skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple has evidently made a decision to prevent iPods from working without iTunes, and to prevent iTunes from working with non-iPod audio players. We must assume that Apple's executives have weighed the pros and cons of this decision, and have decided that the pros (maintaining a reputation for a seamless experience) outweigh the cons (losing some sales to Linux owners, Palm owners, etc.). That's an ordinary business decision.

"You'd think they would want to sell more iPods, not block a certain percentage of their market out," says mdeslaur in this post.

Maybe the Apple executives have made the wrong decision for their company's bottom line, and maybe mdeslaur, and many of the commenters here, would have made a better decision that would have increased Apple's profits. But given that (a) they have access to a lot of data that you don't have, and (b) they're executives at Apple and you're not, I wouldn't bet on it.
So I guess Microsoft should be able to block any other browser because Chrome might crash and someone could says "Windows Vista sucks" (which it does but that's a whole 'nother story)

Beyond that, if that scenario does happen Apple gets to tell it's customers "Look, Palm messed up your data which is why you should use geniune Apple hardware" and they win a monsterous victory. Palm corrupting iTunes data would be the greatest thing to ever happen to Apple. So the idea that Apple is blocking the Pre because of that doesn't hold much weight.
Why should apple care? If someone mucks with their phone that's their own problem.

Apple should simply ignore it: don't support it, and don't block it.
I'm sorry but they have a defacto monopoly in the digital music market. When Walmart, Amazon and Microsoft specifically target you and can't even get their foot in the door that says a lot.
better pay, better possibility of more pay in the future, and probably more interesting long term. The automotive industry is quite mature at this point, and therefore boring.

I could totally see myself going into cars, though, if I was born a century earlier. That would have been really interesting.
They way they re-enabled iTunes sync is by changing their
USB id to be the same as Apple's.

What about this do you find objectionable? Do you deplore reverse engineering too?
No problem, try this one:

git clone git://github.com/cloudkick/libcloud.git
MJF: Hemminger is claiming Microsoft put the LIC code under the GPL because it was in violation of the GPL. Is this true? Did you have to suggest to (Microsoft Platform Strategy Chief Sam) Ramji & Co. that they were in violation in order to get them to agree to release the code under GPLv2?

GKH: I didn’t have to “suggest” anything, I only had to merely point out the obviousness of the situation :)

MJF: If this isn’t accurate, could you let me know how to interpret (Hemminger’s) comments on his blog.

GKH: No, that sounds accurate.

[...]

Ramji didn’t come right out and deny the GPL violations claim, but I guess that’s as much as we’re going to get.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3433
Ask your local SysAdmin; you can do ok without a degree even without going into 'the trades'
Honestly?

I downvote comments I agree with, if they look upvoted out of proportion to their value. I also upvote things I disagree with if they've been downvoted unreasonably low. I don't think a stance on an issue that's plausible and civilly stated needs to go below 1, for instance.

Different people have different approaches; if we could get everyone to vote based on one standard, we wouldn't need a karma system in the first place.
Three things...

1. DRM free does not mean all my meta data comes with me. Much of that data is stuff I created and stuff I should have the right to take elsewhere

2. I specifically said "I don't expect Apple to support the Pre but they shouldn't actively block it"

3. Revenue is gross not net. Apple's margins are obviously WAY smaller on a hardware device than they are on digital media.
Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in Operating Systems either (I think polls have shown that a majority of the members of this site don't run Windows), but they still are fined and antagonized for their 'monopolistic' business practices and bundling.

Apple's free to do this if they want, but then again Microsoft should be free to bundle IE also.
This article is also very good:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond
Maybe there is an opportunity here for hackers. Some sort of job swapping / training site. It seems a lot of hackers would like to work a "manual job" and I would bet a lot of people doing manual labors would like to learn about computers.
I never said it was unlawful. I also didn't say it not rational. I said it was a bad idea.

It's a bad idea because it's hurts their own customers. It's a bad idea because it causes some people not to buy their product.

Huggies is a ridiculously bad example.

A better example is the Michelin PAX run flat wheels (rims) that require special (expensive) tires. Nothing illegal there, it's a great lock in. Except customers refuse to buy it, and not just refuse to buy the wheels, they won't even buy a car with those, and car manufacturers started having to add an option to not have run flat tires.

With the tires, it's just a bad idea, but with an iPhone apple is blocking access to a customers data. It's MY iPhone apple - not yours.
The problem with registration news sites--they don't own the underlying news.

A nag-free copy of the same information: http://www.livemint.com/2009/07/24122026/De-Beers-H1-net-pro...
Somehow I wasn't seeing the exact formulas, even though I simulated it and got a similar answer.
I get that. But from the perspective of a traveler, for any given well traveled city you are going to find an equivalent host with equivalent accommodations at both sites.
I wonder if it would have been wiser to start Airbnb.com as the web 2.0 version of couchsurfing, and then go freemium. Something couchsurfing wouldn't do.
Disappointing, excitement got the better of me and I upvoted out of sheer anticipation that someone finally implemented a Facade interface pattern for tutorials on the web.

Instead I gotta get more printer paper and another hard-drive to archive all these pdfs I'll probably never read.
"I used to use this scheme exclusively"

So what do you do now?
It's treading where they are obviously unwanted. That's not a good way to do business or instill faith.

About ten years ago, Be wanted to have BeOS be an alternative OS you could run on Macs. Be did in fact get the first version running okay. But Apple was in the midst of one of its big hardware changes, so Be needed tech docs for the motherboard to do a really good job of it. Apple never supplied that information.

BeOS advocates at the time said: just go ahead and reverse engineer it. That's what the Linux people did. The powers that be at Be said: nope, we don't play that way. If Apple doesn't want us on their computers, then we're not going there. Be subsequently refocused on standard PC hardware.
Microsoft had --- according to the DC District and Circuit Court --- a monopoly in desktop operating systems.
why there is the need for a extended own standard instead
of extending the existing standards.

Because standards bodies move too slowly?
In what sense can you claim that iTMS has a monopoly on digital music? I wanted to buy a Modern Lovers CD last week, and I had to use Amazon, because they had the CD and iTunes didn't. Monopoly doesn't mean "commanding market share". It means "control of the market".
Thats especially true given that you want to add in symbols, numbers and capital letters. You are going to end up needing to write it down anyway.
Taleb is not a good modern thinker. He takes existing, well-known mathematical principles, rewrites them without citation or reference for the layman, and then disparages the people whose work he took and other financial professionals who also understand the mathematics quite well, as if he knows something they don't.

He would be a lot less irritating if he (1) didn't claim credit for ideas that aren't his and (2) stopped falsely disparaging people.

Buffett, on the other hand, is quite a bit more humble and grounded and provides stable, sage advice. He also credits people a lot more for the work they've done.
I use flexiscale at the moment, but have had one hell of a time trying to get any of their officially-offered API stuff to even work. If I manage to get anything out of them, I'll be sure to ping you guys...
> I think the real evil is continuous partial attention.

Yeah. Agreed, it's my main enemy ATM. I may have to admit defeat and block reddit/news.yc/twitter/facebook on all my computers.
For a company that started off with the motive of making the cheapest and most usable computers, and that believed in sharing its design [from iWoz: the APPLE-1 architecture was made public], Apple has come a long way. They are successful, yes. Their products are good, yes. But now they make exhorbitantly expensive products [an iPhone 3gS with contract can cost you ~1000$ in the long run], which they force to not work with anything else [WHY?] and are closely guarded. Apple, you make great products, but I am never gonna buy them, cuz then you'll want me to buy music just from you, use only your software, and pay you for software upgrades [iPod touch] !
Perhaps because portability wasn't just an afterthought in your development.
Palm should've kept using their own USB ID and Manufacturer string, and allow users to override them to impersonate an arbitrary vendor. Including, of course, Apple. This way the Palm is in the clear, and it's the user that is responsible for the actual act of vendor/device impersonation.

But all things considered, all this will simply lead to Apple ditching USB or layering a custom encrypted protocol on top of it. So Palm's current hack is a temporary solution.
There are classes of customers that some businesses don't want. It's also rational to ward off customers who are pains in the ass.

As for the "it's MY iPhone argument", I sympathize with it, but I see the other side of the argument too: I also want companies to be free to create any reasonable business model they'd like. Apple very specifically and deliberately didn't sell you an iPhone as a general-purpose computing platform you could do anything you want with, and you can't claim that you bought it expecting to use it as a Linux box.
The domain may be difficult for your users to access or remember. The dashes and the .me could easily be forgotten or mistyped, as well as "tutorial" vs "tutorials".

When trying to generate a domain I like the "say it out loud" test so I can see how potential users may try to explain it to someone if they're recommending the service in person. Lots of "dashes" is a red flag .

Just a suggestion, I see that myfreetutorials.com and even freetutorialsfor.me is available. May want to check those out.
If they don't have to support and when they have a right to not support, don't they automatically have the right to actively block too?

If it is a standard, they HAVE to support it. If not, they are justified in actively BLOCKing it. There is nothing in between that makes sense to me.
So instead to help to make them faster, just ignore them?
And where's Be now? Dead. Where's Apple? Still acting like twits and preventing OS X from running on standard PC hardware, you still have to go to Apple to buy their hardware.

I don't get your point.
This is an interesting example. I'd argue that if Be had not abandoned the Mac market they might have had a better fate than to be merely bought by, ironically, Palm!
"As for the Pre, anything that allows arbitrary devices to pretend to be an iPhone and sync jeopardizes email account information--which can be synced to the iPhone--and is a security flaw"

So any of the billions of iPod users are automatically trusted? I can't imagine the security of email on the iPod depends on trusting all iPhones? Surely they have some other mechanisms in place?
The implication is that non-Mac PCs have had a greater share of high-end sells before the campaign, but it's not stated (some other places seem to back this up http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-has-91-of-ma...).

The particular stat used (% of 1k+ sales) seems to correct for the recession; my expectation is that sales would decline evenly.

I would agree that this could be unrelated to ad campaign; I don't see any reason they have to be related.
Free Software Foundation calls upon Amazon to free the ebook reader.
Could MySpace + Yahoo Games = A New Online Gaming Powerhouse?
Economics in One lesson - Henry Hazlitt
Where is Be now?
Tweeting all the way to the bank
I saw or hallucinated an "Airbnb for office space" recently, but can't find it for love nor money (which is what makes me think it's a hallucination). I recently spent a bit of time looking for a desk sublet and it took way longer than it should have. Though I guess there's something of a thorny area with commercial lettings and the like, it'd still be nice to book a place at some startup in London/Paris/SF to rest my laptop when I'm next down there for a few days.
A CD isn't digital music first. I get your point that it can be turned into digital music but a lot of media can be converted to other mediums and they count as separate products.

As far as the term. I mean, I understand people can have different definitions but the reality to me is when a company feels they can abuse their customers without fear of them going elsewhere that means they have reached the point of de-facto monopoly. Apple has no problem taking functionality from their own iTunes customers to kill the Pre and that to me is the line (though I fully understand others can differ)
Having “come here from Reddit” some time ago, I can vouch that for newly arrived redditors this is moot, since I’m still not offered a downvote button.

I’d guess that by the time the downvote button shows up, most people should have had time to realize HN generally offers more interesting discussion because it works the way Reddiquette FAQ says Reddit should work: do not downvote points of view.

// Now I’ll go back to lurking.
Modern Lovers, hey? Which one? I like the John Cale-produced stuff. They didn't last very long but they were good for about one whole record, which exists in a zillion forms. (And to exponentially grow the offtopicness: check out the beginning of LCD Soundsystem's "North American Scum" for a pitch-perfect imitation of Jonathan Richman imitating Lou Reed.)
Skype threat to Russia's security
Well yes and no (the codebase originated as VMS-only). The point is that going to Gnu tools helped us solve the problem, it didn't create the problem (as the OP was implying).

And this is the thing - the complaint seems to come down to "ensuring portability is hard in divergent environments" and the answer is "that should not be the sysadmin's problem, that should be upstream's problem". Up to upstream whether they want to deal with the pain up front in the design, or patch it as it comes.
Strange Science? There's An App For That
Over the years, I've noticed a lot of people on Hacker News using underscores for emphasis, like _this_, instead of asterisks, like this. How about supporting both?
The integration between iTunes & iPods is Apple's Secret Sauce. Since they have never really opened either side of this equation to third parties it's hard to argue any monopolistic behavior here. Apple isn't stopping anyone from developing their own hardware, software and online store and making a competing platform with the same level of integration that consumers seem to want. It's not Apple's fault that no one has been able to step up and produce a legitimate competitor yet. Like any company Apple is obligated to maximize their profits and protect their market share. We can argue if it's good or bad for the consumer but honestly it's irrelevant. That's how capitalism works. I do not see any legitimate OSS projects offering a comparable platform. Apple (especially since dropping DRM) is not impeding their ability to do it.
Your metadata is yours, and Apple is not stopping you from doing anything with it. A lot of it is already in the m4a file anyway, using either ID3 tags or some newer analog to them. As for whatever metadata is stored outside the music files themselves, iTunes actually gives you all the metadata you need: it shows you the metadata plainly. What they don't do is maintain a requirement that any arbitrary device or program can reliably access that metadata, i.e. by keeping it in a consistent, well-documented format. That's an engineering decision, not a moral imperative--it allows them flexibility to do things their way instead of worrying about breaking backward or third party compatibility.

Apple's margins on iTunes are pretty low, when you consider how much they have to pay out to record labels and credit card companies even before paying for their own infrastructure. Digital media is high-margin in total, but only if you can realize all the profit. The record labels can do that, but Apple can't.
I don't know. You aren't laying out any logical reasoning behind what you're saying other than "you feel" that way.

Once my car's warranty expires should Chevy be allowed to enforce a mandatory recall in which they change the car to prevent after market products from working in it?
Here's Microsoft's official statement, along with an document detailing their specific terms (the top 10 browsers with a marketshare over 0.5%) and a ppt of a mockup of the ballot page.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-24sta...
I have to say, anything bad happening to De Beers is music to my ears. As you've mentioned they run a cartel to sell worthless rocks at huge markups to irrational consumers, but my real problem comes from the toll their actions take on human lives in third world countries. The human rights violations of the diamond industry are unparalleled.

I'd recommend everyone read up on "blood diamonds" or "conflict diamonds" as well as the diamond market in general before ever purchasing a diamond for jewelry.
At the risk of being a bit gnomic: the standard is here to serve me, I am not here to serve the standard. Apparently the Linux community has more of a taste for writing code than worrying about bureaucratic processes. I can't say that I blame them.
By the way, did anybody notice the sequence at GPS headquarters (minutes 24:00 to 27:00), where the air force guy couldn't even name a commercial GPS manufacturer? It is amazing how much indifference there was towards civilian use of GPS, contrasted with the vast commercial usage built upon them providing the service.
Well... at least they're rethinking car design along the way. That might actually help them (and us).

The hydrogen part? not so much.
A while back there was a rumour that Amazon had open sourced the Kindle, which turned out to be false of course. The code was really GPL'd Linux libraries and drivers.

In an ideal world I think Amazon should open source the Kindle software, but I think because of pragmatic business repurcussions it won't happen anytime soon.
It's really frustrating; as science and physics particularly progress, the metaphorical explanations become less and less effective. Intuition isn't enough, and the public isn't willing to accept math into their lives.

During the space race, people were emotionally involved, and it didn't seem like a hardship to understand a moonshot trajectory --- it was a patriotic duty ;)

Now, the math is a thousand times more arcane, and the emotional connection is gone. I think that it could be possible to get a small subset of the science-show public interested in actual understanding, rather than "The quantum world is bizarre/watch this computer graphic that doesn't explain tunneling." But there is no royal road to math, and without math, the intuition is hard to handle.

We need Square One for adults.
Interoperability with the Pre or with gtkpod? It seems like Apple broke interoperability with the pre deliberately, with the side effect (one that Apple is apathetic towards) of breaking compatibility with gtkpod. Since it's the latter this blogger is complaining about, I'd file this under "not supporting interoperability".
A is for Ajax and C is for Comet
I'm more into passphrases, now - randomly pull, say, 3 words from a vocabulary. With even a modest word list a couple thousand strong, you have billions of combinations, even assuming the attacker has access to the list. Such passphrases are also easier to tell other people over the phone.

I've been pondering building a 8th grade reading level word list, cleaned of homophones, commonly-misspelled words, etc. for more general use. That would be tedious, though...
It's a quarter of everything over six percent.

Source: How to Pick Stocks Like Warren Buffett, pg. 11.
Not sure why you downvoted, I thought you made some great points. However, your example helps illustrate what I've been saying.

Say you want a car. You may want to go to the dealership and just buy one (Toyota's automated process, thus lowering marginal cost). However, maybe you're the hotrod type and would rather build it and customize it yourself. You pay for someone to help you build it and troubleshoot any mistakes you make along the way. Sure, it took longer to build, and was probably more expensive, but it's exactly want you wanted. I think that's where the value of opensource/support lies.

Commercial open source companies (at least Redhat) use subscription models for their support (in addition to consulting, professional QA, etc) so I don't think they would consider troubleshooting software money earned. In fact, I think this gives them a greater incentive to maintain the quality of their software so they get less support tickets and scale to have more subscription fees per support person. I guess you can say that RedHat, through their support, sells the peace of mind of having that support person if you want to go the open source route.
"Broadcast has to reach a massive audience to stand any chance of reaping a return"

While I sympathise with geuis's complaint, I agree that that this is a limitation of the broadcast format. This is a particular problem with children's (semi-)educational programming - every Blue's Clues episode has to work for the 3 year old that just switched on for the first time, and can't build up so that by 5 the child is still being challenged.

I hope you are right and this is a problem that can be addressed by the move to on-demand services.
Stallman's Right to Read (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html) is slowly becoming more and more relevant.
As the title says: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics!

I love the way author uses simple language to describe complex economics concepts.
Have you tried KeePassX or passwordsafe? passwordsafe was actually created by Schneier with twofish encryption.

see: http://www.schneier.com/passsafe.html
or if you are on OS X or windows: http://www.keepassx.org/

Use it with dropbox and it is available anywhere you are.
Dvorak made interesting points, but his logic is flawed: Microsoft doesn't actually need any successful products to survive.

Microsoft not only has a huge bank account, but it is being handed money by all the peripheral industries that (sadly) depend on Microsoft's proprietary technologies. Those companies will simply never risk destroying their huge I.T. investments.
$570M for bankrate.com - Apax Partners
Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aTb_iqZ2nBcE