10.4.9 is a major security and bugfix-type upgrade. I first, I just noticed that things went very fast. Then, I noticed that Photoshop wouldn't open a jpg. Uh-oh. Well, most of the stuff in MacFixit that isn't "reapply the combo updater," is "clean cache and dump prferences. So I ran Applejack, my freeware of choice. Ta-da. Evidently, the caches that were tossed were clogged. Works like a charm. I haven't noticed a single problem since. Sorry if that sounds gung-ho or something. It's just true.
In fact, one of the best "worry-bead" sites is MacFixit. Predictably, when people go there, they've got a problem. Things can break, after all. If you haven't tuned up your system in six months, some permission may be set wrong. You could have a corrupt font or a corrupt cache -- something that impedes a clean install of the update. Get Disk Warrior. Run Disk Warrior. Run Applejack. Unplug all USB and Firewire. All peripherals, just to be safe. Reinstall the whole thing from the combo updater.
If you base your idea of how much trouble a certain upgrade is by who's complaining at MacFixit, you're making a huge statistical error. The people who go there go there because they have problems. It's like an Internet poll: it's a huge sampling error. If you did a survey on heroin addiction at three in the morning outside a clean needle dispensary, you'd think everybody was an addict.
The other day, talking about politics, somebody said, "ALL the people I know are voting for Obama. How come Hillary is ahead in the polls?" Well, that may be true for your friends, but that is stunningly dumb for an intelligent person.
Good idea. Indies? Anybody want to go ahead with that idea? Or do you just want to fulfill a role as a rhetorical device in somebody's anti-Apple tirade?
Where are you getting that idea? Apple has no monopoly, and they have no ability to get it. As Jobs himself points out, 90% of music is sold on Cds, and that's DRM-free. That finds its way onto ipods, maybe the most common source of music on the iPod, and on all other mp3 players. Then there's shared music, and coming up at the end is the online purchases.
To have a monopoly, they'd have to have a higher percentage of the digital music market. The iTunes store would have to be higher than #5 as a music store in the US. (Amazon, Best Buy, etc. -- all higher. Apple would have to leverage its total dominance over digital music (not) to eliminate competition -- not by just outselling other competitors, but by insisting that every mp3 player sold have iTunes and Quicktime installed, or else... something. (That's a monopoly, as in Microsoft: put what we want on the hard drive of every new computer -- Explorer, not Netscape -- or we'll deny you the license to sell Windows. That's what a monopoly is: someone who uses market power to exert undue influence on competitors and on the consumer. Rockefeller wasn't the only oil company, but he used his market power to make contracts with railroads that screwed everybody else, so he could RAISE PRICES without competition. That's why Standard Oil was the first monopoly that got broken up.
There are four encryption regimes. Apple, Plays4Sure, Zune and Real. Each one of these is in a monopoly position with its respective music stores only. All players all also play mp3s and a mix of other formats. The iPod/iTunes was first to market, and it's still selling like hell. You can buy stuff from iTunes, and iTunes only. Real? You have to go with their encrryption. Microsoft? You can choose one of their two regimes.
Apple's not a monopoly, it's just selling more music than the others, and lots more iPods than all the others combined. That's not a crime; and the iTunes store, or at least the encrypted portions -- I'm not counting the podcasts here, where they're also the biggest provider, of free and unencumbered audio and video -- has the same music as anyone else -- you're not restricted in your music choices, and the encrypted portion of any iPod is almost always the smallest segment of the whole flash or hard drive.
The labels, by taking the approach they have done with rights, have totally dominated the availability and pricing of music for a very long time. In fact, there have been recurrent price-fixing and payola scandals for decades, as they attempt to exercise this monopoly power as though they're somehow above the law and above the natural laws of economics. They are the ones acting like monopolies, in fact; trying to abolish the music commons. There are many, like Bronfman, who want nothing more than that all of his music be encrypted, and that all of the labels participate in this cartel. They will then continue as before, or so they think. keeping the great majority of its signed acts in penury and debt slavery while promoting the hell out of a tiny few. This they will tell you is "protecting artists."
I'd rather have unprotected music, so that the labels would be forced to have a more open market, competing on recording quality, on the artists whom THEY WORK FOR, and their ability to guess what the public wants.
Imagine if you could buy a track, or an album digitally in aac, or in apple lossless; or buy that some album in 5.1 surround with an extra booklet and have it shipped to you.
Some 5 million tracks are, effectively, the great majority of recorded music up to this time. The online music stores give you access to all that plenty with a simple search term. Try doing that at the local record store.
For the record companies to say they have "intellectual property," first they have to show some intellect.
False premise. A universal, common DRM isn't the solution. DRM itself sucks. The common, universal element is music delivered in files that are engineered to sound as good as it's possible to sound. Period.
Only that stupid Norwegian "consumer" group and the RIAA think otherwise.
You'd think after the mountains of bad journalism and bad politics in the last 20 years, we'd have some sense. The article doesn't say what the slashdot poster seems to think it says. I guess making a report of a meeting of music execs into a "bash Jobs" fest is what makes this writer tick. C/Net is the home of sloppy, stupid journalism. "Many blamed" is a figure of speech, not journalism. Who blamed Jobs, and why? You mean, he didn't call for DRM to be dropped, or that he "wasn't sincere" about doing so? None of this approaches an elementary knowledge of the situation at this particular conference. In fact, the major execs all insisted on DRM, and Jobs called for them to drop it.
In fact, only the indie exec cited made any sense at all.
Although it might have been necessary for the FCC, and/or for building up anticipation, it also allows all the thumb-suckers to mold their arguments so they sound reasonable.
Like the Norwegian clowns who just happen to have the RIAA's stance in the upcoming music wars, how surprising that upshot of all this is that Apple will "have to give up its high-handed approach" to our brave businesses like AT&T wireless. And the survey. Gee, you want a lower price? Please accept the wireless subsidies. You just have to lock Bluetooth, and buy our ringtones.
See the page in WSJ where Verizon wouldn't go along with Apple's conditions? That's the story about Cingular.
The qwerty keyboard is why I don't use anything right now beyond a phone. Nobody, so far, has made a keypad for small devices... for humans. You either have the phone pad, which involes multiple taps for most letters -- yuck -- or a dinky little piece of junk keyboard that takes up half the available real estate. Will the Apple virtual keyboard be good enough? That remains to be seen. But it solves a lot of the problems inherent in tiny keyboards.
The price is very high. All the commentators said the iPod cost too much, too. They were not right. They couldn't keep up production fast enough. The result as been an entire line of iPods, from $79 to $400, and they're all selling, like, uh, iPods.
As for myself, I can't afford the first model, though I'd love one. By next year, though, I'll have one of these puppies.
Technically, Cisco had legal control of the name, but in fact, all they did throughout the product cycle was do the bare legal requirements at the last minute, over and over. The fact is, in their filings, they showed the box of an old Skype phone they had brought out a year before, but had not called that. The picture on the cover is a mockup, and you can plainly see that "iPhone" is pasted on the box. They later, in November or December 2006, at the last possible moment, put out the same old unit, in a box that actually said, "iPhone" at last. Apparently, the pdf manual on the website didn't call it that. Looks like a purely legal rush to me, and hardly a real necessity to use that name on an important product. It looks, yawn, like a cordless phone from one of a dozen manufacturers, and as a Skype phone it's scarcely unique. I don't know how important in the law, but in the real world it sure is. They were actually willing to rebrand something just to farm for dollars, no?
Now, lemme tell you about secret agreements. If Apple had paid a ton of money, you'd be hearing semi-official rumors by now. Sort of like, "See how much our lawyers gouged out of them?" They would be officially denied, but insiders would have a good idea. The lack of even inflated figures, that the PR department denies after the rumor has had a chance to percolate, kind of says, "They caved" to me.
Whatever a patent attorney would say about this case, it's clear that either through personal animosity, or the desire to make a buck, Cisco put up a legal roadblock. If it was important to the Cisco brand, they would have put up a huge fight, and Apple probably would have had no choice but to back off. Possession being 9/10 of the law and all. But it's not important to Cisco, they were just playing games.
The rumors of the "iPhone" were never confirmed by Apple, but everybody used it. It didn't officially exist and it was already branded. I'm sure they had a name in reserve, if Cisco wanted to play hardball, and make the prospective of maybe losing the case in a couple of years and having to pay Cisco x dollars per phone, or shut down the iPhone until it could be renamed, or some other disaster. But Cisco just had bluster.
Now, why is it that Linksys routers are unique for their total lack of Mac support? I mean, you can use them, but you have to dust off the geek to get him going.
"Sweden and a few other European countries are now showing their backbone impling (not saying it outright, they don't want to piss off big business because that means less money for their economy) that business-controlled DRM is bad. Notice that they've never said anything about user-centric DRM..."
What a perfect weasel that position is. If they want that, they should pass laws disallowing all corporate-driven DRM. But they're not going to because they're cowards. So what they're doing is completely counterproductive; they want to set in place a single DRM to rule us all -- but I'd rather have seperate DRM satrapies, which can be overwhelmed, than an international system enforcing that stupidity.
There are two paths: this idea of an "open-source DRM" ends up with DRM permanently in place. If you share the DRM, so what? A bunch of loser devices get to have a shot at iTunes, which remains copy-protected. If you're blinded enough by your hatred of Jobs, or if you're easily gulled enough to think that Plays4Sure is "open", then you maybe deserve what the labels have in mind.
If they abolished DRM, on the other hand, then the market would be open, fair and free. THEN if Apple really insists on an "iPod only" path, I'd be a little pissed off -- but then, there could be an honest competition for users of Plays4Sure stuff, after Microsoft has abandoned them.
Oh, by the way, the reason MS hasn't made a hardware device before is because they're trying the same deal as with Windows. Let other people put up the factories and capitalize. We'll write the software and collect the licensing whether your company goes to hell or not.
There's nothing magic about the iTunes store. All the same music, or just about, is available everywhere else. How come Windows doesn't share its DRM with Apple? How come they've dropped the Mac version of Windows Media? How come they insist on using WMA? You know, suddenly, because 70% prefer the iPod, people have their underwear in a twist. If you're a Microsoft shill, the hell with you. If you're an earnest open-sourcer, notice how you're being played and by whom. If you've gotten stuck with a Plays4Sure device and now it can't play anything on the Zune store, my sympathies, but I don't see why it's my problem.
Microsoft had over 90% of the market. That's step one, but even that is fine.
They then used that market power to force their browser on to the desktop, by threatening hardware manufacturers with economic ruin if they tried to install Netscape on the desktop. That is behaving like a monopoly.
If Apple has captured 70% of the market, that's not a monopoly. They're not threatening ANYBODY with anything but competition.
Not wanting to share DRM? If that's so great, why doesn't MS share? Or Real? I want to put Real media on my Zune with my Mac iTunes!!!! I can't do that, either.
In fact, the RIAA's policy is a) to allow the record labels to set pricing, not Mr. Jobs. Go with variable pricing: the average price, hint, hint, will be higher, won't it? If you want the Columbia Record Club experience, go with variable pricing; and b) the RIAA wants to share the DRM with Apple. Hint: this is the RIAA. That means the music cartel, or a big part of it, wants that. I thought all you hip bastards were anti-RIAA.
The only way out, EVEN IF STEVE JOBS WANTS IT, linux bois, is to abolish DRM, which is not only not accomplished if DRM is "shared," but the market becomes stable with DRM only. All the parties will then have no possibility of backing out. Everybody will be unified in screwing the consumer. Waytago!
Bronfman is the grandson of a bootlegger, but unlike Kennedy, he shows exactly zero sense in his fat head. An elitist gangster who is now on his way to screwing up his second corporation. Having accepted Gates's bribe on the Zune -- wow, he must have made $100,000 on that deal by now -- he now speaks with a golden tongue. What a maroon.
I think all you eager Apple-haters should notice one thing: what's the RIAA's opinion on all this? Why, they adopt the "Norwegian Consumer Orgy-Borgys" position on all this: that Apple should bite the bullet and share the profitable portion of its business with all the losers. The RIAA. Do you get it now, morons? In response, Jobs offers a truly free market, and the labels, most of them, run in fear. (Though I heard a rumor that EMI is actually considering it.)
What we need now is a consumer movement. You want to start a boycott of all online music until they drop DRM? I'll sign that petition. Will I angrily denounce Apple for not sharing its DRM? Not on your life. That's the RIAA's position, chowderheads.
If you have DRM, you are locked in. That's been the product of DRM, in fact, which was required by the studios. The studios had just come from their victory over Napster, and many of them, no doubt, wanted to go back to things just the way they were. Around came Jobs, saying downloads were continuing, but that if they made their music available cheaply online, they could lessen the losses of digital distribution. DRM was the price of admission -- and even then, they didn't all join at the same time.
It would be good if Disney agreed to letting their music go DRM-free.
Has it occurred to anybody to check the funding for the "security experts" who came up with MOAB. Billy seemed kind of familiar with it, didn't he? At least with its spin.
Since Microsoft has been well-known to fund phony grassroots activity, $20 million for phony lawsuits agains IBM and any flavor of linux you can name, and all kinds of dirty tricks, I'm just wondering who's doing the funding for the "security researchers." I mean, for a solid month, there's a trickle of pee about so-called security problems, and then, Vista is launched, and the CEO and founder is still hit with snide comparisons to the Mac and the iPod. Do I know it for sure? No. Would I put it past them? No.
I'd be proud to have her as a daughter. Any of you nerds want to mess with her, you'll deal with me.
Seriously, I thought she was intelligent and genuine in the interview. Quite perceptive about the bizarre kind of celebrity that accrued to her.
I mean, they invented DRM to make our lives miserable, and now I discover that they invented national jurisdictions for copyright regulations and credit card sales just to piss off the internationalist commies amongst us.
Apple has spent a lot of time working out the details of the sometimes bizarre, sometimes rational national rules for sales. That's why the international sites took a while to get up and running. I remember reading, many times, about how impatient people were in this or that country to get going, and how angry they were that their credit cards were not recognized, even though they were good citizens of Zambesia, and how dare that George Bush who runs Apple frustrate world consumers? Now it turns out it was all a nasty plot to dominate music sales and withhold Japanese rock from the Western consumers.
More likely it was the labels refusing to cooperated, or the bands, or it was finding a way to get the credit cards -- who take.25 per track in the US -- to not charge.45 cents somewhere else.
In Canada, there are Canadian content rules, for instance. Different rights organizations. Jesus.
A single repository for the world's music? Good idea. Rewrite your copyright laws, will you?
Oh, the horror, the horror.
If you want to find a way to force the labels to do away with DRM, fight the good fight. I'm with you. But why the hell should you and your friends start screwing up the way I like to listen to music? I like my iPod. I don't want a Zune or a Plays4Sure or anything else. I grab most of the music on my iPod from CDs and uh, other places. Mp3's play on everything. Sometimes I like to buy a song, or a whole album, from iTunes. I may have 200 purchased tracks. Why the hell do you have to be such a buzzkill? Do you think that screwing up other people's fun is what an activist does?
And no, it's not a monopoly. You can get all the same tracks as the iTunes store has on a number of other services. No reason why you can't. There's no exclusivity in the iTunes store, as far as I know. That would be a monopoly. If Apple said, "If you make Dave Mason available on the Zune store, we'll drop all his tracks," that would be a monopolistic practice. They don't do that.
Microsoft has paid Universal a fee on each Zune -- gee, Universal is a thousandaire by now! -- and allowed them and Sony to disable the "squirt" for their already-crippled WiFi on about half of their songs. With Apple, there's even a few hacks available to take the DRM off. Illegal, but I've heard some people do it. Not that I know how.
And another thing, if this suit is successful, and Apple has to start loading songs on to other players for which they haven't gotten the money, they'll have to make the music store a profit center, which it's not now. Watch the iTunes prices go up. Thanks, Mr. Buzzkill.
I'm all for DRM being made illegal. But demanding that Apple open up its music while not requiring all Plays4Sure and Zune and other DRM schemes to be either open or interoperable is sheer stupidity. No, Apple doesn't have a monopoly. It has a large share of the market, but the same songs are available for all platforms and all players by: buying from another store, which have most of the same content and some that Apple doesn't have, or by ripping CDs, or, well, by those other means of copying music.
They've been 100% wrong so far. How many people do you think are going to hold off on buying something for $250 -- the 30 GB iPod -- so they can pick up something for $500-600? The iPod wasn't going to sell at all because it was $400. Then the cheaper ones would be better. Then Apple brought out cheaper ones, and an entire line of Flash iPods, and now there's iPods from $79 to $350. Somebody who has enough for an 80GB iPod but doesn't want a phone won't hold out for a monthly fee to AT&T and at least $500.
I'd also bet that there will be a whole passle of widescreen iPods eventually without phones.
Oh, but with all those iPod killers out there, iPod sales are falling and iTunes sales are collapsing. Except they sold 21 million of them the last quarter, and iTunes sold its two-billionth song a little while ago.
This "Apple" section is not an Apple section, in the sense that it is information about Apple, and differing opinions about this or that. This place is like the DNC being taken over by Karl Rove. Every single goddamned story is just a bunch of second-guessing FUD and spin. What does Mr. Smartypants think that Apple should have done? Leaked the whole thing to the rumor sites? Launched it like the Zune? Launched it like that cool tablet thing that isn't selling more than 12 copies? Asked C/Net if it was okay to do it? Asked the FCC to break the news? If they have a 3.5" screen, it should have been bigger but the phone itself smaller. The screen, which nobody but about 12 people have touched, is no good. It's no good because it doesn't have shiny little buttons like my Blackberry. It doesn't have an alt-delete key??? What's it got, a one-button mouse???? How dare Apple have something popular, they're just for the artistic set. How dare they have a computer which hasn't, of yet, had any serious viruses? Who the hell do they think they are, anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
10.4.9 is a major security and bugfix-type upgrade. I first, I just noticed that things went very fast. Then, I noticed that Photoshop wouldn't open a jpg. Uh-oh. Well, most of the stuff in MacFixit that isn't "reapply the combo updater," is "clean cache and dump prferences. So I ran Applejack, my freeware of choice. Ta-da. Evidently, the caches that were tossed were clogged. Works like a charm. I haven't noticed a single problem since. Sorry if that sounds gung-ho or something. It's just true.
In fact, one of the best "worry-bead" sites is MacFixit. Predictably, when people go there, they've got a problem. Things can break, after all. If you haven't tuned up your system in six months, some permission may be set wrong. You could have a corrupt font or a corrupt cache -- something that impedes a clean install of the update. Get Disk Warrior. Run Disk Warrior. Run Applejack. Unplug all USB and Firewire. All peripherals, just to be safe. Reinstall the whole thing from the combo updater.
If you base your idea of how much trouble a certain upgrade is by who's complaining at MacFixit, you're making a huge statistical error. The people who go there go there because they have problems. It's like an Internet poll: it's a huge sampling error. If you did a survey on heroin addiction at three in the morning outside a clean needle dispensary, you'd think everybody was an addict.
The other day, talking about politics, somebody said, "ALL the people I know are voting for Obama. How come Hillary is ahead in the polls?" Well, that may be true for your friends, but that is stunningly dumb for an intelligent person.
Good idea. Indies? Anybody want to go ahead with that idea? Or do you just want to fulfill a role as a rhetorical device in somebody's anti-Apple tirade?
Where are you getting that idea? Apple has no monopoly, and they have no ability to get it. As Jobs himself points out, 90% of music is sold on Cds, and that's DRM-free. That finds its way onto ipods, maybe the most common source of music on the iPod, and on all other mp3 players. Then there's shared music, and coming up at the end is the online purchases.
To have a monopoly, they'd have to have a higher percentage of the digital music market. The iTunes store would have to be higher than #5 as a music store in the US. (Amazon, Best Buy, etc. -- all higher. Apple would have to leverage its total dominance over digital music (not) to eliminate competition -- not by just outselling other competitors, but by insisting that every mp3 player sold have iTunes and Quicktime installed, or else... something. (That's a monopoly, as in Microsoft: put what we want on the hard drive of every new computer -- Explorer, not Netscape -- or we'll deny you the license to sell Windows. That's what a monopoly is: someone who uses market power to exert undue influence on competitors and on the consumer. Rockefeller wasn't the only oil company, but he used his market power to make contracts with railroads that screwed everybody else, so he could RAISE PRICES without competition. That's why Standard Oil was the first monopoly that got broken up.
There are four encryption regimes. Apple, Plays4Sure, Zune and Real. Each one of these is in a monopoly position with its respective music stores only. All players all also play mp3s and a mix of other formats. The iPod/iTunes was first to market, and it's still selling like hell. You can buy stuff from iTunes, and iTunes only. Real? You have to go with their encrryption. Microsoft? You can choose one of their two regimes.
Apple's not a monopoly, it's just selling more music than the others, and lots more iPods than all the others combined. That's not a crime; and the iTunes store, or at least the encrypted portions -- I'm not counting the podcasts here, where they're also the biggest provider, of free and unencumbered audio and video -- has the same music as anyone else -- you're not restricted in your music choices, and the encrypted portion of any iPod is almost always the smallest segment of the whole flash or hard drive.
The labels, by taking the approach they have done with rights, have totally dominated the availability and pricing of music for a very long time. In fact, there have been recurrent price-fixing and payola scandals for decades, as they attempt to exercise this monopoly power as though they're somehow above the law and above the natural laws of economics. They are the ones acting like monopolies, in fact; trying to abolish the music commons. There are many, like Bronfman, who want nothing more than that all of his music be encrypted, and that all of the labels participate in this cartel. They will then continue as before, or so they think. keeping the great majority of its signed acts in penury and debt slavery while promoting the hell out of a tiny few. This they will tell you is "protecting artists."
I'd rather have unprotected music, so that the labels would be forced to have a more open market, competing on recording quality, on the artists whom THEY WORK FOR, and their ability to guess what the public wants.
Imagine if you could buy a track, or an album digitally in aac, or in apple lossless; or buy that some album in 5.1 surround with an extra booklet and have it shipped to you.
Some 5 million tracks are, effectively, the great majority of recorded music up to this time. The online music stores give you access to all that plenty with a simple search term. Try doing that at the local record store.
For the record companies to say they have "intellectual property," first they have to show some intellect.
False premise. A universal, common DRM isn't the solution. DRM itself sucks. The common, universal element is music delivered in files that are engineered to sound as good as it's possible to sound. Period.
Only that stupid Norwegian "consumer" group and the RIAA think otherwise.
You'd think after the mountains of bad journalism and bad politics in the last 20 years, we'd have some sense. The article doesn't say what the slashdot poster seems to think it says. I guess making a report of a meeting of music execs into a "bash Jobs" fest is what makes this writer tick. C/Net is the home of sloppy, stupid journalism. "Many blamed" is a figure of speech, not journalism. Who blamed Jobs, and why? You mean, he didn't call for DRM to be dropped, or that he "wasn't sincere" about doing so? None of this approaches an elementary knowledge of the situation at this particular conference. In fact, the major execs all insisted on DRM, and Jobs called for them to drop it.
In fact, only the indie exec cited made any sense at all.
Although it might have been necessary for the FCC, and/or for building up anticipation, it also allows all the thumb-suckers to mold their arguments so they sound reasonable.
Like the Norwegian clowns who just happen to have the RIAA's stance in the upcoming music wars, how surprising that upshot of all this is that Apple will "have to give up its high-handed approach" to our brave businesses like AT&T wireless. And the survey. Gee, you want a lower price? Please accept the wireless subsidies. You just have to lock Bluetooth, and buy our ringtones.
Well, duh, don't you think there will be a widescreen iPod, no phone, at various prices?
See the page in WSJ where Verizon wouldn't go along with Apple's conditions? That's the story about Cingular.
The qwerty keyboard is why I don't use anything right now beyond a phone. Nobody, so far, has made a keypad for small devices... for humans. You either have the phone pad, which involes multiple taps for most letters -- yuck -- or a dinky little piece of junk keyboard that takes up half the available real estate. Will the Apple virtual keyboard be good enough? That remains to be seen. But it solves a lot of the problems inherent in tiny keyboards.
The price is very high. All the commentators said the iPod cost too much, too. They were not right. They couldn't keep up production fast enough. The result as been an entire line of iPods, from $79 to $400, and they're all selling, like, uh, iPods.
As for myself, I can't afford the first model, though I'd love one. By next year, though, I'll have one of these puppies.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=236
Technically, Cisco had legal control of the name, but in fact, all they did throughout the product cycle was do the bare legal requirements at the last minute, over and over. The fact is, in their filings, they showed the box of an old Skype phone they had brought out a year before, but had not called that. The picture on the cover is a mockup, and you can plainly see that "iPhone" is pasted on the box. They later, in November or December 2006, at the last possible moment, put out the same old unit, in a box that actually said, "iPhone" at last. Apparently, the pdf manual on the website didn't call it that. Looks like a purely legal rush to me, and hardly a real necessity to use that name on an important product. It looks, yawn, like a cordless phone from one of a dozen manufacturers, and as a Skype phone it's scarcely unique. I don't know how important in the law, but in the real world it sure is. They were actually willing to rebrand something just to farm for dollars, no?
Now, lemme tell you about secret agreements. If Apple had paid a ton of money, you'd be hearing semi-official rumors by now. Sort of like, "See how much our lawyers gouged out of them?" They would be officially denied, but insiders would have a good idea. The lack of even inflated figures, that the PR department denies after the rumor has had a chance to percolate, kind of says, "They caved" to me.
Whatever a patent attorney would say about this case, it's clear that either through personal animosity, or the desire to make a buck, Cisco put up a legal roadblock. If it was important to the Cisco brand, they would have put up a huge fight, and Apple probably would have had no choice but to back off. Possession being 9/10 of the law and all. But it's not important to Cisco, they were just playing games.
The rumors of the "iPhone" were never confirmed by Apple, but everybody used it. It didn't officially exist and it was already branded. I'm sure they had a name in reserve, if Cisco wanted to play hardball, and make the prospective of maybe losing the case in a couple of years and having to pay Cisco x dollars per phone, or shut down the iPhone until it could be renamed, or some other disaster. But Cisco just had bluster.
Now, why is it that Linksys routers are unique for their total lack of Mac support? I mean, you can use them, but you have to dust off the geek to get him going.
"Sweden and a few other European countries are now showing their backbone impling (not saying it outright, they don't want to piss off big business because that means less money for their economy) that business-controlled DRM is bad. Notice that they've never said anything about user-centric DRM..." What a perfect weasel that position is. If they want that, they should pass laws disallowing all corporate-driven DRM. But they're not going to because they're cowards. So what they're doing is completely counterproductive; they want to set in place a single DRM to rule us all -- but I'd rather have seperate DRM satrapies, which can be overwhelmed, than an international system enforcing that stupidity.
There are two paths: this idea of an "open-source DRM" ends up with DRM permanently in place. If you share the DRM, so what? A bunch of loser devices get to have a shot at iTunes, which remains copy-protected. If you're blinded enough by your hatred of Jobs, or if you're easily gulled enough to think that Plays4Sure is "open", then you maybe deserve what the labels have in mind.
If they abolished DRM, on the other hand, then the market would be open, fair and free. THEN if Apple really insists on an "iPod only" path, I'd be a little pissed off -- but then, there could be an honest competition for users of Plays4Sure stuff, after Microsoft has abandoned them.
Oh, by the way, the reason MS hasn't made a hardware device before is because they're trying the same deal as with Windows. Let other people put up the factories and capitalize. We'll write the software and collect the licensing whether your company goes to hell or not.
There's nothing magic about the iTunes store. All the same music, or just about, is available everywhere else. How come Windows doesn't share its DRM with Apple? How come they've dropped the Mac version of Windows Media? How come they insist on using WMA? You know, suddenly, because 70% prefer the iPod, people have their underwear in a twist. If you're a Microsoft shill, the hell with you. If you're an earnest open-sourcer, notice how you're being played and by whom. If you've gotten stuck with a Plays4Sure device and now it can't play anything on the Zune store, my sympathies, but I don't see why it's my problem.
Wait a minute, to claim intellectual property, shouldn't the owner first give evidence that they have an intellect?
Bronfman himself is the best argument against capitalism I've ever seen, and I'm pro-capitalist.
Or, even more, he's a one-man argument for a 100% Inheritance Tax.
Lend me your ears, and I'll tell you a tale.
Microsoft had over 90% of the market. That's step one, but even that is fine.
They then used that market power to force their browser on to the desktop, by threatening hardware manufacturers with economic ruin if they tried to install Netscape on the desktop. That is behaving like a monopoly.
If Apple has captured 70% of the market, that's not a monopoly. They're not threatening ANYBODY with anything but competition.
Not wanting to share DRM? If that's so great, why doesn't MS share? Or Real? I want to put Real media on my Zune with my Mac iTunes!!!! I can't do that, either.
In fact, the RIAA's policy is a) to allow the record labels to set pricing, not Mr. Jobs. Go with variable pricing: the average price, hint, hint, will be higher, won't it? If you want the Columbia Record Club experience, go with variable pricing; and b) the RIAA wants to share the DRM with Apple. Hint: this is the RIAA. That means the music cartel, or a big part of it, wants that. I thought all you hip bastards were anti-RIAA.
The only way out, EVEN IF STEVE JOBS WANTS IT, linux bois, is to abolish DRM, which is not only not accomplished if DRM is "shared," but the market becomes stable with DRM only. All the parties will then have no possibility of backing out. Everybody will be unified in screwing the consumer. Waytago!
Bronfman is the grandson of a bootlegger, but unlike Kennedy, he shows exactly zero sense in his fat head. An elitist gangster who is now on his way to screwing up his second corporation. Having accepted Gates's bribe on the Zune -- wow, he must have made $100,000 on that deal by now -- he now speaks with a golden tongue. What a maroon.
I think all you eager Apple-haters should notice one thing: what's the RIAA's opinion on all this? Why, they adopt the "Norwegian Consumer Orgy-Borgys" position on all this: that Apple should bite the bullet and share the profitable portion of its business with all the losers. The RIAA. Do you get it now, morons? In response, Jobs offers a truly free market, and the labels, most of them, run in fear. (Though I heard a rumor that EMI is actually considering it.)
What we need now is a consumer movement. You want to start a boycott of all online music until they drop DRM? I'll sign that petition. Will I angrily denounce Apple for not sharing its DRM? Not on your life. That's the RIAA's position, chowderheads.
If you have DRM, you are locked in. That's been the product of DRM, in fact, which was required by the studios. The studios had just come from their victory over Napster, and many of them, no doubt, wanted to go back to things just the way they were. Around came Jobs, saying downloads were continuing, but that if they made their music available cheaply online, they could lessen the losses of digital distribution. DRM was the price of admission -- and even then, they didn't all join at the same time.
It would be good if Disney agreed to letting their music go DRM-free.
Has it occurred to anybody to check the funding for the "security experts" who came up with MOAB. Billy seemed kind of familiar with it, didn't he? At least with its spin.
Since Microsoft has been well-known to fund phony grassroots activity, $20 million for phony lawsuits agains IBM and any flavor of linux you can name, and all kinds of dirty tricks, I'm just wondering who's doing the funding for the "security researchers." I mean, for a solid month, there's a trickle of pee about so-called security problems, and then, Vista is launched, and the CEO and founder is still hit with snide comparisons to the Mac and the iPod. Do I know it for sure? No. Would I put it past them? No.
I'd be proud to have her as a daughter. Any of you nerds want to mess with her, you'll deal with me. Seriously, I thought she was intelligent and genuine in the interview. Quite perceptive about the bizarre kind of celebrity that accrued to her.
I mean, they invented DRM to make our lives miserable, and now I discover that they invented national jurisdictions for copyright regulations and credit card sales just to piss off the internationalist commies amongst us.
.25 per track in the US -- to not charge .45 cents somewhere else.
Apple has spent a lot of time working out the details of the sometimes bizarre, sometimes rational national rules for sales. That's why the international sites took a while to get up and running. I remember reading, many times, about how impatient people were in this or that country to get going, and how angry they were that their credit cards were not recognized, even though they were good citizens of Zambesia, and how dare that George Bush who runs Apple frustrate world consumers? Now it turns out it was all a nasty plot to dominate music sales and withhold Japanese rock from the Western consumers.
More likely it was the labels refusing to cooperated, or the bands, or it was finding a way to get the credit cards -- who take
In Canada, there are Canadian content rules, for instance. Different rights organizations. Jesus.
A single repository for the world's music? Good idea. Rewrite your copyright laws, will you?
Well, then, bye-bye Norway. Why exactly should Apple make up new rules for Norway?
Plays4Sure only supports Windows. iPod supports both.
Oh, broadband isn't necessary. I downloaded a movie at 56k. I downloaded one movie, and it took me most of 2006.
Oh, the horror, the horror. If you want to find a way to force the labels to do away with DRM, fight the good fight. I'm with you. But why the hell should you and your friends start screwing up the way I like to listen to music? I like my iPod. I don't want a Zune or a Plays4Sure or anything else. I grab most of the music on my iPod from CDs and uh, other places. Mp3's play on everything. Sometimes I like to buy a song, or a whole album, from iTunes. I may have 200 purchased tracks. Why the hell do you have to be such a buzzkill? Do you think that screwing up other people's fun is what an activist does? And no, it's not a monopoly. You can get all the same tracks as the iTunes store has on a number of other services. No reason why you can't. There's no exclusivity in the iTunes store, as far as I know. That would be a monopoly. If Apple said, "If you make Dave Mason available on the Zune store, we'll drop all his tracks," that would be a monopolistic practice. They don't do that. Microsoft has paid Universal a fee on each Zune -- gee, Universal is a thousandaire by now! -- and allowed them and Sony to disable the "squirt" for their already-crippled WiFi on about half of their songs. With Apple, there's even a few hacks available to take the DRM off. Illegal, but I've heard some people do it. Not that I know how. And another thing, if this suit is successful, and Apple has to start loading songs on to other players for which they haven't gotten the money, they'll have to make the music store a profit center, which it's not now. Watch the iTunes prices go up. Thanks, Mr. Buzzkill.
I'm all for DRM being made illegal. But demanding that Apple open up its music while not requiring all Plays4Sure and Zune and other DRM schemes to be either open or interoperable is sheer stupidity. No, Apple doesn't have a monopoly. It has a large share of the market, but the same songs are available for all platforms and all players by: buying from another store, which have most of the same content and some that Apple doesn't have, or by ripping CDs, or, well, by those other means of copying music.
They've been 100% wrong so far. How many people do you think are going to hold off on buying something for $250 -- the 30 GB iPod -- so they can pick up something for $500-600? The iPod wasn't going to sell at all because it was $400. Then the cheaper ones would be better. Then Apple brought out cheaper ones, and an entire line of Flash iPods, and now there's iPods from $79 to $350. Somebody who has enough for an 80GB iPod but doesn't want a phone won't hold out for a monthly fee to AT&T and at least $500.
I'd also bet that there will be a whole passle of widescreen iPods eventually without phones.
Oh, but with all those iPod killers out there, iPod sales are falling and iTunes sales are collapsing. Except they sold 21 million of them the last quarter, and iTunes sold its two-billionth song a little while ago.
This "Apple" section is not an Apple section, in the sense that it is information about Apple, and differing opinions about this or that. This place is like the DNC being taken over by Karl Rove. Every single goddamned story is just a bunch of second-guessing FUD and spin. What does Mr. Smartypants think that Apple should have done? Leaked the whole thing to the rumor sites? Launched it like the Zune? Launched it like that cool tablet thing that isn't selling more than 12 copies? Asked C/Net if it was okay to do it? Asked the FCC to break the news? If they have a 3.5" screen, it should have been bigger but the phone itself smaller. The screen, which nobody but about 12 people have touched, is no good. It's no good because it doesn't have shiny little buttons like my Blackberry. It doesn't have an alt-delete key??? What's it got, a one-button mouse???? How dare Apple have something popular, they're just for the artistic set. How dare they have a computer which hasn't, of yet, had any serious viruses? Who the hell do they think they are, anyway?
That's why I go to Digg.