Re: [Banshee-List] Comptability with iPhone/iPod Touch?

["Aaron Bockover" <abockover novell com>]

No, Apple sucks. Apple and Sony compete for the #1 slot in my most evil
and hated companies list. Currently they are tied.

A while ago I wrote about just some of the problems with Apple,
specifically around iPods. 

http://abock.org/2006/09/14/we-need-you-and-apple-sucks-part-2/

Apple goes out of their way to lock out third parties.

They locked down DAAP with iTunes 7 such that only other iTunes 7
clients could share with each other. We no longer can share music in
Banshee with iTunes 7+ clients.

With the new Nano and Classic, they went out of their way to lock out
third party software with their "clever" new hash algorithm in which a
field is zeroed out in the iTunesDB file, the database is built by
iTunes, then the file is processed through this algorithm and the result
is written back to the zeroed field. When you then try to use your iPod,
the iPod firmware makes note of this hash field, zeros it out, then runs
the same algorithm and verifies the results. If the two hashes do not
match, the iPod reports that there is no content on the device. 

This was reverse engineered in 2 days.

http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/ipod-sharp/src/Hash58.cs

Apple is brilliant at marketing and making beautiful products. This is
why they have the market in MP3 players. Kudos to them on that. Instead
of leveraging this market to create a more vibrant ecosystem of software
and hardware, they lock people out. 

Enjoy your iPod, just don't complain to the open source community about
your proprietary hardware not working, thinking it's somehow our fault.
(Not saying you were, that's just my feeling about it all).

And actually, it's not even so much that the hardware is proprietary and
the specs are closed. It's that they *change* so many mundane little
details in their file formats (and then do stupid big changes like the
aforementioned hashing). As an engineer, you look at these little
changes you have to constantly make when trying to remain compatible
with them, and you have no other recourse but to think, "these asshats
changed this for no technical reason... they just want us to have to
keep dancing."

Anyway, I'll stop ranting.

Best,
Aaron


On Sun, 2008-01-13 at 23:55 -0800, David Wade Hagar wrote:
> Igor Guerrero Fonseca wrote:
> > On Sun, 2008-01-13 at 19:15 -0600, Kevin Dupuy wrote:
> >> The iPod and iPhone ARE technically compatible with Linux... but not
> >> with Banshee. With GTKpod it works, but they need to be jailbroken.
> >> Check their website for info.
> > 
> > Interesting, but Apple still sucks :P
> > 
> > More info about jailbreaking the iPhone(or iPod Touch):
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installer.app
> >
> 
> Interesting that you think Apple sucks.  Really, do they?  Their OS is as stable as linux, comes with every computer they sell, and is even based on BSD.  Their players are the standard in mp3 players.  Their music store started tons of music stores all over the place.  Myself, while they aren't Linux friendly.  I think they rock.
> 
> That is just me though. :)
> 
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