Apple has been delivering QT for Windows for over a decade. QT does more than play MOV files, it's a playback and editing architecture.
There is nothing "anticompetitive" about Apple delivering QT for Windows and delivering the entire functionality of QT.
Microsoft decided not to continue to deliver WMP for the Mac, making their WM DRM v10 and later Windows only. It then decided it would be better to support WMA playback (non DRM) in QT by buying and licensing existing QT codecs rather than continuing development for the Mac.
Microsoft's video strategy has been so erratic and vaporous over the last decade that there's no conspiracy theory to blame for Apple not supporting it with plugins. Microsoft made lots of promises about Active Movie and then Direct-branded software that never materialized. Apple has no moral obligation to bend to Microsoft's flavor of the week with DirectShow, which itself is tied to the Windows monopoly. There's also nothing stopping anyone from writing MOV codecs or container support for DirectShow apart from a lack of commercial viability.
So to wrap things up for you: QuickTime works on both the Mac and PC, and is universally used for the vast majority of media downloads. Microsoft has no cohesive strategy, has no significant business in media downloads, and is losing the battle for pushing its Windows Media DRM and WMV-based HD-DVD. So why would Apple need to bail Microsoft out by adding MOV support (container or codec or do you know what you're even talking about?) to whatever Microsoft has trotted out as its current video strategy? You're so simple.
- Apple sold 4 billion tracks and is maintaining sustainable profits while growing its music business rapidly in per song sales. - Rhapsody is stuck with the same niche of music renters and can't find new ones, just like PressPlay and Duet and all the rental losers before it.
Rhapsody did however manage to pull MTV's urge out of WMP and the Zune software, leaving a big hole in Microsoft's trousers. This didn't seem to have much of positive impact on Rhapsody though. Real is now promoting per track song sales.
When you say "a company that can't let in a little competition," are you arguing that:
- Apple has thwarted any retail market for devices that are not iPods, as Microsoft prevented the sale of DOS and Windows alternatives? - that Apple should be forced to license FairPlay to other companies, like how Microsoft was forced to license Office to rival third parties for resale under different brands? - that Apple should be forced to fund alternatives to iTunes for use with the iPod, the way Microsoft has enabled integration with Notes clients from Exchange, or CalDAV from Outlook clients, or WiiConnect compatibility from the Xbox 360? - that the iPod should play WMA DRM, just like Microsoft supports PlayStation 3 games on the Xbox 360? - that Fairplay should work on PlaysForSure players, just as Microsoft had to support Win32 apps on Unix?
Because any of those ideas would be batshit nuts. What were you really thinking?
And when in recent history has Apple become "even worse than the big bad wolf Microsoft," as I missed the story about:
- two decades of holding back better technology, - promising vaporware that wasn't delivered for years if ever, - being charged with monopoly market exploitation and overcharging customers by various states and countries, - attempting to cover it up political astroturf campaigns uncovered by the LA Times, - delivering unusable technology at absurd prices, - raising the price of a desktop OS by 400 percent - stealing code and violating copyright while advertising anti-piracy campaigns - tightening spyware-policed phone home DRM on their OS - starting a format war to control the world's media DRM and push a shitty authoring system like HDi - working to raise the price of media downloads while killing off all fair use rights like WMA and WMV - shipping a new OS whose main features revolve around HD DRM policing and OS Activation - inventing Paladium - delivering a crappy mobile OS they can't hardly sell but would love to stick the world with - delivering a proprietary alternative to PDF, JPEG, MP3, H.264, Java, OpenDocument and every other open format with the intent to screw the world with a poorly designed file architecture that forces dependence upon a derelict monopoly... or anything else Microsoft-like. When did any of those things happen? Or are you talking about specific evils of Apple, such as:
- delivering an open sourced alternative to the NT kernel - delivering an open sourced, standards based alternative to the IE browser engine - delivering an advanced graphics compositing engine for Vista to copy 7 years later - delivering the advanced Cocoa frameworks to power Mac OS X and the iPhone, well ahead of.NET - delivering a smartphone that blows away the state of the art and forces innovation into a dead industry - promoting an open alternative to DirectX in OpenGL - promoting an open alternative to WMA DRM with the MP3 playing iPod - promoting a mild DRM that offers fair use rights to revitalize the dead music industry - promoting an end to DRM restrictions in music downloads - promoting an open alternative to WMV/VC-1 by pushing joint development of ISO MPEG standards - creating a competitive music player that sells better than DRM obsessed, subscription touting rivals - creating a competitive operating system that sells better than DRM obsessed, authorization touting Vista - promoting the use of open file formats such as PDF, PNG, MP3/AAC, H.264, OpenDocument - promoting a standards based web and working on HTML 5 rather than a Win32/.NET/Flash-based web - contributing back to the GPL/BSD community in core OS, security, and web rendering - developing a calendar server and releasing it to the community under the free Apache license
Anyway, that's why there's a difference. Not sure why its so invisible to you. Also, the sky is generally blue on clear days.
The context of "shrink wrapped commercial software" mentioned by the OP was QuickBooks, not an enterprise database server. Oracle is supporting Linux for the same reason IBM is. Those reasons have nothing to do with desktop commercial software.
However, I could grant you that if WalMart/Dell/HP began delivering a common low cost PC alternative running Ubuntu or something similar, there could easily develop a consumer software market. The problem is, the only viable market for such a Linux PC would be a super cheap system, and consumers don't really understand the value of software (ie won't pay for it unless they are forced to do so).
As you point out yourself, most Linux users (or Linux-minded users) don't see any need to buy commercial software, which was my whole point. It's not a value judgement, its just an observation.
Look at the mobile phone software market: no demand, no value apps, everything is over priced junk because consumers won't pay anything for it if they can steal it, and developers who write anything of any value will charge a silly price to try to get something for their work. So Palm OS software games were $15-20 for a shitty game, and more complex apps tried to sell for nearly $100. No market, no demand, no supply.
If Apple sets up an iTunes store for iPod Touch/iPhone software, that might change. Its current $5 iPod games are apparently making enough money to get the attention of EA and other developers who see a market in it. If Apple can get people to pay a little and buy in volume without stealing everything, it will establish a market, create demand, and supply will arrive to meet it.
There is no existing market for Linux on the consumer desktop, and no viable reason to think there will be one that develops. That might not be a problem for the existing users of Linux, particularly if they can get the few apps they need to run using something like Wine. The Mac game market is pretty much in the same boat: a Wine CIDER wrapper is the best bet to get enough games available to make most Mac users happy. the Mac doesn't need and won't rapidly get a big gaming market unless things change dramatically at Apple.
QT has flaws, but unless you're using it to play media or have installed web plugins, they are not exploitable, are they? With IE, any app can access the network and do anything, even if you've deleted your blue e icon.
Final Cut Pro and After Effects are QuickTime programs. So retard, you can't use them without using QuickTime. Sorry I didn't point out the color of the sky for you, mr. pedantic asshat. However, you can play all the OGG files you want using VLC without invoking QT, while you couldn't use Netscape exclusively to browse the web prior to the Feds mandating that Microsoft back down, which it did after Netscape was no longer relevant. Nobody is really competing against QT on Mac OS X, and even Microsoft delivers its competing WMA/WMV codecs as QT components rather than a QT replacement.
It's not really clear what you're trying to shout out your ass. If all you can bark about is abstract theoretical postulations, perhaps you should be doing it alone in the dark of your basement where it would make some sense, rather than blowing your nonsense load all over Slashdot for no obvious reason.
you're kidding right? A DRM format that continues to deliver its side of the bargain after the business model fails? Google Video, NFL, PlaysForSure, etc ad nauseam.
DRM seems to be a fair way to rent movies temporarily or to buy music you can burn to CDs at any point. Outside of that, its a "trust me!" game that you shouldn't trust past what you can't afford to lose at any moment in time.
Apple doesn't "obfuscate the file on the ipod during the file transfer." If you're thinking of the private file system iTunes copies to the iPod when it copies tracks over (whether MP3/AAC or AAC-Fairplay), what's going on is that iTunes gives all the files identically long, pseudo-random file names to optimize reading and file system transversal on the iPod.
It's not designed to hide anything, only to make reading files and transversing the file system simple. That's why you can browse the hidden directory and copy files back manually. Song files are hidden primarily to prevent users from mucking with the files once iTunes copies them over, so that the software won't have to deal with verifying file system integrity and externally edited files or directories. If Apple really wanted to hide the files or prevent you from getting them off, it knows how to create an encrypted file system disk image.
Modifying the iPod's firmware to play back WMA wouldn't be impossible it seems, but doing so would be legally difficult for a commercial company. Rockbox and Linux can already run on the classic iPods. However, Apple could repeatedly bork every attempt with new firmware updates, just as it did to stop Real from shoving its DRM on the iPod.
Apple is happy having Amazon sell MP3s for the iPod, but they're not going to stand for Helix, WMA or any other DRM system locking up music in a way that takes advantage of the iPod. Also, with Apple now selling two families of iPod, rolling out a system that works on both the Nano/Classic and the Touch/iPhone would be far more difficult for a Fairplay-compatible system like Real tried to do with Helix. They only copied the basic ACC format, no messing with the firmware.
Getting WMA to play on the iPod would require a very sophisticated firmware change, and only the classic iPods are known to have WMA capable hardware. The Touch/iPhone likely only has hardware support for H.264.
Playing ads on the iPod using DRM tracks would be absurd. It would be much easier to just serve up songs as video podcasts running ads or videos with ads, just like TV and the web, where users can ignore ads. Forcing the screen to play would rape battery life though, and who really needs ads to sponsor songs they can get for 99 cents or from CDs they own? A foolish idea all around it seems.
While you can draw a parallel in abstractions, it's really not the same thing at all.
IE is a program that relies upon a rendering engine Microsoft tightly integrated into the OS in order to make it difficult for competitors to offer a rival browser, and as a way to force development that required IE instead of any browser. In addition, Windows also has graphics capabilities that are tied to its proprietary DirectX software rather than using cross platform standards such as OpenGL.
Apple has a browser, Safari, and provides system wide rendering functions using the WebKit engine. While you can't really tear WebKit out of the OS, it doesn't matter because it poses no real threat to competitive browsers. Apple also has a graphics subsystem, initially QuickDraw and then Quartz, which both served as the models for Microsoft's GDI and its new compositing engine in Vista. Parts of Quartz support the functions of QuickTime, so while you can remove QuickTime on an application level, eviscerating all support for anything connected to QuickTime would also bork the system
However, it really makes no sense to associate QuickTime with IE, in large part because there is no anti-competitive basis for QT being integrated into the OS, and no real downside. If you don't use QT, you can stop updating it and there's no problem. If you don't use IE, you're still in danger of security problems Microsoft built into the design, and applications can invoke the IE plumbing to do things you are not aware of and don't want to happen. QT has none of those problems if you don't choose to use it.
Which is why the answer to your previous question about seeing shrink wrapped Linux software anytime soon is: no.
Supply and demand. The core group of people running Linux on the desktop do so for one of three reasons:
- they don't want to pay for or support commercial software (free as in GNU) - they don't want to pay the Microsoft tax or pay for anything else (free as in five finger discount) - they don't want to follow the crowd or generally prefer Linux (free as a bird)
None of those reasons really support a commercial market for Linux software. Compare the main reasons why people buy into the other significant alternative PC platform, Apple's Mac:
- they don't want to run Windows (they pay Apple for Mac OS X ) - they want to run something that just works (they pay a premium for hardware/software integration) - they like the community/brand/marketing (and they pay to join)
It should come as no surprise why the Mac platform has a pretty rich supply of software, despite having less than 10% of the market for computer sales. Take servers and business PCs out of the worldwide PC market, and Apple has a 15-20% share of the consumer market and 50-70% of the education market. Add in 20-27% of the US mobile phone market and 99% of the WiFi mobile media handheld market, and it looks like there'll be a lot more consumer software for the Mac to come.
Why would anyone develop commercial software (let alone shrinkwraped retail boxes) for Linux, given that nobody is using it on the desktop who would also buy retail software? How many copies of Quickbooks could one sell to companies running Linux as a firewall or headless LAMP deployment? It makes sense that IBM is releasing its Lotus Notes and Symphony suite (aka rebranded OpenOffice) for Linux, because it is targeting Linux in the Enterprise and hopes to foster the replacement of Windows desktops with Linux (and Exchange Server with Notes/Domino). It doesn't make much sense for anyone else to release consumer software for Linux.
The MacBook Air does stack up well against other ultra thin laptops in its category however, mixing leading performance, graphics capabilities, a full size keyboard and display with an ultra-thin package priced very competitively. And it solves many of the engineering tradeoffs with light and thin laptops in software. So it should blend in well with the rest of the hot selling MacBook line.
"The EV-1 failed because battery technology isn't good enough for an electric car... just look at the wikipedia article on it."
Gasoline technology of the 40s wasn't good enough either. That's why we kept investing in research and development. This principle also works in other areas. Do you think batteries couldn't improve, or shouldn't, or that it wouldn't benefit the US economy to have advancement going on in battery technology? Do you think the EV-1 wasn't good enough for urban drivers in CA, where the primary market was? It didn't need to immediately replace pickups in Montana.
"Hygrogen cars *are* electric cars"
Thanks genius! The problem with hydrogen is that its the least dense fuel in the Universe, hard to store, and hard to deliver (recharging stations had already been built out across CA and could be installed at home cost effectively). So while both might involve electricity, hydrogen involves all sorts of engineering problems that are outrageously difficult to solve and require massive investment in infrastructure.
There are busses running on hydrogen fuel cells, the problem is that it's not easy to set up consumers with a reasonably sized car with enough storage to hold enough gas and supply enough refueling opportunities.
By cutting all support for any reasonable alt fuel development and throwing federal support behind the pipe dream of hydrogen, Bush very clearly was mandating what GM and other US companies would do. Perpetuating the myth that government policy has no effect on business isn't helpful. Government can work to effectively regulate, or can banish intelligent regulations and set up tax breaks for the companies that support whoever's in charge. The latter is not lean effective government even if the neocons want you to believe it.
You sure managed to blow out a bunch of nonsensical, poorly thought out, irrelevant chit chat before telling me that the reality of public policy is a "conspiracy theory" and that my facts aren't right. Are you drinking, or just a moron?
And the Tesla Roadster, being put together in a Lotus garage in the UK, has what to do with practical EV or other alternative fuel development and research in the US?
If you're having trouble conceiving Bush's every major decision with supporting Bush/Saudi oil, maybe you should better inform yourself. Also, why did Bush just stop California from enacting its own CAFE-type fuel standards? No progress in effeciency means more short term profits for selling Bush/Saudi oil.
Do you really think its a wild conspiracy theory that Bush is associated with and supportive of Bush/Saudi oil as the exclusive energy source of the US? Do you think Bush makes nothing from a string of administrative decisions that have made Bush/Saudi oil the exclusive energy source of the US? I didn't say Bush stopped GM from making the EV1, only that once in power, he stopped all positive investment in credible alt energy sources and made it impossibly impractical to invest in non Bush/Saudi oil ventures.
Actually the government plays a huge role in making GM's business decisions. Carter drafted laws that mandated the CAFE MPG regulations that pushed carmakers to be more aggressive and innovative in their engineering, and mandated catalytic converters so that society wouldn't be enshrouded in a perpetual cancerous smog. The result was less dependence on foreign oil, cleaner air, and more efficient use of resources.
Reagan scribbled out regulations, pushing carmakers to dial back the amount of effort they put into safety and economy, and instead invested in securing relations with the Saudis to ensure oil would be cheap enough to prevent competition. This was exactly the same as having a ditto head administrator clear out all the mainframe terminals and minis and replace them with "client server" PCs running Windows: it appeared to be cheap, but ensured a monopoly where there would only be one flawed product, one flawed vendor, and it would become outrageously expensive as it also prevented any new competition from arising.
The oil monopoly was not an example of free market economics, but fascist corporate collusion with government. You're right that Reagan and Bush didn't invest in alternative fuels because they supported the Bush/Saudi oil monopoly. But Clinton did push alternative energy. When Bush II arrived, that was all cleaned out for the shell game of hydrogen, which Bush knew would sound good while accomplishing nothing other than to single source US energy back to Bush/Saudi oil.
You can give Bush credit for handing corporations money to play with hydrogen, but this hasn't accomplished anything in the last 8 years other than to prevent any rational alternative energy research and keep us tied to Bush/Saudi oil. Notice that Bush/Saudi oil has also jumped from under a dollar in the early 90s under Clinton to nearly $4 under a decade of Bush. Also notice how Windows has changed from being around $100 in the early 90s to being $400 with Vista.
That's what you get when you have no free market operating, and monopolize an industry under one vendor with no regulations to check what they do. If we're only going to have one OS vendor, we should mandate some kind of minimum functionality and reliability standards for operating systems and encourage competition. If we only have one fuel source, we should mandate efficiency standards and encourage competition.
Sorry to explode your neocon brain with some reality. Now go back to your scheduled Fox programming and learn more about how "no other administration has offered a single penny of federal money to spur any type of alternative fuels/energy research, but Bush did." Retards like you are significant part of the reason why the US is fucked.
Then why did GM refuse to market, sell, or continue the EV-1? As soon as Bush came to power, the government dismantled all electric car development efforts and immediately began talking about hydrogen, a silly and impractical power source that couldn't be economically feasible in our lifetime, even if little other progress was ever made in any other alternative fuel.
US car companies were ahead of the game in developing all electric cars and in hybrids, but that all got pushed aside to make room for a bullshit smoke and mirrors ad campaign that featured CA Gov. Schwartzenegger driving around in a million dollar hydrogen Hummer prototype that only served as an "environmental" placeholder so everyone would forget about any real alternative to Bush/Saudi oil.
That enabled Bush/Saudi oil to raise significantly in price without any competition, ensuring rich profits for those selling oil over the current decade, and guaranteeing that little progress would be made in finding any real alternatives until 2008 by the earliest. Even if the US embarked on immediate sensible energy policy immediately after Bush is removed from the White House, there will be little prospects for any real competition to Bush/Saudi oil in the next five years.
GM and other car makers aren't so much for oil as they are resistant to any change. And in the current political climate, there's more profits in building huge oil burning tanks like the Hummer, which the current administration lined up with huge tax subsidies, than in building or researching alternative energy vehicles.
Microsoft pushed HD-DVD because it wanted to push VC-1 (aka Windows Media 9) and HD1 (based on WinCE). The Blu-Ray camp paid to license VC-1, but most titles were initially MPEG-2, and are now transitioning to MPEG-4 / H-264. BR also uses a Java-based titling system rather than Microsoft's HDi.
So the loss of HD-DVD, which Microsoft was also pushing in Vista, was a huge blow to Microsoft's video/embedded operations as well.
Michael Bay (the director of Transformers and other explosion movies) complained that Microsoft was supporting HD-DVD to prevent BR from growing and then jumped to the conclusion that Microsoft was trying to kill both HD disc formats in order to promote its downloads. That was angry speculation, not fact. Bay simply wants to sell his HD-friendly explosion movies on HD, and was pissed that his studio signed up with what was obviously the losing side in HD-DVD.
If Microsoft shot itself in the face with HD-DVD as part of a "crazy like a fox" plot to push downloads over HD discs, it sure wasn't a brilliant play, because now discs will be dominated by Sony's PS3, BR, and H.264, while downloads are already dominated by Apple's iTunes (also H.264). That shuts Microsoft out of the game entirely with WMA, Xbox, HD-DVD, etc.
If you think Microsoft's Xbox Live is competition for iTunes, try to keep in mind that Microsoft has ~15 million 360s (many of which are still on shelves), while Apple has sold +25 million video capable iPods, 4 million iPhones, hundreds of millions of paid iTunes users on PCs, and had taken 91% of the video downloads market even before it began offering movie rentals and HD. Microsoft is in the bottom 1% of TV downloads and is not even in the top 4 of movie downloads, a group that takes up 93% of the market. Again, Apple had 40% of movie downloads even without offering rentals and HD. Microsoft's Xbox Live is somewhere in the 7% of other along with Vudu and Tivo/UnBox and every other minority player.
HD discs do look dead, but that means it's the year of Apple TV, not Xbox Live.
When you throw in lines like "murder also is not theft -- despite you insisting to the contrary" it only shows you're not really paying attention. Nobody in this simpleton thread referred to murder as theft, and certainly not me. Another poster threw out "speeding is not murder!!" just to use a non sequitur as his rational for stealing intellectual property, apparently because the corollary of "x isn't y" is "up is down" in the minds of the thinking impaired.
The reason we have copyright, patent and other intellectual property law is that many works can be ripped off (ie stolen) without depriving one of an original copy. If I plagiarize your book, you still have your book. I'm still a thief. If I violate the GPL and sell Linux or whatever software you write as closed source to make money, you still have your original code, but I'm still a thief because I used it without your permission as you licensed it. If I clone a million copies of an album you performed and distribute it worldwide, killing your ability to earn money from your efforts, you still have the song in your head and on your master recording, but I'm still a thief.
This isn't fucking brain surgery. Stealing IP is stealing, and doing so is immoral and illegal. There are no hairs to split, just thieves who like to rationalize their behavior so they can continue being thieves while considering themselves righteous.
Theft is taking something that you don't have a right to take.
A lie is saying something that isn't true.
Speeding isn't killing someone unless you actually do it, although flying through a school zone might be considered attempted murder.
Don't be a simpleton fucknut. Weaseling about with definitions that support theft doesn't make you a better person, it just makes you a hypocrite.
Anyone I've met with a foot to stomp about intellectual property being a fiction is also itching to bitch about their "work" being copied, particularly if its a fricking website design. You can complain about unfair copyright laws, but saying intellectual property doesn't exist or that violating copyright is somehow not theft is just asinine and self-delusional.
That's why intellectual property refers to an implementation or work, rather than the arrangement of bits used to record it.
If you didn't produce The Simpsons or write iTunes, you have no right to steal either just because you can do so using a numbers game. It's also illegal to defraud banks using computers. Even if you can simplify things down to the point where you can rationalize theft, it's still theft.
IP isn't about owning an arrangement of bits, its about monetizing the effort of individuals so they can be paid for their work. Cheating them is no different that cheating any other working stiffs, whether stealing candy bars or cars.
Tiger was not "largely problem free." There were lots of problems: Spotlight didn't work great, Mail screwed up, there were problems with APE, and Tiger in general really recommendable until around 10.4.3. Leopard had a few minor problems, but comparing it unfavorably to Tiger is silly. 10.5.1 is already rock solid and a major improvement over the latest 10.4.11 Tiger in many ways.
I manage hundreds of machines at a wide range of clients, and I've seen problems with third party drivers and hackie software plugins and several of the problems Apple addressed shortly after Leopard's release. It's no different than any other significant OS release, but far better than the plague that is Vista and really quite a large improvement over Apple's rollout of Tiger.
Qualcomm worked diligently to impede the development of UMTS, despite making millions from its patent licensing of W-CDMA.
While Qualcomm patented lots of W-CDMA, the UMTS standards were developed by NTT DoCoMo as FOMA, and submitted to standards bodies as a 3G replacement for GSM. UMTS was the result, and is mostly compatible with FOMA. Qualcomm is selling chipsets that support UMTS, but only after working hard to prevent the standard from gaining ground.
Microsoft is also now supporting MP3, but only after attempts to replace all music recordings with WMA failed.
EVDO is the incompatible 3G that Qualcomm worked so hard to push in place of UMTS. That's why the US is now screwed with a fractured network between AT&T/T-Mobile and Sprint/Verizon. Obviously EVDO isn't going away now that Sprint/Verizon paid billions to roll it out, but the rest of the world is migrating toward UMTS, and the iPhone offers some potential hope for pushing things toward UMTS in the US as well. That's why Verizon wags are all turning inside out to hate on the iPhone.
UMTS is the next generation of GSM, and is based on W-CDMA. That makes it a closer relation to Qualcomm's CMDA2000 (the 2G rival to GSM used by Sprint/Verizon Wireless in the US and the common standard in Japan).
However, while 3G UMTS uses W-CDMA rather that GSM's TDMA, it is not supported by Qualcomm. For the 3G of mobile networks, 2G GSM and 2G CDMA2000 carriers were supposed to unify the world under one new standard: W-CDMA UMTS. The U stands for Universal. Such a system would be a lot more like GSM than CDMA2000 in principle: interoperable.
There are problems. For starters, Qualcomm decided to push their own incompatible WCDMA version to rival UMTS, so they'd be assured to make more money. This is like Microsoft using MPEG-4 H.263 as the basis for Windows Media/VC-1, and then using it to compete against the MPEG-4 H.264 standard. Qualcomm hates interoperability as much as Microsoft. Giving either Qualcomm or Microsoft the credit for introducing bastardized versions of standards is questionable.
The other roadblock for UMTS being universal is that it has been built out in Europe and Japan (FOMA) using frequencies that aren't available in the US. That's why AT&T's UMTS isn't the same. A chipset can operate on two different frequencies, but this is still quite a bit more expensive and not widespread enough to be affordable yet, as AT&T's UMTS network is mainly available just in big cities. Slightly worse is the fact that T-Mobile in the US also operates UMTS service on a third set of incompatible frequencies. Having US providers of UMTS fractured between frequencies is preventing economies of scale from working.
In contrast, AT&T, T-Mobile, and European 2G GSM all operate on two out of four different frequency bands, and are common enough that quad-band GSM phones are easy and cheap to build.
A dual-frequency 3G UMTS iPhone could help standardize and cheapen the chipsets required to deliver worldwide UMTS, due to its broad branding, popularity, and common development platform. That could in turn help push other manufacturers toward delivering phone sets that support worldwide UMTS service, and bring things back to the kind of interoperability GSM provided for 2G networks.
Another problem for UMTS is that it requires far more intensive signal processing than earlier protocols, so battery life is a problem when using it. Ubiquitous WiFi might be a better solution.
Microsoft actually supported Firewire before getting USB complete, particularly USB 2.0, where the two standards overlap in certain areas. While Firewire was invented by Apple, Microsoft also actually delivered support for IP over Firewire first (several years first), although I doubt many people used it on Windows because most PCs that have Firewire only have the 4-pin, non-powered version like Sony's iLink. Mini-to-mini Firewire cables are not too common.
Apple didn't support IP over Firewire networking until around 10.3.5 IIRC. Now that it's there, it is actually quite useful on Macs as a secondary network interface, since all modern Macs have FW400 and many now have FW800 too. Macs also have smart enough firmware to use Firewire in Target Mode, which is a significant feature other PCs won't match anytime soon.
The new FW3200 uses the same connector as FW800, an advantage over the different and more complex USB 3.0 connector.
Another advantage of Firewire is that it provides higher voltage for charging, so it can power more significant devices and can recharge devices faster. It's noticiably faster to charge iPods/iPhone over Firewire. The 30-pin Dock Connector has Firewire compatible pins for charging, even though modern iPods don't support Firewire for data exchange.
There's really no reason for Apple to drop Firewire, and it will be difficult for PC makers to match the features of Macs even when including Firewire ports on their PCs. Not only do BIOS PCs lack any firmware support for target mode use, but Microsoft dropped IP over Firewire in Vista (!). USB 3.0 might bump the speed for new devices, but it doesn't match the Firewire-related features that exist now, and doesn't match the throughput of FW3200, which is also in the pipeline.
Ten Big Predictions for Apple in 2008 What's Apple going to be up to in 2008? The previous article looked at clues from the Newton MessagePad to the iPhone. Here's a look at the potential future of the rest of Apple's businesses, from hardware to software to services.
You've used Java on your PC, but have you used WinCE? That's what Microsoft's HDi is based on, the rival to BR's features software. Of course, nobody cares much about bonus features. People want to watch movies, not hours of junk about the movie, but trying to talk smack about BR Java is silly when it's used to defend a more ridiculous authoring environment from the maker of Vista-Zune.
The other software bit is the codec: do we want Microsoft's Windows Media 9 (VC-1, based on proprietary extensions to H.263) to become a widespread standard, or would we rather have an ISO MPEG industry consortium that nobody fully controls? VC-1 is backed by Microsoft and its close satellite nations, and rubber stamped by SMPTE (which is videophile for 'ECMA'). Microsoft's codecs are dead everywhere else but HD (WMA players, stores, Zune, video), so the death of HD-DVD was important to prevent an infection of home theater with Microsoft's advances. Yes, Microsoft got VC-1 licensing pushed into the BR spec, but nobody is using it.
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Apple has been delivering QT for Windows for over a decade. QT does more than play MOV files, it's a playback and editing architecture.
There is nothing "anticompetitive" about Apple delivering QT for Windows and delivering the entire functionality of QT.
Microsoft decided not to continue to deliver WMP for the Mac, making their WM DRM v10 and later Windows only. It then decided it would be better to support WMA playback (non DRM) in QT by buying and licensing existing QT codecs rather than continuing development for the Mac.
Microsoft's video strategy has been so erratic and vaporous over the last decade that there's no conspiracy theory to blame for Apple not supporting it with plugins. Microsoft made lots of promises about Active Movie and then Direct-branded software that never materialized. Apple has no moral obligation to bend to Microsoft's flavor of the week with DirectShow, which itself is tied to the Windows monopoly. There's also nothing stopping anyone from writing MOV codecs or container support for DirectShow apart from a lack of commercial viability.
So to wrap things up for you: QuickTime works on both the Mac and PC, and is universally used for the vast majority of media downloads. Microsoft has no cohesive strategy, has no significant business in media downloads, and is losing the battle for pushing its Windows Media DRM and WMV-based HD-DVD. So why would Apple need to bail Microsoft out by adding MOV support (container or codec or do you know what you're even talking about?) to whatever Microsoft has trotted out as its current video strategy? You're so simple.
Why Low Def is the New HD
Well according to the free market:
- Apple sold 4 billion tracks and is maintaining sustainable profits while growing its music business rapidly in per song sales.
- Rhapsody is stuck with the same niche of music renters and can't find new ones, just like PressPlay and Duet and all the rental losers before it.
Rhapsody did however manage to pull MTV's urge out of WMP and the Zune software, leaving a big hole in Microsoft's trousers. This didn't seem to have much of positive impact on Rhapsody though. Real is now promoting per track song sales.
Rise of the iTunes Killers Myth
When you say "a company that can't let in a little competition," are you arguing that:
... or anything else Microsoft-like. When did any of those things happen? Or are you talking about specific evils of Apple, such as:
.NET
- Apple has thwarted any retail market for devices that are not iPods, as Microsoft prevented the sale of DOS and Windows alternatives?
- that Apple should be forced to license FairPlay to other companies, like how Microsoft was forced to license Office to rival third parties for resale under different brands?
- that Apple should be forced to fund alternatives to iTunes for use with the iPod, the way Microsoft has enabled integration with Notes clients from Exchange, or CalDAV from Outlook clients, or WiiConnect compatibility from the Xbox 360?
- that the iPod should play WMA DRM, just like Microsoft supports PlayStation 3 games on the Xbox 360?
- that Fairplay should work on PlaysForSure players, just as Microsoft had to support Win32 apps on Unix?
Because any of those ideas would be batshit nuts. What were you really thinking?
And when in recent history has Apple become "even worse than the big bad wolf Microsoft," as I missed the story about:
- two decades of holding back better technology,
- promising vaporware that wasn't delivered for years if ever,
- being charged with monopoly market exploitation and overcharging customers by various states and countries,
- attempting to cover it up political astroturf campaigns uncovered by the LA Times,
- delivering unusable technology at absurd prices,
- raising the price of a desktop OS by 400 percent
- stealing code and violating copyright while advertising anti-piracy campaigns
- tightening spyware-policed phone home DRM on their OS
- starting a format war to control the world's media DRM and push a shitty authoring system like HDi
- working to raise the price of media downloads while killing off all fair use rights like WMA and WMV
- shipping a new OS whose main features revolve around HD DRM policing and OS Activation
- inventing Paladium
- delivering a crappy mobile OS they can't hardly sell but would love to stick the world with
- delivering a proprietary alternative to PDF, JPEG, MP3, H.264, Java, OpenDocument and every other open format with the intent to screw the world with a poorly designed file architecture that forces dependence upon a derelict monopoly
- delivering an open sourced alternative to the NT kernel
- delivering an open sourced, standards based alternative to the IE browser engine
- delivering an advanced graphics compositing engine for Vista to copy 7 years later
- delivering the advanced Cocoa frameworks to power Mac OS X and the iPhone, well ahead of
- delivering a smartphone that blows away the state of the art and forces innovation into a dead industry
- promoting an open alternative to DirectX in OpenGL
- promoting an open alternative to WMA DRM with the MP3 playing iPod
- promoting a mild DRM that offers fair use rights to revitalize the dead music industry
- promoting an end to DRM restrictions in music downloads
- promoting an open alternative to WMV/VC-1 by pushing joint development of ISO MPEG standards
- creating a competitive music player that sells better than DRM obsessed, subscription touting rivals
- creating a competitive operating system that sells better than DRM obsessed, authorization touting Vista
- promoting the use of open file formats such as PDF, PNG, MP3/AAC, H.264, OpenDocument
- promoting a standards based web and working on HTML 5 rather than a Win32/.NET/Flash-based web
- contributing back to the GPL/BSD community in core OS, security, and web rendering
- developing a calendar server and releasing it to the community under the free Apache license
Anyway, that's why there's a difference. Not sure why its so invisible to you. Also, the sky is generally blue on clear days.
Apple TV Promises to Take 2008
The context of "shrink wrapped commercial software" mentioned by the OP was QuickBooks, not an enterprise database server. Oracle is supporting Linux for the same reason IBM is. Those reasons have nothing to do with desktop commercial software.
However, I could grant you that if WalMart/Dell/HP began delivering a common low cost PC alternative running Ubuntu or something similar, there could easily develop a consumer software market. The problem is, the only viable market for such a Linux PC would be a super cheap system, and consumers don't really understand the value of software (ie won't pay for it unless they are forced to do so).
As you point out yourself, most Linux users (or Linux-minded users) don't see any need to buy commercial software, which was my whole point. It's not a value judgement, its just an observation.
Look at the mobile phone software market: no demand, no value apps, everything is over priced junk because consumers won't pay anything for it if they can steal it, and developers who write anything of any value will charge a silly price to try to get something for their work. So Palm OS software games were $15-20 for a shitty game, and more complex apps tried to sell for nearly $100. No market, no demand, no supply.
If Apple sets up an iTunes store for iPod Touch/iPhone software, that might change. Its current $5 iPod games are apparently making enough money to get the attention of EA and other developers who see a market in it. If Apple can get people to pay a little and buy in volume without stealing everything, it will establish a market, create demand, and supply will arrive to meet it.
There is no existing market for Linux on the consumer desktop, and no viable reason to think there will be one that develops. That might not be a problem for the existing users of Linux, particularly if they can get the few apps they need to run using something like Wine. The Mac game market is pretty much in the same boat: a Wine CIDER wrapper is the best bet to get enough games available to make most Mac users happy. the Mac doesn't need and won't rapidly get a big gaming market unless things change dramatically at Apple.
Tom Krazit of CNET and Eric Savitz of Barrons Deny the Jesus Phone
QT has flaws, but unless you're using it to play media or have installed web plugins, they are not exploitable, are they? With IE, any app can access the network and do anything, even if you've deleted your blue e icon.
Final Cut Pro and After Effects are QuickTime programs. So retard, you can't use them without using QuickTime. Sorry I didn't point out the color of the sky for you, mr. pedantic asshat. However, you can play all the OGG files you want using VLC without invoking QT, while you couldn't use Netscape exclusively to browse the web prior to the Feds mandating that Microsoft back down, which it did after Netscape was no longer relevant. Nobody is really competing against QT on Mac OS X, and even Microsoft delivers its competing WMA/WMV codecs as QT components rather than a QT replacement.
It's not really clear what you're trying to shout out your ass. If all you can bark about is abstract theoretical postulations, perhaps you should be doing it alone in the dark of your basement where it would make some sense, rather than blowing your nonsense load all over Slashdot for no obvious reason.
Tom Krazit of CNET and Eric Savitz of Barrons Deny the Jesus Phone
you're kidding right? A DRM format that continues to deliver its side of the bargain after the business model fails? Google Video, NFL, PlaysForSure, etc ad nauseam.
DRM seems to be a fair way to rent movies temporarily or to buy music you can burn to CDs at any point. Outside of that, its a "trust me!" game that you shouldn't trust past what you can't afford to lose at any moment in time.
Tom Krazit of CNET and Eric Savitz of Barrons Deny the Jesus Phone
Apple doesn't "obfuscate the file on the ipod during the file transfer." If you're thinking of the private file system iTunes copies to the iPod when it copies tracks over (whether MP3/AAC or AAC-Fairplay), what's going on is that iTunes gives all the files identically long, pseudo-random file names to optimize reading and file system transversal on the iPod.
It's not designed to hide anything, only to make reading files and transversing the file system simple. That's why you can browse the hidden directory and copy files back manually. Song files are hidden primarily to prevent users from mucking with the files once iTunes copies them over, so that the software won't have to deal with verifying file system integrity and externally edited files or directories. If Apple really wanted to hide the files or prevent you from getting them off, it knows how to create an encrypted file system disk image.
Modifying the iPod's firmware to play back WMA wouldn't be impossible it seems, but doing so would be legally difficult for a commercial company. Rockbox and Linux can already run on the classic iPods. However, Apple could repeatedly bork every attempt with new firmware updates, just as it did to stop Real from shoving its DRM on the iPod.
Apple is happy having Amazon sell MP3s for the iPod, but they're not going to stand for Helix, WMA or any other DRM system locking up music in a way that takes advantage of the iPod. Also, with Apple now selling two families of iPod, rolling out a system that works on both the Nano/Classic and the Touch/iPhone would be far more difficult for a Fairplay-compatible system like Real tried to do with Helix. They only copied the basic ACC format, no messing with the firmware.
Getting WMA to play on the iPod would require a very sophisticated firmware change, and only the classic iPods are known to have WMA capable hardware. The Touch/iPhone likely only has hardware support for H.264.
Playing ads on the iPod using DRM tracks would be absurd. It would be much easier to just serve up songs as video podcasts running ads or videos with ads, just like TV and the web, where users can ignore ads. Forcing the screen to play would rape battery life though, and who really needs ads to sponsor songs they can get for 99 cents or from CDs they own? A foolish idea all around it seems.
Will Steve Jobs License Apples FairPlay DRM ?
How FairPlay Works: Apple's iTunes DRM Dilemma
While you can draw a parallel in abstractions, it's really not the same thing at all.
IE is a program that relies upon a rendering engine Microsoft tightly integrated into the OS in order to make it difficult for competitors to offer a rival browser, and as a way to force development that required IE instead of any browser. In addition, Windows also has graphics capabilities that are tied to its proprietary DirectX software rather than using cross platform standards such as OpenGL.
Apple has a browser, Safari, and provides system wide rendering functions using the WebKit engine. While you can't really tear WebKit out of the OS, it doesn't matter because it poses no real threat to competitive browsers. Apple also has a graphics subsystem, initially QuickDraw and then Quartz, which both served as the models for Microsoft's GDI and its new compositing engine in Vista. Parts of Quartz support the functions of QuickTime, so while you can remove QuickTime on an application level, eviscerating all support for anything connected to QuickTime would also bork the system
However, it really makes no sense to associate QuickTime with IE, in large part because there is no anti-competitive basis for QT being integrated into the OS, and no real downside. If you don't use QT, you can stop updating it and there's no problem. If you don't use IE, you're still in danger of security problems Microsoft built into the design, and applications can invoke the IE plumbing to do things you are not aware of and don't want to happen. QT has none of those problems if you don't choose to use it.
Tom Krazit of CNET and Eric Savitz of Barrons Deny the Jesus Phone
Which is why the answer to your previous question about seeing shrink wrapped Linux software anytime soon is: no.
Supply and demand. The core group of people running Linux on the desktop do so for one of three reasons:
- they don't want to pay for or support commercial software (free as in GNU)
- they don't want to pay the Microsoft tax or pay for anything else (free as in five finger discount)
- they don't want to follow the crowd or generally prefer Linux (free as a bird)
None of those reasons really support a commercial market for Linux software. Compare the main reasons why people buy into the other significant alternative PC platform, Apple's Mac:
- they don't want to run Windows (they pay Apple for Mac OS X )
- they want to run something that just works (they pay a premium for hardware/software integration)
- they like the community/brand/marketing (and they pay to join)
It should come as no surprise why the Mac platform has a pretty rich supply of software, despite having less than 10% of the market for computer sales. Take servers and business PCs out of the worldwide PC market, and Apple has a 15-20% share of the consumer market and 50-70% of the education market. Add in 20-27% of the US mobile phone market and 99% of the WiFi mobile media handheld market, and it looks like there'll be a lot more consumer software for the Mac to come.
Why would anyone develop commercial software (let alone shrinkwraped retail boxes) for Linux, given that nobody is using it on the desktop who would also buy retail software? How many copies of Quickbooks could one sell to companies running Linux as a firewall or headless LAMP deployment? It makes sense that IBM is releasing its Lotus Notes and Symphony suite (aka rebranded OpenOffice) for Linux, because it is targeting Linux in the Enterprise and hopes to foster the replacement of Windows desktops with Linux (and Exchange Server with Notes/Domino). It doesn't make much sense for anyone else to release consumer software for Linux.
The Unrealized Potential of Apple's Hybrid Platform: Mac, iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV
Do you have an 8 x 12" blender?
The MacBook Air does stack up well against other ultra thin laptops in its category however, mixing leading performance, graphics capabilities, a full size keyboard and display with an ultra-thin package priced very competitively. And it solves many of the engineering tradeoffs with light and thin laptops in software. So it should blend in well with the rest of the hot selling MacBook line.
How the MacBook Air stacks up against other ultra-light notebooks
"The EV-1 failed because battery technology isn't good enough for an electric car... just look at the wikipedia article on it."
Gasoline technology of the 40s wasn't good enough either. That's why we kept investing in research and development. This principle also works in other areas. Do you think batteries couldn't improve, or shouldn't, or that it wouldn't benefit the US economy to have advancement going on in battery technology? Do you think the EV-1 wasn't good enough for urban drivers in CA, where the primary market was? It didn't need to immediately replace pickups in Montana.
"Hygrogen cars *are* electric cars"
Thanks genius! The problem with hydrogen is that its the least dense fuel in the Universe, hard to store, and hard to deliver (recharging stations had already been built out across CA and could be installed at home cost effectively). So while both might involve electricity, hydrogen involves all sorts of engineering problems that are outrageously difficult to solve and require massive investment in infrastructure.
There are busses running on hydrogen fuel cells, the problem is that it's not easy to set up consumers with a reasonably sized car with enough storage to hold enough gas and supply enough refueling opportunities.
By cutting all support for any reasonable alt fuel development and throwing federal support behind the pipe dream of hydrogen, Bush very clearly was mandating what GM and other US companies would do. Perpetuating the myth that government policy has no effect on business isn't helpful. Government can work to effectively regulate, or can banish intelligent regulations and set up tax breaks for the companies that support whoever's in charge. The latter is not lean effective government even if the neocons want you to believe it.
You sure managed to blow out a bunch of nonsensical, poorly thought out, irrelevant chit chat before telling me that the reality of public policy is a "conspiracy theory" and that my facts aren't right. Are you drinking, or just a moron?
And the Tesla Roadster, being put together in a Lotus garage in the UK, has what to do with practical EV or other alternative fuel development and research in the US?
If you're having trouble conceiving Bush's every major decision with supporting Bush/Saudi oil, maybe you should better inform yourself. Also, why did Bush just stop California from enacting its own CAFE-type fuel standards? No progress in effeciency means more short term profits for selling Bush/Saudi oil.
Do you really think its a wild conspiracy theory that Bush is associated with and supportive of Bush/Saudi oil as the exclusive energy source of the US? Do you think Bush makes nothing from a string of administrative decisions that have made Bush/Saudi oil the exclusive energy source of the US? I didn't say Bush stopped GM from making the EV1, only that once in power, he stopped all positive investment in credible alt energy sources and made it impossibly impractical to invest in non Bush/Saudi oil ventures.
yes that's why they started offering rental movies from iTunes.
Apple TV Promises to Take 2008
Actually the government plays a huge role in making GM's business decisions. Carter drafted laws that mandated the CAFE MPG regulations that pushed carmakers to be more aggressive and innovative in their engineering, and mandated catalytic converters so that society wouldn't be enshrouded in a perpetual cancerous smog. The result was less dependence on foreign oil, cleaner air, and more efficient use of resources.
Reagan scribbled out regulations, pushing carmakers to dial back the amount of effort they put into safety and economy, and instead invested in securing relations with the Saudis to ensure oil would be cheap enough to prevent competition. This was exactly the same as having a ditto head administrator clear out all the mainframe terminals and minis and replace them with "client server" PCs running Windows: it appeared to be cheap, but ensured a monopoly where there would only be one flawed product, one flawed vendor, and it would become outrageously expensive as it also prevented any new competition from arising.
The oil monopoly was not an example of free market economics, but fascist corporate collusion with government. You're right that Reagan and Bush didn't invest in alternative fuels because they supported the Bush/Saudi oil monopoly. But Clinton did push alternative energy. When Bush II arrived, that was all cleaned out for the shell game of hydrogen, which Bush knew would sound good while accomplishing nothing other than to single source US energy back to Bush/Saudi oil.
You can give Bush credit for handing corporations money to play with hydrogen, but this hasn't accomplished anything in the last 8 years other than to prevent any rational alternative energy research and keep us tied to Bush/Saudi oil. Notice that Bush/Saudi oil has also jumped from under a dollar in the early 90s under Clinton to nearly $4 under a decade of Bush. Also notice how Windows has changed from being around $100 in the early 90s to being $400 with Vista.
That's what you get when you have no free market operating, and monopolize an industry under one vendor with no regulations to check what they do. If we're only going to have one OS vendor, we should mandate some kind of minimum functionality and reliability standards for operating systems and encourage competition. If we only have one fuel source, we should mandate efficiency standards and encourage competition.
Sorry to explode your neocon brain with some reality. Now go back to your scheduled Fox programming and learn more about how "no other administration has offered a single penny of federal money to spur any type of alternative fuels/energy research, but Bush did." Retards like you are significant part of the reason why the US is fucked.
Then why did GM refuse to market, sell, or continue the EV-1? As soon as Bush came to power, the government dismantled all electric car development efforts and immediately began talking about hydrogen, a silly and impractical power source that couldn't be economically feasible in our lifetime, even if little other progress was ever made in any other alternative fuel.
US car companies were ahead of the game in developing all electric cars and in hybrids, but that all got pushed aside to make room for a bullshit smoke and mirrors ad campaign that featured CA Gov. Schwartzenegger driving around in a million dollar hydrogen Hummer prototype that only served as an "environmental" placeholder so everyone would forget about any real alternative to Bush/Saudi oil.
That enabled Bush/Saudi oil to raise significantly in price without any competition, ensuring rich profits for those selling oil over the current decade, and guaranteeing that little progress would be made in finding any real alternatives until 2008 by the earliest. Even if the US embarked on immediate sensible energy policy immediately after Bush is removed from the White House, there will be little prospects for any real competition to Bush/Saudi oil in the next five years.
GM and other car makers aren't so much for oil as they are resistant to any change. And in the current political climate, there's more profits in building huge oil burning tanks like the Hummer, which the current administration lined up with huge tax subsidies, than in building or researching alternative energy vehicles.
Microsoft pushed HD-DVD because it wanted to push VC-1 (aka Windows Media 9) and HD1 (based on WinCE). The Blu-Ray camp paid to license VC-1, but most titles were initially MPEG-2, and are now transitioning to MPEG-4 / H-264. BR also uses a Java-based titling system rather than Microsoft's HDi.
So the loss of HD-DVD, which Microsoft was also pushing in Vista, was a huge blow to Microsoft's video/embedded operations as well.
Michael Bay (the director of Transformers and other explosion movies) complained that Microsoft was supporting HD-DVD to prevent BR from growing and then jumped to the conclusion that Microsoft was trying to kill both HD disc formats in order to promote its downloads. That was angry speculation, not fact. Bay simply wants to sell his HD-friendly explosion movies on HD, and was pissed that his studio signed up with what was obviously the losing side in HD-DVD.
If Microsoft shot itself in the face with HD-DVD as part of a "crazy like a fox" plot to push downloads over HD discs, it sure wasn't a brilliant play, because now discs will be dominated by Sony's PS3, BR, and H.264, while downloads are already dominated by Apple's iTunes (also H.264). That shuts Microsoft out of the game entirely with WMA, Xbox, HD-DVD, etc.
If you think Microsoft's Xbox Live is competition for iTunes, try to keep in mind that Microsoft has ~15 million 360s (many of which are still on shelves), while Apple has sold +25 million video capable iPods, 4 million iPhones, hundreds of millions of paid iTunes users on PCs, and had taken 91% of the video downloads market even before it began offering movie rentals and HD. Microsoft is in the bottom 1% of TV downloads and is not even in the top 4 of movie downloads, a group that takes up 93% of the market. Again, Apple had 40% of movie downloads even without offering rentals and HD. Microsoft's Xbox Live is somewhere in the 7% of other along with Vudu and Tivo/UnBox and every other minority player.
HD discs do look dead, but that means it's the year of Apple TV, not Xbox Live.
Origins of the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD War
Why Low Def is the New HD
Apple TV Promises to Take 2008
When you throw in lines like "murder also is not theft -- despite you insisting to the contrary" it only shows you're not really paying attention. Nobody in this simpleton thread referred to murder as theft, and certainly not me. Another poster threw out "speeding is not murder!!" just to use a non sequitur as his rational for stealing intellectual property, apparently because the corollary of "x isn't y" is "up is down" in the minds of the thinking impaired.
The reason we have copyright, patent and other intellectual property law is that many works can be ripped off (ie stolen) without depriving one of an original copy. If I plagiarize your book, you still have your book. I'm still a thief. If I violate the GPL and sell Linux or whatever software you write as closed source to make money, you still have your original code, but I'm still a thief because I used it without your permission as you licensed it. If I clone a million copies of an album you performed and distribute it worldwide, killing your ability to earn money from your efforts, you still have the song in your head and on your master recording, but I'm still a thief.
This isn't fucking brain surgery. Stealing IP is stealing, and doing so is immoral and illegal. There are no hairs to split, just thieves who like to rationalize their behavior so they can continue being thieves while considering themselves righteous.
Analysts, Investors Take Apple to Task For its Best Quarter Ever
Theft is taking something that you don't have a right to take.
A lie is saying something that isn't true.
Speeding isn't killing someone unless you actually do it, although flying through a school zone might be considered attempted murder.
Don't be a simpleton fucknut. Weaseling about with definitions that support theft doesn't make you a better person, it just makes you a hypocrite.
Anyone I've met with a foot to stomp about intellectual property being a fiction is also itching to bitch about their "work" being copied, particularly if its a fricking website design. You can complain about unfair copyright laws, but saying intellectual property doesn't exist or that violating copyright is somehow not theft is just asinine and self-delusional.
Who Was the Biggest Loser at Macworld?
That's why intellectual property refers to an implementation or work, rather than the arrangement of bits used to record it.
If you didn't produce The Simpsons or write iTunes, you have no right to steal either just because you can do so using a numbers game. It's also illegal to defraud banks using computers. Even if you can simplify things down to the point where you can rationalize theft, it's still theft.
IP isn't about owning an arrangement of bits, its about monetizing the effort of individuals so they can be paid for their work. Cheating them is no different that cheating any other working stiffs, whether stealing candy bars or cars.
Tiger was not "largely problem free." There were lots of problems: Spotlight didn't work great, Mail screwed up, there were problems with APE, and Tiger in general really recommendable until around 10.4.3. Leopard had a few minor problems, but comparing it unfavorably to Tiger is silly. 10.5.1 is already rock solid and a major improvement over the latest 10.4.11 Tiger in many ways.
I manage hundreds of machines at a wide range of clients, and I've seen problems with third party drivers and hackie software plugins and several of the problems Apple addressed shortly after Leopard's release. It's no different than any other significant OS release, but far better than the plague that is Vista and really quite a large improvement over Apple's rollout of Tiger.
Qualcomm worked diligently to impede the development of UMTS, despite making millions from its patent licensing of W-CDMA.
While Qualcomm patented lots of W-CDMA, the UMTS standards were developed by NTT DoCoMo as FOMA, and submitted to standards bodies as a 3G replacement for GSM. UMTS was the result, and is mostly compatible with FOMA. Qualcomm is selling chipsets that support UMTS, but only after working hard to prevent the standard from gaining ground.
Microsoft is also now supporting MP3, but only after attempts to replace all music recordings with WMA failed.
EVDO is the incompatible 3G that Qualcomm worked so hard to push in place of UMTS. That's why the US is now screwed with a fractured network between AT&T/T-Mobile and Sprint/Verizon. Obviously EVDO isn't going away now that Sprint/Verizon paid billions to roll it out, but the rest of the world is migrating toward UMTS, and the iPhone offers some potential hope for pushing things toward UMTS in the US as well. That's why Verizon wags are all turning inside out to hate on the iPhone.
But you knew that.
Canalys, Symbian: Apple iPhone Already Leads Windows Mobile in US Market Share, Q3 2007
UMTS is the next generation of GSM, and is based on W-CDMA. That makes it a closer relation to Qualcomm's CMDA2000 (the 2G rival to GSM used by Sprint/Verizon Wireless in the US and the common standard in Japan).
However, while 3G UMTS uses W-CDMA rather that GSM's TDMA, it is not supported by Qualcomm. For the 3G of mobile networks, 2G GSM and 2G CDMA2000 carriers were supposed to unify the world under one new standard: W-CDMA UMTS. The U stands for Universal. Such a system would be a lot more like GSM than CDMA2000 in principle: interoperable.
There are problems. For starters, Qualcomm decided to push their own incompatible WCDMA version to rival UMTS, so they'd be assured to make more money. This is like Microsoft using MPEG-4 H.263 as the basis for Windows Media/VC-1, and then using it to compete against the MPEG-4 H.264 standard. Qualcomm hates interoperability as much as Microsoft. Giving either Qualcomm or Microsoft the credit for introducing bastardized versions of standards is questionable.
The other roadblock for UMTS being universal is that it has been built out in Europe and Japan (FOMA) using frequencies that aren't available in the US. That's why AT&T's UMTS isn't the same. A chipset can operate on two different frequencies, but this is still quite a bit more expensive and not widespread enough to be affordable yet, as AT&T's UMTS network is mainly available just in big cities. Slightly worse is the fact that T-Mobile in the US also operates UMTS service on a third set of incompatible frequencies. Having US providers of UMTS fractured between frequencies is preventing economies of scale from working.
In contrast, AT&T, T-Mobile, and European 2G GSM all operate on two out of four different frequency bands, and are common enough that quad-band GSM phones are easy and cheap to build.
A dual-frequency 3G UMTS iPhone could help standardize and cheapen the chipsets required to deliver worldwide UMTS, due to its broad branding, popularity, and common development platform. That could in turn help push other manufacturers toward delivering phone sets that support worldwide UMTS service, and bring things back to the kind of interoperability GSM provided for 2G networks.
Another problem for UMTS is that it requires far more intensive signal processing than earlier protocols, so battery life is a problem when using it. Ubiquitous WiFi might be a better solution.
Readers Write About iPhone, 3G Wireless Networks
Microsoft actually supported Firewire before getting USB complete, particularly USB 2.0, where the two standards overlap in certain areas. While Firewire was invented by Apple, Microsoft also actually delivered support for IP over Firewire first (several years first), although I doubt many people used it on Windows because most PCs that have Firewire only have the 4-pin, non-powered version like Sony's iLink. Mini-to-mini Firewire cables are not too common.
Apple didn't support IP over Firewire networking until around 10.3.5 IIRC. Now that it's there, it is actually quite useful on Macs as a secondary network interface, since all modern Macs have FW400 and many now have FW800 too. Macs also have smart enough firmware to use Firewire in Target Mode, which is a significant feature other PCs won't match anytime soon.
The new FW3200 uses the same connector as FW800, an advantage over the different and more complex USB 3.0 connector.
Another advantage of Firewire is that it provides higher voltage for charging, so it can power more significant devices and can recharge devices faster. It's noticiably faster to charge iPods/iPhone over Firewire. The 30-pin Dock Connector has Firewire compatible pins for charging, even though modern iPods don't support Firewire for data exchange.
There's really no reason for Apple to drop Firewire, and it will be difficult for PC makers to match the features of Macs even when including Firewire ports on their PCs. Not only do BIOS PCs lack any firmware support for target mode use, but Microsoft dropped IP over Firewire in Vista (!). USB 3.0 might bump the speed for new devices, but it doesn't match the Firewire-related features that exist now, and doesn't match the throughput of FW3200, which is also in the pipeline.
Ten Big Predictions for Apple in 2008
What's Apple going to be up to in 2008? The previous article looked at clues from the Newton MessagePad to the iPhone. Here's a look at the potential future of the rest of Apple's businesses, from hardware to software to services.
You've used Java on your PC, but have you used WinCE? That's what Microsoft's HDi is based on, the rival to BR's features software. Of course, nobody cares much about bonus features. People want to watch movies, not hours of junk about the movie, but trying to talk smack about BR Java is silly when it's used to defend a more ridiculous authoring environment from the maker of Vista-Zune.
The other software bit is the codec: do we want Microsoft's Windows Media 9 (VC-1, based on proprietary extensions to H.263) to become a widespread standard, or would we rather have an ISO MPEG industry consortium that nobody fully controls? VC-1 is backed by Microsoft and its close satellite nations, and rubber stamped by SMPTE (which is videophile for 'ECMA'). Microsoft's codecs are dead everywhere else but HD (WMA players, stores, Zune, video), so the death of HD-DVD was important to prevent an infection of home theater with Microsoft's advances. Yes, Microsoft got VC-1 licensing pushed into the BR spec, but nobody is using it.
Origins of the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD War
Blu-ray vs HD-DVD in Next Generation Game Consoles
We don't need another fries with that.