Speaking as a liberal, I've always been against this kind of hate speech law, where the "crime" is in uttering a thought.
And I hate Mark Steyn, who is just playing the martyr. His column was evil and hateful in intent, but it shouldn't be illegal.
I think the law we have in the States, however, where if you commit a crime like assault, and part of your motivation can be shown to be the furtherance of prejudice against a group, is just fine. It's called a "sentence enhancement," and we have lots of things like that in the law. If you kill someone by accident, there's no charge to be made as long as you weren't reckless. If you planned to kill someone, and you went out and did it, and you "laid in wait," as they say in Cali, then you can get the Death Penalty. So, everything from no charge to death by lethal injection: the differences in sentencing are differences mainly in intent. It's not illegal to say, "God hates fags." Disgusting, but not illegal. It's already illegal to beat someone up. A gay-bashing is worse than simple assault, because it's the lowest form of political thuggery, and that's what makes it more dangerous for society. In the years leading up to the Nazi takeover, there were hundreds of political killings in the streets. THAT'S the state of affairs that Hate Crimes legislation is equipped to stop. It should only be charged when there's evidence.
A good deal of the cost-cutting was actually Steve Jobs. When he came in, a lot of technology stopped. The number of designs went to four. No more proliferation of indistinguishable models. No more Newton. Lots of interesting software projects that had been wandering aimlessly for years went dead. Sure, Amelio had started cost-cutting, but he never understood the turnaround part. That started with the iMac. Apple Computer became Apple, Inc., with the iPod. The Newton was reborn in the iPhone. And the computer part of the name could be put back by the Intel transition. The other day, at work, I had the opportunity to demo some software at work on my Mac mini. It involved using files generated in a Windows app and then recoding it in a Mac application. When the Windows logo came up in Parallels, people's heads raised. When I F9'ed the Windows apps with the Mac apps, and dragged and dropped from one OS to the other, people couldn't believe it. Yes, I know, hackers can make that happen on a Dell. But not most people.
I think they'll deal with this the way they dealt with the iPod for the last six years or so: they'll bring in something new with some cool feature, drop the price on the older model, probably drop the shuffle and figure out how to sell a nano with a screen and GPS and HDTV for $100. I'm reminded of the rumor that the old iPhone 1.0 might not disappear, but be reborn as a subsidized AT&T phone while iPhone 2.0 has a faster network and GPS and.. HDTV. Or whatever the gnomes of Cupertino have in store. In ten years, why not a $100 iPhone/iPod/GPS/Gameboy/TV/Tricorder? Then where's the "iPod slump"? You'd think after so many years, Jobs wouldn't surprise you guys anymore.
The fact is, the net protocol was not designed for huge, fast and continuous usage. It was designed for quick bursts, more or less, and most often, quiescence. I agree absolutely that net neutrality will have to be respected. But now we have things like AT&T's UVerse running over the net. This TCP/IP was not designed for. We need to get our trusty engineers busy extending the protocol to acccount for the burst use and the growing steady streaming rates, which we want faster and faster. This cannot happen without the government stepping in on the side of the people. Ahem.
It surely seems real. You should try it now. I think it was probably not ready for the Dig-- er, the Slashdot effect.
But here: the $399 price is really Dell marketing. It doesn't include the OS. It has an Intel graphics card and no firewire. If you get all that, you have a $749 computer. And no monitor, mouse or keyboad. So, let's say this "$399" computer costs about $1,000, if you want it to be something more than a Mac mini. Oops. No wi-fi yet. See?
Now, you'll be forever reliant on the pirate hackers for upgrades. Still sound like a good deal?
When you look at their program, the fact that you'll be using the same APIs that their developers use, that they'll take care of marketing your product in the absolutely perfect market, with enormous exposure. If you don't like it, it's not like the iPhone represents 90% of the cell phone market, does it? You can write software for... well, the Palm? For the linux phones. For google phones. For Nokias, I guess. Knock yourself out.
No, it's not illegal. But unlocking involves using a hack to get root. That's called a bug. If Apple left it, people would be justifiedly angry. When they fix it, it will break the unlocking hack. There's a simple way out of it: refuse the updates from iTunes. No problems then.
There are very useful things called haxies on the Mac, but every other new version of the OS breaks them, because it involves putting in an interrupt that Apple warned would break often. Then you wait a few days, and the company brings out a new version. The horror!
Adobe has a huge problem: its past. When the Mac crossed over to OS X, Photoshop had a huge constituency that wasn't going to be happy about running in Classic, and a huge code base that needed some heavy lifting to translate to Cocoa. Apple provided the Carbon template as a temporary transition to OS X. Adobe farted around and took the easy way out. Imagine, they just discovered that there would be no 64-bit Carbon. So they'd actually have to delve into all that spaghetti and rewrite stuff. Apple switches to Intel, and to 64-bit chips. It's seven years into OS X. It's not a fad. Wake up, Adobe!
Time to stop reading the crap in the Apple section of slashdot. If you look at the last 20 or so stories, the majority are written from the angle of what the Fake Steve Jobs calls "freetards" and Windows nuts. All these horrible, horrible things that are going to happen. Well, maybe, but they haven't happened yet. They've been predicted so often, and happened so little, that I think it's time for the fortune tellers and propagandists to get a new crystal ball. Not that there's anything at all wrong with Linux, or Windows, in their contexts. I like the Mac. Back when there was only OS 7, a product line that was on the road to ruin, it took some special fanaticism to stick with it. In my case, I had bought an SE30 when I had more money, and I had to hang onto it. It lasted about ten years, by the way. Well, it wrote screenplays. The Internet browser overwhelmed it. So I bought the iMac. Now I have a G5 tower and an Intel Mac mini, for about the cost of that old SE/30. I prefer it. I also use Windows, and I have Ubuntu in a Parallels. You don't hear me dissing them. I just like the Mac better. You don't have to, and Steve Jobs is not tunneling through your brainstem to deprive you of anything. For the moment, we're riding high. Have fun, toodle-ooh. I've got better things to do than to waste my time with you guys.
Really, the function of the "Apple" section on Slashdot is for the courageous anti-capitalist 20-somethings to find something, anything, that pisses on Apple from a great height. For months, you hear nothing but "Open the SDK!" "We want to produce apps!" And then they do, and there is news of fresh alarums. One would think the frigtards of Slashdot will do and say anything.
You will be using the same SDK that Apple engineers use. There is a foundation ready to disburse $100 million to fund developers. AIM is going to be ported. You will be able to use Skype for calls over Wi-Fi. You will be able to give away your programs for free in one of the best possible venues: your phone, or on iTunes. If you charge money, Apple will pay you what the record labels get, 70%. only better than they get, because the developer will set the price.
And the new firmware will be cracked for jailbreak, of that you can be sure. And then you will have the privilege of using any provider with GSM.
It's a fully-functional computing platform. Most people, the vast majority in fact, don't give a damn about jailbreaking and Java or anything else. It will do some amazing things, and Apple will make a truckload of money, and with that truck they will hit blips in the highway, and the driver will say, "What did I just hit?" And it will be slashdotters.
I can't see how anybody who saw the demo of the SDK can say this. There's a whole new platform available. You can program an app to run on a fully-powerful platform, and game developers are going to go nuts. Did you see Spore? That space shoot-'em-up? The Sega game? Holy crap! It's like the Wii Remote.
Microsoft is taking a cut of the software on the Windows Media Phones only because they only have software. Except for their mice and keyboards, their ventures into hardware kind of suck, so far. Windows CE, Windows Mobile, etc., has been a gigantic money-loser to this day, and the iPhone blew past them in less than a year on the market.
Yes, you'll have to sell through iTunes, the second-largest seller of music in the US, and the one that works easiest with the dominant player on the market anyway. If you are a freeware developer, you pay NOTHING. If you want to charge for your software, you control the pricing, and Apple takes 30%, with which they pay for a huge server farm, credit-card charges, bandwidth, marketing -- you're in the most popular e-store already, and you'll be listed prominently, and if your app gets Apple publicity, that's better than most could ever afford. Does Apple make money on its 99c tracks? A penny or two, is the most common response. They will take a cut on software, but so do theatrical agents, and a good one is worth his weight in gold, because they keep your money flow going. In fact, software developers now have roughly the same terms as the record labels. Not bad, I say.
Value to the consumer to being able to buy an app from the iPhone, and to be pretty sure someone has gone through it enough that there's no virus or malware or incompetence there? Priceless.
Will other platforms catch up to them eventually? Yeah, probably. That's called competition. But they'll be, as was made clear today, a very moving target.
I don't click on url's in e-mail. When I want to go to the bank or Paypal, I either type in the URL or click a bookmark I know is good. Now, if some bad guy got in and screwed around with my DNS, would a phishing detector even detect it?
Given that, they still should put a phishing detector in Safari, with a warning that only your common sense is the ultimate protection, and once phishers start figuring out what these things are detecting, they'll find a way to sneak under that too.
Trust Slashdot. The "Apple" segment consists of a number of articles ragging on Apple. And some of it's real, but a lot of it is just a bunch of freetards making stuff up.
In the case of APE, Apple said, "Don't use those calls. They will break in future releases." They broke, repeatedly, and often in ways that didn't make you think, "Ah, APE did that."
It is not on my system anymore. You can't say they weren't warned.
Given the number of Mac users who run Firefox instead of Safari, I'm sure this will come as news to them.
My only objection is that Firefox 2, on my G5, seems prone to crashes on first startup. Firefox 3, no.
I don't know. If a given browser doesn't use webkit, doesn't use the Mac java, but instead puts other software on my Mac, are they crippling other software? I doubt it, but I'll leave it open.
Does Safari use some custom APIs? Maybe. What do they do?
I've become convinced that what is required above all to understand politics and business is the ability to remember a story line. If you don't, you will be the easy target of people who want to take you for rubes.
1. Apple started the first successful, and still the most successful, online music store. This in the face of an industry that had won total, complete and Pyrrhic victories over their own future by smashing Napster, Kazaa, and all the rest. Apple was obligated, as part of this deal, to use DRM. By making this concession, they were able to build the business model that points to music's future.
2. Apple also became convinced that DRM must be done away with almost two years ago. They offered the industry a challenge. Months later, they delivered the EMI coup.
3. The Empire struck back. It seems to be a price dispute, I suppose; for whatever reason, the rest of the major labels have all dropped DRM in the meantime, but they offer their catalogs DRM-free only to Amazon and their own web sites, not to the company that got the ball rolling. Price dispute? The Amazon prices are all over the block, but they seem to be holding a lot of their prices deliberately below Apple's. So was THAT the "pricing dispute"? I doubt it. It seems to me to be an illegal restraint of trade. What does Apple have to do to get those tracks free of DRM? Turn over pricing decisions to the labels? Does anybody in their right mind think that then the prices would go up?
4. If Apple doesn't send those letters, they will not fulfill the obligation they have to the labels to assiduously defend their DRM. If they do that, they could be dropped by three of the four majors.
Now, what's the story about? Oh, I see. Big meanie corporation sends cease-and-desist letter, say the pro-free music crowd, neglecting to say that Apple is being forced to defend a business model they don't want any more part of by the labels who refuse to come to an agreement with. How about Amazon's deal? Why can't Apple, and every other electronic music store, have that deal? Is this not restraint of trade?
I just want to object to the "expensive" label. When it first came out, maybe. They lowered the price to a frankly amazing $399, which is extremely competitive in the smartphone market. Like the Nokia N95's features? You'll pay a lot more. The battery life with GPS enabled sucks.
And the big thing is the cost of the two-year unlimited data plan. That makes the iPhone quite a bit cheaper than most comparable phones. That's part of the benefit of going with one provider: AT&T made a deal for the added customers. Now, AT&T is building up its high-speed operations, and I presume HSDPA iPhones are coming.
People had tantrums about 3rd party software, but I believe they intended to release the SDK as soon as they could. Recent accounts show that the iPhone a couple of months before launch was still not working, so it's quite believable to me that they just held off until the stability of the platform could be guaranteed. People managed to put 3rd party apps on the iPhone due to the buffer overflows, etc., that they found. Apple had no choice but to plug those holes.
I think that nobody would be happier than Apple to have an iPhone nano, for instance, to sell for Verizon, or any other carrier. But in the same way that iTunes needed to have DRM to launch, it had to make a deal with one carrier to extract the deals that let the iPhone launch. A year ago, Jobs said he didn't want DRM anymore. So he got one company to drop it, and now all major labels have no DRM -- if you go to Amazon, that is. They don't like being schooled by Mr. Jobs, and they don't mind restraint of trade, or punishing Steve-o for being, you know, right.
First of all, it is against federal law to erase emails. What they did with them is irrelevant. Six presidents had obeyed federal law, and we're supposed to be put off by "they meant well"?
When Apple said, "Hey, you find a security hole to install third-party software, we're going to have to close the hole," everybody yelled and screamed. Now someone's using the back door that the hackers found. Well, as Gomer used to say, "Surprise, surprise." I wonder if the new software update closes that hole.
They've burdened the world with Windows, and far worse, Outlook Server. Outlook is presently having a competition for the most meaningless instruction on one of its "Wizards." Hey, if you make a Wizard, you shouldn't then babble at you in jargon. Ooh, it can push important mail to important executives. Big frickin' deal. Most of the data it's pushing at you starts chiming or beeping in your pocket, and then it's just a notice about the going-away party for Doug on Friday.
All the rest of the piece sounds like corporate whining, like the ridiculous suit that wants to force Apple to have Windows DRM so the frigtards will be able to play it on their Zoons -- all the while, Amazon is selling unprotected, high-quality tracks from all the companies. Outlook will crash like this recession that's coming up, and everybody will revert to Pine.
I don't think business will ever adopt anything cool, by any company. They want tools for frigtards.
It's the way it changes. Open an editing program, and your keyboard switches icons, showing the edit commands. Hold down the option key, and the alternate characters display. The old Mac app Keycaps in a keyboard. Change languages, look down and your keyboard's Urdu or French or Danish. That would be the real innovation: a variable keyboard, and that's what the display fight is over.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as a liberal, I've always been against this kind of hate speech law, where the "crime" is in uttering a thought.
And I hate Mark Steyn, who is just playing the martyr.
His column was evil and hateful in intent, but it shouldn't be illegal.
I think the law we have in the States, however, where if you commit a crime like assault, and part of your motivation can be shown to be the furtherance of prejudice against a group, is just fine. It's called a "sentence enhancement," and we have lots of things like that in the law. If you kill someone by accident, there's no charge to be made as long as you weren't reckless. If you planned to kill someone, and you went out and did it, and you "laid in wait," as they say in Cali, then you can get the Death Penalty. So, everything from no charge to death by lethal injection: the differences in sentencing are differences mainly in intent.
It's not illegal to say, "God hates fags." Disgusting, but not illegal. It's already illegal to beat someone up. A gay-bashing is worse than simple assault, because it's the lowest form of political thuggery, and that's what makes it more dangerous for society.
In the years leading up to the Nazi takeover, there were hundreds of political killings in the streets. THAT'S the state of affairs that Hate Crimes legislation is equipped to stop. It should only be charged when there's evidence.
A good deal of the cost-cutting was actually Steve Jobs. When he came in, a lot of technology stopped. The number of designs went to four. No more proliferation of indistinguishable models. No more Newton. Lots of interesting software projects that had been wandering aimlessly for years went dead. Sure, Amelio had started cost-cutting, but he never understood the turnaround part. That started with the iMac. Apple Computer became Apple, Inc., with the iPod. The Newton was reborn in the iPhone. And the computer part of the name could be put back by the Intel transition. The other day, at work, I had the opportunity to demo some software at work on my Mac mini. It involved using files generated in a Windows app and then recoding it in a Mac application. When the Windows logo came up in Parallels, people's heads raised. When I F9'ed the Windows apps with the Mac apps, and dragged and dropped from one OS to the other, people couldn't believe it. Yes, I know, hackers can make that happen on a Dell. But not most people.
I think they'll deal with this the way they dealt with the iPod for the last six years or so: they'll bring in something new with some cool feature, drop the price on the older model, probably drop the shuffle and figure out how to sell a nano with a screen and GPS and HDTV for $100.
I'm reminded of the rumor that the old iPhone 1.0 might not disappear, but be reborn as a subsidized AT&T phone while iPhone 2.0 has a faster network and GPS and.. HDTV. Or whatever the gnomes of Cupertino have in store.
In ten years, why not a $100 iPhone/iPod/GPS/Gameboy/TV/Tricorder? Then where's the "iPod slump"? You'd think after so many years, Jobs wouldn't surprise you guys anymore.
The fact is, the net protocol was not designed for huge, fast and continuous usage. It was designed for quick bursts, more or less, and most often, quiescence. I agree absolutely that net neutrality will have to be respected. But now we have things like AT&T's UVerse running over the net. This TCP/IP was not designed for. We need to get our trusty engineers busy extending the protocol to acccount for the burst use and the growing steady streaming rates, which we want faster and faster. This cannot happen without the government stepping in on the side of the people. Ahem.
It surely seems real. You should try it now. I think it was probably not ready for the Dig-- er, the Slashdot effect.
But here: the $399 price is really Dell marketing. It doesn't include the OS. It has an Intel graphics card and no firewire. If you get all that, you have a $749 computer. And no monitor, mouse or keyboad. So, let's say this "$399" computer costs about $1,000, if you want it to be something more than a Mac mini. Oops. No wi-fi yet. See?
Now, you'll be forever reliant on the pirate hackers for upgrades. Still sound like a good deal?
And the "issue" was solved later in the day that it was posted. Oh, God, the agony! How arrogant and abusive Apple is!
Yes, but I can't figure out this new comment system, and I found the reply button. When I find the "I agree" button, I'll press that.
When you look at their program, the fact that you'll be using the same APIs that their developers use, that they'll take care of marketing your product in the absolutely perfect market, with enormous exposure. If you don't like it, it's not like the iPhone represents 90% of the cell phone market, does it? You can write software for... well, the Palm? For the linux phones. For google phones. For Nokias, I guess. Knock yourself out.
No, it's not illegal. But unlocking involves using a hack to get root. That's called a bug. If Apple left it, people would be justifiedly angry. When they fix it, it will break the unlocking hack. There's a simple way out of it: refuse the updates from iTunes. No problems then.
There are very useful things called haxies on the Mac, but every other new version of the OS breaks them, because it involves putting in an interrupt that Apple warned would break often. Then you wait a few days, and the company brings out a new version. The horror!
Well, jeez, how long did it last? Four or five hours before the new version of iPhone 2.0 became available? My God! The humanity!
Adobe has a huge problem: its past. When the Mac crossed over to OS X, Photoshop had a huge constituency that wasn't going to be happy about running in Classic, and a huge code base that needed some heavy lifting to translate to Cocoa. Apple provided the Carbon template as a temporary transition to OS X. Adobe farted around and took the easy way out. Imagine, they just discovered that there would be no 64-bit Carbon. So they'd actually have to delve into all that spaghetti and rewrite stuff. Apple switches to Intel, and to 64-bit chips. It's seven years into OS X. It's not a fad. Wake up, Adobe!
Time to stop reading the crap in the Apple section of slashdot. If you look at the last 20 or so stories, the majority are written from the angle of what the Fake Steve Jobs calls "freetards" and Windows nuts. All these horrible, horrible things that are going to happen. Well, maybe, but they haven't happened yet. They've been predicted so often, and happened so little, that I think it's time for the fortune tellers and propagandists to get a new crystal ball. Not that there's anything at all wrong with Linux, or Windows, in their contexts. I like the Mac. Back when there was only OS 7, a product line that was on the road to ruin, it took some special fanaticism to stick with it. In my case, I had bought an SE30 when I had more money, and I had to hang onto it. It lasted about ten years, by the way. Well, it wrote screenplays. The Internet browser overwhelmed it. So I bought the iMac. Now I have a G5 tower and an Intel Mac mini, for about the cost of that old SE/30. I prefer it. I also use Windows, and I have Ubuntu in a Parallels. You don't hear me dissing them. I just like the Mac better. You don't have to, and Steve Jobs is not tunneling through your brainstem to deprive you of anything. For the moment, we're riding high. Have fun, toodle-ooh. I've got better things to do than to waste my time with you guys.
Really, the function of the "Apple" section on Slashdot is for the courageous anti-capitalist 20-somethings to find something, anything, that pisses on Apple from a great height. For months, you hear nothing but "Open the SDK!" "We want to produce apps!" And then they do, and there is news of fresh alarums. One would think the frigtards of Slashdot will do and say anything.
You will be using the same SDK that Apple engineers use. There is a foundation ready to disburse $100 million to fund developers. AIM is going to be ported. You will be able to use Skype for calls over Wi-Fi. You will be able to give away your programs for free in one of the best possible venues: your phone, or on iTunes. If you charge money, Apple will pay you what the record labels get, 70%. only better than they get, because the developer will set the price.
And the new firmware will be cracked for jailbreak, of that you can be sure. And then you will have the privilege of using any provider with GSM.
It's a fully-functional computing platform. Most people, the vast majority in fact, don't give a damn about jailbreaking and Java or anything else. It will do some amazing things, and Apple will make a truckload of money, and with that truck they will hit blips in the highway, and the driver will say, "What did I just hit?" And it will be slashdotters.
I can't see how anybody who saw the demo of the SDK can say this. There's a whole new platform available. You can program an app to run on a fully-powerful platform, and game developers are going to go nuts. Did you see Spore? That space shoot-'em-up? The Sega game? Holy crap! It's like the Wii Remote.
Microsoft is taking a cut of the software on the Windows Media Phones only because they only have software. Except for their mice and keyboards, their ventures into hardware kind of suck, so far. Windows CE, Windows Mobile, etc., has been a gigantic money-loser to this day, and the iPhone blew past them in less than a year on the market.
Yes, you'll have to sell through iTunes, the second-largest seller of music in the US, and the one that works easiest with the dominant player on the market anyway. If you are a freeware developer, you pay NOTHING. If you want to charge for your software, you control the pricing, and Apple takes 30%, with which they pay for a huge server farm, credit-card charges, bandwidth, marketing -- you're in the most popular e-store already, and you'll be listed prominently, and if your app gets Apple publicity, that's better than most could ever afford. Does Apple make money on its 99c tracks? A penny or two, is the most common response. They will take a cut on software, but so do theatrical agents, and a good one is worth his weight in gold, because they keep your money flow going. In fact, software developers now have roughly the same terms as the record labels. Not bad, I say.
Value to the consumer to being able to buy an app from the iPhone, and to be pretty sure someone has gone through it enough that there's no virus or malware or incompetence there? Priceless.
Will other platforms catch up to them eventually? Yeah, probably. That's called competition. But they'll be, as was made clear today, a very moving target.
I don't click on url's in e-mail. When I want to go to the bank or Paypal, I either type in the URL or click a bookmark I know is good. Now, if some bad guy got in and screwed around with my DNS, would a phishing detector even detect it?
Given that, they still should put a phishing detector in Safari, with a warning that only your common sense is the ultimate protection, and once phishers start figuring out what these things are detecting, they'll find a way to sneak under that too.
Trust Slashdot. The "Apple" segment consists of a number of articles ragging on Apple. And some of it's real, but a lot of it is just a bunch of freetards making stuff up.
In the case of APE, Apple said, "Don't use those calls. They will break in future releases." They broke, repeatedly, and often in ways that didn't make you think, "Ah, APE did that." It is not on my system anymore. You can't say they weren't warned.
Given the number of Mac users who run Firefox instead of Safari, I'm sure this will come as news to them.
My only objection is that Firefox 2, on my G5, seems prone to crashes on first startup. Firefox 3, no.
I don't know. If a given browser doesn't use webkit, doesn't use the Mac java, but instead puts other software on my Mac, are they crippling other software? I doubt it, but I'll leave it open.
Does Safari use some custom APIs? Maybe. What do they do?
I've become convinced that what is required above all to understand politics and business is the ability to remember a story line. If you don't, you will be the easy target of people who want to take you for rubes. 1. Apple started the first successful, and still the most successful, online music store. This in the face of an industry that had won total, complete and Pyrrhic victories over their own future by smashing Napster, Kazaa, and all the rest. Apple was obligated, as part of this deal, to use DRM. By making this concession, they were able to build the business model that points to music's future. 2. Apple also became convinced that DRM must be done away with almost two years ago. They offered the industry a challenge. Months later, they delivered the EMI coup. 3. The Empire struck back. It seems to be a price dispute, I suppose; for whatever reason, the rest of the major labels have all dropped DRM in the meantime, but they offer their catalogs DRM-free only to Amazon and their own web sites, not to the company that got the ball rolling. Price dispute? The Amazon prices are all over the block, but they seem to be holding a lot of their prices deliberately below Apple's. So was THAT the "pricing dispute"? I doubt it. It seems to me to be an illegal restraint of trade. What does Apple have to do to get those tracks free of DRM? Turn over pricing decisions to the labels? Does anybody in their right mind think that then the prices would go up? 4. If Apple doesn't send those letters, they will not fulfill the obligation they have to the labels to assiduously defend their DRM. If they do that, they could be dropped by three of the four majors. Now, what's the story about? Oh, I see. Big meanie corporation sends cease-and-desist letter, say the pro-free music crowd, neglecting to say that Apple is being forced to defend a business model they don't want any more part of by the labels who refuse to come to an agreement with. How about Amazon's deal? Why can't Apple, and every other electronic music store, have that deal? Is this not restraint of trade?
I just want to object to the "expensive" label. When it first came out, maybe. They lowered the price to a frankly amazing $399, which is extremely competitive in the smartphone market. Like the Nokia N95's features? You'll pay a lot more. The battery life with GPS enabled sucks.
And the big thing is the cost of the two-year unlimited data plan. That makes the iPhone quite a bit cheaper than most comparable phones. That's part of the benefit of going with one provider: AT&T made a deal for the added customers. Now, AT&T is building up its high-speed operations, and I presume HSDPA iPhones are coming.
People had tantrums about 3rd party software, but I believe they intended to release the SDK as soon as they could. Recent accounts show that the iPhone a couple of months before launch was still not working, so it's quite believable to me that they just held off until the stability of the platform could be guaranteed. People managed to put 3rd party apps on the iPhone due to the buffer overflows, etc., that they found. Apple had no choice but to plug those holes.
I think that nobody would be happier than Apple to have an iPhone nano, for instance, to sell for Verizon, or any other carrier. But in the same way that iTunes needed to have DRM to launch, it had to make a deal with one carrier to extract the deals that let the iPhone launch. A year ago, Jobs said he didn't want DRM anymore. So he got one company to drop it, and now all major labels have no DRM -- if you go to Amazon, that is. They don't like being schooled by Mr. Jobs, and they don't mind restraint of trade, or punishing Steve-o for being, you know, right.
First of all, it is against federal law to erase emails. What they did with them is irrelevant. Six presidents had obeyed federal law, and we're supposed to be put off by "they meant well"?
When Apple said, "Hey, you find a security hole to install third-party software, we're going to have to close the hole," everybody yelled and screamed. Now someone's using the back door that the hackers found. Well, as Gomer used to say, "Surprise, surprise." I wonder if the new software update closes that hole.
They've burdened the world with Windows, and far worse, Outlook Server. Outlook is presently having a competition for the most meaningless instruction on one of its "Wizards." Hey, if you make a Wizard, you shouldn't then babble at you in jargon. Ooh, it can push important mail to important executives. Big frickin' deal. Most of the data it's pushing at you starts chiming or beeping in your pocket, and then it's just a notice about the going-away party for Doug on Friday.
All the rest of the piece sounds like corporate whining, like the ridiculous suit that wants to force Apple to have Windows DRM so the frigtards will be able to play it on their Zoons -- all the while, Amazon is selling unprotected, high-quality tracks from all the companies. Outlook will crash like this recession that's coming up, and everybody will revert to Pine.
I don't think business will ever adopt anything cool, by any company. They want tools for frigtards.
And more to Apple's point, they would have to pay huge licensing fees to MS. Would they want to? Sure, as soon a pigs grow wings.
It's the way it changes. Open an editing program, and your keyboard switches icons, showing the edit commands. Hold down the option key, and the alternate characters display. The old Mac app Keycaps in a keyboard. Change languages, look down and your keyboard's Urdu or French or Danish. That would be the real innovation: a variable keyboard, and that's what the display fight is over.