- Edmunds.com: “Confessions of a Car Salesman” Updated for 2009. The original series was a classic on the shady business practices of car dealerships. Turns out the same basic practices are still being applied.
- Bloomberg: Ballmer Says Tax Would Move Microsoft Jobs Offshore. Microsoft exec threatens to move more jobs offshore if the government closes some unrelated tax loopholes that the company takes advantage of.
- Dan Froomkin: Celebrity Journalism at the White House. A strong critique of NBC’s silly news special this week on the Obama White House.
- slacktivist: Killing in the name of. An important blog post on the history of the anti-abortion movement.
- Carrer Blog: 1 line CSS Grid Framework. Everything good and bad about CSS in a single line.
- Daring Fireball: Why Palm’s WebOS ‘Media Sync’ iTunes Integration Can’t Be Legit. Don’t miss the followup on the legality of the Palm Pre impersonating an iPod.
- Hivelogic: Deploying ExpressionEngine from GitHub with Capistrano. This approach should work for any PHP app.
- Andrew Leonard: GM: Into bankruptcy, out of the Dow. Companies that file for bankruptcy are automatically delisted.
- Joe Gregorio: Wave Protocol Thoughts. On the plumbing.
- Trader Joe’s Wine Compendium. A blog that reviews only wines sold at Trader Joe’s.
- The Atlantic: Do CEOs Matter? What do chief executives add? One thing’s for sure, a bad CEO can certainly be a disaster for a company.
June 4, 2009 at 12:51 am
About the Palm impersonating the iPod, don’t care if it’s legit or not. It should be.
My device, my songs — I should be able to do whatever I want with them.
Amazing how corporations have wormed their busted-ass values into your brains.
June 4, 2009 at 10:46 am
I certainly don’t care whether the Pre impersonates an iPod. Frankly, I think that Apple should open up iTunes to third party players so there’s no need to hack around its limitations. My biggest frustration with Apple is that they so rarely play nicely with others.
June 4, 2009 at 11:11 am
Mike, it is your device and your songs, but iTunes is not your software.
I would have to think that Palm (and Sprint) have both looked into the issue and feel they have a legal leg to stand on. They may also feel that the regulatory environment in Washington is such that businesses with a lot of cash on hand will not try to draw attention to themselves.
Apple on the other hand, if they feel they have a case to prosecute, may go ahead because winning would likely mean the end of Palm and one of their major competitors.
I’m with Rafe, Apple should play nice. If I bought a phone/mp3 player, I’d certainly wonder why I’m using iTunes to sync things up…maybe there is something to that iPod if it’s by those crazy Apple guys.
June 5, 2009 at 3:32 pm
I thought that bit about the Palm Pre being “cheesy” (or something like that) for reverse-engineering its way into iTunes was lame as hell. Yeah, we should respect the intellectual integrity of giant corporations who think they pwn your computer and everything on it and anything you might one day connected just because you happened to purchase one of their products. Hmm, not so much.
If Apple was not so super lame on this front (I like Apple for many things but not this) they would have an open, documented protocol for both iTunes and the iPod and they would trust in the superiority of their product. When I see someone trying to lock me in, I immediately am suspicious that the reason they are doing so is that they know that either their product is inferior or that they believe that it may become inferior to a newer product at some point in the future. It’s a sign of weakness, not strength.
Hopefully we will have some cases that will decide that reverse-engineering is not a crime, and that in fact the kind of multi-product lock-in that Apple (and many other vendors) love to try are antitrust violations. Failing that, a more vocal protestation of lock-in may persuade the vendors that it is a losing strategy just like DRM was.
June 5, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Also, on the Wave protocol, the point about the mix of JSON and XML was exactly what I thought when I looked at the docs.
I am considering it my task in life to rid the world of XML for anything except document markup. It completely blows for data storage.