This is not an Apple blog, which would include some good things they do. Instead, it's the foolish fanboys' trivial take on Apple the Monster. Well, be happy with your childish amusements. I'm outie.

Of course, there's always been a small supply of the Old Ones to use as actors in Space Alien movies. Kind of like the Indians in John Ford movies. But seriously, space aliens are clearly the first manifestation of the Cold War paranoia.

We're the space aliens, they're the locals. Most of us have just forgotten what happened after our birth on epsilon kappa. The earth used to be littered with little green men. We killed them all by installing air conditioners. Now and again, some come back for a visit, and we kill them too. This was one of those visits. That'll teach 'em.

I think he qualifies as an expert on codecs. More than me, and probably more than you.

Maybe, then, the free (as in beer) software movement has its limitations, much as I like some of it. Firefox can certainly pay the codec out of referrals from Big Brother Google. Or Google could very easily fork over a few pennies from its Scrooge McDuck-sized treasury to bail out Firefox.

Sez you. I don't know. Are YOU a lawyer, or just another ideologue? Maybe you're right. Then why should Google not support both codecs? The latest GPL license is a kamikaze attack on software, and a plea for crap written in mother's basement.

Why doesn't Google suggest a standard to the body that allows a browser to give people the choice of codec? Something in Preferences? Or alternately, allow the browser to recognize them both? During the whole Flash debate, Google came out in favor of "consumer choice" for Flash on mobile phones. Flash is closed. But they're not in favor of an open standard there, HTML 5, but here they're against the open standard administered by a consortium, H.264. Could it be because the megacorp, Google, in both cases chose whatever would hurt its competitor the most, and screw open/closed? And is their distaste for paying royalties mean they're champions of open, or just another junk merchant that provokes religious frenzy by saying it's "open," except when it isn't?

And your expertise is...? A codec is a very hard bit of programming to optimize for all uses. H.264 is a damned good job, that exists on Blu-ray down to cellphones, giving the best possible image in each case. The world is full of hardware that is compatible with it, and hardware encoding and decoding is in a lot of programs and hardware throughout the industry. Yes, the consortium controls the patents. Big movie studios pay the most, and companies that distribute the codecs, like Apple, Google (yes!), and Microsoft, pay about a million a year. If you want to distribute your own movie on discs, you have to pay a modest bit of royalty with exemptions for charities and non-profits. Let's see: Google Chrome, rightfully, has grown very popular over the past year. I had adopted it as my default because it's so damn fast. If they carry through with this, that's the end of it for me. Firefox I find has become unusable too. I know the problems with Safari and speed, memory leaks, etc. -- but this is intolerable. It is unfair practice, and if Chrome was any bigger, it would get the attention of the Justice Department. If Google also dropped h.264 from YouTube, you bet they'd be investigated. (Apple, by the way, has now relented and allowed Flash Builder apps to be run on the iPhone. The Justice Department may have influenced that, too.)

The became pro-DRM when Apple dropped it, of course.

There is no DRM per se on programs sold on the Mac App Store. But Apple does advise developers to authenticate the receipts with the bundle IDs. Many programmers, like Rovio, apparently, either didn't bother or did it wrong. You can put in phony receipts, with the wrong numbers, and it works. Undoubtedly, there is a way to fake even real receipts, and that will be discovered in the future. Piracy is rather trivial on the Mac, in fact. A simple serial and a copy of Little Snitch will get you just about anything. And the OS isn't locked down at all, like some other OSes I might mention.

I sell more more with my free OS on it, or versions of same? Who's winning? HTC? The Android makers will now have a race to the bottom, and the networks will make money on the OS by restricting choice. The dictators, the "EVIL EMPIRE" here are AT&T and Verizon, etc., that do their best to hook you into exclusive bondage to their networks by various means of branding their company. Whether you like Android or iOS is a matter of taste. I like the iPhone, despite the crappiness of the AT&T network. Our rents on these phones are too damn high, get it? Oh, no, the Androids among us like to see Jobs as the locus of evil in cell phones. As long as you look at the problem that way, you're fresh meat for Verizon, etc. What we need is a populist rebellion against the networks, and all you guys can do is cheer for one vastly wealthy corporation over another, both of which make creditable platforms.

Why on earth would Apple want a software product that could disappear tomorrow? Okay, in the next year. Right now, it's big. All that's in the way of it losing 90% of its value is some other thing coming along. By the time the word filters down to Mom and Pop that the kids aren't on Facebook anymore, that's about two years. How's Rupert's investment in MySpace doing? Duh. Adobe, on the other hand...

You're no longer relevant. This item, and the last five or six, are not about Apple. They are about how some people think Apple is terrible, and Google is good. Well, good luck to you. Apparently, one way that Apple is bad is that Rupert Murdoch hopes to make money from the iPad. Well, I don't know. The WSJ app sucks, big time, but nobody cares. The rabid conservatives loves them freakin' editorials, and then people get the news and stock market stuff to make money. Google doesn't have to make money this way. They give away Android, because they make their money selling you to advertisers. They've got a business, and so does Apple. Bless 'em both. Bye, all.

Like AvitarX, I want to explain to the learned idiots at Slate -- always wrong about everything -- that Woz loves the tablet, and lined up overnight at the Apple Store to get one. Here's a live interview: http://twit.cachefly.net/video/specials/specials0015/specials0015_h264b_864x480_500.mp4 An interesting point he makes is that he wanted all the expansion cards on the Apple computer, where Jobs wanted to drop them. Maybe Jobs went too far, but eventually, Jobs was in favor of expansion, just through dedicated ports for printers and so on. So, who sells a computer today with printer expansion slots?

Let's see: $300-400 for a full legal copy vs. $29-$129. Copy protection and activation vs. no copy protection. Yeah, that's right, the honor system. In the last 13 years, Mac has transitioned to the PowerPC IBM chips and then to Intel, and now, in the mobile processors, to Atom and things like that. Same basic OS on each, though of course for the iPhone, a lot of what's in the full Mac OS X isn't appropriate or needed in the iPhone OS. You know, I don't know if it's the same way on Windows (smirk), but on the Mac there are these people called hackers, and they find the ways to go around the Apple prohibitions. Know what they found? The new OS doesn't run as well on the old machine as it does on the new. Some machines are "Tiger" machines, and they'll always run better with 10.4.11. Some are Leopard machines, and will always run better with 10.5.8.