I think it's both: inexpensive downloads do drive iPod sales as well as play on iTunes, clearly a popular pasttime among Mac users.
Before Apple's music store, the future for music listeners looked pretty grim: even CDs were being listener-restricted in extraordinarily stupid ways (adding "imperceptible" hiss to the music, among others) that sometimes made them impossible to play on standard equipment--such as Macintoshes.
Apple was (probably) seeing a future in which not only would iPods not be able to play new music, but even Macintoshes might not play over-the-counter CDs.
The iTunes Music Store changed the direction of music digital restriction management. Where DRM was once heavily restrictive, the only way to compete with the IMS was to make DRM that was only lightly restrictive. If the industry maintains competition someone will eventually realize that letting music fans listen to their music will sell even better than restricting their ability to listen to music that they've purchased, and will not be pirated any more often.
However it goes, though, Apple is probably no longer quite as worried about a future where Macs and iPods cannot play music.
You're mistaking what Apple really wants. The reason Apple has not licensed their DRM is because of a secret Apple plan to kill all DRM.
What Apple is really trying to do here is force Real to negotiate DRM-free terms with the music companies. Once Real is able to sell music DRM-free, the rest of the online industry will be forced to follow suit. Microsoft will die, and the consumers will be able to play any music on any player, including the iPod.
The reason Apple chose Real is their known negotiation skills and the quality of their software. If anyone can get this done, it is Real.
Many, many years ago in Los Angeles I bought my first RGB monitor (to be used on a Radio Shack Color Computer III running OS/9).
It was a scam: the monitor did not work, and on opening it up I discovered that the main circuit board was completely cracked down the middle. Pissed off and having more time than brains, I took a solder gun and some wire, and carefully wired across each part of the board that needed it. To my surprise, the monitor worked once I did that, and I kept that monitor for about two years before selling the CoCo.
But infoworld does not. As far as I can tell from the headers I displayed in the previous post, infoworld's server does not provide such data. Without the last-modified or etag or something similar, there is no way to ask for a conditional get, because there is nothing to base the conditional on, and most likely the server doesn't know how to compare the conditional anyway since it clearly is not keeping track of when the document was last modified.
I could easily be getting the syntax wrong, but whenever I request that it only send me the xml feed if it has been last modified in the last fraction of a second, I still get the page back:
date > datestamp; curl --time-cond datestamp http://www.infoworld.com/rss/news.xml
This returns a bunch of xml.
Running the same command on Pastiche's xml feed returns, as I would expect, absolutely nothing:
date > datestamp; curl --time-cond datestamp http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/nerdfull.xml
So, he's writing from infoworld and complaining that RSS feed readers grab feeds whether the data has changed or not. So, I went to look for infoworld's RSS feeds. Found them at:
1) I can understand people on some of the less programming-savvy forums wondering how Apple could also use the term "widgets" when someone else was already using it, but come on. Anyone here should know that "widget" is a standard term for any bit of somewhat separate code, especially code that displays. Konfabulator can't stop Apple from using the term, and Apple would not have been able to stop Konfabulator from using the term.
2) According to the Stevenote, Dashboard is not specifically based on Javascript. It is based on Webkit. You know, that SDK based on KHTML that Apple put out to let everyone else create web browsers, such as WebDesktop, that either compete with Safari or come up with new places to put browsers. Both have happened--I've seen webkit in text editors to render HTML in real time, and in standalone web browsers--and as far as I know Apple hasn't "nailed" anyone yet for doing so.
Any developer can create a web browser using Webkit. Apple has done just that, it appears: come up with a new use for WebKit. And perhaps integrated it more fully with the OS for cool imaging effects and file access.
It isn't like shareware developers haven't copied Apple like crazy after Mac OS X came out. I personally paid for WindowShade back when the only thing it did was copy Apple's Mac OS 9 Windowshade feature. The dock received numerous copies that could do more. It is unlikely that Apple would have "nailed" Arlo if Arlo had used Apple's webkit "1 year later" to do what webkit was designed to let him do.
This is a cool feature, but it is hardly a big surprise. Apple has been making scripting and alternative programming languages available for some time now, with AppleScript Studio, Java near-parity with C in the development tools, and webkit itself. This Stevenote also contained the announcement of an easier-to-use Applescript environment, Automator. Dashboard appears to be just another step towards making scripting in commonly-used web languages nearly as useful as programming in Objective-C.
Konfabulator itself uses the Javascript runtime from Mozilla, according to reports I've seen.
Your complaint ends up being a complaint that Apple is making it easier for other people to make apps for the Mac.
Finally, for this to be a blatant case of copyright infringement, code has to be copied. Since you haven't seen the code, this can't be "blatant" copyright infringement. Since Apple probably hasn't seen the code either, it almost certainly isn't copyright infringement at all.
I suppose it could be a patent infringement, if someone took out a patent on "integrate open source scripting languages with a desktop GUI environment to provide separate GUI applications". But I hope such a patent would fail.
Jerry
Re:Popularity of miniATX is validation for the Cub
on
G5 in an iMac
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In our area, the cube was useful because of the small footprint and quiet; very much like a G4 iMac would have been.
The problem was that the combination of a cube and an LCD screen was prohibitively expensive (at least in education); and buying a cube with a CRT monitor defeated the purpose.
At the end of its lifespan, when the price of cube+LCD became more attractive, we bought (or at least ordered, I don't recall if we ordered them in time) several of them.
Nowadays, the people who would have purchased a cube purchase an iMac. Not because the iMac is cheaper than the tower, but because it has a small footprint and looks nice on the desktop and isn't overly expensive compared to the tower.
I'm not sure who in our area would want a headless iMac. The clients who want headless computers also want easy access to RAM, they want PCI cards, they want a tower.
I don't think a trojan could disable the network connection on Mac OS X without further assistance from the user. The configuration files (as far as I can tell in/private/var/db/SystemConfiguration) are all owned by root.
Removing or modifying those files is not just a matter of double-clicking a trojan; it would also require the trojan to convince the user to type in an administrative username and password.
Not saying that some users wouldn't go ahead and give their password to a program they downloaded off of limewire, but really, there are limits to who should be allowed to use computers.
You are not, in the United States at least, under any obligation to follow an invalid EULA. License agreements for sales do not exist; if this is a sale, the EULA is invalid. As far as I can tell from the few songs I've purchased from the iTunes music store, these are sales. I buy the file, I get to listen to it forever without further payments.
This was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1906 in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus; it has been continually affirmed by the Supreme Court and by lower courts, most recently by the ninth in Softman Products Company, LLC v. Adobe Systems Inc. The copyright monopoly must be strictly interpreted to not override the property rights of the individual purchasing the product.
What the courts have continually found is that calling a purchase a license does not turn a purchase into a license, whether you're buying a book, software, or anything else. Bobbs-Merrill did not call their EULA a EULA, but it is clearly recognizable as such today. It, like today's EULAs, is invalid insofar as it attempts to use the copyright monopoly to enforce restrictions that the monopoly does not confer.
A junk call from the California Narcotics Officers Association (or something like that). We made small talk first, you know, "how are you doing," "Fine, how are you?", "Fine, thanks for asking." Then he got down to asking me for money (I assume, as we didn't get that far.) He told me how we're winning the war on drugs, and the most important thing in winning the war on drugs is stopping "the dope" from coming in over the border (I live in San Diego), and also putting the dealers in jail.
That's the exact phrase he used. "The dope." I thought I was receiving a telephone call straight out of the fifties.
"You support that, don't you?" he asked.
I responded, "No, I support 'the dope' wholeheartedly."
"Oh, well, we're mainly concerned with the cocaine and heroin."
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's both: inexpensive downloads do drive iPod sales as well as play on iTunes, clearly a popular pasttime among Mac users.
Before Apple's music store, the future for music listeners looked pretty grim: even CDs were being listener-restricted in extraordinarily stupid ways (adding "imperceptible" hiss to the music, among others) that sometimes made them impossible to play on standard equipment--such as Macintoshes.
Apple was (probably) seeing a future in which not only would iPods not be able to play new music, but even Macintoshes might not play over-the-counter CDs.
The iTunes Music Store changed the direction of music digital restriction management. Where DRM was once heavily restrictive, the only way to compete with the IMS was to make DRM that was only lightly restrictive. If the industry maintains competition someone will eventually realize that letting music fans listen to their music will sell even better than restricting their ability to listen to music that they've purchased, and will not be pirated any more often.
However it goes, though, Apple is probably no longer quite as worried about a future where Macs and iPods cannot play music.
Jerry
You're mistaking what Apple really wants. The reason Apple has not licensed their DRM is because of a secret Apple plan to kill all DRM.
What Apple is really trying to do here is force Real to negotiate DRM-free terms with the music companies. Once Real is able to sell music DRM-free, the rest of the online industry will be forced to follow suit. Microsoft will die, and the consumers will be able to play any music on any player, including the iPod.
The reason Apple chose Real is their known negotiation skills and the quality of their software. If anyone can get this done, it is Real.
John
Many, many years ago in Los Angeles I bought my first RGB monitor (to be used on a Radio Shack Color Computer III running OS/9).
It was a scam: the monitor did not work, and on opening it up I discovered that the main circuit board was completely cracked down the middle. Pissed off and having more time than brains, I took a solder gun and some wire, and carefully wired across each part of the board that needed it. To my surprise, the monitor worked once I did that, and I kept that monitor for about two years before selling the CoCo.
Jerry
Uh, no.
. 1 200 OK
Pastiche knows when the document was last modified and can support my writing an rss reader that checks last-modified:
curl --head http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/nerdfull.xml
HTTP/1
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 22:16:33 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) Debian GNU/Linux mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_jk/1.1.0
Last-Modified: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 02:52:46 GMT
ETag: "28620-8faa-40fb377e"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 36778
Content-Type: text/xml
But infoworld does not. As far as I can tell from the headers I displayed in the previous post, infoworld's server does not provide such data. Without the last-modified or etag or something similar, there is no way to ask for a conditional get, because there is nothing to base the conditional on, and most likely the server doesn't know how to compare the conditional anyway since it clearly is not keeping track of when the document was last modified.
I could easily be getting the syntax wrong, but whenever I request that it only send me the xml feed if it has been last modified in the last fraction of a second, I still get the page back:
date > datestamp; curl --time-cond datestamp http://www.infoworld.com/rss/news.xml
This returns a bunch of xml.
Running the same command on Pastiche's xml feed returns, as I would expect, absolutely nothing:
date > datestamp; curl --time-cond datestamp http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/nerdfull.xml
Jerry
So, he's writing from infoworld and complaining that RSS feed readers grab feeds whether the data has changed or not. So, I went to look for infoworld's RSS feeds. Found them at:
http://www.infoworld.com/rss/rss_info.html
Trying the top news feed, got back:
date -u ; curl --head http://www.infoworld.com/rss/news.xml
Tue Jul 20 19:51:44 GMT 2004
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 19:48:30 GMT
Server: Apache
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 7520
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
How do I write an RSS reader that only downloads this feed if the data has changed?
Jerry
1) I can understand people on some of the less programming-savvy forums wondering how Apple could also use the term "widgets" when someone else was already using it, but come on. Anyone here should know that "widget" is a standard term for any bit of somewhat separate code, especially code that displays. Konfabulator can't stop Apple from using the term, and Apple would not have been able to stop Konfabulator from using the term.
2) According to the Stevenote, Dashboard is not specifically based on Javascript. It is based on Webkit. You know, that SDK based on KHTML that Apple put out to let everyone else create web browsers, such as WebDesktop, that either compete with Safari or come up with new places to put browsers. Both have happened--I've seen webkit in text editors to render HTML in real time, and in standalone web browsers--and as far as I know Apple hasn't "nailed" anyone yet for doing so.
Any developer can create a web browser using Webkit. Apple has done just that, it appears: come up with a new use for WebKit. And perhaps integrated it more fully with the OS for cool imaging effects and file access.
It isn't like shareware developers haven't copied Apple like crazy after Mac OS X came out. I personally paid for WindowShade back when the only thing it did was copy Apple's Mac OS 9 Windowshade feature. The dock received numerous copies that could do more. It is unlikely that Apple would have "nailed" Arlo if Arlo had used Apple's webkit "1 year later" to do what webkit was designed to let him do.
This is a cool feature, but it is hardly a big surprise. Apple has been making scripting and alternative programming languages available for some time now, with AppleScript Studio, Java near-parity with C in the development tools, and webkit itself. This Stevenote also contained the announcement of an easier-to-use Applescript environment, Automator. Dashboard appears to be just another step towards making scripting in commonly-used web languages nearly as useful as programming in Objective-C.
Konfabulator itself uses the Javascript runtime from Mozilla, according to reports I've seen.
Your complaint ends up being a complaint that Apple is making it easier for other people to make apps for the Mac.
Finally, for this to be a blatant case of copyright infringement, code has to be copied. Since you haven't seen the code, this can't be "blatant" copyright infringement. Since Apple probably hasn't seen the code either, it almost certainly isn't copyright infringement at all.
I suppose it could be a patent infringement, if someone took out a patent on "integrate open source scripting languages with a desktop GUI environment to provide separate GUI applications". But I hope such a patent would fail.
Jerry
In our area, the cube was useful because of the small footprint and quiet; very much like a G4 iMac would have been.
The problem was that the combination of a cube and an LCD screen was prohibitively expensive (at least in education); and buying a cube with a CRT monitor defeated the purpose.
At the end of its lifespan, when the price of cube+LCD became more attractive, we bought (or at least ordered, I don't recall if we ordered them in time) several of them.
Nowadays, the people who would have purchased a cube purchase an iMac. Not because the iMac is cheaper than the tower, but because it has a small footprint and looks nice on the desktop and isn't overly expensive compared to the tower.
I'm not sure who in our area would want a headless iMac. The clients who want headless computers also want easy access to RAM, they want PCI cards, they want a tower.
I don't think a trojan could disable the network connection on Mac OS X without further assistance from the user. The configuration files (as far as I can tell in /private/var/db/SystemConfiguration) are all owned by root.
Removing or modifying those files is not just a matter of double-clicking a trojan; it would also require the trojan to convince the user to type in an administrative username and password.
Not saying that some users wouldn't go ahead and give their password to a program they downloaded off of limewire, but really, there are limits to who should be allowed to use computers.
You are not, in the United States at least, under any obligation to follow an invalid EULA. License agreements for sales do not exist; if this is a sale, the EULA is invalid. As far as I can tell from the few songs I've purchased from the iTunes music store, these are sales. I buy the file, I get to listen to it forever without further payments.
This was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1906 in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus; it has been continually affirmed by the Supreme Court and by lower courts, most recently by the ninth in Softman Products Company, LLC v. Adobe Systems Inc. The copyright monopoly must be strictly interpreted to not override the property rights of the individual purchasing the product.
What the courts have continually found is that calling a purchase a license does not turn a purchase into a license, whether you're buying a book, software, or anything else. Bobbs-Merrill did not call their EULA a EULA, but it is clearly recognizable as such today. It, like today's EULAs, is invalid insofar as it attempts to use the copyright monopoly to enforce restrictions that the monopoly does not confer.
Cites
If computer code is not creative expression, why can it be copyrighted?
A junk call from the California Narcotics Officers Association (or something like that). We made small talk first, you know, "how are you doing," "Fine, how are you?", "Fine, thanks for asking." Then he got down to asking me for money (I assume, as we didn't get that far.) He told me how we're winning the war on drugs, and the most important thing in winning the war on drugs is stopping "the dope" from coming in over the border (I live in San Diego), and also putting the dealers in jail.
That's the exact phrase he used. "The dope." I thought I was receiving a telephone call straight out of the fifties.
"You support that, don't you?" he asked.
I responded, "No, I support 'the dope' wholeheartedly."
"Oh, well, we're mainly concerned with the cocaine and heroin."
"Well, I support those, too."
"Okay, sir, well, you have a nice day."
"You have a nice day, too. Thanks for calling."
(No one's broken my door down yet.)
Jerry