Why high-def DVD is unlike the iTunes Music Store; prose for search engines; Xcode’s 10-year lead
- Paul Thurrott observes..
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. - Machine hed
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)
- Universal Python Build
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)
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Microsoft packages, and fixing the iTunes Music Store (someone else did) (11 March 2006; score: 95.2%)
- One last thing from the Expo: music store divisions (2 September 2004; score: 91.28%)
- Best and worst value on the iTunes Music Store (3 August 2004; score: 71.64%)
![[Valid RSS]](wp-includes/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}
April 14th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
Uhh, well burning an inferior quality AAC to cd isn’t really a substitute for true flexibility, is it? And Apple has already already fiddled with the agreement in thier DRM after purchase; they limited the number of times a playlist could be burnt from 10 to 7, presumably due to industry pressure.
Yes, Apple might be a more benevolent dictator than the more closely MPAA affiliated HD-DVD crowd, but they’re still using the same methods and have the same interests to protect..
April 14th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Codewarrior will have a very hard time indeed given that Motorola/Freescale sold Metrowerk’s Codewarrior Intel compilers to Symbian a while back.
April 14th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
Uhh, yes it is. If you don’t like iTunes quality of music, then don’t buy it from iTunes. That initial level of quality won’t be compromised much by whatever format you choose afterwards, so it’s really a moot point. And going from 10 to 7 burns is *nothing* like the “analog sunset” or the other controls that the industry bigs have been expecting. What interests does Apple have to protect? They don’t own the music. They don’t own the films. They are just the storefront and the conduit — not the license-holders, so the two are not even comparable. Sorry, bro.
April 14th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
A few comments.
First, CodeWarrior has officially announced that the current version (10? 11? I lost track) will be the last version for building Mac OS X. I came back to CodeWarrior after three years in ProjectBuilder/Xcode and I’d forgotten how nice CodeWarrior is. You mentioned that NeXT/Apple has had ten years to play with Xcode, but I’d point out that CodeWarrior has been around since the early ’90s and it’s compilers generally produce faster benchmark code than Xcode/GCC.
That said, all new work is being done with Xcode and 2.2 is pretty close to being as good as CodeWarrior. They’re not better, yet, but with CodeWarrior getting out of the Mac OS game, Apple will have a much easier time catching up.
Second, I always like to remind people that while you can un-DRM your music the CD, there is no way in iTunes to un-DRM your music videos. One of those little DRM gotchas that I hit recently. I bought a music video instead of the song and when I went to burn it to a CD so I could listen to the song in the car, I got a “Nope. Sorry.” message from iTunes. Audio Hijack to the rescue. But, needless to say, I won’t be buying anymore music videos from iTMS…
April 16th, 2006 at 2:27 am
Mac OS X could be installed on Intel as late as Rhapsody DR2. At that point, it was still running the old school Display PostScript window server from NeXT, but you get the idea.
As for CodeWarrior, it is a complete non-issue at this point. MetroWorks sold off all Intel related IP to Nokia early last year. Lock, stock, and barrel.
As for Xcode. It is getting better. And we are hell bent on making it even better. If there are things that piss you off or features you need, please file bugs.