It's hard to imagine how a country that pays more for everything is surprised that the iPhone's service plan isn't the same price as the US version. Of course, that gives the ignorant shills an opportunity to spew such silliness as "Apple takes 40% of O2's revenues!!!" and other made up factoids.
BBC Prints Irresponsible Rubbish on Apple The BBC has joined the London tabloid press in printing a series of articles skewering Apple over invented suppositions based entirely upon misinformed speculation and some outright lies. The worst part is that the BBC is being grossly hypocritical in its misinformation campaign against Apple, because the company is up to its eyeballs in the Microsoft-encrusted scandal surrounding its proprietary, Windows-only iPlayer imbroglio.
UK Tabloids Pick Up Zoon Awards It's not just the American media that is desperate to publish misleading or downright false information in attempts to prevent the erosion of existing barriers to innovation. The release of the iPhone in the UK touched off a flurry of snide reporting worthy of being Zooned.
Yes this was a huge problem for Wii and Xbox 360 buyers who found they had to buy their PlayStation 2 games over again.
The difference is that iPod games are $5 rather than $40. Game incompatibility is a minor disappointment, but hardly a cause for revolt as you suggest. I wonder why you'd make it a big deal? Oh right, FUD!
Speaking of FUD, lets have a CNET blogger associate the ideas of Apple working to stop phone unlocking with DMCA takedowns and third party apps, then throw in the absolute bullocks of O2 paying Apple 40% of its revenues. How much more false information can one roll into a single serving?
Where's the quotes from Rob Enderle about how the iPhone might result in rape, murder, or the violent death of children? Oh right, they're in:
Why Dan Frommer and Scott Moritz Are Wrong on iPhone Sales Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer says Apple's announcement of reaching its million mark goal in iPhone sales three weeks early is actually bad news for Apple and is convolutedly "below plan." He also says the announcement only props up the speculative conjecture by Scott Moritz of the Street that Apple's iPhones sales are somehow woefully below expectations. They're wrong, here's why.
Your argument falls down around your ankles when you look at how much profit Apple and Microsoft actually earn.
Apple does not make 50% margins on its hardware. Despite making the vast majority of its money selling hardware, in the year ending in July 07, Apple earned $3.13 billion on revenues of $22.61 billion, an overall profit margin of less than 14%. Just to quash your "Apple marketing" fantasy, I'll poinit out that Apple did not spend (50% -14% =) 36% of its revenues on $10 billion of advertising last year.
Microsoft's three monopolies (Office, desktop Windows, Servers) reported revenues over the same period of:
- nearly $11.18 billion for its Windows Server products. - just over $14.97 billion in Windows desktop sales. - over $16.39 billion in revenues from its Microsoft Business Division, 90% of which come from sales of Office.
In terms of annual profits, Microsoft earned:
- $3.9 billion from server software. - $11.6 billion from Windows. - almost $10.84 billion from Office.
While Microsoft's Windows Enthusiast wags desperately try to make the iPhone sound over priced with its purported "50% profit margins," they neglect to mention that Microsoft actually makes--after expenses--a 66% profit margin on sales of Office and a jaw-dropping 81% profit margin on Windows.
Why are Microsoft shills so enraptured with screeching about Apple's "outrageous profits" when the company they blindly follow is making absolutely insane profits selling old technology and then jacking up prices even higher and adding more DRM validation and WGA spyware on top? Recall that this past year, Microsoft's profits primarily came from selling:
- The half decade old Windows XP. - The ancient Office for Windows from 2003. - The creaky old Office for Mac from 2004.
Who are the blind sheep drinking flavoraid: people paying craploads of money to use old technology from Microsoft, or people paying less to buy alternatives from Apple... like the iPhone that with service cost less over two years than the crap "$99" Windows Mobile Motorola Q that Steve Ballmer waved around as real compeition to the iPhone--even before the $200 price drop?
Microsoft's Outrageous Office Profits Microsoft's Office suite represents the third pillar of the company's core trio of monopolies, next to its Windows desktop software and its Windows Server products. Here's why the company's monopoly position in productivity applications is holding back innovation and why the mainstream tech media has absolutely nothing to say anything about it.
Fake Apple Scandal 1: The Wild Profiteering on the Expensive iPhone! This first invented Apple scandal that analysts have worked hard to establish is that the iPhone is not only very expensive, but also grossly overpriced in an effort to profiteer on the interest in the iPhone. Gizmodo likes to refer to the "iPhone Fanboy Tax" as a populist way to cater to readers who want feel better about their choice to own a phone that's not made by Apple.
The money Google makes from residual amounts of BBC Prints Irresponsible Rubbish on Apple The BBC has joined the London tabloid press in printing a series of articles skewering Apple over invented suppositions based entirely upon misinformed speculation and some outright lies. The worst part is that the BBC is being grossly hypocritical in its misinformation campaign against Apple, because the company is up to its eyeballs in the Microsoft-encrusted scandal surrounding its proprietary, Windows-only iPlayer imbroglio.
What the US really needs is citizens who demand fair use as a right, and insist that representitives act to codify fair use as a right, rather than simply ignore politics and allow Congress to serve the needs of industry.
If they flew overseas, they would have needed to turn on "Airplane mode," which turns off the cell radio, Bluetooth, and WiFi. When they were on their cruise, they would have had to manually turn Airplane Mode off--purposely re enabling their radios--in order to rack up a phone bill. If they thought their phones were off, why would they do this? Were they browsing the web while on WiFi?
They would also have to purposely charge the iPhone every day or two or their batteries would die.
They would also have to manually click on email attachments to download them. The iPhone does not poll for emails and download the entire content if there is a large message, nor does it automatically download attachments.
So they turned the radios on, constantly charging up their phones, and somehow remained oblivious that they were manually downloading huge emails for a week long period, and then surprised that they had an international phone bill?
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How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly Microsoft's Office monopoly gives the company more revenues and delivers nearly as much profit as its Windows software. How did it gain such a powerful position in productivity applications? The history of Office is rooted in decisions Apple made in the 80s with the Lisa and Macintosh, and also has an interesting correlation to Apple's iPhone strategy today.
Yes and Windows Vista costs $1 to "make," its just $398 of Microsoft tax for an empty box and a DVD you'll only use a few times a year. Right.
Here's why Apple really dropped the iPhone price: the iPod Touch will kill the market for high end smartphones worldwide in markets where Apple can't yet market the iPhone (CDMA2000 / FOMA/UMTS-only Japan for example), because users will be able to buy the fancy touch screen iPod and hold onto their existing mobile. But the iPhone also needs to be competitive with the iPod Touch in the US, so users enamored by it will be tempted to pay the extra $100 to get a full phone, Bluetooth, camera and other stuff.
Existing iPhone users can't be too miffed, because the new, cheaper price point will broaden adoption and pave the way for more iPhone-savvy websites and third party development--not to mention further investment from Apple. I bought two iPhones, and I'm not upset to have paid a $200 premium to be free of my POS Treo as soon as was humanely possible.
Apple's iPhone Price Cut Unleashes Complaints While introducing the iPod Touch as a version of the iPhone lacking cellular mobile features, Bluetooth, and an integrated camera, Apple also set a new price on the 8 GB iPhone and discontinued the 4 GB model. That move angered some buyers, who felt the $200 price cut after just ten weeks on the market was too much, too soon.
Streaming to an Airport Express requires re-encoding the audio stream to Lossless and transmitting it to the base station. It really isn't reasonable to think that an iPod will be able to do that anytime soon. And why should it? If you have an AEx, you likely have a PC running iTunes on that network. Why burn through an iPod battery to stream audio?
Curious Stuff About the New iPods Apple's iPod Event introduced a flurry of new features that raises some interesting questions and uncovers some new information on Apple's worldwide plans to expand the iPod's reach.
BZZZ! Wrong. Had Apple suddenly lowered the iPhone's price out of nowhere, it might have suggested that the company needed to boost sales in the same manner as Sony's PS3 price cut. However, what really happened was that Apple released a very popular product that nearly a million people were happy to pay $600 to buy within the first two months.
Apple then released the iPod Touch, which delivers 60% of the iPhone's features - no cell, no Bluetooth, no camera, no mic or speakers, but largely everything else: the iPod and the "Breakthrough Internet Device!!" The iPhone's price had to drop. Anyone who wanted an iPhone got their phone, and now millions more will grab one at the lower price. People complaining about the $200 price drop should take some consolation from the recent $600 price drop on the significantly improved iMac, and the fact that the iPhone's hardware price is only a small fraction of the price with service. So ownership of the iPhone didn't drop by some monumental huge percentage, but merely from $2000 to $1800 across its two year contract.
If you have nothing in a tiny flat, buying a $50 wireless card for your laptop is a lot easier than paying $40-50/month for internet service.
Sounds like the baboonery that says the iPhone is terribly expensive at $600, compared to $99 crap phones. But when you look at the real cost of service, it's actually significantly less after two years. It's the ongoing service that's always the expensive part.
-- August 2007 Zoon Awards for Technical Ignorance and Incompetence In an effort to recognize the spectacular efforts of individuals and organizations promoting the regression of human achievement in the field of technology, a series of nominations await your vote to determine the recipients of August 2007 Zoon Awards.
The blame is entirely upon the Board of Supervisors. SF Mayor Newsom pushed the plan for years as both a way to bring WiFi to the City, and an option for free Internet access to poor residents. The BoS responded by holding things up repeatedly to tack on political BS to take credit for the mayor's plan.
Most recently, the board decided to cut Earthlink's contract in half and demand twice the bandwidth, as if they could "fix" things by jacking up numbers. These assholes do this to every project in the City, hoping to load everything up with bulletpoints that they can parade as accomplishments. What it almost always means in reality, however, is that projects never get completed or are delayed for so long that the economic benefit of their add ons is a large negative.
This also happens in housing projects, where developers come in with a plan to build new housing, and the BoS insist that increasingly high percentages of units are reserved for welfare housing called "affordable housing"--not for the poor, but a for handful of well connected people who want to live on someone else's dime. So 10-20% of a project is subsidized, jacking up housing costs and ensuring that the only people who can afford to live in the new housing are the ultra-rich. Meanwhile, all the housing construction is held up in welfare negotiations until projects are tabled or until they are held up for so long that the minor addition of more welfare units constitute an insignificant trickle of new "affordable housing." This is backed up both by those who think market pricing can be overridden by political pricing, and by those who want to keep the supply low so that the demand and prices will remain sky high.
The plot to kill SF's WiFi was the same coalition of populists who thought a community group could put together a faster system, and those who didn't want competition to their pay WiFi or internet services.
And so what it depends upon may be whether a crack involves defeating a locking system, or selling a patched version of Apple's OS.
Apple didn't sue the kid who reprogrammed his iPhone. It was AT&T who warned the company announcing it would sell a patched version of the iPhone software.
NPD's numbers only cover most retail stores (although they don't include major retailers like WalMart), and exclude Apple's own retail stores.
The also exclude online stores like Amazon and Apple, and direct marketers like Dell.
However, that means Apple's outside retail sales have jumped by nearly double. That would suggest that Apple's own sales are also doing "well."
Apple set a new record of 1.7 million Macs last quarter, which is commonly its slowest quarter. This quarter is back to school, and next is Christmas, so it will be interesting to see where sales go.
Perhaps you can draw up a Five Year Plan for the video game industry and we can implement it after the Revolution, comrade.
I'll work on rounding up the proletariat to design games for the People, so we can all play without anyone being trampled under these bourgeois capitalists who build electronics for money and orchestrate evil plots to make their products more attractive through proprietary software.
-- ZDNet's George Ou Exposed as Ignorant Microsoft Shill (Zoon!) The assault on reason isn't just a political phenomenon. Microsoft has long been developing its own cast of apologists who have eked out full time careers in the field of sputtering out ignorant, unfounded claims with such insistence and volume that the undecided simply have no alternative but to line up and applaud their seemingly convincing rhetoric. Among them is George Ou, who unsurprisingly blogs for CNET's ZDNet branded website.
Apple iPhone vs the FIC Neo1973 OpenMoko Linux Smartphone Frequently compared to Apple's new smartphone, the OpenMoko FIC Neo1973 is described as the free and open software community's alternative to Apple's officially closed iPhone platform. Here's a look at what it really is and how it compares to the iPhone.
It's easy to wage a war against someone else's comments, but I think you are arguing in circles and far beyond the point.
I merely pointed out that the world already had a free version of Unix to build upon. You can criticize "technical superiority" and suggest that Linux has a better "community," but the reality is that businesses are wary to deal with the GPL. I called it an "entanglement," not because of my own personal ideology, but because the GPL is a problem for businesses; even those who attempt to work with the "community" are frequently attacked by it.
Since you asked "with the SCO suit, BSD was able to make a comeback, right?, I pointed out that Linux hasn't made much progress and the uncertainty surrounding SCO really was as big of a problem for Linux as the uncertainty surrounding BSD. That's not my FUD, it's an observation that FUD was generated, and had negative results.
But the real problem is when you personify Linux as a savior. It's not. It offers really nothing beyond the companies pushing it. If you have a bunch of random distros pushed by tech consultant groups, all you'll ever do is emulate the success of MSCEs pushing Windows for everything. That'll work on the server side, but only until Microsoft starts up its own patent wars. Linux is worthless without a real company standing up for it; without backers like IBM and Novell, the work of the "community" would go nowhere apart from hobbyist activities.
You can giggle about Mac hardware market share, but the fact is that Apple is now making a third of the revenues and a quarter of the profits of Microsoft with its 3% share of the worldwide PC market. That's a lot of funding for Mac OS X. The only people using Linux on the desktop are companies trying to avoid paying for Windows: WalMart, hobbyists, and a few careful steps from the big Windows OEMs. They will never invest anything into Linux, and all the amazing work individual groups do will be ignored by the wider market.
As long as consumers are expected to sort out their own window manager, desktop environment, and variant of Linux, there will never be cohesive progress on the desktop. Linux Enthusiasts can ignore the truth and call me a troll for pointing that out, but as long as you insist that the "community" is going to accomplish anything significant without real commercial backing... well, Linux is never going to make any progress on the desktop.
Along the way, you dig up so many fallacies. Don't stuff words in my mouth about what 'I obviously believe.' Also, Mac OS X doesn't need to be released under the GPL to incorporate GPL software. Surely you are aware that it comes bundled with, among other things, GCC. Name a Linux application that can't run on Mac OS X because of the GPL.
As far as taking Linux' reinvention of the wheel by writing another free Unix kernel from scratch when the technically superior BSD already existed, and equating that with Apple releasing new versions of NeXT software, well I think your ability to find similarities between events is suffering from logic flaws. Apple used code from various BSD projects and incorporated the latest GPL software, much like any Linux distro might.
The difference is that Apple actually invested huge resources into its code base rather than just trying to make a quick buck off distributing the work of others. Efforts in the community to develop similar things (such as other advanced graphic compositing systems) haven't done much for actual Linux users, as nobody uses them. Code is only useful it if gets used. Apple has 25 million users that all use the same software, and its outgrowing the growth of the PC industry as a whole by a factor of 3. Linux isn't growing on the desktop at all, and its users--perhaps in the millions, but who knows--all use different versions X Window, KDE/GNOME, and various other fractionalized projects. That's no way to build anything, and certainly isn't going to displace Windows on the desktop.
Don't jump down my throat for expressing facts based o
Technical superiority did win in BSD's case. While Linux is doing a lot in the server arena, it has accomplished very little on the desktop, despite efforts like OpenLinux and United Linux to create a standard Linux. The kernel may not have forked like Open/Net/FreeBSD, but there's really no difference between forked kernels and forked distros when it comes to fracturing the market. There are really no commercial apps for Linux and there is no real market that will ever encourage their development.
That leaves Apple's Mac OS as the only viable desktop, and its based on BSD, not Linux. It does however share the same POSIX platform, meaning that there's really nothing of unique value in Linux that can't be ported to Mac OS X, while there is lots of value associated with Mac OS X that will never make it to Linux: commercial apps, consumer focus, real marketing, retail support and the like.
It's not that code associated with Linux isn't a great contribution to technology, it's that it simply won't matter on the desktop. Linux is just the new FreeDOS, and Mac OS X is source code compatible with Linux' software.
My original point was only that the world didn't need a new Unix kernel, and there's really nothing special about the Linux kernel.
No Linus wrote Linux as a reimplementation of BSD, during the period that AT&T sued to stop the distribution of BSD. Had BSD not been held up in court, there would have been no need to rewrite BSD from scratch using inferior networking code.
When Novell bought AT&T's Unix labs it ended the frivilous lawsuit against BSD, but by that time, Linux had gained so much marketing buzz that it overwhelmed both commercial Unix and the free BSD, serving to water down any hope for either of the candidates to prevent the expansion of Micorsoft's DOS and the promise of NT and Cairo.
By the end of the 90s, Unix vendors had mainly squabbled amongst themselves, BSD had been largely overlooked, and Linux had expended millions of dollars in efforts to reinvent a perfectly good wheel. That allowed Microsoft to take over the desktop.
Since 2000, the only commercial desktop BSD variant to matter is Mac OS X, while Linux has gone nowhere on the desktop and Microsoft has struggled to deliver upon any of its promises, having only gradually rewarmed NT over the last ~15 years.
Mac OS X Leopard is now certified as Unix, making it the heir of both BSD and Unix, and primary real competition against Windows on the desktop. Linux exists as a BSD alternative with the entanglements of the GPL.
MS-DOS was simply Microsoft's rebranding of a CP/M clone as its own technology, a regurgitation of the late 70s played back to haunt the 80s. NT is a similar effort to salvage VMS as a tool against Unix. It will be interesting to see who will continue to back Microsoft as it pretends Vista isn't just another embarrassing placeholder while it touts "Seven" as its real product, perpetually two years out.
When you buy an iPhone, you get $600 worth of hardware and make a commitment to use AT&T. You also get a commitment from Apple to deliver you regular security updates and new applications for it.
When you buy a New1973, you pay for the hardware from a Chinese company called FIC, and have no commitment to anyone but the GSM provider "of your choice," which in the US means AT&T. The only other GSM provider is T-Mobile, which doesn't have GSM coverage on standard frequencies; they may be able to resell AT&T GSM service to you on slightly different terms. That's the extent of your real "freedom."
The other "freedom from commitment" you have is the freedom to write your own software. In fact, you have no choice, as FIC doesn't want to bother to write it, they insist you do. You are entirely dependent upon the community to deliver your phone software, because FIC isn't going to do anything for you.
The FIC phone also lacks significant features, including functional WiFi and the ability to place calls. Who's the "sucker":
- Those who buy a functional phone that works from Apple, which will continue to work and get better over its lifespan or - Those who buy a non-functional phone from FIC and are stuck having to fiddle with crap that doesn't work?
To complicate this connumdrum, there is another complicating fact: one can also write their own software for the iPhone.
There are already more people working on (and interested in) hacking software for the iPhone than for OpenMoki. There is a development toolchain available, and people are writing apps on Apple's foundation. If you had the time and inclination, you could even start from scratch and port Linux, or DOS or whatever floats your boat. Of course, you have to choose between whether you want to have a slick phone that just works, or a hobbiest hacked iPhone that might have problems related to your own hacking.
That's a freedom you don't have with FIC's phone. The only choice you get is crap that doesn't work. That's the same reason Linux for the desktop will never get past $300 WalMart PCs. Good luck dicking around with a lame Chinese knockoff with "software you can write yourself!" Just don't be so arrogantly dismissive of those who chose to use things that actually work.
The iPhone is only expensive if you compare its full cost with the subsidy illusion of another phone. Hardware costs nothing compared to service plans. If you compare the full cost over two years, the iPhone with its cheaper service plan is one of the least expensive smartphones you can buy. The more expensive 8GB iPhone with 2 years of service is $2056.
a TYTN is $800 more a Sony Ericsson K850i is also nearly $800 more a Nokia N95 is over $800 more an LG Prada KE850 is $700 more a RIM BlackBerry Pearl is over $300 more a new Palm Treo is nearly $400 more a "$99" Motorola Q is over $200 more
That isn't taking into account that the iPhone will have resale value as a WiFi browser and iPod after two years, while all those other phones will be pretty worthless. It also doesn't note that iPhone competitors all have:
half the battery runtime of the iPhone. a clunker design that's commonly twice as thick as the iPhone. less than half the iPhone's screen resolution.
The iPhone is "locked" to AT&T unless you activate it and attach your iPhone SIM card to another provider. So it's as locked as any other phone. The RAZR, LG Chocolate, Treo and every other phone was exclusive to a provider at launch, and all of them were $500 phones. Who cried foul then? Oh right, nobody did, because it isn't Apple users who are the shrill fanboys, its people like you who love to publish false information.
As for "Proprietary," the definition of that word is owned by a proprietor. Or in other words, for sale. Your OpenMOKO hardware is similarly proprietary to the company building it, it just didn't bother to finish its own software, expecting the "community" to write it for them. So you can own the software collectively and have nobody to blame when it doesn't work but yourselves, but you're still buying proprietary hardware, and it costs just as much. The service just costs more. That makes you a rube, and a pawn, and a simpleton.
"Expensive to maintain" because the battery is integrated? Well, if you plan to use your iPhone for more than a couple years before selling it and getting a new one, yes, you will have to pay for a new battery. My Sonicare toothbrush costs more to replace the battery than the iPhone. There are also third party iPod batteries that cost less than $15, with the DIY kit. Imagine that they'll be available in two years after 15 million iPhones are sold? Again, you are presenting false information because you are bitter about a successful product. You may as well boot Windows.
The iPhone is getting attention because it delivers a much better platform and 80% of the features on any phone in its 1.0 release. It's only going to get more features and improved upon. Apple has a history of updating its software for the Mac and the iPod. Years old devices are kept up to date with updates. No other phone maker does anything approaching this, and any updates that are released are too hard for most users to install. Windows Mobile works like ass, and Palm had been rotting for half a decade. OS X offers the maturity of Symbian or Linux with a consistent, polished interface they will never have.
Even if you hate Apple, its iPhone will make whatever you get end up buying a better phone through competition. That can't be said of Microsoft, which has held back the progress of technology for 20 years. Who else is leading mobile devices? A bunch of stupid followers. If you can't handle reading about a company that can bother to challenge the status quo, maybe you need to reevaluate why. There's nothing insightful about being a whiny bitch with nothing to say.
If the desperately litigious SCO, thinking it owned the copyright to Unix, could announce that it found no reason to sue Sun over Solaris, how does it make any sense that the less litigious Novell would sue Sun?
Just because SCO was found to not own the rights to Unix does not mean Sun's OS is suddenly at odds with Unix copyright. In fact, that seems to make no sense at all. Am I missing something huge?
Mostly for worse. MS has made contributions to lots of things, including WebDAV and (IIRC) inventing the basis of AJAX for Outlook Web Access.
However, most of what Microsoft has "contributed" comes from two poisoned buckets:
The Give: APIs, DRM systems, file formats and other ideas floated in order to prevent / erect barriers to competition.
The Take: FAT, NTFS, SMB, and other protocols and conventions that the world has standardized upon (or hopes to), all of which involve patent risk.
All companies exist to make money. However, other companies make great products, and increasingly, share their contributions to the community, simply because its in their best interests to participate in a market competing in implementations, not competing in formats.
If you compare shared contributions of other companies, MS doesn't look so sharing at all:
Apple - supports BSD and KHTML, opened its core OS and various projects. Sun - opened its Solaris, Java, and SPARC. IBM - supported Linux development. Novell - supports SuSE development.
What has Microsoft ever shared? At a time when it owned the PC desktop 1987-1997, not only did it deliver products of very poor quality, but it really didn't share anything. It got paid for putting out software that was mostly developed by others. Little excellent work, huge profits, garbage for consumers.
Microsoft doesn't deserve respect, it needs to work on earning it.
If you don't like the idea of rentals, don't sign any contracts to obtain limited use of somebody else's stuff in exchange for money. They might default.
You might also be disappointed by defaults as they apply to any other contract:
loans service and support agreements marriage (divorce)
It's a disappointing world when partners can terminate a contract they no longer want to fulfill. The problem isn't DRM, that's just leverage in a specific kind of agreement. DRM is only as trustworthy as the entity offering it. If you don't trust anyone, you can't trust anyone.
So stock food inside a compound you own, not rent; better yet, grow your own food. Dig your own well and generate your own power. Then all you'll have to fear is the gov'ment coming for taxes. But you won't stuffer the anguish of losing your online movie rentals from a company you thought you could trust, nor are you likely to get married to someone who might leave you.
It is a lonely life however.
-- Universal vs Apple in the iTunes Store Contracts When reports surfaced that Universal Music Group, the world's largest music label, refused to resign its existing deal with Apple's iTunes Store, there were private schadenfreude celebrations held in many closets.
How is Google shutting down a DRM business and leaving customers disenfranchised different than any other rental store closing down and leaving its customers all bummed that they have to return their stuff, get a refund, and go somewhere else to rent things?
The problem isn't DRM, it's intellectual property rentals. Any DRM that supports the idea of rental/limited use/subscription is going to disappoint. But we knew that already.
That's why Apple is selling lots of iTunes songs and Windows Media stores aren't. It's also why Universal wants to do its DRM-free trial independent of iTunes to see if it can divert any traffic into Microsoft's partners and gain concessions out of Apple. If it can breathe any life into the former PlaysForSure partners, it will then immediately suspend the DRM-free trial and hook up the world to Windows Media DRM, as it originally intended, and mainstream music will be fucked.
But we knew that already.
Universal vs Apple in the iTunes Store Contracts When reports surfaced that Universal Music Group, the world's largest music label, refused to resign its existing deal with Apple's iTunes Store, there were private schadenfreude celebrations held in many closets.
Well the subject under discussion was Apple's mDNS, its UPNP implementation, and the security issues that resulted in Apple simply turning UPNP off.
You can give yourself points for knowing unrelated details about Microsoft's non-standard, security challenged architecture. The number of devices using UPNP as anything other than a way to play games over a router are really insignificant however.
The wikipedia article you linked to points out:
- UPnP uses HTTP over UDP (known as HTTPU and HTTPMU for unicast and multicast), even though this is not standardized and is specified only in an Internet-Draft that expired in 2001.
- UPnP does not have a lightweight authentication protocol, while the available security protocols are complex. As a result, many UPnP devices ship with UPnP turned off by default as a security measure.
That's the same reason Apple gave up on it and turned it off by default as well.
Ten Fake Apple Scandals: 9 - Troy Wolverton, Neil Cavuto, and the Apple Stock Scandal Google for 'Apple Scandal' and the results are overwhelmingly related to options backdating. Those backdated options from 1997 - 2001 resulted in Apple taking an $84 million charge against operations, but continued to monopolize the headlines for months with the panic that Steve Jobs might go to jail and Apple might be delisted from the NASDAQ stock exchange.
For those confused by acronyms and internal names:
mDNS is Multicast DNS, an standard for resolving host names collaboratively on a local subnet using APIs similar to standard server/unicast DNS. It is half of what Apple calls Bonjour.
DNS-SD is DNS Service Discovery, which allows devices with shared services to advertise themselves on a local network.
Together, they provide much of the simple "just works" networking that AppleTalk delivered in 1986: devices discover each other and auto configure without any complex address settings and without needing a DHCP/DNS server. Implemented as extensions to DNS, these features now work over standard IP networks. Apple released the project as ZeroConfig, and named its own implementation Rendezvous, and then Bonjour after it got sued over the Rendezvous name. The specification is open under the IETF, and Apple offers its own implementation as open source, as well as a binary package for Windows. Avahi is another open source implementation.
The most obvious use of Bonjour is for finding printers on a network, but it works great for throwing any device on a network without configuration. For example, a WiFi security video camera can be turned on and will instantly show up in Safari as a Bonjour website, as well as its RSTP video feed being discovered by QuickTime.
UPNP is Universal Plug and Play, a complex protocol based on HTTP created by Microsoft as a way for local apps to get around NAT issues on home routers. It allows holes through the firewall, largely to support networked games.
Apple implements UPNP to be compatible with all the Linksys routers that support it. It has been a security dog and does not work well.
Apple is also working on Wide Area Bonjour, which allows a Bonjour-savvy client to register with an external DNS server, authenticate, and obtain DNS location discovery and naming information for services and devices behind a NAT layer.
That means you could list services you want to access while away from home (printer, file shares, security camera, iTunes) on an outside DNS server that supports DNS-SD, and then while away from home, you could sign into your own domain and access them without needing to set up any complex networking. Its personal dynamic DNS.
Apple's 802.11n AirPort Base station provides support for this global DNS-SD, but doesn't say anything about how to actually use it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to imagine how a country that pays more for everything is surprised that the iPhone's service plan isn't the same price as the US version. Of course, that gives the ignorant shills an opportunity to spew such silliness as "Apple takes 40% of O2's revenues!!!" and other made up factoids.
BBC Prints Irresponsible Rubbish on Apple
The BBC has joined the London tabloid press in printing a series of articles skewering Apple over invented suppositions based entirely upon misinformed speculation and some outright lies. The worst part is that the BBC is being grossly hypocritical in its misinformation campaign against Apple, because the company is up to its eyeballs in the Microsoft-encrusted scandal surrounding its proprietary, Windows-only iPlayer imbroglio.
UK Tabloids Pick Up Zoon Awards
It's not just the American media that is desperate to publish misleading or downright false information in attempts to prevent the erosion of existing barriers to innovation. The release of the iPhone in the UK touched off a flurry of snide reporting worthy of being Zooned.
Yes this was a huge problem for Wii and Xbox 360 buyers who found they had to buy their PlayStation 2 games over again.
The difference is that iPod games are $5 rather than $40. Game incompatibility is a minor disappointment, but hardly a cause for revolt as you suggest. I wonder why you'd make it a big deal? Oh right, FUD!
Speaking of FUD, lets have a CNET blogger associate the ideas of Apple working to stop phone unlocking with DMCA takedowns and third party apps, then throw in the absolute bullocks of O2 paying Apple 40% of its revenues. How much more false information can one roll into a single serving?
Where's the quotes from Rob Enderle about how the iPhone might result in rape, murder, or the violent death of children? Oh right, they're in:
Why Dan Frommer and Scott Moritz Are Wrong on iPhone Sales
Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer says Apple's announcement of reaching its million mark goal in iPhone sales three weeks early is actually bad news for Apple and is convolutedly "below plan." He also says the announcement only props up the speculative conjecture by Scott Moritz of the Street that Apple's iPhones sales are somehow woefully below expectations. They're wrong, here's why.
Your argument falls down around your ankles when you look at how much profit Apple and Microsoft actually earn.
Apple does not make 50% margins on its hardware. Despite making the vast majority of its money selling hardware, in the year ending in July 07, Apple earned $3.13 billion on revenues of $22.61 billion, an overall profit margin of less than 14%. Just to quash your "Apple marketing" fantasy, I'll poinit out that Apple did not spend (50% -14% =) 36% of its revenues on $10 billion of advertising last year.
Microsoft's three monopolies (Office, desktop Windows, Servers) reported revenues over the same period of:
- nearly $11.18 billion for its Windows Server products.
- just over $14.97 billion in Windows desktop sales.
- over $16.39 billion in revenues from its Microsoft Business Division, 90% of which come from sales of Office.
In terms of annual profits, Microsoft earned:
- $3.9 billion from server software.
- $11.6 billion from Windows.
- almost $10.84 billion from Office.
While Microsoft's Windows Enthusiast wags desperately try to make the iPhone sound over priced with its purported "50% profit margins," they neglect to mention that Microsoft actually makes--after expenses--a 66% profit margin on sales of Office and a jaw-dropping 81% profit margin on Windows.
Why are Microsoft shills so enraptured with screeching about Apple's "outrageous profits" when the company they blindly follow is making absolutely insane profits selling old technology and then jacking up prices even higher and adding more DRM validation and WGA spyware on top? Recall that this past year, Microsoft's profits primarily came from selling:
- The half decade old Windows XP.
- The ancient Office for Windows from 2003.
- The creaky old Office for Mac from 2004.
Who are the blind sheep drinking flavoraid: people paying craploads of money to use old technology from Microsoft, or people paying less to buy alternatives from Apple... like the iPhone that with service cost less over two years than the crap "$99" Windows Mobile Motorola Q that Steve Ballmer waved around as real compeition to the iPhone--even before the $200 price drop?
Microsoft's Outrageous Office Profits
Microsoft's Office suite represents the third pillar of the company's core trio of monopolies, next to its Windows desktop software and its Windows Server products. Here's why the company's monopoly position in productivity applications is holding back innovation and why the mainstream tech media has absolutely nothing to say anything about it.
Fake Apple Scandal 1: The Wild Profiteering on the Expensive iPhone!
This first invented Apple scandal that analysts have worked hard to establish is that the iPhone is not only very expensive, but also grossly overpriced in an effort to profiteer on the interest in the iPhone. Gizmodo likes to refer to the "iPhone Fanboy Tax" as a populist way to cater to readers who want feel better about their choice to own a phone that's not made by Apple.
The money Google makes from residual amounts of BBC Prints Irresponsible Rubbish on Apple
The BBC has joined the London tabloid press in printing a series of articles skewering Apple over invented suppositions based entirely upon misinformed speculation and some outright lies. The worst part is that the BBC is being grossly hypocritical in its misinformation campaign against Apple, because the company is up to its eyeballs in the Microsoft-encrusted scandal surrounding its proprietary, Windows-only iPlayer imbroglio.
What the US really needs is citizens who demand fair use as a right, and insist that representitives act to codify fair use as a right, rather than simply ignore politics and allow Congress to serve the needs of industry.
Apple's iTunes Ringtones and Complex World of Copyright Law
Why copyright law involves more complex issues than many seem to recognize, and why we need to start caring about it.
If they flew overseas, they would have needed to turn on "Airplane mode," which turns off the cell radio, Bluetooth, and WiFi. When they were on their cruise, they would have had to manually turn Airplane Mode off--purposely re enabling their radios--in order to rack up a phone bill. If they thought their phones were off, why would they do this? Were they browsing the web while on WiFi?
They would also have to purposely charge the iPhone every day or two or their batteries would die.
They would also have to manually click on email attachments to download them. The iPhone does not poll for emails and download the entire content if there is a large message, nor does it automatically download attachments.
So they turned the radios on, constantly charging up their phones, and somehow remained oblivious that they were manually downloading huge emails for a week long period, and then surprised that they had an international phone bill?
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How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly
Microsoft's Office monopoly gives the company more revenues and delivers nearly as much profit as its Windows software. How did it gain such a powerful position in productivity applications? The history of Office is rooted in decisions Apple made in the 80s with the Lisa and Macintosh, and also has an interesting correlation to Apple's iPhone strategy today.
Yes and Windows Vista costs $1 to "make," its just $398 of Microsoft tax for an empty box and a DVD you'll only use a few times a year. Right.
Here's why Apple really dropped the iPhone price: the iPod Touch will kill the market for high end smartphones worldwide in markets where Apple can't yet market the iPhone (CDMA2000 / FOMA/UMTS-only Japan for example), because users will be able to buy the fancy touch screen iPod and hold onto their existing mobile. But the iPhone also needs to be competitive with the iPod Touch in the US, so users enamored by it will be tempted to pay the extra $100 to get a full phone, Bluetooth, camera and other stuff.
Existing iPhone users can't be too miffed, because the new, cheaper price point will broaden adoption and pave the way for more iPhone-savvy websites and third party development--not to mention further investment from Apple. I bought two iPhones, and I'm not upset to have paid a $200 premium to be free of my POS Treo as soon as was humanely possible.
Apple's iPhone Price Cut Unleashes Complaints
While introducing the iPod Touch as a version of the iPhone lacking cellular mobile features, Bluetooth, and an integrated camera, Apple also set a new price on the 8 GB iPhone and discontinued the 4 GB model. That move angered some buyers, who felt the $200 price cut after just ten weeks on the market was too much, too soon.
Streaming to an Airport Express requires re-encoding the audio stream to Lossless and transmitting it to the base station. It really isn't reasonable to think that an iPod will be able to do that anytime soon. And why should it? If you have an AEx, you likely have a PC running iTunes on that network. Why burn through an iPod battery to stream audio?
Curious Stuff About the New iPods
Apple's iPod Event introduced a flurry of new features that raises some interesting questions and uncovers some new information on Apple's worldwide plans to expand the iPod's reach.
BZZZ! Wrong. Had Apple suddenly lowered the iPhone's price out of nowhere, it might have suggested that the company needed to boost sales in the same manner as Sony's PS3 price cut. However, what really happened was that Apple released a very popular product that nearly a million people were happy to pay $600 to buy within the first two months.
Apple then released the iPod Touch, which delivers 60% of the iPhone's features - no cell, no Bluetooth, no camera, no mic or speakers, but largely everything else: the iPod and the "Breakthrough Internet Device!!" The iPhone's price had to drop. Anyone who wanted an iPhone got their phone, and now millions more will grab one at the lower price. People complaining about the $200 price drop should take some consolation from the recent $600 price drop on the significantly improved iMac, and the fact that the iPhone's hardware price is only a small fraction of the price with service. So ownership of the iPhone didn't drop by some monumental huge percentage, but merely from $2000 to $1800 across its two year contract.
Homeless people have laptops.
If you have nothing in a tiny flat, buying a $50 wireless card for your laptop is a lot easier than paying $40-50/month for internet service.
Sounds like the baboonery that says the iPhone is terribly expensive at $600, compared to $99 crap phones. But when you look at the real cost of service, it's actually significantly less after two years. It's the ongoing service that's always the expensive part.
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August 2007 Zoon Awards for Technical Ignorance and Incompetence
In an effort to recognize the spectacular efforts of individuals and organizations promoting the regression of human achievement in the field of technology, a series of nominations await your vote to determine the recipients of August 2007 Zoon Awards.
The blame is entirely upon the Board of Supervisors. SF Mayor Newsom pushed the plan for years as both a way to bring WiFi to the City, and an option for free Internet access to poor residents. The BoS responded by holding things up repeatedly to tack on political BS to take credit for the mayor's plan.
Most recently, the board decided to cut Earthlink's contract in half and demand twice the bandwidth, as if they could "fix" things by jacking up numbers. These assholes do this to every project in the City, hoping to load everything up with bulletpoints that they can parade as accomplishments. What it almost always means in reality, however, is that projects never get completed or are delayed for so long that the economic benefit of their add ons is a large negative.
This also happens in housing projects, where developers come in with a plan to build new housing, and the BoS insist that increasingly high percentages of units are reserved for welfare housing called "affordable housing"--not for the poor, but a for handful of well connected people who want to live on someone else's dime. So 10-20% of a project is subsidized, jacking up housing costs and ensuring that the only people who can afford to live in the new housing are the ultra-rich. Meanwhile, all the housing construction is held up in welfare negotiations until projects are tabled or until they are held up for so long that the minor addition of more welfare units constitute an insignificant trickle of new "affordable housing." This is backed up both by those who think market pricing can be overridden by political pricing, and by those who want to keep the supply low so that the demand and prices will remain sky high.
The plot to kill SF's WiFi was the same coalition of populists who thought a community group could put together a faster system, and those who didn't want competition to their pay WiFi or internet services.
http://roughlydrafted.com/
And so what it depends upon may be whether a crack involves defeating a locking system, or selling a patched version of Apple's OS.
Apple didn't sue the kid who reprogrammed his iPhone. It was AT&T who warned the company announcing it would sell a patched version of the iPhone software.
http://roughlydrafted.com/
NPD's numbers only cover most retail stores (although they don't include major retailers like WalMart), and exclude Apple's own retail stores.
The also exclude online stores like Amazon and Apple, and direct marketers like Dell.
However, that means Apple's outside retail sales have jumped by nearly double. That would suggest that Apple's own sales are also doing "well."
Apple set a new record of 1.7 million Macs last quarter, which is commonly its slowest quarter. This quarter is back to school, and next is Christmas, so it will be interesting to see where sales go.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/
Perhaps you can draw up a Five Year Plan for the video game industry and we can implement it after the Revolution, comrade.
I'll work on rounding up the proletariat to design games for the People, so we can all play without anyone being trampled under these bourgeois capitalists who build electronics for money and orchestrate evil plots to make their products more attractive through proprietary software.
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ZDNet's George Ou Exposed as Ignorant Microsoft Shill (Zoon!)
The assault on reason isn't just a political phenomenon. Microsoft has long been developing its own cast of apologists who have eked out full time careers in the field of sputtering out ignorant, unfounded claims with such insistence and volume that the undecided simply have no alternative but to line up and applaud their seemingly convincing rhetoric. Among them is George Ou, who unsurprisingly blogs for CNET's ZDNet branded website.
Apple iPhone vs the FIC Neo1973 OpenMoko Linux Smartphone
Frequently compared to Apple's new smartphone, the OpenMoko FIC Neo1973 is described as the free and open software community's alternative to Apple's officially closed iPhone platform. Here's a look at what it really is and how it compares to the iPhone.
It's easy to wage a war against someone else's comments, but I think you are arguing in circles and far beyond the point.
I merely pointed out that the world already had a free version of Unix to build upon. You can criticize "technical superiority" and suggest that Linux has a better "community," but the reality is that businesses are wary to deal with the GPL. I called it an "entanglement," not because of my own personal ideology, but because the GPL is a problem for businesses; even those who attempt to work with the "community" are frequently attacked by it.
Since you asked "with the SCO suit, BSD was able to make a comeback, right?, I pointed out that Linux hasn't made much progress and the uncertainty surrounding SCO really was as big of a problem for Linux as the uncertainty surrounding BSD. That's not my FUD, it's an observation that FUD was generated, and had negative results.
But the real problem is when you personify Linux as a savior. It's not. It offers really nothing beyond the companies pushing it. If you have a bunch of random distros pushed by tech consultant groups, all you'll ever do is emulate the success of MSCEs pushing Windows for everything. That'll work on the server side, but only until Microsoft starts up its own patent wars. Linux is worthless without a real company standing up for it; without backers like IBM and Novell, the work of the "community" would go nowhere apart from hobbyist activities.
You can giggle about Mac hardware market share, but the fact is that Apple is now making a third of the revenues and a quarter of the profits of Microsoft with its 3% share of the worldwide PC market. That's a lot of funding for Mac OS X. The only people using Linux on the desktop are companies trying to avoid paying for Windows: WalMart, hobbyists, and a few careful steps from the big Windows OEMs. They will never invest anything into Linux, and all the amazing work individual groups do will be ignored by the wider market.
As long as consumers are expected to sort out their own window manager, desktop environment, and variant of Linux, there will never be cohesive progress on the desktop. Linux Enthusiasts can ignore the truth and call me a troll for pointing that out, but as long as you insist that the "community" is going to accomplish anything significant without real commercial backing... well, Linux is never going to make any progress on the desktop.
Along the way, you dig up so many fallacies. Don't stuff words in my mouth about what 'I obviously believe.' Also, Mac OS X doesn't need to be released under the GPL to incorporate GPL software. Surely you are aware that it comes bundled with, among other things, GCC. Name a Linux application that can't run on Mac OS X because of the GPL.
As far as taking Linux' reinvention of the wheel by writing another free Unix kernel from scratch when the technically superior BSD already existed, and equating that with Apple releasing new versions of NeXT software, well I think your ability to find similarities between events is suffering from logic flaws. Apple used code from various BSD projects and incorporated the latest GPL software, much like any Linux distro might.
The difference is that Apple actually invested huge resources into its code base rather than just trying to make a quick buck off distributing the work of others. Efforts in the community to develop similar things (such as other advanced graphic compositing systems) haven't done much for actual Linux users, as nobody uses them. Code is only useful it if gets used. Apple has 25 million users that all use the same software, and its outgrowing the growth of the PC industry as a whole by a factor of 3. Linux isn't growing on the desktop at all, and its users--perhaps in the millions, but who knows--all use different versions X Window, KDE/GNOME, and various other fractionalized projects. That's no way to build anything, and certainly isn't going to displace Windows on the desktop.
Don't jump down my throat for expressing facts based o
Technical superiority did win in BSD's case. While Linux is doing a lot in the server arena, it has accomplished very little on the desktop, despite efforts like OpenLinux and United Linux to create a standard Linux. The kernel may not have forked like Open/Net/FreeBSD, but there's really no difference between forked kernels and forked distros when it comes to fracturing the market. There are really no commercial apps for Linux and there is no real market that will ever encourage their development.
That leaves Apple's Mac OS as the only viable desktop, and its based on BSD, not Linux. It does however share the same POSIX platform, meaning that there's really nothing of unique value in Linux that can't be ported to Mac OS X, while there is lots of value associated with Mac OS X that will never make it to Linux: commercial apps, consumer focus, real marketing, retail support and the like.
It's not that code associated with Linux isn't a great contribution to technology, it's that it simply won't matter on the desktop. Linux is just the new FreeDOS, and Mac OS X is source code compatible with Linux' software.
My original point was only that the world didn't need a new Unix kernel, and there's really nothing special about the Linux kernel.
No Linus wrote Linux as a reimplementation of BSD, during the period that AT&T sued to stop the distribution of BSD. Had BSD not been held up in court, there would have been no need to rewrite BSD from scratch using inferior networking code.
When Novell bought AT&T's Unix labs it ended the frivilous lawsuit against BSD, but by that time, Linux had gained so much marketing buzz that it overwhelmed both commercial Unix and the free BSD, serving to water down any hope for either of the candidates to prevent the expansion of Micorsoft's DOS and the promise of NT and Cairo.
By the end of the 90s, Unix vendors had mainly squabbled amongst themselves, BSD had been largely overlooked, and Linux had expended millions of dollars in efforts to reinvent a perfectly good wheel. That allowed Microsoft to take over the desktop.
Since 2000, the only commercial desktop BSD variant to matter is Mac OS X, while Linux has gone nowhere on the desktop and Microsoft has struggled to deliver upon any of its promises, having only gradually rewarmed NT over the last ~15 years.
Mac OS X Leopard is now certified as Unix, making it the heir of both BSD and Unix, and primary real competition against Windows on the desktop. Linux exists as a BSD alternative with the entanglements of the GPL.
MS-DOS was simply Microsoft's rebranding of a CP/M clone as its own technology, a regurgitation of the late 70s played back to haunt the 80s. NT is a similar effort to salvage VMS as a tool against Unix. It will be interesting to see who will continue to back Microsoft as it pretends Vista isn't just another embarrassing placeholder while it touts "Seven" as its real product, perpetually two years out.
SCO, Linux, and Microsoft in the History of OS: 1990s
SCO, Linux, and Microsoft in the History of OS: 1980s
SCO, Linux, and Microsoft in the History of OS: 1970s
When you buy an iPhone, you get $600 worth of hardware and make a commitment to use AT&T. You also get a commitment from Apple to deliver you regular security updates and new applications for it.
When you buy a New1973, you pay for the hardware from a Chinese company called FIC, and have no commitment to anyone but the GSM provider "of your choice," which in the US means AT&T. The only other GSM provider is T-Mobile, which doesn't have GSM coverage on standard frequencies; they may be able to resell AT&T GSM service to you on slightly different terms. That's the extent of your real "freedom."
The other "freedom from commitment" you have is the freedom to write your own software. In fact, you have no choice, as FIC doesn't want to bother to write it, they insist you do. You are entirely dependent upon the community to deliver your phone software, because FIC isn't going to do anything for you.
The FIC phone also lacks significant features, including functional WiFi and the ability to place calls. Who's the "sucker":
- Those who buy a functional phone that works from Apple, which will continue to work and get better over its lifespan
or
- Those who buy a non-functional phone from FIC and are stuck having to fiddle with crap that doesn't work?
To complicate this connumdrum, there is another complicating fact: one can also write their own software for the iPhone.
There are already more people working on (and interested in) hacking software for the iPhone than for OpenMoki. There is a development toolchain available, and people are writing apps on Apple's foundation. If you had the time and inclination, you could even start from scratch and port Linux, or DOS or whatever floats your boat. Of course, you have to choose between whether you want to have a slick phone that just works, or a hobbiest hacked iPhone that might have problems related to your own hacking.
That's a freedom you don't have with FIC's phone. The only choice you get is crap that doesn't work. That's the same reason Linux for the desktop will never get past $300 WalMart PCs. Good luck dicking around with a lame Chinese knockoff with "software you can write yourself!" Just don't be so arrogantly dismissive of those who chose to use things that actually work.
The iPhone is only expensive if you compare its full cost with the subsidy illusion of another phone. Hardware costs nothing compared to service plans. If you compare the full cost over two years, the iPhone with its cheaper service plan is one of the least expensive smartphones you can buy. The more expensive 8GB iPhone with 2 years of service is $2056.
a TYTN is $800 more
a Sony Ericsson K850i is also nearly $800 more
a Nokia N95 is over $800 more
an LG Prada KE850 is $700 more
a RIM BlackBerry Pearl is over $300 more
a new Palm Treo is nearly $400 more
a "$99" Motorola Q is over $200 more
That isn't taking into account that the iPhone will have resale value as a WiFi browser and iPod after two years, while all those other phones will be pretty worthless. It also doesn't note that iPhone competitors all have:
half the battery runtime of the iPhone.
a clunker design that's commonly twice as thick as the iPhone.
less than half the iPhone's screen resolution.
The iPhone is "locked" to AT&T unless you activate it and attach your iPhone SIM card to another provider. So it's as locked as any other phone. The RAZR, LG Chocolate, Treo and every other phone was exclusive to a provider at launch, and all of them were $500 phones. Who cried foul then? Oh right, nobody did, because it isn't Apple users who are the shrill fanboys, its people like you who love to publish false information.
As for "Proprietary," the definition of that word is owned by a proprietor. Or in other words, for sale. Your OpenMOKO hardware is similarly proprietary to the company building it, it just didn't bother to finish its own software, expecting the "community" to write it for them. So you can own the software collectively and have nobody to blame when it doesn't work but yourselves, but you're still buying proprietary hardware, and it costs just as much. The service just costs more. That makes you a rube, and a pawn, and a simpleton.
"Expensive to maintain" because the battery is integrated? Well, if you plan to use your iPhone for more than a couple years before selling it and getting a new one, yes, you will have to pay for a new battery. My Sonicare toothbrush costs more to replace the battery than the iPhone. There are also third party iPod batteries that cost less than $15, with the DIY kit. Imagine that they'll be available in two years after 15 million iPhones are sold? Again, you are presenting false information because you are bitter about a successful product. You may as well boot Windows.
The iPhone is getting attention because it delivers a much better platform and 80% of the features on any phone in its 1.0 release. It's only going to get more features and improved upon. Apple has a history of updating its software for the Mac and the iPod. Years old devices are kept up to date with updates. No other phone maker does anything approaching this, and any updates that are released are too hard for most users to install. Windows Mobile works like ass, and Palm had been rotting for half a decade. OS X offers the maturity of Symbian or Linux with a consistent, polished interface they will never have.
Even if you hate Apple, its iPhone will make whatever you get end up buying a better phone through competition. That can't be said of Microsoft, which has held back the progress of technology for 20 years. Who else is leading mobile devices? A bunch of stupid followers. If you can't handle reading about a company that can bother to challenge the status quo, maybe you need to reevaluate why. There's nothing insightful about being a whiny bitch with nothing to say.
iPhone cost comparison
iPhone contract security, hardware, sales, FUD comparisons
iPhone camera and viewing comparisons
If the desperately litigious SCO, thinking it owned the copyright to Unix, could announce that it found no reason to sue Sun over Solaris, how does it make any sense that the less litigious Novell would sue Sun?
Just because SCO was found to not own the rights to Unix does not mean Sun's OS is suddenly at odds with Unix copyright. In fact, that seems to make no sense at all. Am I missing something huge?
Mostly for worse. MS has made contributions to lots of things, including WebDAV and (IIRC) inventing the basis of AJAX for Outlook Web Access.
However, most of what Microsoft has "contributed" comes from two poisoned buckets:
The Give: APIs, DRM systems, file formats and other ideas floated in order to prevent / erect barriers to competition.
The Take: FAT, NTFS, SMB, and other protocols and conventions that the world has standardized upon (or hopes to), all of which involve patent risk.
All companies exist to make money. However, other companies make great products, and increasingly, share their contributions to the community, simply because its in their best interests to participate in a market competing in implementations, not competing in formats.
If you compare shared contributions of other companies, MS doesn't look so sharing at all:
Apple - supports BSD and KHTML, opened its core OS and various projects.
Sun - opened its Solaris, Java, and SPARC.
IBM - supported Linux development.
Novell - supports SuSE development.
What has Microsoft ever shared? At a time when it owned the PC desktop 1987-1997, not only did it deliver products of very poor quality, but it really didn't share anything. It got paid for putting out software that was mostly developed by others. Little excellent work, huge profits, garbage for consumers.
Microsoft doesn't deserve respect, it needs to work on earning it.
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Microsoft's Yellow Road to Cairo
If you don't like the idea of rentals, don't sign any contracts to obtain limited use of somebody else's stuff in exchange for money. They might default.
You might also be disappointed by defaults as they apply to any other contract:
loans
service and support agreements
marriage (divorce)
It's a disappointing world when partners can terminate a contract they no longer want to fulfill. The problem isn't DRM, that's just leverage in a specific kind of agreement. DRM is only as trustworthy as the entity offering it. If you don't trust anyone, you can't trust anyone.
So stock food inside a compound you own, not rent; better yet, grow your own food. Dig your own well and generate your own power. Then all you'll have to fear is the gov'ment coming for taxes. But you won't stuffer the anguish of losing your online movie rentals from a company you thought you could trust, nor are you likely to get married to someone who might leave you.
It is a lonely life however.
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Universal vs Apple in the iTunes Store Contracts
When reports surfaced that Universal Music Group, the world's largest music label, refused to resign its existing deal with Apple's iTunes Store, there were private schadenfreude celebrations held in many closets.
How is Google shutting down a DRM business and leaving customers disenfranchised different than any other rental store closing down and leaving its customers all bummed that they have to return their stuff, get a refund, and go somewhere else to rent things?
The problem isn't DRM, it's intellectual property rentals. Any DRM that supports the idea of rental/limited use/subscription is going to disappoint. But we knew that already.
That's why Apple is selling lots of iTunes songs and Windows Media stores aren't. It's also why Universal wants to do its DRM-free trial independent of iTunes to see if it can divert any traffic into Microsoft's partners and gain concessions out of Apple. If it can breathe any life into the former PlaysForSure partners, it will then immediately suspend the DRM-free trial and hook up the world to Windows Media DRM, as it originally intended, and mainstream music will be fucked.
But we knew that already.
Universal vs Apple in the iTunes Store Contracts
When reports surfaced that Universal Music Group, the world's largest music label, refused to resign its existing deal with Apple's iTunes Store, there were private schadenfreude celebrations held in many closets.
Well the subject under discussion was Apple's mDNS, its UPNP implementation, and the security issues that resulted in Apple simply turning UPNP off.
You can give yourself points for knowing unrelated details about Microsoft's non-standard, security challenged architecture. The number of devices using UPNP as anything other than a way to play games over a router are really insignificant however.
The wikipedia article you linked to points out:
- UPnP uses HTTP over UDP (known as HTTPU and HTTPMU for unicast and multicast), even though this is not standardized and is specified only in an Internet-Draft that expired in 2001.
- UPnP does not have a lightweight authentication protocol, while the available security protocols are complex. As a result, many UPnP devices ship with UPnP turned off by default as a security measure.
That's the same reason Apple gave up on it and turned it off by default as well.
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Ten Fake Apple Scandals: 10 - Apple's Mac and iPhone Security Crisis
Windows Enthusiasts weary of making excuses for Microsoft's security failures have discovered that the best defense is a good offense.
Ten Fake Apple Scandals: 9 - Troy Wolverton, Neil Cavuto, and the Apple Stock Scandal
Google for 'Apple Scandal' and the results are overwhelmingly related to options backdating. Those backdated options from 1997 - 2001 resulted in Apple taking an $84 million charge against operations, but continued to monopolize the headlines for months with the panic that Steve Jobs might go to jail and Apple might be delisted from the NASDAQ stock exchange.
For those confused by acronyms and internal names:
.Mac
mDNS is Multicast DNS, an standard for resolving host names collaboratively on a local subnet using APIs similar to standard server/unicast DNS. It is half of what Apple calls Bonjour.
DNS-SD is DNS Service Discovery, which allows devices with shared services to advertise themselves on a local network.
Together, they provide much of the simple "just works" networking that AppleTalk delivered in 1986: devices discover each other and auto configure without any complex address settings and without needing a DHCP/DNS server. Implemented as extensions to DNS, these features now work over standard IP networks. Apple released the project as ZeroConfig, and named its own implementation Rendezvous, and then Bonjour after it got sued over the Rendezvous name. The specification is open under the IETF, and Apple offers its own implementation as open source, as well as a binary package for Windows. Avahi is another open source implementation.
The most obvious use of Bonjour is for finding printers on a network, but it works great for throwing any device on a network without configuration. For example, a WiFi security video camera can be turned on and will instantly show up in Safari as a Bonjour website, as well as its RSTP video feed being discovered by QuickTime.
UPNP is Universal Plug and Play, a complex protocol based on HTTP created by Microsoft as a way for local apps to get around NAT issues on home routers. It allows holes through the firewall, largely to support networked games.
Apple implements UPNP to be compatible with all the Linksys routers that support it. It has been a security dog and does not work well.
Apple is also working on Wide Area Bonjour, which allows a Bonjour-savvy client to register with an external DNS server, authenticate, and obtain DNS location discovery and naming information for services and devices behind a NAT layer.
That means you could list services you want to access while away from home (printer, file shares, security camera, iTunes) on an outside DNS server that supports DNS-SD, and then while away from home, you could sign into your own domain and access them without needing to set up any complex networking. Its personal dynamic DNS.
Apple's 802.11n AirPort Base station provides support for this global DNS-SD, but doesn't say anything about how to actually use it.
A Global Upgrade for Bonjour: AirPort, iPhone, Leopard,