The bunnies have died in vain
Saturday, May 7th, 2005 Posted in Annoyances, Comics | 1 Comment »Looking at the list of “most popular” links on Del.icio.us, it seems someone has scanned the entire Book of Bunny Suicides and its sequel, both by Andy Riley.
Good grief, people—you can pick up the book for $7.00 at any bookstore. I can understand posting a couple of excerpts, but from what I can tell, these people have scanned and posted the entire book. They haven’t even credited the source! In the blog postings that show up on a “bunny suicides” search, most of them don’t even seem to know where the cartoons are from. Heck, even with pirated MP3s you usually know who sang the song.
Google has pulled a few of the sites from their index in response to a DMCA complaint. (Interestingly, Google themselves linked to the Chilling Effects entry.)
It always amazes me how rude people can be.
Cry me a river
Friday, July 30th, 2004 Posted in Apple | No Comments »So Apple is ticked off at Real’s reverse-engineering to let people buy music from Real and play it on an iPod. Apple has threatened DMCA sanctions and all but promised to deliberately break it in the next software update.
Excuse me? In general I like Apple, but their insistence on locking the iPod to iTunes and iTunes alone is short-sighted. When people hacked up a way to use an iPod on Windows, they first licensed the software, then wrote iTunes for Windows. iPod sales have tripled to the point where they may soon outsell Macintoshes. This could never have happened if Apple had kept the iPod Mac-specific.
I’m reminded of the many times Microsoft has altered its file-sharing protocol to break compatibility with Samba, the package that allows Linux, BSD, and now Mac OS X to connect to Windows networks.
The classic analogy is getting a car that can only run on certain roads. So someone’s found a way to let the iPod drive some different roads. But Apple still sells as many iPods. They might even sell more (as when it gained Windows compatibility). Why the accusations of hacking, why the legal threats, and why the determination to keep the iPod locked to their own roads?
