I desperately wanted one when they came out because of the promise of e-books, but the greed of the publishers has ruined that. When the electronic version of the book barely costs any less than the physical book, I'll take the physical version because I get something tangible for negligible additional cost. I don't have such a need for instant gratification that I can't wait a day or two for Amazon to get it to me.

None of these media cartels seems to realize that the point of electronic distribution is to bring the price down for the consumer so publishers can make it up in sales volume-- not so they can keep the price nearly the same as for the physical product and use the savings in production/distribution costs to pad their profits.

One of the things that pisses me off the most about these fuckers is that their answer to the "Are you selling this to me or licensing this to me?" question always seems to be whichever one means they get paid again (or in this case, whichever one means they get to not pay someone else).

Your CD got scratched? Oooh, sorry, we sold you that music. Buy another copy.

You want to resell that legal MP3? Nope, that's a nontransferable license, no can do. (IIRC, this is currently being battled out in the courts.)

You think we owe you more in royalties? Nah, we sold those songs instead of licensing them. You mad, bro?

The sooner these dinosaurs get done in by their own greed, the better.

~Philly

Since when have IT pros made policy based on user desires?

Since CxOs (who are "users") started walking into their IT departments, holding up their shiny new iDevices and declaring, "Thou shalt make this work on the corporate network."

~Philly

"Apple needs to build a LDAP compliant network Management server that plugs into AD network and just blend in, and manages all the iDevices for Enterprise. It would do even better if said server would also allow AD like policies on managed Macs."

Uh, except for the iDevices for Enterprise bit (which I'm not entirely sure about), they already have-- it's called Mac OS X Server. It will replicate AD info for authentication purposes and use separate Open Directory info for management of the Macs on the network. This technique is generally known as the "golden triangle."

You could also use a product called Centrify DirectControl, which as I understand it basically translates AD group policies and applies them to non-Windows systems. I have not used this myself, but it's something that may be worth a look if someone reading this has a need.

~Philly

Agreed. Apple is being unfairly singled out here. Damn near every major electronics/computer maker's products roll out of many of those very same factories... something the Apple-hater crowd is usually very quick to point out in an attempt to refute the "Apple uses better components" or "Apple products have better build quality" arguments made by Apple fanboys.

~Philly

Yes, what a silly people we Americans are, designing our combat aircraft based on their purposes in the field.

Designing a plane around a gun that was built to devastate Soviet tanks? Well that was just crazy!

And designing a plane to be nearly invisible to radar, so it can destroy targets before the enemy even knows it's in their airspace? What kind of cockamamie Uncle Sam jibba-jabba is that???

Doublestack, Novell, IBM, Apple, Netscape, AOL, DEC, all were companies that were turned on in an instant and had to deal with a Microsoft's severely bipolar behavior.

Don't forget Go Corp, who'd likely have given us viable tablet computing 20 years ago if they hadn't insisted on using their own OS instead of Windows. Microsoft destroyed them with extreme prejudice for it.

Also, I think you meant Stac Electronics, not Doublestack. A Doublestack is a burger at Wendy's, and it appears you were posting at lunchtime. Freudian slip, perhaps?

~Philly

I had a Moto SLVR that was kind of bitchy like that. I put up with it for about 6 months, until I found a good deal on an unlocked Sony-Ericsson K550i on eBay. That phone lasted me a year and a half, until I gave in and got an iPhone.

"Appears to be working, but isn't" is about the worst way a phone can act up on you. I had that happen with multiple WinMo based HTC phones over the years. Definitely not fun when your job includes on-call duty. After the first time I got burned while on-call I had them direct that stuff to my personal cell and not my company-issued WinMo piece of shit.

"Learn your geeky history. Apple didn't but Steve Jobs did build all Next manufacturing to high tech facilities in the US."

You learn YOUR geeky history. Apple initially had all their manufacturing done in the US, and kept at least some manufacturing there, up until the early to mid 90s. They had factories in Fremont and Sacramento, CA, and another in Fountain, CO, to name three. You can easily tell the factory that built a given Mac from letters at the beginning of the serial number-- the only two that I still remember are "FC" for the Fremont factory, and "CK" for one they had in Cork, Ireland.

I actually just read the Jobs biography, and he apparently had a meeting with Obama during which Jobs took him to task over how difficult and expensive it is to open a new factory in the US, compared to nearly anywhere else in the world. I got the sense that Jobs would have happily done some production in the US again if it made business sense to do so.

~Philly

...and if you disagree with me, you can bite my shiny metal ass!

~Philly

Yup. Plenty of historical accounts have said this. IBM saw Apple's success and wanted a piece of the personal computer market, and quickly. They formed a team to do an end-run around their own bureaucracy and slap something together with off the shelf components in a year. They thought the copyrighted BIOS would be their protection from cloners, but Compaq footed the bill for the first legal reverse engineering of it. Once it was proven doable, another company did it (I think it was Phoenix Technologies) and sold their BIOS to anyone who wanted it. Then the PC clone floodgates opened.

IBM later tried to stuff the commoditization genie back in the bottle with the MicroChannel architecture that shipped in their Personal System/2 machines, but the licensing for it was so onerous the major cloners ignored it, banded together and standardized on (I believe) ISA.

Hackintosh fileserver
Beige PPC Mac home automation server
Mac mini development server
Web Power Switch
Hackintosh desktop
2 MacBooks
Laser printer
iPhone
TiVo Series 1 with added NIC
2 Rokus
2 IP security cameras