I think I follow, but it seems to me that would just encourage more "information overload" than what we've already got now!
I mean, one of the biggest problems I have with the web is that after using a search engine of choice to hunt down relevant links for a topic I need info on, I wind up being presented with a page or pages that link back to quite a few related (or loosely related) pages - giving me at least 2-3x as much to read through and comprehend than I initially had. When each of THOSE links feature more link-backs (and of course they're going to!), you reach a point where you have to just stop reading, or else get sucked into your information search becoming a day-long project.
Now, it sounds like this guy is saying, "It's really not good enough to rely on web page authors voluntarily and manually linking to some of the information they used when constructing their page! We need to have a system where you basically highlight/click on content you're using and have it automatically rolled into the new content you're making." Umm.... wow. Even if the whole WWW was constructed in a manner where this was part of its standard operation, it seems like it would lead to many readers going on a "chase to find the original source material", as they followed text back to its original sources, and then followed THAT source's related content back further, to try to find who really came up with a given concept or set of instructions. (It's part of human nature to try to get things from the "horse's mouth", so to speak.) It seems like this would wind up making it a waste of time for a lot of folks to try to summarize or re-interpret ideas and publish them, because people would tend to use their pages as nothing more than "launching points" to click back to read pages run by whoever provided content clippings that were referenced.
Umm..... yes, someone obviously could do it, but you'd probably have some difficulty linking up the clippings you found to specific individuals. (I mean, would you propose the hair stylists themselves start indexing their customers' hair clippings? They'd be the ones who know their clients' names, addresses and phone numbers since everyone's in their computer system already. If they started acting as the data collectors for this type of operation, it would cause a big loss of business when people started finding out -- so most salons would probably ban the practice, regardless of its legality.)
And just as a somewhat related side note? My g/f is Jewish and brought up the fact that some Jews already believe in not leaving any toenail or fingernail clippings behind. They collect them to destroy them by burning them, etc. Granted, it's based on very old scripture and so doesn't say anything about concerns about people obtaining one's DNA.... but it's interesting that maybe they were onto something anyway!
If you're a "hater" who donated to his cause, then you have every reason to complain! He spent YOUR money and didn't do what he promised with it!
In the case of everyone else, no... like everyone else outside the immediate court battle, they're not being sued over it. But we ALL have a vested interest, in the sense that companies like Sony are apparently still able to sell you a product that lists a certain feature-set, remove part of that feature-set in a software update, and twist your arm to either take said update, or lose other critical features (network play capabilities). On top of that? It's apparently still ok for them to lock down the entire platform so the end-user isn't able to bypass or undo any of this, to get back the functionality they received when they bought the device.
In the most basic sense, yes, I agree with you. But the "because we can" is by the NATURE of the type of content folks are trying to sell. The ability to replicate/duplicate the original product perfectly without reducing the quantity of the original that's available is just a reality of "intellectual property".
Therefore, I truly believe it needs to be factored into the equation as just part of doing that type of business, rather than endlessly trying to "squeeze the sand in one's fist more tightly, to prevent it from slipping through one's fingers".
Whether it's DRM, or "copy protection" schemes, or getting government to act as "bill collector" for your industry -- all these methods of "controlling/stopping piracy" are flawed and doomed to fail.
In anything resembling a "free market", people are going to gravitate towards whatever they perceive as the "best value". So sure, when you see so many "middle-class Americans" making unlicensed copies of things, that's not always because they can't afford the asking prices - but rather, the value proposition of "free" sounds even better.
So how do you stop that from happening? You don't, but you greatly REDUCE it by adding value to BUYING the content that's simply not there with a free copy. Essentially, you change your business model so people aren't simply asked to pay to obtain the work in question. But by paying for said work, receive other benefits bundled with it!
Remember: There's a certain "inconvenience factor" always present with "pirating" a given work. If I want to get a free copy of a new music CD, for example? I've got to provide my own storage space for it in some fashion. That might be as inexpensive as a 15 cent recordable CDR disc, but it's still a cost. More importantly, my TIME is a factor since downloading all the songs or taking the time to borrow someone's CD and duplicate it takes a little bit of time and effort. Then there's still the fact that I'm probably left with an end result that isn't as well "labeled" as the original. (If I just duplicate a bought music CD, I don't have the list of song titles or their run-times, or any of the other liner notes the original has....) If I download from unknown sources on the Internet, the quality of the music is often sub-par (might have a skip or pops in the audio, or heck - I might even get a trojan-horse virus in the process of downloading it?) too.
For these reasons, a lot of people have been driven to paying the 99 cents per track or so for music they want. They view it as a fair value proposition vs. the downsides of seeking out the free alternatives.
For software titles, even more is offered - like technical support and free software updates, if you purchase it rather than copy it. But all in all? Too many people are finding they get a FAR better value by obtaining the unlicensed copies than paying, and that is nothing but a MARKETING failure. I certainly don't have all the solutions but I can think of plenty of things that COULD be a start, in various situations.
For example, since so many computer games are already based on movies? Why not make it a "bundle" somehow, so the only way to obtain the game is to pay for a "premium movie ticket" that gives you the game at the same time you go see the film? (The opposite idea has been done before, where buying the game gives you some sort of coupon for a movie pass or two -- but I think that's backwards. People interested in the game have probably already SEEN the movie first. The movie generated the interest in owning the game so the sale needs to be made when the MOVIE is paid for.)
While I like the idea of drawing an analogy between the computer scenario of the 80's and the smartphone scenario of today? I don't agree with the original poster's conclusions, or even some of the comparisons.
MS-DOS really isn't a great comparison to Android, IMO. MS-DOS was flexible and seen running on a wide range of hardware - but it was also copyrighted and licensed out to interested parties. This led to fragmentation of DOS, in fact. IBM had their own "PC-DOS" for a while, and there was the Digital Research DR-DOS too. Additionally, there were a lot of compatibility issues, early on. I remember Tandy selling a whole line of "PC compatibles" that weren't really quite compatible, for example. The fact you saw a DOS operating system on the hardware was no guarantee all your software was going to work right on it!
I see no reason to predict the death of Apple's iOS, even in the long haul -- because the smartphone market is more like gaming consoles than computers. Just as people develop allegiances to the Playstation or the XBox 360 or the Wii, they prefer the Blackberry or the Apple iPhone or Nokia's offerings. Unlike a computer, a phone only needs to really do specific things - and for the vast majority? The real reasons they want a "smartphone" over a regular cellphone revolve around the Internet connectivity - which has more to do with the carrier selected than the device. (They want to use Facebook on their phone, read the news, check email, surf random web sites, update a Twitter account, or upload some photographs someplace. They may want to tether too. Doesn't matter which OS your phone runs, really, to accomplish any of that stuff.)
I'm currently using an HTC Evo 4G myself, with Android 2.2 -- so I'm not "anti Android" by any means. But having owned an iPhone previously? I'd have to say I see far more similarities than differences, and I prefer iOS when it comes to the small details. (Easier to delete an app, less problems of system getting quirky and needing a power off/on to get it back to normal, etc.)
I have to agree, at least to a large extent. Sure, Top Gear is an entertainment show -- not "Consumer Reports TV for vehicles". But what's so "invalid" about showing the Tesla only goes 55 miles on a charge, with pedal to the metal driving? That's one of the realities and weaknesses of electric cars that it's worth noting Tesla hasn't been able to overcome either.
It's probably telling that Tesla Motors isn't even attempting to sue for anything more than getting the episode pulled from television. I mean, if they've got such a strong case of this being inaccurate and damaging information, why not sue for monetary damages while they're at it? Surely the legal fees are somewhat substantial....
And in a more general, overall sense? I think Clarkson and co. are absolutely right in giving the Tesla roadster a hard time. What niche does the car really fill? It's not suitable for any real racing, because it's not comparable enough to the competition to even be allowed to enter it in many formal racing events. It's WAY too expensive and out of reach for the very audience who is concerned that high gas prices are hammering their pocketbook. It seems to be little more than a way for the uber-wealthy to buy yet another high dollar "exotic sports car" while trying to say they're "environmentally conscious" at the same time. I bet in any exhaustive analysis of the total environmental impact of owning such a car, it wouldn't fare that well against a gasoline-powered counterpart anyway. (Consider the whole process of making its batteries and environmental impact disposing of them will have, whenever they wear out. Consider the environmental impact of generating the electricity used to recharge the car all the time. Are its owners going to exclusively connect them up to wind farms?)
Wow.... (listens.... nothing but silence)! Where's that angry Libertarian horde? Oh, maybe like one of the libertarians who posted earlier, they're not taking issue with things like you were so sure they would be!?
As a libertarian myself, I wasn't necessarily opposed to the Ma Bell breakup. I know some will take a "hard line" stance that it's never acceptable to consider a monopoly "illegal" -- but I think many of us aren't so quick to say "Never!".
I was far more opposed to the Justice Dept.'s investigation of Microsoft and accusations that they were becoming an illegal monopoly. In the case of Bell Telephone, practically *every* residence in America was wired up to their service and paying their fees for it, and it became a necessity. (If you didn't have a phone at home, you were reduced to pumping coins into one of the Bell company's pay phones on a regular basis, at the very least.) Furthermore, they were making their money off an infrastructure that was largely paid for and protected by federal govt. from the beginning - so it wasn't truly something they achieved on their own. By contrast, the Microsoft situation stemmed largely from the premise that they squashed the competition of the Netscape web browser. The transient nature of that issue is pretty obvious today, when you look at the market-share of Firefox or even Chrome. The remaining issues at stake revolved mostly about Microsoft making bundling deals with OEMs that required the hardware maker to distribute nothing but the Microsoft OS's from there forward, or else risk losing their special pricing. Again, nobody held a gun to anyone's head to accept those contracts, but in the short-term, they were probably smart deals for companies like Dell or HP to make. (That's the OS most people wanted to buy on their new PC in the first place, so why not lock in great pricing on it and run with it?) A more forward-thinking company, in it for the long term, could easily have said "No!" though, and carved out a niche for themselves selling systems with NO operating system pre-loaded, or offering various BSD or Linux distros. There were multiple options.... It wasn't even out of the realm of possibility for someone to buy up rights to a rather competitive alternative like IBM's OS/2, and start updating/maintaining it and offering PCs with that pre-installed! I know I would have bought one, if it was done right.....)
True, but at the same time? You weren't allowed to plug anything into the phone jack that wasn't RENTED to you on a monthly basis by the phone company, and technologies like touch-tone dialing? They cost an extra charge, despite actually requiring FEWER resources on the back end than the original pulse dialing that they had as the default!
If Ma Bell wasn't deregulated, I dare-say we might not have even seen the digital revolution that came about with the phone modem and the computer bulletin board system. (Can you imagine how that would have gone otherwise? "Sorry, but the only phone modem you can use is the 300 baud acoustic coupler modem we certified for safe use on our lines. That will cost you $20 per month to rent it from us, too.")
Next time that infernal Windows "authenticity" WGA software screws up and flags a legal copy of Windows as counterfeit, there should be an opportunity for a serious high-dollar counter-suit for damages!
Don't think for a minute this doesn't really happen! Just a few weeks ago, I had a call from one of our salespeople asking for help, because "my screen suddenly turned black and these notices keep popping up telling me my copy of Windows isn't authentic". This is the same Windows XP Pro machine he's used for the last 4 years or so! (Our company had a lot of financial problems in the last couple years with the economic downturn, so a lot of PC upgrade plans got put on hold.) His PC still has the exact same OEM Windows XP copy installed on it that came with it when it was new, and if you check the CD key it says it's installed with? It matches the Microsoft sticker placed on the back of his machine. But for whatever reason, Microsoft suddenly decided he was running a pirated copy.....
Wow... I'm not even sure how to respond to this, exactly?
The reasons for boycotting the purchase of any Sony products are numerous and clear-cut. They loaded spyware on people's computers as part of their "copy protection" mechanism. They continuously try to force people to buy into unnecessary Sony-proprietary variants of industry standard media formats by requiring them in their devices (Sony "memory stick" vs. SD card for example). They sell products with certain, promised functionality that they proceed to take away down the road (PS3 firmware updates removing Linux boot capability). The list goes on. But in Apple's case? I fail to see any justification, beyond ones that have pretty much always been there - if those issues were so important to you. Yes, Apple likes to sell you a complete "solution" vs. only an operating system, only a piece of hardware, or only an application. Yes, that means especially for the electronic devices/gadgets running iOS (vs. full-blown computer systems), they will put up some artificial constraints on what you can/can't do with it. But NO, there's nothing indicating Apple is on a mission to lock down the whole ecosystem so only THEY can provide you with software!
People are WAY over-reacting, IMHO. Much of this stems from people making wild assumptions after Apple offered an "App Store" for OS X, parallel to what they've got for iOS devices. Big deal!?! This just makes sense as "low hanging fruit" for Apple to profit from. If you already have the back-end infrastructure in place for that type of online store, and you've got developers making things for iOS that they can easily port to OSX -- why not port over the store itself and give people one more option there? That doesn't mean Apple suddenly has ideas to change everything so nobody can put a piece of code on a Mac unless it's obtained via that App Store application!
By the same token, what does ANY of that have to do with this current news story? Sounds to me like Apple's simply saying, "Hey... GPL3 is going to give us some licensing hassles if we start adding some networking functionality to devices like the iPad in the future. Let's get off Samba codebase and move to something where we won't lose that flexibility."
I certainly won't "flame" you for this suggestion. As maligned as the iTunes software is, I think its ability to index media and very quickly retrieve it by a number of different fields is pretty darn good -- especially for a program you can download free of charge for both Windows and the Mac.
As a Mac user myself, I started using another free program to manage my movies and saved TV shows though. I really like Plex (www.plexapp.com) for the purpose. It doesn't have the restrictions on playable video formats that iTunes has, and has a great UI to serve as your media center via a remote control.
I believe the latest update to Plex added some interesting, if slightly obscure, functionality -- like the ability to search the subtitles of your movies for specific strings, too.
I mean, what would you have expected De Icaza to say his preferred OS was? Yeah, the fact he said it was Linux didn't exactly shock me....
But his other statement is equally "non news". Yep, "proprietary systems" (commercial OS offerings) are far better at supporting random hardware. Linux will NEVER really win that particular battle, because too many companies release a new product (such as a video card) where the driver software is just as critical a component as the chips soldered onto the board at giving the advertised video performance. The video performance is what people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for. Otherwise, everyone would just be happy with whatever on-board video was provided with their motherboard, or whichever card was the cheapest. When you as a video card maker are in this situation? You're going to be struggling enough to make it perform reliably, as-intended, with just ONE operating system. The motivation to go through all that work again for a free OS like Linux just isn't really there. #1, Linux won't have the number of 3D game titles that actually make good use of such a card. But #2, you don't want to risk releasing the source code to those proprietary drivers that make that new card go, because doing so would be like inviting all your competitors into your factories to take video and photographs, or make copies of all your engineers' design notes. So any Linux drivers provided will have to be binaries only, leading to a lot of hassles providing ones that work with various distros and Linux releases. And don't forget #3 - when you re-release the SAME card with re-worked drivers for Mac OS X, you get to sell the thing at close to full retail price for far longer than you'll ever fetch that price with the Windows crowd. Do you think the Linux community would pay those prices for a "Linux edition" of a given Windows graphics card, just because good Linux drivers were offered? (Maybe a few die-hards would, but just as many would get indignant about having to pay inflated prices for a card with drivers they don't even get the source to.)
It's been so long, I can't even recall all the details anymore. But honestly, I thought it was a situation where some early version of Trumpet Winsock didn't require a payment to use it (though maybe the documentation asked for it if you kept using the program?), but later versions added the registration requirement?
I just have some vague recollection of everyone using an older (and more buggy) version of Trumpet that was handed out on disks provided by colleges and universities for their students to get online. And when we'd find newer, better versions to download, they always had those timers in them preventing using it more than so many minutes at a time or whatever, so we'd get frustrated and go back to the older one.
Really depends on what you use your laptop for, though. As alternate devices like the iPad or netbooks get more popular, they're taking up a big chunk of the "use cases" out there that used to justify people buying a laptop computer. The people still carrying around a full blown notebook/laptop today are often doing more complex things with them that require more drive space.
For example, on my Macbook Pro, I've got both OS X and Windows 7 installed in two partitions, so I can boot into either OS as necessary. That, alone, means I need one of the larger capacity drives available for the machine, or else there's just not enough to work with when I've divided the drive in half for each OS. Then, I want to use it as a portable means to edit video captured from my Canon Rebel T2i camera. That HD video starts taking up a lot of space when you keep dumping it off of memory cards in 4GB or more "clips", into a library, so you can copy and paste the pieces and massage them into a complete project.
Modern games tend to chew up a lot of storage space too. If you're someone who wants a few titles like the latest version of Civilization, and maybe a 3D shooter like the latest Call of Duty game on there? Again, you're quickly filling up the drive space.
I agree though.... for a lot of people, they can get by fine with something like a 320GB drive. It'll hold a pretty good sized collection of their still photos and/or music files, the OS itself, their choice of Office suite, and a few other random apps they might want to install and use. Beyond that, they can do a lot with streaming and saving documents in the "cloud" (even if you're just talking free services like DropBox or Evernote).
I'm with you 100% that the current system is broken. (I think much of that stems from our collective arrogance 20+ years ago, when the intellectuals declared the United States "too intelligent and sophisticated" to waste time with physical labor, manufacturing things, and proclaimed that we'd get ahead if we let other nations do all of that stuff for us.) In reality, manufacturing involves all levels of skill, from highly technical folks who design and maintain the complex conveyor systems and automated assembly machines to the mentally handicapped guy who functions at just a high enough level so he can screw the caps on the containers as they come by, or box up products for shipment. When we decided we didn't need that stuff so much any more, we let go of a LOT more employment opportunities than we were able to fill with replacement employment peddling "intellectual property".
But the idea that just because "not enough work is available", we should institute some sort of basic income for all? Doesn't that basically define Communism the way the old Soviet Union handled things? Didn't pan out so well.... (Sure, they claimed their government would find employment for everyone and in name, they generally did. But it was clear they didn't REALLY have enough work to keep all those people employed full-time. So you had people collecting some meager paycheck for a job they only sort-of did, when they felt like coming in. Not much different than just giving them a handout and dropping the pretense that they "worked for it".)
If you want a prosperous nation, you need to CREATE more jobs. The work is ALWAYS there. It's just a matter of getting enough businesses (or even non-profits that hire people) off to a good start. Unless you really believe that humans have achieved perfection in most areas and there's NOTHING more under the sun we can do to improve on any of the things we use or do in a day -- opportunities exist to create more jobs doing real, useful work!
IMO, there's never anything unethical about improving efficiency of a process. On the contrary, *sometimes* there are ethical questions that arise if the company that just improved the process feels it's better to eliminate jobs, rather than find other places to use the labor they have. That's one of the big mistakes I think many businesses make. The simplest way to show a "cost savings" is to reduce your labor costs. But then, you're really shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to doing anything additional or new. You eliminated skilled labor that was already trained and familiar with many aspects of your workplace, and presumably got along well with their co-workers too. The next time an opportunity comes along to start manufacturing a new type of widget for somebody? You don't have enough employees to do it successfully, so you're back to square 1, trying to hire new people, spend money giving them all the H.R. handouts and processing their paperwork,etc. And it's a roll of the dice if the new hires wind up better than the people you had previously.
So in essence, penny-wise short-term but potentially pound-foolish long-term... and meanwhile, the churn contributes to reduced morale of the people you have left!
Ok.... but don't come crying back to us when your new Android phone can't:
1. support proxy server connections over wi-fi 2. do FaceTime video conferences with any of your friends who DO own iPhones 3. use nice video streaming apps like Air Video to watch your movie/video library from anywhere 4. work flawlessly with various bluetooth hands-free car kit implementations out there 5. be located if you lose it via a free "Find My iPhone" type of service 6. delete unwanted apps as easily as holding down the icon for a few seconds and tapping the "X" in the corner of it 7. integrate as a music player with hundreds of different commercial products from clock radios to car stereos, using the Apple iPod interface standards
I'm saying this as someone who DOES use Android, BTW. (My work pays for my phone, so why wouldn't I go with what's free....) And frankly, Android phones have some benefits and advantages of their own too. But the iPhone is a worthy competitor and I wouldn't be so quick to blow one off as "not an option", especially because of some reason like THIS?! There's really no telling what this will do for eBook content on the iPhone in the long haul. IMHO, it's a simple matter of Apple thinking they can get more profit out of them, and the customers making a final decision if that's really so or not. You can still install the Kindle app on the iPhone and completely avoid using the iTunes store for eBook content if you so desire. You can probably even find many other free or shareware eBook readers that handle the standard "ePub" file format, and even use Apple's own Books app with any PDFs you sync up with it. If eBooks gets too expensive, people will simply find alternative sources for them. The hardware allows viewing and storing them so that's all that should really matter from your perspective as the end-user.
So wait a minute? You're trying to turn this around into a case of the CUSTOMER being at fault here? I've owned several iPhones, knowing full-well that it was a device made to work within a "walled garden" of approved applications. I never really felt I was "at the whims of Apple" though. If anything, I felt much more of that towards AT&T who I had the cellphone contract with. After all, they were the ones withdrawing over $80 per month from my bank account to keep the phone working as a phone, and they were the reason so many features of the iPhone got delayed or restricted. (No video messaging until AT&T felt their network was ready for it. No initial ability to stream things like Slingbox video over 3G connections. No tethering option for a long time.....)
On the Apple side of the equation, they gave me exactly what I paid for... a shiny piece of quality hardware that was an industry leader in changing the way cellphones were used. If I didn't like one of Apple's restrictions on it, fine. I could always use a jailbreak and get around that. But 9 times out of 10, that wasn't really a big deal. Bloggers who have axes to grind make those things into big issues... not most of the users. There were still tens of thousands of apps I could download and use without need to "hack" the phone in any way, and that's PLENTY more than I'll ever get the time to install and look at.
Situations like this, with regards to eBooks and payments are all contract disputes that are rather irrelevant to me as the end-user. From my POV? Either I can get the content I want at a price I deem fair to me, or I simply won't buy it from that source. Apple can demand all they want with this stuff, but once they lose all the quality content or sales plummet -- they'll have to change things.
Absolutely.... but the problem, as usual, is that people aren't comfortable with change. They get used to things being a certain way and feel it's better for everyone if it's just left alone.
EG. My mom's community finally started a curb-side recycling program where you pay $20 per month or so more for your trash pickup, but they give you a big green can on wheels that's assigned to your house address. Instead of driving to the next community over, to voluntarily drop off your recyclables in big holding bins at their site (where you had to separate everything out manually first), you can now toss all the glass bottles, paper products and plastic milk jugs in the green can, wheel it to the street corner once a week, and you're done. Well, her next-door neighbor was really angry about the changes. Why? Not because she doesn't recycle, but because she "got so used to taking all her stuff over to the old facility, she didn't want to have to pay $20 per month for doing things the new way, when she planned on continuing to do things the old way anyway"!
When you think about it though? Aren't your trips in the car usually ones you expect to make with as FEW interruptions as possible? Why people would PREFER having to queue up at toll booths where they have to roll down a window and interact with some person sitting in the booth is beyond me..... This isn't like arguing that you miss the human interaction when doing business at your local bank or something. In those cases, those places are your DESTINATIONS -- not impediments to travel artificially placed in your way to collect money from you!
Many years ago, my cable TV provider was screwing their set-top boxes shut with screws that appeared to take an Allen wrench to open them, except they had little metal pegs/posts right in the middle of the indentation in the top of the screw, so no normal tool could fit into the opening to turn them. Apparently, only their authorized service people had a special wrench with a hole in the middle that the post would fit into.
People wishing to hack the boxes with different chips to get free cable quickly figured out the work-around was to take a small drill bit and drill out the posts in the middle, converting the screws back into something you could open normally.
I agree that it's a "dick move" on Apple's part. Especially in the case of the iPhone 4 where the glass back cover often gets broken when the phones are dropped, the ability to remove those two screws was a nice feature, really. You could buy a cheap aluminum or plastic replacement back cover if you didn't like the glass, and solve the problem for yourself (and/or customize the look of your phone). But like people said, this won't last long. People will simply find ways to remove the non-standard screws and replace them with Phillips screws like they used to come with.....
I'm a native St. Louisan myself, although I'm a little younger than you. (My parents bought a new '73 Vega a couple years after I was born.)
When I was in high-school, I taped quite a few complete albums from KSHE's 7th. Day program (occasionally with one song missing if I underestimated the length of cassette tape needed to fit the whole thing!).
Truthfully though, I don't bother with trying to digitally record off of radio broadcasts. Either you're trying to record an analog source (complete with any background hiss or noise caused by any interruptions in the radio reception), or you're capturing a digital stream a station offers, which is usually in a relatively low bit-rate and doesn't sound nearly as good as CD quality.
You're right that you'd get a pretty good collection of whatever's currently popular, that way. But for a meager $9.99 per month or so, you could just subscribe to a Premium Usenet service like EasyNews or GIgaNews and join a newsgroup like alt.binaries.mp3.complete_CD and download entire albums, nicely ripped as quality MP3s, to your heart's content. So far, the record labels have all but ignored Usenet music piracy.....
Yes, Steve Jobs wants to have ultimate control over his company's devices as they ship. He spends quite a bit on internal R&D, and tries hard to keep that work a secret so it doesn't leak out before a product is ready. But that "control" evaporates as soon as the products reach consumers.
iPhones and iPads? Jailbreaks have always been available for them, often within DAYS of any software updates rendering older ones useless. AppleTV? Made to run completely different software with hacks allowing booting them from USB memory sticks. iPods? Heck, people have entire Linux projects that run on the platform!
And comparing Wikipedia's model of contributions to their content to what Apple sells? VERY different things and hardly even comparable in the first place! Wikipedia doesn't even sell a tangible product, for starters. The closest thing Apple has to Wikipedia might be their free user forums, where yes -- all registered users can contribute their own comments and suggestions.
I think people are being overly reactionary when they refuse to differentiate between special-purpose gadgets and devices and full-blown computer systems.
Just like you said, the "walled garden" approach is just fine for a PHONE or even something a little larger, like the iPad. It's NOT supposed to be a computer. If it was, Apple would have immediately stopped selling Macbooks and Macbook Pros!
At the end of the day, ALL of these electronic devices have little computers in them, but the whole point is -- people didn't really WANT to carry a full-blown computer around with them everywhere or networking everything imaginable in the house or office to it, relying on it for EVERYTHING. (Imagine if your microwave oven just networked to your home PC and you controlled the cook time and settings from a piece of software on the computer? That'd get rid of a duplicate "special purpose computer" in the thing and reduce its price a little bit. But would you actually WANT it that way? Doubtful!)
Many times, I even find the functionality offered for my "smartphone" crosses into the territory of things I prefer to do with another gadget instead. GPS navigation is a great example. Sure, I *could* run any number of iPhone or Android phone apps for that in my car. But what about when I need to take a phone call while I'm using it? Plus, mounting it on my windshield glass so I can actually SEE the maps while driving means I need more special hardware to do that, and I *always* have to unclip and disconnect the thing so I can take it with me as soon as I get out of the vehicle. A cheap dedicated GPS is more convenient for the task.
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I think I follow, but it seems to me that would just encourage more "information overload" than what we've already got now!
I mean, one of the biggest problems I have with the web is that after using a search engine of choice to hunt down relevant links for a topic I need info on, I wind up being presented with a page or pages that link back to quite a few related (or loosely related) pages - giving me at least 2-3x as much to read through and comprehend than I initially had. When each of THOSE links feature more link-backs (and of course they're going to!), you reach a point where you have to just stop reading, or else get sucked into your information search becoming a day-long project.
Now, it sounds like this guy is saying, "It's really not good enough to rely on web page authors voluntarily and manually linking to some of the information they used when constructing their page! We need to have a system where you basically highlight/click on content you're using and have it automatically rolled into the new content you're making." Umm.... wow. Even if the whole WWW was constructed in a manner where this was part of its standard operation, it seems like it would lead to many readers going on a "chase to find the original source material", as they followed text back to its original sources, and then followed THAT source's related content back further, to try to find who really came up with a given concept or set of instructions. (It's part of human nature to try to get things from the "horse's mouth", so to speak.) It seems like this would wind up making it a waste of time for a lot of folks to try to summarize or re-interpret ideas and publish them, because people would tend to use their pages as nothing more than "launching points" to click back to read pages run by whoever provided content clippings that were referenced.
Umm..... yes, someone obviously could do it, but you'd probably have some difficulty linking up the clippings you found to specific individuals. (I mean, would you propose the hair stylists themselves start indexing their customers' hair clippings? They'd be the ones who know their clients' names, addresses and phone numbers since everyone's in their computer system already. If they started acting as the data collectors for this type of operation, it would cause a big loss of business when people started finding out -- so most salons would probably ban the practice, regardless of its legality.)
And just as a somewhat related side note? My g/f is Jewish and brought up the fact that some Jews already believe in not leaving any toenail or fingernail clippings behind. They collect them to destroy them by burning them, etc. Granted, it's based on very old scripture and so doesn't say anything about concerns about people obtaining one's DNA .... but it's interesting that maybe they were onto something anyway!
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100114112104AAz2PtZ
If you're a "hater" who donated to his cause, then you have every reason to complain! He spent YOUR money and didn't do what he promised with it!
In the case of everyone else, no ... like everyone else outside the immediate court battle, they're not being sued over it. But we ALL have a vested interest, in the sense that companies like Sony are apparently still able to sell you a product that lists a certain feature-set, remove part of that feature-set in a software update, and twist your arm to either take said update, or lose other critical features (network play capabilities). On top of that? It's apparently still ok for them to lock down the entire platform so the end-user isn't able to bypass or undo any of this, to get back the functionality they received when they bought the device.
In the most basic sense, yes, I agree with you. But the "because we can" is by the NATURE of the type of content folks are trying to sell. The ability to replicate/duplicate the original product perfectly without reducing the quantity of the original that's available is just a reality of "intellectual property".
Therefore, I truly believe it needs to be factored into the equation as just part of doing that type of business, rather than endlessly trying to "squeeze the sand in one's fist more tightly, to prevent it from slipping through one's fingers".
Whether it's DRM, or "copy protection" schemes, or getting government to act as "bill collector" for your industry -- all these methods of "controlling/stopping piracy" are flawed and doomed to fail.
In anything resembling a "free market", people are going to gravitate towards whatever they perceive as the "best value". So sure, when you see so many "middle-class Americans" making unlicensed copies of things, that's not always because they can't afford the asking prices - but rather, the value proposition of "free" sounds even better.
So how do you stop that from happening? You don't, but you greatly REDUCE it by adding value to BUYING the content that's simply not there with a free copy. Essentially, you change your business model so people aren't simply asked to pay to obtain the work in question. But by paying for said work, receive other benefits bundled with it!
Remember: There's a certain "inconvenience factor" always present with "pirating" a given work. If I want to get a free copy of a new music CD, for example? I've got to provide my own storage space for it in some fashion. That might be as inexpensive as a 15 cent recordable CDR disc, but it's still a cost. More importantly, my TIME is a factor since downloading all the songs or taking the time to borrow someone's CD and duplicate it takes a little bit of time and effort. Then there's still the fact that I'm probably left with an end result that isn't as well "labeled" as the original. (If I just duplicate a bought music CD, I don't have the list of song titles or their run-times, or any of the other liner notes the original has....) If I download from unknown sources on the Internet, the quality of the music is often sub-par (might have a skip or pops in the audio, or heck - I might even get a trojan-horse virus in the process of downloading it?) too.
For these reasons, a lot of people have been driven to paying the 99 cents per track or so for music they want. They view it as a fair value proposition vs. the downsides of seeking out the free alternatives.
For software titles, even more is offered - like technical support and free software updates, if you purchase it rather than copy it. But all in all? Too many people are finding they get a FAR better value by obtaining the unlicensed copies than paying, and that is nothing but a MARKETING failure. I certainly don't have all the solutions but I can think of plenty of things that COULD be a start, in various situations.
For example, since so many computer games are already based on movies? Why not make it a "bundle" somehow, so the only way to obtain the game is to pay for a "premium movie ticket" that gives you the game at the same time you go see the film? (The opposite idea has been done before, where buying the game gives you some sort of coupon for a movie pass or two -- but I think that's backwards. People interested in the game have probably already SEEN the movie first. The movie generated the interest in owning the game so the sale needs to be made when the MOVIE is paid for.)
While I like the idea of drawing an analogy between the computer scenario of the 80's and the smartphone scenario of today? I don't agree with the original poster's conclusions, or even some of the comparisons.
MS-DOS really isn't a great comparison to Android, IMO. MS-DOS was flexible and seen running on a wide range of hardware - but it was also copyrighted and licensed out to interested parties. This led to fragmentation of DOS, in fact. IBM had their own "PC-DOS" for a while, and there was the Digital Research DR-DOS too. Additionally, there were a lot of compatibility issues, early on. I remember Tandy selling a whole line of "PC compatibles" that weren't really quite compatible, for example. The fact you saw a DOS operating system on the hardware was no guarantee all your software was going to work right on it!
I see no reason to predict the death of Apple's iOS, even in the long haul -- because the smartphone market is more like gaming consoles than computers. Just as people develop allegiances to the Playstation or the XBox 360 or the Wii, they prefer the Blackberry or the Apple iPhone or Nokia's offerings. Unlike a computer, a phone only needs to really do specific things - and for the vast majority? The real reasons they want a "smartphone" over a regular cellphone revolve around the Internet connectivity - which has more to do with the carrier selected than the device. (They want to use Facebook on their phone, read the news, check email, surf random web sites, update a Twitter account, or upload some photographs someplace. They may want to tether too. Doesn't matter which OS your phone runs, really, to accomplish any of that stuff.)
I'm currently using an HTC Evo 4G myself, with Android 2.2 -- so I'm not "anti Android" by any means. But having owned an iPhone previously? I'd have to say I see far more similarities than differences, and I prefer iOS when it comes to the small details. (Easier to delete an app, less problems of system getting quirky and needing a power off/on to get it back to normal, etc.)
I have to agree, at least to a large extent. Sure, Top Gear is an entertainment show -- not "Consumer Reports TV for vehicles". But what's so "invalid" about showing the Tesla only goes 55 miles on a charge, with pedal to the metal driving? That's one of the realities and weaknesses of electric cars that it's worth noting Tesla hasn't been able to overcome either.
It's probably telling that Tesla Motors isn't even attempting to sue for anything more than getting the episode pulled from television. I mean, if they've got such a strong case of this being inaccurate and damaging information, why not sue for monetary damages while they're at it? Surely the legal fees are somewhat substantial....
And in a more general, overall sense? I think Clarkson and co. are absolutely right in giving the Tesla roadster a hard time. What niche does the car really fill? It's not suitable for any real racing, because it's not comparable enough to the competition to even be allowed to enter it in many formal racing events. It's WAY too expensive and out of reach for the very audience who is concerned that high gas prices are hammering their pocketbook. It seems to be little more than a way for the uber-wealthy to buy yet another high dollar "exotic sports car" while trying to say they're "environmentally conscious" at the same time. I bet in any exhaustive analysis of the total environmental impact of owning such a car, it wouldn't fare that well against a gasoline-powered counterpart anyway. (Consider the whole process of making its batteries and environmental impact disposing of them will have, whenever they wear out. Consider the environmental impact of generating the electricity used to recharge the car all the time. Are its owners going to exclusively connect them up to wind farms?)
Wow.... (listens .... nothing but silence)! Where's that angry Libertarian horde? Oh, maybe like one of the libertarians who posted earlier, they're not taking issue with things like you were so sure they would be!?
As a libertarian myself, I wasn't necessarily opposed to the Ma Bell breakup. I know some will take a "hard line" stance that it's never acceptable to consider a monopoly "illegal" -- but I think many of us aren't so quick to say "Never!".
I was far more opposed to the Justice Dept.'s investigation of Microsoft and accusations that they were becoming an illegal monopoly. In the case of Bell Telephone, practically *every* residence in America was wired up to their service and paying their fees for it, and it became a necessity. (If you didn't have a phone at home, you were reduced to pumping coins into one of the Bell company's pay phones on a regular basis, at the very least.) Furthermore, they were making their money off an infrastructure that was largely paid for and protected by federal govt. from the beginning - so it wasn't truly something they achieved on their own. By contrast, the Microsoft situation stemmed largely from the premise that they squashed the competition of the Netscape web browser. The transient nature of that issue is pretty obvious today, when you look at the market-share of Firefox or even Chrome. The remaining issues at stake revolved mostly about Microsoft making bundling deals with OEMs that required the hardware maker to distribute nothing but the Microsoft OS's from there forward, or else risk losing their special pricing. Again, nobody held a gun to anyone's head to accept those contracts, but in the short-term, they were probably smart deals for companies like Dell or HP to make. (That's the OS most people wanted to buy on their new PC in the first place, so why not lock in great pricing on it and run with it?) A more forward-thinking company, in it for the long term, could easily have said "No!" though, and carved out a niche for themselves selling systems with NO operating system pre-loaded, or offering various BSD or Linux distros. There were multiple options.... It wasn't even out of the realm of possibility for someone to buy up rights to a rather competitive alternative like IBM's OS/2, and start updating/maintaining it and offering PCs with that pre-installed! I know I would have bought one, if it was done right.....)
True, but at the same time? You weren't allowed to plug anything into the phone jack that wasn't RENTED to you on a monthly basis by the phone company, and technologies like touch-tone dialing? They cost an extra charge, despite actually requiring FEWER resources on the back end than the original pulse dialing that they had as the default!
If Ma Bell wasn't deregulated, I dare-say we might not have even seen the digital revolution that came about with the phone modem and the computer bulletin board system. (Can you imagine how that would have gone otherwise? "Sorry, but the only phone modem you can use is the 300 baud acoustic coupler modem we certified for safe use on our lines. That will cost you $20 per month to rent it from us, too.")
Next time that infernal Windows "authenticity" WGA software screws up and flags a legal copy of Windows as counterfeit, there should be an opportunity for a serious high-dollar counter-suit for damages!
Don't think for a minute this doesn't really happen! Just a few weeks ago, I had a call from one of our salespeople asking for help, because "my screen suddenly turned black and these notices keep popping up telling me my copy of Windows isn't authentic". This is the same Windows XP Pro machine he's used for the last 4 years or so! (Our company had a lot of financial problems in the last couple years with the economic downturn, so a lot of PC upgrade plans got put on hold.) His PC still has the exact same OEM Windows XP copy installed on it that came with it when it was new, and if you check the CD key it says it's installed with? It matches the Microsoft sticker placed on the back of his machine. But for whatever reason, Microsoft suddenly decided he was running a pirated copy .....
Wow... I'm not even sure how to respond to this, exactly?
The reasons for boycotting the purchase of any Sony products are numerous and clear-cut. They loaded spyware on people's computers as part of their "copy protection" mechanism. They continuously try to force people to buy into unnecessary Sony-proprietary variants of industry standard media formats by requiring them in their devices (Sony "memory stick" vs. SD card for example). They sell products with certain, promised functionality that they proceed to take away down the road (PS3 firmware updates removing Linux boot capability). The list goes on. But in Apple's case? I fail to see any justification, beyond ones that have pretty much always been there - if those issues were so important to you. Yes, Apple likes to sell you a complete "solution" vs. only an operating system, only a piece of hardware, or only an application. Yes, that means especially for the electronic devices/gadgets running iOS (vs. full-blown computer systems), they will put up some artificial constraints on what you can/can't do with it. But NO, there's nothing indicating Apple is on a mission to lock down the whole ecosystem so only THEY can provide you with software!
People are WAY over-reacting, IMHO. Much of this stems from people making wild assumptions after Apple offered an "App Store" for OS X, parallel to what they've got for iOS devices. Big deal!?! This just makes sense as "low hanging fruit" for Apple to profit from. If you already have the back-end infrastructure in place for that type of online store, and you've got developers making things for iOS that they can easily port to OSX -- why not port over the store itself and give people one more option there? That doesn't mean Apple suddenly has ideas to change everything so nobody can put a piece of code on a Mac unless it's obtained via that App Store application!
By the same token, what does ANY of that have to do with this current news story? Sounds to me like Apple's simply saying, "Hey... GPL3 is going to give us some licensing hassles if we start adding some networking functionality to devices like the iPad in the future. Let's get off Samba codebase and move to something where we won't lose that flexibility."
I certainly won't "flame" you for this suggestion. As maligned as the iTunes software is, I think its ability to index media and very quickly retrieve it by a number of different fields is pretty darn good -- especially for a program you can download free of charge for both Windows and the Mac.
As a Mac user myself, I started using another free program to manage my movies and saved TV shows though. I really like Plex (www.plexapp.com) for the purpose. It doesn't have the restrictions on playable video formats that iTunes has, and has a great UI to serve as your media center via a remote control.
I believe the latest update to Plex added some interesting, if slightly obscure, functionality -- like the ability to search the subtitles of your movies for specific strings, too.
I mean, what would you have expected De Icaza to say his preferred OS was? Yeah, the fact he said it was Linux didn't exactly shock me....
But his other statement is equally "non news". Yep, "proprietary systems" (commercial OS offerings) are far better at supporting random hardware. Linux will NEVER really win that particular battle, because too many companies release a new product (such as a video card) where the driver software is just as critical a component as the chips soldered onto the board at giving the advertised video performance. The video performance is what people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for. Otherwise, everyone would just be happy with whatever on-board video was provided with their motherboard, or whichever card was the cheapest. When you as a video card maker are in this situation? You're going to be struggling enough to make it perform reliably, as-intended, with just ONE operating system. The motivation to go through all that work again for a free OS like Linux just isn't really there. #1, Linux won't have the number of 3D game titles that actually make good use of such a card. But #2, you don't want to risk releasing the source code to those proprietary drivers that make that new card go, because doing so would be like inviting all your competitors into your factories to take video and photographs, or make copies of all your engineers' design notes. So any Linux drivers provided will have to be binaries only, leading to a lot of hassles providing ones that work with various distros and Linux releases. And don't forget #3 - when you re-release the SAME card with re-worked drivers for Mac OS X, you get to sell the thing at close to full retail price for far longer than you'll ever fetch that price with the Windows crowd. Do you think the Linux community would pay those prices for a "Linux edition" of a given Windows graphics card, just because good Linux drivers were offered? (Maybe a few die-hards would, but just as many would get indignant about having to pay inflated prices for a card with drivers they don't even get the source to.)
It's been so long, I can't even recall all the details anymore. But honestly, I thought it was a situation where some early version of Trumpet Winsock didn't require a payment to use it (though maybe the documentation asked for it if you kept using the program?), but later versions added the registration requirement?
I just have some vague recollection of everyone using an older (and more buggy) version of Trumpet that was handed out on disks provided by colleges and universities for their students to get online. And when we'd find newer, better versions to download, they always had those timers in them preventing using it more than so many minutes at a time or whatever, so we'd get frustrated and go back to the older one.
Really depends on what you use your laptop for, though. As alternate devices like the iPad or netbooks get more popular, they're taking up a big chunk of the "use cases" out there that used to justify people buying a laptop computer. The people still carrying around a full blown notebook/laptop today are often doing more complex things with them that require more drive space.
For example, on my Macbook Pro, I've got both OS X and Windows 7 installed in two partitions, so I can boot into either OS as necessary. That, alone, means I need one of the larger capacity drives available for the machine, or else there's just not enough to work with when I've divided the drive in half for each OS. Then, I want to use it as a portable means to edit video captured from my Canon Rebel T2i camera. That HD video starts taking up a lot of space when you keep dumping it off of memory cards in 4GB or more "clips", into a library, so you can copy and paste the pieces and massage them into a complete project.
Modern games tend to chew up a lot of storage space too. If you're someone who wants a few titles like the latest version of Civilization, and maybe a 3D shooter like the latest Call of Duty game on there? Again, you're quickly filling up the drive space.
I agree though.... for a lot of people, they can get by fine with something like a 320GB drive. It'll hold a pretty good sized collection of their still photos and/or music files, the OS itself, their choice of Office suite, and a few other random apps they might want to install and use. Beyond that, they can do a lot with streaming and saving documents in the "cloud" (even if you're just talking free services like DropBox or Evernote).
I'm with you 100% that the current system is broken. (I think much of that stems from our collective arrogance 20+ years ago, when the intellectuals declared the United States "too intelligent and sophisticated" to waste time with physical labor, manufacturing things, and proclaimed that we'd get ahead if we let other nations do all of that stuff for us.) In reality, manufacturing involves all levels of skill, from highly technical folks who design and maintain the complex conveyor systems and automated assembly machines to the mentally handicapped guy who functions at just a high enough level so he can screw the caps on the containers as they come by, or box up products for shipment. When we decided we didn't need that stuff so much any more, we let go of a LOT more employment opportunities than we were able to fill with replacement employment peddling "intellectual property".
But the idea that just because "not enough work is available", we should institute some sort of basic income for all? Doesn't that basically define Communism the way the old Soviet Union handled things? Didn't pan out so well.... (Sure, they claimed their government would find employment for everyone and in name, they generally did. But it was clear they didn't REALLY have enough work to keep all those people employed full-time. So you had people collecting some meager paycheck for a job they only sort-of did, when they felt like coming in. Not much different than just giving them a handout and dropping the pretense that they "worked for it".)
If you want a prosperous nation, you need to CREATE more jobs. The work is ALWAYS there. It's just a matter of getting enough businesses (or even non-profits that hire people) off to a good start. Unless you really believe that humans have achieved perfection in most areas and there's NOTHING more under the sun we can do to improve on any of the things we use or do in a day -- opportunities exist to create more jobs doing real, useful work!
It sounds like solar warming must be creating holes in its magnetic field!
IMO, there's never anything unethical about improving efficiency of a process. On the contrary, *sometimes* there are ethical questions that arise if the company that just improved the process feels it's better to eliminate jobs, rather than find other places to use the labor they have. That's one of the big mistakes I think many businesses make. The simplest way to show a "cost savings" is to reduce your labor costs. But then, you're really shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to doing anything additional or new. You eliminated skilled labor that was already trained and familiar with many aspects of your workplace, and presumably got along well with their co-workers too. The next time an opportunity comes along to start manufacturing a new type of widget for somebody? You don't have enough employees to do it successfully, so you're back to square 1, trying to hire new people, spend money giving them all the H.R. handouts and processing their paperwork,etc. And it's a roll of the dice if the new hires wind up better than the people you had previously.
So in essence, penny-wise short-term but potentially pound-foolish long-term ... and meanwhile, the churn contributes to reduced morale of the people you have left!
Ok.... but don't come crying back to us when your new Android phone can't:
1. support proxy server connections over wi-fi
2. do FaceTime video conferences with any of your friends who DO own iPhones
3. use nice video streaming apps like Air Video to watch your movie/video library from anywhere
4. work flawlessly with various bluetooth hands-free car kit implementations out there
5. be located if you lose it via a free "Find My iPhone" type of service
6. delete unwanted apps as easily as holding down the icon for a few seconds and tapping the "X" in the corner of it
7. integrate as a music player with hundreds of different commercial products from clock radios to car stereos, using the Apple iPod interface standards
I'm saying this as someone who DOES use Android, BTW. (My work pays for my phone, so why wouldn't I go with what's free....) And frankly, Android phones have some benefits and advantages of their own too. But the iPhone is a worthy competitor and I wouldn't be so quick to blow one off as "not an option", especially because of some reason like THIS?! There's really no telling what this will do for eBook content on the iPhone in the long haul. IMHO, it's a simple matter of Apple thinking they can get more profit out of them, and the customers making a final decision if that's really so or not. You can still install the Kindle app on the iPhone and completely avoid using the iTunes store for eBook content if you so desire. You can probably even find many other free or shareware eBook readers that handle the standard "ePub" file format, and even use Apple's own Books app with any PDFs you sync up with it. If eBooks gets too expensive, people will simply find alternative sources for them. The hardware allows viewing and storing them so that's all that should really matter from your perspective as the end-user.
So wait a minute? You're trying to turn this around into a case of the CUSTOMER being at fault here? I've owned several iPhones, knowing full-well that it was a device made to work within a "walled garden" of approved applications. I never really felt I was "at the whims of Apple" though. If anything, I felt much more of that towards AT&T who I had the cellphone contract with. After all, they were the ones withdrawing over $80 per month from my bank account to keep the phone working as a phone, and they were the reason so many features of the iPhone got delayed or restricted. (No video messaging until AT&T felt their network was ready for it. No initial ability to stream things like Slingbox video over 3G connections. No tethering option for a long time.....)
On the Apple side of the equation, they gave me exactly what I paid for ... a shiny piece of quality hardware that was an industry leader in changing the way cellphones were used. If I didn't like one of Apple's restrictions on it, fine. I could always use a jailbreak and get around that. But 9 times out of 10, that wasn't really a big deal. Bloggers who have axes to grind make those things into big issues ... not most of the users. There were still tens of thousands of apps I could download and use without need to "hack" the phone in any way, and that's PLENTY more than I'll ever get the time to install and look at.
Situations like this, with regards to eBooks and payments are all contract disputes that are rather irrelevant to me as the end-user. From my POV? Either I can get the content I want at a price I deem fair to me, or I simply won't buy it from that source. Apple can demand all they want with this stuff, but once they lose all the quality content or sales plummet -- they'll have to change things.
Yeah.... and that fact has completely ruined seeing live plays and Broadway musicals for all of us, too!
Oh, wait! ......
Absolutely .... but the problem, as usual, is that people aren't comfortable with change. They get used to things being a certain way and feel it's better for everyone if it's just left alone.
EG. My mom's community finally started a curb-side recycling program where you pay $20 per month or so more for your trash pickup, but they give you a big green can on wheels that's assigned to your house address. Instead of driving to the next community over, to voluntarily drop off your recyclables in big holding bins at their site (where you had to separate everything out manually first), you can now toss all the glass bottles, paper products and plastic milk jugs in the green can, wheel it to the street corner once a week, and you're done. Well, her next-door neighbor was really angry about the changes. Why? Not because she doesn't recycle, but because she "got so used to taking all her stuff over to the old facility, she didn't want to have to pay $20 per month for doing things the new way, when she planned on continuing to do things the old way anyway"!
When you think about it though? Aren't your trips in the car usually ones you expect to make with as FEW interruptions as possible? Why people would PREFER having to queue up at toll booths where they have to roll down a window and interact with some person sitting in the booth is beyond me..... This isn't like arguing that you miss the human interaction when doing business at your local bank or something. In those cases, those places are your DESTINATIONS -- not impediments to travel artificially placed in your way to collect money from you!
Many years ago, my cable TV provider was screwing their set-top boxes shut with screws that appeared to take an Allen wrench to open them, except they had little metal pegs/posts right in the middle of the indentation in the top of the screw, so no normal tool could fit into the opening to turn them. Apparently, only their authorized service people had a special wrench with a hole in the middle that the post would fit into.
People wishing to hack the boxes with different chips to get free cable quickly figured out the work-around was to take a small drill bit and drill out the posts in the middle, converting the screws back into something you could open normally.
I agree that it's a "dick move" on Apple's part. Especially in the case of the iPhone 4 where the glass back cover often gets broken when the phones are dropped, the ability to remove those two screws was a nice feature, really. You could buy a cheap aluminum or plastic replacement back cover if you didn't like the glass, and solve the problem for yourself (and/or customize the look of your phone). But like people said, this won't last long. People will simply find ways to remove the non-standard screws and replace them with Phillips screws like they used to come with.....
I'm a native St. Louisan myself, although I'm a little younger than you. (My parents bought a new '73 Vega a couple years after I was born.)
When I was in high-school, I taped quite a few complete albums from KSHE's 7th. Day program (occasionally with one song missing if I underestimated the length of cassette tape needed to fit the whole thing!).
Truthfully though, I don't bother with trying to digitally record off of radio broadcasts. Either you're trying to record an analog source (complete with any background hiss or noise caused by any interruptions in the radio reception), or you're capturing a digital stream a station offers, which is usually in a relatively low bit-rate and doesn't sound nearly as good as CD quality.
You're right that you'd get a pretty good collection of whatever's currently popular, that way. But for a meager $9.99 per month or so, you could just subscribe to a Premium Usenet service like EasyNews or GIgaNews and join a newsgroup like alt.binaries.mp3.complete_CD and download entire albums, nicely ripped as quality MP3s, to your heart's content. So far, the record labels have all but ignored Usenet music piracy.....
Yes, Steve Jobs wants to have ultimate control over his company's devices as they ship. He spends quite a bit on internal R&D, and tries hard to keep that work a secret so it doesn't leak out before a product is ready. But that "control" evaporates as soon as the products reach consumers.
iPhones and iPads? Jailbreaks have always been available for them, often within DAYS of any software updates rendering older ones useless.
AppleTV? Made to run completely different software with hacks allowing booting them from USB memory sticks.
iPods? Heck, people have entire Linux projects that run on the platform!
And comparing Wikipedia's model of contributions to their content to what Apple sells? VERY different things and hardly even comparable in the first place! Wikipedia doesn't even sell a tangible product, for starters. The closest thing Apple has to Wikipedia might be their free user forums, where yes -- all registered users can contribute their own comments and suggestions.
I think people are being overly reactionary when they refuse to differentiate between special-purpose gadgets and devices and full-blown computer systems.
Just like you said, the "walled garden" approach is just fine for a PHONE or even something a little larger, like the iPad. It's NOT supposed to be a computer. If it was, Apple would have immediately stopped selling Macbooks and Macbook Pros!
At the end of the day, ALL of these electronic devices have little computers in them, but the whole point is -- people didn't really WANT to carry a full-blown computer around with them everywhere or networking everything imaginable in the house or office to it, relying on it for EVERYTHING. (Imagine if your microwave oven just networked to your home PC and you controlled the cook time and settings from a piece of software on the computer? That'd get rid of a duplicate "special purpose computer" in the thing and reduce its price a little bit. But would you actually WANT it that way? Doubtful!)
Many times, I even find the functionality offered for my "smartphone" crosses into the territory of things I prefer to do with another gadget instead. GPS navigation is a great example. Sure, I *could* run any number of iPhone or Android phone apps for that in my car. But what about when I need to take a phone call while I'm using it? Plus, mounting it on my windshield glass so I can actually SEE the maps while driving means I need more special hardware to do that, and I *always* have to unclip and disconnect the thing so I can take it with me as soon as I get out of the vehicle. A cheap dedicated GPS is more convenient for the task.