Except when Microsoft or another company does the same thing they get blasted for vendor lock-in. When Apple pushes DRM, people look the other way.
Either you oppose these tactics, or you find the tactics acceptable. You can't blast one person for doing it, and then say it is perfectly acceptable for another to do the same thing.
What really gets me is that in many ways Apple is worse about the same tactics that people supposedly hate companies like Microsoft for.
I've seen several comments on Slashdot that people will never again by a single Sony product because of the rootkit fiasco (despite Sony being a fairly reasonable company in supporting open protocols, Linux, etc. over the years) while praising a company like Apple who forced installs of Safari on people's boxes.
If they were so furious over the rootkit to permanently boycott a company and bash them repeatedly in public, why forgive Apple for repeated offenses?
Frankly, I don't loathe Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc. on the whole. I try to see the big picture and judge actions individually.
Apple throws lawsuits around left and right. They attack fans for blogging about their products. I remember reading in Wired about a twelve-year old girl who offered a product suggestion to improve her iPod. Apple sent a threatening legal letter in response, demanding that she not offer suggestions.
If Microsoft is evil for bundling software, then Apple is far more evil in the same regard.
Steve Jobs said from day 1 he hated DRM, yet Apple products have pushed DRM far more than any company I've seen on the planet.
They take bundling and DRM to another level with cross-product lock-in.
Forcing the installation of Safari in the background without asking is exceptionally evil. Had Microsoft done that, the Slashdot crowd would have had an aneurysm.
"...don't just suggest evil lurking were none does."
Did you just really suggest there is no evil in Cupertino?
I understand what you're saying with Compaq, but again I think that helps Psystar's case. You can't say that IBM/Microsoft was hindering competition because they didn't go out of their way to stop someone from developing a compatible device.
Apple does go out of their way to stifle competition by preventing a compatible device. That is precisely what Psystar is claiming here. Stifling competition is illegal, and those practices can be forbidden by law.
I think you misunderstand the article, and that apparently people did misunderstand the book, but not like you suggest. I thought the book was crystal clear. He didn't write about a "Big Brother" type government, even though the fire fighters worked for the government. Bradbury was clear in the book, and in how he discussed it over the years that censorship also exists in oppression from minorities. We are so afraid of offending people that we must be overtly politically correct. We snip this statement, or this though and what are we left with? If we remove anything that might possibly be offensive to anyone, then you are basically left with no one.
The characters in 451 didn't burn books because they were anti-government, but rather because original thought might offend someone.
451 is about censorship, but not about the government censoring people. It is about people censoring themselves.
Apple is making it impossible for anyone else to sell a computer that is compatible with OS X. The Microsoft anti-trust rulings these days all seem to stem from interoperability. There are existing rulings that suggest if you refuse to play well with others, you can be found guilty of antitrust violations.
Heck, if Microsoft is going to be found guilty by bundling Media Player with Windows, I think Apple does far worse things when it comes to bundling, such as forcing me to purchase Apple hardware to run Apple software.
That is what this new counter-suit will be about. Based on previous Microsoft rulings, I think Psystar has an argument. What may kill their case is the psuedo-legality of their current business practices. Will a court give Psystar a fair shake if they pre-judge them to be criminals trying to illegally profit off someone else's product?
I wasn't under the impression that people are required to carry older products under the law. I think auto manufacturers are supposed to provide parts for their vehicles for so many years and such, but I'm not sure it is illegal for Microsoft to stop selling XP.
In this case the only chance they have is if they can prove that their OpenPCs are Mac compatible; but because they are not (requiring the use of outside software and slight modifications to the OS X DVD) they can't claim the same protections that Compaq had when they made the original IBM-PC clones.
That might be the entire basis for their case. Apple has gone out of their way to make sure people can't put OS X on whatever hardware they want, and it can only be accomplished with some hackery.
Does Apple have the right to say their software may only be used on Apple hardware? That is for the courts to decide.
I agree. Apple's tactics are pretty horrid, yet they seem to get a pass from the fan-boys for some reason just because their products are shiny.
It amazes me how often on Slashdot I read that Google is evil, and Apple is great. Apparently people aren't paying attention to their actual business practices in either case.
Fahrenheit 451 itself was censored in exactly the method we wrote about for years, and he didn't know it. When he later discovered it, he wrote this new piece to go in the end of the book. Everyone should read it.
I work for the Omaha World-Herald which owns a direct marketing company, as well as almost every paper in Nebraska and Iowa. We have online advertising as well, but our money almost all comes from physical insert advertising in our paper.
We bring this up at work quite a bit. Radio was going to completely kill print. TV would completely kill print. Some newspapers are hurting right now, but the well run papers are doing just fine.
We have an internet presence, and even though it costs less than our very expensive physical product, we still make far more money off the physical product. Advertisers are still willing to pay more to have a physical insert in the physical paper, and they don't seem very interested in recreating that via PDF or Flash, or whatever online.
We actually drive our paper in all directions, as far as 7 hours away, DAILY. Do you know how much we pay in transportation? Yet, this is still our most profitable model.
I've suggested printing the paper locally in each location, and sending electronic copies to those cities rather than trucking them, but my company is actually more committed to putting out the best product, even at the expense of profit. We have really nice presses in our main facility. If we printed our paper in small towns, rather than deliver it via truck, the quality wouldn't be as good.
No doubt, our company will shift more and more online in the future, but print isn't dead yet if you put out a quality product, cater to your audience, and sell advertising like mad.
This is the same company that admits to using illegal denial-of-service attacks. They have no regard for the law, and if they get busted, they'll close shop and reopen under another name.
That is FAR more complicated. It would be nice to have, but it would also require a compiler be part of the base system for the LSB.
Not necessarily. Make package-build-environment a dependency for any source-based package. You don't have to install a compiler unless you want to compile.
This is why the Linux Foundation should be working with distros to actually support the LSB. Find out why they don't currently support it better now, what their gripes are, and try to draft a new version of the LSB that people can center around.
1 - I'd love to see one major package management system. 2 - It shouldn't care if the package is a.deb or a.rpm, though the distinction there shouldn't be necessary anymore..deb was created because of problems with.rpm that don't really exist anymore, and the LSB does say people are supposed to standardize around.rpm, though it certainly wouldn't be impossible for one package manager to read both.deb and.rpm files. 3 - Package management should know how to handle source packages with a recipe/ebuild/instructions to build it from source. 4 - There need to be better standards for where files are kept. This is a major failing of the FHS in Linux, because of the redundancy and exceptions, one distro will put something in/opt and then another in/bin or/sbin and it gets ridiculous. 5 - Linux will never have much of a coordinated marketing effort because it is so fragmented, but the Linux foundation could work with and encourage marketing for each major distro to help raise visibility of the brand.
Look how resistant people are to changing the file hierarchy in any *nix based system. People claim that once you know the *nix standard, you can administer it well enough, but that doesn't change there are several exceptions to it, and unnecessary redundancy. Not to mention it was designed around a precept that directory names should be three characters or less.
If Linux isn't Unix, and has no desire to be certified as Unix, then why fight so hard for all the POSIX standards? At some point, shouldn't Linux say "how do we become the best OS we can be, without tethering ourselves to things that aren't helping us?"
And I'm not suggesting abandoning standards wholesale for no reason, but the file system structure really needs improvement.
A lot of people are conditioned to just close out pop-up windows of any kind right away. I think asking one, and then one reminder a few weeks later is reasonable.
I have been running 3 since alpha on all kinds of different boxes with no real problems. I'm not saying you didn't have problems, but I am a bit surprised because they tested the heck out of 3 before releasing it. And there have been some bug-fix releases since then.
I'd give it another shot, and I'd also submit a bug report if you continue to have problems.
I've never seen a nag screen with mplayer. Maybe it is because I update my packages all the time, but does mplayer really have a nag screen? I've never seen it in years.
There are several distros that had Firefox 2 and don't push Firefox 3 as an update. So unless you're browser is set to pull the updates automatically, you're left with Firefox 2 until you manually install it, or upgrade your distro. There are some people that don't update distros right away. They feel that older means more stable. (I contend that newer may mean new bugs, but it also means old bugs are closed. An old package isn't necessarily more stable if there are known, unpatched exploits in it.)
I bet that the Linux community will continue to back port some fixes to Firefox 2, but 2 and 3 are so different, that it won't be easy.
Except, iTunes is the single largest retailer for music period, these days. No one retailer sells more music than them. Digital music is growing an at exponential rate, where as CD sales continue to decline year after year.
Physical media will go away.
Please show we a link that digital music only accounts for 15% of sales.
Slashdot Mirror
Except when Microsoft or another company does the same thing they get blasted for vendor lock-in. When Apple pushes DRM, people look the other way.
Either you oppose these tactics, or you find the tactics acceptable. You can't blast one person for doing it, and then say it is perfectly acceptable for another to do the same thing.
What really gets me is that in many ways Apple is worse about the same tactics that people supposedly hate companies like Microsoft for.
I've seen several comments on Slashdot that people will never again by a single Sony product because of the rootkit fiasco (despite Sony being a fairly reasonable company in supporting open protocols, Linux, etc. over the years) while praising a company like Apple who forced installs of Safari on people's boxes.
If they were so furious over the rootkit to permanently boycott a company and bash them repeatedly in public, why forgive Apple for repeated offenses?
Frankly, I don't loathe Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc. on the whole. I try to see the big picture and judge actions individually.
Apple throws lawsuits around left and right. They attack fans for blogging about their products. I remember reading in Wired about a twelve-year old girl who offered a product suggestion to improve her iPod. Apple sent a threatening legal letter in response, demanding that she not offer suggestions.
If Microsoft is evil for bundling software, then Apple is far more evil in the same regard.
Steve Jobs said from day 1 he hated DRM, yet Apple products have pushed DRM far more than any company I've seen on the planet.
They take bundling and DRM to another level with cross-product lock-in.
Forcing the installation of Safari in the background without asking is exceptionally evil. Had Microsoft done that, the Slashdot crowd would have had an aneurysm.
"...don't just suggest evil lurking were none does."
Did you just really suggest there is no evil in Cupertino?
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_apple
I understand what you're saying with Compaq, but again I think that helps Psystar's case. You can't say that IBM/Microsoft was hindering competition because they didn't go out of their way to stop someone from developing a compatible device.
Apple does go out of their way to stifle competition by preventing a compatible device. That is precisely what Psystar is claiming here. Stifling competition is illegal, and those practices can be forbidden by law.
I think you misunderstand the article, and that apparently people did misunderstand the book, but not like you suggest. I thought the book was crystal clear. He didn't write about a "Big Brother" type government, even though the fire fighters worked for the government. Bradbury was clear in the book, and in how he discussed it over the years that censorship also exists in oppression from minorities. We are so afraid of offending people that we must be overtly politically correct. We snip this statement, or this though and what are we left with? If we remove anything that might possibly be offensive to anyone, then you are basically left with no one.
The characters in 451 didn't burn books because they were anti-government, but rather because original thought might offend someone.
451 is about censorship, but not about the government censoring people. It is about people censoring themselves.
Apple is making it impossible for anyone else to sell a computer that is compatible with OS X. The Microsoft anti-trust rulings these days all seem to stem from interoperability. There are existing rulings that suggest if you refuse to play well with others, you can be found guilty of antitrust violations.
Heck, if Microsoft is going to be found guilty by bundling Media Player with Windows, I think Apple does far worse things when it comes to bundling, such as forcing me to purchase Apple hardware to run Apple software.
That is what this new counter-suit will be about. Based on previous Microsoft rulings, I think Psystar has an argument. What may kill their case is the psuedo-legality of their current business practices. Will a court give Psystar a fair shake if they pre-judge them to be criminals trying to illegally profit off someone else's product?
I wasn't under the impression that people are required to carry older products under the law. I think auto manufacturers are supposed to provide parts for their vehicles for so many years and such, but I'm not sure it is illegal for Microsoft to stop selling XP.
In this case the only chance they have is if they can prove that their OpenPCs are Mac compatible; but because they are not (requiring the use of outside software and slight modifications to the OS X DVD) they can't claim the same protections that Compaq had when they made the original IBM-PC clones.
That might be the entire basis for their case. Apple has gone out of their way to make sure people can't put OS X on whatever hardware they want, and it can only be accomplished with some hackery.
Does Apple have the right to say their software may only be used on Apple hardware? That is for the courts to decide.
I agree. Apple's tactics are pretty horrid, yet they seem to get a pass from the fan-boys for some reason just because their products are shiny.
It amazes me how often on Slashdot I read that Google is evil, and Apple is great. Apparently people aren't paying attention to their actual business practices in either case.
Wow. I thought Psystar was going to get crushed, and then suddenly I see their angle. They might have a case here.
Bash auto-completion, anyone?
Fahrenheit 451 itself was censored in exactly the method we wrote about for years, and he didn't know it. When he later discovered it, he wrote this new piece to go in the end of the book. Everyone should read it.
http://members.iquest.net/~jswartz/jks/humor/451.htm
I work for the Omaha World-Herald which owns a direct marketing company, as well as almost every paper in Nebraska and Iowa. We have online advertising as well, but our money almost all comes from physical insert advertising in our paper.
We bring this up at work quite a bit. Radio was going to completely kill print. TV would completely kill print. Some newspapers are hurting right now, but the well run papers are doing just fine.
Very, very true. Content is king. If you deliver the stories that people want, especially if they are exclusive stories, then people will come to you.
I work for a newspaper company.
We have an internet presence, and even though it costs less than our very expensive physical product, we still make far more money off the physical product. Advertisers are still willing to pay more to have a physical insert in the physical paper, and they don't seem very interested in recreating that via PDF or Flash, or whatever online.
We actually drive our paper in all directions, as far as 7 hours away, DAILY. Do you know how much we pay in transportation? Yet, this is still our most profitable model.
I've suggested printing the paper locally in each location, and sending electronic copies to those cities rather than trucking them, but my company is actually more committed to putting out the best product, even at the expense of profit. We have really nice presses in our main facility. If we printed our paper in small towns, rather than deliver it via truck, the quality wouldn't be as good.
No doubt, our company will shift more and more online in the future, but print isn't dead yet if you put out a quality product, cater to your audience, and sell advertising like mad.
This is the same company that admits to using illegal denial-of-service attacks. They have no regard for the law, and if they get busted, they'll close shop and reopen under another name.
That is FAR more complicated. It would be nice to have, but it would also require a compiler be part of the base system for the LSB.
Not necessarily. Make package-build-environment a dependency for any source-based package. You don't have to install a compiler unless you want to compile.
I thought video didn't work on the Linux version of Skype.
This is why the Linux Foundation should be working with distros to actually support the LSB. Find out why they don't currently support it better now, what their gripes are, and try to draft a new version of the LSB that people can center around.
1 - I'd love to see one major package management system. .deb or a .rpm, though the distinction there shouldn't be necessary anymore. .deb was created because of problems with .rpm that don't really exist anymore, and the LSB does say people are supposed to standardize around .rpm, though it certainly wouldn't be impossible for one package manager to read both .deb and .rpm files. /opt and then another in /bin or /sbin and it gets ridiculous.
2 - It shouldn't care if the package is a
3 - Package management should know how to handle source packages with a recipe/ebuild/instructions to build it from source.
4 - There need to be better standards for where files are kept. This is a major failing of the FHS in Linux, because of the redundancy and exceptions, one distro will put something in
5 - Linux will never have much of a coordinated marketing effort because it is so fragmented, but the Linux foundation could work with and encourage marketing for each major distro to help raise visibility of the brand.
Look how resistant people are to changing the file hierarchy in any *nix based system. People claim that once you know the *nix standard, you can administer it well enough, but that doesn't change there are several exceptions to it, and unnecessary redundancy. Not to mention it was designed around a precept that directory names should be three characters or less.
If Linux isn't Unix, and has no desire to be certified as Unix, then why fight so hard for all the POSIX standards? At some point, shouldn't Linux say "how do we become the best OS we can be, without tethering ourselves to things that aren't helping us?"
And I'm not suggesting abandoning standards wholesale for no reason, but the file system structure really needs improvement.
A lot of people are conditioned to just close out pop-up windows of any kind right away. I think asking one, and then one reminder a few weeks later is reasonable.
I have been running 3 since alpha on all kinds of different boxes with no real problems. I'm not saying you didn't have problems, but I am a bit surprised because they tested the heck out of 3 before releasing it. And there have been some bug-fix releases since then.
I'd give it another shot, and I'd also submit a bug report if you continue to have problems.
I've never seen a nag screen with mplayer. Maybe it is because I update my packages all the time, but does mplayer really have a nag screen? I've never seen it in years.
There are several distros that had Firefox 2 and don't push Firefox 3 as an update. So unless you're browser is set to pull the updates automatically, you're left with Firefox 2 until you manually install it, or upgrade your distro. There are some people that don't update distros right away. They feel that older means more stable. (I contend that newer may mean new bugs, but it also means old bugs are closed. An old package isn't necessarily more stable if there are known, unpatched exploits in it.)
I bet that the Linux community will continue to back port some fixes to Firefox 2, but 2 and 3 are so different, that it won't be easy.
Only certain add-ons do that, and it is the code of the add-on to load that page, not in Firefox.
Except, iTunes is the single largest retailer for music period, these days. No one retailer sells more music than them. Digital music is growing an at exponential rate, where as CD sales continue to decline year after year.
Physical media will go away.
Please show we a link that digital music only accounts for 15% of sales.