The Mandelbear's Musings

A pretty good day, I think. At work, I finally got the last few bugs out of my code, though it needs some more testing before I'll call it done. I spent my lunchtime on the phone with Apple, registering my complaint about "PeekabooTranny". I went in through their "small business" number, on the grounds that I'm a musician who sells through the iTunes store. The inability of their speech-recognition system to get usable keywords from what I was telling it and the bafflement of their call center people (possibly in India, from the sound of it) when I finally got through to them made for a rather frustrating experience, but the second try got me the corporate number, 408-996-1010, where the word "complaint" got me through almost immediately to a helpful woman who took my comments and also referred me to the website. She had some trouble looking up the url, but I already knew it. Which says something, I guess. Not sure what.

You'll find the text of my second comment, written after I realized that I might have more leverage as a musician than as a random non-customer, up there under the cut.

A little singing, but I stopped after two songs because congestion was making it difficult. Nasal semivowels, in particular, rapidly ran up against the lack of a functional nose. I spent the rest of the evening eating chili peppers and horseradish in hopes that they would loosen things up enough not to need another dose of topical decongestant. They didn't help all that much, but between that, diphenhydramine, phenelephrine, fluticasone proprionate, and a hot bath, I managed. Grr.

Hmm. The only link I see up there is to our new VP of Engineering's a cappella group, Curious Blend.

From Slashdot via gmcdavid we get this article referencing this New York Times article (soul-sucking registration required) quoting Jobs as saying that the iPhone will not be an open environment:

"We define everything that is on the phone," he said. "You don't want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn't work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.'

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

"These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them," he said. "That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment."

gmcdavid also points to another NYT article titled "Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs" about Apple's DRM and how it serves Apple's interests, not those of either the artists or the consumers.

There's a lot to be said for keeping phones as simple appliances without extra features cluttering up the UI, and add-on software making them less reliable. I actually agree with that to a large extent, which is precisely why my cell phone is just a phone, with my PDA and camera separate devices. The total price of a basic Nokia phone, a Nokia 770 tablet, and a Casio camera was less than the price of the cheapest iPhone; the tablet has WiFi, Bluetooth, and Linux. I'll probably eventually spring for a Linux-based phone, provided it's programmable and not carrier-locked.

Macworld UK - Apple closes down OS X

Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code. Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial OS.

...thereby demonstrating the reason why Apple picked the BSD license for Darwin, and the reason why Linux, with the GPL, remains open.