tech news weirdness
Here we go.. another night of procrastinating homework. It’s Saturday night.. which isn’t so lame since it’s technically my Sunday because I work tomorrow. Anyways.. I spent most of the day cleaning and at kung fu, so applied algorithms isn’t really something I want to do at the moment. Now I have 1 screen of catching up on The Guild and Zero Punctuation and the blog on the other. I’m such a good multitasking faffer. It’ll get done, done correctly and on time.
A long time ago when my focus was art/film/animation/whatever I had stopped reading tech news. I recently got back into it and all I can say is what the hell is going on?
The patent wars? Seriously? Patents have no place in the tech field. Copyright? Yes. Patents? No. The problem with patents as a non-lawyer sees it, is that they are far too broad which stifles innovation. 1 person makes something cool, patents it, and no one else can take the idea and improve on it. That’s how the tech industry has worked since the beginning. You can’t really call foul this late in the game, especially when your company has done the exact same thing. *cough* apple *cough*.
ebook price fixing? Apple: hey publishers, if you want to sell ebooks for our shiny new ipad (please don’t laugh at the name) that everyone is going to want cause we are apple and we are the hippest shit out there, you have to agree to our terms. Set whatever price you want unlike that evil empire Amazon. We are going to take 30% of every single sale for no reason other than we can, so add that to your price. Oh and you can’t sell them cheaper anywhere else.
See that last part there? That’s against the law. Oops. Enter in the DoJ, European Commission, 16 states and a few class action law suits from Canada. What I don’t understand is where Apple is getting the balls to actually fight this. The line they are trying to stand on is that they were trying to break the monopoly held by amazon and it’s better for the consumer.
I’m a kindle consumer. I don’t want to read a book on a backlit screen, sorry apple. I <3 my kindle. Hard. It is hands down my favourite gadget. I can carry around programming and personal books without killing my back and decide which I want to read during my daily hour long train commute. If I finish a book while on the train? No big deal, hop onto my amazon wish list. I could buy them at 50% off. In comes apple and now books are almost the same price. Fuck you, apple. How is that good for me? I give up being able to lend out books to friends, sell them back, use during open book tests, read during parts of flights, and flip through for reference; and yet I now get to pay roughly the same price? All because you want to take 30% of the sales for your customers.
What they should have done is just opened their ebook store and let their customers overpay. They are used to it anyways. And like everything else, they would have happily bent over and asked for more.
