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As seen in this MacSlash article from a few days ago, BuyMusic.com eliminated the option to purchase songs if you're not using Internet Explorer and Windows.

As reported on MacSlash, Buymusic.com is violating copyrights. Jody Whitesides, a musician, found an old CD he made for sale on the Buymusic.com site without ever being informed/asked/paid. He checked and also found albums from friends of his. As it turns out, they all had dealings with a brick and mortar distribution company called Orchard in the 90's that supposedly went out of business. They didn't and now it seems that anyone who had dealings with them might be on Buymusic.com without their knowledge, consent or recompense.

As reported on MacSlash, Buymusic.com is violating copyrights. Jody Whitesides, a musician, found an old CD he made for sale on the Buymusic.com site without ever being informed/asked/paid. He checked and also found albums from friends of his. As it turns out, they all had dealings with a brick and mortar distribution company called Orchard in the 90's that supposedly went out of business. They didn't and now it seems that anyone who had dealings with them might be on Buymusic.com without their knowledge, consent or recompense.

iTunes Music Store does not "check" to see where you are via IP address, or any other network method.

Music you own is never "deleted".

The only reason this user encountered the issue is because he had to reinstall his entire OS, and reauthorize the computer with a credit card whose billing address had since been changed to a non-US address - this didn't specifically disallow him from playing his purchased music; rather, it didn't allow him to REauthorize the computer in order to play the purchased music. As others have said, this seems to be more of a unique situation/accident than intentional on Apple's part (notwithstanding the valid legal considerations Apple has).

Music you burn to CD from iTunes Music Store is yours to keep - FOREVER. No matter where you move. You DO own the music you buy from iTunes Music Store. (Unlike other sites).

As soon as international licensing arrangements are worked out, more and more countries will have iTunes Music Store available.

Apple did much better than anyone else with keeping broad rights with the user/customer, where they belong.

And, finally, a letter from the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA:

The reason why the Apple iTunes Music Store isn't yet available outside the US is because Apple hasn't made arrangements to obtain the rights outside of that country (this is called "clearing the rights" in the music business).

I run the largest music licensing agency in Canada, CMRRA. On behalf of our clients from around the world, we represent the owners of the vast majority of songs used in Canada.

Yesterday afternoon I placed a call to Apple Canada to open a discussion on the licensing of Apple's online music store in Canada. Apple's Canadian office is basically a sales operation; no products are designed or produced by Apple in Canada, to the best of my knowledge.

I'm hoping to set up a meeting with Apple, probably in Cupertino, in the next two weeks. We're looking forward to doing business with Apple - among other things, our clients don't make any money saying, "no". Until we've cut a deal with Apple, it won't be possible for them to do business in Canada - that's why I'd like to negotiate that deal and have it set up as soon as possible.

We love Mac and iTunes, too! We're sure that a substantial number of Canadians are going to want to do business with Apple, and we look forward to our discussions with them.

All Apple has to do is call me back to set up the meeting.

David A. Basskin
President
Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency Ltd.
Toronto, Canada

My girlfriend and I recently took a three week cross-country road trip (pictures here), and visited the following destinations (they aren't entirely geeky, but there are some geeky spots along the way):

Tallahassee, FL -> Madisonville, LA -> Austin, TX -> Elephant Butte, NM (silly name, cool place!) -> Williams, AZ (stopped to see the Very Large Array (VLA) on the way, near Magdalena, NM -> Grand Canyon, AZ -> Las Vegas, NV -> Yosemite National Park, CA -> San Francisco, CA (lotsa fun geeky stuff here) -> Lake Tahoe, CA -> Elko, NV -> Denver, CO -> Oklahoma City, OK -> Tallahassee, FL

I highly recommend this trip, as you get to see a lot of things in a fairly short amount of time. Some tips (in no particular order):

- Buy a national parks pass. See my other post for more information.
- In desolate areas, keep spare gas with you. Five gallons should do nicely, unless you have an SUV.
- Bring a camera. A digital camera is preferred, and a 128 MB picture card (or more) is highly recommended if you are using a digital camera.
- Go camping. All motels, regardless of location, are pretty much exactly the same -- four walls, a bed and a shower. Camping is different wherever you go.
- Carry a AAA membership. They can get you out of many hairy situations.
- Ride with two or more people. This makes the trip that much more fun, because you can share the experiences for a lifetime. It's also much safer to travel this way.
- Many of my other recommendations are here -- they are equally important to having a good trip.

Happy travels!

It was on macslash

In case any of you haven't noticed - any user with a login on your computer - including a guest account - is able to enter in their username and password to the screensaver login box and get to your session without any issue.

Sounds like MacOSX can be called UNIX in a same way as Windows-95. I think that's because BSD layer on MacOSX is like cygwin on Windows - it wasn't designed to be there.

And yes, neither Windows NT nor Linux users should consider switching to MacOSX. The GUI of their OS might not have a taste, but at least it has a general design idea of what is a protection of user sessions.

As funny as this is, it isn't accurate -- the job has been available for several weeks now: check out the MacSlash discussion.

And Macslash says Powerbook G5!

We have always supported PPC, and we are on the platform for the duration. It is sad that so many people have been misled by bad reporting. Here is the clarification. http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=02/12/18/2 332242&cid=8

> Where is the bad intent?

I think this says it all. Notice that the default view of MacSlash is "newest post first". Also notice how some user named "proclus" posts a friggin' advertisement in the forum, ripe to show at the top of the comments, 4 months after the last post to the thread!

First, we are making explicit and binding the following policy. GNU-Darwin will not support or distribute any software which links to proprietary libraries, and that includes Cocoa, Carbon, CoreAudio, etc. There will be no native package manager from GNU-Darwin (pkg_add suffices).

Second, we will be moving our operations to x86, and we are putting the ppc collection into maintenance mode

You need to take a remedial reading comprehension class.

I don't know, and I never claimed to know, what Apple's motivation was for announcing the iMac in May '98 but not shipping it until August '98. They just did it that way. Maybe they had something they could show in May, but it still needed a bit more tinkering under the hood before they could actually ship it. Maybe they needed the time to ramp up production capability to meet expected demand. Maybe Steve Jobs had a dream where a weird, naked Indian told him to just not ship until August 15. I don't fucking know, and I never said I did. All I said was that a three-month delay existed between Apple saying "Hey, we've got this iMac," and people being able to get their hands on one from a retail establishment.

And if Apple doesn't announce products before they're ready to ship, why did they announce Jaguar on July 17 last year, but not ship it until August 24? The Jaguar build number on the display Macs I played with in Apple's booth at MWNY on July 17, 2002 was not the same as the build number on the final shipping copy of Jaguar I bought on August 24, 2002-- clearly, more work was done on Jaguar after the announcement.

And if you're so sure you're right, stop hiding behind the AC and post with your account.

~Philly

Shamelessly copied and pasted from MacSlash:

Derek Sivers, president of CD Baby and Hostbaby, attended yesterday's meeting between Apple representatives and about 150 indie label produces and executives and has posted his notes online from the meeting. Some of the highlights include a link to the fairplay website, which apple has said it's using for DRM, and the fact that Apple reports iTunes Music Store sales to SoundScan. Apple also told producers that they would not sell ad space to record labels and that all store content is done by Apple editors. Additionally, Apple promised to treat the indie labels the same as the big five, with the "same treatment, all-around."

unfortunately, apple just bowed to the pigopolists: the new iTunes update released yesterday cripples tunes sharing for machines outside of local net.

When this first came out a few months ago, I did a few tests, copying an 850 MB .img between two OS X G4s in various ways: (times are min:sec) (original thread over here)
TCP/IP over 10/100 LAN: 1:30
IP over FireWire: 1:50
FireWire with 1 Mac in target disk mode: 1:25
TCP/IP over 1000bT (straignt cable): 0:27
My conclusion at the time was "Slow, but potentially useful." Well, I have since found a use. I have a G4 here at work and recently bought an iBook. I put the (old) IP-FW driver on both Macs, gave them similar IPs, turned on Internet connection sharing on the G4, and poof! my iBook can access the servers and Internet without my having to request an additional network drop in my cube. I just leave a 6p-6p FW cable plugged into my G4 and draped over my desk.

I hear that some euros have put together a method for using the iTunes store already. This tomfoolery, along with comments from Sony Music that they don't want Windows users to have the same freedom as Apple users do now, makes me think that the RIAA is already getting cold feet, despite the money.

Europeans are too smart, and the RIAA is getting nervous because they don't have control over all those Montenegrins, Serbians, and Andorrans.

When all those German techno records starting moving to the top of the store, Steve Jobs new there was a problem. He put on his best black turtleneck and headed for the server room, but when he looked in the mirror, he realized that he was Dietre from Sprockets.

Man! That was a weird dream!

Yeah, IP over Firewire for OS X has been around for some time, too. It's just been updated.

Large-Scale Music Sharing With iTunes 4

Quick summary:

Sharing with friends/family (for personal use) is cool

Sharing with total strangers isn't legal and violates the iTunes license

Yes, streaming != downloading, but your rights to stream have some limits.

Spymac Music and others sites will be shut down by Apple and/or the RIAA

Sharing music with friends is cool -- let's not ruin a good thing, people!

There were already some posts about this here a few days back.

I did try some other sites listed in those posts and I have to say that this is balancing on the dangerous zone. I could see the RIAA going after this specifically for that fact that there is little difference (if any), as far as they're concerned, with users 'broadcasting' stuff via iTunes vs. any other streamer.

I will not be suprised to see a few things happen:

1. all these public iTunes sharing sites will be shut down (or at least the biggest ones) via RIAA court orders
2. most of these public iTunes sites will simply turn off due to bandwidth limitations
3. Apple with either disable this feature in an update or publicly state that it is not meant for public sharing. Or some statement to that affect

That said, coupled with Rendezvous on a local lan, this is a pretty kick ass feature. :)

The iTunes 4 app doesn't mutitask as well as prior versions did either (at least on a dual proc machine) and there's a big red flag in the success of the Apple product... Its an Apple only software/hardware package. Sure the iPod runs on PC's with MusicMatch, but does the music service. This alone could be the death of the music service. I hope Apple is ready to release some sort of patch/plugin for Windows based systems.

Stories on the Windows port of iTunes: apple.slashdot.org & MacSlash

It will include the Music Store and probably iPod support (hasn't been confirmed but it's one of those d'uh things to do). At the iTMS/iPod show, Jobs announced that the Music Service would be on Windows by the end of the year.

Over at MacSlash we've got coverage of the conference call between analysts and Apple's CFO, Fred Anderson. It's fun to listen in on the conference calls, although there's not a whole lot of new information from this one. One of the most interesting things I heard was that the education market has fallen off so significantly for Apple. It'll be interesting to see how this picks up in the June quarter, when schools traditionally do a lot of buying for next year.

Don't just plan on web advertising revenue. Think of other creative ways to make some dough. We have been pretty successful with the Amazon Affiliate program. We even added some stuff to Slashcode that allows the authors to very easily link to Amazon products in the stories. Some of the readers don't like it, but you could denote those links with an icon or something. Most of our readers are tolerant and understand that we need to make some money. Most months our Amazon income beats or banner ad income.

Another thing that worked well for us was a biweekly or monthly book/product list that we worked into the left column of the site. Also, work directly with related companies to advertise their product for either a monthly fee or product donations.

All that said, unless you plan to be really big, don't plan on actually making any profit. At MacSlash we're happy that the site makes enough for us to go to a convention or two each year.

Don't just plan on web advertising revenue. Think of other creative ways to make some dough. We have been pretty successful with the Amazon Affiliate program. We even added some stuff to Slashcode that allows the authors to very easily link to Amazon products in the stories. Some of the readers don't like it, but you could denote those links with an icon or something. Most of our readers are tolerant and understand that we need to make some money. Most months our Amazon income beats or banner ad income.

Another thing that worked well for us was a biweekly or monthly book/product list that we worked into the left column of the site. Also, work directly with related companies to advertise their product for either a monthly fee or product donations.

All that said, unless you plan to be really big, don't plan on actually making any profit. At MacSlash we're happy that the site makes enough for us to go to a convention or two each year.

GENERAL_SMILEY writes "Never posted a story before, so be gentle. This is a story(FRR) close to my heart though, I work with Universal regularly, and I hope it is true." The story says that Jobs is in talks with Vivendi to buy the music division of Universal for between 5 and 6 billion, making Apple the biggest player in the music business. In other news today, Disney is going to buy Apple and Apple is going to buy Palm. Take lots of grains of salt with this one.

Dig Deeper...

GENERAL_SMILEY writes "Never posted a story before, so be gentle. This is a story(FRR) close to my heart though, I work with Universal regularly, and I hope it is true." The story says that Jobs is in talks with Vivendi to buy the music division of Universal for between 5 and 6 billion, making Apple the biggest player in the music business. In other news today, Disney is going to buy Apple and Apple is going to buy Palm. Take lots of grains of salt with this one.

Dig Deeper...

Actually a new rc5 client is soon to be released (may already be release by this posting) with AltiVec instructions. There are claims of a 300% speed increase in checking rc5-72 keys.

macslash article

geez Pudge, you could at least credit Macslash somewhere in your articles when they beat you to the punch by a whole friggin' week. Your headlines are eerily similar too.

Triv

geez Pudge, you could at least credit Macslash somewhere in your articles when they beat you to the punch by a whole friggin' week. Your headlines are eerily similar too.

Triv

Hey guys, MacSlash called, they want their story from February 10th back.

The xServe RAID box has been out for a month. Why is this "news"?

Copying articles from other sites is questionable to begin with, but at least you could do a better job disguising the title title.

According to this (registration required...bleah) article from the L.A. Times, "Users will be able to buy and download songs with a single click and transfer them automatically to any iPod they've registered with Apple....Rather than make the songs available in the popular MP3 format, Apple plans to use a higher fidelity technology known as Advanced Audio Codec."

As seen on macslash

What gets me is the "registered iPod" bit...can't we do anything anonymously anymore? Geeze!

Apparently the original poster had not problem Copy/Pasting.

Can't believe I actually took the time to reword it a little, and was dissed in exchange for a plagiarist's post. *grin*

-Alex

Why this one, and not any of the other umpteen-jillion "press releases" that are published everyday?
Because MacSlash had it posted too.

Microsoft would have no reason to want to stop VPC users buying windows, at all, no.

However, Microsoft also has no reason to want certain things about VPC to stay the way they are. For example, the fact it is screamingly fast. For a long time, one of the big bragging points mac users had was that we could run windows, *emulated*, at about the speed as a windows machine with half the mhz. (I don't know how current models perform.) That's really, really impressive insofar as emulation goes. Microsoft also has no reason to want VPC to continue to be as clean and effective as it has been.

What i am saying is that people don't come to VPC on a lark: it is an expensive piece of software, and people come to it becuase they need to get something out of it, usually to run some windows-only program. This means VPC's quality can suffer, and Microsoft will have no reason to consider this a bad thing-- at the moment, VPC has no serious competitors, so people will keep buying VPC.

Microsoft also has no reason *not* to stop Virtual PC from being able so cleanly, seamlessly, and easily to emulate, say, Linux. They have no reason to make it easy to run a non-MS operating system on your mac.

There is also no reason not for Microsoft to continue as they have and then, after a couple versions, slowly let wierd bugs, incompatibilities, etc, creep into VPC., until mac users *still* can run windows, but they only do so becuase they need to run windows for some reason-- because VPC has become enough of a pain that the PPC's wonderful talent for emulation no longer seems like much of an advantage over the x86.

Am i saying Microsoft is going to do this? Well.. no. In fact, i don't think they will, becuase macslash is reporting that apparently the VPC team will report directly to the MacBU, not to seattle. This means that they will continue, almost certainly, to make VPC as much a quality product as possible. So there goes that conspiracy theory out the window right there.

However, it does bother me that Microsoft is able to take big, important groups like Connectix and Softway (Interix) and buy them up just like that. Yes, they are buying them for apparently benign purposes. But what it seems like to me is that while Microsoft is not buying these companies so they can quash or disable them, they are buying them so that they can keep their eye on them. Potentially, something like Interix or VPC could become a big stepstone in some kind of major migration away from Microsoft. if Microsoft owns those companies, however, if it looks like such a thing is going to happen, MS can take steps to prevent it, so long as MS always keeps the quality of those companies' products so high that there never is a reason for a competitor to arise. Threat management.

This brings me to my question: how on earth is MS going to make Palladium work with VPC? Palladium becomes pointless unless those keys are kept secret, and if MS embeds those keys into a macintosh executable then extracting them will be trivial. So how is MS planning to make Palladium work in VPC? Are they going to require a PCI card with a palladium chip in it, or what? That would still toss out Palladium's concept of the secure keyboard-to-processor-to-monitor path, but it would at least keep the keys locked safely in silicon. Or, much more likely, are they just going to not let VPC run palladium apps, since the Mac OS is not "secure"?

So, here's a slightly more likely conspiracy theory. Perhaps MS [only partially of course-- i've no doubt they're mainly buying Connectix for the reasons they say they are] likes the idea of buying Connectix because it removes the risk Connectix will attempt to emulate Palladium within VPC? I mean, Palladium is going to be damned hard to crack, but if anyone at this exact moment in time has both the resources and the reason to crack palladium, it's Connectix or nobody. I really haven't the foggiest idea what Connectix was planning to do about Palladium, but they have experience at cracking closed systems-- they reverse-engineered the PSX. That expertise, and a few hours rented time with an electron microscope to pull on the Palladium's keys, and suddenly MS is no longer the sole source or vendor of their Palladium platform.

Would that have actually happened? I have no idea. But it certainly won't now. Maybe not a big deal, but certainly convenient for Microsoft either way, no?

Just like it's "convenient" that Bungie's excellent cross-platform game development library, rather than being sold off with Oni and Myth, is currently buried somewhere deep in the bowels of the earth..

www.macslash.com had an article on it... search the old articles for it an the story will point you to the website with details on film gimp on os x

The port still requires an X-Server, it is not a GTK OSX app but there seems to be work in progress to make a GTK OSX version of Film Gimp.
Hopefully the high standards of Mac users and developers will help force FilmGimp (and hopefully GIMP) to become more flexible and user friendly.

It doesn't appear to be Eric C's mod.

Here's what I had to say on it over at macslash.

wanna see inside this thing? its very chic...

take a look at the pics in this article.

There is a discussion about Pith on MacSlash.

In other news, Apple has updated it's iMac product line...

That should make it easier to lift high-karma comments there and just paste them here for hopeful same effect.

why give them a chance? they've had year upon year of chances. as chance is to risk, using their products is the same, a risk. i use and as much as i don't like to admit it, like windows 2000. but i don't trust it. hell, even bruce schneier is considering leaving the platform altogether and moving to mac...

Very funny... except this was comment was posted, word for word, on MacSlash 2 days ago.

But if you're just a karma whore, why are you posting anonymously?

Check the results of the article there.

http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=02/12/18/2 332242&cid=8
http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=02/12/18/2 332242&cid=28
http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=02/12/18/2 332242&cid=49

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=02/12/18/2 332242&cid=8
http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=02/12/18/2 332242&cid=28
http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=02/12/18/2 332242&cid=49

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=02/12/18/2 332242&cid=8
http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=02/12/18/2 332242&cid=28
http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=02/12/18/2 332242&cid=49

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

[posted by Melantha_Bacchae on MacSlash, edited a bit for clarity:]

I am getting sick of posting this correction.

OWC hijacked iDVD (in violation of the iDVD license, not the DMCA) to sell their own DVD-R drives in competition to Apple. Apple asked them to stop, and they complied to preserve good relations. This happened back on August 12, with *no* mention of the DMCA

Note that the reference to the DMCA in the news.com article is purely the quote of Other World Computing's president. There is no quote from any document they received from Apple, or any actual evidence other than the OWC president's word. The story is from the same silly news site that manufactured the "Apple + Sun = true love and Star Office for OS X" story.

Lacking any actual proof, beyond someone's say-so who has an axe to grind, reported on a flaky news site, I'm going to presume that Apple is innocent here. After all, who would you believe, a company that has taken the RIAA to task over their anti-piracy excesses, or one who tried to capitalize on someone else's hard work in order to compete with them?

So let me get this straight. You haven't read the article, or read the guys justifications for what he's doing, yet you hope his project falls into oblivion because you don't see the point.

Right. A few things you might want to bear in mind. This interview with Jordan Hubbard, a top guy in the BSD community, reveals a lot. To be exact, it reveals that:

• Hubbard had to ask to be employed by Apple. They didn't ask him, or suggest it, or even talk to him.

• FreeBSD has gained so far from Apple, a few test suites. Brilliant. Oh, and of course he makes a big deal of the positive PR. That's not code though is it?

• Hubbard appears to be motivated primarily by wanting to see UNIX on the desktop. In contrast, the GNU/Darwin guy is motivated primarily by wanting to see a free operating system on the desktop.

Now I don't know about you, but I couldn't care less about UNIX. Sure, it's nice, I like the coloured directory listings, but you could conceivable argue that Windows was better engineered for instance. UNIX was great in its day, in 2002 it's merely average. Who gives a monkeys about UNIX, it doesn't matter. What does matter is who's in control of a technology as fundamental as computing. To me at any rate, that's a far bigger deal that what APIs are used to write apps.

I just don't see the point.

I don't see the point of FreeBSD. It's recreating UNIX but has opened itself up to commercial forks such as MacOS. What's the point? If they wanted to make a totally kickass OS, they could do a lot better by dropping UNIX and coming up with something truly original. If they wanted to fix the mess that's been made of the computing industry, letting anybody fork your code and close isn't the way to go about doing it.

Next time, before you comment on another guys project, take the time to understand their perspective on things, otherwise you're no better than they are.

From MacSlash, today's issue:

Compact Flash in Your Apple II

CrazyJoel writes "I found this on woz.org. And it seemed pretty neat. Basically, the guy figured out a way to put mass storage devices like compact flash on an Apple II."

Why would one do such a thing? The geek in question explains:
My reasoning for this project is described in detail in the Background section, but suffice it to say, I wanted to be able to pull out my old Apple II and use it from time to time to reminisce about the early days of personal computers. I wanted a reliable way to store my Apple II programs and data files for many years to come. Due to the long term reliability prospects of floppy drives, and my general laziness, I decided a mass storage device is what I needed.

MacSlash has a brief note how NASA's JPL has put together a cluster of 33 XServes that was able to achieve 1/5 teraflop

I think you meant:

MacSlash has a brief note how NASA's JPL has put together a cluster of 33 XServes that was able to achieve 1/5 teraflop. Apple.