Copyright law gives a creator the right to license a work. License law gives the creator power to write a set of rules that say how other people are allowed to use the work.
Using the work in a way that isn't allowed by the license is first a violation of the license, and second a violation of the creator's rights as established by copyright law.
The two tend to get rolled together in conversation, though.
Wow.. you challenge my statements about error with a link to a page that says:
It should also be noted that many reconstructions of past climate report substantial error bars, which are not represented on this figure.
Note the words 'substantial' and 'not represented'.
... Nice shootin', Tex.
I never said that error alone refutes global warming. All I said is that it's one factor to consider when trying to establish a confidence interval.
The important fact isn't the existence of error itself, but the size of the error relative to the variation you're trying to explain. If the error is less than 1% of the total variation, yeah, you can ignore it. But in this case we're talking about an observed variation in global temperature of 1.5C. One perceent of that would be.015C.
Do you honestly want to sit there and tell me that our estimates of global mean temperature for the past umpty-thousand years are accurate to roughly a hundredth of a degree?
I don't think so.
If you want to bring STRONG evidence into this discussion, go find the actual margin for error in the sample data. It's that simple. Go find a composite error for all those many different sources, plunk it down, and show that it's statistically insignificant with respect to the observed variation.
I'm not denying the existence of a warming trend. What I'm trying to do is state that trend in scientifically valid terms so people can disuss it rationally. The way to do that is to say, "we have observed a change of 1.5C in a sample whose standard deviation is.4-.7C, and whose margin for error is, say,.1C"
Given those figures, we can say there's an 80% chance that.7-.9C of that change is not due to normal variation if we take sigma to be.7C, and a 95% chance that.2-.4C of the change is not due to normal variation if we take sigma to be.4C
Scale those figures down for a CoC of.8, and we can legitimately say, "there's about a 75% chance that anthropogenic CO2 has raised global temperatures by half a degree C over the past 150 years."
That figure is worth taking seriously. It's just not strong enough to support the sky-is-falling rhetoric of alarmists who want to dismantle the global industrial economy.
All you're really saying is, "I think someone else should suffer to support my ideals." Who cares that dumping DRM or pulling DRM'd music from the iTunes store would probably violate the contracts Apple has with the labels? Who cares that it would give the labels a free ticket to crucify Apple, not only for the immediate loss of revenue, but also to send a message to any other company that dares to try and defy them? Who cares that shutting down the iTunes store all of a sudden would royally screw the millions of customers -- i.e.: people who actually give Apple money -- who like using the service, DRM and all.
Not you, apparently. In your uncomplicated little world, everything can be resolved with grandiose gestures that would look poorly thought out in a comic book.
Minor correction: DRM is a technological means to enforce license law, not contract law.
The confusion between those two branches of law creates an unnecessary amount of meaningless noise here on/. Way too many people think that, "I never signed anything," is a vaild refutation of EULAs, music and video license restrictions, or any other rule that gets in the way of their 'I paid for it so I should be able to do whatever I want' mindset.
The irony, of course, is that 'GPL violation' would be completely meaningless if that were true.
You do realize that you're quoting the report written by politicians, right? The one that's still being written by scientists is due to be released some time around spring.
The trouble with appeal to authority is not that the experts could be wrong. The real trouble is that a person who needs to cite an authority probably doesn't know if they're citing it correctly.
If you really understand something, you can cite the data directly. I don't have to cite Galileo to discuss gravity, for instance. I know how to measure the speed of a falling object and work out the force necessary to generate that speed over that distance and time. Having to cite Galileo (or Newton) means that I probably don't know how to do the measurements myself, and can be thrown by something like the 'experiment' in the movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead:
R (or G): "You'd think that this (holds up a bowling ball) would fall faster than this (flourishes a feather)."
[Drops both. The ball thumps to the foor almost immediately, and the feather wafts slowly down]
---- No reputible sources are disputing global warming and that humans are the cause.
Uh, think again.
There's a fairly solid consensus that global mean temperatures have gone up about 1.5C in the last hundred and fifty years. There's good proof that humans are putting a significant amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. There's still a lot of room for discussion of how much effect anthropogenic CO2 has on the global mean temperature, though.
Most scientists say, "at least some," but it's hard to pin anyone down to specific numbers. First and foremost, we don't understand the atmosphere well enough to say we know what acounts for natural variation. We know very little about the cloud system, for instance, which has a significant effect on planetary temperature.
If you want to make scientific statements about anthropogenic global warming, you need to be able to answer the following questions:
What's the margin for error in the sample data, both for historical temperature levels and historical CO2 levels?
What's the standard deviation of the historical temperature data?
What's the exact coefficient of correlation between atmospheric CO2 and global mean temperature?
All measurements have some error, and you can't make meaningful statements about numbers smaller than that error. For most scientific work, an error margin of 5% is considered acceptable. I don't happen to know the error for converting 500-year-old tree ring data to global mean temperature, for instance, but I'd be surprised to find it less than 5%. The same is true for extrapolating global CO2 levels from a microliter of prehistoric gas trapped in an ice core sample.
By the same token, all real data populations have some amount of variation. It might be very small, or it might be very large. Statistically, about 2/3 of a sample falls within one standard deviation (aka: sigma) of the average. That means a variation of less than one sigma is 2/3 likely to be perfectly natural, and only 1/3 likely to be caused by external factors.
And finally we have coefficient of correlation. A CoC of.95 means that when factor A goes up, factor B also goes up 95% of the time. Again, it's scientifically invalid to claim correlations greater than your CoC.
So.. the scientifically valid way to discuss anthropogenic global warming is to say it's X% certain that anthropogenic CO2 accounts for Y degrees of variation in global mean temperature, plus or minus Z degrees of error.
And let's face it, when you carve out a 5% error for basic measurement, figure a standard deviation of between.4C and.75C in the historical temperature data, then factor in a CoC of.8 or so (which is generous for real-world science), there isn't much room left for sweeping pronouncements. If you want to be 95% certain that Y degrees of variation are due to human-produced CO2, you have to set Y somewhere around.1C.
Soooo different from the traffic on Linux support lists.
There you'll get twelve people saying "RTFM," fifteen people saying you should use a completely different piece of software which may or may not do what the person asking the question wants, and ten flamewars about the relative functional/ethical/technical merits of those programs.
It's only when the supplicant says, "foobazquux 2.13b007n doesn't actually do what I want," that the outright abuse starts.
---- After all it's my understanding that he fought tierd-pricing... he could have fought DRM as well.
I think your perspective is a little off.
Yeah, Steve fought tiered pricing. That was something the labels wanted to add to the existing agreement. In other words, he had to hang tough to keep the labels from making things any worse.
It's only now, in the aftermath of his having won the fight that people think Apple is strong enough to dictate policy. Before the results actually came down, a lot of people were certain that Apple would lose that particular fight.
In fact, Edgar Bronfman not only wanted (and expected to get) tiered pricing, but also a cut of every hardware sale. Universal got exactly that when it dragged a $1-per-Zune fee out of Microsoft, and its CEO was quoted as saying something to the effect of, "everyone knows your customers are thieves, so you should darn well pay for it." We've also heard recent comments from MPAA members saying, "We won't put movies on the iTunes store because Apple's [permissive] attitude toward DRM scares the crap out of us."
I don't think Apple had the clout to dump DRM at the last contract negotiation. And even if they did and had won, it would have screwed their chances to negotiate with the MPAA.
If Apple does have to shut down some nation-specific iTunes stores for legal reasons, that will be another bargaining chip in Apple's favor the next time contract negotiations roll around.
And as a personal aside, I find the comments made by the RIAA and the minister from Norway to be really annoying: "Gee, Apple has lots of smart folks.. they should cope with all the headaches of developing and maintaining a security system that will be distributed among any number of vendors because we want them to. But don't expect us to do anything about it except sit on our butts and complain."
---- Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris on the proposed French DRM interoperability law: [...]
Read two paragraphs further:
But Apple said the law, which it opposes, would likely actually increase its sales of iPod music players. "IPod sales will likely increase as users freely upload their iPods with 'interoperable' music which cannot be adequately protected," Kerris said. "Free movies for iPods should not be far behind."
"We'd probably make more money from dropping DRM," (since Apple more or less breaks even on music sales and takes almost all its iPod related profit from hardware sales) is hardly the most ringing of endorsements.
---- You mean the API that allows developers to optionally integrate MS's HDCP implementation into their media players without having to write their own HDCP implementation?
Saying third party developers can roll similarly restrictred code for themselves is disingenuous at best. The RIAA/MPAA want DRM that goes all the way down to the hardware, and Microsoft has delivered that in Vista.
Bah.. having read the article myself, I think a better summary would be, Nate Anderson lists some reasons why Apple benefits from DRM, and uses an unnecessarily controversial title as a hook to draw reader attention.
Here's a tip: Nate isn't an official Apple spokesperson. His views and opinions are his own, and have about as much bearing on Apple's strategic goals as yours or mine do. Now, if you can point me to an article that has a single verifiable quote from someone who oficially speaks for Apple saying, "hey, we're right behind DRM," then you might have a point. Otherwise, the best legitimate summary you can get is, "Nate thinks Apple likes DRM."
If you want to see DRM's best friends, look at the RIAA and MPAA. They're the ones who continue to spend tons of money lobbying Congress for laws that would make hardware DRM mandatory in any device that touches any device that could ever potentially touch content. They're the ones who've spent tons of money on markting campaigns that say, "you wouldn't commit genocide against an entire, harmless, sentient species, so why would you consider letting another person watch a rented movie on your HDTV screen without paying us theatre royalties?"
Or perhaps look at the DRM that Microsoft has rolled into Vista. Show me how Apple has loaded its flagship products with restrictions that turn them into crippleware as soon as one sees anything that looks like protected content.
Hell, if you want an opinion piece, try this one: How Apple Could End Up Being DRM's Worst Enemy:
The labels wanted to use DRM to control the consumer's access to content. They'd be happy to legislate away fair use and sell it back to us, impose bullshit like tiered pricing for anything that actually sells, and screw hardware vendors for the infamous $1-per-Zune "because we all know your customers are criminals" fee.
But they can't, because Apple doesn't like those ideas. And the labels famously failed to strong-arm Apple at the last contract negotiation because they need Apple more than Apple needs them. The iPod is the dominant product in the market, and the only way to sell DRM'd content for the iPod is through Apple.
In short, Apple is using DRM to screw the labels harder than the labels have been able to screw the consumer. And the labels are getting so tired of being screwed by Apple. They're so tired, in fact, that they're starting to look at dropping the DRM just to take some of the edge off Apple's market dominance.
Let's be clear here, boys and girls: if the labels do away with DRM, it won't be because they've spontaneously turned into "information wants to be free" idealists. They'll do it because it's hurting their bottom line. And who's the company that's used DRM to hurt the labels's bottom line rather than using DRM to help the labels screw consumers? Apple.
All the ethical rants, consumer hostility, and technological circumvention to date have failed to make the labels back away from DRM. They've only entrenched the labels more firmly in the idea that they need legal control over everything up to and including the consumer's eyes and ears.
If the labels decide to drop DRM, it will be because of how Apple used DRM to screw the labels out of money. Period.
---- Easy to use? The idiots at Apple forgot the most basic of user controls: the on-off switch.
Pushing any button turns an iPod on. Pushing and holding the play/pause button turns it off. Thank you for demonstrating your lack of knowledge of the product you want to slam. Bonus points for the boneheaded idea that 'pushing one button to turn the device on, then pushing another button to make it do something interesting' counts as good usability.
---- Remember when they had a tiny pinhole to eject disks while their PC competitors had an eject button?
Yeah.. the pinhole was for edge cases where telling the OS to eject the disk didn't work. If you hanker for the ability to physically eject a disk from the device before a write is complete, your usability cred has just taken another hit.
Your trouble is that you've mistaken 'making trivial actions immediately visible' for 'usability'. In many cases, trivial actions get in the way of good usability.
Case in point: turning an iPod on and off. Who actually wants to do that? Where's the use case for someone picking up a portable music player and saying, "I want to turn it on. That's all. Once I've turned it on, I'll put it down and go away." There isn't one. 'Turning the device on' isn't a goal, it's just a prequisite for the real use cases, like "I want to listen to a song."
Good usability eliminates as many trivial prerequisite steps as possible. What physical constraint in the use cases forces me to design a device where the Play button doesn't work unless I've pushed some other button first? There is none. If 'make sure the power button is ON' precedes every freaking step in your instructions on how to get something users actually want out of the product, then it's my job as a designer to say, "y'know, I could save the user a step by moving that 'make sure the power is on' operation down into the hardware."
Here's a design problem for you: what happens to a device with a physical on/off switch when the user turns it on, puts it down, and walks away? The device continues to burn power, that's what. In other words, you have a device that will run out of power overnight (or sitting in a coat pocket during the day) if the user forgets to turn it off after they hit the 'stop playing' button.
Quick hint: 'running out of power while I was away' is rarely considered a feature.
Of course, we can eliminate that problem by building in some soft-power logic and having the device turn itself off after N minutes of inactivity. But that completely undercuts your beloved on/off switch. Having the switch in the ON position no longer means the device is ON.. the switch can be ON but the device can be OFF thanks to the soft-power logic. So how do we turn a device in that state back on? Flip the switch OFF then back ON again? Users will just love that. How about hooking the soft logic to the control buttons so pushing any button turns the device back on?
Hey look! We've just reinvented the iPod soft-power interface, with an extra and essentially useless power button on the side. Users will flip that switch ON when they take the device out of the package and just leave there for the rest of the device's lifespan.
Or how about this: if we admit that soft-power totally screws the rationale behind an ON button, we can still find valid use cases for an OFF button. Sometimes I don't want the thing to turn on when I hit a button. Of course, there are valid use cases for users wanting to block unwanted pushes of all the other buttons, too. So how about we make our on/off switch mean 'the device does/doesn't listen to the buttons' rather than 'the power is on/off'?
Hey look! We've just reinvented the iPod's HOLD switch.
And that my friend, is the difference between 'usability' and 'making trivial mechanics immediately visible'.
Then you'll love digging through Bittorrent streams looking for a version that isn't crap.
Customer service includes things like, "consistent quality," "broad selection," and "easy searching." If you don't care about any of those things, feel free to, as Steve Jobs says, pay yourself less than minimum wage crawling around looking for data.
That may be true in abstract terms, but a lot of Wal-Mart's products are also crap.
One fast and easy way for a retailer to cut prices is to buy seconds from suppliers. That can mean anything from boxes of ceral with misprinted labels to clothes that are the wrong size. Try taking a tape measure into the Wal-Mart women's clothes section and measuring the waist sizes of all the size 12 pants on a rack.
Let's assume Apple did know about this issue months ago. The list of problems seems to suggest some kind of mismatch between the iTunes code to sync data with the device and the Vista device i/o code.
If the solution to those problems involves architectural changes.. replacing XP/ME-specific device i/o code with Vista-specific device i/o code.. it makes sense for Apple to wait and release a Vista-specific version shortly after Vista itself goes into public use. it doesn't make sense for them to load a bunch of Vista code into the versions of iTunes that were running on XP or ME just so the program would probably survive the OS upgrade seamlessly.
It also makes sense for Apple to wait a few weeks after Vista goes public before releasing its Vista-specific version of iTunes, just to see if any edge-cases crop up when umpty-zillion users start upgrading upmty-zillion different XP and ME configurations. Give it a couple of weeks to watch the radar for bugs, another two weeks to solve them, and one more for QA testing, and you have a good Vista-specific version of iTunes coming out five weeks after Vista itself hits the shelves of Wal-Mart.
That isn't bad, as far as timing goes. There's always some ramp-up in new product adoption, and Vista is hardly the 'must upgrade as soon as I can get my hands on a copy' product of the 21st century. Even most of the early adopters will still be waiting to upgrade by the time Apple's Vista-specific version of iTunes is released.
IMO, the real story here is that Vista's iPod compatability is a big enough issue to be getting attention at all.
The past week has probably seen Vista running in a larger and more diverse selection of real-world configurations than all the beta testing combined. Some quirky little edge case that only crops up a fraction of one percent of the time is suddenly happening often enough to make the pattern visible. These things happen when new products hit the market. It isn't sabotage on either side, it's just a slight mismatch between the old and new configurations.
But seriously folks, this well has been poisoned. To my mind there are three highlight events associated with the whole, "Mac users need to get off their complacent butts" meme:
Symantec published a white paper with essentially that title. Its contents were a bunch of generalizations about complacency being bad and prevention being good.
About a month later they published another paper that boiled down to, "No, we don't know of any actual Mac exploits in the wild. No, we don't have any signatures for Mac malware in our database. Yes, our software works by looking for signatures of known malware in the database. So yes, our product would be a complete waste of time, money, and computing resources for Mac users as of today. We were speaking generally. Please stop hitting us."
David "wants to stab a Mac user in the eye with a cigarette" Maynor.
I honestly do believe he and Ellch discovered some kind of 802.11b vulnerability in some category of hardware, and only used a Mac in the demostration for the sake of color. I just don't care. The Mac aspect of the issue got hyped so far beyond its legitimate context that they retreated into obfuscation, and to this day we still don't know what actually happened. All that's left is the residue from a cloud of sound and fury that ended up signifying nothing. Plus that one, vastly unprofessional, quote.
The Month of Bugs in Third-Party Software That Happens to Run on a Mac, So We'll Blame Them on Apple Anway, Plus the One in Quicktime That Probably Hits More Windows Users than Mac Users.
Yeah, they found the rtsp:// vulnerability. Bravo. They even found a few more bugs in software Apple actually has some control over. Again, I don't care. Any legitimate security value the project had was outweighed by Finnestere's grandstanding, his decision to take grey-hat disclosure out into the hinterlands between 'charcoal' and 'just plain black', and the ultimately disappointing trickle of actual Apple-as-in-code-written-by-Apple bugs that he managed to stroke out.
Those events have set the context for 'wakeup calls to the Mac fanbois'. Whoever picks up the baton next will either struggle against that heap of bullshit, or will end up adding more. Meanwhile, December's spam level has been estimated at 94% of all email sent for the month, thanks in large part to those hundreds of thousands of infected Windows machines in the botnets. And there are still no widespread exploits against Macs, even in spite of all Finnestere's hard work.
It's time to admit that there's an entire circus parade worth of elephants in the clown car. Preferably before the stupidity gets to the, "yeah, at least 95% of all Windows machines are infected, and no, there hasn't been a single widespread exploit against Macs in the past ten years, but the way you Macs weenies walk around acting like your machines are secure makes me sick," mark.
Vint Cerf recently made a report to the UN committee on internet security. He said that maybe 25% of all computers tied to the internet are infected. We're currently seeing the highest spam levels in the history of the internet, much of which is being sent by botnets that contain thousands or hundreds of thousands of compromised machines. We've gotten to a point in history where 'hundreds of thousands of machines compromised' is no longer a newsworthy fact. It's so freaking common that people just look at it as an unpleasant fact of life.
And right in the middle of that context we have a few tens of millions of Macs that have been running unmolested for years.
I don't give a damn about your abstractions. I don't give a damn about your heuristics. I don't give a damn about your moral indignation that Apple doesn't run its entire business in a way that's consistent with the.3 seconds of what passes for thought that you've put into any given issue. I'm an empericist. I care about what's actually happened.
What's actually happened is that there hasn't been a single large-scale compromise of the Mac platform since the introduction of OS X. What's actually happened is that Apple has been notified of several vulnerabilities over the past few years and has rolled out security updates to address them. In many cases, they've also listed the names of the people who notified them of the problem. What's actually happened is that Apple has continued to develop its security model and has built a whole new set of tools into Leopard that will make OS X even more secure than it is today.
There are exactly three classes of people who try to bang the "Macs are no more secure than Windows, but Mac users are too stupid to care" drum any more:
Apple haters
Lazy journalists who don't know or care shit about security but know that putting 'Apple' and 'security' in the headlines guarantees sales/page views/etc
'Security researchers' who either have a financial interest in selling AV software or are media-whore wannabees.
Please note that I do not place Landon Fuller in any of those categories. He isn't trying to sell the world the idea that Apple's sky is falling. He's talking about a fairly interesting concept of community involvement in the overall Apple security process.
I happen to disagree with the idea, personally.. IMO the chance of a zero-day patch breaking something is higher than the chance of a Mac getting infected between day zero and the time Apple releases an official patch (and yes, that includes all those issues that have been hanging out there unpatched for years.. show me the number of active exploits in the wild instead of just stuffing another set of panties into the wad currently wedged up your ass). I also see problems with trust and vetting. A MacZERT would presumably do some QA on the patches before distributing them, which leads to the same kinds of delays you get from Apple. And a MacZERT's capacity to look for unwanted side effects would be limited by the fact that outside third parties don't have all the relevant code.
I do see the possibility of large benefits from a community effort to isolate and develop proposed solutions to bugs, since that would help Apple's own security team with some of the heavy lifting. I think Apple could develop a good dialogue with the third-party security community through such a system.
But that has absolutely nothing to do with you. You're just another anti-fanboy out to spew meaningless FUD. The fact that you can't distinguish between "hundreds of thousands of compromised machines in a single botnet" and "no exploit of even a thousand machines over the past five years" means your opinion is too stupid to be taken seriously.
Actually, no. The W3C specs clearly distinguish between 'tags' and 'elements'.
A tag is a token -- a sequence of characters that tell the parser a new element is about to start or end.
An element is a logical unit composed of a start tag, and end tag, and optional PCDATA content. Or if the element doesn't take content, it can be expressed with an empty element tag.
When you talk about a tag, you're talking about markup. When you talk about an element, you're (hopefully) talking about semantic structure. Neither of those definitions is appropriate to unordered, non-hierarchical metadata, which is what people mean when they say 'tagging'.
---- That sounds like a truth in advertising/trade description issue, not an accounting one. And even then, it would depend on the wording.
I'm not talking about ad copy, I'm talking about documents that get handed over to government regulators.
The law requires Apple to have a set of documents that say exactly what a 'MacBook' is supposed to be. There are two parts to those documents: A complete description of the features the product offers, and a complete accounting of the components it uses to deliver those features. Together, those documents amount to Apple's legal promise that the components listed in part B do in fact deliver the features promised in part A, and that the features listed in part A are exactly what Apple is promising its customers.
In this case, Apple said, "802.11g functionality" in part A, and "stock 802.11g cards or downgraded 802.11n cards" in part B. That's perfectly legal. Manufacturers use partial assemblies or downgraded parts all the time. The only thing that matters is that the components listed in part B do deliver the features listed in part A.
If Apple had said, "upgradeable to 802.11n" in part A, there are a couple of ways it could have gotten into trouble. First of all, any MacBook with a stock 802.11g card would be in violation because 802.11g doesn't do 802.11n. Second, the regulators would look askance at the 'upgradeable' part, because that looks like an unfinished product. The regulators would rather see '802.11n functionality' at the time of sale.
---- But what they shipped, and charged for, and recognised the revenue for was a finished product.
Was it? If Apple releases a 'free upgrade' that materially changes the product after the time of sale, was the product actually finished at the time of sale, or did Apple just under-report the functionality listed in part A so it could push unfinished products out to consumers, record the revenue in this quarter's financial statements, jack up its stock price, then finish the product later?
More to the point, if the product was capable of being materially upgraded for free, why didn't Apple say it was upgradeable? And that, of course, leads back to the question of why they didn't just deliver the functionality at the time of sale.
The bottom line is that the law equates 'free upgrade' to 'something the vendor should have delivered at the time of sale'. Too many companies were using free upgrades as a loophole that allowed them to erase expenses from their books and report revenue artificially early. That combination made those companies look great to investors, who then found themselves owning stock in a company that did not, in fact, have strong revenue growth, and did have all sorts of unexpected debts.
---- How is this different to those cards sandwich shops have, where they stamp it each time and after ten you get one free?
It's different because the sandwich shop is giving you a completely new product for free (in effect, a volume discount that sets the price of 11 sandwiches equal to the price of 10), not saying, "buy a sandwich from us today, then bring it back tomorrow and we'll upgrade it to a deluxe for free."
---- Wow, there's a law that says 802.11g isn't the same as 802.11n?
Well, yeah. For starters, they're fundamentally incompatible devices. An 802.11g device can't speak the 802.11n protocol, and a pure-802.11n device wouldn't speak 802.11g. Second, you can't turn an 802.11g card into an 802.11n card with a simple firmware upgrade. If two devices don't talk to each other, and you can't turn one into the other without serious hardware modification, you have what the law considers two different products.
If you were being sarcastic and asking if there's a specific law for 802.11g/n, then no, but you can bet your booties there's a law that defines what will and will not be considered equivalent products.
---- As I see it, they never CHARGED for 802.11n functionality, so how could they be receiving revenue on that before they deliver it?
If you end up with a machine that has 802.11n functionality, the law says you paid for that functionality at some time or other. If the only time you paid was at the time of sale, then 'time of sale' is the only time when you could have paid for that functionality. If the functionality didn't exist in the product at the time of sale, then the law says Apple could be considered guilty of selling an unfinished product.
Once again: the law prohibits free upgrades. Too many companies were using 'free upgrade' as an excuse for selling products that weren't finished, reporting all the revenue as income for the current quarter, and failing to tell anyone (like the SEC or the shareholders) that the company had a whole bunch of outstanding 'upgrades' that would have to happen later. It was a loophole that allowed companies to hide expenses, artificially boost their profit numbers, and manipulate their stock prices. SOx closed that loophole.
And as with any set of rules, there are edge cases where a strict interpretation of the rules seems silly. This is one of those cases, but that apparent silliness doesn't change the rules.
---- The change in functionality of the wireless chipset by enabling 802.11n is NO different from the change in functionality of the entire computer anytime you add software to it, [...]
Again, you're confusing the physical realities of the chipset with the law. The law says 802.11g and 802.11n are two different things. The law says an 802.11n device is composed of umpty-seven different components, ranging from chips to jumper wires to firmware. That point is important: according to the law, the firmware that makes a device do its thing is a component, and there's no legal difference between a 'software component' and a 'hardware component'.
The difference between 'software' and 'a software component' is important. The fact that some part of an 802.11n card's inner workings is embodied in software is an engineering/economic decision. It's fully possible to build an electrical circuit (a hardware component) that would do everything the firmware (a software component) does. It's just cheaper/easier to do it one way as opposed to the other. What's more, the 802.11n card stops being an 802.11n card if you remove that component.
By contrast, a computer doesn't become 'a computer' when you load Firefox onto it. Nor does it stop being 'a computer' if you delete Firefox from it. It does stop being 'a computer' if you remove the firmware, though, just like it stops being 'a computer' if you remove the CPU, the RAM, or any other critical hardware component.
If a device can no longer perform its stated function when you remove X, then X is a component. If the device can still perform its stated function when you remove X, then X is an accessory, and probably a product in its own right.
As far as the law is concerned, turning what was originally sold as an 802.11g card into an 802.11n card is a material change in the product. To make the change, you have to remove one set of components, and put in some other set of components. The law does
You're confusing the physical capacities of the chips with the law.
The law says 802.11g and 802.11n are different products. Moving from one to the other is a material change in your computer, and the law doesn't care whether you have to swap out hardware or just patch the firmware.
When Apple sold the computer, it said the computer had 802.11g functionality. The fact that the chipset was capable of something else is irrelevant. Apple only had to be able to prove that the chips it used did in fact deliver the promised 802.11g functionality.
If Apple had listed the machine as "802.11n-capable," the law would have required Apple to deliver 802.11n functionality at the time of sale.
If Apple handed out the patch for free now, you'd have customers getting what the law considers to be a material change in the product at no cost, which comes reasonably close to what the law calls "selling unfinished products." A regulator would have grounds for saying that Apple charged customers for the 802.11n capacity at the time of sale, but didn't deliver that functionality until later.
That's illegal. According to the law, a company is only allowed to receive money for functionality when it actually delivers that functionality.
The fact that the law considers 802.11g to be a different product from 802.11n rules out a free upgrade, period. Either Apple delivers 802.11n at the time of sale, or it charges for an upgrade later. Those are its only options.
By the same token, the price Apple charges for the upgrade has to represent a reasonable fee for the material change, as balanced against the actual cost to Apple of making the change. $4.99 is a lot less than it would cost to swap in new hardware, and it's low compared to the ticket price of most software. I'd imagine it just about covers the fees to the credit companies and Apple's internal processing costs, with a little left over to cover the cost of development.
This is hardly going to be a cash cow, after all. The absolute number of people who can get this upgrade is relatively small, and all Apple's new machines are being sold as 802.11n-capable.
Well, they can download any of several free programs that will read the Fairplay keys from their computer or iPod, and create non-DRM'd copies of the files without any loss of quality. Ten minutes to find, five minutes to download, one click to set the thing in motion, and a couple hours to unlock an entire library. Oh noes, the suffering! Evil, Evil Apple!
Apple doesn't want to waste resources trying to make it impossible to strip off its DRM. They know that goal is itself impossible, not to mention massively unfriendly to the consumer. Instead, they make it inconvenient to strip the DRM off songs you don't own yourself, and that's enough to keep most people playing nicely. And they don't publish their own tools to let people who've bought music strip the DRM, but they haven't gone out of their way to crush the tools that do.
Apple understands security well enough to know that locks don't exist to keep criminals out, they exist to keep basically honest people from wandering into places where they'll be tempted to do something illegal. And Apple treats its customers like honest people who don't particularly want to do something illegal.
Comparing and contrasting this with the RIAA and Microsoft strategies, as manifest in their policies and products, is left as an exercise for the reader.
Here are a couple of other things that are quantifiable: transmission artifacts and ambient noise.
A JPEG encoding artifact will disappear if you shrink the image enough, or dither it on a printer enough. Audio artifacts you can hear in an anechoic chamber will disappear under the ambient noise of, say, driving in traffic. Artifacts that are audible on high-performance speakers will be lost when played through a pair of 1/2" earbuds.
If you want the audiophile experience, good on you. Buy high-quality audio sources and play them on good equipment in an acoustically balanced room.
I want to listen to music while I'm driving amid the semis on the interstate. Or under the hearing protection when I'm running my chainsaw or leaf blower. I'm willing to tolerate the signal degradation of small earphones, or FM losses pumped through the factory-standard crap speakers in my truck.
I'll thank you not to treat me like a philistine because the environment where I listen to 95% of my music doesn't happen to meet your audiophile standards.
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Actually, it's both.
Copyright law gives a creator the right to license a work. License law gives the creator power to write a set of rules that say how other people are allowed to use the work.
Using the work in a way that isn't allowed by the license is first a violation of the license, and second a violation of the creator's rights as established by copyright law.
The two tend to get rolled together in conversation, though.
Wow.. you challenge my statements about error with a link to a page that says:
Note the words 'substantial' and 'not represented'.
... Nice shootin', Tex.
I never said that error alone refutes global warming. All I said is that it's one factor to consider when trying to establish a confidence interval.
The important fact isn't the existence of error itself, but the size of the error relative to the variation you're trying to explain. If the error is less than 1% of the total variation, yeah, you can ignore it. But in this case we're talking about an observed variation in global temperature of 1.5C. One perceent of that would be .015C.
Do you honestly want to sit there and tell me that our estimates of global mean temperature for the past umpty-thousand years are accurate to roughly a hundredth of a degree?
I don't think so.
If you want to bring STRONG evidence into this discussion, go find the actual margin for error in the sample data. It's that simple. Go find a composite error for all those many different sources, plunk it down, and show that it's statistically insignificant with respect to the observed variation.
I'm not denying the existence of a warming trend. What I'm trying to do is state that trend in scientifically valid terms so people can disuss it rationally. The way to do that is to say, "we have observed a change of 1.5C in a sample whose standard deviation is .4-.7C, and whose margin for error is, say, .1C"
Given those figures, we can say there's an 80% chance that .7-.9C of that change is not due to normal variation if we take sigma to be .7C, and a 95% chance that .2-.4C of the change is not due to normal variation if we take sigma to be .4C
Scale those figures down for a CoC of .8, and we can legitimately say, "there's about a 75% chance that anthropogenic CO2 has raised global temperatures by half a degree C over the past 150 years."
That figure is worth taking seriously. It's just not strong enough to support the sky-is-falling rhetoric of alarmists who want to dismantle the global industrial economy.
How 'bout you grow a brain first?
All you're really saying is, "I think someone else should suffer to support my ideals." Who cares that dumping DRM or pulling DRM'd music from the iTunes store would probably violate the contracts Apple has with the labels? Who cares that it would give the labels a free ticket to crucify Apple, not only for the immediate loss of revenue, but also to send a message to any other company that dares to try and defy them? Who cares that shutting down the iTunes store all of a sudden would royally screw the millions of customers -- i.e.: people who actually give Apple money -- who like using the service, DRM and all.
Not you, apparently. In your uncomplicated little world, everything can be resolved with grandiose gestures that would look poorly thought out in a comic book.
Minor correction: DRM is a technological means to enforce license law, not contract law.
/. Way too many people think that, "I never signed anything," is a vaild refutation of EULAs, music and video license restrictions, or any other rule that gets in the way of their 'I paid for it so I should be able to do whatever I want' mindset.
The confusion between those two branches of law creates an unnecessary amount of meaningless noise here on
The irony, of course, is that 'GPL violation' would be completely meaningless if that were true.
You do realize that you're quoting the report written by politicians, right? The one that's still being written by scientists is due to be released some time around spring.
The trouble with appeal to authority is not that the experts could be wrong. The real trouble is that a person who needs to cite an authority probably doesn't know if they're citing it correctly.
If you really understand something, you can cite the data directly. I don't have to cite Galileo to discuss gravity, for instance. I know how to measure the speed of a falling object and work out the force necessary to generate that speed over that distance and time. Having to cite Galileo (or Newton) means that I probably don't know how to do the measurements myself, and can be thrown by something like the 'experiment' in the movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead:
R (or G): "You'd think that this (holds up a bowling ball) would fall faster than this (flourishes a feather)."
[Drops both. The ball thumps to the foor almost immediately, and the feather wafts slowly down]
R (or G): "... and you'd be absolutely right."
---- No reputible sources are disputing global warming and that humans are the cause.
Uh, think again.
There's a fairly solid consensus that global mean temperatures have gone up about 1.5C in the last hundred and fifty years. There's good proof that humans are putting a significant amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. There's still a lot of room for discussion of how much effect anthropogenic CO2 has on the global mean temperature, though.
Most scientists say, "at least some," but it's hard to pin anyone down to specific numbers. First and foremost, we don't understand the atmosphere well enough to say we know what acounts for natural variation. We know very little about the cloud system, for instance, which has a significant effect on planetary temperature.
If you want to make scientific statements about anthropogenic global warming, you need to be able to answer the following questions:
All measurements have some error, and you can't make meaningful statements about numbers smaller than that error. For most scientific work, an error margin of 5% is considered acceptable. I don't happen to know the error for converting 500-year-old tree ring data to global mean temperature, for instance, but I'd be surprised to find it less than 5%. The same is true for extrapolating global CO2 levels from a microliter of prehistoric gas trapped in an ice core sample.
By the same token, all real data populations have some amount of variation. It might be very small, or it might be very large. Statistically, about 2/3 of a sample falls within one standard deviation (aka: sigma) of the average. That means a variation of less than one sigma is 2/3 likely to be perfectly natural, and only 1/3 likely to be caused by external factors.
And finally we have coefficient of correlation. A CoC of .95 means that when factor A goes up, factor B also goes up 95% of the time. Again, it's scientifically invalid to claim correlations greater than your CoC.
So.. the scientifically valid way to discuss anthropogenic global warming is to say it's X% certain that anthropogenic CO2 accounts for Y degrees of variation in global mean temperature, plus or minus Z degrees of error.
And let's face it, when you carve out a 5% error for basic measurement, figure a standard deviation of between .4C and .75C in the historical temperature data, then factor in a CoC of .8 or so (which is generous for real-world science), there isn't much room left for sweeping pronouncements. If you want to be 95% certain that Y degrees of variation are due to human-produced CO2, you have to set Y somewhere around .1C.
Soooo different from the traffic on Linux support lists.
There you'll get twelve people saying "RTFM," fifteen people saying you should use a completely different piece of software which may or may not do what the person asking the question wants, and ten flamewars about the relative functional/ethical/technical merits of those programs.
It's only when the supplicant says, "foobazquux 2.13b007n doesn't actually do what I want," that the outright abuse starts.
And Vista is a completely different codebase. New security model, new hardware abstraction layer, new network model, you name it.
If anything, I'd imagine that porting from XP to Vista would be more of a challenge than porting from OS X 10.4 PPC to OS X 10.4 x86.
---- After all it's my understanding that he fought tierd-pricing ... he could have fought DRM as well.
I think your perspective is a little off.
Yeah, Steve fought tiered pricing. That was something the labels wanted to add to the existing agreement. In other words, he had to hang tough to keep the labels from making things any worse.
It's only now, in the aftermath of his having won the fight that people think Apple is strong enough to dictate policy. Before the results actually came down, a lot of people were certain that Apple would lose that particular fight.
In fact, Edgar Bronfman not only wanted (and expected to get) tiered pricing, but also a cut of every hardware sale. Universal got exactly that when it dragged a $1-per-Zune fee out of Microsoft, and its CEO was quoted as saying something to the effect of, "everyone knows your customers are thieves, so you should darn well pay for it." We've also heard recent comments from MPAA members saying, "We won't put movies on the iTunes store because Apple's [permissive] attitude toward DRM scares the crap out of us."
I don't think Apple had the clout to dump DRM at the last contract negotiation. And even if they did and had won, it would have screwed their chances to negotiate with the MPAA.
If Apple does have to shut down some nation-specific iTunes stores for legal reasons, that will be another bargaining chip in Apple's favor the next time contract negotiations roll around.
And as a personal aside, I find the comments made by the RIAA and the minister from Norway to be really annoying: "Gee, Apple has lots of smart folks.. they should cope with all the headaches of developing and maintaining a security system that will be distributed among any number of vendors because we want them to. But don't expect us to do anything about it except sit on our butts and complain."
Read two paragraphs further: "We'd probably make more money from dropping DRM," (since Apple more or less breaks even on music sales and takes almost all its iPod related profit from hardware sales) is hardly the most ringing of endorsements.
---- You mean the API that allows developers to optionally integrate MS's HDCP implementation into their media players without having to write their own HDCP implementation?
No, I mean the code that will transparently downgrade the quality of every signal passing through the machine if any signal is judged to be carrying "Premium Content".
Saying third party developers can roll similarly restrictred code for themselves is disingenuous at best. The RIAA/MPAA want DRM that goes all the way down to the hardware, and Microsoft has delivered that in Vista.
Bah.. having read the article myself, I think a better summary would be, Nate Anderson lists some reasons why Apple benefits from DRM, and uses an unnecessarily controversial title as a hook to draw reader attention.
Here's a tip: Nate isn't an official Apple spokesperson. His views and opinions are his own, and have about as much bearing on Apple's strategic goals as yours or mine do. Now, if you can point me to an article that has a single verifiable quote from someone who oficially speaks for Apple saying, "hey, we're right behind DRM," then you might have a point. Otherwise, the best legitimate summary you can get is, "Nate thinks Apple likes DRM."
If you want to see DRM's best friends, look at the RIAA and MPAA. They're the ones who continue to spend tons of money lobbying Congress for laws that would make hardware DRM mandatory in any device that touches any device that could ever potentially touch content. They're the ones who've spent tons of money on markting campaigns that say, "you wouldn't commit genocide against an entire, harmless, sentient species, so why would you consider letting another person watch a rented movie on your HDTV screen without paying us theatre royalties?"
Or perhaps look at the DRM that Microsoft has rolled into Vista. Show me how Apple has loaded its flagship products with restrictions that turn them into crippleware as soon as one sees anything that looks like protected content.
Hell, if you want an opinion piece, try this one: How Apple Could End Up Being DRM's Worst Enemy:
The labels wanted to use DRM to control the consumer's access to content. They'd be happy to legislate away fair use and sell it back to us, impose bullshit like tiered pricing for anything that actually sells, and screw hardware vendors for the infamous $1-per-Zune "because we all know your customers are criminals" fee.
But they can't, because Apple doesn't like those ideas. And the labels famously failed to strong-arm Apple at the last contract negotiation because they need Apple more than Apple needs them. The iPod is the dominant product in the market, and the only way to sell DRM'd content for the iPod is through Apple.
In short, Apple is using DRM to screw the labels harder than the labels have been able to screw the consumer. And the labels are getting so tired of being screwed by Apple. They're so tired, in fact, that they're starting to look at dropping the DRM just to take some of the edge off Apple's market dominance.
Let's be clear here, boys and girls: if the labels do away with DRM, it won't be because they've spontaneously turned into "information wants to be free" idealists. They'll do it because it's hurting their bottom line. And who's the company that's used DRM to hurt the labels's bottom line rather than using DRM to help the labels screw consumers? Apple.
All the ethical rants, consumer hostility, and technological circumvention to date have failed to make the labels back away from DRM. They've only entrenched the labels more firmly in the idea that they need legal control over everything up to and including the consumer's eyes and ears.
If the labels decide to drop DRM, it will be because of how Apple used DRM to screw the labels out of money. Period.
Show me a more effective enemy than that.
---- Easy to use? The idiots at Apple forgot the most basic of user controls: the on-off switch.
Pushing any button turns an iPod on. Pushing and holding the play/pause button turns it off. Thank you for demonstrating your lack of knowledge of the product you want to slam. Bonus points for the boneheaded idea that 'pushing one button to turn the device on, then pushing another button to make it do something interesting' counts as good usability.
---- Remember when they had a tiny pinhole to eject disks while their PC competitors had an eject button?
Yeah.. the pinhole was for edge cases where telling the OS to eject the disk didn't work. If you hanker for the ability to physically eject a disk from the device before a write is complete, your usability cred has just taken another hit.
Your trouble is that you've mistaken 'making trivial actions immediately visible' for 'usability'. In many cases, trivial actions get in the way of good usability.
Case in point: turning an iPod on and off. Who actually wants to do that? Where's the use case for someone picking up a portable music player and saying, "I want to turn it on. That's all. Once I've turned it on, I'll put it down and go away." There isn't one. 'Turning the device on' isn't a goal, it's just a prequisite for the real use cases, like "I want to listen to a song."
Good usability eliminates as many trivial prerequisite steps as possible. What physical constraint in the use cases forces me to design a device where the Play button doesn't work unless I've pushed some other button first? There is none. If 'make sure the power button is ON' precedes every freaking step in your instructions on how to get something users actually want out of the product, then it's my job as a designer to say, "y'know, I could save the user a step by moving that 'make sure the power is on' operation down into the hardware."
Here's a design problem for you: what happens to a device with a physical on/off switch when the user turns it on, puts it down, and walks away? The device continues to burn power, that's what. In other words, you have a device that will run out of power overnight (or sitting in a coat pocket during the day) if the user forgets to turn it off after they hit the 'stop playing' button.
Quick hint: 'running out of power while I was away' is rarely considered a feature.
Of course, we can eliminate that problem by building in some soft-power logic and having the device turn itself off after N minutes of inactivity. But that completely undercuts your beloved on/off switch. Having the switch in the ON position no longer means the device is ON.. the switch can be ON but the device can be OFF thanks to the soft-power logic. So how do we turn a device in that state back on? Flip the switch OFF then back ON again? Users will just love that. How about hooking the soft logic to the control buttons so pushing any button turns the device back on?
Hey look! We've just reinvented the iPod soft-power interface, with an extra and essentially useless power button on the side. Users will flip that switch ON when they take the device out of the package and just leave there for the rest of the device's lifespan.
Or how about this: if we admit that soft-power totally screws the rationale behind an ON button, we can still find valid use cases for an OFF button. Sometimes I don't want the thing to turn on when I hit a button. Of course, there are valid use cases for users wanting to block unwanted pushes of all the other buttons, too. So how about we make our on/off switch mean 'the device does/doesn't listen to the buttons' rather than 'the power is on/off'?
Hey look! We've just reinvented the iPod's HOLD switch.
And that my friend, is the difference between 'usability' and 'making trivial mechanics immediately visible'.
Then you'll love digging through Bittorrent streams looking for a version that isn't crap.
Customer service includes things like, "consistent quality," "broad selection," and "easy searching." If you don't care about any of those things, feel free to, as Steve Jobs says, pay yourself less than minimum wage crawling around looking for data.
That may be true in abstract terms, but a lot of Wal-Mart's products are also crap.
One fast and easy way for a retailer to cut prices is to buy seconds from suppliers. That can mean anything from boxes of ceral with misprinted labels to clothes that are the wrong size. Try taking a tape measure into the Wal-Mart women's clothes section and measuring the waist sizes of all the size 12 pants on a rack.
Let's assume Apple did know about this issue months ago. The list of problems seems to suggest some kind of mismatch between the iTunes code to sync data with the device and the Vista device i/o code.
If the solution to those problems involves architectural changes.. replacing XP/ME-specific device i/o code with Vista-specific device i/o code.. it makes sense for Apple to wait and release a Vista-specific version shortly after Vista itself goes into public use. it doesn't make sense for them to load a bunch of Vista code into the versions of iTunes that were running on XP or ME just so the program would probably survive the OS upgrade seamlessly.
It also makes sense for Apple to wait a few weeks after Vista goes public before releasing its Vista-specific version of iTunes, just to see if any edge-cases crop up when umpty-zillion users start upgrading upmty-zillion different XP and ME configurations. Give it a couple of weeks to watch the radar for bugs, another two weeks to solve them, and one more for QA testing, and you have a good Vista-specific version of iTunes coming out five weeks after Vista itself hits the shelves of Wal-Mart.
That isn't bad, as far as timing goes. There's always some ramp-up in new product adoption, and Vista is hardly the 'must upgrade as soon as I can get my hands on a copy' product of the 21st century. Even most of the early adopters will still be waiting to upgrade by the time Apple's Vista-specific version of iTunes is released.
IMO, the real story here is that Vista's iPod compatability is a big enough issue to be getting attention at all.
Hardly..
The past week has probably seen Vista running in a larger and more diverse selection of real-world configurations than all the beta testing combined. Some quirky little edge case that only crops up a fraction of one percent of the time is suddenly happening often enough to make the pattern visible. These things happen when new products hit the market. It isn't sabotage on either side, it's just a slight mismatch between the old and new configurations.
Enh, probably..
But seriously folks, this well has been poisoned. To my mind there are three highlight events associated with the whole, "Mac users need to get off their complacent butts" meme:
Symantec published a white paper with essentially that title. Its contents were a bunch of generalizations about complacency being bad and prevention being good.
About a month later they published another paper that boiled down to, "No, we don't know of any actual Mac exploits in the wild. No, we don't have any signatures for Mac malware in our database. Yes, our software works by looking for signatures of known malware in the database. So yes, our product would be a complete waste of time, money, and computing resources for Mac users as of today. We were speaking generally. Please stop hitting us."
David "wants to stab a Mac user in the eye with a cigarette" Maynor.
I honestly do believe he and Ellch discovered some kind of 802.11b vulnerability in some category of hardware, and only used a Mac in the demostration for the sake of color. I just don't care. The Mac aspect of the issue got hyped so far beyond its legitimate context that they retreated into obfuscation, and to this day we still don't know what actually happened. All that's left is the residue from a cloud of sound and fury that ended up signifying nothing. Plus that one, vastly unprofessional, quote.
The Month of Bugs in Third-Party Software That Happens to Run on a Mac, So We'll Blame Them on Apple Anway, Plus the One in Quicktime That Probably Hits More Windows Users than Mac Users.
Yeah, they found the rtsp:// vulnerability. Bravo. They even found a few more bugs in software Apple actually has some control over. Again, I don't care. Any legitimate security value the project had was outweighed by Finnestere's grandstanding, his decision to take grey-hat disclosure out into the hinterlands between 'charcoal' and 'just plain black', and the ultimately disappointing trickle of actual Apple-as-in-code-written-by-Apple bugs that he managed to stroke out.
Those events have set the context for 'wakeup calls to the Mac fanbois'. Whoever picks up the baton next will either struggle against that heap of bullshit, or will end up adding more. Meanwhile, December's spam level has been estimated at 94% of all email sent for the month, thanks in large part to those hundreds of thousands of infected Windows machines in the botnets. And there are still no widespread exploits against Macs, even in spite of all Finnestere's hard work.
It's time to admit that there's an entire circus parade worth of elephants in the clown car. Preferably before the stupidity gets to the, "yeah, at least 95% of all Windows machines are infected, and no, there hasn't been a single widespread exploit against Macs in the past ten years, but the way you Macs weenies walk around acting like your machines are secure makes me sick," mark.
Let's drop the cognitive dissonance, shall we?
Vint Cerf recently made a report to the UN committee on internet security. He said that maybe 25% of all computers tied to the internet are infected. We're currently seeing the highest spam levels in the history of the internet, much of which is being sent by botnets that contain thousands or hundreds of thousands of compromised machines. We've gotten to a point in history where 'hundreds of thousands of machines compromised' is no longer a newsworthy fact. It's so freaking common that people just look at it as an unpleasant fact of life.
And right in the middle of that context we have a few tens of millions of Macs that have been running unmolested for years.
I don't give a damn about your abstractions. I don't give a damn about your heuristics. I don't give a damn about your moral indignation that Apple doesn't run its entire business in a way that's consistent with the .3 seconds of what passes for thought that you've put into any given issue. I'm an empericist. I care about what's actually happened.
What's actually happened is that there hasn't been a single large-scale compromise of the Mac platform since the introduction of OS X. What's actually happened is that Apple has been notified of several vulnerabilities over the past few years and has rolled out security updates to address them. In many cases, they've also listed the names of the people who notified them of the problem. What's actually happened is that Apple has continued to develop its security model and has built a whole new set of tools into Leopard that will make OS X even more secure than it is today.
There are exactly three classes of people who try to bang the "Macs are no more secure than Windows, but Mac users are too stupid to care" drum any more:
Please note that I do not place Landon Fuller in any of those categories. He isn't trying to sell the world the idea that Apple's sky is falling. He's talking about a fairly interesting concept of community involvement in the overall Apple security process.
I happen to disagree with the idea, personally.. IMO the chance of a zero-day patch breaking something is higher than the chance of a Mac getting infected between day zero and the time Apple releases an official patch (and yes, that includes all those issues that have been hanging out there unpatched for years.. show me the number of active exploits in the wild instead of just stuffing another set of panties into the wad currently wedged up your ass). I also see problems with trust and vetting. A MacZERT would presumably do some QA on the patches before distributing them, which leads to the same kinds of delays you get from Apple. And a MacZERT's capacity to look for unwanted side effects would be limited by the fact that outside third parties don't have all the relevant code.
I do see the possibility of large benefits from a community effort to isolate and develop proposed solutions to bugs, since that would help Apple's own security team with some of the heavy lifting. I think Apple could develop a good dialogue with the third-party security community through such a system.
But that has absolutely nothing to do with you. You're just another anti-fanboy out to spew meaningless FUD. The fact that you can't distinguish between "hundreds of thousands of compromised machines in a single botnet" and "no exploit of even a thousand machines over the past five years" means your opinion is too stupid to be taken seriously.
Actually, no. The W3C specs clearly distinguish between 'tags' and 'elements'.
A tag is a token -- a sequence of characters that tell the parser a new element is about to start or end.
An element is a logical unit composed of a start tag, and end tag, and optional PCDATA content. Or if the element doesn't take content, it can be expressed with an empty element tag.
When you talk about a tag, you're talking about markup. When you talk about an element, you're (hopefully) talking about semantic structure. Neither of those definitions is appropriate to unordered, non-hierarchical metadata, which is what people mean when they say 'tagging'.
---- That sounds like a truth in advertising/trade description issue, not an accounting one. And even then, it would depend on the wording.
I'm not talking about ad copy, I'm talking about documents that get handed over to government regulators.
The law requires Apple to have a set of documents that say exactly what a 'MacBook' is supposed to be. There are two parts to those documents: A complete description of the features the product offers, and a complete accounting of the components it uses to deliver those features. Together, those documents amount to Apple's legal promise that the components listed in part B do in fact deliver the features promised in part A, and that the features listed in part A are exactly what Apple is promising its customers.
In this case, Apple said, "802.11g functionality" in part A, and "stock 802.11g cards or downgraded 802.11n cards" in part B. That's perfectly legal. Manufacturers use partial assemblies or downgraded parts all the time. The only thing that matters is that the components listed in part B do deliver the features listed in part A.
If Apple had said, "upgradeable to 802.11n" in part A, there are a couple of ways it could have gotten into trouble. First of all, any MacBook with a stock 802.11g card would be in violation because 802.11g doesn't do 802.11n. Second, the regulators would look askance at the 'upgradeable' part, because that looks like an unfinished product. The regulators would rather see '802.11n functionality' at the time of sale.
---- But what they shipped, and charged for, and recognised the revenue for was a finished product.
Was it? If Apple releases a 'free upgrade' that materially changes the product after the time of sale, was the product actually finished at the time of sale, or did Apple just under-report the functionality listed in part A so it could push unfinished products out to consumers, record the revenue in this quarter's financial statements, jack up its stock price, then finish the product later?
More to the point, if the product was capable of being materially upgraded for free, why didn't Apple say it was upgradeable? And that, of course, leads back to the question of why they didn't just deliver the functionality at the time of sale.
The bottom line is that the law equates 'free upgrade' to 'something the vendor should have delivered at the time of sale'. Too many companies were using free upgrades as a loophole that allowed them to erase expenses from their books and report revenue artificially early. That combination made those companies look great to investors, who then found themselves owning stock in a company that did not, in fact, have strong revenue growth, and did have all sorts of unexpected debts.
---- How is this different to those cards sandwich shops have, where they stamp it each time and after ten you get one free?
It's different because the sandwich shop is giving you a completely new product for free (in effect, a volume discount that sets the price of 11 sandwiches equal to the price of 10), not saying, "buy a sandwich from us today, then bring it back tomorrow and we'll upgrade it to a deluxe for free."
---- Wow, there's a law that says 802.11g isn't the same as 802.11n?
Well, yeah. For starters, they're fundamentally incompatible devices. An 802.11g device can't speak the 802.11n protocol, and a pure-802.11n device wouldn't speak 802.11g. Second, you can't turn an 802.11g card into an 802.11n card with a simple firmware upgrade. If two devices don't talk to each other, and you can't turn one into the other without serious hardware modification, you have what the law considers two different products.
If you were being sarcastic and asking if there's a specific law for 802.11g/n, then no, but you can bet your booties there's a law that defines what will and will not be considered equivalent products.
---- As I see it, they never CHARGED for 802.11n functionality, so how could they be receiving revenue on that before they deliver it?
If you end up with a machine that has 802.11n functionality, the law says you paid for that functionality at some time or other. If the only time you paid was at the time of sale, then 'time of sale' is the only time when you could have paid for that functionality. If the functionality didn't exist in the product at the time of sale, then the law says Apple could be considered guilty of selling an unfinished product.
Once again: the law prohibits free upgrades. Too many companies were using 'free upgrade' as an excuse for selling products that weren't finished, reporting all the revenue as income for the current quarter, and failing to tell anyone (like the SEC or the shareholders) that the company had a whole bunch of outstanding 'upgrades' that would have to happen later. It was a loophole that allowed companies to hide expenses, artificially boost their profit numbers, and manipulate their stock prices. SOx closed that loophole.
And as with any set of rules, there are edge cases where a strict interpretation of the rules seems silly. This is one of those cases, but that apparent silliness doesn't change the rules.
---- The change in functionality of the wireless chipset by enabling 802.11n is NO different from the change in functionality of the entire computer anytime you add software to it, [...]
Again, you're confusing the physical realities of the chipset with the law. The law says 802.11g and 802.11n are two different things. The law says an 802.11n device is composed of umpty-seven different components, ranging from chips to jumper wires to firmware. That point is important: according to the law, the firmware that makes a device do its thing is a component, and there's no legal difference between a 'software component' and a 'hardware component'.
The difference between 'software' and 'a software component' is important. The fact that some part of an 802.11n card's inner workings is embodied in software is an engineering/economic decision. It's fully possible to build an electrical circuit (a hardware component) that would do everything the firmware (a software component) does. It's just cheaper/easier to do it one way as opposed to the other. What's more, the 802.11n card stops being an 802.11n card if you remove that component.
By contrast, a computer doesn't become 'a computer' when you load Firefox onto it. Nor does it stop being 'a computer' if you delete Firefox from it. It does stop being 'a computer' if you remove the firmware, though, just like it stops being 'a computer' if you remove the CPU, the RAM, or any other critical hardware component.
If a device can no longer perform its stated function when you remove X, then X is a component. If the device can still perform its stated function when you remove X, then X is an accessory, and probably a product in its own right.
As far as the law is concerned, turning what was originally sold as an 802.11g card into an 802.11n card is a material change in the product. To make the change, you have to remove one set of components, and put in some other set of components. The law does
You're confusing the physical capacities of the chips with the law.
The law says 802.11g and 802.11n are different products. Moving from one to the other is a material change in your computer, and the law doesn't care whether you have to swap out hardware or just patch the firmware.
When Apple sold the computer, it said the computer had 802.11g functionality. The fact that the chipset was capable of something else is irrelevant. Apple only had to be able to prove that the chips it used did in fact deliver the promised 802.11g functionality.
If Apple had listed the machine as "802.11n-capable," the law would have required Apple to deliver 802.11n functionality at the time of sale.
If Apple handed out the patch for free now, you'd have customers getting what the law considers to be a material change in the product at no cost, which comes reasonably close to what the law calls "selling unfinished products." A regulator would have grounds for saying that Apple charged customers for the 802.11n capacity at the time of sale, but didn't deliver that functionality until later.
That's illegal. According to the law, a company is only allowed to receive money for functionality when it actually delivers that functionality.
The fact that the law considers 802.11g to be a different product from 802.11n rules out a free upgrade, period. Either Apple delivers 802.11n at the time of sale, or it charges for an upgrade later. Those are its only options.
By the same token, the price Apple charges for the upgrade has to represent a reasonable fee for the material change, as balanced against the actual cost to Apple of making the change. $4.99 is a lot less than it would cost to swap in new hardware, and it's low compared to the ticket price of most software. I'd imagine it just about covers the fees to the credit companies and Apple's internal processing costs, with a little left over to cover the cost of development.
This is hardly going to be a cash cow, after all. The absolute number of people who can get this upgrade is relatively small, and all Apple's new machines are being sold as 802.11n-capable.
Well, they can download any of several free programs that will read the Fairplay keys from their computer or iPod, and create non-DRM'd copies of the files without any loss of quality. Ten minutes to find, five minutes to download, one click to set the thing in motion, and a couple hours to unlock an entire library. Oh noes, the suffering! Evil, Evil Apple!
Apple doesn't want to waste resources trying to make it impossible to strip off its DRM. They know that goal is itself impossible, not to mention massively unfriendly to the consumer. Instead, they make it inconvenient to strip the DRM off songs you don't own yourself, and that's enough to keep most people playing nicely. And they don't publish their own tools to let people who've bought music strip the DRM, but they haven't gone out of their way to crush the tools that do.
Apple understands security well enough to know that locks don't exist to keep criminals out, they exist to keep basically honest people from wandering into places where they'll be tempted to do something illegal. And Apple treats its customers like honest people who don't particularly want to do something illegal.
Comparing and contrasting this with the RIAA and Microsoft strategies, as manifest in their policies and products, is left as an exercise for the reader.
[...] but it exists and is quantifiable, [...]
Here are a couple of other things that are quantifiable: transmission artifacts and ambient noise.
A JPEG encoding artifact will disappear if you shrink the image enough, or dither it on a printer enough. Audio artifacts you can hear in an anechoic chamber will disappear under the ambient noise of, say, driving in traffic. Artifacts that are audible on high-performance speakers will be lost when played through a pair of 1/2" earbuds.
If you want the audiophile experience, good on you. Buy high-quality audio sources and play them on good equipment in an acoustically balanced room.
I want to listen to music while I'm driving amid the semis on the interstate. Or under the hearing protection when I'm running my chainsaw or leaf blower. I'm willing to tolerate the signal degradation of small earphones, or FM losses pumped through the factory-standard crap speakers in my truck.
I'll thank you not to treat me like a philistine because the environment where I listen to 95% of my music doesn't happen to meet your audiophile standards.