Thursday, August 03, 2006

Panty-waist Europeans

What the hell is going on in Europe these days? Everybody is suing Apple for compatibility issues over a freakin' MP3 player. Here's the gist:

Sweden, Denmark, France, and Norway are all suing Apple because songs downloaded from iTunes will only play on the iPod. The files are encoded in a lossless codec that is not readable by any other player or application.

This is like Sony's failed attempt to enter the market with their own proprietary format, except that Apple allows you to burn any song you download to CD. So, you can buy from iTunes, listen to the song on your computer, and burn a CD to listen to anywhere you go, but you can't listen to the song on your Creative Zen player.

But what makes this illegal? I mean, come on: Apple's been producing an operating system for the last 22 years that ONLY WORKS ON APPLE COMPUTERS!

And it's not like the iPod is the only player on the market. Nor, for that matter, is iTunes.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Apple is just as evil as Microsoft.
Is what they're doing illegal, no. Mean, yes.

Marklar is in the works (Mac OSX on a PC)
http://www.osx86project.org/

ahamos said...

I don't understand how it's mean to produce files or content for your own device. Is Nvidia mean for not producing drivers that could power an ATI video card? What about Cisco, for not making IOS available on NetGear routers?

I also don't understand how a corporation can be inherently evil. Bad people can work for the corporations, but we have a very functional legal system that keeps companies within the bounds of the law. Anything beyond that is regulated by consumers: if you don't like the company, don't use or buy their products.

Which brings me to this Marklar thing. Why? Why bother porting something that's taken over 22 years to develop and toss it onto a platform for which it's not designed? What do you accomplish with that? Sure, you run Mac OS on a less expensive box, but when the OS starts crashing, where do you point your anger? I guarantee you won't be angry at your hardware: you'll blame the OS.