Is Apple The New Microsoft? 904
Varg Vikernes writes "Even if you don't count Apple's actions this week as a potential threat to first amendment rights (Apple's crackdown on Web sites that love the company), they do nothing to bolster Apple's public image. In fact the company's success of late has yielded accusations of bullying and potentially unlawful business tactics, along with complaints about the fact that songs purchased from its iTunes music service don't work with music players other than its own. According to Forbes, to some these tactics sound like something Apple's neighbor to the North might employ. They wonder aloud Is Apple the New Microsoft?
They wish... (Score:4, Insightful)
I do like (and own) some of Apple's kit, but I'm not one of the blinkered Mac apologists who defend their every action. Apple is not a bunch of nice people; it's a corporation, and frankly I'm not surprised in the slightest at their attempts to monopolise music downloads and attack their own fans' websites. Maybe Wozniak wasn't all about making money, but Jobs and the others left steering the ship certainly are.
Have you noticed that, althought Apple's own operating system owes a lot to the open source movement, and the thousands of developers whose code they use for free, you and I still cannot run iTunes on our Linux desktop to sync an iPod? No money in it for them...
It's time some people took off the rose coloured hippy glasses and realised that Apple is just another wannabe monopolist who've (luckily for us) simply been curtailed by an unfortunate event perpetrated by the current software monopolist.
No iTunes for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
That's an odd complaint. I don't think Apple is demonstrating a grudge against OSS or Linux in particular, it's just that the market share of Linux on the desktop is tiny (2%). If Linux had 70% of the desktop market, they'd certainly be offering iTunes for X11 and Linux. Moreover, if it were purely a quid-pro-quo arrangement, I'm not sure that Apple would be bound to produce iTunes for Linux - maybe they should provide iTunes for OpenBSD, since they actually use that team's products (OpenSSH, for instance). Just because you get Apache and Samba with Red Hat, and OS X (OS X Server has Samba) also includes them, doesn't make them "part of Linux," after all, though they're clearly important to making Linux useful.
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
That's exactly what the parent was talking about - there's no market share so there's no money in it for them (increased ipod/itunes sales).
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
They'd have to port the thing, which costs money, and they'd have to support the port, which costs money. I would expect that it would be a loss to the company. And, as I pointed out in my post, what platform should they give back to? It's not as though Mac OS X is a complete Red Hat under the hood.
Is "giving back to t
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder how many of those that complain that Apple hasn't "given enough back" to the OSS community have given anything back to the linux community themselves.
I see that the originator of this thread, FyRE666 has written games in Javascript [smashcat.org], so perhaps he has some justification for his criticism. But I think there are many free loaders who are just bitter that they can't also freeload off of Apple.
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you're saying is, 2 people got modded up for saying the exact same thing. Now your post makes it three.
Oh, what the hell. There's no market share!! Give me my mod points!!
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
They make if for the Mac so you can keep it in the family. Apple wants you to only buy Apple, just as any other company. Apple goes the extra mile and actively trys to keep it that way as well (blocking Real comes to mind).
I always post non positive Apple comments as AC because more often then not, the Apple biased moderators will mod things they do not agree with as troll or off topic instead of trying to reply with a logical rebuttal.
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't blame you. Already that fairly innocent post has had 4 overrated mods, which can only have come from Apple apologists who can't quite identify what about my comment detracts from the discussion but don't want people to see it anyway.
Overrated is a stupid mod, it's not meta-modera
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
then over few days you'll get modded down with 'overrated'. why? because apple zealots read the stories even when they're old, normal people that would agree with your valid points don't read old apple stories.
is apple open? hell no. is apple always nice with 3rd parties? hell no. is apple always right? hell no.
is 1024*768 high resolution? hell no.
" Mac mini sports a full-fledged ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB dedicated DDR SDRAM over an AGP 4x bus." is that incredible graphics? HELL NO, thats about as crappy as you can get while still using ati's or nvidia's current line(and 9200 on 4x bus really means radeon 9000).
disclaimer, i got an ibook here. it's got it good sides, but it's also got it's bad sides.
and apples marketing is just full of shit, even when compared to pc gfx card marketing. but what's really bad about is it that some people don't have any criticism over apples marketing terms and really believe that their g4 bundled with 9200 kicks the ass of something that would be considered a general/gaming budget pc, and that 1024*768 is a good resolution.
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05, @12:32PM (#11853179)
Humm bob 1024*768 IS high resolution
low resolution start at 320*400. High resolution start at 800*600 Anything higher then 1024*768 is well very high resolution.
True the ati radeon 9200 is not really powerfull but in a laptop your don't need graphic power. And the mac mini is not targeted at gamers or graphic guru.**
Aldo the g4 is a bit underpower graphic wise. but so is a lot pc model. Intel Extreme is not a
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you have Linux users, most of which don't like to pay for things, and bitch like hell if a product doesn't come with the full source code.
Re: No iTunes for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: No iTunes for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has been playing off of their maverick, nice-guy image for way too long. It's about time that people realize that Apple long since shed the original hacker mentality and went big corporate. That happened somewhere around 1982, I'd say. Apple Computer is run just as much by suits as IBM has always been. Sure, you have someone like Jobs at the helm who has a vested interest in maintaining that image
Re: No iTunes for Linux (Score:4, Informative)
This statement is misleading in several important respects.
First, NeXT's original plan to develop a variant preprocessor for the gcc toolchain and maintain it independently was indeed incompatible with the copyleft. However, it did not result in legal action. NeXT was informed about how and why it was incompatible and subsequently released the code. There was no law suit or formal legal action taken at all.
Also note that this was over 15 years ago, before even the BSD 4.4 source code was publicly freed in the law suit between the Regents of the University of California and AT&T. NeXT could not even share their changes to the BSD 4.3 kernel to anyone without a valid Unix Source License.
Regarding the subsequent divergence of the FSF and NeXT/Apple objective-c, it appears that the problem rests squarely with the FSF. The gcc maintainers have repeatedly rejected '#import' and other architectural features which are pretty major. They also deliberately allowed several aspect of the underlying runtime to diverge from the NeXT base because they either rejected or even backed out changes proposed by NeXT/Apple developers.
The code is there for all to see in the Apple branches published in Darwin. Apple developers propose changes to the primary gcc source tree, and argue for their adoption, but are often rebuffed.
I think that support for Frameworks, even for plain C, would benefit both Linux and BSD tremendously. However, unless gcc developers accept those changes they will remain unavailable.
Search the gcc developer mailing list over the past 5 years for discussion of Apple submitted changes, if you don't believe me.
Re: No iTunes for Linux (Score:4, Informative)
Denial, "not just a river in Egypt". What a load of horse hockey.
You provide links to evidence which appears to justify the opposite conclusion.
Your first link, http://dot.kde.org/1097096753/1097113373/ [kde.org] is an email asking about what's going on with merging Apple changes back into KDE. The immediate reply states:
To me this suggests that apple added so much code to KHTML/KJS that it made more sense architecturally to split them into two frameworks "WebCore" and "JavaScriptCore", These are still released in their entirety under the GPL. There are so few developers on the KHTML side that they have been unable to keep up with the changes. Seriously, how is that Apple's fault?
Forking happens all the time. It would take far more effort and money for apple to continue to backport changes piecemeal to the KHTML/KJS trees than to fork the distribution. The sensible approach would be for the KHTML/KJS team to accept the architectural changes and simply start using the WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which is cleaner, better maintained, and of higher quality due to all the work Apple has done. Rather than grouse about how much effort it takes to backport changes piecemeal, why not adopt the superior libraries which Apple has produced and continue to improve them?
NIH syndrome works both ways.
The final link you give is entirely out of context. You state that Apple recommended doing a diff to see what has changed. Actually, the wording was "The best way to see every change line by line is to diff against the originals.". Immediately following, was about 14 pages (in my browser) of itemized descriptions of the changes performed, organized by functional description, subdirectory or even by function call.
Thus, your assertion is at least deliberately disingenuous, if not an outright lie.
Re: No iTunes for Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/ [apple.com]
Re: No iTunes for Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
Did you notice how all of the other posts about user statistics had links to sources? Normally you would want to post a reference of your own to refute the above posts.
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
By that logic they should roll iTunes out for FreeBSD, since Darwin (the base of OSX) is based on FreeBSD 5.x. Ever notice how FreeBSD rolls out a new release and OSX rolls out the next month.
I'm not saying that Darwin and FreeBSD are directly compatible, but the FreeBSD project has benefited from Apple's advancements in Darwin; and porting from one to the other isn't that hard. Google has plenty of good information. [google.com]
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's be clear, Apple doesn't owe Linux a damn thing for using FreeBSD as it's base. It's a different group of people. And Apple pays back to FreeBSD in exactly the way that the open source model says it should, by using the software, and feeding back bug fixes.
See for example [osviews.com]
There seems to be an undercurrent on here that companies doing the things that make a profit is somehow immoral. Which is as valid an opinion as any other, but why not just say "all companies are immoral", rather than picking on the ones that you particularly want to spend time on unprofitable stuff.
Re:No iTunes for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Is Darwin not giving back? You know, the entire underlying operating system, free and open source, given back to the community? Is open sourcing their entire ZeroConf implementation (aka Rendezvous/Bonjour) not giving back? What about all the improvements to KHTML they've given back? You know, the improvements Apple is donating back so fast that the KHTML literally doesn't have the manpower to merge them all back yet?
The fact is, Apple has been incredibly good about giving back improvements to Open Source that they've made to the community. Even with BSD licensed software where they technically don't have to give anything at all back if they don't want to, AFAIK they always have.
So while Apple certainly does some things I don't agree with, you need to seriously check your facts, and somebody needs to negate the insightful mod you've been given because you're anything but.
Nope (Score:4, Informative)
Quicktime Standalone, still available.
Re:They wish... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They wish... (Score:4, Interesting)
So what ? If you're that desperate to use iTunes, unlock the files with the "illegal" library just like you unlock your DVDs. And if you don't run Linux, there's probably a Windows or MacOS or Atari or whatever version floating around.
As for me I'm not even through ripping my CDs so I don't really have a use for an online service, especially not one from Apple. I looked at the players on the market, got an iRiver and never looked back anyway.
I totally disagree with this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft goes out of its way to steal competitor products (Sybase SQL server and OS2/Windows) copy innovations without any consideration to the originators (see GUI interface and mice: which both copied but apple paid stock for when they borrowed it), choke the life out of people they have contracts with (Look at the spyglass to IE story) and sabotage technology standards that they don't control (See Java and the butchery they did to Javascript/ECMAscript the supposed standard). Even in their originally innovative products, they primarily engage in anti-competitive, intentional incompatibilities (See every upgrade of Microsoft Office) that sabotage the compatibility efforts of others.
Apple does none of these things. They are innovating, inventing and are really careful about asking people to mind their own business. They want to make their money by selling the best products in a category - Microsoft wants to make their money by being the only company to sell products in every category.
To sum it all up: Apple makes, Microsoft takes. If Apple is cooking up new, tasty technology, they have a right to privacy.
Re:They wish... (Score:5, Informative)
Pullying the clones was a sensible move. Rather than expanding the marketshare of Apple's OS by attracting Windows-based users to the MacOS fold, all the clones succeeded in doing was stealing hardware sales from Apple itself, which was harming Apple's income. The clones experiment was too little too late to make any dent in the Windows juggernaut and was hurting Apple more than it was helping it, so it had to end.
Apple not making a deal with BeOS was a decision that was based on several factors. One of which was the price - neither side really wanted to budge from their view of what the OS was worth - and another was the reappearance of Steve Jobs, who clearly favoured an OS based upon NeXT's OS, whether for technical reasons or personal vanity and vindication. Be could have easily cut a deal before Jobs was back on the scene, but they played hardball a little too hard and ended up with nothing.
As for Apple's stores in the UK undercutting UK resellers, well, I've talked to a manager at one of Apple's biggest UK retail resellers (Micro Anvika) and he said business was booming, even with the Apple London Store only a mile or so away from his company's flagship stores in Tottenham Court Road, so it's hardly as if Apple's UK resellers are crying about it. If anything, Apple's new retail presence and elevated brand awareness has reinvigorated the market, and encouraged resellers to improve on their value-add, which is no bad thing from a consumer point of view.
Even so, some of the biggest competition the UK resellers face is the disparity between Apple's UK and US pricing: it's long-established fact that it's considerably cheaper to buy a round-trip ticket to New York and pick up a PowerBook there than it is to buy the same PowerBook in the UK.
Is Apple a wannabe monopolist? Probably, yes. Which company isn't? But nothing it's done so far or anything that you've mentioned in your post is evidence of any monopolistic policy on Apple's part.
Re:They wish... (Score:4, Interesting)
The store is bigger, redesigned, and with more products on show. It's always full of customers.
The manager says business has never been so good. Top sellers: iPod mini, G5 iMac, iBook, 12" Powerbook.
Re:They wish... (Score:3)
Go learn how to read (and write), and learn how not to hide behind AC posting when sniping at someone in a petty manner, then come back with something sensible to say.
Apple rules the world...Nahhh GEOS 95 (Score:4, Informative)
Apple even without windows would not dominated because Apple in the 80s and early 90s was DUMB!
It is likely another company would have created a GUI system for the PC even if microsoft didnt. An example being GEOS which came out BEFORE windows for the Commdore 64. Geos was ported to the PC about the same time as Windows came out...had there been no windows it is likely GEOS would have become the defacto GUI for DOS based systems. In such an event...GEOS and either Microsoft or DRDOS would have merged.
and Voila... GEOS 95.
Re:They wish... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple isn't 'attacking' fan websites. Take off your bias for a minute and compare this analogy:
Three websites, say Ars, Anandtech, and Slashdot, publish articles on an upcoming ATI product that no one has heard about.
ATI has subpoenas issued to Ars, Anandtech, and Slashdot in order to discover the source of the leak.
Now replace ATI for Apple, and how is that different than the current Apple legal action?
You also complain about 'formally faithful resellers'. Again, think of it from a business perspective: Apple wants profit. If their resellers satisfied Apple's business needs, why would Apple waste money, effort, and resources opening up stores? Look at the business landscape and tell me that the resellers actually helped Apple; and if they did, do they help more than Apple's own stores? Before the Apple Stores existed in the US, the only place I could acquire them were department stores with broken displays, computer stores with no staffing, and resellers with no customer service. I don't doubt there do exist the odd excellent reseller, but I don't think you can deny there exist a rash of bad outlets either.
Finally you talk about open source. They give back exactly what they owe, and more. Apple doesn't use Linux, they use BSD; FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Towards that end Apple has released their OS core, Darwin, even though the BSD license doesn't require it.
Apple also uses KHTML for their web browser, and releases that back to the KDE folk.
Apple has open sourced their networking kit, Rendezvous, and their Quicktime streaming server, and a few other libraries and projects.
Yes, all of this HAS to have business benefits. If there were no benefits, it would be a waste of YOUR money; you did invest in Apple when you purchased your products. They don't exist to do favors for Linux; when has Linux done favors for Apple?
I don't believe Apple would be worse than Microsoft, given the chance. I think if they grew to Microsoft proportions, they would suffer a host of ills that currently can be seen afflicting HP, Sony, and Compaq: Lack of vision, lack of direction, lack of coordination, lack of innovation. You don't believe that, but I point to ALL the examples out there. The only company of that size that hasn't become listless (and thus surprised by Apple) is IBM.
Re:They wish... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm tired of people calling anyone who defense Apple apologists when it comes to these court cases.
ThinkSecret is a for-profit company, NOT a news organization.
They're convincing people who have signed Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) to ILLEGALLY GIVE THEM INFORMATION.
We don't know all the information, but if ThinkSecret convinced them to give them the information by giving them something, then they're also guilty of bribing.
Either way, Apple ha
Re:They wish... (Score:3, Insightful)
any monopoly is bad..
Re:They wish... (Score:5, Insightful)
They're tying products together artificially, that's normally a pretty good sign.
Since you've clearly forgotten, Apple has contributed enormously to the Open Source movement.
Have they? The only project I can think of where Apple engineers have actually submitted a non-trivial number of patches is GCC, and they maintain their own private fork with many patches not available upstream. Their patches are not available in discrete form anywhere, if you want to get them you have to scrub them out of their own tree.
And that's the best example! The KHTML changes are returned in the form of a massive undocumented patch dump, which makes them extremely hard to use. Note that the latest KDE/KHTML release does not seem to contain many improvements from Apple: that's why. FreeBSD got a few test suites out of it, iirc, and not much else. GNU Binutils is still waiting for many of the patches Apple wrote to be made available in a useful form, etc etc.
Basically Apple have perfected the art of releasing [L]GPLd software they use back to the community in a useless fashion. That's their biggest contribution.
As for the first "large corportation" to embrace open source, I wonder how you can ignore IBM even if you have arbitrarily ruled that Red Hat and other such companies are not "large".
Re:They wish... (Score:3, Informative)
Let's see about that page: OpenPlay is something they have themselves abandoned, and nobody uses it. Microsoft open sourced WiX too, does that mean they're suddenly supporting open source? No.
Darwin is mostly made up stuff that was already open source, and the parts that are new aren't generally useful as they're inferior to what's already available (eg compare performance of Darwin to Linux on POSIX benchmarks sometime).
The Rendezvous code they released consisted
Re:They wish... (Score:4, Insightful)
iTMS == iTunes Music Store
I've been using my iPod for 3 years without ever downloading anything from iTMS, so don't try telling me that I'm wrong. Yes you need iTunes to put songs on the iPod, but since it ships with the iPod, that's not tying, that's just two parts of the same product that i bought.
BTW, no one has "proved" anything about Apple fixes released to the community. You should learn the difference between an opinion and proof. So Apple don't spoon feed people with fixes in the form they'd like. Boo hoo.
Re: They wish... (Score:3, Informative)
Re: They wish... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They wish... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They wish... (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, the same answer is derivable via logic. Linux is a direct competitor to MacOS X. They are both vying
Re:They wish... (Score:3, Insightful)
The "beautiful font engine" you are referring to is FreeType which has indeed worked around this patent. The auto-hinter unfortunately does not work correctly for non-Latin fonts as it relies upon aspects of the geometry. Hinting is still required if you wish to display vector based non-Western glyphs, and it's also required to produce metrically compatible glyphs with s
Re:You prove my point! (Score:5, Informative)
OK, so hinting and anti-aliasing are different things. You can use both, or none, or one of either, it doesn't matter.
Hinting is about correctly grid fitting the pixels. It can (and should) be used at any size, but is most noticable at small sizes (which is most text on a computer screen). If you want to see text that isn't hinted, look at this [sourceforge.net].
So to say "hinting is ugly" is not correct: hinting by itself modifies glyph shapes, for the better (that's why people want it). As you can see from the picture, unhinted text is very ugly indeed - unpleasant to read in fact. What you probably mean is that some people don't like anti-aliasing. On Windows it's off by default,on Linux it's on but you can disable it globally very easily, and on MacOS X you cannot disable it without special purpose hacks that often break when you upgrade.
FreeType is capable of anti-aliasing and also using TrueType hinting, which it can do in one of two modes: automatic and by using the data embedded in the fonts. In automatic mode it tries to guess based on the shapes of the glyphs. The algorithms used are fascinating and developed specifically for FreeType, to work around the patent. However the autohinter doesn't always get it right so FreeType can also use the real hinting engine it is supposed to use, if you have a license.
"Font smoothing" is just another way of saying anti-aliasing, except in that thread you linked to where they appear to be using it to refer to what is normally known as sub-pixel anti-aliasing which exploits properties of how pixels are laid out on LCDs to make it look better. Microsoft calls this "ClearType". FreeType can do this too.
In short: hinting and anti-aliasing/smoothing are different things, which have different purposes. It's possible to have one without the other.
Re:They wish... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They wish... (Score:3, Insightful)
How so? What part of Linux has Apple adopted? If anyone should complain it is BSD (because BSD begat NextStep begat OS X) or GNUStep (because NextStep begat GNUStep). Linux has no connection with Apple except precariously: That they use Apache (The Apache foundation), X11 (XFree86.org), GCC (GNU.org) Samba
No, just normal operating procedure (Score:3, Insightful)
No need to single out Apple for finally joining the crowd in order to stay afloat.
Re:No, just normal operating procedure (Score:3, Insightful)
Not entirely true. I know many local companies and larger corporations that I think do a far better job to maintain common sense and moral while staying in business.
Re:No, just normal operating procedure (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, there are these kind of news now and then of companies trying to stifle competition, but why aren't we facing a jungle of lawsuits, if what you're saying is true? Did Intel recently bully and make use of unlawful tactics? AMD? Google? Yahoo? ATI?
Re:No, just normal operating procedure (Score:5, Insightful)
Subpoenaing TS to find out where the leak is seems lawful.
Bundling free AND non-integrated software seems lawful.
Selling the SAME software in a non-bundled, non-integrated, package seems lawful.
I'm sure half the examples you want to use are alleged violations: Like Apple's treatment of resellers, but truly, where has Apple been stifling competition?
Have you not seen how many small, portable, hard drive based mp3 players exist? I would argue there that by making the market profitable, Apple has encouraged competition.
Have you not seen how many music stores now exist? I would also argue that by making the market viable, Apple has encouraged competition.
Have you not seen Apple's adoption of Open Source software? I would argue that by making Open Source profitable, that Apple has injected new life into the open source movement; that Open Source need not be garage, back-room, or basement, but is viable for the desktop!
Re:No, just normal operating procedure (Score:5, Informative)
The Creative Nomad, 14oz, 5"x5"x1.5"
The PJB100, 10oz, 6"x4"x1"
Apple released the iPod and made it a consumer object, rather than a geek object. Apple changed the entire market! Before Apple they were:
Large (bigger than a paperback. Now all of them, LIKE the iPod, are smaller than a deck of cards)
Heavy (at 10oz or more. Now all of them weigh less than 6oz)
Slow (using USB 1. Now all of them, just like the iPod, use USB2 or FireWire)
They were good for cars, good for work, good for train trips, and good for airplanes, before Apple got a hold of them. After Apple they became good for walking, roller blading (yes I have rollerbladed with iPods), working out at the gym, anywhere.
It was like the difference between a desktop and a laptop, in mobility.
The same with music stores. Before the iTMS, there were NONE that let you burn to CD. NONE that let you upload to an mp3 player. NONE that let you listen on multiple computers. NONE that let you back the music up. You say, "In the works", and I say, "Quickly saw what Apple did and tried to match them."
The only other player besides Apple who has made any money off Open Source would be... IBM. Red Hat hardly makes money, GNU and Apache aren't profit centers.
Here's the initial [members.shaw.ca] announcement and response about Safari's use of KHTML, with positive response from developers.
This [kdedevelopers.org] suggests developers haven't been able to keep up with Apple's changes, which makes sense; a handful of developers working full time on anything can outstrip hundreds of developers working part time over weekends and evenings.
As for gcc [gnu.org], the idea is to search gcc-patches and look for apple.com addresses. Searching Google shows over 6k hits, though I'm sure some of them are duplicates. Some Apple devs maintain special branches (for example, in implementing ObjC specific features) while others contribute fixes, or add Altivec/VMX specific patches.
Where do you get your info that Apple ISN'T contributing?
Re:No, just normal operating procedure (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes need to single out Apple for finally joining the crowd in order to stay afloat.
I think it's a relavant topic of discussion whether Apple owes its success to superior products, or cut-throat business practices.
If I'm considering buying Apple products because their cool now, will I regret it down the road when I realize they're screwing me?
Re:No, just normal operating procedure (Score:4, Insightful)
Saying "it's OK because everybody does it" isn't any kind of moral or legal argument at all - even if you were correct, it wouldn't make it right. At best, it indicates a serious problem with the system. At worst, it indicates that Apple is run by ego-centered millionaires who want to model the world in their image.
Not necessarily (Score:3, Insightful)
Witness the FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:
It's ironic that a company as innovative as Apple Computer could have such a regressive view of the changing world of American media.
Apple's view may seem regressive to the average slashdot reader, but to the rest of the world, it's way ahead.
This is a baldfaced attempt to confuse two sources of outrage for the average geek: threats to free speech and threats from Microsoft. It's a common rhetorical and political tactic meant to funnel away attention from the true threat.
Don't be fooled. Microsoft is the new Microsoft, and the old Microsoft.
From the article:
Problem is, the definition of journalism is rapidly changing. "Traditional" media like print newspapers, broadcast news and weekly magazines years ago began being augmented and in some cases supplanted by "new" media on the Web.
The protection of sources is still a source of contention, even among the "traditional" media. Refer to the Valerie Plame case (another classic "divert the opposition" case) for contention about protection of sources in the traditional media. Protection of sources, even for the major media, is not a set part of the First Amendment.
Re:Witness the FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I really wish I understood that little gem completely before I bought an ipod shuffle.
I did a bit of homework and found out it could be treated as a USB thumbdrive with FAT32 partitioning. Golden, I can mount that... Unlike many of the players out there, I can't just move my music over to the player's file system. I've got a mixed environment, and was really angry over the amount of work I had to do to export MP3's over to my ipod from my Gentoo box. (Hats off to the gtkpod dev team, btw)
As a lightweight MP3 player / thumbdrive the Shuffle is nice. iTunes, not so good. (iconoclastic stance here on
Anyhow, Apple may pitch the iPod as a hardware sale where any music is more or less sold at cost - but they really went out of their way to tie the iTunes software (and thus the on-line store) into the mix. Grrr...
No. (Score:5, Funny)
(And if anyone else has any "New Microsoft" for sale, won't be long before Microsoft buy that too..)
why have I seen this before?? (Score:3, Funny)
His crackley voice speaks, "Arise Darth Apple"
Steve Jobs sets up, "Yes my Lord."
when you come over to the dark side, all of the evil consumes you.
Welcome Apple, the Evil that is Gates has consumed you.
Next we will find Linus cut in half laying on the floor with RMS shaking his head, "ready not for the battle were you. Dead you now are."
oh yeah, this will be good......
Re:why have I seen this before?? (Score:3, Funny)
Jobs is not Gates (Score:5, Interesting)
Jobs, in contrast, is at his core someone who knows marketing and wants to dazzle his customers. With Microsoft it's what they want and you have to go along with it. With Apple, it's about finding the best customer experience and using that for profit.
Look at the quality of their respective products. What kind of quality do you get from Gates? Convoluted, buggy, but hey it's got features so shut up. What kind of quality do you get from Jobs? Look at Pixar. They are a money-making machine, but they do it by providing customers with top-notch quality. People are glad to give them their money. With Microsoft, it's often a case of grudgingly giving their money.
So a world dominated by Steve Jobs would undoubtably have it's own problems, it would be different problems than we have seen from Bill Gates. Their personalities are different enough to ensure that.
Re:Jobs is not Gates (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's exactly why we need antitrust protection. Power corrupts.
Exactly. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's spot on.
Apple is in the zone of making products you think you just can't be without. You want them. Have to have them. And you will spend the little extra to get the little extras they spend time investing in making a quality product.
M$ has labored
"Apple's neighbour to the North" (Score:5, Funny)
Short answer: (Score:5, Insightful)
"No".
Longer answer:
Apple was never really the "friend" of independents. Macs are designed to be closed systems, not particularly open towards user-implemented modifications. This is one of the reasons the systems are so polished, secure and easy to use. The fact that Apple is willing to sue to protect said secrets doesn't make them the new MS... they're just doing the same thing they've always done - protect their products.
ThinkSecret infringed on that, and it could very well have been detrimental - look at how quickly Intel has designed a Mac-mini clone. Redmond doesn't have to worry about that - most of their software is a clone of Mac ideas anyway.
Here we come Private Eye (Score:4, Funny)
All image no substance (Score:4, Insightful)
They seek to have total control over their platform and how the users use that platform. Sueing their fansites is exactly the behavior I would expect from Apple.
It is ironic that Apple used 1984 themes in their first Mac ad since Apple revels in "thought" control.
Re:All image no substance (Score:3, Insightful)
While the platform is somewhat closed and he hardware very closed, the release of Darwin and the use of numerous open standards doesn't fit your theory. Their software complies more with open standards than Microsoft's has any year, and I don't think they've tried to make their own proprietary revision of those open standards.
I think you've missed a few points on the lawsuits There are laws saying th
Re:All image no substance (Score:4, Insightful)
They've pretty much always had total control over their platform. The exception being during the clone era, which didn't go well for a number of reasons. It's how they've managed to keep the quality of their products higher than average.
I don't understand your argument that they want to totally control how I use my Mac. There's no software on my machine that I can't remove. A lot of their apps are collaborate in neat ways, but if take one of them off, the rest still work. Sure, they dictate what buttons and windows their programs present to me, but doesn't every application writer do that?
Much of their software writes to open formats, and other developers are free to pull apart and write to those files (keynote, ical, etc...).
I've installed various versions of Mac OS dozens of times on many different machines, and not once have I been asked to a serial number, or to authenticate.
I can think of lots of software on my computer that Apple didn't create. I don't even have to ask them for permission to use those programs.
I'm free to try and upgrade my hardware. My mac is filled mostly with pretty standard components. Video card choices are a bit limited because of the mac's smaller marketshare, but not because of any Apple conspiracy. I guess I can't really change my motherboard, but the percentage of computer users who care in the least what sort of motherboard they have is negligible.
There are hundreds, probably thousands of Apple fansites that have been operating for years, and I don't think many of them have been sued.
Linux and OpenBSD and whatnot most certainly do provide an extremely open and free environment. It's an environment that many people thrive in, and really enjoy. There are, however, plenty of other people who like to have a lot of the work already done for them, and that's the market that Apple has always targeted. Paying someone else make a bunch of decisions for you, so that you can get to work on the ones that you're actually interested in, that's not evil. And a company existing to make money off of doing that is not evil either.
Re:All image no substance (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm. You must be talking about just the chip or something, because on the G5 towers that start at $1400 or something, you can replace/upgrade drives, vid cards, optical drives, memory, etc. as well as add bajillions of compatible 3rd party peripherals. A 16 button mouse, if you want.
Apple also includes X11, you can use fink or another package manager, you can even install yellowdog linux. They include free dev tools for both the BSD and mac environments. A free compiler. Almost RAD-like cocoa app dev tools that give you the low level stuff for free.
So I'm not sure what you mean when you say "total control" over how users use the platform, unless you mean you can't build a mac out of spit and tinfoil with an embedded mach kernel with an opensource mac personallity or something.
$35B (Score:3, Insightful)
see here [yahoo.com]
If only we had trade secret escrow (Score:3, Interesting)
I do love the protections that the press has and feel that those protections should be extended to online media, but I also think that companies should have some protection of their trade secrets.
Ok ENOUGH. (Score:4, Insightful)
If I had a contract with somebody and they broke it, I would want to know about it and so would you.
-1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is the ONLY Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple may guard their secrets and markets closely, but they also support open standards and open source.
Red Hat makes the source code for all their products easily available by ftp/http mirrors everywhere.
To paraphrase Gandalf: There is only one Microsoft and it does not share power!
Apple = Microsoft? (Score:3, Interesting)
However, for all the blind loyalty, slowly but surely people started to hate Microsoft. I can see Apple going exactly the same way. Why? Because like Microsoft, they have started to screw the average Joe around and act anti-competitively.
When they make their cute little computers, they can pretty much get away with charging at a premium, as they have total lock-in and nobody else can make a compatible, yet cheaper device (and competition is one of the main things that commerce is founded on). However, with, for example, the iPod and iTunes store, a lot of other companies have been able to produce alternatives that are cheaper, and do the job just as well, but better. What's the Apple answer? Lower the costs? Make their products (Fairplay DRM I'm looking at you) more attractive to consumers? Nope. Instead they try to stifle the competition by making their hardware only able to purchase tracks from their own online store (which kind of feels like a car manufacturer only allowing their cars to be used with their own brand gas), and taking legal action against any competitor that tries to provide tracks that can be made to work with Apple's hardware.
If that isn't anti-competitive, and the Microsoft way, then I don't know what is.
Used to??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Used to? Jesus man. I still see so much evidence of this going on today here on Slashdot and everywhere else. To an awful lot of people, Microsoft is still a kind, benevolent company who make secure robust software. Or at least they don't seem to bothered by the rest of the shit MS does.
Re:Apple = Microsoft? (Score:3, Insightful)
making their hardware only able to purchase tracks from their own online store
I'm not talking about ripping a CD and making an mp3 of it, or downloading from Kazaa here. I'm talking about freedom to buy music from an online store other than iTunes. There is none of that with the iPod, and that's why the iTunes store is being investigated for price fixing by the European Union.
What is Love, anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Paying Apple employees to break an agreement with Apple and leak Apple's trade secrets isn't a manifestation of "love".
Some people have to grow up and understand that a company is about making money, and a company has corporate interests that some blogger may not be able to appreciate. A company isn't "open", like the government is (supposed) to be.
Re:What is Love, anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
FINALLY, someone gets it! This isn't about fansite's or blogger's "rights as journalists", this isn't about freedom of speech, this is about someone willing to violate a legally binding contract forbidding them from revealing trade secrets to outsiders, and someone else soliciting that violation.
Apple has been such a driving force in the industry in recent years due to their ability to innovate. When someone from inside the company leaks information, that innovation is threatened by the million and one companies clamoring to whip out a cheap knockoff of the latest Apple design.
It's not like these fan sites haven't gotten cease and desist orders for YEARS prior to this. It's not like they didn't know all about Apple's land sharks. The company known as Apple Computer is well within their rights to pursue these legal means to defend their rights.
Oh, please (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, this is about unauthorized publication of private information. Certainly nobody believes that "the press", in any of its traditional or more modern forms, has the unfettered freedom to publish private information, especially if the release of the information is potentially harmful to someone.
Consider the (admittedly imperfect) analogy of a blogger publishing your private medical information, or financial records. Nobody would claim that the first amendment extends to malicious release of private data.
A reasonable person might argue that a corporation is not entitled to the same protection as a an individual, and it is certainly the case that ThinkSecret's actions were not malicious (although they were arguably harmful). OK, we have the basis for a discussion, but not histrionics about a corporate evil empire trashing our constitutional rights.
I can't believe Forbes published that drivel. Reasonable people can disagree about whether Apple's actions are reasonable or constructive, but this was an inexcusably sloppy start.
And, oh, by the way, my pre-iPod MP3 player (a Creative Nomad II) is currently loaded with mostly iTunes-purchased songs. I guess I failed to notice the Apple-logo'd chains around my neck when I loaded it...
Re:Oh, please (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, thank God that the Washington Post wasn't able to publish that sensitive private information about the Watergate break-in which would have been terribly damaging to Nixon.
Get real, almost anything worth publishing will be damaging and considered private to someone.
Um... yeah right. (Score:3, Informative)
Companies aren't open, companies aren't free, companies are typically closed, proprietary, and restrictive. Apparently some Apple employees blabbed and they shouldn't have. Things like this can cost companies millions in lost profit.
Is this bad PR for Apple? Yes, I think it is. Is it within Apple's rights? Certainly. Does it make Apple the next Microsoft? No, last I checked Apple only controlled a fairly modest portion of the market.
Later, GJC
Yes and no (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple's stance on Think Secret is about First Amendment rights. From Apple's perspective, it is trying to protect their trade secrets by limiting information about upcoming products. Apple isn't alone in doing this. Most automanufacturers go to great lengths to protect new models. From ThinkSecret's perspective, it's about their First Amendment rights. A court will settle it.
If it was MS, not only would MS sue ThinkSecret, they would try to influence ThinkSecret's partners, suppliers, and customers in not so subtle ways.
Apple like some companies have and will continue to bully some resellers This behavior could turn away many, and Apple could be nicer. The sad fact of the matter, though, is that Apple owns a monopoly on their own machines, but they have not in recent memory tried to bully resellers against competitors.
Microsoft has not only bullied resellers but strong-armed partners too against their competitors. When Win95 was out, many OEMs were persuaded not to install Netscape but IE or their Windows prices might rise. Intel wanted to develop a Java runtime compiler for i386, but MS hinted that AMD would get a more favorable treatment when MS developed their next version of Windows if they did.
The issue with iTunes keeps coming up, and it never really gets explained. AAC is an open standard. Fairplay contains the DRM. Not many players support AAC and almost all support mp3 (as does iTunes/iPod) and some support wma. Those that support wma have struck deals with MS. Some of those who complain about Apple being closed include MS and Real and that's the pot calling the kettle black. You can always convert the songs into MP3s if you want although it's not a simple process and their will be fidelity loss.
OK. So the question is... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not pleased with Apple's behavior of late. But IMO Microsoft has a long history of much worse. I'll stick with Apple as long as their product does what I need at a price I can afford (both time and hardware/software expense). I bought a Mac because I don't have time to maintain a Linux box at home any longer. I ran both Linux or *BSD on my home PCs for over ten years, and if I had the time to tinker, I'd go back. Not now. I work full time, I take two evening classes, and I'm a part time landlord. My computer is now a tool, not a toy. So, Mac it is - warts and all.
*sigh* As good as much Free Software is, sometimes one must make a tradeoff between necessity and available time. And if that means accepting Apple's somewhat rude and abusive behavior, for the moment I'm willing to do so for expidiency's sake. But that doesn't mean I like it. Apple may convince me yet to make my next purchase an Opteron running Linux. --M
There is no first amendment issue here (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, Apple is not attacking ThinkSecret.
This is not a First Amendment issue. Apple is trying to track down people who violated their NDA. When you sign an NDA, you are signing a legal contract and violating that contract is a violation of the law. When you sign an NDA you have essentially agreed to forfeit your 1st Amendment right as it relates to the subject of the NDA.
Apple is trying to track down a person or people who willfully and illegally violated the terms of a legally binding agreement that they made with Apple. ThinkSecret is safe. ThinkSecret is not being forced off of the web. They are not being sued for damages. They are not being prosecuted at all. They are being subpoenaed for info that would lead to the prosecution of people who have broken the law (this is not even debatable at this point, these people have violated the terms of a contract that they agreed to). No one is attacking ThinkSecret or their right to say whatever they choose to say.
And the whole idea of media sources being protected is sketchy at best. There has never been a clear and well-defined legal precedent for this supposed protection. In fact, whenever "sources" have provided info that is later determined to be false or defamatory, they are usually pursued with the blessing of the courts. And when someone provides information by violating a legal contract, why should it be any different? If you didn't want to get in trouble for telling people, you shouldn't have signed the NDA.
You people have a funny idea of how the first amendment works.
Tech companies... (half-finished) (Score:3)
Apple has always been this way. (Score:3, Interesting)
NOTHING to do with 1st Amendment... (Score:3)
Look, just because a company wants to shut down some websites, does not make it an automatic 1st Amendment case. The 1st Amendment was originally ONLY meant for the federal government; i.e. Congress can't make laws saying, "no printing bad stuff about any senators." In the early 20th century, the 1st Amendment was "incorporated" so that it also applies to the states (Schenck v. United States); I think it was the first of the Bill of Rights to be incorporated . BUT THAT IS IT. The 1st Amendment does not apply when Apple is suing a few websites over trade secrets/NDA/etc. This case might be corporate censorship through legal intimidation, but it has absolutely nothing to do with a state or federal government abridging free speech.
A good example of a current case that DOES involve the 1st Amendment is the Novak/Valerie spying case where two journalists have been held in contempt because they're refusing to reveal their sources. I think it's a journalist from the Post and the Times.
It's stupid to shout "freedom of speech" whenever anything remotely relating to censorship occurs.
List of iTunes compatible MP3 players (Score:3, Informative)
iPod - Apple
Nomad II - Creative Labs
Nomad II MG - Creative Labs
Nomad II c - Creative Labs
Nomad Jukebox - Creative Labs
Nomad Jukebox 20GB - Creative Labs
Nomad Jukebox C - Creative Labs
Novad MuVo - Creative Labs
Rio One - SONICBlue/S3
Rio 500 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio 600 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio 800 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio 900 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio S10 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio S11 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio S30S - SONICBlue/S3
Rio S35S - SONICBlue/S3
Rio S50 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio Chiba - SONICBlue/S3
Rio Fuse - SONICBlue/S3
Rio Cali - SONICBlue/S3
psa]play 60 - Nike
psa]play 120 - Nike
SoundSpace 2 - Nakamichi
CD MP3 Players
RioVolt SP250 - SONICBlue/S3
RioVolt SP100 - SONICBlue/S3
RioVolt SP90 - SONICBlue/S3
Microsoft is so much 'worse' (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple gives back to the BSD community. Apple mostly supports standards.
I have made a lot of money over the years because of Microsoft, but I must say that I don't like them for a few simple reasons: lack of support for standards, obfrustcated Microsoft Office file formats, putting marketing before creating simpler more reliable products...
I respect Bill Gates for his donations to charity. It makes me feel great to be able to regularly contribute small amounts of money to organizations like the Heifer Project, American Friends Service Committee, and Habitat for Humanity. But, WOW!!, I can no even imagine what it must feel like for Bill and Melinda Gates to be able to literally help millions of people instead of of a few.
But, as a corporation, I am starting to detest Microsoft.
Apple is my ace in the hole in case Linux is ever outlawed in the USA. I guess that I could live with just OS X.
Microsoft has always been more consumer-friendly (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple's persistent proprietary secrecy, its atavistic self-righteousness, and its high profit margins have always been more stringent than Microsoft's.
Which is why Microsoft has always kicked its ass in the market despite lower product quality.
Even after 20 years, I still don't buy Apple because I feel I'll be "locked-in" to a proprietary system with expensive add-ons to do simple things. The fact that they'll be done extremely well doesn't sway me or the other billion Windows users.
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Neither will the beaters on my Kitchen Aid mixer plug into my Oster mixer, or anything else like that. It always amazes me that when a
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not at all. You can buy a $50 Chevy alternator. Of course, it won't fit, so you might have to make some metal brackets, drill new holes and find the right kind of pulley to make it fit on the belt, but you can still do it legally. No one can stop you trying and no one should be able to stop you trying.
With DRMed works, you can not do the software equivalent of the above unless authorized, because of the DMCA (even though you supposedly have fair use rights). Now as it happens, Apple do authorize it by letting you burn on to CD and re rip (which may be a pain), but you can still put your songs on a different player.
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the iTunes Music Store was the only download music store, and they used a proprietary format, then that would be one thing. As it is, the apparently barrier to entry in the downloadable music business is so low that music stores are springing up all over the place (the local radio station now has their own music store where you can download the music from their playlists). MP3 players are for sale at half the stores in the mall.
Nobody is forcing you to use anything from Apple; there are viable competitors in every one of their markets. Nobody is paying an "Apple tax" to buy a computer that doesn't have iTunes installed on it...
forcing you to use anything from Apple?
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:New Microsoft? ... or lapdog? (Score:5, Insightful)
And how is MS using Apple to attack Linux by saying OS X is a better Unix than Linux? I've seen a variety of individuals say something to this effect, but I've never really seen it as an official company line from either MS or Apple.
Re:DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Four letters (Score:5, Insightful)
This has been debated before, but I'll put in my $.02-- If MS didn't "take" the BSD TCP/IP stack we would be in a world of locked up and proprietary communication protocols-- the internet itself may be a different place.
Apple did not "lock up" the changes they made to the BSD Unix core "darwin"-- in fact not only have they been very open about their changes the entire core is available under and open source license. Apple has done more than expected-- and continues to port back all or most changes to Darwin. It's actually a neat operating system, and can be run w/o Quartz (Apple's WM).
Do yourself a favor and bite down hard the next time you put your foot in your mouth.
Re:Four letters (Score:3, Insightful)
If OpenDarwin is crippled, then so is every *Linux and *BSD distribution out there.
Yeah, you definitely put your foot in your mouth.
cr
Re:Four letters (Score:3, Insightful)
OS X without its GUI would probably fall under crippled. However, OS X as a whole isn't open source software that Apple "took and returned to the community a crippled version to us."
Darwin, the kernel that OS X uses, however, is the OSS project Apple used. Apple has since returned many changes they've made to this kernel back to the community. Aqua, the window manager, was developed by Apple itself, and so does not fall under the category of "OSS
Re:Four letters (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yikes (Score:4, Insightful)
So on one hand we have Mac consumers, who love rumors. And on the other hand we have Mac Rumor sites which apparently now are seen by the Mac faithful as enemies of the state.
Well, you can't have it both ways! Take away the obsessiveness about Apple's secret plans and all of a sudden nobody cares what The Steve's big announcement is, the online community has nothing to talk about, and new Apple products are greeted with a big Meh.
Apple's Marketing Hype Machine depends almost entirely on the Mac Community's need for the Next Big Thing. Apple walks the line here with ridiculous secrecy to whip up the faithful. But then when the rumor sites actually hits gold, Apple brings out the legal guns. Being an online Mac freak just got a lot less fun, thanks to Apple.