I’ve just found out about Mrs. Wordpress, a site which sends up the “Mr. Wordpress”—the imaginary figure who is the first person to post a comment on every new Wordpress blog. It’s rather amusing, though I don’t know how long the author of the site will keep updating it.
In a move which has surprised many people within the music and IT industries, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has launched an attack on record companies which insist on including DRM software on their music downloads offered through services such as iTunes. It’s interesting to see the dominant player in the music download market (a statistic that Apple likes to boast about at every opportunity) coming out so strongly against DRM, because usually it’s the smaller players who complain about any practice which they see as anti-competitive.
So why would Apple want to remove this restriction on music sold through its online store? First of all, it would make it much easier to play songs purchased from iTunes on devices other than iPods, which could significantly extend the number of potential customers for Apple. DRM may also put many people off buying music online and its removal could lead to faster growth in digital music sales, a situation which Apple, as the major player in the market, would be well poised to take advantage of. Finally, it would save Apple the significant costs that are currently involved in updating the protection each time some wiley geek manages to crack it.
One of the reasons why I don’t purchase music from iTunes is because of the DRM that comes with it—I believe that you should have the right to play music on any device you want (obviously in a private context such as on an MP3 player or your home stereo system) once you’ve purchased it in one format. If DRM protection was dropped then I’d be much more inclined to go online to get my music, particularly because I often only like a few songs on a CD so buying a whole album is an expensive way to acquire music.
The long awaited version 1.0 of Adium, the popular multiple protocol instant messaging client for OS X, has finally been released. The official release announcement and full changelog have all the details if you want them – there are so many changes that I can’t even begin to summarise them here.
I’ve been using Adium as my primary instant messaging client for a long time now, if you haven’t tried it yourself yet then I definitely recommend giving the 1.0 release a whirl.
Apple has finally released some adverts targetted at a UK audience, so hopefully some of us will actually be able to recognise the actors in them. I particularly like the pie chart video, but all the adverts are good at getting Apple’s message across. I’m not sure how effective they will be at converting users from PCs to Macs because a lot of people have significant amounts of money, time and effort invested in the PC platform and won’t necessarily switch to another platform just because it’s perceived as being a little bit more reliable.
One thing I have noticed is how Apple equates PCs with Windows, and therefore all the problems that they relate with the PC platform are actually issues with Windows software and not with the hardware. I know that this doesn’t really matter to most people because the vast majority of PCs run Windows in some form, but it annoys me a little bit that Apple implies that all PCs are unreliable because of the software that a lot of the machines run. They can hardly claim no knowledge of *nix given that they are always showing off how OS X is based on BSD. I suppose that if they mentioned Windows by name in the adverts then Microsoft might have their lawyers breathing down Steve Jobs’ turtleneck, although I doubt that would worry Apple too much.
You can watch all the videos at Get a Mac on Apple’s web site.
I’ve finally got around to updating the WordPress installation that powers Data Circle to version 2.1. Initially there were a few teething problems caused by insufficient permissions for the upgrade script to make the necessary database changes, but these have now been fixed and everything is back to normal. I don’t think that any of the improvements are likely to be noticed by viewers of the site as they mostly seem to be backend changes, but hopefully things like the new version of the Akismet plugin will help keep spam away from the site.
I know that I haven’t posted for some time either but I’m hoping to rectify that over the next few weeks, so look out for new material coming soon.