Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 0
So how do they match the song you ripped using LAME to a real song? The name probably won't match and there may not be any tags in the file.
Are Apple employing advanced heuristics to analyse song audio content and automatically determine the artist and title only from the audio track?
Wow. Apple are so far ahead of anyone else, including AI researchers!
I can't believe that they can monitor content that wasn't ripped in iTunes or bought from their music store. Until someone can show me what data they use, I'm withholding judgement.
Maybe the follow-up headline could be "Music Store recommendations trivially disabled, leaving no data being sent to the company. Much ado over nothing."
A small extra point - it only tracks the songs it knows about - that is, tracks ripped using iTunes or songs purchased from the store. It cannot track any other music you have.
Australians are no more racist than Americans, British, Germans or just about any other group. Maybe no less racist either though.
Your Tampa stats are rubbish. Any survey can say whatever you like - "Do you think it's good to allow unknown people fleeing their country for unknown reasons into this country?"
I disagreed with the whole thing. I think we should throw open the doors to people fleeing a regime that's apparently so evil that we go to war to bring it down. But then I'm one of the 48% who voted for the second-place party.
There are many, many Australians like me.
And yes, the AMA should be called to account. this article is not about the AMA though, and racism is stretching it a bit too. Which country are you from, so I can heap some of the massive pile of shit back towards you? I am willing to bet that your country isn't pearly white in historical morals. You insensitive twat.
Well, I've personally seen a few examples where it was just all about the money.
That's over here in Melbourne, on the East Coast, but it's the same situation.
It's all about the money. Most IT workers are recruited based on keyword searches through resumes. I know this happens and have seen many examples of it in IT, project manager and other areas.
It's just another form of outsourcing, but doesn't have the negative PR.
Ha! Study, knowledge and long experience aren't any guide.
Anecdotal evidence is a far more valid!
People going around with actual knowledge aren't welcome on Slashdot. It's all supposition, one-off experiences, bizarre conspiracy theories and wild guesses around here.
That's an interesting point, because it seems to me that the move to a higher definition video format is not the final one.
We'll be doing this every 5-10 years for some time, I suspect.
Each time, we'll be wanting to buy the same content in the new format - after all, some films you really want to see on a huge screen at the best possible resolution (the LotR series springs to mind). Each time we'll fork out for a new display, a new player, maybe new tamper-proof cabling and a whole new movie library. How much will all this cost?
While we're not going to have to throw our old stuff away, we will be faced with DVDs being phased out, repairs becoming more expensive (a lot of players are not worth repairing even now) and the whole push will be on the new technology.
The same thing happened in audio - vinyl to 8 track to cassette to CD - but the changes were a lot slower.
Is there any reason to suppose that we won't be seeing the successor to HD_DVD or Blu-Ray in 5-10 years?
I'm going to hold off on stepping up for 5 years or so. If I can skip a generation, I'll be happy, and so will my wallet. I'm no Luddite, but I am wondering whether the continual upgrade cycle is really just a cash cow for the large corporations and whether we really benefit that much.
Apple released the spec for their Pages and Keynote document format. It's somewhere on their developer site (I downloaded it for interest's sake the other day).
It's just a gzipped XML format - very simple to process.
It would be a simple (but not trivial) task to write a converter to ODF, and any reasonable programmer could do it in a day or two. I'm tempted to write one in RealBASIC just for fun.
Well... not a *lot* of fun, but fun nevertheless...
I don't travel so much, but here in Australia just about everyone with headphones seems to have little white headphones. This is my experience in Melbourne and (on a day trip) in Brisbane. They're everywhere!
As to the device itself, I haven't found the sort of problems you've had. In my experience it's been trivial to get music onto it. I bought one for my fiancee, and was rewarded at work with a Nano. I'd have never bought an mp3 player for myself, but after being given one, I find I use it a lot.
My fiancee is a PC user, with no particular feelings for or against Apple. She found the iPod simple to use, and now it's the source of her music collection. After opening the box, we had our entire CD collection of nearly 25GB on it in about 40mins.
The device is not particularly special in the specs, although I'd say they're competitive on price, especially the smaller units. It's just a small hard drive, reasonable audio circuitry and a very smooth interface. There are other options, but after trying them in stores I find them clunky to use. The iPod's not perfect, but it's the best of the bunch.
You say that people are giving Steve Jobs credit for something he didn't do. I've heard that he was personally involved with the project, not at a technical level, but at the design level. If that's true (and I've heard it from different sources, so I don't doubt it) then he can take fairly credit for some part of the iPod, but so also can the design team (headed by Ives, no doubt) and the technical team. It's just that we don't know their names.
I would not use Norton's Anit-Virus even if it was free for life, came on a golden CD and updates were hand-delivered by trained flying monkeys.
A one-year subscription came with my motherboard, and I duly installed it after everything else (including a few games). Performance across the board plummeted, apps took ages to open, or sometimes didn't, every file seemed to take ages to read in or write back to disk - in short, everything started to suck badly.
This is on a brand new Athlon-64 3200, with 1GB RAM and 2x160GB drives. It was like greased lightning until NAV was installed.
I removed NAV and after a little looking around, installed Avast (arrr, me hearties!) and it's been great. No complaints at all, and importantly - no perceived performance difference between running Avast and not running any virus checker.
Apple were negotiating with Burst, but reached an impasse where neither side wanted to give.
Unless we know what the impasse was over (and we will never know that as it was a confidential negotiation) then this can't be dismissed as a frivolous lawsuit.
It could be that Burst wanted vast sums of money or it could be that Apple wanted to pay virtually nothing. We don't know.
Where is Steve Wozniak now? Technical genius is just not enough - to succeed you have to have genius at the right moment. I've no doubt that he was a driving force behind the Apple I and Apple II, but since then..? His efforts have largely come to nothing more than dabbling.
It's terribly sad to see someone with such a record and with such potential not use it, but that's what happened.
When the industry history is written, Jobs will be the guy who got Apple on the map and kept it there, and Woz will be the guy who started Apple with him, but disappeared. The winners write history, and Jobs is one of the biggest winners in computing. Outside of places like Slashdot, few people have even heard of Woz.
This is a truly ridiculous sum of money, far more than any reasonable penalty should be for any crime.
But...
Think about the effects of 280 million emails. A good proportion of them get caught by servers and automated systems, but the remaining ones end up in people's inboxes all around the world.
People have to spend time removing them and even if it's only a second for each email, 10 million emails equates to 115.74 days of people's time. If they all got through, that's about 8.87 years of time to delete them.
The cumulative effect of these spammers is that people all over the world lose time to their pointless emails. There's also an emotional effect, caused by the feeling of receiving 50 spam messages a day.
I think these people spread waves of irritation across the planet, and the true effect of spammers is huge.
So what's a fitting punishment? Well, a financial one hurts, but a better one would be to make them do an extremely long period of community service, fine them a reasonable sum of money, ban them from computer use and revoke their passport. No fleeing the country!
If they fail to do their community service, make them go to jail instead. Not forever, just a few months to a year.
The problem is that spam operations will just move offshore, where your laws can't touch them. While part of me likes the idea of black helicopters flitting in under cover of darkness and delivering a crazed bunch of killers to 'finish the job', I guess some sort of extradition treaty (unlikely) is the best solution.
Unless the staff happen to have tastes that run the same way as profitable business, that'll cause the game shop to lose money.
As far as the staff are concerned, they should match the right game to the right player. The right player is the one in the shop, and the right game is whatever is in front of the player.
Anything else is a luxury that staff can only afford when they own the business.
Games are just as subject to reality and commerce as everything else. If a business venture isn't commercially successful, it closes eventually.
The fact that people lost something (in this case, a game they enjoyed playing) is sad, but that shouldn't make it mandatory for the developers to open source the game. It should always be the choice of the copyright holder, for as long as the copyright exists.
Besides - where's the guarantee with anything in life? Sometimes you just have to accept it and move on.
Oh yeah! As a Mac user, I love being freed from the burden of individual thought. Sometimes I wish I was a PC user with the power of thought, but then I return to the comforting, warm glow of my Mac.
Seriously - the parent post is just so much garbage. And it was modded insightful for trotting out another hackneyed stereotype that's long since been put to rest.
Mac users are exactly as trend-driven as Windows users and Linux users.
I used the Mac when it was original and nothing else like it was available in Australia. That was some time ago, and I stayed with it because of its better reliability, usability, compatibility, interoperability, and higher performance. I left lower cost out of that list though, although my current Mac is an iBook, so I could probably claim lower cost.
It's not that it has to be unique and new, just that there needs to be a compelling reason to switch. Yes, Linux is stable, but so is Windows now, and Windows is more compatible with the apps that people use at work or at school.
I'm not trying to knock Linux, because I like it a lot, but I don't see why someone would pick it over Windows when they then have to learn a heap of new things (good example - in this topic someone recommended something like 'just recompile the application, stripping out the things you don't want' as the solution to a performance issue) just to do what they already do now.
Why is it that Linux offers pretty much the features of Windows or OS X, or Unix for that matter? What is new and unique to Linux from a usability or UI point of view?
And yes, I know about the benefits of free or open source software, but that doesn't explain what I can do in Linux that I can't do in OS X or Windows. I have licences for both anyway, so why should I install Linux? If it's just a political statement ("Software should be free!") then that's not much of a benefit for those of us who either don't agree or don't care enough.
Cherry-picking features from other OSs isn't a good way to develop a coherent OS. I know there's a lot of programming talent in the Linux userbase, but is there any design talent, or more particularly, UI-design talent?
I think this may be one of the big issues Linux has to face to gain wider acceptance. When a thing works just like something else that people already have, they may not find a reason to switch.
These headphones have been around for at least 20 years. I remember using them with my Walkman before portable CD players existed. The article summary is a little off there, making it seem like this is a new problem.
Back then I heard how the headphones would cause deafness. This is no doubt true, but I wonder how different they are from the larger style headphones in this respect. Should be easy to test this properly - all we need are some headphones, a reference frequency with volume control, a dB meter and a model of the Human ear.
I love the last one, in which the guy conveniently forgets that customers do actually pay for the telecom connections, usually in monthly line fees (well, here in Australia my fees well outweigh my call costs) and call costs.
Sure! Let's pay for the same stuff twice! Because we're stupid!
You dismiss things like the GUI, desktop publishing with a simple "None of those are contributions to computer science." That's... a brave statement. If you prefer fundamental changes to incremental changes, then you can dismiss a lot of what we count as science in every field. The vast majority is 'standing on the shoulders of giants' with only a handful of paradigm shifts scattered throughout. I'd argue that the commercial release of the GUI (whose limited ancestor never saw the light of day outside Xerox PARC) is a major shift for the entire computing industry, and it changed the way we use computers fundamentally. I can't dismiss it as lightly as you.
You're right in some of these points though - Apple doesn't do much public work, preferring to most of it privately in support of their products. In the sense that science is not just research but also providing results to others, your original point of Apple not contributing is true.
I'd argue that the science aspect doesn't show the whole picture here, and that we see a lot less research done nowadays outside of product research (and this trend will continue).
Google are buying maps that are publicly available, and displaying them without alteration in a freely available web page.
If the providers of the maps were made to obscure their images, and Google were made to simply refresh their maps, then the Indian Government should be happy. Google aren't taking the satellite images after all, and anyone who really wanted the data could just go to the source if Google's images weren't good enough.
The genie is well out of the bottle here.
Google should be required to simply refresh their maps. It's the original providers (who still sell the maps to anyone with a credit card) who need to alter their data.
He might have a great history, but this is a PR piece a year before anything actually ships. Skepticism is justified until a real product is on the horizon, let alone actually delivered.
Apple licenced a lot of stuff from Xerox PARC, but added a lot as well. The whole menubar concept is an Apple one, as well as most of the window concepts. They developed a lot of the GUI, and defended their development in courts but eventually settled with Microsoft.
You don't like their panel-view interface for music, and attack Apple for using the existing patent system to protect their competitive advantages. You should attack the right target - the system itself. Any flaw or weakness in any system will be used to gain advantages where possible. Apple are no more at fault for doing this than any other company that takes out a patent. Yet you single Apple out here, and assume they'll do something that they haven't yet done. You should at least wait until they commit the act before you pronounce them guilty.
As for not contributing to computer science - you're plain wrong there. A list off the top of my head in a few moments includes:
Apple I Apple II A usable GUI (largely based on Jef Raskin's seminal paper from '67) Desktop publishing and word processing based on WYSIWYG Firewire QuickTime An online music store that actually works Apple people sit on the OpenGL ARB as well as other industry special interest groups
Some of those items have changed the computing landscape completely.
They spent $534M on research and development last year, according their Sep2005 report. That's not 'very little' in anyone's language.
I don't know why you believe Apple have contributed very little to computer science. Like them or hate them, they've done a lot to make the world of computing what it is today.
Perhaps you can outline a company who has made the difference you're talking about? Microsoft? Dell? Sony? Redhat? I'm not saying that Apple has done more for the industry than these companies, but you need to be more specific when you say that Apple 'contributes very little to computer science' - in contrast with who?
Slashdot Mirror
So how do they match the song you ripped using LAME to a real song? The name probably won't match and there may not be any tags in the file.
Are Apple employing advanced heuristics to analyse song audio content and automatically determine the artist and title only from the audio track?
Wow. Apple are so far ahead of anyone else, including AI researchers!
I can't believe that they can monitor content that wasn't ripped in iTunes or bought from their music store. Until someone can show me what data they use, I'm withholding judgement.
Maybe the follow-up headline could be "Music Store recommendations trivially disabled, leaving no data being sent to the company. Much ado over nothing."
A small extra point - it only tracks the songs it knows about - that is, tracks ripped using iTunes or songs purchased from the store. It cannot track any other music you have.
Australians are no more racist than Americans, British, Germans or just about any other group. Maybe no less racist either though.
Your Tampa stats are rubbish. Any survey can say whatever you like - "Do you think it's good to allow unknown people fleeing their country for unknown reasons into this country?"
I disagreed with the whole thing. I think we should throw open the doors to people fleeing a regime that's apparently so evil that we go to war to bring it down. But then I'm one of the 48% who voted for the second-place party.
There are many, many Australians like me.
And yes, the AMA should be called to account. this article is not about the AMA though, and racism is stretching it a bit too. Which country are you from, so I can heap some of the massive pile of shit back towards you? I am willing to bet that your country isn't pearly white in historical morals. You insensitive twat.
Well, I've personally seen a few examples where it was just all about the money.
That's over here in Melbourne, on the East Coast, but it's the same situation.
It's all about the money. Most IT workers are recruited based on keyword searches through resumes. I know this happens and have seen many examples of it in IT, project manager and other areas.
It's just another form of outsourcing, but doesn't have the negative PR.
Ha! Study, knowledge and long experience aren't any guide.
Anecdotal evidence is a far more valid!
People going around with actual knowledge aren't welcome on Slashdot. It's all supposition, one-off experiences, bizarre conspiracy theories and wild guesses around here.
Sadly.
That's an interesting point, because it seems to me that the move to a higher definition video format is not the final one.
We'll be doing this every 5-10 years for some time, I suspect.
Each time, we'll be wanting to buy the same content in the new format - after all, some films you really want to see on a huge screen at the best possible resolution (the LotR series springs to mind). Each time we'll fork out for a new display, a new player, maybe new tamper-proof cabling and a whole new movie library. How much will all this cost?
While we're not going to have to throw our old stuff away, we will be faced with DVDs being phased out, repairs becoming more expensive (a lot of players are not worth repairing even now) and the whole push will be on the new technology.
The same thing happened in audio - vinyl to 8 track to cassette to CD - but the changes were a lot slower.
Is there any reason to suppose that we won't be seeing the successor to HD_DVD or Blu-Ray in 5-10 years?
I'm going to hold off on stepping up for 5 years or so. If I can skip a generation, I'll be happy, and so will my wallet. I'm no Luddite, but I am wondering whether the continual upgrade cycle is really just a cash cow for the large corporations and whether we really benefit that much.
Apple released the spec for their Pages and Keynote document format. It's somewhere on their developer site (I downloaded it for interest's sake the other day).
It's just a gzipped XML format - very simple to process.
It would be a simple (but not trivial) task to write a converter to ODF, and any reasonable programmer could do it in a day or two. I'm tempted to write one in RealBASIC just for fun.
Well... not a *lot* of fun, but fun nevertheless...
I don't travel so much, but here in Australia just about everyone with headphones seems to have little white headphones. This is my experience in Melbourne and (on a day trip) in Brisbane. They're everywhere!
As to the device itself, I haven't found the sort of problems you've had. In my experience it's been trivial to get music onto it. I bought one for my fiancee, and was rewarded at work with a Nano. I'd have never bought an mp3 player for myself, but after being given one, I find I use it a lot.
My fiancee is a PC user, with no particular feelings for or against Apple. She found the iPod simple to use, and now it's the source of her music collection. After opening the box, we had our entire CD collection of nearly 25GB on it in about 40mins.
The device is not particularly special in the specs, although I'd say they're competitive on price, especially the smaller units. It's just a small hard drive, reasonable audio circuitry and a very smooth interface. There are other options, but after trying them in stores I find them clunky to use. The iPod's not perfect, but it's the best of the bunch.
You say that people are giving Steve Jobs credit for something he didn't do. I've heard that he was personally involved with the project, not at a technical level, but at the design level. If that's true (and I've heard it from different sources, so I don't doubt it) then he can take fairly credit for some part of the iPod, but so also can the design team (headed by Ives, no doubt) and the technical team. It's just that we don't know their names.
I would not use Norton's Anit-Virus even if it was free for life, came on a golden CD and updates were hand-delivered by trained flying monkeys.
A one-year subscription came with my motherboard, and I duly installed it after everything else (including a few games). Performance across the board plummeted, apps took ages to open, or sometimes didn't, every file seemed to take ages to read in or write back to disk - in short, everything started to suck badly.
This is on a brand new Athlon-64 3200, with 1GB RAM and 2x160GB drives. It was like greased lightning until NAV was installed.
I removed NAV and after a little looking around, installed Avast (arrr, me hearties!) and it's been great. No complaints at all, and importantly - no perceived performance difference between running Avast and not running any virus checker.
Apple were negotiating with Burst, but reached an impasse where neither side wanted to give.
Unless we know what the impasse was over (and we will never know that as it was a confidential negotiation) then this can't be dismissed as a frivolous lawsuit.
It could be that Burst wanted vast sums of money or it could be that Apple wanted to pay virtually nothing. We don't know.
Not every lawsuit is a frivolous thing.
Possibly.
Where is Steve Wozniak now? Technical genius is just not enough - to succeed you have to have genius at the right moment. I've no doubt that he was a driving force behind the Apple I and Apple II, but since then..? His efforts have largely come to nothing more than dabbling.
It's terribly sad to see someone with such a record and with such potential not use it, but that's what happened.
When the industry history is written, Jobs will be the guy who got Apple on the map and kept it there, and Woz will be the guy who started Apple with him, but disappeared. The winners write history, and Jobs is one of the biggest winners in computing. Outside of places like Slashdot, few people have even heard of Woz.
This is a truly ridiculous sum of money, far more than any reasonable penalty should be for any crime.
But...
Think about the effects of 280 million emails. A good proportion of them get caught by servers and automated systems, but the remaining ones end up in people's inboxes all around the world.
People have to spend time removing them and even if it's only a second for each email, 10 million emails equates to 115.74 days of people's time. If they all got through, that's about 8.87 years of time to delete them.
The cumulative effect of these spammers is that people all over the world lose time to their pointless emails. There's also an emotional effect, caused by the feeling of receiving 50 spam messages a day.
I think these people spread waves of irritation across the planet, and the true effect of spammers is huge.
So what's a fitting punishment? Well, a financial one hurts, but a better one would be to make them do an extremely long period of community service, fine them a reasonable sum of money, ban them from computer use and revoke their passport. No fleeing the country!
If they fail to do their community service, make them go to jail instead. Not forever, just a few months to a year.
The problem is that spam operations will just move offshore, where your laws can't touch them. While part of me likes the idea of black helicopters flitting in under cover of darkness and delivering a crazed bunch of killers to 'finish the job', I guess some sort of extradition treaty (unlikely) is the best solution.
Unless the staff happen to have tastes that run the same way as profitable business, that'll cause the game shop to lose money.
As far as the staff are concerned, they should match the right game to the right player.
The right player is the one in the shop, and the right game is whatever is in front of the player.
Anything else is a luxury that staff can only afford when they own the business.
Games are just as subject to reality and commerce as everything else. If a business venture isn't commercially successful, it closes eventually.
The fact that people lost something (in this case, a game they enjoyed playing) is sad, but that shouldn't make it mandatory for the developers to open source the game. It should always be the choice of the copyright holder, for as long as the copyright exists.
Besides - where's the guarantee with anything in life? Sometimes you just have to accept it and move on.
Oh yeah! As a Mac user, I love being freed from the burden of individual thought. Sometimes I wish I was a PC user with the power of thought, but then I return to the comforting, warm glow of my Mac.
Seriously - the parent post is just so much garbage. And it was modded insightful for trotting out another hackneyed stereotype that's long since been put to rest.
Mac users are exactly as trend-driven as Windows users and Linux users.
I used the Mac when it was original and nothing else like it was available in Australia. That was some time ago, and I stayed with it because of its better reliability, usability, compatibility, interoperability, and higher performance. I left lower cost out of that list though, although my current Mac is an iBook, so I could probably claim lower cost.
It's not that it has to be unique and new, just that there needs to be a compelling reason to switch. Yes, Linux is stable, but so is Windows now, and Windows is more compatible with the apps that people use at work or at school.
I'm not trying to knock Linux, because I like it a lot, but I don't see why someone would pick it over Windows when they then have to learn a heap of new things (good example - in this topic someone recommended something like 'just recompile the application, stripping out the things you don't want' as the solution to a performance issue) just to do what they already do now.
Why is it that Linux offers pretty much the features of Windows or OS X, or Unix for that matter? What is new and unique to Linux from a usability or UI point of view?
And yes, I know about the benefits of free or open source software, but that doesn't explain what I can do in Linux that I can't do in OS X or Windows. I have licences for both anyway, so why should I install Linux? If it's just a political statement ("Software should be free!") then that's not much of a benefit for those of us who either don't agree or don't care enough.
Cherry-picking features from other OSs isn't a good way to develop a coherent OS. I know there's a lot of programming talent in the Linux userbase, but is there any design talent, or more particularly, UI-design talent?
I think this may be one of the big issues Linux has to face to gain wider acceptance. When a thing works just like something else that people already have, they may not find a reason to switch.
That's amazing! Here in Australia we also consider Budweiser a terrible beer. And Heineken. ...and pretty much any American beer made north of Mexico.
These headphones have been around for at least 20 years. I remember using them with my Walkman before portable CD players existed. The article summary is a little off there, making it seem like this is a new problem.
Back then I heard how the headphones would cause deafness. This is no doubt true, but I wonder how different they are from the larger style headphones in this respect. Should be easy to test this properly - all we need are some headphones, a reference frequency with volume control, a dB meter and a model of the Human ear.
You're fighting a lost battle there. The common understanding of the word 'hacker' now implies criminal behaviour.
The whole 'white hat' and 'black hat' thing never made it to the media, so all hackers are 'black hats' now.
I love the last one, in which the guy conveniently forgets that customers do actually pay for the telecom connections, usually in monthly line fees (well, here in Australia my fees well outweigh my call costs) and call costs.
Sure! Let's pay for the same stuff twice! Because we're stupid!
You dismiss things like the GUI, desktop publishing with a simple "None of those are contributions to computer science." That's... a brave statement. If you prefer fundamental changes to incremental changes, then you can dismiss a lot of what we count as science in every field. The vast majority is 'standing on the shoulders of giants' with only a handful of paradigm shifts scattered throughout. I'd argue that the commercial release of the GUI (whose limited ancestor never saw the light of day outside Xerox PARC) is a major shift for the entire computing industry, and it changed the way we use computers fundamentally. I can't dismiss it as lightly as you.
You're right in some of these points though - Apple doesn't do much public work, preferring to most of it privately in support of their products. In the sense that science is not just research but also providing results to others, your original point of Apple not contributing is true.
I'd argue that the science aspect doesn't show the whole picture here, and that we see a lot less research done nowadays outside of product research (and this trend will continue).
Google are buying maps that are publicly available, and displaying them without alteration in a freely available web page.
If the providers of the maps were made to obscure their images, and Google were made to simply refresh their maps, then the Indian Government should be happy. Google aren't taking the satellite images after all, and anyone who really wanted the data could just go to the source if Google's images weren't good enough.
The genie is well out of the bottle here.
Google should be required to simply refresh their maps. It's the original providers (who still sell the maps to anyone with a credit card) who need to alter their data.
He might have a great history, but this is a PR piece a year before anything actually ships. Skepticism is justified until a real product is on the horizon, let alone actually delivered.
You're simply wrong about these points.
Apple licenced a lot of stuff from Xerox PARC, but added a lot as well. The whole menubar concept is an Apple one, as well as most of the window concepts. They developed a lot of the GUI, and defended their development in courts but eventually settled with Microsoft.
You don't like their panel-view interface for music, and attack Apple for using the existing patent system to protect their competitive advantages. You should attack the right target - the system itself. Any flaw or weakness in any system will be used to gain advantages where possible. Apple are no more at fault for doing this than any other company that takes out a patent. Yet you single Apple out here, and assume they'll do something that they haven't yet done. You should at least wait until they commit the act before you pronounce them guilty.
As for not contributing to computer science - you're plain wrong there. A list off the top of my head in a few moments includes:
Apple I
Apple II
A usable GUI (largely based on Jef Raskin's seminal paper from '67)
Desktop publishing and word processing based on WYSIWYG
Firewire
QuickTime
An online music store that actually works
Apple people sit on the OpenGL ARB as well as other industry special interest groups
Some of those items have changed the computing landscape completely.
They spent $534M on research and development last year, according their Sep2005 report. That's not 'very little' in anyone's language.
I don't know why you believe Apple have contributed very little to computer science. Like them or hate them, they've done a lot to make the world of computing what it is today.
Perhaps you can outline a company who has made the difference you're talking about? Microsoft? Dell? Sony? Redhat? I'm not saying that Apple has done more for the industry than these companies, but you need to be more specific when you say that Apple 'contributes very little to computer science' - in contrast with who?