The Archives
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10.28.08Travel light - Eee PC 1000H HackBookI've been wanting a lightweight travel machine for ages. I've been looking longingly at the MacBook Air as several folks I know own one, but the price has always been too high for me to easily justify to myself. And with the recent price increase in Australia to AU$2899 base, I just couldn't do it. I also know several people with Asus Eee PCs. They swear by them. Most of them are running one form of Linux or another. I could cope with that, but am so comfortable in OS X that I dislike using anything else. Not that the OS ...
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05.03.07Green my Apple reduxSix months ago, I posted about the campaign from Greenpeace to put pressure on Apple to adopt more eco-friendly practices in their manufacturing. Today, it looks like that campaign has taken full effect, with Apple's public announcement that they are adopting processes to significantly reduce their environmental footprint across their manufacturing. The announcement comes straight from the top - Steve Jobs himself. While the announcement notes that Apple was already well ahead of the game in many respects, there were others in which it lagged: Apple has been criticized by some environmental organizations for not being a leader in removing ...
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04.11.07Apple TV - not feeling the loveI really want to like the Apple TV. I think it's a great idea and has a huge amount of potential. However, it's deep ties to iTunes and the iTunes libraries of device owners essentially makes it a low-value (so low as to be effectively not worth the AU$449 it costs) device for us Australians. For US owners, for whom a wealth of television and movies are available through the iTunes Store, there's obvious and demonstrable value. If I was in the US, I could happily and relatively cheaply download all my favorite shows plus the occasional film ...
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04.03.07RIP DRMRegular readers here will already be aware of my low opinion of DRM, not because I think the labels/distributors/evil overlords are on to a good thing but because: DRM restricts user rights post-purchase - the "I should be able to play this where and when I want" argument DRM hurts content creators - content creators invariably sign over a significant portion of their rights when agreeing to distribution through major distributors, money goes to the distributors rather than the creators DRM is invariably broken -some smarty always figures out a way to "route around the damage" and break DRM It's why I actively support ...
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02.08.07Steve Jobs on DRMSteve Jobs has written an open letter to the music industry, positing that the best thing for the labels, consumers and music player manufacturers is to abolish DRM altogether:The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license ...
