- Wednesday, 25 November 2009
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Everything above kilo (1,000) is expressed with a capital letter so Mb and Gb; mb is millibytes (one thousandth of a byte) - Guardian correction
Palm complains about Apple
PALM has filed a complaint with the USB Implementers Forum claiming that Apple is restraining its trade.
The USB industry group was established by technology companies and develops technology that links computers to other electronic devices. It might be a strange place to whinge about antitrust activity, but that does not seem to have occurred to Palm.
Analyst Mike Abramsky told the New York Times that there isn't much precedent for this case.
Palm synchs with Itunes by getting the perfect rainbow-hued software to recognise the phone as an Apple music player, allowing it to transfer files between the phone and a personal computer.
Palm said that this is okay because Apple is restricting connections via USB, which it says is a blatant disregard for the terms of the standard. For its part, Apple might try to claim that what Palm is doing is also a breach of standards compliance.
Douglas Luftman, an associate general counsel for Palm, said his outfit is not trying to appear to be anything it is not, except for the purpose of interoperability with Itunes. µ
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http://nanocr.eu/2009/06/04/palm-pre-usb-hack-confirmed/
It's not like Palm has much of the moral high ground here, since their Pre hack to work with iTunes is basically stealing Apple's USB vendor ID and product ID. Somehow when the USB Implementers Forum set up vendor IDs and product IDs, which companies had to pay for, I doubt the intended use was for products to mis-identify themselves.
http://www.usb.org/developers/vendor/VID_Only_Form_withCCAuth_02042009.pdf
Neither can Apple claim the high ground. They are using the USB Id, not to correctly identify the device, but to thwart a competitor.
There's a long history of being forced to pretend your some other device for the sake of interoperability. It's the reason that most routers have the ability to 'Clone a MAC address'. ISP's were misusing the unique nature of the MAC address to lock out other devices.
Palm Who, these guys still in business ?
If you don't like it invent your own music store !
"Douglas Luftman, an associate general counsel for Palm, said his outfit is not trying to appear to be anything it is not, except for the purpose of interoperability with Itunes."
Yeah, Doug, it's probably the '...except...' that's going to get you in trouble, dontcha think?