Category: Tech

Apple’s iTunes Plus store just went live today and features (or will feature as I have not checked myself yet) many songs so sale that are not encumbered by digital rights management (DRM). These “plus” track are also encoded at a higher bit rate which may translate into higher quality, though in all honesty, most people won’t be able to hear the difference. And while these tracks should now play on any player capable of playing AAC encoded music, there’s quite a ruckus on Digg right now because the tracks have the buyer’s account info encoded in the track. That means that if someone chooses to break the law by giving away the tracks via filesharing programs or other means, they can be tracked down and perhaps held accountable.

I think though, that many are really missing the big story here. I think that the stripping of the DRM is something that Apple has wanted for a long time and the record companies are starting to allow this in order to make a little more money (DRM-less tracks cost $1.29 vs $0.99 with), and to, they hope, loosen Apple’s grip on the legal digital music market. So why oh why would Apple agree to this, especially since they make their money by selling iPods, not the music? I think that they understand that in the near term at least, they’ll still be able to sell plenty of iPods because the iPod-iTMS combo is easy to use, easier than any current competitor. In the long term though, I think they want to increase the popularity of AAC versus MP3 for digital music.

Right now, all of the competing digital music players play MP3 encoded music tracks, but only a subset of these play AAC. DRM free iTunes tracks in the AAC format by default should be incentive enough for all music players to adopt AAC as a supported format. But hold on, why can’t people just transcode their AACs to MP3s? First, most people don’t know how to do that and really can’t be bothered to, and secondly, those who know how also know that transcoding from one lossy format to another lossy format results in a loss of sound quality, sound quality you just paid an extra $0.30 to get! So if Apple is able to maintain its lead in digital music players, it is inevitable that AAC popularity will rise and could someday surpass MP3. Not only that, iTMS seems likely to become the digital music store of choice for all since writing support to transfer DRM free AAC files from an iTunes library is easier to do than building a complete competing digital music store. I guess that means it’s Apple FTW!

I’ve been having some fun over the last few days getting reacquainted with my Ubuntu installation. I’ve just upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn and so far am very pleased with overall performance. It always makes me wonder why I even bother going back into Windows XP at all.

All was not well in paradise though when it came to printing. My printer is now connected to a Linksys WPS54G wireless print server that quite honestly, I have not been impressed with. While working in Windows, it seems to just go to sleep whenever it feels like it, but I can usually get it to work eventually, usually after a power cycle or two. It’s a real pain. I thought I had had it working in my earlier version of Ubuntu, but today no amount of power cycling or cursing seemed to work. So I decided to try IPP, internet protocol printing, since the manual said it supported that.

Hooray! Setting the printer to IPP in Ubuntu using the local network address of the print server did the trick. Next I’ll see if doing this in Windows XP improves printing performance there as well. Perhaps the real trouble lies in how the server handles Windows networking or printing protocols.

Having played with Flash over the years and seen it become a defacto standard on the web, it was with some interest that I read about Microsoft’s Flash rival, Silverlight. My only complaint about developing Flash apps is having to buy expensive software from Adobe in order to do so. Microsoft has generally excelled at making it easy to develop for the platforms they support. Silverlight is slated to run on Windows PC or Mac in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. This is pretty broad support for Microsoft, so maybe they’re serious about mounting a challenge to Flash after all. And their plan to support Silverlight development in a variety of languages, including Javascript definitely intrigues me. I think that unless Adobe significantly lowers the barrier to Flash development, they’re going to watch kids and cheapskates like me flood the web with Silverlight applications.

More on Silverlight in Tim Sneath’s MSDN blog

Sorry Symantec, these days when I see “360”, I usually think of Microsoft’s game console, not PC security software suites such as Norton 360. Honestly, I haven’t been that happy with Norton’s products lately because on my PCs at least, they seem to have an unquenchable thirst for system resources! I’m not quite ready to switch yet, but I’ll definitely give the Microsoft and McAffee products a look if they cost less and don’t bring my systems to a crawl.

I have Photoshop envy. Yes, I admit it, but not because Photoshop is so much better than Fireworks MX, which BTW has served me very well, but only because it seems that everyone else uses Photoshop. Sadly, the high price of Photoshop is the main thing that keeps me from making the move. And because of this, I constantly have to do just a bit more work to take advantage of the sea of Photoshop oriented tutorials on the web.

I found an interesting Photoshop tutorial via Digg this morning, Create A Software Box, which fortunately I should be able to apply to Fireworks without too much trouble. It’s funny that even in this time of digital software delivery, that shrink wrapped box still carries enough weight to give an air of professionalism to products that will never see the inside of a physical box. Nice tutorial, definitely worth checking out no matter what graphics tool you use.

Back in the day, I used to be an OS Cowboy. I loved loading up new operating systems when they came out with their promises of improved this and improved that. I even installed the betas, months before the release to get a sneak peak and to help sniff out bugs. I am a veteran of the great OS/2 vs Windows war, on the losing side…sigh. These days I run Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. I’ve retired from the OS battles for the most part, choosing to use what works in a generally agnostic fashion. Still, I’d love to get my hands on Windows Vista, except for one little problem… It’s too f***ckin g*damn expensive! The family pack discount is a good idea, but the upfront cost is still too darn high!

If Microsoft wants to spread Vista far and wide, they have a strange way of doing it with what they’re going to charge for it. At $399 for a full copy of Windows Vista Ultimate (the only one worth having IMHO), it’s way out of reach for me and probably a lot of other like minded people out there. Such a high price virtually guarantees that Vista will not only be cracked, but that cracked copies may be the preferred method of upgrading to Windows Vista. C’mon Microsoft, give us a break!

In a sign of the times, Google has just rolled out Google Patents, a patent search service, in beta, of course. Now perhaps it will be easier for us little guys to avoid being trampled by bottom feeding patent holding companies! If only reform of the generally messed up patent system (in the U.S. at least) was as simple.

As if there weren’t already more toys than I can afford, Steve Jobs just went nuclear with his announcement of Apple’s iPhone during his Macworld keynote address. Calling this device any kind of “phone” is a true insult to it. This is the thing that I’ve been wanting for a long time now, a device that finally ties everything together in a sustainable fashion. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s in a visually attractive package. Click over to Engadget for the details. Apple is going to sell millions of these things and the PDA/Smartphone/Cell Phone world will never be the same! Their service partner, Cingular, is going to get a lot of new business soon. Oh, and did I mention it’s an iPod too?

Steve Jobs’ Macworld 2007 Keynote Address on Engadget

Ars Technica on the iPhone

The cheapest Blu Ray player, the PS3 is hideously expensive and basically unavailable. While movies on Blu Ray are not is great abundance either. Is Blu Ray dead before it even starts. TripleII’s Top 5  Reasons Blu Ray Will Never Be In My Home makes some good arguments against the adoption of Blu Ray, at least by people who really think about these things.

Honestly, I don’t think most consumers think much about these types of decisions. The main things are going to be the cost of the players, what movies are available, and how going to Blu Ray, or HD-DVD for that matter, is better, tangibly better, than current DVD technology. Personally, I think both of these physical media types are dead in the water as far as movies are concerned. The future is shaping up to be downloadable digital, no media required. That’s why I’m not likely to buy movies in either of the new HD formats. I’m more interested in devices with big hard drives that are reasonably easy to use and simple, legal, ways of getting content. So I’ll be keeping an eye out for Apple’s iTV and may play a bit with MythTV. This should be fun!