunes library.
I'm not sure how that's a rebuff, you still need to open the app and sync the Blackberry, which makes the whole operation three times more complicated and time consuming than necessary. Blackberry could certainly automate the process (they may have, I don't know), but that would require yet another annoying process sitting in the background slowing your system down (slightly, but all those processes add up, particularly if they are poorly written) doing fuck all until you plug in your Blackberry. I hate that crap. Hell, I hate the crap iTunes already loads, but I tolerate it because it is worth it to me. Obviously going through the rigamarole for your Blackberry is worth it for you, and I don't blame you. Blackberries are frickin sweet as hell (my roommate has the Storm).
Face it, Palm's solution to the problem yields more functionality, a simpler interface, and avoids everything that would irk someone like me in one fell swoop. Dinky little sync apps that rely on the iTunes library xml file don't really compare.
None of which will allow a device to be recognized and synched by iTunes, nor will it allow them to pass information back to the iTunes library database like most played songs, song ratings given on the player itself, and other usefull data.
Furthermore, non-iPod users who prefer iTunes must organize and purchase their music with iTunes, save the library, then open up another application to sync to the iTunes library xml file. That's a hell of a lot more annoying and cumbersome than hitting "sync" in iTunes.
The fact is, having to rely on the XML file cuts out a lot of functionality, leaving you with only synching music files and not album art or anything else. Combined with the popularity of iTunes it is a major contributor to the iPod's dominance in the digital music player market.
There is absolutely no way to get iTunes to recognize and interact with a device unless that device identifies itself as an iPod with Apple's vendor ID as well. Pre-iTunes 9 a device only needed to use the iPod's product ID. That is standard practice in the industry, when you have a compatible device that the software was not originally designed to handle, you use the same product ID as a device it was designed to handle. So long as your device behaves the same as the original device everything works.
Throwing in the vendor ID check when Pre came out with an iPod compatible (granted, compatible with an older iPod) was basically a dirty trick by Apple to prohibit a legitimate device from directly interacting with their software.
What the Blackberry and other music players are doing is not at all the same as what the Pre was doing. Those players come with another software application for interacting with the iTunes Library xml file, which is produced by iTunes from the iTunes database. This means a third party program can sync a player with the iTunes library, but you lose a lot of the iPod functionality when this happens because there is no way to put information into the iTunes database from the library xml file (iPods track things like most played songs, song ratings, etc and dumps it back into iTunes for playlist info - no other device can do this except now the Pre). Also, syncing must be done when you are finished with iTunes via another application - it is not quick and automatic like it is for iPods.
In other words, if iTunes treats your device like an iPod, you've just blown all the other syncing solutions out of the water. This is bad for Apple, and I am an example of why. The only reason I bought an iPod is because I like iTunes and the way the iPod integrates with it. If there were a non-iPod player that synced directly with iTunes when I bought my iPod I probably would not have bought an iPod at all. I think they are far too expensive for what they do, it just happens that nothing else provides the features I really want like iTunes+iPod does, so I paid the Apple tax.
What happens when there is an alternative to the iPod that also happens to sync directly with the #1 music organization software? It's a scary thing for Apple, for sure.
The only problem with the second option, is that the Pre almost certainly has code to deal with attempted firmware updates (that's one of the first things I would put in, Apple is well known for bricking hardware), which would actually put the Pre at less risk than legitimate iPod owners of a bricked iPod.
Essentially, everything Apple can do is expensive, and Palm's workarounds at this point are relatively cheap. From what I know of the law (granted, not much) it looks like Palm's workarounds are actually more legal than Apple's artificial roadblocks to compatibility. At the very least they are currently on the same level (reverse engineering vs artificially inhibiting competition). If Apple sues, or goes much farther than what they already have to prevent a competing product from interacting with their software, they could be looking at some serious legal trouble themselves.
Do you realize how many flavors of iPods are out there? Apple would have to spend some serious cash to update all the firmware (which hasn't been updated in years) of all the likely candidates for Palm to change their product ID to, while making sure the updates don't brick -legitimate- iPods, while all Palm has to do is alter the product ID to a similar iPod. It's a cat and mouse game that Apple would have to spend millions to try and win, all the while increasing the risk of hosing their own customers.
It's easy to say, but very hard and expensive to do.
That's why the Pre identifies itself as an older iPod, with the exact features they are able to impliment. No Mobile Me crap, no iCal, nadda.
Do you think the guys at Palm are stupid? Do you have amnesia and think the current model of iPod has the exact same feature-set as iPods had six years ago? Goodness, think a bit.
The interface does not need to be public, because reverse-engineering is a legitimate and legal practice. Artifically restricting a competitor's product is on much thinner ice than reverse engineering the functionality of a competitor's product. If this goes to court, I think Apple would lose a lot more than Palm would.
ActiveX controls exist for inter-operability between windows programs. Firefox in Windows can use the exact same controls that IE does, if they choose to integrate them.
I'm not surprised they didn't, it's a lot of extra effort to go through to add the functionality that a very small percentage of their userbase will use. Frankly, most people don't care that they need to use IE when using Windows Update.
Same with the MS Office Live Workspaces, which frankly I'd never heard of before you mentioned them. They designed it to use IE, that's Microsoft's choice, and it potentially cuts out a chunk of their userbase. FF probably could find a way to integrate, but if MS is not using standards it is a lot of extra effort for little extra gain.
The Live Workspaces and Windows Update websites aren't just websites, they are extensions of other Microsoft products and they are designed to connect to them in certain ways. In that case, the web is simply a facilitator for non-web functionality.
Also note that Microsoft is moving away from the ActiveX model and has been for many years now for the exact reasons you state - it has poor cross-platform compatibility. Their.NET framework is designed to ease that, though they certainly impliment it in a Microsoft-centric fashion.
Doing this would also open Apple up to a massive anti-competitive lawsuit, very similar to what Microsoft was hit with, especially since they are singling out one particular competitor - that's a big no-no for our anti-trust laws (which don't necessarily require a monopoly to apply, though Apple does dominate the music player industry).
What you're suggesting is that Apple quite literally shoot themselves in the foot.
Slashdot Mirror
...you cannot polish a turd.
Actually you can polish a turd, it was a surprising result from a Mythbusters episode a while back. Denser turds turn out especially shiny.
Otherwise your post was spot on. I think the concept behind .Net can be very useful in the Enterprise environment, primarily in areas where efficient memory/processor management of apps from multiple vendors is required. This particular case seems more suited to the pure process effeciency you get with C and C++. The only thing that seems strange is the cost disparity. .NET apps are usually much cheaper to develop, and the hardware costs would have to be astronomical to make up the difference were that the case. Obviously something about the structure of .Net did not fit the application and had to be worked around in a big way. Of course I've also seen projects whose primary costs have nothing to do with actually engineering or delivering the system.
Anyone can use open source in their profit-generating business, it's only newsworthy when a major player makes a significant contribution back to the community whose shoulders it stands upon.
It is this type of thinking that prevents Linux from moving beyond being the behind the scenes "muscle" in an enterprise-level environment. Microsoft, on the other hand, wants as many people as possible to use their systems, and verious memo and powerpoint leaks over the years have shown that internally they focus on keeping their customers as satisfied as possible. Obviously, they fail sometimes (i.e. TFA), but overall this focus has allowed them to maintain their dominance, whereas Linux has somewhat plateaued lately.
What you really should be doing is celebrating each and every user - be it an individual or a whole enterprise environment - because every new user of Linux increases the incentive for developers to develop for Linux in addition to, and maybe eventually instead of, Windows.
Having spent better part of the last decade engaged in a sysephian struggle to clean a house inhabited by three children and two working adults...
If you think that's impressive, I recently organized my house without throwing much of anything away. It doesn't sound that impressive at first, but it's about like a super-massive black hole suddenly spitting out a solar system all orderly and primed for life.
Except that black holes woudln't turn it in to a diamond, it would do the opposite. It would take your bag of sugar/salt and atomize it while burning it, leaving you with nothing but waste heat. That is a definite increase in entropy - if you think about it for a second you'll realize that all matter has a higher potential for entropy than all radiation, because it has more structure that can be broken down. Black holes are very good at breaking down structures.
They are related but not the same, they are describing different facets of the same issue. "Heat Death" refers to the ultimate state of entropy - that all the energy in the universe had moved from a high concentration to a low concentration, which results in a perfect equilibrium.
"Cold Death" happens long before heat death, it referse to the point when the expansion of the universe spreads the stars so far apart that new stars can not be re-formed from the gasses of dead stars/systems. Once all stars have consumed all their fuel and no new stars can be formed, life in the universe is no longer possible. That is the cold death of the universe.
Basically, heat death will happen hundreds of billions of years after cold death happens - the Universe will have reached a completely uniform 0 degrees kelvin and it will be completely dead.
I suppose I disagree with classifying GNOME as a vital system component, and I am pretty sure nobody is talking about using C# for writing core OS components either. That would be foolish for a lot more reasons than patent confusion.
You already need a C compiler to install -anything- in Linux, why would you have a problem with including C#?
I'm not sure I see what is insane about it, since you need to do the exact same thing with another language already. In fact a great many Linux programs also require Python and other languages to be installed. Given the modular nature of Linux, I don't see why doing something like that with a program like Gnome would be a concern.
What is the reasoning behind the objection, other than "Oh noes! C# means Micro$oft!"? If the license is compatible (from what I understand, it is, it's .NET that isn't atm), what is the problem?
Exactly, Stallman believes in forced sharing, which is not freedom. "Freedom" in his mind is giving one person the right to take the hard work of another person and use it for themselves, regardless of whether or not the original creator wanted to share his work.
When this philosophy of sharing is volunteer based, it works pretty well. You end up with the open source community we have today, which is strong and happy and one can easilly see the benefits to society as a whole. However, when the philosophy becomes imposed upon people who disagree, the happy system breaks down and becomes a bitter system. If Stallman ever gets his way in regards to forcing all software to be "free", the software landscape will more than likely mirror what happened to Soviet Russia, where the best and brightest may have a future but the average programmer will have little incentive to create their own small innovations. Software in general will suffer greatly for it.
I encourage RMS to convert as many programmers as he can to open source, but if he is ever allowed to make policy he will fuck up the whole system. Honestly, he's an ass who doesn't care about anybody else's opinions but his own, and he has zero class. This is starting to ramble, but I recently watched the speech he gave after Linus and the Linux Foundation donated something like sixty thousand dollars to the GNU project, and Stallman had the nerve to get up and say Linux wasn't really Linux, it was GNU using the Linux kernel. Technically correct, but that was an asshole thing to say. The kernel just happens to be the most important and most difficult piece, without which you have no operating system. It has been over twenty years since the GNU project started, and the GNU HURD kernel is still not even close to being finished, despite the fact that the rest of GNU was in place after only a few years.
Bah! I should have previewed.
Damnit, I hate fragments.
Do you actually understand what Perl is? Or did you just try to use it some time and didn't like it?
Perl is a very old (it gets updated, obviously) server scripting language that has been pretty much standard on all unix based servers for 20 years now (guesstimate there). The court system's document database is almost certainly a Unix based system.
Since he can obviously easily run a Perl script on the government machine by using the tools on the machine itself (thereby not illegally installing software on it) to automate the task. Seriously, I doubt this task was more than a line or two of Perl, what moron would use anything else?
Seriously, it's using the right tool for the job. Just because you don't like a scripting language does not mean it is not the best language to use in a given situation. Obviously this guy has the programming know-how and the flexible skill-set to actually use the best tool for a job, rather than bitch about a language he may or may not like.
"Colitas" refers to Colita de Rata, also known as Antelope sage. Warm smells are pleasant smells, and the reference was in the part of the song talking about how irresistably inviting California is at first.
They may have been talking about pot, but it seems like a stretch.
JUICHE! I think it means '42' in North Korea.
Actually it means "11" in Japan.
Mar Hoon Dool is "42" in North Korea.
We still have VMS servers in operation, and we can't get rid of them. Damn things are critical to the business and it would mean replacing whole process controls systems (hundreds of millions of dollars) to replace the frickin things. It's a pain in the ass because we only have a couple people left who knows how to troubleshoot them.
This whole notion of cloud computing is completely irrelevant for me though, so meh.
The system libraries can and do change, usually not often, but they do over time. That is completely out of the developer's control.
What MS has done is instead of having 20 different virtually identical .dlls with different names (which would mean thousands more .dll files to store for compatibility), they put all the .dlls of a particular type into one file, and give an XML that allows the program to access the correct version.
For some reason I read that with a Canadian accent, and it was hilarious.
Because his savings has a rebate plan, whereby that $25 will earn him $1.25.
In other words, he's just looking for something to complain about and what Staples did was 100% legitimate. They never said they would send him $25 cash, and most people know sending cash in the mail is incredibly foolish. Generally speaking sending the cards is much safer than sending cash or even a money order, and depending on Staples' deal with VISA may be cheaper also.
Obviously, you didn't RTFA, or even the summary.
These attacks completely avoid the problem, you'd have to drop the IP for several days to mitigate this attack. It is hundreds of linux boxes tagging a target and waiting a while before hitting it again. It's a slow brute force attack because no individual bot attacks a particular target more than once or twice in a given time period, maybe several minutes, maybe even several hours. The frequency of this attack was about 1500 attacks per day total, which is only two attacks per machine in the 770 bot network in a single day.
Implimenting your strategy to prevent these attacks would also mean you would be locking out legitimate users who mis-type a password for a day or more. That is not going to work in any environment I am aware of.
The brilliance of this attack is that while a bot is only attacking a particular machine once or twice a day, there is nothing stopping it from attacking other machines in the mean time. A bot can still send out thousands of attacks per day, they are just sending them to thousands of machines instead of one. Well coordinated it certainly has the same potential for building a large botnet as normal brute force methods. The downside of course is your odds of getting a particular machine are terrible, you're playing statistics to get a large botnet.
Any more imagined issues with the provided APIs that you'd like to invent?
Ok, Apple does not provide an API at all, do you know what an API is? You might want to look it up. An XML file with configuration/database information is not an API. Now, were Apple to provide a structure to pass commands to iTunes via XML tags, that would be an API. Apple does not do this, and if they did Palm would not need to spoof the iPod and Blackberry would not need a separate sync app.
Which doesn't matter, because you can still build 1-button sync. Who cares whether the button is in iTunes or in some other application? It certainly doesn't matter to me when I sync my BlackBerry.
I'm not sure how you get one button sync when you have to open a second app first, that's pretty frickin magical. And I care, it's annoying to have to use two programs to organize and sync my music. That was pretty much the deciding factor when I bought a new iPod recently. Just because YOU are fine with extra, needless annoyances doesn't mean I should be.
That can be done by scripting iTunes, if you want to do it. (Yes, I've done it.)
Not trying to be rude or argumentative (I know I'm starting to sound like I am by now), but I could care less what you've done, honestly. Blackberry hasn't done it, iTunes hasn't either (obviously), and I don't feel like doing it myself. The whole point of what Palm did with the Pre was to make it so that you plug it in and oh my god, it works. No separate app necessary, no scripting bullshit, just plug it in.
Wrong. iTunes updates the XML file automatically whenever something is added to the library. In fact, the XML file is how other Apple applications such as iMovie access the iTunes library.
I'm not sure how that's a rebuff, you still need to open the app and sync the Blackberry, which makes the whole operation three times more complicated and time consuming than necessary. Blackberry could certainly automate the process (they may have, I don't know), but that would require yet another annoying process sitting in the background slowing your system down (slightly, but all those processes add up, particularly if they are poorly written) doing fuck all until you plug in your Blackberry. I hate that crap. Hell, I hate the crap iTunes already loads, but I tolerate it because it is worth it to me. Obviously going through the rigamarole for your Blackberry is worth it for you, and I don't blame you. Blackberries are frickin sweet as hell (my roommate has the Storm).
Face it, Palm's solution to the problem yields more functionality, a simpler interface, and avoids everything that would irk someone like me in one fell swoop. Dinky little sync apps that rely on the iTunes library xml file don't really compare.
None of which will allow a device to be recognized and synched by iTunes, nor will it allow them to pass information back to the iTunes library database like most played songs, song ratings given on the player itself, and other usefull data.
Furthermore, non-iPod users who prefer iTunes must organize and purchase their music with iTunes, save the library, then open up another application to sync to the iTunes library xml file. That's a hell of a lot more annoying and cumbersome than hitting "sync" in iTunes.
The fact is, having to rely on the XML file cuts out a lot of functionality, leaving you with only synching music files and not album art or anything else. Combined with the popularity of iTunes it is a major contributor to the iPod's dominance in the digital music player market.
Except that he is wrong.
There is absolutely no way to get iTunes to recognize and interact with a device unless that device identifies itself as an iPod with Apple's vendor ID as well. Pre-iTunes 9 a device only needed to use the iPod's product ID. That is standard practice in the industry, when you have a compatible device that the software was not originally designed to handle, you use the same product ID as a device it was designed to handle. So long as your device behaves the same as the original device everything works.
Throwing in the vendor ID check when Pre came out with an iPod compatible (granted, compatible with an older iPod) was basically a dirty trick by Apple to prohibit a legitimate device from directly interacting with their software.
What the Blackberry and other music players are doing is not at all the same as what the Pre was doing. Those players come with another software application for interacting with the iTunes Library xml file, which is produced by iTunes from the iTunes database. This means a third party program can sync a player with the iTunes library, but you lose a lot of the iPod functionality when this happens because there is no way to put information into the iTunes database from the library xml file (iPods track things like most played songs, song ratings, etc and dumps it back into iTunes for playlist info - no other device can do this except now the Pre). Also, syncing must be done when you are finished with iTunes via another application - it is not quick and automatic like it is for iPods.
In other words, if iTunes treats your device like an iPod, you've just blown all the other syncing solutions out of the water. This is bad for Apple, and I am an example of why. The only reason I bought an iPod is because I like iTunes and the way the iPod integrates with it. If there were a non-iPod player that synced directly with iTunes when I bought my iPod I probably would not have bought an iPod at all. I think they are far too expensive for what they do, it just happens that nothing else provides the features I really want like iTunes+iPod does, so I paid the Apple tax.
What happens when there is an alternative to the iPod that also happens to sync directly with the #1 music organization software? It's a scary thing for Apple, for sure.
The only problem with the second option, is that the Pre almost certainly has code to deal with attempted firmware updates (that's one of the first things I would put in, Apple is well known for bricking hardware), which would actually put the Pre at less risk than legitimate iPod owners of a bricked iPod.
Essentially, everything Apple can do is expensive, and Palm's workarounds at this point are relatively cheap. From what I know of the law (granted, not much) it looks like Palm's workarounds are actually more legal than Apple's artificial roadblocks to compatibility. At the very least they are currently on the same level (reverse engineering vs artificially inhibiting competition). If Apple sues, or goes much farther than what they already have to prevent a competing product from interacting with their software, they could be looking at some serious legal trouble themselves.
Do you realize how many flavors of iPods are out there? Apple would have to spend some serious cash to update all the firmware (which hasn't been updated in years) of all the likely candidates for Palm to change their product ID to, while making sure the updates don't brick -legitimate- iPods, while all Palm has to do is alter the product ID to a similar iPod. It's a cat and mouse game that Apple would have to spend millions to try and win, all the while increasing the risk of hosing their own customers.
It's easy to say, but very hard and expensive to do.
That's why the Pre identifies itself as an older iPod, with the exact features they are able to impliment. No Mobile Me crap, no iCal, nadda.
Do you think the guys at Palm are stupid? Do you have amnesia and think the current model of iPod has the exact same feature-set as iPods had six years ago? Goodness, think a bit.
The interface does not need to be public, because reverse-engineering is a legitimate and legal practice. Artifically restricting a competitor's product is on much thinner ice than reverse engineering the functionality of a competitor's product. If this goes to court, I think Apple would lose a lot more than Palm would.
ActiveX controls exist for inter-operability between windows programs. Firefox in Windows can use the exact same controls that IE does, if they choose to integrate them.
I'm not surprised they didn't, it's a lot of extra effort to go through to add the functionality that a very small percentage of their userbase will use. Frankly, most people don't care that they need to use IE when using Windows Update.
Same with the MS Office Live Workspaces, which frankly I'd never heard of before you mentioned them. They designed it to use IE, that's Microsoft's choice, and it potentially cuts out a chunk of their userbase. FF probably could find a way to integrate, but if MS is not using standards it is a lot of extra effort for little extra gain.
The Live Workspaces and Windows Update websites aren't just websites, they are extensions of other Microsoft products and they are designed to connect to them in certain ways. In that case, the web is simply a facilitator for non-web functionality.
Also note that Microsoft is moving away from the ActiveX model and has been for many years now for the exact reasons you state - it has poor cross-platform compatibility. Their .NET framework is designed to ease that, though they certainly impliment it in a Microsoft-centric fashion.
Doing this would also open Apple up to a massive anti-competitive lawsuit, very similar to what Microsoft was hit with, especially since they are singling out one particular competitor - that's a big no-no for our anti-trust laws (which don't necessarily require a monopoly to apply, though Apple does dominate the music player industry).
What you're suggesting is that Apple quite literally shoot themselves in the foot.