Re:Content industry = criminal price fixing cartel
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NBC Chief Slamming Apple
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Subscription models don't work for music. They may work for video, but that remains to be seen.
The whole idea of a subscription means you amortize the money you pay across the amount of content you use. Use lots of content, and you only pay a little bit per item. That sounds great when you first start out, because whoever offers the subscription has a huge library of stuff you've never seen before, so the idea of searching cheaply has an obvious appeal.
Thing is, people tend to re-use music and video. I can read a newspaper or magazine, throw it away, and never want to look at it again. If I hear a song I like, I want to hear it again later.
That's where the problem starts. When I build a library of items I want to use again, every item in that library competes with the others for my time and attention. If "really liking" a song means I want to hear it at least once a week, and I spend about 2 hours per day listening to music, I can only have about 350 songs in my "really like" playlist. Adding more songs means I'll hear less of the stuff I already "really like." The time each new item takes away from stuff already in my library has to be subtracted from the value of adding the song.
Eventually, the cost of adding another song balances the value of having it, at which point the song is basically worthless to me. Having a million songs to explore means I could spend a three years, twelve hours a day, doing nothing but listening to tracks I haven't heard yet, and never listening to anything that I already knew I liked. Very few people want to do that.
Once you start using content more than once, the idea of amortizing the cost over the number of plays starts to make sense. If I spend $0.99 for an iTunes track and play it 99 times, I've paid a penny per play, and the cost just keeps getting lower the more I play the thing.
So subscription models are good for people who want to explore a large body of stuff, and outright purchase is good for people who want to build a library of stuff they'll use frequently.
One can argue that Vista sucks because Microsoft had so many programmers working on it.
It takes a lot of back-end logistics to keep 5000 programmers all working in synch with each other. Everyone who writes code that opens a window needs to know what data structures the guys writing the 'open a window' library have chosen, and those guys need to know what the video device driver team is doing, etcetera. The lines of communication between software module teams are exactly the same as the dependencies in the software.
But when you have 5000 programmers working on a project, it's a full-time job just trying to stay on top of who's doing what. The programmers themselves can't put in that kind of effort and still write any code, so you divide them into teams and assign managers.
That sounds great when you say it fast, but how do you decide what teams to create? You don't know what teams you'll need until you have a detailed design for the product and a list of all the dependencies. Again, that sounds great, but in practice it means you have 5000 programmers sitting around doing nothing for six months while about 25 OS architects work out the design.
Companies don't like doing that. If it's a big, important project, management wants to see some big, important effort going into the thing from day one. Assigning 5000 programmers to the project is their way of letting the stockholders know that This Is Important, and if senior management is going to allocate those kinds of resources, the project manager had damn well better well USE THEM.
So the project starts with 5000 programmers trying to do something to justify their place in The Really Important Project, but having no idea what anyone else is actually doing. Meanwhile, the middle managers are playing politics with each other. The team writing the HTML parser is trying to build something that's fast, efficient and standards compliant, but the team writing the browser is logging every "doesn't support this horribly malformed bullshit that we used to ignore" as a bug in the parser. Fundamental technical decisions get made based on who can suck up to the next higher level of management better, and who can outstare the other across the conference table. (Don't laugh.. I've seen million dollar deals decided exactly that way)
All this pathological crap gets reflected -- even embodied -- in the software. The 'shut down this machine' dialog has nine different buttons and takes 18 months to program because there are four different teams whose work has some effect on system shutdown. All communication has to flow through the one manager high enough up in the org chart to have all four teams under his control, which means it takes up to three months for a design change Team A makes to filter over to Team C. Meanwhile, you have managers from two the other teams and a whole flock of marketing androids bickering over which button will go on top, and what names the buttons will have. (Again.. don't laugh. It happens a LOT)
The final product of such a development process is a giant mess, but somehow everyone supposedly responsible is able to dodge the blame for it being so bad.
And you can't blame the result on the programmers. If you restrict your view of the product to what one programmer or one team could know, you'll see a lot of really good work. It's just a lot of really good work that doesn't fit together as a total product.
Johnny cash has a song called "One Piece At A Time" about a guy who decides to steal a car from the auto plant where he works -- one piece at a time -- over the course of about 30 years. The payoff comes in:
Now, up to now my plan went all right
'Til we tried to put it all together one night
And that's when we noticed that something was definitely wrong.
-->"Prove". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Prove: to generate a statement through iterative application of a given set of operators on a given set of axioms. More generally, to show through iterative derivation that if axiom A is true, then statement S is also true.
Scientific proof of the existence of 'God' simply means a definition of 'God' that doesn't contradict any axiom of 'science'.
---- For instance, the big bang theory fits your description; "a set of repeatable phenomena that could be reproduced by an intentional agent with sufficient resources" - but does not prove such an agent could exist; in fact it offers NO such proof that the much greater requirements of environment outside our universe
By itself, no. But then, we also know of about a dozen reasons why the Big Bang wouldn't have produced the universe we live in. We don't regard it as a correct solution, only as the one that's currently least wrong. And if you want to delve into String Theory, the notion that the Big Bang was the result of a collision between two 10-dimensional 'branes' in an 11-dimensional space (that's the model that is currently least wrong with regard to the nature of space/time), offers plenty of extra-10-dimensional-universe space for a 'God' to exist.
---- The example appears to be poorly chosen as Boston and Beijing are located on a rotating planet thereby making the trajectories different when facing in different directions, even with the same 'laws of projectile motion'.
'Trajectories'?
I'm talking about the laws of motion -- "Ess equals one-half aay-tee-squared" -- a 'trajectory' is the result you get by applying those laws to a given set of initial conditions.
My point is that you don't use one set of formulas when you face north and another set when you face south. Or when you've moved left or right (or geodesically if you insist on modeling the earth as a sphere). They even translate nicely between fixed and rotating frames of reference, so we can use the fixed equations when the observer is in the same rotational frame as the moving object.
The question of why things work so nicely is a deep issue in science.
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Enh.. My primary thesis was a response to the notion of 'mental gymnastics necessary to fit God back in the model'. That notion is flawed because 'God' was never in the model to start with. The fact that 'God' isn't part of the 'science' model should not be treated as a deficiency of 'God', though, because 'science' simply lacks the tools to discuss 'God'. Science also lacks the tools to discuss 'left' and 'right'. Seriously, show me a single experiment that doesn't work equally well in a mirror-image universe and I'll recant the statement. That doesn't mean 'left' and 'right' are deficient concepts, only that 'left and 'right' aren't necessary parameters for any of the equations.
My secondary thesis was in response to the idea that people could look to science if they wanted to gleam some wisdom. Science has done great things, but it's hardly the Pythagorean ideal description of the universe that laypeople take it to be. It's full of gaps, guesses, and flat-out contradictions. That's perfectly acceptable, because it's only proper to regard science as a work in progress. We don't expect the results to be perfect, but we respect the process.
The double-standard of 'trusting the process' of science and 'demanding perfection' from religion pisses me off. They're both human inventions, they both claim to have their origins in something larger than Man, and they're both works in progress. They're also both inescapable parts of the human condition, to the extent that no one can function without a non-normative mental map of 'how things are' and a normative map of 'how things should be'. Remove the first, and we'd starve because we couldn't identify food. Remove the second, and we'd starve because we'd have no reason to prefer eating over starvation.
---- 1. and 2. are somewhat simplistic versions of Popper's arguments, but 3. is a complete straw-man.
I'm glad we agree. Now go look at the GGGP's note about working 'God' back into the model. 'God' isn't in the model, so there's no way for 'science' to push it out.
---- This sounds like a mathematical statement, but it isn't (there is no meaningful inner product space; see any math book or even wikipedia for the definitions).
Science belongs to the family of philosophies known as 'ontologies'. To the extent that science deserves any respect (and it deserves a great deal of respect), it does so by making non-normative statements about how things are.
Religion belongs to the family of philosophies known as 'moralities'. It makes normative statements about how things should be.
If we take 'normative' as A and 'non-normative' as not-A, we have two disjoint sets which partition a universe U. If statement S (defined in U) can be any mix of A and non-A, we can represent S as a tuple (A, not-A).
That gives us a vector space where (1,0) represents a purely normative statement, and (0,1) represents a purely non-normative statement. The cross-product of (1,0) and (0,1) is 0.
Science and religion are orthogonal to each other. The set of axioms that runs:
Science deals in falsifiable statements.
'God' cannot be falsified.
Science disproves (falsifies) 'God'
wouldn't last five minutes in Introduction to Logic 101.
The only rational thing to say is that science does not allow us to make statements about the existence of 'God', which should hardly be a surprise to anyone.
Science deals largely with the study of symmetries.. things that allow us to ignore some kind of change. The laws of projectile motion remain the same (are symmetric) regardless of whether you're facing north or south; whether you're standing in Boston or Beijing.
One thing that's extremely easy to ignore is 'agency'. You can write a doctoral thesis on the kinetics and aerodynamics of a curveball, but you can't use any of it to 'prove' or 'disprove' the existence of Nolan Ryan. Science only allows us to talk about how the ball behaves subsequent to a given set of initial conditions. It doesn't allow us to extrapolate that behavior back to the agent which imposed those original conditions.
At the end of the day, there are only two possible end-states for science: Either we'll be able to reduce the creation of our universe to a set of repeatable phenomena that could be reproduced by an intentional agent with sufficient resources, or we'll find that we can't reduce the creation of our universe to a set of repeatable phenomena. In other words, we'll either prove that 'God' could exist, or we'll prove that 'God' must exist.
Besides, science doesn't have all that much going for it in the Universal Truths department. It has a tendency to paper over difficult fundamental questions by slapping a name on what happens, and sweeping the rest of the mess under the rug of combinatorial complexity.
When Newton published his theory of gravity, it was denounced as mysticism by his peers. They considered the idea of 'action at a distance' tantamount to saying, "God did it." General relativity papered over the problem by calling it 'curved space/time'. We still don't really have any solid answers on what 'space' or 'time' are, and the mechanism of 'gravity' is still an open question, but GR has great predictive power, and tons of experimental validation.
In 1909, Rutherford discovered 'the hand of God' when he proved that electrons don't fall to the lowest possible energy state as predicted by the most basic laws of electrodynamics. Quantum theory papered over that problem by calling it 'uncertainty'. The fact that we can't explain 'uncertainty' in any terms other than 'it just happens' is something we can ignore. QT also has great predictive power and tons of experimental validation.
The small fact that GR and QT are mathematically incompatible -- meaning they can't both describe the same universe -- is something we don't talk about when the children are in the room.
Ffor all the intricate math, and all the really cool things we've done by reducing physics to engineering, we're still dealing with the simplest cases of the simplest pieces we can find. Inverse-square law? We're so excited about being able to call it a Universal Truth that we'll ignore the fact that the N-body problem is provably unsolvable in the general case. Protein folding? Meh.. let's harness a few teraflops of distributed processing power and brute-force our way through the umpty-zillion possibilities. Consciousness? It is to laugh. 'God'? Not even on the map.
A large part of what makes science and math such great tools is that they tell us their own limits. We know for a fact that mathematics as we practice it today cannot derive all possible truths from a finite set of axioms. We know that science doesn't give us the tools to discuss matters of agency or initial-first-causes.
Watching people ignore those limits and use 'science' to 'disprove God' offends me as a mathematician.
You're confusing the mechanism of perception with the existence of a source.
Brain surgeons have long known that stimulation of the temporal lobe can make people hear voices. That doesn't count as proof that 'voices' don't really exist, though.. unless you're writing the Cliff's Notes summary of The Matrix.
One could just as well ask why such a center exists in the brain if nothing exists to stimulate it.
Well, I was going to use the "pendulum hanging from a pole that sits on the vertex of a teeter-totter" analogy, but the juggling seems, y'know.. more folsky.
There's a difference between "causing permanent damage to the hardware" and "wedging the firmware in a state where the device no longer accepts input and can only be reverted to factory state through direct access to the hardware."
There were BIOS viruses that basically turned PCs into bricks back in the 1990s. The basic principle was the same: If you have to go through the firmware to modify the firmware, you'd better make damn sure you don't mess with that access path. If you do, your only remaining choice is to remove the chip that contains the firmware and replace it with one that does what it's supposed to.
The rest of the hardware can work perfectly, even if the firmware won't let you talk to it.
This is a firmware update.. if it hangs in the middle of an 'unsupported' operation, you end up with a very stylish paperweight.
The fact that the paperweight can still execute its 'supported' features in potentia,e.g.: if it wasn't completely wedged, doesn't stop it from being a paperweight, now does it?
You haven't spent much time working with real-time signal processing systems, have you?
By way of analogy, think about juggling: You don't throw the ball to where your hand is right now. You throw it to the correct spot in the pattern -- 12" off center, and 36" off the ground -- then make sure your hand is in the right place by the time the ball comes down. It requires some prediction and timing, but it's basically doable.
Now try doing it in an earthquake. The 'correct spot in the pattern' is no longer a simple location. You have to predict where the ground will be when the ball comes down, and adjust your throw accordingly. That's a lot more complicated, and there's always a chance that something will happen between the throw and the catch that you didn't predict.
The number of possible states and unpredictable events is more or less infinite, so there's no way you can possibly cover them all. The best you can do is try to keep everything within a range where you can spot the failures early enough to recover before they trigger a train wreck.
Systems like that are delicate. Screw with the timing just a little, and you can bump a few 'recoverable' cases over into the 'train wreck' category. They won't show up right away, though.. you have to get just the right combination of events before the thing will hang.
And with embedded systems, there's no option to shut down, reload the program, and start from a fresh, known state.
And, of course, the job is just that much harder when someone else has fiddled with the system in ways you don't know about.
Apple's announcement is just their way of saying they can't be positive they've hit every possible edge case that might cause this next update to interact badly with any unknown, unauthorized, and unsupported firmware tinkering people might have chosen to do on their own.
Honestly, I don't know why there's so much fuss about this. Hacking the firmware is very much an "at your own risk" procedure, and anyone who pretends not to know that is being deliberately stupid.
And why is everybody dumping this problem on Apple? Why aren't people yelling at the guys who released the unlocking software, demanding a "100% guaranteed or we'll replace your iPhone for free" reversion kit? If anyone should know how to return a hacked iPhone to its factory state, it would be the guys who hacked it in the first place.
Call it "investment over hoarding", and use "buying gold" as your basis for comparison.
When people buy gold, they basically stick it under their mattress. They don't use it themselves, and no one else gets any benefit from it either. For all intents and purposes, that gold has been removed from the economy. It doesn't build new factories, buy new machines, or pay anyone's wages. It doesn't even do anything for the person who bought it. It just sits there while the owner waits for the price to go up so they can make a profit selling it to someone else. And then the new buyer will stick it under another mattress.
Investment, OTOH, creates wealth. The money I invest in a company's stock allows the company to buy factories and machines, pay wages, and make products. And the ratchet of a competitive market means that products tend to provide more value for less money over time. That means every dollar I have gains more buying power, making me wealthier even if I don't have more money per se.
Case in point: about ten years ago, I bought a 1GB hard drive for $700. These days, a gig of drive costs between 50 and 75 cents. My dollar today buys a thousand times as much drive as it did ten years ago, even though I don't have a thousand times as much money.
So yeah.. the Fed (and the IRS.. 'expenses' aka: 'investments' are deductible) prefers to see investment over hoarding.
Or it can be a Scottish term for a certain kind of fish. 150 years ago, a 'girl' was any small child, regardless of gender.
Welcome to linguistic drift.
WRT TFA, my reading says Lyons was making a chagrined reference to his attitude at the time, which was admittedly condescending. He's since learned that those people he looked down on had a much better grip on the situation than he did, and knows damn well that the shoe is now on the other foot.
The "I'm repeating my insult now that I know it makes me look like a complete idiot" thing is a fairly common literary device in abject apologies. It's on par with taping a "kick me" sign to your own chest.
He could have executed it a tad better by putting 'nerds' in quotes the second time to indicate that the word was now in question, but I don't read it as one more insult to the Groklaw community. Quite the opposite.
The fact that ringtones are protected IP doesn't have any particular bearing on whether people need to pay twice for them.
The article had an example of a movie where someone gets a call on their cell phone and plays a custom ringtone. The movie producers had to remove that scene from the distribution DVD.
There are four major differences between that situation and Apple's ringtone policy, though:
Making copies of the movie would also make copies of the unlicensed, protected IP (the ringtone).
Distributing the movie would put copies of the protected IP into the hands of people who had no previous license to use that IP.
The movies were sold for profit, so the DVD vendor would be making money on the distribution of the unicensed copies of the ringtone.
It's easy to rip further high-quality, unlicensed copies of the ringtone from the DVD.
iPhone ringtones differ on all four points.
A ringtone doesn't create a copy of unlicensed IP. You bought a license to use the music when you bought the original CD or iTunes track.
Converting a song to a ringtone doesn't put a copy of the protected IP into the hands of anyone who doesn't already have a license to use the music.
Ringtones aren't sold by the people who use them, so there's no question of financial gain.
There's no way to argue that 'playing a ringtone' makes it easy for unlicensed people to rip copies of the music.
In short, the only real difference is whether I play a snippet of music through the headphones or through the speaker. Aside from that, the only grounds the labels have for charging another license fee would be if the ringtones were 'derivative works' of the original song. And as Gruber pointed out, the RIAA itself says they aren't, because if they were, the RIAA would have to pay the artists royalties for the ringtones per se.
---- Presumably there was some trigger at Apple. I would guess that the price change was forced by the introduction of the new iPod touch, their rate of sales is not considered fast enough to meet their market share targets, or the imminent European launch has been analysed as requiring a lower entry price for some reason and they need to bring US pricing in line.
The Christmas buying season is right around the corner. The iPhone is toward the top of the 'must have' tech products list right now. That buzz won't be there in another year, so Apple's capitalizing on it while they can.
Plus, Apple wants a share in the cellphone market. The faster it can build its installed base, the sooner all the pundits and analysts saying, "well, we don't know whether Apple will be able to stay in this for the long term.. they're only a niche player after all, and other, bigger companies have tried to tackle this market and failed" will shut the hell up. Three or four quarters of iPhone sales numbers climbing like nothing the cellphone market has ever seen will drive Apple's stock price through the roof.
Another point: The frenzy surrounding the iPhone was fueled largely by Apple's success with the iPod. The question then was, "will they be able to do it again?" If the iPhone turns out to be another runaway hit, imagine the buzz Apple's next hardware product will get.
Oh, for a world where companies only had to think about one thing when setting prices..
Profit per unit sold is only one thing a company can want. It can also want market share. The iPhone is toward the top of the hot-shit-must-have items right now, and the Christmas buying season is right around the corner. Dropping the price will mean that many more people find iPhones in their stockings come Christmas morning, and Apple's share of the cellphone market will grow by that much more.
Apple also gets a cut of the service contract from AT&T, and that revenue isn't tied to the purchase price of the iPhone. Selling one iPhone at $500 and getting a single $100 payment from AT&T brings Apple $600. Selling two iPhones at $300 and getting two $100 payments brings Apple $800. And the $100 payments are pure profit for Apple, where you have to subtract the materials, development, shipping and marketing costs from the initial $500-or-$300 payment.
Beyond that, Apple also sells stock. A lot of investors and analysts are still leery about Apple's ability to make it in the cellphone market. A 2007-Q4 report that shows iPhones selling like mad over the holiday season will help those investors and analysts feel more comfortable about Apple's ability to succeed in that market. That will take stock prices up, and it doesn't take much of a boost in stock price to offset a $200-per-unit accounting loss on the iPhones themselves.
I must not be communicating this idea clearly enough: Crews don't necessarily know whether they're doing a live mission or a practice mission. That's need-to-know information, and the flight crew doesn't need to know.
Yeah, that seems wrong at first glance, but a flight crew doesn't need to know the nature of its cargo any more than a FedEx air-freight crew does. Knowing the nature of the cargo is someone else's job. The flight crew's job is to take the plane where they're told, and execute any orders they're given along the way. Period. They're transport and delivery agents, not decision-makers.
The whole point of practice missions is to get the crew used to doing whatever they'd do on a live mission. Therefore, the crew should behave as if every mission was a live one. All they know is that the loaders attached something to the wings, and that they got a sealed folder along with their flying orders. They may have live nukes and arming codes, or they may have dummies. As far as they're concerned, it really doesn't matter. They'll go where they're told to go, and execute any orders they're given along the way.
It's not like the crew of a training flight would get dummy arming codes, authorization protocols, and anything else they might need for live weaponry. After all, the whole point of a training exercise is to make the whole thing different enough from the real thing that no one could confuse the two.
They'd know they were carrying ordnance, and they'd know that the bombs might be nukes, but they wouldn't know for certain what was actually inside the casings.
For every nuke in our arsenal, there's a set of dummy weapons with exactly the same look and feel. The only people allowed near the vehicle while the ordnance is being loaded are the loaders themselves, and even they probably don't know whether the weapons are real or not.
It's a security measure. A load of nukes is both extremely valuable and extremely dangerous. If the Bad Guys knew they could get an arsenal by attacking a specific plane or by bending a few members of a specific flight crew, they'd try it. By the same token, if a few members of a flight crew managed to convince themselves it would be a good idea to convert a certain part of the planet to dirty glass, they might try that.
Running fake weapons most of the time eliminates the certainty of payoff in both cases. But an investigation and reprisals are damn well certain, so it just isn't worth attacking a plane or letting a few bombs fall on the off-chance that they might be real.
You're correct (as far as I know) that we stopped carrying live nukes at the end of the cold war, but that doesn't mean the drills with dummy weapons have ended. We really don't want to be at the low end of the learning curve if we end up needing nukes in a hurry.
In this case, it sounds like someone screwed up a requisition. Instead of calling for dummy weapons to be used in a practice flight, someone got real nukes instead. And yeah.. that's a case where the CO in charge of the base is in serious deep shit. We really don't want the people who take care of our nuclear arsenal to get confused about their inventory.
It depends on what you call the 'iPod Halo'. No, people aren't buying Macs simply because they have iPods. But most people who own iPods also end up using iTunes.
iTunes is probably the first piece of Apple software most PC users have ever used.
As a long-time Mac user who's seen dozens of PC users go from "you and your toys" to "okay, I get it now" after finally buying a Mac for some business reason, I can say with some certainty that the Apple user experience is what really sells the product. Windows users are accustomed to tolerating and working around minor problems with their machines. None of the problems are deal-breakers, but they're always there as minor annoyances.. the HP scanner software on a machine at work that pops up three 'the script in this page won't run, do you want to keep trying?' alerts every time it launches, for instance. They don't stop me from getting the scans, but I get tired of seeing them every damn time I want to scan something.
Mac software doesn't do that so much. It Just Works to the point where an issue like the scanner software above gets defined as 'crappy software' not 'just part of using a computer'.
So when people who own an iPod think about buying a new computer, they don't think, "well, I own one Apple product, I may as well buy another." They think, "hmm.. the one piece of Apple software I've used has been pretty good. Maybe I'll give the whole machine a look." And occasionally, some people go ahead and buy one.
The iPod is just a trojan. The sales come from the iTunes Halo effect.
If the history of iTunes is any guide, Apple will continue to roll out new measures that are strong enough to keep unlocking a niche issue, but won't waste time, money, and consumer goodwill by trying to lock the thing down completely. The geohot hack doesn't bother Apple or AT&T at all. Most people won't open their phone and start tinkering with the hardware. If somebody comes out with a pure-software hack that can be loaded and run with only a couple mouse clicks, Apple will probably take steps to make that harder. But in the long run, fighting to prevent hacks is a losing proposition, and Apple knows it.
The best way for Apple and AT&T to stop people from unlocking their phones is to develop software-as-a-service products that are only supported by the AT&T network. Maybe that means seamless integration between the AT&T network and the iTunes store, maybe it means streaming music & video that automagically syncs to your desktop computer's iTunes library, or maybe it means things none of us have even considered yet. Apple's whole business strategy revolves around the idea that people will pay for better quality, though.
If 'unlocking the iPhone' means 'keeping all the really good features of the iPhone and ditching the expensive suck factor of AT&T service', then unlocking will rule no matter what Apple and AT&T do. If 'unlocking the iPhone' means 'I ditched AT&T, but lost a bunch of cool features in the process', then only a handful of people will bother.
There are two main reasons Apple won't try to play the lock-in card.
First, Apple doesn't own enough of the cellphone market to have a 'lock' on anything. Their stated goal is to own 1% of the smartphone market by the end of 2008. Meanwhile, Nokia's goal is to own 40% of that same market. Apple isn't in a position to get pushy about anything right now. All that will do is alienate customers, and alienating customers doesn't help them increase their market share.
Second, Apple doesn't compete by locking out alternatives. It competes by offering the best package it can, and trusting consumers to think the package is worth the price.
Re:SCOX: death throes begin - spasms of appeals
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SCO Loses
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· Score: 1
The official line runs like so:
"Not long ago, the Black Gate of Armonk swung open. The lights went out, my skin crawled, and dogs began to howl. I asked my neighbor what it was and he said, 'Those are the nazgul. Once they were human, now they are IBM's lawyers.'"
In addition it has been said that they are "probably really nice people. They would be nicer too if they had (say) blood or souls like normal people."
Now, I don't know anyone in IBM's legal division personally, so I can't say whether they use the term internally or not. But it crops up all over the internet and is frequently used in Groklaw comments to indicate respect, awe, and a healthy dose of "wow I'm glad they aren't after me." So it's for damnsure The Nazgul do know that the nickname exists.
A body couldn't be human without being at least a little bit flattered and amused by all that.
But then... they are The Nazgul. It's entirely possible that they simply dismiss it as immaterial to the litigation at hand.
Re:SCOX: death throes begin - spasms of appeals
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SCO Loses
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· Score: 5, Interesting
SCO stopped being able to pay its lawyers around Halloween 2004.
More accurately, SCO made an agreement with Boies Schiller to cap the fees for this case at $31M, with some additional stock and 'cut of the winnings' language thrown in. Boies Schiller agreed to represent SCO all the way through appeals, but the general assumption is that they won't start any new cases for SCO unless SCO dumps some cash on the barrel-head.
So right now, Boies Schiller is looking at a family of cases where they're basically screwed.. they've lost the Novell slander-of-title case outright, and the best they can hope to do there is prove that the $30M technology license Microsoft bought wasn't entirely based on code Novell now officially owns. To the extent that Novell owns the code, Novell also owns 95% of the money, and money Novell owns won't pay SCO's legal fees. In the IBM case, they've been forced to limit their complaint to literal infringement of code that SCO owns -- and there's pathetically little of that which the judge will allow to be used as the basis of a complaint -- and now SCO doesn't even seem to own the code that IBM has allegedly infringed. To make matters worse, Novell has the explicit right to grant IBM permission to do anything it wants with the code, and Novell did exactly that at the outset of this whole long farce.
The whole family of cases as they stand right now are a train wreck for SCO and Boies Schiller, and the only way they could hope to win would be to go back and reformulate their bitch against IBM in a completely new way. But that's exactly what Boise Schiller isn't likely to do without getting a fresh mound of cash from SCO, and SCO doesn't have any cash to throw around right now. Right now, they're shitting bricks trying to find a way to keep Novell from taking away the $30M that's been propping them up since this whole thing started.
Meanwhile, SCO is still in the crosshairs of all the counterclaims Novell and IBM have filed, most of which Novell and IBM are likely to win, and win big. The damages from those will cost far more than SCO has ever been worth. The end result of that game will basically guarantee that any potential 'successor in interest' to SCO would rather strip naked, stick his feet in a hill of fire ants, and shove his arms into a tree-chipper than even think about trying to pick up the case where SCO left off.
Then we'll have to see whether Darl MacBride and the rest of the SCO management team can escape criminal charges, based on what they actually knew or should have known, what they said to the press and government agencies like the SEC, and whether this whole thing can be written off as the longest and most obnoxious pump-and-dump scheme in history.
So basically, this will all end when SCO's crops have been burned, their fields have been tilled with salt, and their flayed carcasses have been poisoned so thoroughly that even the buzzards won't dare to eat what's left.
Of course, that's only what I can come up with. They don't call IBM's lawyers The Nazgul for nothing.
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Subscription models don't work for music. They may work for video, but that remains to be seen.
The whole idea of a subscription means you amortize the money you pay across the amount of content you use. Use lots of content, and you only pay a little bit per item. That sounds great when you first start out, because whoever offers the subscription has a huge library of stuff you've never seen before, so the idea of searching cheaply has an obvious appeal.
Thing is, people tend to re-use music and video. I can read a newspaper or magazine, throw it away, and never want to look at it again. If I hear a song I like, I want to hear it again later.
That's where the problem starts. When I build a library of items I want to use again, every item in that library competes with the others for my time and attention. If "really liking" a song means I want to hear it at least once a week, and I spend about 2 hours per day listening to music, I can only have about 350 songs in my "really like" playlist. Adding more songs means I'll hear less of the stuff I already "really like." The time each new item takes away from stuff already in my library has to be subtracted from the value of adding the song.
Eventually, the cost of adding another song balances the value of having it, at which point the song is basically worthless to me. Having a million songs to explore means I could spend a three years, twelve hours a day, doing nothing but listening to tracks I haven't heard yet, and never listening to anything that I already knew I liked. Very few people want to do that.
Once you start using content more than once, the idea of amortizing the cost over the number of plays starts to make sense. If I spend $0.99 for an iTunes track and play it 99 times, I've paid a penny per play, and the cost just keeps getting lower the more I play the thing.
So subscription models are good for people who want to explore a large body of stuff, and outright purchase is good for people who want to build a library of stuff they'll use frequently.
One can argue that Vista sucks because Microsoft had so many programmers working on it.
It takes a lot of back-end logistics to keep 5000 programmers all working in synch with each other. Everyone who writes code that opens a window needs to know what data structures the guys writing the 'open a window' library have chosen, and those guys need to know what the video device driver team is doing, etcetera. The lines of communication between software module teams are exactly the same as the dependencies in the software.
But when you have 5000 programmers working on a project, it's a full-time job just trying to stay on top of who's doing what. The programmers themselves can't put in that kind of effort and still write any code, so you divide them into teams and assign managers.
That sounds great when you say it fast, but how do you decide what teams to create? You don't know what teams you'll need until you have a detailed design for the product and a list of all the dependencies. Again, that sounds great, but in practice it means you have 5000 programmers sitting around doing nothing for six months while about 25 OS architects work out the design.
Companies don't like doing that. If it's a big, important project, management wants to see some big, important effort going into the thing from day one. Assigning 5000 programmers to the project is their way of letting the stockholders know that This Is Important, and if senior management is going to allocate those kinds of resources, the project manager had damn well better well USE THEM.
So the project starts with 5000 programmers trying to do something to justify their place in The Really Important Project, but having no idea what anyone else is actually doing. Meanwhile, the middle managers are playing politics with each other. The team writing the HTML parser is trying to build something that's fast, efficient and standards compliant, but the team writing the browser is logging every "doesn't support this horribly malformed bullshit that we used to ignore" as a bug in the parser. Fundamental technical decisions get made based on who can suck up to the next higher level of management better, and who can outstare the other across the conference table. (Don't laugh.. I've seen million dollar deals decided exactly that way)
All this pathological crap gets reflected -- even embodied -- in the software. The 'shut down this machine' dialog has nine different buttons and takes 18 months to program because there are four different teams whose work has some effect on system shutdown. All communication has to flow through the one manager high enough up in the org chart to have all four teams under his control, which means it takes up to three months for a design change Team A makes to filter over to Team C. Meanwhile, you have managers from two the other teams and a whole flock of marketing androids bickering over which button will go on top, and what names the buttons will have. (Again.. don't laugh. It happens a LOT)
The final product of such a development process is a giant mess, but somehow everyone supposedly responsible is able to dodge the blame for it being so bad.
And you can't blame the result on the programmers. If you restrict your view of the product to what one programmer or one team could know, you'll see a lot of really good work. It's just a lot of really good work that doesn't fit together as a total product.
Johnny cash has a song called "One Piece At A Time" about a guy who decides to steal a car from the auto plant where he works -- one piece at a time -- over the course of about 30 years. The payoff comes in:
Now, up to now my plan went all right
'Til we tried to put it all together one night
And that's when we noticed that something was definitely wrong.
-->"Prove". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Prove: to generate a statement through iterative application of a given set of operators on a given set of axioms. More generally, to show through iterative derivation that if axiom A is true, then statement S is also true.
Scientific proof of the existence of 'God' simply means a definition of 'God' that doesn't contradict any axiom of 'science'.
---- For instance, the big bang theory fits your description; "a set of repeatable phenomena that could be reproduced by an intentional agent with sufficient resources" - but does not prove such an agent could exist; in fact it offers NO such proof that the much greater requirements of environment outside our universe
By itself, no. But then, we also know of about a dozen reasons why the Big Bang wouldn't have produced the universe we live in. We don't regard it as a correct solution, only as the one that's currently least wrong. And if you want to delve into String Theory, the notion that the Big Bang was the result of a collision between two 10-dimensional 'branes' in an 11-dimensional space (that's the model that is currently least wrong with regard to the nature of space/time), offers plenty of extra-10-dimensional-universe space for a 'God' to exist.
---- The example appears to be poorly chosen as Boston and Beijing are located on a rotating planet thereby making the trajectories different when facing in different directions, even with the same 'laws of projectile motion'.
'Trajectories'?
I'm talking about the laws of motion -- "Ess equals one-half aay-tee-squared" -- a 'trajectory' is the result you get by applying those laws to a given set of initial conditions.
My point is that you don't use one set of formulas when you face north and another set when you face south. Or when you've moved left or right (or geodesically if you insist on modeling the earth as a sphere). They even translate nicely between fixed and rotating frames of reference, so we can use the fixed equations when the observer is in the same rotational frame as the moving object.
The question of why things work so nicely is a deep issue in science.
----
Enh.. My primary thesis was a response to the notion of 'mental gymnastics necessary to fit God back in the model'. That notion is flawed because 'God' was never in the model to start with. The fact that 'God' isn't part of the 'science' model should not be treated as a deficiency of 'God', though, because 'science' simply lacks the tools to discuss 'God'. Science also lacks the tools to discuss 'left' and 'right'. Seriously, show me a single experiment that doesn't work equally well in a mirror-image universe and I'll recant the statement. That doesn't mean 'left' and 'right' are deficient concepts, only that 'left and 'right' aren't necessary parameters for any of the equations.
My secondary thesis was in response to the idea that people could look to science if they wanted to gleam some wisdom. Science has done great things, but it's hardly the Pythagorean ideal description of the universe that laypeople take it to be. It's full of gaps, guesses, and flat-out contradictions. That's perfectly acceptable, because it's only proper to regard science as a work in progress. We don't expect the results to be perfect, but we respect the process.
The double-standard of 'trusting the process' of science and 'demanding perfection' from religion pisses me off. They're both human inventions, they both claim to have their origins in something larger than Man, and they're both works in progress. They're also both inescapable parts of the human condition, to the extent that no one can function without a non-normative mental map of 'how things are' and a normative map of 'how things should be'. Remove the first, and we'd starve because we couldn't identify food. Remove the second, and we'd starve because we'd have no reason to prefer eating over starvation.
---- 1. and 2. are somewhat simplistic versions of Popper's arguments, but 3. is a complete straw-man.
I'm glad we agree. Now go look at the GGGP's note about working 'God' back into the model. 'God' isn't in the model, so there's no way for 'science' to push it out.
---- This sounds like a mathematical statement, but it isn't (there is no meaningful inner product space; see any math book or even wikipedia for the definitions).
Science belongs to the family of philosophies known as 'ontologies'. To the extent that science deserves any respect (and it deserves a great deal of respect), it does so by making non-normative statements about how things are.
Religion belongs to the family of philosophies known as 'moralities'. It makes normative statements about how things should be.
If we take 'normative' as A and 'non-normative' as not-A, we have two disjoint sets which partition a universe U. If statement S (defined in U) can be any mix of A and non-A, we can represent S as a tuple (A, not-A).
That gives us a vector space where (1,0) represents a purely normative statement, and (0,1) represents a purely non-normative statement. The cross-product of (1,0) and (0,1) is 0.
Orthogonal.
Science and religion are orthogonal to each other. The set of axioms that runs:
wouldn't last five minutes in Introduction to Logic 101.
The only rational thing to say is that science does not allow us to make statements about the existence of 'God', which should hardly be a surprise to anyone.
Science deals largely with the study of symmetries.. things that allow us to ignore some kind of change. The laws of projectile motion remain the same (are symmetric) regardless of whether you're facing north or south; whether you're standing in Boston or Beijing.
One thing that's extremely easy to ignore is 'agency'. You can write a doctoral thesis on the kinetics and aerodynamics of a curveball, but you can't use any of it to 'prove' or 'disprove' the existence of Nolan Ryan. Science only allows us to talk about how the ball behaves subsequent to a given set of initial conditions. It doesn't allow us to extrapolate that behavior back to the agent which imposed those original conditions.
At the end of the day, there are only two possible end-states for science: Either we'll be able to reduce the creation of our universe to a set of repeatable phenomena that could be reproduced by an intentional agent with sufficient resources, or we'll find that we can't reduce the creation of our universe to a set of repeatable phenomena. In other words, we'll either prove that 'God' could exist, or we'll prove that 'God' must exist.
Besides, science doesn't have all that much going for it in the Universal Truths department. It has a tendency to paper over difficult fundamental questions by slapping a name on what happens, and sweeping the rest of the mess under the rug of combinatorial complexity.
When Newton published his theory of gravity, it was denounced as mysticism by his peers. They considered the idea of 'action at a distance' tantamount to saying, "God did it." General relativity papered over the problem by calling it 'curved space/time'. We still don't really have any solid answers on what 'space' or 'time' are, and the mechanism of 'gravity' is still an open question, but GR has great predictive power, and tons of experimental validation.
In 1909, Rutherford discovered 'the hand of God' when he proved that electrons don't fall to the lowest possible energy state as predicted by the most basic laws of electrodynamics. Quantum theory papered over that problem by calling it 'uncertainty'. The fact that we can't explain 'uncertainty' in any terms other than 'it just happens' is something we can ignore. QT also has great predictive power and tons of experimental validation.
The small fact that GR and QT are mathematically incompatible -- meaning they can't both describe the same universe -- is something we don't talk about when the children are in the room.
Ffor all the intricate math, and all the really cool things we've done by reducing physics to engineering, we're still dealing with the simplest cases of the simplest pieces we can find. Inverse-square law? We're so excited about being able to call it a Universal Truth that we'll ignore the fact that the N-body problem is provably unsolvable in the general case. Protein folding? Meh.. let's harness a few teraflops of distributed processing power and brute-force our way through the umpty-zillion possibilities. Consciousness? It is to laugh. 'God'? Not even on the map.
A large part of what makes science and math such great tools is that they tell us their own limits. We know for a fact that mathematics as we practice it today cannot derive all possible truths from a finite set of axioms. We know that science doesn't give us the tools to discuss matters of agency or initial-first-causes.
Watching people ignore those limits and use 'science' to 'disprove God' offends me as a mathematician.
You're confusing the mechanism of perception with the existence of a source.
Brain surgeons have long known that stimulation of the temporal lobe can make people hear voices. That doesn't count as proof that 'voices' don't really exist, though.. unless you're writing the Cliff's Notes summary of The Matrix.
One could just as well ask why such a center exists in the brain if nothing exists to stimulate it.
Cool. What techniques do you use to guarantee that your code will never enter a race condition, even if someone else modifies it?
Well, I was going to use the "pendulum hanging from a pole that sits on the vertex of a teeter-totter" analogy, but the juggling seems, y'know.. more folsky.
There's a difference between "causing permanent damage to the hardware" and "wedging the firmware in a state where the device no longer accepts input and can only be reverted to factory state through direct access to the hardware."
There were BIOS viruses that basically turned PCs into bricks back in the 1990s. The basic principle was the same: If you have to go through the firmware to modify the firmware, you'd better make damn sure you don't mess with that access path. If you do, your only remaining choice is to remove the chip that contains the firmware and replace it with one that does what it's supposed to.
The rest of the hardware can work perfectly, even if the firmware won't let you talk to it.
This is a firmware update.. if it hangs in the middle of an 'unsupported' operation, you end up with a very stylish paperweight.
The fact that the paperweight can still execute its 'supported' features in potentia, e.g.: if it wasn't completely wedged, doesn't stop it from being a paperweight, now does it?
You haven't spent much time working with real-time signal processing systems, have you?
By way of analogy, think about juggling: You don't throw the ball to where your hand is right now. You throw it to the correct spot in the pattern -- 12" off center, and 36" off the ground -- then make sure your hand is in the right place by the time the ball comes down. It requires some prediction and timing, but it's basically doable.
Now try doing it in an earthquake. The 'correct spot in the pattern' is no longer a simple location. You have to predict where the ground will be when the ball comes down, and adjust your throw accordingly. That's a lot more complicated, and there's always a chance that something will happen between the throw and the catch that you didn't predict.
The number of possible states and unpredictable events is more or less infinite, so there's no way you can possibly cover them all. The best you can do is try to keep everything within a range where you can spot the failures early enough to recover before they trigger a train wreck.
Systems like that are delicate. Screw with the timing just a little, and you can bump a few 'recoverable' cases over into the 'train wreck' category. They won't show up right away, though.. you have to get just the right combination of events before the thing will hang.
And with embedded systems, there's no option to shut down, reload the program, and start from a fresh, known state.
And, of course, the job is just that much harder when someone else has fiddled with the system in ways you don't know about.
Apple's announcement is just their way of saying they can't be positive they've hit every possible edge case that might cause this next update to interact badly with any unknown, unauthorized, and unsupported firmware tinkering people might have chosen to do on their own.
Honestly, I don't know why there's so much fuss about this. Hacking the firmware is very much an "at your own risk" procedure, and anyone who pretends not to know that is being deliberately stupid.
And why is everybody dumping this problem on Apple? Why aren't people yelling at the guys who released the unlocking software, demanding a "100% guaranteed or we'll replace your iPhone for free" reversion kit? If anyone should know how to return a hacked iPhone to its factory state, it would be the guys who hacked it in the first place.
Call it "investment over hoarding", and use "buying gold" as your basis for comparison.
When people buy gold, they basically stick it under their mattress. They don't use it themselves, and no one else gets any benefit from it either. For all intents and purposes, that gold has been removed from the economy. It doesn't build new factories, buy new machines, or pay anyone's wages. It doesn't even do anything for the person who bought it. It just sits there while the owner waits for the price to go up so they can make a profit selling it to someone else. And then the new buyer will stick it under another mattress.
Investment, OTOH, creates wealth. The money I invest in a company's stock allows the company to buy factories and machines, pay wages, and make products. And the ratchet of a competitive market means that products tend to provide more value for less money over time. That means every dollar I have gains more buying power, making me wealthier even if I don't have more money per se.
Case in point: about ten years ago, I bought a 1GB hard drive for $700. These days, a gig of drive costs between 50 and 75 cents. My dollar today buys a thousand times as much drive as it did ten years ago, even though I don't have a thousand times as much money.
So yeah.. the Fed (and the IRS.. 'expenses' aka: 'investments' are deductible) prefers to see investment over hoarding.
Or it can be a Scottish term for a certain kind of fish. 150 years ago, a 'girl' was any small child, regardless of gender.
Welcome to linguistic drift.
WRT TFA, my reading says Lyons was making a chagrined reference to his attitude at the time, which was admittedly condescending. He's since learned that those people he looked down on had a much better grip on the situation than he did, and knows damn well that the shoe is now on the other foot.
The "I'm repeating my insult now that I know it makes me look like a complete idiot" thing is a fairly common literary device in abject apologies. It's on par with taping a "kick me" sign to your own chest.
He could have executed it a tad better by putting 'nerds' in quotes the second time to indicate that the word was now in question, but I don't read it as one more insult to the Groklaw community. Quite the opposite.
The fact that ringtones are protected IP doesn't have any particular bearing on whether people need to pay twice for them.
The article had an example of a movie where someone gets a call on their cell phone and plays a custom ringtone. The movie producers had to remove that scene from the distribution DVD.
There are four major differences between that situation and Apple's ringtone policy, though:
iPhone ringtones differ on all four points.
In short, the only real difference is whether I play a snippet of music through the headphones or through the speaker. Aside from that, the only grounds the labels have for charging another license fee would be if the ringtones were 'derivative works' of the original song. And as Gruber pointed out, the RIAA itself says they aren't, because if they were, the RIAA would have to pay the artists royalties for the ringtones per se.
---- Presumably there was some trigger at Apple. I would guess that the price change was forced by the introduction of the new iPod touch, their rate of sales is not considered fast enough to meet their market share targets, or the imminent European launch has been analysed as requiring a lower entry price for some reason and they need to bring US pricing in line.
The Christmas buying season is right around the corner. The iPhone is toward the top of the 'must have' tech products list right now. That buzz won't be there in another year, so Apple's capitalizing on it while they can.
Plus, Apple wants a share in the cellphone market. The faster it can build its installed base, the sooner all the pundits and analysts saying, "well, we don't know whether Apple will be able to stay in this for the long term.. they're only a niche player after all, and other, bigger companies have tried to tackle this market and failed" will shut the hell up. Three or four quarters of iPhone sales numbers climbing like nothing the cellphone market has ever seen will drive Apple's stock price through the roof.
Another point: The frenzy surrounding the iPhone was fueled largely by Apple's success with the iPod. The question then was, "will they be able to do it again?" If the iPhone turns out to be another runaway hit, imagine the buzz Apple's next hardware product will get.
Oh, for a world where companies only had to think about one thing when setting prices..
Profit per unit sold is only one thing a company can want. It can also want market share. The iPhone is toward the top of the hot-shit-must-have items right now, and the Christmas buying season is right around the corner. Dropping the price will mean that many more people find iPhones in their stockings come Christmas morning, and Apple's share of the cellphone market will grow by that much more.
Apple also gets a cut of the service contract from AT&T, and that revenue isn't tied to the purchase price of the iPhone. Selling one iPhone at $500 and getting a single $100 payment from AT&T brings Apple $600. Selling two iPhones at $300 and getting two $100 payments brings Apple $800. And the $100 payments are pure profit for Apple, where you have to subtract the materials, development, shipping and marketing costs from the initial $500-or-$300 payment.
Beyond that, Apple also sells stock. A lot of investors and analysts are still leery about Apple's ability to make it in the cellphone market. A 2007-Q4 report that shows iPhones selling like mad over the holiday season will help those investors and analysts feel more comfortable about Apple's ability to succeed in that market. That will take stock prices up, and it doesn't take much of a boost in stock price to offset a $200-per-unit accounting loss on the iPhones themselves.
I must not be communicating this idea clearly enough: Crews don't necessarily know whether they're doing a live mission or a practice mission. That's need-to-know information, and the flight crew doesn't need to know.
Yeah, that seems wrong at first glance, but a flight crew doesn't need to know the nature of its cargo any more than a FedEx air-freight crew does. Knowing the nature of the cargo is someone else's job. The flight crew's job is to take the plane where they're told, and execute any orders they're given along the way. Period. They're transport and delivery agents, not decision-makers.
The whole point of practice missions is to get the crew used to doing whatever they'd do on a live mission. Therefore, the crew should behave as if every mission was a live one. All they know is that the loaders attached something to the wings, and that they got a sealed folder along with their flying orders. They may have live nukes and arming codes, or they may have dummies. As far as they're concerned, it really doesn't matter. They'll go where they're told to go, and execute any orders they're given along the way.
Yeeeeeah...
It's not like the crew of a training flight would get dummy arming codes, authorization protocols, and anything else they might need for live weaponry. After all, the whole point of a training exercise is to make the whole thing different enough from the real thing that no one could confuse the two.
And of course you can't turn the loyalties of people who work with nukes.. that would be like saying China could get classified nuclear weapon designs out of Los Alamos.
They'd know they were carrying ordnance, and they'd know that the bombs might be nukes, but they wouldn't know for certain what was actually inside the casings.
For every nuke in our arsenal, there's a set of dummy weapons with exactly the same look and feel. The only people allowed near the vehicle while the ordnance is being loaded are the loaders themselves, and even they probably don't know whether the weapons are real or not.
It's a security measure. A load of nukes is both extremely valuable and extremely dangerous. If the Bad Guys knew they could get an arsenal by attacking a specific plane or by bending a few members of a specific flight crew, they'd try it. By the same token, if a few members of a flight crew managed to convince themselves it would be a good idea to convert a certain part of the planet to dirty glass, they might try that.
Running fake weapons most of the time eliminates the certainty of payoff in both cases. But an investigation and reprisals are damn well certain, so it just isn't worth attacking a plane or letting a few bombs fall on the off-chance that they might be real.
You're correct (as far as I know) that we stopped carrying live nukes at the end of the cold war, but that doesn't mean the drills with dummy weapons have ended. We really don't want to be at the low end of the learning curve if we end up needing nukes in a hurry.
In this case, it sounds like someone screwed up a requisition. Instead of calling for dummy weapons to be used in a practice flight, someone got real nukes instead. And yeah.. that's a case where the CO in charge of the base is in serious deep shit. We really don't want the people who take care of our nuclear arsenal to get confused about their inventory.
It depends on what you call the 'iPod Halo'. No, people aren't buying Macs simply because they have iPods. But most people who own iPods also end up using iTunes.
iTunes is probably the first piece of Apple software most PC users have ever used.
As a long-time Mac user who's seen dozens of PC users go from "you and your toys" to "okay, I get it now" after finally buying a Mac for some business reason, I can say with some certainty that the Apple user experience is what really sells the product. Windows users are accustomed to tolerating and working around minor problems with their machines. None of the problems are deal-breakers, but they're always there as minor annoyances.. the HP scanner software on a machine at work that pops up three 'the script in this page won't run, do you want to keep trying?' alerts every time it launches, for instance. They don't stop me from getting the scans, but I get tired of seeing them every damn time I want to scan something.
Mac software doesn't do that so much. It Just Works to the point where an issue like the scanner software above gets defined as 'crappy software' not 'just part of using a computer'.
So when people who own an iPod think about buying a new computer, they don't think, "well, I own one Apple product, I may as well buy another." They think, "hmm.. the one piece of Apple software I've used has been pretty good. Maybe I'll give the whole machine a look." And occasionally, some people go ahead and buy one.
The iPod is just a trojan. The sales come from the iTunes Halo effect.
If the history of iTunes is any guide, Apple will continue to roll out new measures that are strong enough to keep unlocking a niche issue, but won't waste time, money, and consumer goodwill by trying to lock the thing down completely. The geohot hack doesn't bother Apple or AT&T at all. Most people won't open their phone and start tinkering with the hardware. If somebody comes out with a pure-software hack that can be loaded and run with only a couple mouse clicks, Apple will probably take steps to make that harder. But in the long run, fighting to prevent hacks is a losing proposition, and Apple knows it.
The best way for Apple and AT&T to stop people from unlocking their phones is to develop software-as-a-service products that are only supported by the AT&T network. Maybe that means seamless integration between the AT&T network and the iTunes store, maybe it means streaming music & video that automagically syncs to your desktop computer's iTunes library, or maybe it means things none of us have even considered yet. Apple's whole business strategy revolves around the idea that people will pay for better quality, though.
If 'unlocking the iPhone' means 'keeping all the really good features of the iPhone and ditching the expensive suck factor of AT&T service', then unlocking will rule no matter what Apple and AT&T do. If 'unlocking the iPhone' means 'I ditched AT&T, but lost a bunch of cool features in the process', then only a handful of people will bother.
There are two main reasons Apple won't try to play the lock-in card.
First, Apple doesn't own enough of the cellphone market to have a 'lock' on anything. Their stated goal is to own 1% of the smartphone market by the end of 2008. Meanwhile, Nokia's goal is to own 40% of that same market. Apple isn't in a position to get pushy about anything right now. All that will do is alienate customers, and alienating customers doesn't help them increase their market share.
Second, Apple doesn't compete by locking out alternatives. It competes by offering the best package it can, and trusting consumers to think the package is worth the price.
The official line runs like so:
Now, I don't know anyone in IBM's legal division personally, so I can't say whether they use the term internally or not. But it crops up all over the internet and is frequently used in Groklaw comments to indicate respect, awe, and a healthy dose of "wow I'm glad they aren't after me." So it's for damnsure The Nazgul do know that the nickname exists.
A body couldn't be human without being at least a little bit flattered and amused by all that.
But then... they are The Nazgul. It's entirely possible that they simply dismiss it as immaterial to the litigation at hand.
SCO stopped being able to pay its lawyers around Halloween 2004.
More accurately, SCO made an agreement with Boies Schiller to cap the fees for this case at $31M, with some additional stock and 'cut of the winnings' language thrown in. Boies Schiller agreed to represent SCO all the way through appeals, but the general assumption is that they won't start any new cases for SCO unless SCO dumps some cash on the barrel-head.
So right now, Boies Schiller is looking at a family of cases where they're basically screwed.. they've lost the Novell slander-of-title case outright, and the best they can hope to do there is prove that the $30M technology license Microsoft bought wasn't entirely based on code Novell now officially owns. To the extent that Novell owns the code, Novell also owns 95% of the money, and money Novell owns won't pay SCO's legal fees. In the IBM case, they've been forced to limit their complaint to literal infringement of code that SCO owns -- and there's pathetically little of that which the judge will allow to be used as the basis of a complaint -- and now SCO doesn't even seem to own the code that IBM has allegedly infringed. To make matters worse, Novell has the explicit right to grant IBM permission to do anything it wants with the code, and Novell did exactly that at the outset of this whole long farce.
The whole family of cases as they stand right now are a train wreck for SCO and Boies Schiller, and the only way they could hope to win would be to go back and reformulate their bitch against IBM in a completely new way. But that's exactly what Boise Schiller isn't likely to do without getting a fresh mound of cash from SCO, and SCO doesn't have any cash to throw around right now. Right now, they're shitting bricks trying to find a way to keep Novell from taking away the $30M that's been propping them up since this whole thing started.
Meanwhile, SCO is still in the crosshairs of all the counterclaims Novell and IBM have filed, most of which Novell and IBM are likely to win, and win big. The damages from those will cost far more than SCO has ever been worth. The end result of that game will basically guarantee that any potential 'successor in interest' to SCO would rather strip naked, stick his feet in a hill of fire ants, and shove his arms into a tree-chipper than even think about trying to pick up the case where SCO left off.
Then we'll have to see whether Darl MacBride and the rest of the SCO management team can escape criminal charges, based on what they actually knew or should have known, what they said to the press and government agencies like the SEC, and whether this whole thing can be written off as the longest and most obnoxious pump-and-dump scheme in history.
So basically, this will all end when SCO's crops have been burned, their fields have been tilled with salt, and their flayed carcasses have been poisoned so thoroughly that even the buzzards won't dare to eat what's left.
Of course, that's only what I can come up with. They don't call IBM's lawyers The Nazgul for nothing.