Wifi is a great feature to have but it is no replacement for an SD card. An SD card can be removed from the phone and plugged into a computer when you get to where you are going where the files can be transferred. Relying on Internet access is never a good idea although it is more and more reliable these days on phones.
Are you saying that WiFi is less common than SD card slots? Or do you just carry around an SD card reader everywhere you go? If it's the former, you're nuts. If it's the latter, you're I don't understand how you can make a generalization.
The question is how quickly their corporate cultures can switch round...
Regardless of the industry, the answer to this question is consistently "not fast enough". When established market leaders (read: dinosaurs) get blind-sided by new entrants, they have a tendency to respond first by redoubling their efforts toward mediocrity, and second by simply trying to copy. Eventually, there are shifts in senior management, memos get passed around, and finally a new idea. It's as though nobody is willing to admit that they were wrong, that their products had been crappy all along, and that they have no idea what they are doing. Humility is not a word you hear often in corporate circles.
iPhone will probably have POP3 access to mailboxes like most current smartphones do.
According to the keynote announcement, it also has push IMAP. If your business is built on open standards like IMAP, instead of (say) RIM and Exchange, you're golden. Also, for non-corporate users, Yahoo! and.Mac (at least) will support push IMAP on the iPhone.
Apple stated in no uncertain terms that there would not be third-party apps on the iPhone, except through Apple.
If by "no uncertain terms", you mean "very uncertain terms, indeed", then you're right. Clearly, people interpreted earlier statements quite differently. I for one never understood them to mean that there would be no third-party development, and I am not alone.
In fact, why not some sort of HTML-based mini-apps, like widgets perhaps? Oh wait...
Oh, but then they'd have to ship new developer tools for making widgets. Oh wait... Well, still, developers wouldn't feel limited if they had to do everything in JavaScript. If only you could use Cocoa in a widget. Oh wait...
Has anyone seriously believed that there wouldn't be third-party development for the iPhone? I was under the impression that the answer to that question was pretty obvious. The only question has been what form it would take, and even that is pretty obvious if you just look at the thing: Dashboard!
For starters, the interface has a lot of the same visual elements as Dashboard. The grille/tray, rounded-glass squares, identical icons. Hell, identical set of apps as the default set of Dashboard widgets. Dead giveaway. And why shouldn't it be the same set of apps? Apart from email, the main reason to have an internet-connected phone is for quickly fetching bite-sized chunks of information: exactly the sort of thing that widgets are good for.
Consider also that typical widgets take up very little memory and about the same amount of screen real estate as is available on the iPhone. On a Mac, this is because it is expected that you'll be looking at a bunch at the same time, but on the iPhone it's a perfect fit. For existing widgets, it's trivial to either modify the interface to fit the iPhone's screen or load a different interface depending on the platform.
There's no reason why every existing widget couldn't easily be made to run on iPhone, something that isn't true for existing desktop applications. That means thousands of applications available as soon as Apple allows it. Hell, developers don't even need to own or have access to an iPhone to be able to write applications for it. And before anyone screams "JavaScript Sucks", remember that Dashboard widgets can work with Cocoa, too. Off hand I can't think of much that you can't do in a widget. (For a good time, open up the Quartz Composer template included with Dashcode and ask yourself how much fun it would be if you could touch the cube.)
I know there a lot of doubters, but I think that iPhone is going to become the easiest mobile platform to develop third-party apps for.
Only among an extremely shrill minority. Most of us have realized by now that problems with Apple products just get a lot more press than problems with any other brand, whether or not it's a serious or widespread issue. The recent "6-bit screens" fiasco is a good example, wherein every PC manufacturer uses 6-bit panels for high-density displays, but Apple gets all of the bad press for it.
The whole premise behind the FCC was that if spectrum was unregulated you would have a tragedy of the commons were everybody would pollute it so much that it would become unusable. However in practice that has turned out to be a complete and absolute lie.
So there is no such thing as interference? It doesn't ever happen? Anywhere? Ever? Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
How did they solve this in the iPhone, then? You can get 20 of them for $10,000.
That should be a clue that they used a different technique. Which we already knew from context. I'm not intimately familiar with Apple's patent filings or those of Fingerworks (whom they purchased), else I'd tell you exactly how it works. However, I do know that it is unlike the FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) technique used by Jeff Han and the similar approach used by Microsoft, which require rear projection and do not scale down to iPhone-size. Similarly, I would doubt that what is used in the iPhone would scale up to 40+ inches. Just because two technologies appear similar does not mean they are interchangeable.
There is a company that you send them your iMac they send it back with a touch screen on it. These guys are like in a garage somewhere. At no time will you find a rear-projection system installed in your iMac due to this.
TrollTouch will install a single-point analog resistive touchscreen. This is not multi-touch.
Microsoft is doing such outrageous low-tech and poor design you have to make an ass out of yourself just to try and defend it.
Who is defending it? All I said was that they did it they way they did because of certain limitations the poster wasn't aware of. The only "attacking" here is you.
Ir cameras and rear-projection? Surely this is the multi-touch screen of the 1970's.
I'll point out that even the wildy popular video of Jeff Han's demo uses a camera and rear projection. You clearly know nothing of the problems involved, and the existing research. Or maybe you'd like to cite an example of multi-touch from the 70s, which is earlier than any that I've ever heard of.
Surely a flat-screen technology (TFT, Plasma, whatever) coupled with one of the newer multi-touch sensitive technologies would be better?
Microsoft is doing it this way because that's what they have patented and/or bought. Also, many multi-touch technologies effectively require rear-projection. Otherwise the display layer has to be behind the touch layer, rather than projected onto it. It means the point on screen that you mean to touch and the point on the table that you have to touch are separated by half an inch or more, breaking the illusion and the precision. Not so good in a $10,000 device.
Apple has been patenting the hell out of the multitouch UI concept
There's more than one way to do multitouch. Plenty enough for Microsoft, Apple, Perceptive Pixel (Jeff Han's company), and probably half a dozen groups at MIT to do very similar things in different ways. Unfortunately, all of them but Han claims (in marketing-speak) to have invented the idea, but then everyone on the web saw Han's video first, so they think he invented the idea and everyone else is copying him. Sigh.
Hidden in the recent demo for the Iphone was a glimpse of Apple's multitouch technology. If you knew where to look, it was hidden in plain site during the demo of the photo album and rolodex functions.
"Hidden"? It was specifically talked about as a feature of the phone.
Still, someone had to find those bugs, and it was likely not the programmers themselves, or they would probably have been fixed before shipping.
Ah, but much of what Apple ends up patching in updates like these isn't actually Apple-specific, but rather fixes to open source stuff they ship. This update has fixes for bind, fetchmail, ruby, and screen, to name a few. Those bugs could have been found by users or programmers on a dozen other platforms.
This article says this is the first exploit fixed that hasn't been logged on the MOAB project.
You misunderstand. This is the first update that doesn't patch anything listed by MOAB. That doesn't mean that everything patched before was. MOAB only listed 31 bugs, whereas dozens of potential vulnerabilities have been patched by Apple in that time.
The MOAB project was started by security researchers who decided to release their findings publicly because they got mad when Apple outright denied some existing vulnerabilities they found.
That doesn't explain why they chose to give the same treatment to VLC, OmniGroup, and Panic.
All that's being fought about now is WHICH senior executives and board members were at fault.
Uh, no. The SEC has cleared everyone at Apple but the former CFO and the former general counsel, both of whom where involved in backdating options granted to themselves from which they benefited. They're also the only people who would have had to know.
Since obviously Jobs rules Apple so loosely that this kind of thing can go on under his nose (cough) and just HAPPENS to have also happened at Pixar.
I've never heard anything to suggest that Jobs dictatorial style extends to details like proper filing of options grants, which are rightly the responsibility of the CFO and general counsel. As you said, backdating is legal and common if it's done right, and it's the job of the CFO, not the CEO, to make sure that it is.
Also, that similar issues happened at Pixar is unsurprising. The SEC is investigating hundreds of (mostly tech) companies for options backdating discrepancies during the 1997-2003 timeframe.
I really think their is a more of a "politcal" reason for not supporting OGG files
The reason is pretty simple and boring, which is why geeks have such a hard time believing it. Basically, Thompson has claimed that Ogg "probably" infringes on one or more of their patents, so nobody can say with certainty that supporting Ogg won't someday get them sued. The bigger makers would rather just pay a license fee up front than risk future litigation. Big companies are often quite timid.
He is the highest paid executive in the US, and still manages to get focus on his 1$ salary PR stunt.
Highest paid in 2006. He doesn't have huge stock option grants vesting every year. From the Forbes profile you linked to is very telling:
Total Compensation (2006) $646.60 mil
5-Year Compensation Total $650.17 mil
In other words, over 99% of his compensation for the past five years came from last year alone. During that time AAPL went from about $12 to over $100.
So under "free speech" it's legal for a shopkeeper to give out his customers' credit card numbers to anyone who asks.
That's nothing like what they're claiming at all. They're claiming that disclosing information to the government is protected speech under the First Amendment's right to petition the government. Note that it is only protected when it is part of petitioning the government, not "anyone who asks". If Verizon had shared the same information with anyone else, they would not be able to invoke this defense.
It is still more or less a horseshit argument, but most people seem to be misunderstanding it.
This doesn't mean what you think it does. Jobs holds about 138 million shares, of which there are over 2 billion. He isn't some kind of all-powerful ruler of Disney. He may have sway, but he's not in the same position of control as he is at Apple.
[...] but doesn't push for Disney [...]
How do you know he doesn't?
When asked about it, he hemmed and hawed, "Um, well, you see, video is different than audio...". Bull.
His point is that movies have never been available without some form of copy protection, so the argument that can be made with music doesn't work. That's not bull, it's true. I would suspect it's only going to become easier when the DRM-free music push (which happens to be lead by Jobs) turns out to be advantageous for the record companies.
They gave us something we didn't want in the first place, and now they're using the taking away of it to justify a higher price?
Judging by iTunes' sales, people wanted (or anyway didn't mind) DRMed music. People that didn't want (or did mind) it didn't buy it. Clearly, enough people think DRMed music is worth the current price to justify that price. Wouldn't you agree that DRM-free music is more valuable? Then why shouldn't the price be higher?
Wax cylinders -> Lps -> tapes -> Cds -> downloads - it just gets easier to move the data, but the price never goes down!
That should be a clue that the bulk of the cost of music comes from the content. It is music after all, not white noise.
Amazon has been working on their service for the last 8-12 months.
Apple has been working on their service for four years. So what? Also, The link doesn't say anything about DRM-free music. In fact, it says "yes, it's fair to say this is going to be YAPFSS -- yet another PlaysForSure service". Every story I can find about DRM-free content from Amazon has come after Apple's DRM-free deal with EMI.
World of Warcraft is at least ten times as popular but does not get anywhere near the same coverage as Second Life does.
There just isn't much "new" going on in connection with World of Warcraft. Second Life has considerably more novelty, hence it gets more coverage. Even your example, the whorecraft story, may be "funny", but it isn't new or interesting at all -- does anyone really think that hasn't been going on for ages? Besides, if you're looking for "teh lulz", try Digg or Fark or Reddit instead. Slashdot doesn't really do enough volume to warrant posting every tiny story.
Quite right, and moreover, since it is a "lost trade secret", I would argue it has now become "common knowledge." I don't see how any law (DMCA, copyright, etc.) can be used to suppress common knowledge.
That's not how trade secret law works. It wasn't common knowledge at one point, and now it is, by way of the actions of many people. What they're saying is that they're planning to go after those people for divulging their trade secrets. They aren't trying to suppress the key (anymore), because they don't need to -- they just revoke the key, and it will no longer work on new HD-DVDs.
Whether such a key qualifies as a trade secret is up to a judge to decide, but they will argue that keeping such a key secret is vital to their business, and that they made reasonable efforts to keep it a secret. In other words, that it was valuable because it wasn't common knowledge. That's what makes a trade secret legally different than just a secret.
There are over a million Slashdot logins. Even assuming that only 5% of those are active and posting users, you're still making a generalization about 50,000 opinions based on a few hundred comments. "Everyone", my ass.
No, and it's telling that your knee-jerk reaction is to imply that I do. God forbid anybody but an Apple employee would think you're full of shit.
It is common knowledge that iPods batteries loose their ability to power the device in an extremely short amount of time if regularly used. Many studies have consistently shown how quick the iPod breaks (some models at almost 30% within 1 year!!!!) and the fact that very few remain of the 1st generation is empirical proof of their numerous design flaws.
Four exclamation points and zero sources. Waving your hands and saying "Wikipedia" doesn't fly, either. An example of the "many good sources" you linked to:
Citation 44 is a fluff piece of quotes that only makes reference to the inconclusive MacInTouch survey below.
Citation 45 is an interview about a book that only refers to the iPod in passing.
Citation 46 is the MacInTouch survey which begins with a note that "The results are interesting, but comments we collected indicate that the true iPod failure rate may be lower than it appears.", and goes on to say "Many readers acknowledged damage or accident as the cause of failure.", and "Many readers reported their original 5 GB, first-generation iPods are still running strong -- some with battery replacements, some with original batteries that still last several hours.", and so on. It also represents and extremely small sample of self-selected participants.
Citation 47 is a description of how to replace the hard disk.
Citations 48, 49, 50 are all about iPod nano screen scratches.
So, which of these were you referring to when you linked to that section? Or were you just too lazy to link to the "Battery Issues" section, which also doesn't support your statements?
I want to know about this "common knowledge" and "multiple studies" and "empirical proof". All you've provided is exclamation points.
Slashdot Mirror
Wifi is a great feature to have but it is no replacement for an SD card. An SD card can be removed from the phone and plugged into a computer when you get to where you are going where the files can be transferred. Relying on Internet access is never a good idea although it is more and more reliable these days on phones.
Are you saying that WiFi is less common than SD card slots? Or do you just carry around an SD card reader everywhere you go? If it's the former, you're nuts. If it's the latter, you're I don't understand how you can make a generalization.
The question is how quickly their corporate cultures can switch round...
Regardless of the industry, the answer to this question is consistently "not fast enough". When established market leaders (read: dinosaurs) get blind-sided by new entrants, they have a tendency to respond first by redoubling their efforts toward mediocrity, and second by simply trying to copy. Eventually, there are shifts in senior management, memos get passed around, and finally a new idea. It's as though nobody is willing to admit that they were wrong, that their products had been crappy all along, and that they have no idea what they are doing. Humility is not a word you hear often in corporate circles.
iPhone will probably have POP3 access to mailboxes like most current smartphones do.
.Mac (at least) will support push IMAP on the iPhone.
According to the keynote announcement, it also has push IMAP. If your business is built on open standards like IMAP, instead of (say) RIM and Exchange, you're golden. Also, for non-corporate users, Yahoo! and
Apple stated in no uncertain terms that there would not be third-party apps on the iPhone, except through Apple.
If by "no uncertain terms", you mean "very uncertain terms, indeed", then you're right. Clearly, people interpreted earlier statements quite differently. I for one never understood them to mean that there would be no third-party development, and I am not alone.
In fact, why not some sort of HTML-based mini-apps, like widgets perhaps? Oh wait...
Oh, but then they'd have to ship new developer tools for making widgets. Oh wait...
Well, still, developers wouldn't feel limited if they had to do everything in JavaScript. If only you could use Cocoa in a widget. Oh wait...
Has anyone seriously believed that there wouldn't be third-party development for the iPhone? I was under the impression that the answer to that question was pretty obvious. The only question has been what form it would take, and even that is pretty obvious if you just look at the thing: Dashboard!
For starters, the interface has a lot of the same visual elements as Dashboard. The grille/tray, rounded-glass squares, identical icons. Hell, identical set of apps as the default set of Dashboard widgets. Dead giveaway. And why shouldn't it be the same set of apps? Apart from email, the main reason to have an internet-connected phone is for quickly fetching bite-sized chunks of information: exactly the sort of thing that widgets are good for.
Consider also that typical widgets take up very little memory and about the same amount of screen real estate as is available on the iPhone. On a Mac, this is because it is expected that you'll be looking at a bunch at the same time, but on the iPhone it's a perfect fit. For existing widgets, it's trivial to either modify the interface to fit the iPhone's screen or load a different interface depending on the platform.
There's no reason why every existing widget couldn't easily be made to run on iPhone, something that isn't true for existing desktop applications. That means thousands of applications available as soon as Apple allows it. Hell, developers don't even need to own or have access to an iPhone to be able to write applications for it. And before anyone screams "JavaScript Sucks", remember that Dashboard widgets can work with Cocoa, too. Off hand I can't think of much that you can't do in a widget. (For a good time, open up the Quartz Composer template included with Dashcode and ask yourself how much fun it would be if you could touch the cube.)
I know there a lot of doubters, but I think that iPhone is going to become the easiest mobile platform to develop third-party apps for.
Apple *is* known for badly-made shoddy products.
Only among an extremely shrill minority. Most of us have realized by now that problems with Apple products just get a lot more press than problems with any other brand, whether or not it's a serious or widespread issue. The recent "6-bit screens" fiasco is a good example, wherein every PC manufacturer uses 6-bit panels for high-density displays, but Apple gets all of the bad press for it.
The whole premise behind the FCC was that if spectrum was unregulated you would have a tragedy of the commons were everybody would pollute it so much that it would become unusable. However in practice that has turned out to be a complete and absolute lie.
So there is no such thing as interference? It doesn't ever happen? Anywhere? Ever? Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
How did they solve this in the iPhone, then? You can get 20 of them for $10,000.
That should be a clue that they used a different technique. Which we already knew from context. I'm not intimately familiar with Apple's patent filings or those of Fingerworks (whom they purchased), else I'd tell you exactly how it works. However, I do know that it is unlike the FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) technique used by Jeff Han and the similar approach used by Microsoft, which require rear projection and do not scale down to iPhone-size. Similarly, I would doubt that what is used in the iPhone would scale up to 40+ inches. Just because two technologies appear similar does not mean they are interchangeable.
There is a company that you send them your iMac they send it back with a touch screen on it. These guys are like in a garage somewhere. At no time will you find a rear-projection system installed in your iMac due to this.
TrollTouch will install a single-point analog resistive touchscreen. This is not multi-touch.
Microsoft is doing such outrageous low-tech and poor design you have to make an ass out of yourself just to try and defend it.
Who is defending it? All I said was that they did it they way they did because of certain limitations the poster wasn't aware of. The only "attacking" here is you.
Ir cameras and rear-projection? Surely this is the multi-touch screen of the 1970's.
I'll point out that even the wildy popular video of Jeff Han's demo uses a camera and rear projection. You clearly know nothing of the problems involved, and the existing research. Or maybe you'd like to cite an example of multi-touch from the 70s, which is earlier than any that I've ever heard of.
Surely a flat-screen technology (TFT, Plasma, whatever) coupled with one of the newer multi-touch sensitive technologies would be better?
Microsoft is doing it this way because that's what they have patented and/or bought. Also, many multi-touch technologies effectively require rear-projection. Otherwise the display layer has to be behind the touch layer, rather than projected onto it. It means the point on screen that you mean to touch and the point on the table that you have to touch are separated by half an inch or more, breaking the illusion and the precision. Not so good in a $10,000 device.
Apple has been patenting the hell out of the multitouch UI concept
There's more than one way to do multitouch. Plenty enough for Microsoft, Apple, Perceptive Pixel (Jeff Han's company), and probably half a dozen groups at MIT to do very similar things in different ways. Unfortunately, all of them but Han claims (in marketing-speak) to have invented the idea, but then everyone on the web saw Han's video first, so they think he invented the idea and everyone else is copying him. Sigh.
Hidden in the recent demo for the Iphone was a glimpse of Apple's multitouch technology. If you knew where to look, it was hidden in plain site during the demo of the photo album and rolodex functions.
"Hidden"? It was specifically talked about as a feature of the phone.
Still, someone had to find those bugs, and it was likely not the programmers themselves, or they would probably have been fixed before shipping.
Ah, but much of what Apple ends up patching in updates like these isn't actually Apple-specific, but rather fixes to open source stuff they ship. This update has fixes for bind, fetchmail, ruby, and screen, to name a few. Those bugs could have been found by users or programmers on a dozen other platforms.
This article says this is the first exploit fixed that hasn't been logged on the MOAB project.
You misunderstand. This is the first update that doesn't patch anything listed by MOAB. That doesn't mean that everything patched before was. MOAB only listed 31 bugs, whereas dozens of potential vulnerabilities have been patched by Apple in that time.
The MOAB project was started by security researchers who decided to release their findings publicly because they got mad when Apple outright denied some existing vulnerabilities they found.
That doesn't explain why they chose to give the same treatment to VLC, OmniGroup, and Panic.
All that's being fought about now is WHICH senior executives and board members were at fault.
Uh, no. The SEC has cleared everyone at Apple but the former CFO and the former general counsel, both of whom where involved in backdating options granted to themselves from which they benefited. They're also the only people who would have had to know.
Since obviously Jobs rules Apple so loosely that this kind of thing can go on under his nose (cough) and just HAPPENS to have also happened at Pixar.
I've never heard anything to suggest that Jobs dictatorial style extends to details like proper filing of options grants, which are rightly the responsibility of the CFO and general counsel. As you said, backdating is legal and common if it's done right, and it's the job of the CFO, not the CEO, to make sure that it is.
Also, that similar issues happened at Pixar is unsurprising. The SEC is investigating hundreds of (mostly tech) companies for options backdating discrepancies during the 1997-2003 timeframe.
I really think their is a more of a "politcal" reason for not supporting OGG files
The reason is pretty simple and boring, which is why geeks have such a hard time believing it. Basically, Thompson has claimed that Ogg "probably" infringes on one or more of their patents, so nobody can say with certainty that supporting Ogg won't someday get them sued. The bigger makers would rather just pay a license fee up front than risk future litigation. Big companies are often quite timid.
He is the highest paid executive in the US, and still manages to get focus on his 1$ salary PR stunt.
Highest paid in 2006. He doesn't have huge stock option grants vesting every year. From the Forbes profile you linked to is very telling:
Total Compensation (2006)
$646.60 mil
5-Year Compensation Total
$650.17 mil
In other words, over 99% of his compensation for the past five years came from last year alone. During that time AAPL went from about $12 to over $100.
So under "free speech" it's legal for a shopkeeper to give out his customers' credit card numbers to anyone who asks.
That's nothing like what they're claiming at all. They're claiming that disclosing information to the government is protected speech under the First Amendment's right to petition the government. Note that it is only protected when it is part of petitioning the government, not "anyone who asks". If Verizon had shared the same information with anyone else, they would not be able to invoke this defense.
It is still more or less a horseshit argument, but most people seem to be misunderstanding it.
If this were the case, then copyright, medical privacy laws, laws protecting identity theft, etc. would all be unconstitutional.
There is a difference between "not in the Constitution" and "contrary to the Constitution" (i.e. unconstitutional).
Jobs is the single largest shareholder in Disney
This doesn't mean what you think it does. Jobs holds about 138 million shares, of which there are over 2 billion. He isn't some kind of all-powerful ruler of Disney. He may have sway, but he's not in the same position of control as he is at Apple.
[...] but doesn't push for Disney [...]
How do you know he doesn't?
When asked about it, he hemmed and hawed, "Um, well, you see, video is different than audio...". Bull.
His point is that movies have never been available without some form of copy protection, so the argument that can be made with music doesn't work. That's not bull, it's true. I would suspect it's only going to become easier when the DRM-free music push (which happens to be lead by Jobs) turns out to be advantageous for the record companies.
They gave us something we didn't want in the first place, and now they're using the taking away of it to justify a higher price?
Judging by iTunes' sales, people wanted (or anyway didn't mind) DRMed music. People that didn't want (or did mind) it didn't buy it. Clearly, enough people think DRMed music is worth the current price to justify that price. Wouldn't you agree that DRM-free music is more valuable? Then why shouldn't the price be higher?
Wax cylinders -> Lps -> tapes -> Cds -> downloads - it just gets easier to move the data, but the price never goes down!
That should be a clue that the bulk of the cost of music comes from the content. It is music after all, not white noise.
Amazon has been working on their service for the last 8-12 months.
Apple has been working on their service for four years. So what? Also, The link doesn't say anything about DRM-free music. In fact, it says "yes, it's fair to say this is going to be YAPFSS -- yet another PlaysForSure service". Every story I can find about DRM-free content from Amazon has come after Apple's DRM-free deal with EMI.
World of Warcraft is at least ten times as popular but does not get anywhere near the same coverage as Second Life does.
There just isn't much "new" going on in connection with World of Warcraft. Second Life has considerably more novelty, hence it gets more coverage. Even your example, the whorecraft story, may be "funny", but it isn't new or interesting at all -- does anyone really think that hasn't been going on for ages? Besides, if you're looking for "teh lulz", try Digg or Fark or Reddit instead. Slashdot doesn't really do enough volume to warrant posting every tiny story.
Quite right, and moreover, since it is a "lost trade secret", I would argue it has now become "common knowledge." I don't see how any law (DMCA, copyright, etc.) can be used to suppress common knowledge.
That's not how trade secret law works. It wasn't common knowledge at one point, and now it is, by way of the actions of many people. What they're saying is that they're planning to go after those people for divulging their trade secrets. They aren't trying to suppress the key (anymore), because they don't need to -- they just revoke the key, and it will no longer work on new HD-DVDs.
Whether such a key qualifies as a trade secret is up to a judge to decide, but they will argue that keeping such a key secret is vital to their business, and that they made reasonable efforts to keep it a secret. In other words, that it was valuable because it wasn't common knowledge. That's what makes a trade secret legally different than just a secret.
I love the fact that everyone here is...
There are over a million Slashdot logins. Even assuming that only 5% of those are active and posting users, you're still making a generalization about 50,000 opinions based on a few hundred comments. "Everyone", my ass.
Do you like work for Apple or something?
No, and it's telling that your knee-jerk reaction is to imply that I do. God forbid anybody but an Apple employee would think you're full of shit.
It is common knowledge that iPods batteries loose their ability to power the device in an extremely short amount of time if regularly used. Many studies have consistently shown how quick the iPod breaks (some models at almost 30% within 1 year!!!!) and the fact that very few remain of the 1st generation is empirical proof of their numerous design flaws.
Four exclamation points and zero sources. Waving your hands and saying "Wikipedia" doesn't fly, either. An example of the "many good sources" you linked to:
Citation 44 is a fluff piece of quotes that only makes reference to the inconclusive MacInTouch survey below.
Citation 45 is an interview about a book that only refers to the iPod in passing.
Citation 46 is the MacInTouch survey which begins with a note that "The results are interesting, but comments we collected indicate that the true iPod failure rate may be lower than it appears.", and goes on to say "Many readers acknowledged damage or accident as the cause of failure.", and "Many readers reported their original 5 GB, first-generation iPods are still running strong -- some with battery replacements, some with original batteries that still last several hours.", and so on. It also represents and extremely small sample of self-selected participants.
Citation 47 is a description of how to replace the hard disk.
Citations 48, 49, 50 are all about iPod nano screen scratches.
So, which of these were you referring to when you linked to that section? Or were you just too lazy to link to the "Battery Issues" section, which also doesn't support your statements?
I want to know about this "common knowledge" and "multiple studies" and "empirical proof". All you've provided is exclamation points.