In my view Apple has absolutely no right to keep Dave Winer's drive old drive as it had not been replaced on a warranty basis (instead, he paid a hefty price for the new one).
IANAL, but it seems clear that Dave has perfect legal ownership to both drives as he has paid for both of them (supposing labor costs for the drive exchange have either been charged separately or were included in the new drives price).
... a download center for lossless audio. This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music
Whoever will be going to set up such a thing should keep in mind that people who spend thousands of dollars (make this dozens of thousands, if you like) for their audio equipment are not just picky when it comes to the format of the tracks they are offered.
They are equally picky in terms of recording/encoding quality of the tracks, to start with.
They won't be willing to deal with any kind of DRM, watermarks and other annoying side effects.
And last but not least, they are especially demanding when it comes to content. Real content, top quality content. For many of the audiophiles this will be Classical music, featuring the world's top orchestras, conductors and voices, including a tagging scheme that finally makes sense in operas and symphonies, etc. etc.
This could be achieved, but then we're not in Kansas... err... mainstream music business anymore, as we know it today.
Otherwise most people in the target group will just laugh all the way to their favourite downtown CD-and-vinyl stores.
Who wouldn't want a WinXP version with source code attached?
Count me in here. I wouldn't.
If i was Negroponte, i wouldn't say a flat 'NO'. I would ask for the source code:)
If I were Negroponte, I'd do exactly what he did before: I'd say "No" to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and an equally clear "No" to Steve Jobs, too.;-)
As much as I love my n800/770 I do remember that early on Nokia needed a very firm reminder (more so than they may admit) that they had to release kernel source of the actual kernel not just the source they started from. Once they (Asus) fall in line, the community can then get behind them and make that rock really roll!
That's the way the gpl-violations.org people usually work:
They have approached companies like D-Link, Edimax, Gigabyte, Longshine, Sitecom for alleged GPL infringements. Most cases have been finally settled out of court.
Main target is to educate these companies, to explain them what GPL means, eventually to show them how easy it is to be a good citizen of the community world, in order to let them find out by themselves later how rewarding it might turn out to be as well.
The community world is a culture different from the company world and culture, and very much so.
To OpenMoko, the Android will be far less of a threat than to the traditional closed source mobile platforms, all of them (including the recently released ones).
Asus has also been making notebooks for Apple for many years
Even worse.
Another foe to GNU/GPLed FOSS software.
But as long Asus doesn't pre-install Windows, billing me the usual rate, _and_ as long as I can install my favourite Linux distribution instead of Xandros...;-)
... can only be bought out by Microsoft - out of existence eventually, that is.
As we all know, this would not be a monetary problem for MS, and maybe MS would consider such a "get them out of the way" option to be of much higher value than the "keep them running to whatever purpose" strategy.
Grab them, mine their assets (most likely, good bits of software heavily in use in the Open Source universe), change the licences of all their software, especially the GPL ones, to "as-closed-as-can-be" and then, shut them down.
I think this could be a serious problem for Apple because the one thing Apple traditionally has going for them over other companies is that other companies make their products too complex. But Google keeps things simple and cheap.
This will be certainly a serious problem for Apple.
People will just love to have a choice of ten or more hardware devices.
And there are some people who do not look for a particular PC (even less, for a particular OS), they just want to have "Google" (like five years ago there's been a considerable proportion of newbie and non-technical users who wanted to have "Internet", remember?). I presume that their number is growing...
Novell, RedHat, PCLinuxOS, Freespire, Sabayon, Mandriva, Ubuntu, slackware, gentoo etc. haven't a clue how many boxes their distribution is installed on, but I bet it's many many times their traceable installed base.
Agreed.
And there's another stretching going on, favouring Windows' numbers.
The other way round, if you buy a PC with Windows pre-installed and you do not launch this Windows even once, but wipe the hard drive instantly in order to do a Linux installation, the one OS that will get an "add 1" in the "market share" aspect will be Windows. Currently, there's no way a next-day Linux install could ever lead to a "subtract 1" from the Windows numbers...
One PC sold, one Windows counted - following the "market share" model, it has been as simple (and misleading) as this, for many years.
It might be even more irrelevant when somebody tries to guess something like "installed base" numbers of OSes, based on such shaky "market share" values...
When you buy a mobile phone... let them go through the process of registering and "locking" it (they do this WITHOUT telling you usually sneakly... BEFORE you hand over your money, ask them to try it again.. plop in YOUR alterntaive SIM card, then when it wont work, hand it back and say you dont want it because it doesnt work:) They have now a DEAD phone as they registered and locked it. The sales guy is in the deep shit now:) Walk out grinning:)
Hmmm... great. I like this idea.
But won't the sales people do this registering and stealth "locking" only _after_ the customer has signed a contract?
New Zealand Mac users missing DST patch Apple has yet to issue a patch adjusting to a change in New Zealand's seasonal times, Mac users from the country complain.
... by this Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, formally-legally.
I don't know. IANAL.
Still, there's a point to the suggestion raised here:
--- Shame on Apple!...
Frankly, I think the solution is to quickly organize a massive "Do Not Buy Apple Products" day before the new firmware comes out. Maybe October 1. Send a message to Apple that they enjoy success at our pleasure, and that a second rate iPhone experience is not acceptable and not what we've come to expect from Apple.
So on October 1, do not run Software Update. Do not buy an iPhone. Do not buy Mac apps at all, including shareware or third party OS X stuff. Let's piss off Apple, let's piss off small developers who will have no one to complain to but Apple.... ---
... youth counselor instead, who put the photo into Flickr and chose a CC licence for it?
And in addition, perhaps, Flickr itself (although I am not sure about that)?
Please note, IANAL.
Sueing Creative Commons here looks like sueing the publisher of a law textbook because "my case in court did not work like the example in your book"...
exactly flying off the shelves recently (they sold less in each of the whole months July and August than in the two last days of June), what else could Apple have done than lowering the price, and drastically so?
Obviously, Apple did not expect the turmoil that followed, so they had to do something, quickly. So they chose the vouchers.
Btw, I wonder how long the 4GB iPhones, officially discontinued, will be on special sale "while supplies last" in the U.S. online store? The duration of their availability (starting the day count last Wednesday) will give non-insiders a rough idea how big the inventories have actually been.
This particular blue vs pink thing may have come out very different in different parts of the world.
Well said.
In the sixteenth century it was the habit at the royal Spanish court to dress the royal boys in red/pink, their sisters wearing light blue - the classic "baby colours" of our days, just the other way round. In those days, the Spanish court had a lot of influence on the French court, which in turn influenced all the other courts in Europe.
In my theory, babies' and childrens' clothes chosen like this (or the other way round) was a way to show extreme wealth and power. The material was mostly silk, the dyes were most probably indigo and purple (both very expensive then).
These colors became affordable to the commoners only later when blue and bright red pigments became available as cheaper products from easier accessible overseas "sources" (such as big-scale farming in the colonies) and, eventually, the rising chemical industry.
Somewhere in this "trickle-down" process from the royal household to Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins, the assignment of pink to boys and blue to girls was reversed. Maybe just a little misunderstanding.:-)
The customer Apple is targetting thinks Putty is silly, Citrix is a vitamin C supplement, and RDP is a French police department.:-)
That describes the Apple Fans very well (I'm not talking about Mac users in general here, just the kind of people who are referring to Jobs as "Steve" in the forums).
Having been a Mac user myself for more than twenty years now, btw.
This is why I would bite the bullet and buy an unlocked phone where the carrier cannot sabotage my phone's capabilities. Speaking of unlocked phones, who's looking forward to the Neo1973?
Slashdot Mirror
Each of them is a serious threat to MS.
Together, they are Redmond's nightmare. In the long run, MS cannot beat them.
As often, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
In my view Apple has absolutely no right to keep Dave Winer's drive old drive as it had not been replaced on a warranty basis (instead, he paid a hefty price for the new one).
IANAL, but it seems clear that Dave has perfect legal ownership to both drives as he has paid for both of them (supposing labor costs for the drive exchange have either been charged separately or were included in the new drives price).
... a download center for lossless audio. This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music
Whoever will be going to set up such a thing should keep in mind that people who spend thousands of dollars (make this dozens of thousands, if you like) for their audio equipment are not just picky when it comes to the format of the tracks they are offered.
They are equally picky in terms of recording/encoding quality of the tracks, to start with.
They won't be willing to deal with any kind of DRM, watermarks and other annoying side effects.
And last but not least, they are especially demanding when it comes to content. Real content, top quality content. For many of the audiophiles this will be Classical music, featuring the world's top orchestras, conductors and voices, including a tagging scheme that finally makes sense in operas and symphonies, etc. etc.
This could be achieved, but then we're not in Kansas... err... mainstream music business anymore, as we know it today.
Otherwise most people in the target group will just laugh all the way to their favourite downtown CD-and-vinyl stores.
Who wouldn't want a WinXP version with source code attached?
:)
;-)
Count me in here. I wouldn't.
If i was Negroponte, i wouldn't say a flat 'NO'. I would ask for the source code
If I were Negroponte, I'd do exactly what he did before:
I'd say "No" to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and an equally clear "No" to Steve Jobs, too.
As much as I love my n800/770 I do remember that early on Nokia needed a very firm reminder (more so than they may admit) that they had to release kernel source of the actual kernel not just the source they started from.
Once they (Asus) fall in line, the community can then get behind them and make that rock really roll!
That's the way the gpl-violations.org people usually work:
http://www.gpl-violations.org/
They have approached companies like D-Link, Edimax, Gigabyte, Longshine, Sitecom for alleged GPL infringements. Most cases have been finally settled out of court.
Main target is to educate these companies, to explain them what GPL means, eventually to show them how easy it is to be a good citizen of the community world, in order to let them find out by themselves later how rewarding it might turn out to be as well.
The community world is a culture different from the company world and culture, and very much so.
What does this mean for OpenMoko?
To OpenMoko, the Android will be far less of a threat than to the traditional closed source mobile platforms, all of them (including the recently released ones).
Asus has also been making notebooks for Apple for many years
;-)
Even worse.
Another foe to GNU/GPLed FOSS software.
But as long Asus doesn't pre-install Windows, billing me the usual rate, _and_ as long as I can install my favourite Linux distribution instead of Xandros...
... can only be bought out by Microsoft - out of existence eventually, that is.
As we all know, this would not be a monetary problem for MS, and maybe MS would consider such a "get them out of the way" option to be of much higher value than the "keep them running to whatever purpose" strategy.
Grab them, mine their assets (most likely, good bits of software heavily in use in the Open Source universe), change the licences of all their software, especially the GPL ones, to "as-closed-as-can-be" and then, shut them down.
... to millions of brains, for many years.
Only now, they want read privileges to them as well.
I think this could be a serious problem for Apple because the one thing Apple traditionally has going for them over other companies is that other companies make their products too complex. But Google keeps things simple and cheap.
This will be certainly a serious problem for Apple.
People will just love to have a choice of ten or more hardware devices.
And there are some people who do not look for a particular PC (even less, for a particular OS), they just want to have "Google" (like five years ago there's been a considerable proportion of newbie and non-technical users who wanted to have "Internet", remember?). I presume that their number is growing...
Novell, RedHat, PCLinuxOS, Freespire, Sabayon, Mandriva, Ubuntu, slackware, gentoo etc. haven't a clue how many boxes their distribution is installed on, but I bet it's many many times their traceable installed base.
Agreed.
And there's another stretching going on, favouring Windows' numbers.
The other way round, if you buy a PC with Windows pre-installed and you do not launch this Windows even once, but wipe the hard drive instantly in order to do a Linux installation, the one OS that will get an "add 1" in the "market share" aspect will be Windows. Currently, there's no way a next-day Linux install could ever lead to a "subtract 1" from the Windows numbers...
One PC sold, one Windows counted - following the "market share" model, it has been as simple (and misleading) as this, for many years.
It might be even more irrelevant when somebody tries to guess something like "installed base" numbers of OSes, based on such shaky "market share" values...
So we have the weak point (or, one of the weak points, resp.?) of the scheme here. ;-)
Thanks for clarifying.
When you buy a mobile phone... let them go through the process of registering and "locking" it (they do this WITHOUT telling you usually sneakly... BEFORE you hand over your money, ask them to try it again.. plop in YOUR alterntaive SIM card, then when it wont work, hand it back and say you dont want it because it doesnt work :) They have now a DEAD phone as they registered and locked it. The sales guy is in the deep shit now :) Walk out grinning :)
Hmmm... great. I like this idea.
But won't the sales people do this registering and stealth "locking" only _after_ the customer has signed a contract?
... maybe not, but Apple is:
New Zealand Mac users missing DST patch
Apple has yet to issue a patch adjusting to a change in New Zealand's seasonal times, Mac users from the country complain.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/09/28/new.zealand.dst.problems/
To order, one can use any valid combination of state and ZIP code, like CA for California and 95014 for Cupertino. ;-)
After all, there's no physical delivery...
... by this Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, formally-legally.
...
...
I don't know.
IANAL.
Still, there's a point to the suggestion raised here:
---
Shame on Apple!
Frankly, I think the solution is to quickly organize a massive "Do Not Buy Apple Products" day before the new firmware comes out. Maybe October 1. Send a message to Apple that they enjoy success at our pleasure, and that a second rate iPhone experience is not acceptable and not what we've come to expect from Apple.
So on October 1, do not run Software Update. Do not buy an iPhone. Do not buy Mac apps at all, including shareware or third party OS X stuff. Let's piss off Apple, let's piss off small developers who will have no one to complain to but Apple.
---
http://firsttube.com/read/Shame-on-Apple
http://wiki.openmoko.org/
or a (hypothetical) Pocket Debian or a similar Free/OpenSource software platform.
Otherwise, the iPhone isn't a Smartphone.
... youth counselor instead, who put the photo into Flickr and chose a CC licence for it?
And in addition, perhaps, Flickr itself (although I am not sure about that)?
Please note, IANAL.
Sueing Creative Commons here looks like sueing the publisher of a law textbook because "my case in court did not work like the example in your book"...
Walter.
exactly flying off the shelves recently (they sold less in each of the whole months July and August than in the two last days of June), what else could Apple have done than lowering the price, and drastically so?
Obviously, Apple did not expect the turmoil that followed, so they had to do something, quickly. So they chose the vouchers.
Btw, I wonder how long the 4GB iPhones, officially discontinued, will be on special sale "while supplies last" in the U.S. online store? The duration of their availability (starting the day count last Wednesday) will give non-insiders a rough idea how big the inventories have actually been.
This particular blue vs pink thing may have come out very different in different parts of the world.
:-)
Well said.
In the sixteenth century it was the habit at the royal Spanish court to dress the royal boys in red/pink, their sisters wearing light blue - the classic "baby colours" of our days, just the other way round. In those days, the Spanish court had a lot of influence on the French court, which in turn influenced all the other courts in Europe.
In my theory, babies' and childrens' clothes chosen like this (or the other way round) was a way to show extreme wealth and power. The material was mostly silk, the dyes were most probably indigo and purple (both very expensive then).
These colors became affordable to the commoners only later when blue and bright red pigments became available as cheaper products from easier accessible overseas "sources" (such as big-scale farming in the colonies) and, eventually, the rising chemical industry.
Somewhere in this "trickle-down" process from the royal household to Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins, the assignment of pink to boys and blue to girls was reversed. Maybe just a little misunderstanding.
And am I correct in thinking that locking a phone is illegal in Germany?
In Germany (and some other countries), it isn't.
In Belgium (and maybe some other countries), it is.
Things like these might be even more confusing to some billion-dollar-company execs in the U.S.
... to read this. :-(
:-)
And then they will ask Apple a few questions, I presume.
The customer Apple is targetting thinks Putty is silly, Citrix is a vitamin C supplement, and RDP is a French police department. :-)
That describes the Apple Fans very well (I'm not talking about Mac users in general here, just the kind of people who are referring to Jobs as "Steve" in the forums).
Having been a Mac user myself for more than twenty years now, btw.
Walter.
does it runs linux?
Obviously not, but perhaps
"Of course it runs NetBSD".
http://www.netbsd.org/
(That said, Debian running here anyway...)
This is why I would bite the bullet and buy an unlocked phone where the carrier cannot sabotage my phone's capabilities. Speaking of unlocked phones, who's looking forward to the Neo1973?
;-)
I am (and some of my friends are, too).
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo1973
Availability of GTA02 version scheduled for October