Ha! It's been Ma BellSouth for years. BellSouth just bought up AT&T's wireless services, and most everything of value left in AT&T, SBC is getting their land lines and that's it. SBC has bought all of that old fangled technology, and BellSouth bought all of AT&T's investments in the future.
Did ya hear when Bill Gates recently named BellSouth as one of the companies lined up with MS in a strategic partnership for delivering content to MS based media centers?
I used to do tech suport for BellSouth, back when it didn't suck ass. I was privy to most of this stuff back when it was hush hush under my NDA. I previewed so much technology and saw so many attempts to ramp up broadband acceptance and push digital media hard. Every few months a higher speed of broadband would become available, the existing tech would get cheaper, more incentives would crop up to wean users off of dial up and we were giving out another slew of free MovieLink accounts. All while offering ridiculous discounts to people who bought the whole communications stack from us - broadband, cellphone, landline, and for some markets, even cable.
SBC is the second of the baby bells. BellSouth is number 1.
We have to stop Steam now. Even though in the current arrangement (I believe) it's possible to have purchased half life 2 without being tied to steam, that doesn't excuse the idiocy that Valve and others are trying to promote.
I want a world where when I buy shit I own it, and where that ownership is not artificially tied to a single vendor's continued existence. It's just like the argument for open standards. When a vendor goes, so does your ability to use products which depend on closed file formats and protocols.
I can't get to the article, but an alphabetic keyboard is just plain dumb.
1) The QWERTY keyboard is established tech 2) I see no empirical evidence that alphabetic is easier to learn or use 3) Alphabetic keyboards overwork one area of the keyboard 4) It would be difficult, if not impossible, to arrange keys to allow alternating of hands, which speeds typing.
Can anyone list any real reason that this is better? Other than the reduced number of keys, of course.
Put the pressure on right now, seriously. Then never, ever work with them or any other outsourcing company that "protects the source" by wrapping it up somehow.
I've worked with these "reputable" outsourcers before. Really, there is a crop of programming companies that have turned up in the last few years that make the 15 year old outsourcing companies sick. I've been in a position where I had an internally modified GPL source, needed a feature added, and when the CTO decided to push that work out of house, we wound up with a binary and that's it. And it didn't do what we needed it to do.
The company you're working with has probably been behaving this way as long as it's been around, but this shit needs to stop. Lay down the law and pull out, as much and as fast as you can. There are reputable companies who do this kind of work. However, it is almost always small companies, which also release real products that will get you the best result - like Omni, who makes OmniWeb for the Mac, also was well known for being outsourced to for game porting. Look for someone who also makes a product, then you'll have found someone potentially worth working with
but that's just plain nuts. If they write B and insert it into A, how can the license agreements with A prevent you from adding the same code to your own product C?
Licences are strane things boyo. I once heared of a licence that extended to all derived works. So if I licenced product A under this licence, and created derived product B from it, and put code I had written for product B into product C, the C would have to be licenced the same as product A.
I bet you've heared of this licence yourself. It's called the GPL.
Now, before someone flames me, there are legitimate cases where the GPL doesn't cause this problem, in the case where you are, for example, adding subsystems to the Linux kernel. There is some reason to consider, say, large portions of ReiserFS 4 to be potentially relicencable, since they aren't linux specific, and are isolated from even the kernel VFS via Reiser's own VFS. This code probably isn't a derived work in any sense (Linus said something similar about Nvidia binary drivers a while back).
Despite this, if someone forked Linux or portions of Linux to create another OS (say, Syllable, an OS which is not directly derived from Linux, but has huge portions of code from Linux), that OS would be GPL. You then can't shove Syllable code into MS Windows.
The question is not "Is this nuts" the question is "Is this what the original Unix licence actually means"
It's the end of the internet as we know it and I feel fine.
Back when I worked for ByRegion (the company that owns, amongst other things, http://jukeboxalive.com/) I was put on the design team for a rather ambitious project to design a generic class hierarchy into which all the various parts of a website could be fit. Talking about the whole design would both bore you and take a while, but the goal of cutting down on development time had the side effect of allowing some really powerful aggregation schemes, since the hierarchy was self organizing and indexing. We started to jokingly call it Internet2 (which later became the name of another project . ..)
This is a realistic version of that dream. It's like google but instead of searching for a specific website or chunk of info, you intentionally seek related but diverging chunks of info.
I don't have a problem with people calling evolution a theory. They are ignorant, and ignorance is the predominant state of mind on the planet. And that includes us slashdotters (excepting UID under 1000, of course).
To willfully ignore the argument behind evolution, to willfully ignore the terms used in science, and to willfully ignore the hard work and thought that brought the modern world the immense luxury available to those fortunate enough to be born in the right places. Which usually includes the people making the arguments.
Evolution is both a theory AND a fact. To clarify, finally, to those of you not in the above category whose ignorance is not willfull: Evolution is a theory because
1) There is a limitation to which man can trust his senses. You cannot prove that this isn't all a dream.
2) There is a limitation to which man can trust the empirical world (I'm getting cartesion aren't I?). We have no way of knowing that the world wasn't made by a malevolent force - satan, the demiurge, or whomever.
All of Science (in fact, almost all of human thought) is subject to those two things. But there is a third
3)Given that the world is not purposefully decieving us evolution happened, period, end of story. But it cannot be empirically demonstrated, or rationally proven that it HAD to. Ergo it is a theory, not a law. Evolution could stop right now, for all we know. But animals change, period, and animals now are the decendents of animals before, shaped by selection and fitness pressures.
TaDa! Now stop spending my tax money on stupid stickers, and spend it on computers in underprivilaged neighboorhoods, teacher raises, and things people need.
What news is this? There have been local exploits in the Linux kernel before, and there will be again. This is less news than the Debian break in a while back - that was worth mentioning because a major Linux installation was comprimised with an unknown kernel vulnerability. But come on! The last few 2.4 kernels (IIRC) have included patches to fix local root exploits. Marcello didn't even rush those out the door. This exploit certainly doesn't seem especially unusual nor was there an exploit in the wild.
Newsflash kids! Linux isn't perfect! Certainly not Linux specific API extensions like uselib. Move along, this isn't the kernel vulnerability you are looking for.
You are completely right of course. But your tone is overly critical. What I see is a group of people in a public forum doing several things:
1)They are discussing whether or not there is a real danger - deciding whether or not to vote with their wallet
2)They are disseminating information - in other words, they are letting people know about the DRM features and their implications, so others can as well vote with their wallet
3)They are making their decision to not purchase the product and the reasons why a matter of public record. When Intel determines that sales are below expected numbers, we want Intel to know that the reason is DRM, and not processor speed, or missing features.
Voting with one's wallet is a bit more than not purchasing something. Bitching is in fact requisite. That's how a marketplace, both of ideas and of commerce, works.
There is still one company marketing high end services running Windows - Unisys IS the Windows Mainframe market. And while Unisys does suck balls, that doesn't mean that they don't command marketshare or respect
2) Adam Mathes is one of those guys I always though really understood the internet as a distributed ad hoc metadata generation system. He's also pretty funny. He was one of the cofounders of the snarky webzine Uber.nu (which I used to write for). He combined the two and invented googlebombing, which earned him a certain degree of noteriety.
3) I think there is nothing new in these criticisms of distributed ad hoc systems. It's the same with google, and wikipedia. You sacrifice some depth and accuracy for breadth, And as your algorithms become more sophisticated they can organically uncover the inconsistencies and work around them.
Historically, PARC is much like any other (good) think tank. Neat ideas, poor implementations, left for others to mature.
The grandparent's claim that PARC will help Fujitsu produce stable products is amusing because of this. The people who made the mouse, GUI, WYSIWYG, and ethernet make money are Apple, Apple, Apple, and 3COM, respectively, not PARC
I think you misunderstand the author when he calls security and stability "red herrings". We're speaking theoretically on web browser design - the author basically claims that if security and stability ever become major marketing points, then the whole market has failed to meet minimal standards. "security and stability" are basically a given once you are talking about UI design.
The fact that Firefox can gain ground on IE based on security (spyware, exploits) shows that IE isn't meeting basic software quality control. The fact that Gecko still has rendering issue is the same. The fact that both MS and Mozilla.org think of these things as advocacy issues (Make spyware illegal! Stomp out IE specific pages!) only ignores the problem.
Thanks for getting it. It's a totally incalculable measure, and as such, all these already biased studies are meaningless, except as marketing.
But when you tell your boss that you run Linux because it has higher uptime, you're translating from "This makes my job easier" - aka employee speak - to "This makes production cheaper" - aka management speak, also known this week as TCO.
We can change the TLA all we want, and MS, and Sun, and OSDL, and IBM, and anyone else playing the game will, whenever it suits them. We can talk licencing price, support cost, usability, learnability, training costs, yadda yadda, but it all means "How can I change these numbers and the perspective to make it look like my competition's product makes it harder for my customers to make _their_ products."
TCO remains the holy grail of metics - unattainable, but ultimately what everyone wants to know, regardless of what we are calling it this week. It's how MS beat Apple - commodity hardware beat proprietary, the TCO was smaller.
The corporate environment is easier than the home user environment in this regard not the other way around.
Linux and other Unices provide a much more granular and mature customization system and access control. Even just plain user/group/world read/write/execute is better than the windows layout.
Creating simple systems that only do email, the web, blah blah blah is very easy in Linux. In some senses it can't be done in windows, certainly without kiosk software, and at that point, it's hard to lock down the custom apps I guarentee that a business needs to run.
Corporate "users" never mess with their box, no matter the OS. That's the admins job. You can't tell me that Thunderbird, Firefox, and Abiword on Linux are any harder on Joe Dumbass than say, Thunderbird, Firefox, and Abiword in Windows.
A company makes a product. Technology is a means to an end. TCO is the TOTAL cost (in cash, lost sales, employee time, overhead) of the technology.
TCO includes: the cost to initially purchase the software, the cost in lost time as users and admins to learn new interfaces, the cost in paying employees in maintaining the system, the cost in purchasing obscure or less capable hardware supported by the technology, the cost in lost time in porting/writing/purchasing applications to run in the environment, and on and on.
TCO is NOT cost of purchase + cost of support. And it is also always an estimate because of so many variables it must encompass - that's why there are so many studies about TCO. It's an ambiguous metric.
TCO is all that matters, TCO is all that matters, TCO is all that matters.
I'm building a new embedded device. It needs an OS. What goes there? Hint: an OS that is demonstrably easy to port, with good docs for doing so.
I'm building a new piece of hardware. What platform provides the most robust system for developing a reference driver. Hint: One that doesn't create and licencing problems, and has a system designed to make drivers work across archetectures.
I'm teaching OS design in a graduate program - what OS do I use for examples? Hint: One that has a focus on cleanliness of design, architecture independence, and frees my students to use its code in whatever post graduate work they do, regardless of licence?
Look, trash AOL all you want to (really, I enjoy it!), but this is built on two technologies - one is the playback engine in Winamp (which, as I recall, was a fork of a BSD licenced cross platform player) and XUL.
That means that a major technology company is using XUL to build their apps. Is anyone putting this together with the previous announcment that there is a new Netscape - sure, it uses the IE rendering engine (triton) on IE specific sites, but thats embedded in an XUL interface!
AOL is actually _using_ the technology it developed when it ran Mozilla. This could mean AMP and AOL come to Linux/*BSD/Haiku/Amiga whatever alternative OS supported by XUL, same as Moz already does. It's like XUL brings rich client application written using thing client technologies - which is a big win for both the developer and alternative OS crowds.
So here is what a little thought and research shows.
-ThinkSecret, the preeminent Apple rumor site, shows no sign of iTunes rumors in the months surrounding release, including when Apple filed for the trademark. Do we really think that this guy follows Apple more than these guys?
-There is no sign that Apple has been asked by this guy to buy the domain. The squatting theory seems to hold little water in that regard
-This guy does have a legit music service, and has a note on the front page about the domain and the conflict with apple
-QuickQuid.com however, has only been around for a few months. CyberBritain.com the guys main website lists it as a new service.
-The Wayback machine has no archive of the site. This may be because it didn't point anywhere prior to August.
My view? The guy is a sleezeball, who probably registered the domain legitimately. I used to work for a small web company, and we had about half a dozen unused domain names - registered for half a dozen reasons, planned projects that never launched, etc. In 2000, it was 'i' everything. iTunes would have been a natural thought - hell APPLE registered itunes.com in '99, years before applying for a trademark, or launching the product.
Who should get the domain is a bit more of a fuzzy question. But no doubt that this guy has less than pure intentions with the name, now that apple has a same named service.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha! It's been Ma BellSouth for years. BellSouth just bought up AT&T's wireless services, and most everything of value left in AT&T, SBC is getting their land lines and that's it. SBC has bought all of that old fangled technology, and BellSouth bought all of AT&T's investments in the future.
Did ya hear when Bill Gates recently named BellSouth as one of the companies lined up with MS in a strategic partnership for delivering content to MS based media centers?
I used to do tech suport for BellSouth, back when it didn't suck ass. I was privy to most of this stuff back when it was hush hush under my NDA. I previewed so much technology and saw so many attempts to ramp up broadband acceptance and push digital media hard. Every few months a higher speed of broadband would become available, the existing tech would get cheaper, more incentives would crop up to wean users off of dial up and we were giving out another slew of free MovieLink accounts. All while offering ridiculous discounts to people who bought the whole communications stack from us - broadband, cellphone, landline, and for some markets, even cable.
SBC is the second of the baby bells. BellSouth is number 1.
We have to stop Steam now. Even though in the current arrangement (I believe) it's possible to have purchased half life 2 without being tied to steam, that doesn't excuse the idiocy that Valve and others are trying to promote.
I want a world where when I buy shit I own it, and where that ownership is not artificially tied to a single vendor's continued existence. It's just like the argument for open standards. When a vendor goes, so does your ability to use products which depend on closed file formats and protocols.
Actually, Fitts law says that right where your mouse already is is the easist thing to access. So Fitts law actually encourages this kind of behaviour
I can't get to the article, but an alphabetic keyboard is just plain dumb.
1) The QWERTY keyboard is established tech
2) I see no empirical evidence that alphabetic is easier to learn or use
3) Alphabetic keyboards overwork one area of the keyboard
4) It would be difficult, if not impossible, to arrange keys to allow alternating of hands, which speeds typing.
Can anyone list any real reason that this is better? Other than the reduced number of keys, of course.
Put the pressure on right now, seriously. Then never, ever work with them or any other outsourcing company that "protects the source" by wrapping it up somehow.
I've worked with these "reputable" outsourcers before. Really, there is a crop of programming companies that have turned up in the last few years that make the 15 year old outsourcing companies sick. I've been in a position where I had an internally modified GPL source, needed a feature added, and when the CTO decided to push that work out of house, we wound up with a binary and that's it. And it didn't do what we needed it to do.
The company you're working with has probably been behaving this way as long as it's been around, but this shit needs to stop. Lay down the law and pull out, as much and as fast as you can. There are reputable companies who do this kind of work. However, it is almost always small companies, which also release real products that will get you the best result - like Omni, who makes OmniWeb for the Mac, also was well known for being outsourced to for game porting. Look for someone who also makes a product, then you'll have found someone potentially worth working with
Licences are strane things boyo. I once heared of a licence that extended to all derived works. So if I licenced product A under this licence, and created derived product B from it, and put code I had written for product B into product C, the C would have to be licenced the same as product A.
I bet you've heared of this licence yourself. It's called the GPL.
Now, before someone flames me, there are legitimate cases where the GPL doesn't cause this problem, in the case where you are, for example, adding subsystems to the Linux kernel. There is some reason to consider, say, large portions of ReiserFS 4 to be potentially relicencable, since they aren't linux specific, and are isolated from even the kernel VFS via Reiser's own VFS. This code probably isn't a derived work in any sense (Linus said something similar about Nvidia binary drivers a while back).
Despite this, if someone forked Linux or portions of Linux to create another OS (say, Syllable, an OS which is not directly derived from Linux, but has huge portions of code from Linux), that OS would be GPL. You then can't shove Syllable code into MS Windows.
The question is not "Is this nuts" the question is "Is this what the original Unix licence actually means"
Actually, we're powered by a fission reactor.
The muscles just translates that to kinetic energy.
It's the end of the internet as we know it and I feel fine.
.)
Back when I worked for ByRegion (the company that owns, amongst other things, http://jukeboxalive.com/) I was put on the design team for a rather ambitious project to design a generic class hierarchy into which all the various parts of a website could be fit. Talking about the whole design would both bore you and take a while, but the goal of cutting down on development time had the side effect of allowing some really powerful aggregation schemes, since the hierarchy was self organizing and indexing. We started to jokingly call it Internet2 (which later became the name of another project . .
This is a realistic version of that dream. It's like google but instead of searching for a specific website or chunk of info, you intentionally seek related but diverging chunks of info.
Higher information density gives me a boner.
aKregator? They put a "K" in aggregator?
Just stop. Just - just stop. Please.
I don't have a problem with people calling evolution a theory. They are ignorant, and ignorance is the predominant state of mind on the planet. And that includes us slashdotters (excepting UID under 1000, of course).
To willfully ignore the argument behind evolution, to willfully ignore the terms used in science, and to willfully ignore the hard work and thought that brought the modern world the immense luxury available to those fortunate enough to be born in the right places. Which usually includes the people making the arguments.
Evolution is both a theory AND a fact. To clarify, finally, to those of you not in the above category whose ignorance is not willfull: Evolution is a theory because
1) There is a limitation to which man can trust his senses. You cannot prove that this isn't all a dream.
2) There is a limitation to which man can trust the empirical world (I'm getting cartesion aren't I?). We have no way of knowing that the world wasn't made by a malevolent force - satan, the demiurge, or whomever.
All of Science (in fact, almost all of human thought) is subject to those two things. But there is a third
3)Given that the world is not purposefully decieving us evolution happened, period, end of story. But it cannot be empirically demonstrated, or rationally proven that it HAD to. Ergo it is a theory, not a law. Evolution could stop right now, for all we know. But animals change, period, and animals now are the decendents of animals before, shaped by selection and fitness pressures.
TaDa! Now stop spending my tax money on stupid stickers, and spend it on computers in underprivilaged neighboorhoods, teacher raises, and things people need.
What news is this? There have been local exploits in the Linux kernel before, and there will be again. This is less news than the Debian break in a while back - that was worth mentioning because a major Linux installation was comprimised with an unknown kernel vulnerability. But come on! The last few 2.4 kernels (IIRC) have included patches to fix local root exploits. Marcello didn't even rush those out the door. This exploit certainly doesn't seem especially unusual nor was there an exploit in the wild.
Newsflash kids! Linux isn't perfect! Certainly not Linux specific API extensions like uselib. Move along, this isn't the kernel vulnerability you are looking for.
You are completely right of course. But your tone is overly critical. What I see is a group of people in a public forum doing several things:
1)They are discussing whether or not there is a real danger - deciding whether or not to vote with their wallet
2)They are disseminating information - in other words, they are letting people know about the DRM features and their implications, so others can as well vote with their wallet
3)They are making their decision to not purchase the product and the reasons why a matter of public record. When Intel determines that sales are below expected numbers, we want Intel to know that the reason is DRM, and not processor speed, or missing features.
Voting with one's wallet is a bit more than not purchasing something. Bitching is in fact requisite. That's how a marketplace, both of ideas and of commerce, works.
There is still one company marketing high end services running Windows - Unisys IS the Windows Mainframe market. And while Unisys does suck balls, that doesn't mean that they don't command marketshare or respect
1) Most incomprehensible /. blurb EVAR
2) Adam Mathes is one of those guys I always though really understood the internet as a distributed ad hoc metadata generation system. He's also pretty funny. He was one of the cofounders of the snarky webzine Uber.nu (which I used to write for). He combined the two and invented googlebombing, which earned him a certain degree of noteriety.
3) I think there is nothing new in these criticisms of distributed ad hoc systems. It's the same with google, and wikipedia. You sacrifice some depth and accuracy for breadth, And as your algorithms become more sophisticated they can organically uncover the inconsistencies and work around them.
...but does it have breakout?
Historically, PARC is much like any other (good) think tank. Neat ideas, poor implementations, left for others to mature.
The grandparent's claim that PARC will help Fujitsu produce stable products is amusing because of this. The people who made the mouse, GUI, WYSIWYG, and ethernet make money are Apple, Apple, Apple, and 3COM, respectively, not PARC
That's right! Because PARC has such a _great_ history creating lasting tools and products!
I think you misunderstand the author when he calls security and stability "red herrings". We're speaking theoretically on web browser design - the author basically claims that if security and stability ever become major marketing points, then the whole market has failed to meet minimal standards. "security and stability" are basically a given once you are talking about UI design.
The fact that Firefox can gain ground on IE based on security (spyware, exploits) shows that IE isn't meeting basic software quality control. The fact that Gecko still has rendering issue is the same. The fact that both MS and Mozilla.org think of these things as advocacy issues (Make spyware illegal! Stomp out IE specific pages!) only ignores the problem.
Yes!
Thanks for getting it. It's a totally incalculable measure, and as such, all these already biased studies are meaningless, except as marketing.
But when you tell your boss that you run Linux because it has higher uptime, you're translating from "This makes my job easier" - aka employee speak - to "This makes production cheaper" - aka management speak, also known this week as TCO.
We can change the TLA all we want, and MS, and Sun, and OSDL, and IBM, and anyone else playing the game will, whenever it suits them. We can talk licencing price, support cost, usability, learnability, training costs, yadda yadda, but it all means "How can I change these numbers and the perspective to make it look like my competition's product makes it harder for my customers to make _their_ products."
TCO remains the holy grail of metics - unattainable, but ultimately what everyone wants to know, regardless of what we are calling it this week. It's how MS beat Apple - commodity hardware beat proprietary, the TCO was smaller.
Never loose sight of it.
The corporate environment is easier than the home user environment in this regard not the other way around.
Linux and other Unices provide a much more granular and mature customization system and access control. Even just plain user/group/world read/write/execute is better than the windows layout.
Creating simple systems that only do email, the web, blah blah blah is very easy in Linux. In some senses it can't be done in windows, certainly without kiosk software, and at that point, it's hard to lock down the custom apps I guarentee that a business needs to run.
Corporate "users" never mess with their box, no matter the OS. That's the admins job. You can't tell me that Thunderbird, Firefox, and Abiword on Linux are any harder on Joe Dumbass than say, Thunderbird, Firefox, and Abiword in Windows.
Listen to me very very carefully.
TCO is all that matters.
Say it again kids.
TCO is all that matters.
A company makes a product. Technology is a means to an end. TCO is the TOTAL cost (in cash, lost sales, employee time, overhead) of the technology.
TCO includes: the cost to initially purchase the software, the cost in lost time as users and admins to learn new interfaces, the cost in paying employees in maintaining the system, the cost in purchasing obscure or less capable hardware supported by the technology, the cost in lost time in porting/writing/purchasing applications to run in the environment, and on and on.
TCO is NOT cost of purchase + cost of support. And it is also always an estimate because of so many variables it must encompass - that's why there are so many studies about TCO. It's an ambiguous metric.
TCO is all that matters, TCO is all that matters, TCO is all that matters.
I'm building a new embedded device. It needs an OS. What goes there? Hint: an OS that is demonstrably easy to port, with good docs for doing so.
.
I'm building a new piece of hardware. What platform provides the most robust system for developing a reference driver. Hint: One that doesn't create and licencing problems, and has a system designed to make drivers work across archetectures.
I'm teaching OS design in a graduate program - what OS do I use for examples? Hint: One that has a focus on cleanliness of design, architecture independence, and frees my students to use its code in whatever post graduate work they do, regardless of licence?
I could keep going . .
Look, trash AOL all you want to (really, I enjoy it!), but this is built on two technologies - one is the playback engine in Winamp (which, as I recall, was a fork of a BSD licenced cross platform player) and XUL.
That means that a major technology company is using XUL to build their apps. Is anyone putting this together with the previous announcment that there is a new Netscape - sure, it uses the IE rendering engine (triton) on IE specific sites, but thats embedded in an XUL interface!
AOL is actually _using_ the technology it developed when it ran Mozilla. This could mean AMP and AOL come to Linux/*BSD/Haiku/Amiga whatever alternative OS supported by XUL, same as Moz already does. It's like XUL brings rich client application written using thing client technologies - which is a big win for both the developer and alternative OS crowds.
I'm ecstatic to see XUL being made mainstream.
So here is what a little thought and research shows.
-ThinkSecret, the preeminent Apple rumor site, shows no sign of iTunes rumors in the months surrounding release, including when Apple filed for the trademark. Do we really think that this guy follows Apple more than these guys?
-There is no sign that Apple has been asked by this guy to buy the domain. The squatting theory seems to hold little water in that regard
-This guy does have a legit music service, and has a note on the front page about the domain and the conflict with apple
-QuickQuid.com however, has only been around for a few months. CyberBritain.com the guys main website lists it as a new service.
-The Wayback machine has no archive of the site. This may be because it didn't point anywhere prior to August.
My view? The guy is a sleezeball, who probably registered the domain legitimately. I used to work for a small web company, and we had about half a dozen unused domain names - registered for half a dozen reasons, planned projects that never launched, etc. In 2000, it was 'i' everything. iTunes would have been a natural thought - hell APPLE registered itunes.com in '99, years before applying for a trademark, or launching the product.
Who should get the domain is a bit more of a fuzzy question. But no doubt that this guy has less than pure intentions with the name, now that apple has a same named service.
The main point was code is harder to write than read. That doesn't change based on quality level.
And nothing is like six thousand lines of code. Or, say 3 million (MS Office).