Gary Robinson's Rants

Apple vs. Real

There's a Wired story about Real's competent hacking job here which says:

Apple said in a statement it is "stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod." Once its iPod software is updated, Apple said, it is unlikely that RealNetworks users will be able to use the newer version.

My personal take on it is this: Real wouldn't have done this if they weren't desperate. It was a gamble they had to take because they had no better options, and they couldn't just throw in the towel without a fight, however unlikely it is that they will win. They will have a lot of trouble keeping up with Apple's defensive moves, and even if they continue to succeed at hacking the iPod, few will care very much.

Real is going down.

Not so long ago, there was no iTunes or iPod. There was QuickTime, which was a codec competing with Real's and Microsoft's. QuickTime was in third place. A reporter had heard that Steve Jobs had a personal vendetta to destroy Real, because he thought QuickTime should have Real's place in the scheme of things. When told of this rumor, Jobs said something like "There's nothing personal -- it's all just business."

However that may be, it is interesting to see events play out.

Update:

An article on the conflict in Forbes. A lot of people have the feeling that Apple should not fight this move by Real. I understand the reasoning. Apple's music play is supposed to be about selling iPods, and they supposedly don't particularly care about making money directly off of music sales. So why not open up the iPod to music sold by Real? It could only help them sell more iPod's right?

I assume that Apple has serious hopes of being the Microsoft of Music, and they think their chances of doing that increase if they own the store as well as the player. I don't know if that reasoning is correct or not. I tend to assume they have thought about this very seriously and are not being stupid, and can and will change their plans if market conditions indicate that they should. I think they're "going for it" but will intelligently change their strategy if they can't actually get it. After all Steve Jobs has been through, I don't believe he's so stupid as to bullheadedly and inflexibly "need" to own everything for reasons that have only to do with his own dumb ego and stubbornness -- which is what people frequently assume is the reason Jobs makes decisions.

In any case, my position on Real is unchanged, although it is true that they could fare a bit better if Apple changes its mind decides to let them in.

Update 2:

Daring Fireball has an interesting and amusing interview with the Magic 8 Ball on the subject of the Real hack. The Magic 8 Ball agrees with me on the desperation involved in Real's move.

Why I wouldn't want to be a male Osedax worm

"Initially we were puzzled why every worm was a female," Vrijenhoek said in a telephone interview. He said Rouse took some worms to his laboratory for study and discovered tiny male worms living inside the females.

There were as many as 50 to 100 males within each female, Vrijenhoek said.

The males still contained bits of yolk, as if they had never developed past their larval stage, but they also contained large amounts of sperm. [CNN.com]

Motorola/iTunes and HP/iTunes news

Beginning in the first half of next year, new Motorola mobile phones will be able to fetch songs from Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store and play stereo-quality music. Using software developed by Apple, consumers will be able to transfer iTunes from their Windows or Macintosh computers via USB or Bluetooth connections. [Forbes]

Steve Jobs says this doesn't compete with the iPod -- presumably a major difference would be the iPod's hard drive. And yet,

Memory chips in Motorola's E398 phones, now on sale in Europe, can pack about two hours of music and offer sound quality that rivals portable digital music players. Next year's models are expected to be able to store as much as 9 hours of music. [ibid]

It's not an iPod, but it's a fair amount of music.

An article on the Motorola deal in The Register also notes that HP will be shipping its iPod-based players in September.

Real on iPod

RealNetworks announced Monday that it has unlocked some of Apple Computer's most tightly held technology secrets, giving its music a way onto the popular iPod digital music player. [News.com]

Microsoft's change in strategy

Microsoft's decision to return $32 billion to its shareholders may be a wise business move, but it is also an admission of defeat. With its announcement this week that it will pay a special one-time dividend of $3 a share, the company is confessing that despite years of trying, it has not found an attractive way to invest its cash reserves. After decades of spectacular growth, the world's most famous software company seems resigned to a more sedate middle age. [NICHOLAS G. CARR, author of Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, writing in the NY Times. Thanks to ./ for pointing it out.]

This seems to me to be a completely irrefutable and illuminating observation.

I originally said more here, but I decided it probably wasn't worth saying without spending more time justifying my points than I have right now.

The author goes on to conclude:

Software companies are smart and inventive, and they will continue to come up with new, if ever more specialized, products. The industry will remain a large and important one, but it seems fated to resemble more and more a traditional, mature sector like manufacturing. It is no longer unthinkable to say that software's glory days lie in the past, not the future.

But Microsoft has never shown expertise at innovating. The more logical conclusion to Microsoft's giveaway is that they don't think there is anything out there now that they can spend a lot of money copying and make a profit from. That could well be true. We may be in a period now when the rate of new technologies being generated has slowed down considerably, as it had in 1899, when Charles Duell, the US Patent Commissioner, who in 1899 proposed shutting down the Patent Office on the grounds that "Everything that can be invented has been invented." But in 1899 the world was simply waiting for a few key enabling technologies -- for instance the Wright Brother's first powered flight was just 4 years away. That may be the situation in the software world now -- what comes next may be so different from the applications that are prominent today that it may simply be unimaginable to the Old Guard.

Busy

I've been too busy to have much time to post lately...

Apple, Microsoft sued over patent updates

Using Mac OS X's Software Update system preferences pane to update your operating system and Apple-made applications could become a thing of the past, if a lawsuit pending against Apple Computer Inc. and Microsoft Corp. gets its way. Both companies have been named as defendants in a lawsuit recently filed in the Federal Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiff in the case is Teleshuttle Technologies LLC. The suit alleges that Apple and Microsoft are infringing a patent that covers online software updates. [MacCentral]

Patent 6,557,054.

It's based on a string of applications dating back to 1994, although the patent in question was applied for in the year 2000. It may be possible for this patent to be attacked based on a principle known as "prosecution laches." This principle says that if material is disclosed but not claimed until much later, then such a patent may be held by the courts to be unenforceable. The underlying idea is that an inventor is supposed to claim an invention within a reasonable time frame so that the 20-year clock can start ticking. That way the time when the invention will be free for everyone to use will come sooner. The law wants to reward the inventor, but not let him play the system to extend his reward indefinitely.

It will be interesting to see if Apple and/or Microsoft use that principle in their defense.

BBC's take on the new iPod...

...is here.

Microsoft teaming with Creative Labs for iPod competition

Microsoft is coming. The software colossus is preparing its own download store for launch in the fall. Details aren't yet known, but I expect Microsoft to try and best Apple with a bigger selection, more features and other twists. It's also teaming with hardware maker Creative Labs to build a portable player supposedly cooler than the iPod. [Wall Street Journal via Macintouch]

Bob Dylan singing George Harrison's "Something"

This RealAudio stream ought to be legal since it's from Dylan's official site. I'm a big fan of Something as one of the best love songs ever written, a real tour de force of songwriting by George Harrison.

Harrison had to compete in the Beatles with two of the greatest songwriters ever, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. It has always been utterly amazing to me that he was able to grow in skill to the point that he could, at times, actually challenge the two of them; in fact I think his Something and Here Comes the Sun are the best two examples of classic songwriting on Abbey Road. That achievement appears to make Harrison one of the best songwriters ever, as well.

But it really can't be, by pure coincidence, that the Beatles just happened to have not two, but three, of the best songwriters in the world. Well, it could be, but it's highly unlikely. Rather, to me it seems much more likely that Harrison achieved what he did through effort, learning, and competitive spirit added to whatever "pure" genetically-given talent he had.

So, to me, it's an example of what humans are capable of if they choose to really try to learn and grow.

Anyway, Bob Dylan and George Harrison were friends, so Dylan's performance of Something is a heartfelt tribute from Bob to George. It can't compare with the utter beauty of the Beatle's performance, but it's interesting and worth hearing nonetheless, at least if you're a fan of both of them. As I am.

Sony's snub of MP3's

...But Sony doesn't play MP3. It seems it "supports" MP3 through conversion, and we all love trans-coded music, right? But nope, no playback of MP3.

Yes, seriously. Really, stop laughing. Transcoding is an abomination. Running your music through two lossy encoding steps is plain bad for the music if your standards are anywhere above 1950's AM radio technology. [From a most entertaining rant in cat /dev/DiBona/brain via Linux Journal]

500 Nigerian scammers arrested by Nigeria

My posting has been very light lately due to having so much going on in my business and personal lives. (In particular look out for a product update announcement here sometime real soon now). But this I thought was worth noting:

NIGERIAN AUTHORITIES have arrested more than 500 email scammers, including some high profile people, and seized more than $500 million worth of their assets.
...
According to AFP, amongst those court in the net were 419 previously "untouchable kingpins” including legislators, lawyers, politicians, bankers and public functionaries. [The Inquirer]

More cleaning up Python __init__() methods

A while ago I posted a suggestion for how to eliminate some mindless code in python __init__() methods when you want to assign instance attributes from __init__() args.

Henry Crutcher postedhis own solution on Thursday in the Python Cookbook.

I've combined the two approaches in a comment to that post (on the same page). I think it's getting to be a good solution.