But I'll add to that, what are Apple's fees to license iTunes DRM/AAC, and are there any other players that support this format?
Supporting AAC is easy. However, the specific DRM system Apple uses is not licensed to others; rumors abound about why this is, with probably the most sensible explanation being that Apple -- which is theoretically on the hook to the record labels if/when somebody cracks the DRM scheme -- doesn't trust anyone else to implement it.
Oddly enough, we aren't the first country to do this, and those who have aren't totalitarian regimes. And as strange as it sounds, when done properly (admittedly, not likely given the "lowest pay and least training wins the contract" system used for American airport security) behavioral profiling is actually an effective security measure; even Bruce Schneier, a Slashdot favorite for debunking silly security theater, is in favor of behavioral profiling when done correctly.
A law that prevents you from talking about something that someone is doing is not constitutional.
You've never been on the wrong end of an NDA before, have you? There are all sorts of ways you can end up legally forbidden to talk about something while not violating the US Constitution in any way.
So, here's the thing you're missing: this isn't about free speech. This is about the press, and specifically about one aspect of the press. While we do have freedom of the press in this country, we have no clause in our Constitution which guarantees the anonymity of sources used by that free press. The protection of anonymous sources is largely meant to further the free spirit of the press, but the Constitution does not directly require or impose that protection; in fact, there's not a single federal law on the books which recognizes or protects anonymous sources. Various states have variations on "shield laws", but they are by no means universal.
So first of all, there's not one single "civil right" at issue here. What there is is a kid wrapping himself up in the Constitution without bothering to read it first: he got his ass handed to him in court as a result, and deservedly so. Again: freedom of the press if not carte blanche to violate laws left and right, and may God preserve us from people who think they know otherwise.
There are two issues people tend to go after here: the "I thought trade secrets weren't protected!" issue and the "OMG First Amendment!" issue. Both objections have serious problems.
Let's deal first with trade secrets. The revelant federal law is quite clear, and lays out some pretty stiff potential penalties for both Think Secret (who almost certainly knew they were receiving an inappropriately-disclosed trade secret, and thus would have triggered the statute) and the person who talked to them (who almost certainly misappropriated a trade secret or improperly transmitted one, and thus would have triggered the statute). 10 years' federal imprisonment or $5m fine is nothing to sneeze at, so we're talking about something that -- from the standpoint of the law -- is a pretty serious offense.
Now, as for journalism and the First Amendment: Think Secret originally attempted to claim the traditional right of journalists to protect anonymous sources, but there's serious doubt about whether they ought to receive it. The traditional protection afforded to journalists' sources exists to ensure that information which is important to, or which impacts the public good will be brought to light. But in this case the information does not serve any high and lofty public purpose: this isn't Watergate or the Pentagon Papers, it's some company's product lineup. And while we have freedom of the press, that's not the same as carte blanche to break the law: if you're going to wrap yourself in the Constitution, you need to go to the judge with something better than "Well, we really only did it because we can, and because we thought it'd be cool." Think Secret didn't have anything better to tell the judge than that, and so the judge (rightly) laid the smackdown on them.
The result is that they've been backed into a settlement which puts them out of business. Whether this means Apple is the next Google is the next Microsoft is the next IBM is the next Dark Lord Sauron, I don't know. But Think Secret basically screwed themselves, and have no-one to blame but themselves.
What part of initially suggesting Ogg Vorbis doesn't fit with the new quote?
The submarine patent threat. Ogg claims to be unencumbered, but until somebody big starts using it and lawsuits start flying in the Eastern District of Texas, nobody actually knows whether it's unencumbered. And companies which are already carrying a significant risk of submarine patents from other more popular/profitable codecs don't have much incentive to assume even more risk for sake of a codec that's hardly used and doesn't present compelling technical advantages.
Some people think this is FUD. I think those people don't pay attention to patent-related news in the US; the only safe position right now is to assume something is encumbered until someone else has spent millions of dollars litigating it to be sure, which is why you get development models like SQLite: SQLite refuses to accept or use any code based on algorithms or techniques that are less then 17 years old, so that they can prove they're using technologies which couldn't possibly be patent encumbered.. Patent reform would be a nice thing to have for cases like this...
In the US, if you loudly criticize the government you won't be heard because a finely-tuned media machine will just shout louder. In Russia, if you loudly criticize the government you won't be heard because you'll disappear.
In the US, the president belongs to an "old boys network" of guys who were in the same secret fraternity in their college days. In Russia, the president belongs to an "old boys network" of guys who were in the same secret police agency in the Soviet days.
In the US, journalists who uncover serious government misconduct get yelled at by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. In Russia, journalists who uncover serious government misconduct get injected with lethal doses of radioactive material.
Frequently my workspace switches for no reason, sometimes several times in a row
I don't know if this is what's happening to you, but I ran into something similar. The key combo for jumping to beginning/end of a document in most apps is Fn+arrow key, while the combo for switching spaces is Ctrl+arrow key; in my case I was just occasionally hitting the wrong key with my pinky and triggering Spaces.
(Oh, and anyone who used the Unsanity APE and didn't remove it before upgrading really ought to know better. The similarity of "haxies" to "hacks" isn't just marketing. Nor is the company name)
From what I've seen on the issue, it appears that Logitech installed an ancient version of APE as part of one of their driver bundles, and so there were a fair number of people with said ancient APE lying around on their drives without their ever realizing it.
I don't know whether it's true or not that this was the reason, but publicly he stated it was because he wanted to spend time with his kids while they grew up instead of constantly being on the road/in the studio. And it's not like he was hurting for money at that point...
IIRC when he went into retirement he inked a deal which granted exclusive distribution rights, going forward, to Wal-Mart; unless they get into downloadable music in a big way, or can grant digital rights to a big online player like Amazon or Apple, that may come back to bite him pretty hard.
Maybe that "obsessive control" has something to do with the fact that they have a music store business to run, and that this gets a whole lot easier when the user can't decide to use a competing service?
Or maybe it has to do with their contract with AT&T and rumored guarantees that a VoIP application won't appear on the iPhone. We can go all day speculating on peoples' motives, if you'd like;)
Why don't they just come out and say that then? What do they gain by lying about it?
Well, what they've said publicly is that there isn't a public API or SDK right now. They've hinted that there will be at some point, just not right now. And regardless of how you feel about whether Apple has an obsession with control, they do have an obsession with secrecy; keeping things as tightly under wraps as possible, even if it means flat-out lying to the public about upcoming products, would actually be par for the course for Apple (remember the days of "we'll never make an iPod that plays video"?).
How hard is it for them to go "well, we're not going to document nor support the API, but if you want to play with it, knock yourself out"
Isn't that pretty much what they're doing right now? There's no official API, no official access and no documentation, and Apple doesn't go out of their way to help you or work around problems which could be caused if you take advantage of undocumented, unofficial channels. About all they've said one way or another is "if you hacked your phone, don't apply the firmware updates", which would be consistent with such a policy...
I got accused of starting flamewars by rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth Mac fanbois.
OK, then, I'll accuse you of flaming. My credentials are that the only Apple-built computer I've ever owned was an Apple IIe; I've got a MacBook Pro that I use at work, but it belongs to the company. Personally, until they issued me that laptop, I'd used nothing but Free software for six years straight, and still do most of my work that way (Emacs, Subversion, etc.). I've owned and enjoyed a couple of iPods, but I don't think that should count against me.
And I think you're being an ignorant flamer. There are plenty of reasons why Apple might not have released an officialy development kit yet which have nothing to do with "obsessive control"; it might be as simple as the APIs not being frozen enough for reliable third-party development yet. But if you desperately need to see enemies everywhere trying to control you, then by all means flame on.
A few short weeks ago people were all over Microsoft when they installed software without your knowledge that turns out to have broken some installations. This is worse, since the "breaking" is intentional.
Except for a few inconvenient facts:
Apple didn't secretly update anyone's iPhone.
Apple warned everyone in advance that there was a good chance the update could screw up a hacked phone.
Apple isn't forcing you to apply the update; it's up to you whether you do or not.
Please do try to come up with a better analogy next time.
it is not legal to utterly render a wireless phone useless all calls, as it will violate the 'emergency use only' clause that the FCC requires
That's not what's happening. If you actually read reports from people who actually have iPhones and who actually unlocked them and then actually applied the update, you'll find that the "bricking" effect simply means that the SIM is locked again, and turning on the phone yields the activation screen which asks you to purchase cellular service from AT&T. It doesn't "utterly render the phone useless", it just kicks it back to factory defaults which -- since it was allowed to go on sale in the US -- presumably comply with US regulations.
Pop open a track you bought, look at the ID3 tags. There's an Amazon download id in there.
Yes, you can remove it easily. Yes, this is how iTunes "watermarks" their DRM-free tracks (plaintext metadata). No, it's nothing to get worked up about.
Best part is when I import the mp3s into iTunes the songs are properly recognized and the album covers are downloaded accordingly.
You should actually read about something before making a comment like that; several reviews pointed out (and I can confirm, having tried it with both a single track and a full album) that Amazon includes the album art with the tracks, and their downloader app will automatically import your new tracks into iTunes.
Plus, unlike eMusic, I don't have to subscribe to a separate service: I already have an Amazon account, and that's all that's required to use their music store.
Er. Image rendering is typically one of the most obvious places where separate processes with no shared state yield huge benefits. In fact, image/graphics rendering applications are among the few categories of software which are able to take full advantage of multi-core systems right now, and it's largely because this is such a good solution for them.
One thing I like about Python is that it's not ashamed to steal good features from other languages. Even better, it usually makes them easier to use or gives them nicer syntax. So I'm OK with this. But I feel it's necessary to point out a couple problems with your thesis here:
Erlang is cool and all, but libraries are basically a dead end at this point. There are too many things missing that you have to go implement on your own, and if they don't catch up soon they're going to realize that other languages which already have great libraries available have nicked all the cool features.
Haskell.... is a mess. When you can write non-trivial programs in Haskell without needing a post-graduate degree in category theory, I'll take another look, but right now I read Haskell tutorials and I keep expecting Geordi to call up from Engineering and tell me I need to reconfigure the phase emitters for an inverse tachyon pulse; all of the Haskell documentation beyond extremely basic things basically consists of technobabble right now.
The syntactic whitespace is hard to get used to and causes hard to find bugs.
You do know about Python's block delimiter support, right? You can use the block delimiters from any language you like, just prefix them with '#' and Python will handle them automatically.
Specifically, it's the Global Interpreter Lock. The GIL is the most retarded move I've ever seen in a language. Basically, Python said "We don't want to make the Python interpreter too complicated, so we're going to deliberately remove multicore support." They even support real OS threads, but only one Python instruction may be executed at a time. Which is fucking stupid.
Python has multicore support; it's called "spawn a process".
Down the road when you have, say, 200 cores, do you really want to be dealing with sharing data in memory between tens or hundreds of thousands of threads spread out over them? Having a program run as a single process with huge numbers of threads -- as practiced by the Java world and egged on by people who don't know any better -- is largely a hack designed to deal with running on operating systems which, at the time, didn't have true multitasking. Seeing as that's not so much of a problem these days, and seeing as how there are very good concurrency models based around lightweight IPC, do we really want languages to be chaining themselves to it?
Slashdot Mirror
Supporting AAC is easy. However, the specific DRM system Apple uses is not licensed to others; rumors abound about why this is, with probably the most sensible explanation being that Apple -- which is theoretically on the hook to the record labels if/when somebody cracks the DRM scheme -- doesn't trust anyone else to implement it.
Oddly enough, we aren't the first country to do this, and those who have aren't totalitarian regimes. And as strange as it sounds, when done properly (admittedly, not likely given the "lowest pay and least training wins the contract" system used for American airport security) behavioral profiling is actually an effective security measure; even Bruce Schneier, a Slashdot favorite for debunking silly security theater, is in favor of behavioral profiling when done correctly.
You've never been on the wrong end of an NDA before, have you? There are all sorts of ways you can end up legally forbidden to talk about something while not violating the US Constitution in any way.
So, here's the thing you're missing: this isn't about free speech. This is about the press, and specifically about one aspect of the press. While we do have freedom of the press in this country, we have no clause in our Constitution which guarantees the anonymity of sources used by that free press. The protection of anonymous sources is largely meant to further the free spirit of the press, but the Constitution does not directly require or impose that protection; in fact, there's not a single federal law on the books which recognizes or protects anonymous sources. Various states have variations on "shield laws", but they are by no means universal.
So first of all, there's not one single "civil right" at issue here. What there is is a kid wrapping himself up in the Constitution without bothering to read it first: he got his ass handed to him in court as a result, and deservedly so. Again: freedom of the press if not carte blanche to violate laws left and right, and may God preserve us from people who think they know otherwise.
LThere are two issues people tend to go after here: the "I thought trade secrets weren't protected!" issue and the "OMG First Amendment!" issue. Both objections have serious problems.
Let's deal first with trade secrets. The revelant federal law is quite clear, and lays out some pretty stiff potential penalties for both Think Secret (who almost certainly knew they were receiving an inappropriately-disclosed trade secret, and thus would have triggered the statute) and the person who talked to them (who almost certainly misappropriated a trade secret or improperly transmitted one, and thus would have triggered the statute). 10 years' federal imprisonment or $5m fine is nothing to sneeze at, so we're talking about something that -- from the standpoint of the law -- is a pretty serious offense.
Now, as for journalism and the First Amendment: Think Secret originally attempted to claim the traditional right of journalists to protect anonymous sources, but there's serious doubt about whether they ought to receive it. The traditional protection afforded to journalists' sources exists to ensure that information which is important to, or which impacts the public good will be brought to light. But in this case the information does not serve any high and lofty public purpose: this isn't Watergate or the Pentagon Papers, it's some company's product lineup. And while we have freedom of the press, that's not the same as carte blanche to break the law: if you're going to wrap yourself in the Constitution, you need to go to the judge with something better than "Well, we really only did it because we can, and because we thought it'd be cool." Think Secret didn't have anything better to tell the judge than that, and so the judge (rightly) laid the smackdown on them.
The result is that they've been backed into a settlement which puts them out of business. Whether this means Apple is the next Google is the next Microsoft is the next IBM is the next Dark Lord Sauron, I don't know. But Think Secret basically screwed themselves, and have no-one to blame but themselves.
The submarine patent threat. Ogg claims to be unencumbered, but until somebody big starts using it and lawsuits start flying in the Eastern District of Texas, nobody actually knows whether it's unencumbered. And companies which are already carrying a significant risk of submarine patents from other more popular/profitable codecs don't have much incentive to assume even more risk for sake of a codec that's hardly used and doesn't present compelling technical advantages.
Some people think this is FUD. I think those people don't pay attention to patent-related news in the US; the only safe position right now is to assume something is encumbered until someone else has spent millions of dollars litigating it to be sure, which is why you get development models like SQLite: SQLite refuses to accept or use any code based on algorithms or techniques that are less then 17 years old, so that they can prove they're using technologies which couldn't possibly be patent encumbered.. Patent reform would be a nice thing to have for cases like this...
In the US, if you loudly criticize the government you won't be heard because a finely-tuned media machine will just shout louder. In Russia, if you loudly criticize the government you won't be heard because you'll disappear.
In the US, the president belongs to an "old boys network" of guys who were in the same secret fraternity in their college days. In Russia, the president belongs to an "old boys network" of guys who were in the same secret police agency in the Soviet days.
In the US, journalists who uncover serious government misconduct get yelled at by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. In Russia, journalists who uncover serious government misconduct get injected with lethal doses of radioactive material.
Now. You were saying?
I don't know if this is what's happening to you, but I ran into something similar. The key combo for jumping to beginning/end of a document in most apps is Fn+arrow key, while the combo for switching spaces is Ctrl+arrow key; in my case I was just occasionally hitting the wrong key with my pinky and triggering Spaces.
Only three hours? I once (literally) told our CSR that I'd fixed a bug, at the moment the customer was calling to complain about it.
From what I've seen on the issue, it appears that Logitech installed an ancient version of APE as part of one of their driver bundles, and so there were a fair number of people with said ancient APE lying around on their drives without their ever realizing it.
I don't know whether it's true or not that this was the reason, but publicly he stated it was because he wanted to spend time with his kids while they grew up instead of constantly being on the road/in the studio. And it's not like he was hurting for money at that point...
Yes, but that's why I said "unless they go online in a big way". They're still a pretty small fish in the online music business.
IIRC when he went into retirement he inked a deal which granted exclusive distribution rights, going forward, to Wal-Mart; unless they get into downloadable music in a big way, or can grant digital rights to a big online player like Amazon or Apple, that may come back to bite him pretty hard.
Or maybe it has to do with their contract with AT&T and rumored guarantees that a VoIP application won't appear on the iPhone. We can go all day speculating on peoples' motives, if you'd like ;)
Well, what they've said publicly is that there isn't a public API or SDK right now. They've hinted that there will be at some point, just not right now. And regardless of how you feel about whether Apple has an obsession with control, they do have an obsession with secrecy; keeping things as tightly under wraps as possible, even if it means flat-out lying to the public about upcoming products, would actually be par for the course for Apple (remember the days of "we'll never make an iPod that plays video"?).
Isn't that pretty much what they're doing right now? There's no official API, no official access and no documentation, and Apple doesn't go out of their way to help you or work around problems which could be caused if you take advantage of undocumented, unofficial channels. About all they've said one way or another is "if you hacked your phone, don't apply the firmware updates", which would be consistent with such a policy...
OK, then, I'll accuse you of flaming. My credentials are that the only Apple-built computer I've ever owned was an Apple IIe; I've got a MacBook Pro that I use at work, but it belongs to the company. Personally, until they issued me that laptop, I'd used nothing but Free software for six years straight, and still do most of my work that way (Emacs, Subversion, etc.). I've owned and enjoyed a couple of iPods, but I don't think that should count against me.
And I think you're being an ignorant flamer. There are plenty of reasons why Apple might not have released an officialy development kit yet which have nothing to do with "obsessive control"; it might be as simple as the APIs not being frozen enough for reliable third-party development yet. But if you desperately need to see enemies everywhere trying to control you, then by all means flame on.
Except for a few inconvenient facts:
Please do try to come up with a better analogy next time.
That's not what's happening. If you actually read reports from people who actually have iPhones and who actually unlocked them and then actually applied the update, you'll find that the "bricking" effect simply means that the SIM is locked again, and turning on the phone yields the activation screen which asks you to purchase cellular service from AT&T. It doesn't "utterly render the phone useless", it just kicks it back to factory defaults which -- since it was allowed to go on sale in the US -- presumably comply with US regulations.
Pop open a track you bought, look at the ID3 tags. There's an Amazon download id in there.
Yes, you can remove it easily. Yes, this is how iTunes "watermarks" their DRM-free tracks (plaintext metadata). No, it's nothing to get worked up about.
You should actually read about something before making a comment like that; several reviews pointed out (and I can confirm, having tried it with both a single track and a full album) that Amazon includes the album art with the tracks, and their downloader app will automatically import your new tracks into iTunes.
Plus, unlike eMusic, I don't have to subscribe to a separate service: I already have an Amazon account, and that's all that's required to use their music store.
Er. Image rendering is typically one of the most obvious places where separate processes with no shared state yield huge benefits. In fact, image/graphics rendering applications are among the few categories of software which are able to take full advantage of multi-core systems right now, and it's largely because this is such a good solution for them.
One thing I like about Python is that it's not ashamed to steal good features from other languages. Even better, it usually makes them easier to use or gives them nicer syntax. So I'm OK with this. But I feel it's necessary to point out a couple problems with your thesis here:
Erlang is cool and all, but libraries are basically a dead end at this point. There are too many things missing that you have to go implement on your own, and if they don't catch up soon they're going to realize that other languages which already have great libraries available have nicked all the cool features.
Haskell.... is a mess. When you can write non-trivial programs in Haskell without needing a post-graduate degree in category theory, I'll take another look, but right now I read Haskell tutorials and I keep expecting Geordi to call up from Engineering and tell me I need to reconfigure the phase emitters for an inverse tachyon pulse; all of the Haskell documentation beyond extremely basic things basically consists of technobabble right now.
You do know about Python's block delimiter support, right? You can use the block delimiters from any language you like, just prefix them with '#' and Python will handle them automatically.
Python has multicore support; it's called "spawn a process".
Down the road when you have, say, 200 cores, do you really want to be dealing with sharing data in memory between tens or hundreds of thousands of threads spread out over them? Having a program run as a single process with huge numbers of threads -- as practiced by the Java world and egged on by people who don't know any better -- is largely a hack designed to deal with running on operating systems which, at the time, didn't have true multitasking. Seeing as that's not so much of a problem these days, and seeing as how there are very good concurrency models based around lightweight IPC, do we really want languages to be chaining themselves to it?