And frankly Steve Jobs doesn’t care. He has felt his mortality so he’s working on his legacy with single minded dedication and couldn’t give a wet crap what anyone who disagrees with him thinks, specially some self righteous punks.

It’s not like there is anything like a monopoly going on. Find some other product to deploy on. Seriously, what’s so special about the iPad that you MUST have it your way?

And the problem? It hasn’t changed anything.

The problem? Your lack of patience and perseverance. Change like this takes a LONG time. And, it’s often thankless (or worse) to be a part of the core that gets change rolling. Expect thanks later when everyone else comes around? Don’t. And, if you’re in it for a pat on your back in the first place, you’re probably not in for the long haul anyway, are you?

I wish I could snap my fingers and life would be fair too. It’s fantasy. In the real world, you stick to your guns where you can and things progress over time. Even if it makes things only less shitty… that’s still less shitty, isn’t it?

That’s why you vote in the lesser evil year after year after year and that’s why you don’t get discouraged at slow, positive progression with all it’s bumps, hiccups and temporary regressions. YOU KEEP TRYING.

Because, believe me, the corporatists will NEVER stop trying to screw us. Never.

Shame on you Steve Jobs. Your luster is fading every day you keep this shit up.

I love LaTeX for writing math papers (really! I do!), and there are experts who have made beautiful not-technical books using TeX or one of it’s variants, but it just isn’t the right tool for someone who just wants to sit down and write about Devo, or Rue McClanahan, or whatever you are a fan of.

So when you get Quark running again, don’t bother with InDesign, just print to PDF and then make a paper copy. It’ll be readable if not editable for the forseeable future.

Additionally, why not let the market decide the value of licensed products that are subject to the First Sale doctrine and those that are not?

Putting aside for the moment whether or not the idea that first-sale may not apply has merit: Because “the market” has a seller-side as much as it has a buyer-side. This is the seller-side making decisions. You can’t just abstract that out. Also, where there’s basically no shortage of supply (digital proliferation flattens the supply issue completely) value cannot be decided by scarcity anymore. “Letting the market handle it” is functionally impossible. At the end of the day the price is going to be completely arbitrary and set by the seller. The auction/scarcity based-environment of the traditional market doesn’t really apply to electronic content. Why does everyone keep forgetting that information and content are not commodities?

Sure, they’re valuable, but that doesn’t mean they can be bought and sold like every other thing that has value. Content is highly variable, certainly not fungible, it’s not scarce, and it’s highly differentiable. If you don’t believe that, visit the local bargain bin at the bookstore and tell me that a DRM-locked version of any of those books is worth ten bucks sight-unseen.

When does it come out? Where do I buy one? How much does it cost?

Will it kill the JooJoo too?

For example, I’ve got a bunch of old fanzines I wrote years ago, in QuarkXPress format. My copy of QuarkXPress won’t run under MacOS X, and my copy of InDesign won’t read those old Quark files. One of these days I need to install OS9 on this old PPC Mac (if I upgrade to an Intel Mac I think I’ll lose that option) and see if I can re-save those files in a more recent Quark format that InDesign can read, but even then I’ll be locked in to InDesign if I want to read those files. If I’d done all that old work in LaTeX, I wouldn’t have this problem.

AND, most importantly, to support aritists/writers/musicians directly by buying from their sites/them directly. (one click or no)

With the current economy, we can bleed the big corporations dry. Their lawsuits against “Pirates” only feed their lawyers, the industry is still quaking and fighting itself.

Support creators directly. Reject “Mainstream” stuff.

And, even with the “Theft” supposedly made possible by no-DRM, the “Tip Economy” is quite lucrative when it doesn’t support the CEO and a thousand middlemen. If you toss $1 or $5 into the “Tip Jar” of a guy playing a flute on the street corner, you pay him far more than if he was a “Pro” and you bought his $18.99 CD.

http://technabob.com/blog/2010/02/15/notion-ink-adam-price-specs-release-date/

Um- “going elsewhere” is kinda what this is talking about. Did I misread the article or something? Or are you just complaining for no apparent reason? Do you walk into a discussion about raising a tax for schools and go, “You know what? All you whiners should just raise a tax!” and walk out? That’s basically what you’re doing here.

Long ago, IBM wrote an operating system to use with their computers. It was called OS/360. The “360″ referred to all points of the compass. When you bought an IBM computer, you got the object code for the operating system for free, and you also got the source code to the operating system.

Those with enough technical skill could alter the operating system, or fix bugs as they found them.

In the early 1980s, to its customer’s dismay, IBM began to withhold the source code to some operating system components. Various accounts on the ibm-main listserv put this down to customers causing more problems than they solved. The trend continues to this day, with more and more components being shipped “object code only.”

IBM customers continue to assert that, if they had the source code to z/OS (the most current decedent of OS/360), they could debug and fix their own problems. IBM maintains that, in the past, such fixes resulted in more trouble calls (from ill-implemented fixes) not less.

Forcibly dragging this line of reasoning back to what I believe is one of the main points in the original article, there is historical precedent for the reasoning restricting your ability to do as you will with that which you have purchased.

In this case Apple seems to believe that if you run an app that causes you to be unhappy with your iPad in some manner, you will blame Apple. Or you will bring your iPad in for service because of a misbehaving app, costing Apple money in servicing the device (presuming such work is done under a warranty).

Apple is apparently willing to forego the portion of the market that insists on being able to do whatever they want with their iPad. They also apparently believe that the ill-will garnered by such an approach is less to their disadvantage than that which would (in what I posit to be their position) result from iPad problems due to errant apps.

The analogy isn’t perfect, but I think it holds some water. Perhaps another analogy is the voluntary tyranny concept in Alastair Reynolds “The Prefect.”

I’m not an artist (I may be a craftsman), so I don’t have the same visceral reaction as the original article’s author to someone trying to control my work.

Nonsense.

The price elasticity of demand for digital goods almost invariably exceeds that for physical goods. E.g. how the mp3 single model has killed the CD based album model for music pricing. I don’t have my cites handy for this argument (they are at work), but digital goods markets are surprisingly functional despite the appearance that the digital good is not fungible nor easily substituted.

I really think Cory is Luddite. Which is a shame there are so many obscure books not in print anymore that physical copies are not profitable but having them on e-reader makes them able to be read again.

If you want to publish through iTunes (or iBookstore or appstore), do so. If you don’t, then don’t.

Apple stores have everything out on tables so you can play to your hearts content, no need to engage with the staff.

“And here’s a fun experiment for the code writers among you: write an app and stick a “buy in one click with Google Checkout” button on the screen. Watch how long it takes for Apple to reject it. “

Why do you think this would be rejected? Amazon has basically written this app. You take a picture of an object, and about a minute later you get a link to buy it directly from Amazon.

For one thing, I spent the past year working in the music industry with artists, labels, site publishers, managers, publicists, internal counsel, external counsel, blah blah blah. I’ve seen the fear of companies afraid of doing anything without detailed contracts so they aren’t sued from IP companies, and content owners who were only happy to sue…all combined with legal departments who wanted to ensure they stayed relevant by keeping the whole system going.

If we look at just music…it took a long time, but finally just about any music store online is DRM free…including Apple. Anything you buy on iTunes can play on any other device. So the argument of a closed system controlling Apple’s monopoly on music isn’t really that accurate…you can buy music just about anywhere these days and put it on any Apple device and vice versa.

IP owners in the movie and TV industries are not likely to allow Apple or anyone else to just sell DRM free products any time soon…and book publishers aren’t likely to allow it either. The Kindle is an example of a company/device that tried to buck the system, only to be strong-armed by publishers.

Also…remember when the Authors Guild (a trade group representing 9,000 authors) told Amazon to disable the text to speech function on the Kindle? Here’s an example of a group of writers who dictated exactly what a device could and could not do…that wasn’t some decision a technology company made…that was a group of WRITERS.

The actual problem here isn’t Apple…or Amazon…the problem is the complexity of copyright and convincing those who hold said IP don’t feel threatened by technology…if you want to see change from companies like Amazon and Kindle…refusing to publish your works through their system really only hurts you…if you want to change the system you need to work to change both copyright…and get authors to fight their own publishers to make a change from the inside…

My $.02

Apple and Amazon are kind of dangerous because they can, will and HAVE retrospectively applied changes in their ratings, terms of service… the works. Amazon for example, deleted Kindle’d copies of Orwell’s “1984″ in certain parts of the world and auto-refunded customers, neither obtaining permission, nor getting the irony in the process.

And Apple? How can they let in trash like the “I am Rich” app, or the billion and one bikini chicks apps only to suddenly grow a conscience about so-called pornography when their boss needed to trash talk competitor? Or cut off Mark Fiore’s editorial cartoon app for being potentially defamatory?

Sorry, too much caprice for my liking. You can keep your Ipad and your expensive laptops too. The more the Macolytes harp on about the awesomeness of their choice of computer, the more I’m likely to seek a Win7 or Ubuntu solution.

Presumably Apple building all those stores is just another part of their nefarious evilness.

“Boycott” is essentially throwing the ‘apple’ out of the pram (pun intended). It provides no solution other than a “Now what?” moment. It is destructive and not creative. Would it perhaps not be better to organise a DRM free, CC licensed (or whatever) method for distributing content instead? Old media wants to throw the rattle out of their pram, let them. Crowd source your buying decision. Problem gone. Far more creative.

I’d much rather spend a day online reading reviews and complaints, and then buy online, than go into a physical store and have someone try to sell me something. Well, maybe not shoes. But, for electronics, I consider face-to-face transactions to be a weakness.

Publishers don’t have to build “piracy” into their pricing of their applications. There are no $50 games on the iPhone/iPad. $2-$5 is closer to normal.

Publisher’s like the walled garden, and when prices plummet as a result, consumers benefit as well.

As for boycotting a brand or whatever there is to boycott, it seems to me that the consumers have now accepted (since the eighties)that they would buy what is for sale without other requirement than their own aesthetics (as opposed to ethics).