That expression always made me wonder, what to you do if the theater's on fire? Not yelling "fire" is not being helpful.
The other thing that I think about this is that it is a case appealing the conviction of Gene Debs, given a ten year's sentence for giving a speech about the First World War, in which he was entirely correct.
Face it, broadast, for about 80-90 years, was a license to print money. Now it's obsolete except for live events. We need downloads and interactivity. The hell with broadcast.
Could it be that that quotation is a bunch of self-serving bull?
My own theory about the current 'conservatism,' which is not conservative at all, is that it is actually a synthetic belief system like communism that has never worked, anywhere. Thust the rage of the modern conservatives. And the fact is, they're going down just like the sones of Lenin.
Yeah, they shoud have done like the iPhone. They--
Well, the difference is, you don't tell anybody you're going to be cutting prices once you get a ball of money to defray start-up costs.
I think they realized that they had set the opening price a little too high. If the top end had sold for $499, they would have sold more at the opening, and then nobody would have objected to $100 price cut. What do the early adopters think, they bought real estate instead of a rapidly-devaluating piece of personal electronics? A $200 drop, so soon, made the upper classes feel ripped off, instead of bravely paying off the development costs for the rest of us. Show a little damn noblesse oblige, iPhone nobility. Keep paying the premium price for your phones, so they can lower the price to $299, at which point, I bite. The lower classes will thank you brave price pioneers. Scratch me behind the ear and I will tug my forelock for you. No, it doesn't mean that. The forelock is the little tuft of hair in the front of your head that the serfs would tug at to show obeisance.
I would imagine they have in mind a system that would charge you maybe.50 for an episode of B.J. and the Bear, but $4.99 for last night's episode of... well, whatever crap has the piddling ratings that broadcast has these days.
and THEN sell their episodes on iTunes or wherever they want -- nobody would have any objections. Or put up hulu.com with their new pricing models, and compete with iTunes fair and square. What cheeses me off entirely is they charge Apple with attempted monopoly. That's just the complete reverse of what's true. Think hulu.com will have copy restrictions? Uh-huh. Whose? Apple's? Why, no. That would leave? Microsoft, no? Then Mac users have NO legal alternative. Watch the broadcast, get a TiVo, or the thing that seems to get the uptight here so uptight, but which is simply the market enforcing discipline among the producers. Demanding $5 to watch an episode of Wacky Family Wisecracks? You got to be kidding. Um, isn't that using the monopoly of your intellectual property to charge what the market will bear, while meanwhile cutting off the already profitable alternative?
Reportedly, NBC wanted to charge you $4.99 for the "new" shows, and then offer discounts, on ITS schedule, for say, last season's shows.
It's pricing control completely. Would you pay $4.99 an episode, or go to the forbidden places?
They think they're in competition with iTunes. They're not. They're in competition with BitTorrent.
I tell you what, neither of these s.o.b.'s are getting my money. Priority one: get the player price down. Priority two: drop DRM. Priority three: get the hell out of the way.
I was arguing with an audiofile the other day. He was saying how awful digital music is, especially mp3s and other compressed formats. I know he's right, of course. Give me a $20,000 system in an acoustically prepared room, and it'll blow the socks off the 1% of the population (or less) that can afford it.
Or take the other tack: exchange mp3s over the internet, or buy them cheaply. They sound good enough on a system that costs a few hundred. The cost of becoming an expert is a few thousand, and largely free. Paricipate in the music of your generation. Swim in it. Is that not more important than the snobbish moron who spends all his money on the REPRODUCTION of sound, which is an industrial process that makes you passive, or listen to a wide swath of music, and if someone special's in town, hear them in perfect fidelity: go to hear the music, live. That's music is the digital age. The price we pay is less-deatiled sound. But it's also more participatory. Learn to make music. Be a fan. Get to understand flatted fifths, diminished ninths -- or learn to play, for God's sake. Most of the musicians I know DON'T have fancy stereos. They hear the real thing every night, coming out of the end of their fingers.
In other words, that old guy Marshall McLuhan knew what he was talking about after all. TV was cool, but it's not "cool" anymore. Sharing stuff over the net is REALLY cool.
It's the same with movies. The catalog is very big now. Thw world movie library is enormous. Do you want to give up your living room to an absurdly large screen, and pay someone twenty dollars to see a movie that you will watch in glorious color once? No. Give me lower detail that can be shared and swapped. Make a Library of World Cinema that can be copied and watched. I'll download Bergman, if you don't mind. I'll even pony up three or four dollars, though I'd prefer to use a lending library formula. Maybe my city government, or state, could pay, just like public libraries.
Anyway, who cares about Hi-Def? It's nice, no doubt, but if the cost is paying these idiots a fortune for Steve Gutenberg in 1080p, I'll sit this dance out.
Functionality? You can put out lots of phones with similar functionality, and in fact, they have. Many phones have more capabilities. But this is a copy, and is very illegal, at least if they sell it here.
Oh, and this phone that works on any network? Not here. People come here from Europe all the time and are surprised to find that AT&T, and other companies, have turned their phones into a useless brick until they do a tricky firmware restoration. That sucks, but if we really had open networks, the iPhone would be universal.
It's the media doing its job. If no one admitted illegal actions, the hidden camera would have ended up in the garbage. If someone actually confessed illegal actions, then more power to Dateline.
One of the saddest moments came about 1995, when ABC used a hidden camera to show that a food market was routinely selling old meat and fish. They sued after the show came out, and won! Well, good-bye to exposing wrongdoing.
And 60 Minutes lost their suit to the tobacco companies, even though Jeffery Wigant was telling the truth.
My memory is a little clouded on all this, but at one point in the late '80s or early '90s, MS and Apple decided that Adobe was really being bitchy about Postscript fonts, and they developed, together, True Type. That hung together for maybe a year, and then, guess what, MS developed its own version of the standard, and went off to MS Land. So when the web developed, MS and Apple had a cheap and scalable font standard they could work from. Of course, by this time, MS's version had "evolved" a bit from the standards, and now, since everybody was using the MS "standard," Apple had to license the fonts that it had developed, together, with MS. If you sometimes, oh Windows lovers, wonder why Mac users seem to have it in for MS, it's composed of little incidents like this. Thousands of incidents like this.
Look at the average smartphone. Understand that Apple wants a wide-screen iPod and a web browser, e-mail, etc. All of it good size. Touchscreen. Usable. Cover Flow. Motion sensor for horizontal or vertical page layout.
Where do you put the friggin' keys? Lot easier to put them on the touch screen when you need them. It solves all the problems, as long as the typing goes well. My friends tell me they can type about 15 words a minute, after using it for a couple of weeks. Good enough?
Yes, Jobs is a design freak. But he doesn't make monstrosities like the old Citroen 2CV -- cool but weird design -- but in Apple devices, form follows function. Don't know, for myself, if it works, except I was typing better than on my stupid Moto RAZR in five minutes in the Apple Store. For that little adaptation, you get movies, full-screen web, etc., and no keyboard that takes up valuable handheld real estate. Good enough for me. How many sentences do you write on a phone? Aren't mobile message something like. "Got yr message. Go ahead. Meet U at 4:00." It would be rotten trying to write a screenplay on, but uh--
Now look at all the smartphones with keys. Type an e-mail, the keys are handy. (Though they don't go to horizontal when you turn a Blackberry, do they?) Surf the web, watch a movie, they shrink the available screen. Fold them up inside the phone and you've got thickness and heat problems. Go ahead, call him weird and a cultist. I think hating buttons is a good move.
No, libertarians are dangerous -- or more likely, impotent -- utopians.
There's lots of precedent for a market regulated for maximum competitiveness being a very productive force. If you let the free market stay completely unregulated, you get the restoration of the monopolies. Markets hate to be free, because everybody's always trying to corner it. So it takes regulation to keep everybody honest.
Why does Apple hate DRM on audio, but not on Software or Video? -wmf
As Jobs said, if you can follow this, 90% of music is sold without copy protection, because of the CD. So it didn't take TOO much persuasion to get EMI to drop DRM, since they already sell most of their library without protecion. But movies have never been unprotected -- Oh, I guess you could count the early home tapes, before they started making home copying difficult with Macrovision, and after they lost their appeal to the Supreme Court to have the Betamax machine banned. They entered the home market in a big way only with DRM. So they're convinced that, although anybody who wants to can crack a DVD, that they will have bigger profits if they keep DRM going, no matter what the more technically inclined part of the market does. Most people won't crack a DVD, copy it to their computer, and then burn it unprotected, or store it as a video file.
So it's not Apple. I'm sure, from their point of view, they'd love to stop all copy protection on everything. And lower the price, too. Make it up on volume, volume, volume, and make the price low enough so that it's not worth the time to burn a DVD or later, a Blu-Ray or HD DVD.
But if Apple, or anybody else, started that now, they'd rapidly find no movies on their virtual shelves.
Oh, come on. A death threat? You mean, some bad boy said, "I could kill you?" And this freak decides to turn it into more publicity for his lame ass? "Oh, Mac fans are Mafia types." Bull.
Does it make me angry to see the credibility that is invested in these jerks? You bet. This is some punk, and I don't think that people who act like this about any OS should be tolerated. If you find a vulnerability, you send what you know to the company. If they don't act on it, well, that's too bad from them. But selling off vulnerabiltiies without telling the company about it? Then constructing malware that uses the vulnerability to do harm? This is criminal activity, or something that is edging up towards it. Why is that tolerated? It doesn't matter to me if you hate the Mac, I tell you what: if there's a bullcrap "Robin Hood" story about some virus writer for Windows, I'll call him a criminal too.
Because, face it, that's what's going on here. The FBI just had a big sting of a number of prominent bot owners -- Operation Bot Roast -- and I hope they get big fines and prison time. Because that's where those people belong. Show me where someone who puts a rootkit on your machine is any different from a burglar and a thief. You can't, because that's what he is.
You know, way back, computer viruses were kind of funny. They'd pop up "Hello World" messages on Michelangelo's birthday, but they wouldn't really do much harm. But now they're running criminal enterprises. And some of these figures come from very rough environments, and they might be able to deliver on a death threat, because that's where a lot of the financing is coming from.
What needs to happen in a lot of circumstances is that copyright should not be transferable. So, if I write a song, it belongs to me. If a company wants to promote it, we can make a service contract. But the copyright is mine, not theirs. The labels are my agents, they could provide studios, or off-site storage for my works, and people with marketing savvy. But guess what? The industry that gave us the indentured servitude of the recording contract is no more. iTunes is more of a music company than any label out there. All they are are assholes with legal degrees.
Not being able to force artists into loan sharking arrangements with the labels would mean, however that all the labels as they exist now are effectively and instantly bankrupt. Yay. Without this leverage, The artist writes contracts with agents, and grants his or her managers a piece of his copyright for say, five years. So, the more tracks of mine they sell, the more they make. The more concerts I give to the bigger audiences, the more money they make. But the artist is in control. He has the copyright. I might spare them 10% of revenues, or 50% if I'm a newbie. But it will revert to me.
Because, after all, what function do the huge conglomerated labels have? They used to provide money for manufacture and distribution. They no longer have any significant burden, since once the final track is laid down, all they have to do is sell copies for more than it costs to download. And they were loan sharks. Game over. Finita la commedia.
First of all, if he's found a real vulnerability, he reports it. I don't care if it's Apple or Linux or even Windows. "Waiting until I finish it" is a disgusting excuse. Will he sell it to the bad guys? Is this free publicity for some jerk?
I think the Slashdot world ought to have a serious discussion of this kind of jerk. I think Congress might to. If what he's doing isn't illegal now, maybe it should be.
It could be. On the other hand, maybe it's just Cisco's revenge for the iPhone thing.
And it's hardly "one-way" communication, since what has happened is that they've opened a "ticket," and then "escalated" it. That means they've got some of the more pricey brains at Apple working at it. Hey, Apple and Cisco made an agreement to make their Wi-Fi phones compatible. Maybe this is instance #1.
Frankly, the collaboration between Safari and that open browser thingie hasn't worked all that badly. Isn't Apple still contributing improvements to the open browser? No, they're not sin-free. But a new fork wouldn't be the worst thing to happen either.
At least they didn't tell CUPS, "You have 224 copyright violations in your code. No, we won't name them. But in order for any company to use this code, they're going to have to pay Apple protection money." You know, like a certain other software company I could name.
It creates an interesting alliance, I think, though a proprietary software/hardware company with $100 billion in sales is kind of an elephant, yes.
The only battery liable to be replaced for the next two years will likely be the ones in iPhones left uncharged in hot cars all this summer. So in a year and a half, or so, the first ones will wend their way to Apple. You will note what happened to the iPod I lost, long story, my original iPod in the trunk of my car for a month while I had operations and hobbled around on crutches. When I found it, the battery could no longer hold a charge longer than two or three hours. So, that was a year after the release. There were, in that case, these services on the web that sold you a lithium battery for $30 and they shipped it to you with directions, a video on their website, and too silly pieces of plastic that helped you get the top off. Now there are many places, non-Apple, which will do the job on later iPods. And Apple will be more sane about the subject.
So in a couple of years, battery tech will have improved, and the third parties will have a fine business installing new batteries in iPhones for maybe $30-$40, with the soldering thrown in. And I'll bet Apple will have blushed by then. As FSJ says, I wonder who Goatberg is in bed with?
You get an iPhone without the phone part. Gee, DVD Jon, can you figure out a way to make my computer play tunes, but not do Excel or Word?
If somebody can actually figure out a way to use it with another provider, great. Until then, there will be an iPod-only varieties in this configuration sure as shootin'.
Microsoft makes an announcement of "230" -- or whatever it was -- copyright violations in Linux. I denounce it as obvious FUD and legal intimidation. The upshot is, more companies pay Microsoft money not to prosecute them for things that Microsoft never shows, because people quaver in fear when they point a lawyer at them.
Now, the GPL people are doing exactly the same thing with the iPhone. "There are copyright violations," they say, though they don't specify them. What do they want Apple to do, exactly?
I'm quite prepared to have the platform closed at first. Rumors abound, among them that the OS X SDK is ready, but the Windows SDK has a long way to go. You know, Apple invested a huge amount of time and money in the new platform. It's up to them to say when and how it can be opened.
Slashdot Mirror
That expression always made me wonder, what to you do if the theater's on fire? Not yelling "fire" is not being helpful. The other thing that I think about this is that it is a case appealing the conviction of Gene Debs, given a ten year's sentence for giving a speech about the First World War, in which he was entirely correct.
Face it, broadast, for about 80-90 years, was a license to print money. Now it's obsolete except for live events. We need downloads and interactivity. The hell with broadcast.
Could it be that that quotation is a bunch of self-serving bull? My own theory about the current 'conservatism,' which is not conservative at all, is that it is actually a synthetic belief system like communism that has never worked, anywhere. Thust the rage of the modern conservatives. And the fact is, they're going down just like the sones of Lenin.
Yeah, they shoud have done like the iPhone. They-- Well, the difference is, you don't tell anybody you're going to be cutting prices once you get a ball of money to defray start-up costs.
I think they realized that they had set the opening price a little too high. If the top end had sold for $499, they would have sold more at the opening, and then nobody would have objected to $100 price cut. What do the early adopters think, they bought real estate instead of a rapidly-devaluating piece of personal electronics? A $200 drop, so soon, made the upper classes feel ripped off, instead of bravely paying off the development costs for the rest of us. Show a little damn noblesse oblige, iPhone nobility. Keep paying the premium price for your phones, so they can lower the price to $299, at which point, I bite. The lower classes will thank you brave price pioneers. Scratch me behind the ear and I will tug my forelock for you. No, it doesn't mean that. The forelock is the little tuft of hair in the front of your head that the serfs would tug at to show obeisance.
I would imagine they have in mind a system that would charge you maybe .50 for an episode of B.J. and the Bear, but $4.99 for last night's episode of... well, whatever crap has the piddling ratings that broadcast has these days.
Note: if they wanted to show for free, with commercials, as ABC seems poised to do, http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streaming/landing
and THEN sell their episodes on iTunes or wherever they want -- nobody would have any objections. Or put up hulu.com with their new pricing models, and compete with iTunes fair and square. What cheeses me off entirely is they charge Apple with attempted monopoly. That's just the complete reverse of what's true. Think hulu.com will have copy restrictions? Uh-huh. Whose? Apple's? Why, no. That would leave? Microsoft, no? Then Mac users have NO legal alternative. Watch the broadcast, get a TiVo, or the thing that seems to get the uptight here so uptight, but which is simply the market enforcing discipline among the producers. Demanding $5 to watch an episode of Wacky Family Wisecracks? You got to be kidding. Um, isn't that using the monopoly of your intellectual property to charge what the market will bear, while meanwhile cutting off the already profitable alternative?
Reportedly, NBC wanted to charge you $4.99 for the "new" shows, and then offer discounts, on ITS schedule, for say, last season's shows. It's pricing control completely. Would you pay $4.99 an episode, or go to the forbidden places? They think they're in competition with iTunes. They're not. They're in competition with BitTorrent.
I tell you what, neither of these s.o.b.'s are getting my money. Priority one: get the player price down. Priority two: drop DRM. Priority three: get the hell out of the way.
I was arguing with an audiofile the other day. He was saying how awful digital music is, especially mp3s and other compressed formats. I know he's right, of course. Give me a $20,000 system in an acoustically prepared room, and it'll blow the socks off the 1% of the population (or less) that can afford it.
Or take the other tack: exchange mp3s over the internet, or buy them cheaply. They sound good enough on a system that costs a few hundred. The cost of becoming an expert is a few thousand, and largely free. Paricipate in the music of your generation. Swim in it. Is that not more important than the snobbish moron who spends all his money on the REPRODUCTION of sound, which is an industrial process that makes you passive, or listen to a wide swath of music, and if someone special's in town, hear them in perfect fidelity: go to hear the music, live. That's music is the digital age. The price we pay is less-deatiled sound. But it's also more participatory. Learn to make music. Be a fan. Get to understand flatted fifths, diminished ninths -- or learn to play, for God's sake. Most of the musicians I know DON'T have fancy stereos. They hear the real thing every night, coming out of the end of their fingers.
In other words, that old guy Marshall McLuhan knew what he was talking about after all. TV was cool, but it's not "cool" anymore. Sharing stuff over the net is REALLY cool.
It's the same with movies. The catalog is very big now. Thw world movie library is enormous. Do you want to give up your living room to an absurdly large screen, and pay someone twenty dollars to see a movie that you will watch in glorious color once? No. Give me lower detail that can be shared and swapped. Make a Library of World Cinema that can be copied and watched. I'll download Bergman, if you don't mind. I'll even pony up three or four dollars, though I'd prefer to use a lending library formula. Maybe my city government, or state, could pay, just like public libraries.
Anyway, who cares about Hi-Def? It's nice, no doubt, but if the cost is paying these idiots a fortune for Steve Gutenberg in 1080p, I'll sit this dance out.
Functionality? You can put out lots of phones with similar functionality, and in fact, they have. Many phones have more capabilities. But this is a copy, and is very illegal, at least if they sell it here. Oh, and this phone that works on any network? Not here. People come here from Europe all the time and are surprised to find that AT&T, and other companies, have turned their phones into a useless brick until they do a tricky firmware restoration. That sucks, but if we really had open networks, the iPhone would be universal.
It's the media doing its job. If no one admitted illegal actions, the hidden camera would have ended up in the garbage. If someone actually confessed illegal actions, then more power to Dateline. One of the saddest moments came about 1995, when ABC used a hidden camera to show that a food market was routinely selling old meat and fish. They sued after the show came out, and won! Well, good-bye to exposing wrongdoing. And 60 Minutes lost their suit to the tobacco companies, even though Jeffery Wigant was telling the truth.
My memory is a little clouded on all this, but at one point in the late '80s or early '90s, MS and Apple decided that Adobe was really being bitchy about Postscript fonts, and they developed, together, True Type. That hung together for maybe a year, and then, guess what, MS developed its own version of the standard, and went off to MS Land. So when the web developed, MS and Apple had a cheap and scalable font standard they could work from. Of course, by this time, MS's version had "evolved" a bit from the standards, and now, since everybody was using the MS "standard," Apple had to license the fonts that it had developed, together, with MS. If you sometimes, oh Windows lovers, wonder why Mac users seem to have it in for MS, it's composed of little incidents like this. Thousands of incidents like this.
I think this means that educated people don't learn as easily as infants do.
Look at the average smartphone. Understand that Apple wants a wide-screen iPod and a web browser, e-mail, etc. All of it good size. Touchscreen. Usable. Cover Flow. Motion sensor for horizontal or vertical page layout.
Where do you put the friggin' keys? Lot easier to put them on the touch screen when you need them. It solves all the problems, as long as the typing goes well. My friends tell me they can type about 15 words a minute, after using it for a couple of weeks. Good enough?
Yes, Jobs is a design freak. But he doesn't make monstrosities like the old Citroen 2CV -- cool but weird design -- but in Apple devices, form follows function. Don't know, for myself, if it works, except I was typing better than on my stupid Moto RAZR in five minutes in the Apple Store. For that little adaptation, you get movies, full-screen web, etc., and no keyboard that takes up valuable handheld real estate. Good enough for me. How many sentences do you write on a phone? Aren't mobile message something like. "Got yr message. Go ahead. Meet U at 4:00." It would be rotten trying to write a screenplay on, but uh--
Now look at all the smartphones with keys. Type an e-mail, the keys are handy. (Though they don't go to horizontal when you turn a Blackberry, do they?) Surf the web, watch a movie, they shrink the available screen. Fold them up inside the phone and you've got thickness and heat problems. Go ahead, call him weird and a cultist. I think hating buttons is a good move.
No, libertarians are dangerous -- or more likely, impotent -- utopians.
There's lots of precedent for a market regulated for maximum competitiveness being a very productive force. If you let the free market stay completely unregulated, you get the restoration of the monopolies. Markets hate to be free, because everybody's always trying to corner it. So it takes regulation to keep everybody honest.
Yeah, you read the story, and you say, "My God! Actual 'security researchers', not snot-nosed hackers!"
This is where iTunes shows its mettle, I predict. You have to plug the thing in every night to recharge. One night, you get a patch when iTunes opens.
Why does Apple hate DRM on audio, but not on Software or Video?
-wmf
As Jobs said, if you can follow this, 90% of music is sold without copy protection, because of the CD. So it didn't take TOO much persuasion to get EMI to drop DRM, since they already sell most of their library without protecion. But movies have never been unprotected -- Oh, I guess you could count the early home tapes, before they started making home copying difficult with Macrovision, and after they lost their appeal to the Supreme Court to have the Betamax machine banned. They entered the home market in a big way only with DRM. So they're convinced that, although anybody who wants to can crack a DVD, that they will have bigger profits if they keep DRM going, no matter what the more technically inclined part of the market does. Most people won't crack a DVD, copy it to their computer, and then burn it unprotected, or store it as a video file.
So it's not Apple. I'm sure, from their point of view, they'd love to stop all copy protection on everything. And lower the price, too. Make it up on volume, volume, volume, and make the price low enough so that it's not worth the time to burn a DVD or later, a Blu-Ray or HD DVD.
But if Apple, or anybody else, started that now, they'd rapidly find no movies on their virtual shelves.
Oh, come on. A death threat? You mean, some bad boy said, "I could kill you?" And this freak decides to turn it into more publicity for his lame ass? "Oh, Mac fans are Mafia types." Bull.
Does it make me angry to see the credibility that is invested in these jerks? You bet. This is some punk, and I don't think that people who act like this about any OS should be tolerated. If you find a vulnerability, you send what you know to the company. If they don't act on it, well, that's too bad from them. But selling off vulnerabiltiies without telling the company about it? Then constructing malware that uses the vulnerability to do harm? This is criminal activity, or something that is edging up towards it. Why is that tolerated? It doesn't matter to me if you hate the Mac, I tell you what: if there's a bullcrap "Robin Hood" story about some virus writer for Windows, I'll call him a criminal too.
Because, face it, that's what's going on here. The FBI just had a big sting of a number of prominent bot owners -- Operation Bot Roast -- and I hope they get big fines and prison time. Because that's where those people belong. Show me where someone who puts a rootkit on your machine is any different from a burglar and a thief. You can't, because that's what he is.
You know, way back, computer viruses were kind of funny. They'd pop up "Hello World" messages on Michelangelo's birthday, but they wouldn't really do much harm. But now they're running criminal enterprises. And some of these figures come from very rough environments, and they might be able to deliver on a death threat, because that's where a lot of the financing is coming from.
What needs to happen in a lot of circumstances is that copyright should not be transferable. So, if I write a song, it belongs to me. If a company wants to promote it, we can make a service contract. But the copyright is mine, not theirs. The labels are my agents, they could provide studios, or off-site storage for my works, and people with marketing savvy. But guess what? The industry that gave us the indentured servitude of the recording contract is no more. iTunes is more of a music company than any label out there. All they are are assholes with legal degrees.
Not being able to force artists into loan sharking arrangements with the labels would mean, however that all the labels as they exist now are effectively and instantly bankrupt. Yay. Without this leverage, The artist writes contracts with agents, and grants his or her managers a piece of his copyright for say, five years. So, the more tracks of mine they sell, the more they make. The more concerts I give to the bigger audiences, the more money they make. But the artist is in control. He has the copyright. I might spare them 10% of revenues, or 50% if I'm a newbie. But it will revert to me.
Because, after all, what function do the huge conglomerated labels have? They used to provide money for manufacture and distribution. They no longer have any significant burden, since once the final track is laid down, all they have to do is sell copies for more than it costs to download. And they were loan sharks. Game over. Finita la commedia.
First of all, if he's found a real vulnerability, he reports it. I don't care if it's Apple or Linux or even Windows. "Waiting until I finish it" is a disgusting excuse. Will he sell it to the bad guys? Is this free publicity for some jerk? I think the Slashdot world ought to have a serious discussion of this kind of jerk. I think Congress might to. If what he's doing isn't illegal now, maybe it should be.
It could be. On the other hand, maybe it's just Cisco's revenge for the iPhone thing. And it's hardly "one-way" communication, since what has happened is that they've opened a "ticket," and then "escalated" it. That means they've got some of the more pricey brains at Apple working at it. Hey, Apple and Cisco made an agreement to make their Wi-Fi phones compatible. Maybe this is instance #1.
Frankly, the collaboration between Safari and that open browser thingie hasn't worked all that badly. Isn't Apple still contributing improvements to the open browser? No, they're not sin-free. But a new fork wouldn't be the worst thing to happen either.
At least they didn't tell CUPS, "You have 224 copyright violations in your code. No, we won't name them. But in order for any company to use this code, they're going to have to pay Apple protection money." You know, like a certain other software company I could name.
It creates an interesting alliance, I think, though a proprietary software/hardware company with $100 billion in sales is kind of an elephant, yes.
The only battery liable to be replaced for the next two years will likely be the ones in iPhones left uncharged in hot cars all this summer. So in a year and a half, or so, the first ones will wend their way to Apple. You will note what happened to the iPod I lost, long story, my original iPod in the trunk of my car for a month while I had operations and hobbled around on crutches. When I found it, the battery could no longer hold a charge longer than two or three hours. So, that was a year after the release. There were, in that case, these services on the web that sold you a lithium battery for $30 and they shipped it to you with directions, a video on their website, and too silly pieces of plastic that helped you get the top off. Now there are many places, non-Apple, which will do the job on later iPods. And Apple will be more sane about the subject.
So in a couple of years, battery tech will have improved, and the third parties will have a fine business installing new batteries in iPhones for maybe $30-$40, with the soldering thrown in. And I'll bet Apple will have blushed by then. As FSJ says, I wonder who Goatberg is in bed with?
You get an iPhone without the phone part. Gee, DVD Jon, can you figure out a way to make my computer play tunes, but not do Excel or Word? If somebody can actually figure out a way to use it with another provider, great. Until then, there will be an iPod-only varieties in this configuration sure as shootin'.
Microsoft makes an announcement of "230" -- or whatever it was -- copyright violations in Linux. I denounce it as obvious FUD and legal intimidation. The upshot is, more companies pay Microsoft money not to prosecute them for things that Microsoft never shows, because people quaver in fear when they point a lawyer at them.
Now, the GPL people are doing exactly the same thing with the iPhone. "There are copyright violations," they say, though they don't specify them. What do they want Apple to do, exactly?
I'm quite prepared to have the platform closed at first. Rumors abound, among them that the OS X SDK is ready, but the Windows SDK has a long way to go. You know, Apple invested a huge amount of time and money in the new platform. It's up to them to say when and how it can be opened.