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Slashback: ITunes, Debian, ATMs
Apple Announces iTunes 7, Movies, Set-Top Box. This evening Apple released iTunes 7.0.1, which "addresses stability and performance issues with Cover Flow, CD importing, iPod syncing, and more." iTunes users, especially those on Windows, have been complaining loudly about iTunes 7.0 since its release.
Wal-Mart threatens studios over iTunes sales. camperslo writes, "Playlist reported that Walt Disney President and CEO Robert Iger said that 125,000 downloadable movies had been purchased in the week since Apple's debut of movies on the iTunes Store. That sales level generated $1 million in revenue for Disney, which works out to $8 per movie. They also state that 'Iger told attendees of an investment conference in New York on Tuesday that Disney anticipates seeing about $50 million in revenue from the venture during its first year.'"
Proposal to fund Debian sparks debate. lisah writes, "Debian Project Leader Anthony Towns is now facing a recall vote over his involvement with Dunc-Tank, something Towns himself is willing to explore. Not everyone agrees that such a move is necessary, or even acceptable, and fur is beginning to fly as one community member asks, 'So, just to be clear, you want to punish a Debian developer for their activities outside of Debian? Now that we're in crazy-as-batshit land, who do you want to bring up on charges next?'"
Googling for ATM master passwords. bagsc writes, "Kevin Poulsen of Wired.com strikes fear into another ATM manufacturer. This time, Triton ATMs had their super-secret master codes revealed by simple Google searches. Tranax was the most recent company with this problem, but probably not the last."
I bought a 2G iPod awhile back and haven't really touched the platform until recently to buy a new Nano. Syncing still doesn't work properly with any playlists that include dates. Before you go thinking "that's not a big deal" -- the Nano doesn't have much storage. You rely on the playlists to fill it up correctly. In my case, I created a playlist with just enough music to fill the iPod up with songs I hadn't listened to recently. Doesn't work at all.
It's a relatively simple problem, and it kind of ticks me off that my 2G "old" iPod did this right while a brand new Nano doesn't.
What a bunch of political bullshit. For fuck sake people, it's a Linux distribution, not the United Nations. During the many years I spent at the University of Queensland I ran into Anthony Towns a bunch of times. Back then he was a fun loving geek, and I doubt much has changed. We both attended HUMBUG semi-regularly, and had a few laughs. The politics at HUMBUG were annoying too. For a bunch of geeks sitting in a lecture theatre playing around with Linux and ignoring whoever was giving a "presentation" that month, there was a heck of a lot bureaucracy, what with voting held annually for president, vice-president, treasurer, secretary and librarian. There's such a thing as too much organisation. Especially when people lose sight of the big picture and get bogged down in administrivity.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The point of Slashback is to post a bunch of updates to recent stories that aren't worth an article on their own, not to post the EXACT SAME STORY TWICE.
Annoying for me ..maybe this can help.
itunes by default stores stuff in a folder called "iTunes" under your user "My Music" folder, and th library itself in "iTunes Music" which is a folder under the iTunes directory.
You can make your "My Music" folder be the same for all your accounts, and then you don't have to worry about different libraries. use TweakUI to change the default location of your "My Music" folder.
I'm still trying to figure out what in the heck 7.0 did to my system. Before the install my system hadn't crashed, bogged down, nothing in over a year. Now suddenly the firewire is dead on it, my iPod isn't recognized by the system at all, not even by the update app from their website.
Apple is deleting posts off their discussion forum by the hundreds, all from people just asking for help to get it working again. This update has done nothing to fix this problem for me so essentially the iPod I spent nearly 500$ on is worthless, Apple won't help me on the matter at all.
I'm glad some people aren't having issues. I've been using OSX since release, bought every update, never had an issue till now. I used to post here telling everyone how great my situation was while others complained. Now that I'm in their shoes, it's pretty shitty.
Apple is a gem of company when things go right, but when they go wrong, watch out. I've never felt so disrespected in my life when dealing with a corporation.
You said, "it had trouble coping with the concept that there were multiple users on the machine, kept separate music libraries for root and me". Not to be rude, but are you serious?
You say that the expected behavior would be for iTunes to keep the same music library for two distinct users on the system. The whole point of having a multi-user system is so that different users have distinct settings and documents. iTunes behaved perfectly correctly, and, if it had done anything else, it would have been buggy.
You use two user accounts on your system to get privilege separation, and that's fine. Then, because you want the two accounts to share data (not the typical multi-user paradigm), you use trickery to get it to work, and that's fine too. What you shouldn't do is complain when software breaks it.
Since the story submitter decided to display only one side of the argument here, I should point out that this objection is somewhat irrational. Several Debian developers have been forcibly kicked out of the project for actions that had no direct connection with the project. The details of names and events are usually considered private, but to pick one example that's already public knowledge - at one point a developer was an operator on the Freenode IRC network (then called OPN), abused this privilege in some fairly juvenile prank, and was promptly kicked out of Debian on the basis that they coudn't be trusted.
It is already expected that Debian developers will conduct themselves appropriately in all circumstances, not just ones relating to Debian. This is interpreted fairly liberally (the project doesn't care if you're an arse, it's primarily only interested in abuse of powers), but it is apparent that the current complaint is of this nature. Whether or not it is upheld by the project is for them to decide, but there's plenty of established precedent for this sort of thing. They're currently arguing about whether or not to uphold it; there appears to be little question as to whether developers should be held accountable in this manner.
ObBio: I'm an ex-developer who quit for personal reasons that had nothing to do with the project.
I upgraded to iTunes 7 (which runs on my PowerMac). Then I noticed that rhythmbox (the default GNOME music player) running on my laptop would no longer recognize my shared iTunes Library. It was doing so just fine before with iTunes 6. And it's not just rhythmbox: closed source software is having problems with this as well. And not just with DAAP sharing, either.
So I downgraded to iTunes 6 immediately. Apple penalizes you for doing so: iTunes 6 cannot read iTunes 7 shares (but iTunes 7 can read iTunes 6 shares). Talk about a forced upgrade. It seems that the change to DAAP was fairly trivial and avoidable, which brings up the question of whether they did it with the sole intention of breaking compatibility with the other software out there that reads the v6 DAAP protocol.
It's just a music player, but now I'm getting a little taste of what Richard Stallman means when he tells you to refrain from using closed source software. Even when you think a closed source vendor has good intentions, there's always a chance that they'll turn on you and slap you with an upgrade that breaks compatibility with your other software.
ITunes should have given me a choice about setting it up for shared use or non-shared. Especially for a "personal computer", it's typical to expect that multiple users will want to share resources, and on a machine and an application program targeted towards consumer entertainment you'd also expect that. (That doesn't mean that I expect it to also force the same playlists onto each iPod - it seems to do a good job of keeping track of multiple iPods.)
If the system didn't insist on having a user with Administrator privileges install it, that'd be different.
I didn't use "trickery" to get it to combine the two accounts - I poked around in the menus until I found where it kept the directory information, and it lets you change it. It was annoyingly well hidden, given that music and especially video podcasts are large enough that many users might want to keep them on some drive other than the default C:.
Breaking user preference settings during an upgrade is a real annoyance - most other software, even Mozilla, has finally caught up with the idea that you might want to do a software version upgrade without forgetting all your settings, or at least the idea that if you're *going* to trash all their settings, you should give an "Are you sure?" choice. iTunes didn't actually forget all my settings - it just forgot some of them. It kept the database of information about the tunes I had - it just lost track of where they were stored, including the tunes I'd downloaded from the iTunes Store. Broken, broken, annoying, and not what I'd expect from Apple.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks