Smaran Dayal's Profile

I couldn't sympathise with you more, James. My iPod 4G has been giving me a lot of problems over the last couple of months, and I'm really regretting not having bought AppleCare. Apple offered to replace my iPod for the price of a new iPod, but, guess what, they wanted to replace it with another 4G iPod! 10,000rs for a three year old product? No thanks! I can get a brand new video iPod with four times the storage for about the same amount! So, I made the decision to void any chance of Apple replacing my iPod (who wants a raw deal like that anyway?) and opened it up myself. It has now been fixed twice, but if I move it around a lot (run with it, for example), it stops working. So, now it's condemned to external harddrivedom. I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to buy AppleCare. I just bought APP for my MacBook Pro. That's two more years of not worrying if my laptop is going to get spoilt. And after having things go wrong during the warranty period, I'm not going to take any chances.

Democracy Player has just been rebranded as Miro. getdemocracy.com/news/2007/03/a-name-change

Chicken2nite, are you aware that VLC is open source and cross-platform? And that it can encode video in a number of formats? It can even rip DVDs. Since it's already been integrated into Democracy Player, I don't think it should be too hard to add the ability to encode video in other formats.

Does the integrity of Fairplay even matter if Apple is forced to open it up? As soon as other Windows-based content stores start licensing it, it will be broken and stay broken no matter what the content industry tries to do. Just look at what's happened with hi-def DVDs. They've been cracked. As Jobs clearly pointed out, opening up Fairplay will put Apple's contract with the recording industry in jeopardy as it'll be increasingly difficult for Apple to keep Fairplay secure. The main point of Jobs' letter was that DRM doesn't work. Apple's own profits won't be affected if Fairplay is opened up, at the most it'll force them to offer higher quality songs.

Of course Cisco played a "game". Rumours of the iPhone have been around for years, and when it was finally looking like Apple was going to release an iPhone, Cisco tried to revive its trademark by rebranding an _existing_ product with the iPhone name. It was all a stupid patent/trademark game that probably got Cisco a bundle of cash from Apple. Unethical.

I think charging people for Boot Camp is Apple's way of weaning x-Windows users off XP and forcing them to make the decision to finally move all their stuff over to OS X. More than anything, Apple wants Mac OS X to succeed. Letting users run Windows was a controversial decision, but it seems Apple always had a master plan. Now that 'switchers' have got a Mac on their lap, let's make them use OS X!

The iPod 2.0 indeed. Although I'm not sure if we were ready for the next big point-0 version yet. The iPhone seems to do it all. What I'm wondering is, how well? The biggest let down for me was that Apple teamed up with Yahoo! Mail instead of Gmail. It's also a shame that the device won't be released in European and Asian markets before the end of this year and next year, respectively. The price point is also a bit of a bother. The company was finally losing its image of being this retailer of expensive goods. Until recently, Macs have been considered over-priced, and the same holds true for the first two generations of iPod.