Voice over IP apps like Skype that attempt to use the cellular data connection will be blocked. Competing web browsers Firefox and Opera are forbidden.
Now imagine the furore if Microsoft were the ones coming out with these sorts of draconian usage restrictions?
Wanna write software for Windows? Sure, just as long as it doesn't compete with Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer or the Office suite.
It never ceases to amaze me how people can be so critical of Microsofts practices one minute, but when Apple roll out ridiculous restrictions like this they just swallow it and even go as far as to start trying to justify it to others even when they don't earnestly believe in it themselves.
I'm surprised Apple even need to bother keeping a legal team on the payroll when it has such a vociferous and blinkered fanbase.
Another point you forgot to mention, but which is just as important in my opinion, is the noise level. The PS3 is very quiet, almost silent in fact, which is of paramount importance when you're watching media in my opinion.
Taking nothing away from the Xbox 360 as a games console but it just doesn't hold a candle to the PS3 as a media centre. You just can't live with the noise it makes, unless your standards are already so low to begin with.
PS3 + Bluray + 1080p screen + decent audio kit = unrivalled in the home.
This is exactly the reason I won't be buying another Creative product again.
A few years ago I bought a Creative Audigy 2 ZS soundcard and set of Cambridge Soundworks DTT3500 5.1 speakers (sold under Creatives name). Later, when the Audigy range was superceded by X-Fi, I found out to my annoyance that Creative had changed the way the digital DIN port on the card functioned which basically meant it wasn't possible to get 5.1 output to work with the breakout box that the DTT3500 came with. There was no fix for this, and people who wanted to get the features available on X-Fi cards had to upgrade their speaker systems too (the Gigaworks speakers that came out after the Soundworks strangely didn't suffer from this incompatibility).
I put up with this because I was on XP and the Audigy 2/DTT3500 worked together perfectly. When Vista came along I was frustrated to see that Creative only provided very basic functionality in the official drivers, many features I had taken for granted in XP were missing and there was no indication of when (if ever) they would be provided. At the start I just assumed this was an issue with Creative familiarising themselves with Vistas nuances and that I would eventually have a driver that worked properly and provided all of the features the card has under XP. Instead Creative simply stopped making drivers for the card.
I managed to find these modified drivers by chance whilst trying to diagnose one of the many problems that the card had in Vista using the official drivers. I installed them and was amazed to see all of the functionality that Creative couldn't (wouldn't?) provide for the older Audigy cards, and the drivers even came with the updated X-Fi control panels, etc too.
Creatives decision to outlaw these modded drivers has nothing to do with protecting copyright or anything like that - they simply don't want owners of the older cards to have functioning cards under Vista. Creative wants owners of the older cards to upgrade to X-Fi and beyond - which magically have proper Vista support. As another comment remarked - Creative have the source code for these drivers, and presumably have a software team that know more about the ins and outs of the code than this Daniel_K guy has, so why is it left to a hacker with binary-only access to provide proper support for the Audigy-class range of cards.
I wonder how many people have tried taking their iPhone back to the store after they'd bricked it, or claimed it was stolen or some other type of fraud. There's plenty of threads out there from people asking how to flash back to stock firmware, etc on all kinds of devices so they can make (ab)use of the manufacturers warranty.
I wouldn't be so sure that everyone is willing to write off the cost of the device should the worst happen when they try and jailbreak/unlock it.
It's only "AMAZINGLY flexible and unrestricted" if you've been living in a cave.
Windows Mobile and Symbian have far more unrestrictive terms of use, in fact - simply being able to write an app in the relevant programming language is the only barrier to entry. There's no third-party enforcing distribution control, no ridiculous $99 sign-up fee - yet, ironically, some people justify the licence fee as "getting rid of the chaff". Unbelievable.
I try to credit people with intelligent reasoning for the most part but it's tough to argue in favour of people who advocate draconian control the likes of which Apple is putting into effect with its SDK, when if it was Microsoft or some other less-favoured darling at the helm there would - justifiably - be outcry.
His profanity let him down really, as he made a good point.
Stocks are only a gamble in so much as when it involves things the company can't control or is unable to react to. When you buy stocks in something it is with the expectation that the board of directors will act in the best interests of the shareholders.
Although IANAL I can definitely see merit in this lawsuit and people writing it off as frivolous or simply borne out of carpet bagging are wrong. As already stated above $31 is a higher share price than any shareholder can ever expect Yahoo to reach under its own steam given its track record and its perceived value in the modern day Internet as compared to the likes of Google and indeed Microsoft themselves. Dismissing this offer out of hand does seem to strike of bullishness to me.
Either way I think Microsoft will be looking at this and smiling - if their original offer wasn't genuine to begin with (poison pill strategy) or even if it was, they'll most likely eventually be able to acquire Yahoo without having to concede much at all.
If you've got a webserver that happens to be running a remotely exploitable bit of code (e.g. CGI script, PHP/Perl application, etc) then you could simply download, compile and run this exploit as you would anything else. Instead of the script kiddies running bots & pingflooders on your system, they will be rooting it and taking it over.
This problem is compounded further by the fact that on virtual servers customers can usually install whatever they like on their websites, sometimes without even informing the sysadmin. All it would take is one old exploitable copy of awstats, for example.
The severity of a "local account escalation to root privileges" exploit shouldn't be underestimated.
It's all very well stating that Linux is better because of some twee fantasy of full and immediate disclosure but for all we know this exploit may have been out there in blackhat circles for weeks, or months.
People should be concerned about things like this - obviously no OS is perfect but it sets a dangerous precedence when people try and sweep vulnerabilities like this under the carpet purely to try and save face.
A signed variable makes sense for some scenarios. For example in Eve Online it is possible to have a negative balance if - for example - you bought ISK (the ingame currency, equivalent to gold) and the game makers caught this. Their standard policy when this happens is to remove the amount bought from your account, which if you've already spent some of it would leave you with a negative balance.
In cases like this players then need to work themselves out of the hole using the normal methods like missions, loans, etc.
Still, in terms of timing and the logistics of where your hands and feet are I still believe the drums in Rock Band are about as faithful a reproduction of the real thing as you're likely to get in a virtual setting.
This would actually work really well on a lot of websites.
It's essential to sanitise user input, but how often do web developers assume their own data source could be tainted? Most of the code I've seen has had a strong distrust of the user but had a open floodgate as far as the already stored data was concerned. I can see why a hack like this would be successful.
Why would you assume a revolutionary graphics upgrade would "speed up" the game. When has this ever happened on any game?
The difference in graphical quality between Trinity and Revolutions II is night and day. It has HDR + Bloom, much higher resolution textures & polys, and you expect it run quicker on the same hardware?
I used to be able to play EvE in 2560x1600 with my graphics card(s) in their 2D speeds, now I have to overclock them to the same speeds I use to play TF2, etc - and I manage around 60-100fps with everything turned on. It's worth it though, it's a massive improvement.
The only downside is that the Mac & Linux crowd will have to wait until 2008 for the premium content, and the classic version nailed the CPU on my MacBook Pro so I can only imagine how bad the premium content will be.
"thers have had to do a software restore back to version 1.1.2 of the iPhone software" is a telling statement, UK iPhones come with 1.1.2 out of the box - no one would need to do a software restore BACK to this version unless they had unlocked it (which currently requires downgrading the software to 1.1.1).
Isn't it possible that if UK users are applying patches/firmwares intended for US iPhones (since that's where it would appear the jailbreaks/unlocks originate) then there may well be a difference in GSM configurations?
Also how many of these users bought their phones from the US? Does anyone know for certain whether or not there are NO hardware/software differences between US and UK iPhones?
I picked up a Nokia N95 8GB (the new black one, apparently the key iPhone rival depending on which reviews you read) for free on a £45 a month 18 month contract. The contract itself can be lowered after 9 months, I'm pretty sure iPhone users are stuck with paying £35/month for the full 18 months.
My contract came with 750 anytime minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited Internet usage. Oh, and I got £50 cashback too.
O2s base iPhone contract is 200 minutes and 200 texts, which is ridiculously low. Either O2 have adopted the same attitude as Apple and basically want to see how much they can strip away before the traditionally meek Apple fanbase start complaining, or they're being squeezed so much for margin that this is the only contract they can offer that makes selling the phone profitable for them.
A friend who works for Carphone Warehouse (who shall remain unmentioned) received an email on launch day from "the powers that be" saying that he expects staff to push for "80% penetration on insurance, 50% penetration on accessories". It's no wonder you were harassed into getting insurance...
The title of this thread is proof positive that hype overrules fact. There was nothing like the sort of chaotic scenes that came with the US iPhone launch, at most stores it was business as usual with no queues. Whether that's general apathy towards a handset that is so unusually priced in the UK (as mentioned previously we're used to getting high value handsets for free on £35+/month contracts), the delay between the US and UK/EU launch (lots of people buying unlocked from the States) or whatever - either way it wasn't the grand launch with people queueing everywhere that Apple and co would have you believe.
Pretty much all the news stories highlighted the Regent Street branch as it was a rare example of a store with a queue. My local CPW and O2 stores had no queues at 6:02pm.
The other big question is what proportion of the 38% paid because they wanted to make a statement (to the labels), paid because it was a unique and untested delivery method, paid more to skew the statistics/subsidise the non-payers, etc.
I don't think too much can be taken from the statistics other than what you've already alluded to - i.e. that given the choice between paying nothing at all and paying *something* - a high percentage value the music and the effort that went into making it at $0.
Kinda depressing really, but not altogether unsurprising.
If it's an image handling vulnerability in IE then the skies are falling and it's featured on the front page of Slashdot.
If the same vulnerability appears in Firefox then it's trivial and automatically "nothing to worry about" simply because it's OSS.
If it's a vulnerability in iPhone then Apple intended it to be there in the first place and it's the users who are mistaken in thinking it was a problem.
My intepretation of this is that it's like an aftermarket ECU for a car. Aftermarket drop-in ECUs essentially replace all of the software in the car, and usually provide a performance boost, change timings on various things, etc. ECUs can run components in the car at performance levels/speeds that are outside manufacturer tolerances, as usually these bits of hardware are just dumb devices that have no real failsafes.
Therefore since software CAN damage hardware by forcing it to operate outside of it's tolerance I'd say that Apple do have a pretty strong case for automatically voiding the warranty on any iPhone that is unlocked or has a firmware that has been tampered with. If you can't guarantee the operating parameters of a product then you can't really provide, or be expected to provide, a full warranty for when it goes wrong.
Just to chime in on this - this was the selling point for me too.
My Alpine double-din unit in the car has an interface which basically means searching & playing songs is as fast as playing them on the iPod itself. You can't really put a price on having a single removable device in the car that has the capacity of several hundred CDs, CD changers and having a glovebox filled to the brim with scratched CDs is yesterdays tech.
I had little interest in this article as I had never explored using my iPod (80GB Video) in Linux via 3rd party software, or in Windows using something other than iTunes. That said, it's a fascinating read simply because of the obvious "Fire & Ice" mentality at work.
I'd wager that a huge percentage of Slashdot users own Apple equipment, and quite a few are also Apple evangelists (or fanatics in some cases). A story that fuses technological lockdown ala DRM with a company that so many people idolise is too delicious for words.
The general responses are nothing if not predictable though - plenty of people explaining away Apples motives as "not hate for Linux users, its to stop M$! Have faith brothers & sisters!" (paraphrased) and looking forlornly for some thin justification for this move that would allow them to continue sleeping soundly at night. Apple = good, OSS = good.. surely the two can get along??
Enough pontificating though, it wouldn't surprise me that Apple would do something like this and I'm quite curious as to where people have got the notion from that they're "pro OSS", I've never got that vibe from them. Apple are the master puppetmasters really, they are in many respects just as morally ambigious as Microsoft when it comes to products & pricing - it just so happens that they're so damn good at PR that most people don't even notice.
(Incidentally I own a Macbook Pro too, and a Linux box at home, before anyone writes me off as a "M$ fanboy")
For starters very rarely in software are you purchasing the actual code (compiled or source), you usually purchase a licence to use the code, and said licence will have had some kind of limited EULA attached to it that you agreed to when you installed it/opened the packaging, etc.
There could be any number of reasons that a company would seek to block the resale of their software, for example:
- The software may include proprietary source code that was provided to the original licensee under a strict Terms of Use licence, either because the software has to provide the source to function (e.g. a web-based application) or because the original licensee had a special relationship with the software house (e.g. large contract value, long relationship, interdependance, etc)
- The publisher may ordinarily restrict the sale of the software to territories either outside of its jurisdiction, or for legal/political reasons (e.g. software that incorporates cryptographic functions may not be allowed - in Law - to be sold to certain territories)
- The original licensee may have received the software (or a number of copies of the software) at a vastly reduced price either as part of a bigger contract or as a volume sale, and the company may wish to stop him reselling the software to avoid dilution/devaluating of the product.
As said before there are a vast number of legal issues that have to be meticulously itemised and covered off legally, lawsuits are never as simple as a couple of sentences would suggest - even ones that appear totally frivolous to armchair lawyers.
The question therefore surely is "do you own the phone" ?
On Pay Monthly contracts with low initial sign-up fee (or none at all in some cases) the phone is heavily subsidised. You certainly haven't paid the market value for the phone initially, the telco argument is that over the course of the contract you will, through rental, eventually have paid off the SIM-free cost of the phone (and then some).
I don't think the car analogy works particularly well here because it's rare that people pay the full "SIM-free unlocked handset" price for phones, whereas someone who has settled the balance when buying a car owns the car outright and has every right to do what they want with it.
This article is a perfect lightning conductor to seperate the wheat from the chaff, those who actually RTFA and realise the author is nothing more than gutter trash looking to sensationalise a topic simply to drive traffic to his site (his own admission), and those who either have an anti-Sony or anti-DRM agenda, can't even be bothered to read the article to find out the truth, etc.
It's been stated already that all BioShock does is bundle SecuROM with both the demo and the full game. If we're going to start calling the standard install of SecuROM a rootkit then there are plenty of other games that are already "installing a rootkit". It's crapware sure, but its relatively benign as DRM solutions go.
Slashdot Mirror
Now imagine the furore if Microsoft were the ones coming out with these sorts of draconian usage restrictions?
Wanna write software for Windows? Sure, just as long as it doesn't compete with Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer or the Office suite.
It never ceases to amaze me how people can be so critical of Microsofts practices one minute, but when Apple roll out ridiculous restrictions like this they just swallow it and even go as far as to start trying to justify it to others even when they don't earnestly believe in it themselves.
I'm surprised Apple even need to bother keeping a legal team on the payroll when it has such a vociferous and blinkered fanbase.
Well put.
Another point you forgot to mention, but which is just as important in my opinion, is the noise level. The PS3 is very quiet, almost silent in fact, which is of paramount importance when you're watching media in my opinion.
Taking nothing away from the Xbox 360 as a games console but it just doesn't hold a candle to the PS3 as a media centre. You just can't live with the noise it makes, unless your standards are already so low to begin with.
PS3 + Bluray + 1080p screen + decent audio kit = unrivalled in the home.
This is exactly the reason I won't be buying another Creative product again.
A few years ago I bought a Creative Audigy 2 ZS soundcard and set of Cambridge Soundworks DTT3500 5.1 speakers (sold under Creatives name). Later, when the Audigy range was superceded by X-Fi, I found out to my annoyance that Creative had changed the way the digital DIN port on the card functioned which basically meant it wasn't possible to get 5.1 output to work with the breakout box that the DTT3500 came with. There was no fix for this, and people who wanted to get the features available on X-Fi cards had to upgrade their speaker systems too (the Gigaworks speakers that came out after the Soundworks strangely didn't suffer from this incompatibility).
I put up with this because I was on XP and the Audigy 2/DTT3500 worked together perfectly. When Vista came along I was frustrated to see that Creative only provided very basic functionality in the official drivers, many features I had taken for granted in XP were missing and there was no indication of when (if ever) they would be provided. At the start I just assumed this was an issue with Creative familiarising themselves with Vistas nuances and that I would eventually have a driver that worked properly and provided all of the features the card has under XP. Instead Creative simply stopped making drivers for the card.
I managed to find these modified drivers by chance whilst trying to diagnose one of the many problems that the card had in Vista using the official drivers. I installed them and was amazed to see all of the functionality that Creative couldn't (wouldn't?) provide for the older Audigy cards, and the drivers even came with the updated X-Fi control panels, etc too.
Creatives decision to outlaw these modded drivers has nothing to do with protecting copyright or anything like that - they simply don't want owners of the older cards to have functioning cards under Vista. Creative wants owners of the older cards to upgrade to X-Fi and beyond - which magically have proper Vista support. As another comment remarked - Creative have the source code for these drivers, and presumably have a software team that know more about the ins and outs of the code than this Daniel_K guy has, so why is it left to a hacker with binary-only access to provide proper support for the Audigy-class range of cards.
That's an idealistic view.
I wonder how many people have tried taking their iPhone back to the store after they'd bricked it, or claimed it was stolen or some other type of fraud. There's plenty of threads out there from people asking how to flash back to stock firmware, etc on all kinds of devices so they can make (ab)use of the manufacturers warranty.
I wouldn't be so sure that everyone is willing to write off the cost of the device should the worst happen when they try and jailbreak/unlock it.
"The Sims" is a licence to print money as far as EA is concerned, it really is as simple as that.
You can't exactly blame them for milking the cash cow when it has such a huge following.
It's only "AMAZINGLY flexible and unrestricted" if you've been living in a cave.
Windows Mobile and Symbian have far more unrestrictive terms of use, in fact - simply being able to write an app in the relevant programming language is the only barrier to entry. There's no third-party enforcing distribution control, no ridiculous $99 sign-up fee - yet, ironically, some people justify the licence fee as "getting rid of the chaff". Unbelievable.
I try to credit people with intelligent reasoning for the most part but it's tough to argue in favour of people who advocate draconian control the likes of which Apple is putting into effect with its SDK, when if it was Microsoft or some other less-favoured darling at the helm there would - justifiably - be outcry.
Disclaimer: I own a Macbook Pro and an iPod.
His profanity let him down really, as he made a good point.
Stocks are only a gamble in so much as when it involves things the company can't control or is unable to react to. When you buy stocks in something it is with the expectation that the board of directors will act in the best interests of the shareholders.
Although IANAL I can definitely see merit in this lawsuit and people writing it off as frivolous or simply borne out of carpet bagging are wrong. As already stated above $31 is a higher share price than any shareholder can ever expect Yahoo to reach under its own steam given its track record and its perceived value in the modern day Internet as compared to the likes of Google and indeed Microsoft themselves. Dismissing this offer out of hand does seem to strike of bullishness to me.
Either way I think Microsoft will be looking at this and smiling - if their original offer wasn't genuine to begin with (poison pill strategy) or even if it was, they'll most likely eventually be able to acquire Yahoo without having to concede much at all.
It's bigger than that really.
If you've got a webserver that happens to be running a remotely exploitable bit of code (e.g. CGI script, PHP/Perl application, etc) then you could simply download, compile and run this exploit as you would anything else. Instead of the script kiddies running bots & pingflooders on your system, they will be rooting it and taking it over.
This problem is compounded further by the fact that on virtual servers customers can usually install whatever they like on their websites, sometimes without even informing the sysadmin. All it would take is one old exploitable copy of awstats, for example.
The severity of a "local account escalation to root privileges" exploit shouldn't be underestimated.
Exactly.
It's all very well stating that Linux is better because of some twee fantasy of full and immediate disclosure but for all we know this exploit may have been out there in blackhat circles for weeks, or months.
People should be concerned about things like this - obviously no OS is perfect but it sets a dangerous precedence when people try and sweep vulnerabilities like this under the carpet purely to try and save face.
A signed variable makes sense for some scenarios. For example in Eve Online it is possible to have a negative balance if - for example - you bought ISK (the ingame currency, equivalent to gold) and the game makers caught this. Their standard policy when this happens is to remove the amount bought from your account, which if you've already spent some of it would leave you with a negative balance.
In cases like this players then need to work themselves out of the hole using the normal methods like missions, loans, etc.
Still, in terms of timing and the logistics of where your hands and feet are I still believe the drums in Rock Band are about as faithful a reproduction of the real thing as you're likely to get in a virtual setting.
This would actually work really well on a lot of websites.
It's essential to sanitise user input, but how often do web developers assume their own data source could be tainted? Most of the code I've seen has had a strong distrust of the user but had a open floodgate as far as the already stored data was concerned. I can see why a hack like this would be successful.
Lest we forget that Warner issued a not-too-dissimilar statement just before they went all-in with the Blu-ray boys.
Moral of the story: Never believe anything you read or hear, especially when it's said in corporate circles.
Why would you assume a revolutionary graphics upgrade would "speed up" the game. When has this ever happened on any game?
The difference in graphical quality between Trinity and Revolutions II is night and day. It has HDR + Bloom, much higher resolution textures & polys, and you expect it run quicker on the same hardware?
I used to be able to play EvE in 2560x1600 with my graphics card(s) in their 2D speeds, now I have to overclock them to the same speeds I use to play TF2, etc - and I manage around 60-100fps with everything turned on. It's worth it though, it's a massive improvement.
The only downside is that the Mac & Linux crowd will have to wait until 2008 for the premium content, and the classic version nailed the CPU on my MacBook Pro so I can only imagine how bad the premium content will be.
"thers have had to do a software restore back to version 1.1.2 of the iPhone software" is a telling statement, UK iPhones come with 1.1.2 out of the box - no one would need to do a software restore BACK to this version unless they had unlocked it (which currently requires downgrading the software to 1.1.1).
Isn't it possible that if UK users are applying patches/firmwares intended for US iPhones (since that's where it would appear the jailbreaks/unlocks originate) then there may well be a difference in GSM configurations?
Also how many of these users bought their phones from the US? Does anyone know for certain whether or not there are NO hardware/software differences between US and UK iPhones?
To give some kind of context:
I picked up a Nokia N95 8GB (the new black one, apparently the key iPhone rival depending on which reviews you read) for free on a £45 a month 18 month contract. The contract itself can be lowered after 9 months, I'm pretty sure iPhone users are stuck with paying £35/month for the full 18 months.
My contract came with 750 anytime minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited Internet usage. Oh, and I got £50 cashback too.
O2s base iPhone contract is 200 minutes and 200 texts, which is ridiculously low. Either O2 have adopted the same attitude as Apple and basically want to see how much they can strip away before the traditionally meek Apple fanbase start complaining, or they're being squeezed so much for margin that this is the only contract they can offer that makes selling the phone profitable for them.
A friend who works for Carphone Warehouse (who shall remain unmentioned) received an email on launch day from "the powers that be" saying that he expects staff to push for "80% penetration on insurance, 50% penetration on accessories". It's no wonder you were harassed into getting insurance...
The title of this thread is proof positive that hype overrules fact. There was nothing like the sort of chaotic scenes that came with the US iPhone launch, at most stores it was business as usual with no queues. Whether that's general apathy towards a handset that is so unusually priced in the UK (as mentioned previously we're used to getting high value handsets for free on £35+/month contracts), the delay between the US and UK/EU launch (lots of people buying unlocked from the States) or whatever - either way it wasn't the grand launch with people queueing everywhere that Apple and co would have you believe.
Pretty much all the news stories highlighted the Regent Street branch as it was a rare example of a store with a queue. My local CPW and O2 stores had no queues at 6:02pm.
The other big question is what proportion of the 38% paid because they wanted to make a statement (to the labels), paid because it was a unique and untested delivery method, paid more to skew the statistics/subsidise the non-payers, etc.
I don't think too much can be taken from the statistics other than what you've already alluded to - i.e. that given the choice between paying nothing at all and paying *something* - a high percentage value the music and the effort that went into making it at $0.
Kinda depressing really, but not altogether unsurprising.
Well you're almost right.
If it's an image handling vulnerability in IE then the skies are falling and it's featured on the front page of Slashdot.
If the same vulnerability appears in Firefox then it's trivial and automatically "nothing to worry about" simply because it's OSS.
If it's a vulnerability in iPhone then Apple intended it to be there in the first place and it's the users who are mistaken in thinking it was a problem.
My intepretation of this is that it's like an aftermarket ECU for a car. Aftermarket drop-in ECUs essentially replace all of the software in the car, and usually provide a performance boost, change timings on various things, etc. ECUs can run components in the car at performance levels/speeds that are outside manufacturer tolerances, as usually these bits of hardware are just dumb devices that have no real failsafes.
Therefore since software CAN damage hardware by forcing it to operate outside of it's tolerance I'd say that Apple do have a pretty strong case for automatically voiding the warranty on any iPhone that is unlocked or has a firmware that has been tampered with. If you can't guarantee the operating parameters of a product then you can't really provide, or be expected to provide, a full warranty for when it goes wrong.
Just to chime in on this - this was the selling point for me too.
My Alpine double-din unit in the car has an interface which basically means searching & playing songs is as fast as playing them on the iPod itself. You can't really put a price on having a single removable device in the car that has the capacity of several hundred CDs, CD changers and having a glovebox filled to the brim with scratched CDs is yesterdays tech.
I had little interest in this article as I had never explored using my iPod (80GB Video) in Linux via 3rd party software, or in Windows using something other than iTunes. That said, it's a fascinating read simply because of the obvious "Fire & Ice" mentality at work.
I'd wager that a huge percentage of Slashdot users own Apple equipment, and quite a few are also Apple evangelists (or fanatics in some cases). A story that fuses technological lockdown ala DRM with a company that so many people idolise is too delicious for words.
The general responses are nothing if not predictable though - plenty of people explaining away Apples motives as "not hate for Linux users, its to stop M$! Have faith brothers & sisters!" (paraphrased) and looking forlornly for some thin justification for this move that would allow them to continue sleeping soundly at night. Apple = good, OSS = good.. surely the two can get along??
Enough pontificating though, it wouldn't surprise me that Apple would do something like this and I'm quite curious as to where people have got the notion from that they're "pro OSS", I've never got that vibe from them. Apple are the master puppetmasters really, they are in many respects just as morally ambigious as Microsoft when it comes to products & pricing - it just so happens that they're so damn good at PR that most people don't even notice.
(Incidentally I own a Macbook Pro too, and a Linux box at home, before anyone writes me off as a "M$ fanboy")
...except it's not that straightforward.
For starters very rarely in software are you purchasing the actual code (compiled or source), you usually purchase a licence to use the code, and said licence will have had some kind of limited EULA attached to it that you agreed to when you installed it/opened the packaging, etc.
There could be any number of reasons that a company would seek to block the resale of their software, for example:
- The software may include proprietary source code that was provided to the original licensee under a strict Terms of Use licence, either because the software has to provide the source to function (e.g. a web-based application) or because the original licensee had a special relationship with the software house (e.g. large contract value, long relationship, interdependance, etc)
- The publisher may ordinarily restrict the sale of the software to territories either outside of its jurisdiction, or for legal/political reasons (e.g. software that incorporates cryptographic functions may not be allowed - in Law - to be sold to certain territories)
- The original licensee may have received the software (or a number of copies of the software) at a vastly reduced price either as part of a bigger contract or as a volume sale, and the company may wish to stop him reselling the software to avoid dilution/devaluating of the product.
As said before there are a vast number of legal issues that have to be meticulously itemised and covered off legally, lawsuits are never as simple as a couple of sentences would suggest - even ones that appear totally frivolous to armchair lawyers.
The question therefore surely is "do you own the phone" ?
On Pay Monthly contracts with low initial sign-up fee (or none at all in some cases) the phone is heavily subsidised. You certainly haven't paid the market value for the phone initially, the telco argument is that over the course of the contract you will, through rental, eventually have paid off the SIM-free cost of the phone (and then some).
I don't think the car analogy works particularly well here because it's rare that people pay the full "SIM-free unlocked handset" price for phones, whereas someone who has settled the balance when buying a car owns the car outright and has every right to do what they want with it.
This article is a perfect lightning conductor to seperate the wheat from the chaff, those who actually RTFA and realise the author is nothing more than gutter trash looking to sensationalise a topic simply to drive traffic to his site (his own admission), and those who either have an anti-Sony or anti-DRM agenda, can't even be bothered to read the article to find out the truth, etc.
It's been stated already that all BioShock does is bundle SecuROM with both the demo and the full game. If we're going to start calling the standard install of SecuROM a rootkit then there are plenty of other games that are already "installing a rootkit". It's crapware sure, but its relatively benign as DRM solutions go.