When EMI announced that they were going to be offering DRM-free tracks on iTMS in May, I was pretty psyched to see that a major label has finally stepped forward and admitted that DRM doesn’t work. However, the month of May passed slowly, and I was somewhat paranoid that EMI would back out on the deal.

Finally, on the last day of May, iTunes has been updated to version 7.2 along with the arrival of “iTunes Plus”. DRM-less, 256kbps AAC files at last. I was excited enough to hop on right away and purchase 2 albums that has been sitting in my Amazon shopping cart for months (in their CD form, no less).

I’ve always been a very discerning audiophile, which only recently finally succumbed to the fact that keeping all of my music in Apple Lossless is really just a waste of hard drive space for a small (although still perceivable) quality gain. I have over thousands of dollars invested in pretty good audio equipments, most of which I no longer listen to on even a monthly basis anymore.

My Super Audio CD player is completely useless, as the format has died a painful and slow death. Now it is nothing more than a glorified CD changer that I never, ever bother to change. I have racks of CD’s that I don’t really want to deal with on my next move, only half of which has been ripped into MP3’s.

Fact of the matter is, there are only so many hours of entertainment…

Everything seems to be up and running as usual. I was pleasantly suprised to see that my themes & plugins are all fully functional. The only difference seems to be the inclusion of widget functionality in WP 2.2, which makes the previous “widget-enabling” addon obsolete.

It’s rare that Microsoft comes up with something truly funny, but this parody is really, actually, LOL-kinda good. Which makes you wonder, if they had this much time to make this parody… where is the ZunePhone?!

[youtube WazA77xcf0A]

A very interesting thing happened at Digg yesterday. There was public posting of a HD-DVD decryption key, which was very promptly deleted by Digg’s admin. It created a public outrage of Digg users feel like they are being censored, and prompted a reaction that resulted in even more posting of the decryption key, and more posting about the deletion and the censorship that Digg was exercising.

The whole fiasco is summarized at TechCrunch, with the users eventually winning out at the end. Obviously, there was no way that Digg can fight back against their entire user community. It’s a demonstration of how powerful the public voice can be, especially given the proper medium.

The question here, is that if a decryption key can be made into such highly publicized information, then what is the boundary for any information to remain private? Traditionally these type of information are always available, but only through backdoor channels, you always had to “know somebody that knew somebody” and digg around (no pun intended) for these ever-elusive hack. Now a HD-DVD decryption key is out in the wild, what’s a software maker’s right to protect say… their serial numbers?

If everyone posted their Windows Vista serial key, for example, what is Microsoft’s right to protect themselves against a possible outbreak of millions of serial keys being made public, and the ensuing windows activation nightmare?

Apple announced today that Leopard is going to be delayed (via TUAW) until October because of the focused effort in getting iPhone out in time.

Personally, I think the delay doesn’t really mean much. As much as I love to see a new OS from Apple, there’s nothing obviously wrong and needs to be improved in MacOS X now. Unless Leopard has some insane, awesome unknown trick up its sleeve, there aren’t any feature that I have to have now. There certainly weren’t any new features introduced by Vista that makes me say, “I wish MacOS had this…”

Getting iPhone out on-time, and without bugs is probably the most important issue to Apple’s continued success at the moment. A bad iPhone launch could set back years of good will that Apple has built up. It’s funny how much it takes to rebuild a company (dating back to Steve Job’s return and the cute multi-color iMacs), and how easy it is to destroy it and see it crumple (the entire 1990’s for Apple).

I’ve pretty much stuck with Blogger since the beginning, before Blogger became a Google property, when it was one of the few freely available blogging tool that existed. So what induced this loyal Blogger blogger to finally change over? One would think that I was dissatisfied with Blogger’s capabilities, but that’s quite the opposite. In fact, the newest version of Blogger, with its tags & widgets, has all of the features that I’ve always wanted.

For the most part, my switch to WordPress almost represents a step backwards. Hosting my own blog, running it on a local database rather than one that will potentially last forever somewhere in Google’s massive server farm. Customizing my own templates, throwing in Plugins to coax WordPress into what I want it to do. In fact, WordPress doesn’t have any official support for tagging, and still relies on a somewhat antiquated category system to deal with post organization.

So why switch to WordPress now? I wish I had a better reason to justify it, perhaps it was just my urge to be able to tinker more than I could with Blogger, perhaps it was the notion of having complete control; maybe it’s even the possibility of implementing WordPress on more sites, where the owner doesn’t feel particularly comfortable with giving everything up to Google.

Whatever it is… I’m happy with the move, until next time, that is.

Meanwhile, here are some tips to getting WordPress up and running:

• Install Sidebar Widgets:
  This addon will give you the ability

…

…That’s often the mantra of many consumer product companies. It’s not just about finding an unfulfilled need in the marketplace, but creating a new need in the market. As devious as it sounds, the reality is that if you break down “need” to its most simplistic form, our lives would only be able survival on the bare minimum of food and water. For example, television was a “created need”, and for the most part, is it now an ingrained part of our daily lives.

However, for every created need, there are a dozen of “WTF were you thinking?” I think this qualifies as one of them:

iCarta: Stereo Dock for iPod® with Bath Tissue Holder

I realize the product is a bit on the old side. I ran across a picture while browsing TUAW, and couldn’t resist posting it here. Since the product has been released for almost a year now, I’d like to see how many of these they’ve actually sold.

You know it’s only a matter of time… just another proof any sort of piracy protection ultimately, will fail.

Brute force keygen cracks open Vista

It’s certainly not an easy hack, but at the end of the day is that it *will* work. Microsoft will probably also attempt to figure which keys are hacked and which ones aren’t, and disable those which are. The problem is, if hacked keys become widespread and varied enough, it will become harder and harder to track & keep everything “clean”. If two people calls up the Windows Activation hotline, who do you trust?

This post goes beyond even my usual amount of geekiness.

“Show Us The Code” is pushing for Steve Ballmer to show the open source world exactly what part of Microsoft’s source code is being used in Linux:

Your repeated claims that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property has come to the attention of the Linux community. Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide.

Publicly pledge your support for Microsoft showing the public the code within Linux that violates their intellectual property by May 1st, 2007.

So far, the support seems to be gathering steam. Let’s hope this one doesn’t fizzle out like previous movements.

This is a really old ad from MacAddict way back when (btw, the magazine was recently renamed as well). Time is quite unkind…

The Original Apple Vs. PC Guy Ad