Charles on… anything that comes along

WWW.HDBOYCOTT.COM: “hdboycott.com:

This site was created to provide information about some unpleasant ‘features’ of new HD technologies. There are two competing formats of high definition DVDs working their way towards availability: HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Unfortunately both systems will utilize the AACS DRM system, which is a giant step backwards for fair use and continues Hollywood’s ongoing battle against their paying customers.

Don’t buy any new HD gear without getting the facts … or you might regret it later.

One could apply the same logic to, say, music purchased from the iTunes Music Store, I suppose.”
Paul Thurrott has been generally (from my perspective) on a roll where he’s not said anything unthinking (OK, I haven’t bothered to read any of his reviews), but on this he’s missed the point. With stuff bought from the iTunes Store you can burn it to CD right away, and have it in un-DRMed AIFF forever, so even if Apple retrospectively alters the terms on that DRM’d stuff, you can have it to use as you like. But you’re not going to get the chance with high-def DVDs to burn them to any un-DRM’d format.
In fact, as George Cole points out in this week’s Guardian (in “Has Hollywood gone overboard on piracy?“), as presently formulated the AACS DRM can retrospectively alter the settings on your very-expensive high-def DVD player so that it won’t play discs you’ve bought. That’s worth boycotting, I’d say.

After slogging through that paragraph, one begins to understand Jarvis’s fondness for machine readers. He writes prose that only a search engine could love

Nick Carr with *another* biting post. It did make me laugh, I must admit. Though Jarvis certainly has a point when it comes to the confused, middle-at-the-top, who-knows-what-the-headline’s-about form of so much American newspaper “English”. It’s been a while since the economy of “Dead. That’s what the man was when they found him.” (Seen at Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog)

Xcode makes building universal binaries easy because the entire high level Mac OS X development model and all of the predecessor technology has been focused on cross-compilation for well over a decade.

Bill Bumgarner lets slip what we did know - that Apple (well, NeXt -> Apple) worked on getting OSX (oh, NeXtStEp) to run on both Intel and PPC for a decade. And didn’t stop, even though people thought they had. So they’ve had a decade to produce a development tool that compiles well on both platforms. Against that, Codewarrior is going to have a very hard time. (Seen at bbum’s weblog-o-mat)