i have karma to burn so i'm'a reply to myself with a mindless rant that'll get some Nerd Panties twisted in a bunch.
Why are people fighting against Apple and the iTMS? DRM and not enough Fair Use? for crying out loud. You wanna play music simultaneously on 98723487234 computers? You can't possibly cope with compressed music because your ears detect inferior quality to music purchased from a CD? BUY THE FUCKING CD from Amazon.com. iTMS was NOT BUILT FOR YOU. Apple is not asking you to slit your wrists, slay an unborn child, give-up your rights to free speech, or to do anything that goes against the U.S. constitution. Apple is not "luring" you into buying some songs from them only to "surprise" you with DRM restrictions. NO, all the rules are clearly stated UP-FRONT, everyone knows about them, and they are a condition of usage of their service. This service can't possibly fit the needs of every single music-connaisseur-wannabe Nerd on Slashdot. If you don't like it, DON'T USE IT.
You, as a consumer, have MANY alternatives to buy music from your favorite artists, on many media: live concerts on DVD and Video, Albums on audio CD and cassettes. Rip, mix and burn to your heart's content.
The fact of the matter is that RIAA owns most of the music industry. If you wanna fight somebody, fight the RIAA by NOT purchasing any music from them. Stick to indy artists. Apple's platform also happens to support independent artists.
Working so hard to reverse-engineer the iTMS protocol only does two things: mostly promote RIAA songs AND feeding more fuel to RIAA's lobbying fire as they can spin this type of news headlines as yet another reason why they are the poor, hapless victims fighting some Evil Army of Nerds, giving them more credibility in the eyes of clueless lawmakers to pass stupid laws and closing their eyes on CD price hikes.
So what if you can browse the iTunes library thru a perl script? WHERE IS THE PURCHASE BUTTON NEXT TO EACH SONG. That's the whole point behind iTMS. And you know, actually listening to samples without having to fire-up a separate application.
*sigh*.
How about writing a useful interface to the Amazon API, which, by design, lets you search its large inventory, is all about metadata (descriptions, reviews and more), gives you direct convenient links to sample audio files for previews (unlike the iTMS links in that interface which my browser is having difficulty understanding), *AND* offers a convenient token-based interface to create a shopping cart of albums that can actually be bought. The Amazon API lays the ground work for a highly-interactive, open market place. Sure you can't buy songs individually, but you can't do that either thru the perl script.
There's absolutely no point in writing significant amounts of "client" code to reverse-engineered, non-standard server protocols, especially without the approval of the entity that runs the only current implementation of that protocol.
If anything, take what's useful from the little you've reverse-engineered, implement a better, open protocol based on that, and convince all major record labels to input their data into your system. Oh wait, that might be a bit of a challenge.
uh, franlly, i don't really care "how the process works". i'm just relating personal experience and that of people close to me. As far as i'm concerned, I can buy a bunch of DRM'ed AAC off of iTMS, create an audio CD from those tracks, listen to the audio CD and not notice any drop in quality, then rip that CD back into a bunch of MP3s using the same compression settings as the ones i use when ripping normal CDs i buy from say, Amazon, and still not notice any audible loss in quality. I just use the iTunes default settings throughout the whole process.
i do know, that by definition, MP3 is a compressed format, i know there is some loss of data, that's what compression algorithms do, they get rid of data you don't need, but from my limited understanding, this does not affect audible quality. People create AUDIO CDs from MP3s and MP3s back from those AUDIO CDs all the frickin' time, then they give said AUDIO CDs to a friend because they were listening to it in the car and: "hey that's pretty cool, can i have it", "sure, just grab it, i'll burn myself another". I've never heard of any audible loss. You're welcome to prove me wrong.
Creating CDs off of iTMS music is a feature Apple has managed to negotiate with the RIAA. You are not messing with the encrypted file, you are not doing anything illegal. The fact that people might start creating MP3s from their newly created CDs is something the RIAA has been willing to live with, as it is a step that is cumbersome enough to limit the amount of rampant piracy originating from iTMS goods, yet convenient enough to decently promote Fair Use applications of this scheme, where, as i've mentioned in another post, "Fair Use" is no applicable legal concept in this case, as usage of iTMS is subject to a set of clearly-defined rules, which are part of a legally-binding contract, to which you "Agreed".
You, as a consumer, have all the information you could possibly need, PRIOR to using their service, as to whether or not you would want to use their service. Apple has given you all the information you need as a consumer to make an educated choice for your purchase.
All further musings about Fair Use are about the "morality" of this situation, and the only recourse you have is to vote with your feet: If this service does not fit your needs, you should simply not use it, and instead, buy music off of amazon, or support your local music store, or support indie music.
There is nothing legal about "breaking a DRM scheme".
Could you please define not portable? When you use iTunes to burn an AUDIO CD, you get a real audio CD, that can be played on any CD player. My GF buys a lot of music off of iTMS and makes lots of CDs which she plays just fine in her car. I must be misunderstanding what you mean by "not portable".
Please also define for my slow brain what you mean by "extra loss". You mean audio quality loss? See, I believe this is where you and I disagree. From personal experience, and that of a few other people, creating an Audio CD from a bunch of purchased iTMS AAC music doesn't appear to yield any loss in quality (which I believe, we agree on), and ripping MP3's or AAC's from that same CD does not either seem to yield any loss of quality either. The quality of the result from Audio CD ==> MP3/AAC process, will of course depend on what compression settings your ripping software is set to. This would apparently be where you and I disagree.
I'm sure you are already aware of this and mainly making a point, but there is absolutely nothing legal about getting rid of DRM from music you purchased from iTMS. Most threads I've read about "Fair Use" and Copyright law seem to ignore one simple thing: When you download music from iTMS, you know ahead of time, what the rules are. You agreed to them when clicking "Accept" on the EULA screen iTunes threw at you upon installation. Apple offers you a contract, you accept it by using their service. It is that simple. All musings about "Fair Use" and "Copyright", from this point, are mainly scoped to whether or not Apple and the RIAA have a "moral right" to apply their DRM scheme, whether or not, from a consumer standpoint this is fair, and whether or not, as a consumer, you should choose to use their services and products. If you do choose to use those services, there is absolutely no law you can invoke to justify bypassing their DRM scheme. The only case where you'd have legal recourse would be if you were never warned in advance, if said companies never provided you with the information you needed as a consumer to make an educated choice as to whether or not you should use their services. Such as when certain CDs are sold with DRM built-in, yet advertised as AUDIO CD, which defines a precise digital format which those CDs technically don't conform to.
The nerds behind PlayFair are doing nothing but harm the very thing they seek to protect: Fair Use. Apple *already* allows you to make an unlimited amount of regular Audio CDs from music you purchased on iTMS. Apple already allows you to listen to your music on any computer running their free iTunes software. THAT *is* fair use. Why go thru the trouble of breaking encryption? just so you could listen to your music on linux? if you're going thru all that trouble then why not create a few audio CDs from all your purchased music, so you could listen to it on your stereo and in your car, AND RIP UN-DRM'ed MP3s onto your linux box?.
This is all just silly. Why don't "freedom fanboys" either get a clue or stick to WMA, rather than bashing Apple on their attempt to make the RIAA play nice and bragging about circumventing a DRM scheme that has always been loose in the first place.
i still buy most my music off of amazon, i'm a big fan of physical goods in the mail.
heh. thanks for ur level-headed comment to my heated reply. i don't think you'd be losing any quality by ripping to MP3/AAC from the CD you created. You should end-up with an mp3/aac file that is of the exact same quality as whatever you got via Pepsi. it's just some hoops, i'll grant you that. You should try it out, see if you can hear any difference.
the part of my comment that's heated revolves around people (granted, not necessarily you, sorry about that) always eager to muse out of their rear-ends about yet another so-called reason for Apple's impending doom.
uh. you're not going to WAV when u burn to CD. when you burn to CD you go to AIFF, which is an uncompressed format which all AUDIO CD Players know how to deal with. There is zero loss of sound quality by burning an AAC song onto a CD.
Plus, if one is to stoop to such level of lifelessness to start comparing various formats, AAC is a format that is superior to OGG or MP3 for the range of the sound spectrum that matters to the human ear, but i've found those quality comparisons to be sterile discussions anyway, unless you're superman, sound quality differences between the various digital formats don't really exist: Only fanboys of whichever platform pretend they do and will ostensibly tag other formats as "lossy".
in any case, the fact that "FairPlay" was cracked is irrelevant to both Apple and the RIAA. DRM restrictions are about making people jump thru hoops before pirating music. Without even necessarily cracking it, there'll always be ways aroundAudio DRM. The RIAA may be many things, one thing it isn't, is stupid. There's just no way they'll revoke Apple's license. Apple brings them A LOT of money they would not otherwise be making.
Is the fairplay crack going to be sold on amazon and/or bundled with your mac? NO. The people who'll be using that crack will be the same people who pirate software and music in the first place.
Is "Arte", channel 5 still around? I'd definitely give these guys a call. While their audience is prolly a small fraction of France 3's, they're usually an educated audience. They like doing documentaries, seek out truth and present things as they are. i couldn't find any direct contact information beside this mailing address:
ARTE G.E.I.E.
4, Quai du Chanoine Winterer
F-67080 Strasbourg Cedex
I'd do whois arte-tv.com and send an email to the contact info on there, you never know.
Bon courage vieux! Fous-leurs une grosse bite au cul de ma part, avec mes remerciments;]
i'm a j2ee application developer among a few other things. I have a 1.25Ghz 15" AlBook, prior to that i was on one of the original 400mhz TiBooks. I do coding, networking, office stuff, email stuff, browsing, just about everything you can ever do on a computer. Granted i'm not much of a gamer. I've played UT2K3 and JediKnight II and Jedi Knight Academy just fine on this AlBook. I've networked and interoperated just fine with windoz machines, all seemless. Exchanged office documents back and forth from the windows world.
the online times i occasionally launch windows is to test web applications i'm building, and ensure various windoz browsers render pages correctly. Usually anything that works in win IE works in safari, and vice-versa.
to me, it all started with Mac OS X 10.1 . It was the corner stone OS that made me switch from my dell laptop that was running win2k and winnt prior to that.
Same Shit Different Package. While m$ windows is busy trying to reinvent a square wheel made of snazzy buzzwords, Apple is moving forward with a strong, stable, lean, mean operating system with very nicely separated yet integrated layers, each of which are subject to exponential innovations: UNIX subsystem powered by collaborative work of the open-source community and Apple developers, journaling filesystem, graphics/video subsystem, user-interface.
meanwhile Apple is also busy developing aspects of computing life people actually care about, meet iLife. Say hello to email with built-in bayesian spam filtering and built-in support for ISP-supplied spam-canning frameworks. Say hello to iSync, Address Book.app, Calendar.app, Mail.app, iChat.app, all insanely intuitive independent applications, yet tightly integrated thru open APIs. Apple is already moving forward with consumer electronics vendors: digital still cameras, digital video cameras, PDAs, cell-phone manufacturers to all get them to adhere to Apple's very-well defined APIs and standards so their products will "just work" with Macs, without installing a single piece of additional software, beyond what comes out of the box with the mac. iSync currently lets me sync my contacts and calendar, to my iPod, my sony ericsson t610 bluetooth phone, my online.MAC account, and my powerbook laptop with built-in bluetooth, all with the single press of a button. If i make a modification to contacts or calendar on any device, the next sync reflects it on all other devices. I could buy a Palm Pilot and have it work in the exact same way, without even using Palm's desktop software.
Most the unix geeks you know? holly shit, you wanna hear about gain in market share beyond unix geeks?
how about this: back when Mac OS 10.1 first came out in late 2001, my boss and i, who have been with this cool, rather large U.S. ISP since 1998 were the first to switch to a TiBook. It was actually a "transition" for him, and a "switch" for me. I had used Mac desktops for a significant part of my professional life, then the company got me a dell laptop running NT in 1999, which i subsequently upgraded to win2k. A laptop is a laptop, for development, windows served me just fine... the beauty of developing Java/J2EE applications, is that you're not tied to a single operating system or platform. I used that puppy for a couple of years, throughout which i saw the thing just slowly go to shit... 'till 2001, when we finally had a stable true unix development environment on a sleek, powerful laptop... which is why the dell doorstop got replaced with the 400Mhz TiBook. The TiBook has never failed me. I've always remained productive. Each release of Mac OS X, Jaguar, then Panther, has made the machine feel even faster.
It comes as no surprise that since 2001 windows and PCs have been losing some significant market share in our rather large engineering organization. unix and non-unix geeks. Partly due to the fact that a lot of engineers are migrating from desktop machines to laptop machines: it gives us more flexibility to work remotely, and allows us to put more hours in our projects. Then the question becomes, well what kind of laptop should we get? Both developers and their managers infallably come to the conclusion that powerbooks are the way to go:
They are true UNIX environments. Forget about spawning cygwin in windows to get a kludgy shell emulation, i'm talking about terminal windows galore with true bash, tcsh, whateversh shells. Geeks work faster in unix shells and that's a fscking fact of life. IDEs are fine, but again, shell gives you added flexibility. There's also a time for a windowed environment and that's fine, but for work, give us a true unix shell and we're in fscking heaven.
We're also a Java shop. through and through. some developers build their shit on windows, others on linux, and the rest of us on OS X. Our production hardware is big-iron Sun running solaris. From a warm and fuzzy standpoint, it feels good to be developing on a laptop built by a company for which Java is a central part of its strategy. Granted the JDK upgrades have lagged behind, but Apple and Sun have been working much more closely. My Java upgrades come from Apple Software update. Which means i know it will work flawlessly once i approve the update. I'm not separately maintaining Java and the versions of my OS, as i would on windows, for which clearly, Java is something microsoft "puts-up" with.
powerbooks are at least powerful enough, i'll even contend as powerful as pc laptops. pc fanboys can gloat all they want about their 2.5Ghz pentium laptops, i have yet to see this 1.25Ghz AlBook (my xmas laptop upgrade gift from work... 400Mhz -- 1.25Ghz jump... BIG) lag behind a pc laptop when performing convoluted and CPU-intensive Java ant builds. The point is, from a management standpoint, an engineer is not going to lose productivity thru CPU speed.
powerbooks are engineered to last. Granted, the original TiBooks, such as my (well the company's) old 400mhz TiBook, has lost all kinds of paint, it has remained, and still is a solid machine that's about to make its way to the desk of an administrative assistant. Today's AlBooks are rock-fscking solid. Yet thin, and light. and beautiful.
powerbooks are thin and light. Yet they remain fully featured. This AlBook lets me back-up large amounts of data to CD and DVD using apple's own free "Backup.app" application. Putting-in extra hours on a saturday night is suddenly not so painful when
i work for a large ISP in a team that builds a comprehensive portal that receives over 6 million unique page views in any 24 hour period. it's written in Java and runs in a Java Servlet Container (open-source)). Since Apple came out with the TiBook in 2001 and OS 10.1, my boss and i were the first ones to switch to powerbooks and OS X in the department.
Jump forward in late 2003, i now have a 1.25Ghz 15" powerbook with 1Gig of RAM and 80GB HD, and let me tell you, there is no end to what this thing can do. it will complete this mechanism that goes thru our whole JSP web application tree, converts each.jsp into.java then compiles into java byte code in about the same amount of time the fastest x86 laptops do. tho i dont have precise numbers. might be faster, might be slower.
while i understand your main focus is on raw power, i would urge you to consider productivity as a factor, based on your operating system's stability, security, and features. XP has greatly evolved in many aspects, and any good engineer can deal with just about any OS. With that said, OSX goes the extra mile to make your overall computing experience much more powerful, especially with Panther.
Expose, Fast User switching, XCode, Apple's own implementation of X11 (comes on the panther CD, it's *F A S T*, GIMP loads litteraly in under 5 seconds) so u can run any open-source app you want. Terminal.app for crying out loud. forget cygwin under windows, here you have a true UNIX bash shell. or tcsh. or ksh. it's all there. all the command-line utilities from the Unix and Linux world are all there. the cmd-line can also trigger things to happen in the finder/aqua-world: "open" could open a directory in a find window, or a file in which ever application created it.
let's talk about address book, calendar and mail. You may import all your Yahoo, Mozilla, Netscape contacts into AddressBook.app. Calendar.app lets you subscribe to calendars, accept.ics invitations, publish your own calendar, define multiple coexisting calendars. Safari's bookmarks interface will show u URLs defined in your AddressBook. Mail.app will read information from AddressBook to show email addresses as clickable "People Objects" and add new email addresses to your address book directly from an email you're reading. You can drag any picture from the web or iPhoto, or your desktop to an AddressBook entry, where it lets you zoom the pic in or out, crop, position, pictures associated with contacts show-up in Mail.app when u receive email from them. They also show-up in iChat.app. All those applications are very simple yet VERY powerful and are also well-defined open APIs any software developer can interact with. For example EarthLink lets you sync your Mac OS X AddressBook with their own online address book, which greatly facilitates email whitelisting to work with their highest-level CR-based spam-blocking feature (lower-level spam-blocking is Bayesian-ish filtering based on email content). Mail.app comes with its own adaptive Bayesian spam filtering that becomes smarter and smarter overtime as you "train it". Mine has become *extremely* effective at blocking spam, and i can tell you this is a definite productivity enhancer. Then there is iSync. A true marvel. iSync is also an open API to sync multiple devices over just about any port or conduit. Most PDA-ish devices and Phone manufacturers have made their devices compatible with iSync, and more are coming on the market every day. Your Calendars, Contacts, Bookmarks can all be sync'ed via iSync to any number of devices WITHOUT installing a single piece of software that may have shipped with such devices. this is HUGE. Currently i'm using iSync to sync an iPod (bookmarks, address book, calendar, over FireWire), a Sony Ericsson t610 (over bluetooth, built-in all the Aluminum powerbooks, including mine), my.MAC account (calendar, address book, bookmarks, over HTTP/webdav i think). I could buy a Palm Pilot and just sy
uh oracle runs on OSX. at work, most of us developers have duplicated almost exactly the way our java/servlet/oracle-db-based web application (portal, 5 million unique page views/day, can't tell u more) runs on our sun solaris production boxes, onto our OS X laptops. yes that includes a copy of Oracle which officially supports OS X. mysql works just fine on OS X too. so does postgres. in fact, just about anything written in C and designed to be compiled with gcc works just fine on OS X. Oh, Apple also implemented its own *fast* version of X11. it's free with your OS. Any Desktop app u can run on linux runs on OS X just fine. yes that includes everything from Gimp, to Gnome and KDE, i mainly just use Gimp, and it's fast.
you want a free video editing software? how about iMovie, which smacks the living shit out of anything the open source community has ever dreamt to produce. the whole iLife suite comes for free with ur new mac. Last xmas i made a few videos using my mom's sony handycam, edited them in iMovie, exported them back to tape, no quality loss as u remain in DV format during the entire process. Then used iDVD to create a DVD with 4 movies and an image slideshow created from selecting one of my iPhoto albums within iDVD. Guess how i picked my movie soundtracks in iMovie? by browsing my iTunes library from iMovie and dragging songs onto the iMovie timeline. Did i mention i did all that on the same laptop i use for application development without breaking anything close to a sweat? After my vacation, i use Apple's free Backup.app to back-up all my movies and dvds projects to DVD to keep my hard drive uncluttered before getting back into work. oh and during this whole process i never ever installed a single piece of software. I simply used my operating system and what came with it out of the box.
Every single USB/1.0-2.0 and/or FireWire-400/800 device you can get your hands on is already compatible with OS X. yeah that includes my nifty USB IBM laser mouse, with 2 buttons, a clickable wheel, and another button to the side, all of which i have configured in OS X thru system preferences to trigger various aspects of expose. If you can plug it into your mac, it works. oh and you might have heard of bluetooth? i've got a sony ericsson t610 phone (t-mobile as my carrier, they rock!). i use iSync, a generic Apple-developed sync'ing API to which all PDA makers already adhere, to synchronize my Address Book and Calendar info onto the phone, and vice-versa. it doesn't stop here.
All bluetooth devices work out of the box too. no software installation required, just run the Apple bluetooth wizard for your laptop to register your device and bickity-bam, you're done.
let's talk more about interoperability here. Apple created cute little applications, disconcerting in their simplicity and ease of use: AddressBook.app, Calendar.app. Most of my IM programs automatically interoperate with my address book, so does Apple's Mail.app, my Calendar can subscribe to others' calendars over HTTP thru standard formats, other applications can interact with it as well. They're simple applications as well as powerful open APIs, all of which interoperate with iSync. iSync essentially means you can have your Palm Pilot, your iPod, your bluetooh phone, your online.MAC account, and whatever exotic PDA-ish device you can think of that somehow plugs into or connects to ur mac, all remain in accurate Sync using Apple's iSync. FOR FREE with your OS. In the windows world, such functionality is partly mimicked by 3rd party services such as intellisync that pick the few most popular devices on the market, creates separate conduits for each one, to in the end sell you a solution that allows you to sync a limited set of devices. If more devices come to the market they'll have to update their software, you'll h
i'll start out by saying that if there is a small, local ISP near you, it might be a good way to go, provided you don't travel or plan to move in this lifetime.
with that said...
i've been a satisfied EarthLink customer for many years now. I switched to their broadband offering since it first came out, and have gladly seen their services dramatically improve. EarthLink makes a lot a sense in my case, as i do travel around quite a bit and find it easy to find and connect to a local POP while using a portion of the 20 hours of free dial-up time that come with my broadband account. They have consistently been at the forefront of spam-fighting efforts, be them legal, or thru software. Their spam-fighting solutions are top-notch, especially since their recently-released Total Access for Mac OS X which allows you to sync your Mac OS X Address Book data with their server, allowing you to almost instantly "whitelist" everyone you know, as Mail.app makes it easy/automatic to add contacts to your address book based on mails received and/or sent. I do also appreciate their other initiatives to fight other Internet annoyances: Pop-Up blocker, server-side scrubbing of e-mail-bound viruses (Virus Blocker), SpyWare blocker which have been resulting in my having to spend less time trying to help my PC-using friends debug their machines. They've also recently released for both Mac OS X and windows, their "EarthLink Accelerator" which is totally bad-ass and results in a dramatic accelration of web-surfing, especially when i use my 15" Apple Aluminum Powerbook's bluetooth connectivity with my Sony Ericsson t610 to dial-up to my EarthLink account at speeds that are limited to less than 14.4Kbps. EarthLink Accelerator is technology licensed from Propel Networks, these guys are really really cool.
so again, Mom and Pop shops are a good alternative, but do keep EarthLink in mind if you're an impatient Internet user. (which i am, to a great extent heh).
Holger Isenberg, the guy behind mars-news.de, is one of manykooks out there who are too ugly and interpersonally incompetent to ever hope to get laid in this life time. He must therefore resort to enclosing himself into his imaginary universe of in-bred conspiracy theories. enjoy.
NASA has always made raw data available to the public, which is what you can leverage thru the Maestro the software. The red tint observed in composite pictures made available to the public are, in fact, a fairly accurate representation of the truth. Pictures MUST be composited to be available in a JPEG format Joe Six Pack can look at in his browser, hence some level of alteration is necessary. There is no lie. There is no conspiracy. Even your average Joe Six Pack can grok the fact that some basic alterations are necessary to represent flat images. Otherwise Joe Six Pack can always download Maestro.
there is absolutely no lying going on. wake up and find something more useful to worry about. or get laid. for crying out loud. what you are seeing as red-colored is just one of many possible representations of the truth. the fact that the tint of the picture is red is absolutely irrelevant. what is interesting is to see is the shape of the landscape. this is what they came there to study. not what fucking color the sky is. who gives a shit. again. get laid.
earthlink only shows 7 text ads. google shows 10 but piles most in the right column. i filter graphical ad banners. ergo, to me, earthlink's results page loads faster than google's. try it. u'll see. earthlink is also my isp, i like what it does to fight spam and other annoyances, and happens to be a convenient way for me to search, and i'd frankly rather send a few advertising $$$ their way thru their revenue sharing with google on adwords clickthrus, than simply sending all the money google's way. strangely, i also find earthlink's search results page easier on the eye than google's. i don't know why. 's'just me. and i do like seeing 7 sponsored results before actual results as i'm often shop-searching, and regard sponsored and actual results with equal importance. i'll typically scour actual search results for reviews abour products i'm looking to buy, such as lately digital video cameras, then peek at the sponsored results to start comparing prices in different browser tabs, after which i'll eventually click on earthlink's "shopping link to refine my price comparisons in yet another tab on their dealtime-hosted shopping site. at the end of all that, i've got a pretty good idea about how much various items go for, and what their quality is. anyway. it's just *my* habits.
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i am now your Fan. I worship you. If i only had mod points.
i have karma to burn so i'm'a reply to myself with a mindless rant that'll get some Nerd Panties twisted in a bunch.
Why are people fighting against Apple and the iTMS? DRM and not enough Fair Use? for crying out loud. You wanna play music simultaneously on 98723487234 computers? You can't possibly cope with compressed music because your ears detect inferior quality to music purchased from a CD? BUY THE FUCKING CD from Amazon.com. iTMS was NOT BUILT FOR YOU. Apple is not asking you to slit your wrists, slay an unborn child, give-up your rights to free speech, or to do anything that goes against the U.S. constitution. Apple is not "luring" you into buying some songs from them only to "surprise" you with DRM restrictions. NO, all the rules are clearly stated UP-FRONT, everyone knows about them, and they are a condition of usage of their service. This service can't possibly fit the needs of every single music-connaisseur-wannabe Nerd on Slashdot. If you don't like it, DON'T USE IT.
You, as a consumer, have MANY alternatives to buy music from your favorite artists, on many media: live concerts on DVD and Video, Albums on audio CD and cassettes. Rip, mix and burn to your heart's content.
The fact of the matter is that RIAA owns most of the music industry. If you wanna fight somebody, fight the RIAA by NOT purchasing any music from them. Stick to indy artists. Apple's platform also happens to support independent artists.
Working so hard to reverse-engineer the iTMS protocol only does two things: mostly promote RIAA songs AND feeding more fuel to RIAA's lobbying fire as they can spin this type of news headlines as yet another reason why they are the poor, hapless victims fighting some Evil Army of Nerds, giving them more credibility in the eyes of clueless lawmakers to pass stupid laws and closing their eyes on CD price hikes.
THINK BEFORE YOU ACT.
So what if you can browse the iTunes library thru a perl script? WHERE IS THE PURCHASE BUTTON NEXT TO EACH SONG. That's the whole point behind iTMS. And you know, actually listening to samples without having to fire-up a separate application.
*sigh*.
How about writing a useful interface to the Amazon API, which, by design, lets you search its large inventory, is all about metadata (descriptions, reviews and more), gives you direct convenient links to sample audio files for previews (unlike the iTMS links in that interface which my browser is having difficulty understanding), *AND* offers a convenient token-based interface to create a shopping cart of albums that can actually be bought. The Amazon API lays the ground work for a highly-interactive, open market place. Sure you can't buy songs individually, but you can't do that either thru the perl script.
There's absolutely no point in writing significant amounts of "client" code to reverse-engineered, non-standard server protocols, especially without the approval of the entity that runs the only current implementation of that protocol.
If anything, take what's useful from the little you've reverse-engineered, implement a better, open protocol based on that, and convince all major record labels to input their data into your system. Oh wait, that might be a bit of a challenge.
Either way, Apple gets increased mindshare.
uh, franlly, i don't really care "how the process works". i'm just relating personal experience and that of people close to me. As far as i'm concerned, I can buy a bunch of DRM'ed AAC off of iTMS, create an audio CD from those tracks, listen to the audio CD and not notice any drop in quality, then rip that CD back into a bunch of MP3s using the same compression settings as the ones i use when ripping normal CDs i buy from say, Amazon, and still not notice any audible loss in quality. I just use the iTunes default settings throughout the whole process.
i do know, that by definition, MP3 is a compressed format, i know there is some loss of data, that's what compression algorithms do, they get rid of data you don't need, but from my limited understanding, this does not affect audible quality. People create AUDIO CDs from MP3s and MP3s back from those AUDIO CDs all the frickin' time, then they give said AUDIO CDs to a friend because they were listening to it in the car and: "hey that's pretty cool, can i have it", "sure, just grab it, i'll burn myself another". I've never heard of any audible loss. You're welcome to prove me wrong.
Creating CDs off of iTMS music is a feature Apple has managed to negotiate with the RIAA. You are not messing with the encrypted file, you are not doing anything illegal. The fact that people might start creating MP3s from their newly created CDs is something the RIAA has been willing to live with, as it is a step that is cumbersome enough to limit the amount of rampant piracy originating from iTMS goods, yet convenient enough to decently promote Fair Use applications of this scheme, where, as i've mentioned in another post, "Fair Use" is no applicable legal concept in this case, as usage of iTMS is subject to a set of clearly-defined rules, which are part of a legally-binding contract, to which you "Agreed".
You, as a consumer, have all the information you could possibly need, PRIOR to using their service, as to whether or not you would want to use their service. Apple has given you all the information you need as a consumer to make an educated choice for your purchase.
All further musings about Fair Use are about the "morality" of this situation, and the only recourse you have is to vote with your feet: If this service does not fit your needs, you should simply not use it, and instead, buy music off of amazon, or support your local music store, or support indie music.
There is nothing legal about "breaking a DRM scheme".
interesting points
Could you please define not portable? When you use iTunes to burn an AUDIO CD, you get a real audio CD, that can be played on any CD player. My GF buys a lot of music off of iTMS and makes lots of CDs which she plays just fine in her car. I must be misunderstanding what you mean by "not portable".
Please also define for my slow brain what you mean by "extra loss". You mean audio quality loss? See, I believe this is where you and I disagree. From personal experience, and that of a few other people, creating an Audio CD from a bunch of purchased iTMS AAC music doesn't appear to yield any loss in quality (which I believe, we agree on), and ripping MP3's or AAC's from that same CD does not either seem to yield any loss of quality either. The quality of the result from Audio CD ==> MP3/AAC process, will of course depend on what compression settings your ripping software is set to. This would apparently be where you and I disagree.
I'm sure you are already aware of this and mainly making a point, but there is absolutely nothing legal about getting rid of DRM from music you purchased from iTMS. Most threads I've read about "Fair Use" and Copyright law seem to ignore one simple thing: When you download music from iTMS, you know ahead of time, what the rules are. You agreed to them when clicking "Accept" on the EULA screen iTunes threw at you upon installation. Apple offers you a contract, you accept it by using their service. It is that simple. All musings about "Fair Use" and "Copyright", from this point, are mainly scoped to whether or not Apple and the RIAA have a "moral right" to apply their DRM scheme, whether or not, from a consumer standpoint this is fair, and whether or not, as a consumer, you should choose to use their services and products. If you do choose to use those services, there is absolutely no law you can invoke to justify bypassing their DRM scheme. The only case where you'd have legal recourse would be if you were never warned in advance, if said companies never provided you with the information you needed as a consumer to make an educated choice as to whether or not you should use their services. Such as when certain CDs are sold with DRM built-in, yet advertised as AUDIO CD, which defines a precise digital format which those CDs technically don't conform to.
The nerds behind PlayFair are doing nothing but harm the very thing they seek to protect: Fair Use. Apple *already* allows you to make an unlimited amount of regular Audio CDs from music you purchased on iTMS. Apple already allows you to listen to your music on any computer running their free iTunes software. THAT *is* fair use. Why go thru the trouble of breaking encryption? just so you could listen to your music on linux? if you're going thru all that trouble then why not create a few audio CDs from all your purchased music, so you could listen to it on your stereo and in your car, AND RIP UN-DRM'ed MP3s onto your linux box?.
This is all just silly. Why don't "freedom fanboys" either get a clue or stick to WMA, rather than bashing Apple on their attempt to make the RIAA play nice and bragging about circumventing a DRM scheme that has always been loose in the first place.
i still buy most my music off of amazon, i'm a big fan of physical goods in the mail.
heh. thanks for ur level-headed comment to my heated reply. i don't think you'd be losing any quality by ripping to MP3/AAC from the CD you created. You should end-up with an mp3/aac file that is of the exact same quality as whatever you got via Pepsi. it's just some hoops, i'll grant you that. You should try it out, see if you can hear any difference.
the part of my comment that's heated revolves around people (granted, not necessarily you, sorry about that) always eager to muse out of their rear-ends about yet another so-called reason for Apple's impending doom.
cheers!
uh. you're not going to WAV when u burn to CD. when you burn to CD you go to AIFF, which is an uncompressed format which all AUDIO CD Players know how to deal with. There is zero loss of sound quality by burning an AAC song onto a CD.
Plus, if one is to stoop to such level of lifelessness to start comparing various formats, AAC is a format that is superior to OGG or MP3 for the range of the sound spectrum that matters to the human ear, but i've found those quality comparisons to be sterile discussions anyway, unless you're superman, sound quality differences between the various digital formats don't really exist: Only fanboys of whichever platform pretend they do and will ostensibly tag other formats as "lossy".
in any case, the fact that "FairPlay" was cracked is irrelevant to both Apple and the RIAA. DRM restrictions are about making people jump thru hoops before pirating music. Without even necessarily cracking it, there'll always be ways around Audio DRM. The RIAA may be many things, one thing it isn't, is stupid. There's just no way they'll revoke Apple's license. Apple brings them A LOT of money they would not otherwise be making.
Is the fairplay crack going to be sold on amazon and/or bundled with your mac? NO. The people who'll be using that crack will be the same people who pirate software and music in the first place.
Bien vu tout ca!
Is "Arte", channel 5 still around? I'd definitely give these guys a call. While their audience is prolly a small fraction of France 3's, they're usually an educated audience. They like doing documentaries, seek out truth and present things as they are. i couldn't find any direct contact information beside this mailing address:
I'd do whois arte-tv.com and send an email to the contact info on there, you never know.
Bon courage vieux! Fous-leurs une grosse bite au cul de ma part, avec mes remerciments ;]
... trying pussy?
i'm a j2ee application developer among a few other things. I have a 1.25Ghz 15" AlBook, prior to that i was on one of the original 400mhz TiBooks. I do coding, networking, office stuff, email stuff, browsing, just about everything you can ever do on a computer. Granted i'm not much of a gamer. I've played UT2K3 and JediKnight II and Jedi Knight Academy just fine on this AlBook. I've networked and interoperated just fine with windoz machines, all seemless. Exchanged office documents back and forth from the windows world.
the online times i occasionally launch windows is to test web applications i'm building, and ensure various windoz browsers render pages correctly. Usually anything that works in win IE works in safari, and vice-versa.
to me, it all started with Mac OS X 10.1 . It was the corner stone OS that made me switch from my dell laptop that was running win2k and winnt prior to that.
check out my journal for switch and misc stories
heh heh. elle est bien bonne ta vanne ;] j'te foutrais bien un +5 poilant si je pouvais :D
Same Shit Different Package. While m$ windows is busy trying to reinvent a square wheel made of snazzy buzzwords, Apple is moving forward with a strong, stable, lean, mean operating system with very nicely separated yet integrated layers, each of which are subject to exponential innovations: UNIX subsystem powered by collaborative work of the open-source community and Apple developers, journaling filesystem, graphics/video subsystem, user-interface.
meanwhile Apple is also busy developing aspects of computing life people actually care about, meet iLife. Say hello to email with built-in bayesian spam filtering and built-in support for ISP-supplied spam-canning frameworks. Say hello to iSync, Address Book.app, Calendar.app, Mail.app, iChat.app, all insanely intuitive independent applications, yet tightly integrated thru open APIs. Apple is already moving forward with consumer electronics vendors: digital still cameras, digital video cameras, PDAs, cell-phone manufacturers to all get them to adhere to Apple's very-well defined APIs and standards so their products will "just work" with Macs, without installing a single piece of additional software, beyond what comes out of the box with the mac. iSync currently lets me sync my contacts and calendar, to my iPod, my sony ericsson t610 bluetooth phone, my online .MAC account, and my powerbook laptop with built-in bluetooth, all with the single press of a button. If i make a modification to contacts or calendar on any device, the next sync reflects it on all other devices. I could buy a Palm Pilot and have it work in the exact same way, without even using Palm's desktop software.
Apple gets it.
Most the unix geeks you know? holly shit, you wanna hear about gain in market share beyond unix geeks?
how about this: back when Mac OS 10.1 first came out in late 2001, my boss and i, who have been with this cool, rather large U.S. ISP since 1998 were the first to switch to a TiBook. It was actually a "transition" for him, and a "switch" for me. I had used Mac desktops for a significant part of my professional life, then the company got me a dell laptop running NT in 1999, which i subsequently upgraded to win2k. A laptop is a laptop, for development, windows served me just fine ... the beauty of developing Java/J2EE applications, is that you're not tied to a single operating system or platform. I used that puppy for a couple of years, throughout which i saw the thing just slowly go to shit ... 'till 2001, when we finally had a stable true unix development environment on a sleek, powerful laptop ... which is why the dell doorstop got replaced with the 400Mhz TiBook. The TiBook has never failed me. I've always remained productive. Each release of Mac OS X, Jaguar, then Panther, has made the machine feel even faster.
It comes as no surprise that since 2001 windows and PCs have been losing some significant market share in our rather large engineering organization. unix and non-unix geeks. Partly due to the fact that a lot of engineers are migrating from desktop machines to laptop machines: it gives us more flexibility to work remotely, and allows us to put more hours in our projects. Then the question becomes, well what kind of laptop should we get? Both developers and their managers infallably come to the conclusion that powerbooks are the way to go:
heh heh. you made my day :) u've just earned urself a fan :) cheers :)
i work for a large ISP in a team that builds a comprehensive portal that receives over 6 million unique page views in any 24 hour period. it's written in Java and runs in a Java Servlet Container (open-source)). Since Apple came out with the TiBook in 2001 and OS 10.1, my boss and i were the first ones to switch to powerbooks and OS X in the department.
Jump forward in late 2003, i now have a 1.25Ghz 15" powerbook with 1Gig of RAM and 80GB HD, and let me tell you, there is no end to what this thing can do. it will complete this mechanism that goes thru our whole JSP web application tree, converts each .jsp into .java then compiles into java byte code in about the same amount of time the fastest x86 laptops do. tho i dont have precise numbers. might be faster, might be slower.
while i understand your main focus is on raw power, i would urge you to consider productivity as a factor, based on your operating system's stability, security, and features. XP has greatly evolved in many aspects, and any good engineer can deal with just about any OS. With that said, OSX goes the extra mile to make your overall computing experience much more powerful, especially with Panther.
Expose, Fast User switching, XCode, Apple's own implementation of X11 (comes on the panther CD, it's *F A S T*, GIMP loads litteraly in under 5 seconds) so u can run any open-source app you want. Terminal.app for crying out loud. forget cygwin under windows, here you have a true UNIX bash shell. or tcsh. or ksh. it's all there. all the command-line utilities from the Unix and Linux world are all there. the cmd-line can also trigger things to happen in the finder/aqua-world: "open" could open a directory in a find window, or a file in which ever application created it.
let's talk about address book, calendar and mail. You may import all your Yahoo, Mozilla, Netscape contacts into AddressBook.app. Calendar.app lets you subscribe to calendars, accept .ics invitations, publish your own calendar, define multiple coexisting calendars. Safari's bookmarks interface will show u URLs defined in your AddressBook. Mail.app will read information from AddressBook to show email addresses as clickable "People Objects" and add new email addresses to your address book directly from an email you're reading. You can drag any picture from the web or iPhoto, or your desktop to an AddressBook entry, where it lets you zoom the pic in or out, crop, position, pictures associated with contacts show-up in Mail.app when u receive email from them. They also show-up in iChat.app. All those applications are very simple yet VERY powerful and are also well-defined open APIs any software developer can interact with. For example EarthLink lets you sync your Mac OS X AddressBook with their own online address book, which greatly facilitates email whitelisting to work with their highest-level CR-based spam-blocking feature (lower-level spam-blocking is Bayesian-ish filtering based on email content). Mail.app comes with its own adaptive Bayesian spam filtering that becomes smarter and smarter overtime as you "train it". Mine has become *extremely* effective at blocking spam, and i can tell you this is a definite productivity enhancer. Then there is iSync. A true marvel. iSync is also an open API to sync multiple devices over just about any port or conduit. Most PDA-ish devices and Phone manufacturers have made their devices compatible with iSync, and more are coming on the market every day. Your Calendars, Contacts, Bookmarks can all be sync'ed via iSync to any number of devices WITHOUT installing a single piece of software that may have shipped with such devices. this is HUGE. Currently i'm using iSync to sync an iPod (bookmarks, address book, calendar, over FireWire), a Sony Ericsson t610 (over bluetooth, built-in all the Aluminum powerbooks, including mine), my .MAC account (calendar, address book, bookmarks, over HTTP/webdav i think). I could buy a Palm Pilot and just sy
uh oracle runs on OSX. at work, most of us developers have duplicated almost exactly the way our java/servlet/oracle-db-based web application (portal, 5 million unique page views/day, can't tell u more) runs on our sun solaris production boxes, onto our OS X laptops. yes that includes a copy of Oracle which officially supports OS X. mysql works just fine on OS X too. so does postgres. in fact, just about anything written in C and designed to be compiled with gcc works just fine on OS X. Oh, Apple also implemented its own *fast* version of X11. it's free with your OS. Any Desktop app u can run on linux runs on OS X just fine. yes that includes everything from Gimp, to Gnome and KDE, i mainly just use Gimp, and it's fast.
you want a free video editing software? how about iMovie, which smacks the living shit out of anything the open source community has ever dreamt to produce. the whole iLife suite comes for free with ur new mac. Last xmas i made a few videos using my mom's sony handycam, edited them in iMovie, exported them back to tape, no quality loss as u remain in DV format during the entire process. Then used iDVD to create a DVD with 4 movies and an image slideshow created from selecting one of my iPhoto albums within iDVD. Guess how i picked my movie soundtracks in iMovie? by browsing my iTunes library from iMovie and dragging songs onto the iMovie timeline. Did i mention i did all that on the same laptop i use for application development without breaking anything close to a sweat? After my vacation, i use Apple's free Backup.app to back-up all my movies and dvds projects to DVD to keep my hard drive uncluttered before getting back into work. oh and during this whole process i never ever installed a single piece of software. I simply used my operating system and what came with it out of the box.
Every single USB/1.0-2.0 and/or FireWire-400/800 device you can get your hands on is already compatible with OS X. yeah that includes my nifty USB IBM laser mouse, with 2 buttons, a clickable wheel, and another button to the side, all of which i have configured in OS X thru system preferences to trigger various aspects of expose. If you can plug it into your mac, it works. oh and you might have heard of bluetooth? i've got a sony ericsson t610 phone (t-mobile as my carrier, they rock!). i use iSync, a generic Apple-developed sync'ing API to which all PDA makers already adhere, to synchronize my Address Book and Calendar info onto the phone, and vice-versa. it doesn't stop here.
All bluetooth devices work out of the box too. no software installation required, just run the Apple bluetooth wizard for your laptop to register your device and bickity-bam, you're done.
let's talk more about interoperability here. Apple created cute little applications, disconcerting in their simplicity and ease of use: AddressBook.app, Calendar.app. Most of my IM programs automatically interoperate with my address book, so does Apple's Mail.app, my Calendar can subscribe to others' calendars over HTTP thru standard formats, other applications can interact with it as well. They're simple applications as well as powerful open APIs, all of which interoperate with iSync. iSync essentially means you can have your Palm Pilot, your iPod, your bluetooh phone, your online .MAC account, and whatever exotic PDA-ish device you can think of that somehow plugs into or connects to ur mac, all remain in accurate Sync using Apple's iSync. FOR FREE with your OS. In the windows world, such functionality is partly mimicked by 3rd party services such as intellisync that pick the few most popular devices on the market, creates separate conduits for each one, to in the end sell you a solution that allows you to sync a limited set of devices. If more devices come to the market they'll have to update their software, you'll h
actually, John Kerry does seem serious about national security. i like his stance on Iraq.
IF we have to give our lives tonight, we give'em HELL before we do!!!
i'll start out by saying that if there is a small, local ISP near you, it might be a good way to go, provided you don't travel or plan to move in this lifetime.
with that said ...
i've been a satisfied EarthLink customer for many years now. I switched to their broadband offering since it first came out, and have gladly seen their services dramatically improve. EarthLink makes a lot a sense in my case, as i do travel around quite a bit and find it easy to find and connect to a local POP while using a portion of the 20 hours of free dial-up time that come with my broadband account. They have consistently been at the forefront of spam-fighting efforts, be them legal, or thru software. Their spam-fighting solutions are top-notch, especially since their recently-released Total Access for Mac OS X which allows you to sync your Mac OS X Address Book data with their server, allowing you to almost instantly "whitelist" everyone you know, as Mail.app makes it easy/automatic to add contacts to your address book based on mails received and/or sent. I do also appreciate their other initiatives to fight other Internet annoyances: Pop-Up blocker, server-side scrubbing of e-mail-bound viruses (Virus Blocker), SpyWare blocker which have been resulting in my having to spend less time trying to help my PC-using friends debug their machines. They've also recently released for both Mac OS X and windows, their "EarthLink Accelerator" which is totally bad-ass and results in a dramatic accelration of web-surfing, especially when i use my 15" Apple Aluminum Powerbook's bluetooth connectivity with my Sony Ericsson t610 to dial-up to my EarthLink account at speeds that are limited to less than 14.4Kbps. EarthLink Accelerator is technology licensed from Propel Networks, these guys are really really cool.
so again, Mom and Pop shops are a good alternative, but do keep EarthLink in mind if you're an impatient Internet user. (which i am, to a great extent heh).
i think not!
CONSPIRACY!!!.
clearly.
Holger Isenberg, the guy behind mars-news.de, is one of many kooks out there who are too ugly and interpersonally incompetent to ever hope to get laid in this life time. He must therefore resort to enclosing himself into his imaginary universe of in-bred conspiracy theories. enjoy.
NASA has always made raw data available to the public, which is what you can leverage thru the Maestro the software. The red tint observed in composite pictures made available to the public are, in fact, a fairly accurate representation of the truth. Pictures MUST be composited to be available in a JPEG format Joe Six Pack can look at in his browser, hence some level of alteration is necessary. There is no lie. There is no conspiracy. Even your average Joe Six Pack can grok the fact that some basic alterations are necessary to represent flat images. Otherwise Joe Six Pack can always download Maestro.
there is absolutely no lying going on. wake up and find something more useful to worry about. or get laid. for crying out loud. what you are seeing as red-colored is just one of many possible representations of the truth. the fact that the tint of the picture is red is absolutely irrelevant. what is interesting is to see is the shape of the landscape. this is what they came there to study. not what fucking color the sky is. who gives a shit. again. get laid.
earthlink only shows 7 text ads. google shows 10 but piles most in the right column. i filter graphical ad banners. ergo, to me, earthlink's results page loads faster than google's. try it. u'll see. earthlink is also my isp, i like what it does to fight spam and other annoyances, and happens to be a convenient way for me to search, and i'd frankly rather send a few advertising $$$ their way thru their revenue sharing with google on adwords clickthrus, than simply sending all the money google's way. strangely, i also find earthlink's search results page easier on the eye than google's. i don't know why. 's'just me. and i do like seeing 7 sponsored results before actual results as i'm often shop-searching, and regard sponsored and actual results with equal importance. i'll typically scour actual search results for reviews abour products i'm looking to buy, such as lately digital video cameras, then peek at the sponsored results to start comparing prices in different browser tabs, after which i'll eventually click on earthlink's "shopping link to refine my price comparisons in yet another tab on their dealtime-hosted shopping site. at the end of all that, i've got a pretty good idea about how much various items go for, and what their quality is. anyway. it's just *my* habits.