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news of 2004-10-06

Leander Kahney of WIRED likes VPC 7.0

You can read his short review here. Basically I can't really add anything but just sum it up for you: It won't do wonders (no, you're not going to play 3D shooters in VPC just yet) but for those who could live with VPC 6.x, VPC 7.0 is going to be a good upgrade. And a must if you need VPC and have a G5.

[ written by fryke™ on 2004-10-06 at 12:39 CET ]
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EC continues to harass MS

And I personally like it. WIRED has the story about the EC considering 'cleaning Windows of DRM'. Now here's to an interesting twist in the story. ;)

[ written by fryke™ on 2004-10-06 at 12:33 CET ]
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What is really on our iPods?

Let's assume the dust has settled and Steve Ballmer's remarks don't drive the blood into our heads anymore. If we cut down through what he said and try to squeeze something useful out of it, it would be something like this: "Many people have MP3s on their iPods that they don't have paid for." We can certainly agree that this sentence isn't altogether wrong, since we can't deny that there was quite a long time when legal music downloads weren't even possible and the old Napster was thriving. And when the original Napster was killed, other services (Gnutella, Kazaa etc.) picked up where things were left - long before iTMS came into the game, and long before other countries than the USA had access to its songs.

Let's talk open here, I'd say. Back in the days, I have downloaded a few hundred songs from Napster. I have later used some or other Gnutella client to get more. I still can't access iTMS, since it's simply not available here in Switzerland. My iTunes library has about 13 GB of music. 12 of those 13 GB of music are, however, not from some misty online source, they're ripped from CDs. Legally so, although the term 'ripped' still sounds quite bad in some ears. And I personally guess I'm not the exception out there. We could have a poll, and I'm sure someone's gonna do it one day, but my guess is that most iPod users have some illegally downloaded songs on their iPods and many CD-ripped songs to crush the other number.

I could erase the illegally downloaded songs. That'd be quite a difficult thing to do for me, though, since I have often bought the albums that I liked later on. And it's not like you could create a smart list in iTunes that would list only pirated tracks. ;)

So what's Ballmer (and also 'the music industry') going on about? Instead of bashing iPod users and customers, they should - in my humble opinion - increase their efforts to ease buying tracks online. That's what Apple does, and I'm glad they're doing it. One day, I hope, I'll see that 'buy' icon next to a song in iTunes and clicking it will actually work for me in Switzerland...

[ written by fryke™ on 2004-10-06 at 10:40 CET ]
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