12 Mar
2006
12 Mar
'06
8:10 p.m.
On Sun, 2006-03-12 at 23:49 +0000, cdr wrote:
Goodbye, "Made in USA", hello, "Designed by Apple in California,
Assembled in China" (reading straight off an iPod box) ;-)
For anyone who didn't bother to read the last article the gist of it is
that to play back videos from your iPod to an external device you can
either buy the expensive shiny white Apple cable, or you can use any
Radio Shack AV cable and (drumroll) switch the yellow and red plugs
around.
It really makes me despair of the future of open standards - even if you
have a perfectly good one the marketing dept will INSIST that you be
incompatible for no reason. This belief that proprietary == good is
really ingrained in some places. For example I saw an episode of "24"
the other day (guilty pleasure ;-) and they had to hack into some
corporate network to stop some terrorists, and were stymied by the
network being "proprietary" which meant it was unhackable and they had
to give up and just blast their way in, or some crap.
Of course any IT person could tell you in a second that black hat
hackers LOVE proprietary systems. Then again the shows main sponsors
seem to be Dell computers and Cisco IP phones... coincidence?
Lee
Apple does
make good hardware
they make hardware? last i checked they just knew how to charge twice as much as HP or
Dell for Chinese hardware assembled by Quanta. kudos to them..maybe everyone else will
understand the power of industrial design and branding one day..
in the meantime im happy with the services my DIY "who? you?" hardware
provides..