Sandy McMurray is a long-time technology journalist whose work has appeared in Time, the Globe & Mail, the Toronto Sun, Report on Business, Profit, and other sources. Between 1995 - 2002, Sandy wrote a weekly column about technology for the Toronto Sun, and served as Technology Editor for five Sun Media newspapers. He has been publishing on the Web since 1996. Contact:readme@mac.com
In my other life as a tech writer, I occasionally write video game reviews. The pre-Christmas flood of product began to arrive a few weeks ago, and I've been playing console games -- Xbox, PS2 and GameCube -- ever since.
Although we have an iMac and an iBook in the house, we have very few recent Mac games. Like many people with game consoles, I rarely think of my computer as a game machine (except when I'm playing Lux or Pax Galaxia or iPoker).
We have family coming for the holidays, and I need some ideas. Can you recommend some great games? (We have a pretty good collection of games for OS 9, but I'm trying to run a Classic-free Mac household these days.)
Categories of interest:
1. Simple arcade-type online games (e.g. GameHouse titles).
2. Inexpensive (or free) games for children under 12.
3. Puzzle games for adults (especially for women).
Post suggestions in the comments section or send e-mail to readme@mac.com
I'd also like to hear from companies that make or sell games for Mac OS X. (Yes, I would be delighted to play and review your games, thanks! Contact me for shipping information.)
idleTunes has a host of useful features:
- find and insert album artwork into tracks
- copy iTunes playlists to any MP3 player
- export iTunes playlists as M3U, PLS, or B4S
- remove "dead" tracks from your library
- create playlists for all of the albums in your library
- create playlists for all of the artists in your library
- delete user playlists
By far the coolest feature of idleTunes is the way that it makes iTunes compatible with non-iPod portable music players, including intelligently renaming files when copying a playlist onto a screenless flash player to ensure the play order stays intact. Brilliant! And did I mention it’s free?
Finally, no post about how to fix iTunes would be complete without some directions on how to clean up your library and get consistent ID3 tags. For that, I'll direct you to Connected Internet, who has a great primer on how to use MusicBrainz Tagger to rationalize your music collection. It takes some time, but MusicBrainz makes it as quick and painless as it can be, and the results are definitely worth it.
Tony Smith at the Register suggests that Microsoft is pushing for a universal dock standard to help competitors take on the iPod.
Tony's reasoning: if rival MP3 players can use the iPod dock it loses a competitive advantage. If Apple opposes an emerging industry standard, that's bad for Apple and good for its competitors. Either way, creating an industry standard is good for those who create it.
In other words, if you can't beat 'em, make them join you.
Tech buzz of the day goes to Microsoft, not just for the launch of the Xbox 360, but for Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) -- a proposal to extend RSS to make it easier to share data more easily. Call it bidirectional RSS.
Those who have seen Microsoft embrace, extend and extinguish technologies before will probably be more than a little suspicious, but on the face of it, SSE looks like a good idea.
Apple says it will prepay $1.25 billion USD over three months to secure a reliable supply of flash memory from five suppliers: Hynix, Intel, Micron, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba.
“We want to be able to produce as many of our wildly popular iPods as the market demands,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.
This is a neat move. This not only guarantees Apple access to the flash memory needed for future iPods, but also provides a potential headache for competitors that need to buy flash memory in quantity for their own MP3 players. (Has any company every prepaid this much for electronic components?)
Meanwhile, Intel and Micron announced the formation of a new company to manufacture flash memory, with an initial investment of $1.2 billion each.
This time, the trigger was this post by Joel Spolsky, who notes that prices send a signal to potential buyers. The very act of establishing "premium" songs (or "discount" songs) communicates the assumed value of the music.
People have come to believe that “you get what you pay for.” If you lowered the price of a movie, people would immediately infer from the low price that it's a crappy movie and they wouldn't go see it. If you had different prices for movies, the $4 movies would have a lot less customers than they get anyway. The entertainment industry has to maintain a straight face and tell you that Gigli or Battlefield Earth are every bit as valuable as Wedding Crashers or Star Wars or nobody will go see them.
Now, the reason the music recording industry wants different prices has nothing to do with making a premium on the best songs. What they really want is a system they can manipulate to send signals about what songs are worth, and thus what songs you should buy. I assure you that when really bad songs come out, as long as they're new and the recording industry wants to promote those songs, they'll charge the full $2.49 or whatever it is to send a fake signal that the songs are better than they really are. It's the same reason we've had to put up with crappy radio for the last few decades: the music industry promotes what they want to promote, whether it's good or bad, and the main reason they want to promote something is because that's a bargaining chip they can use in their negotiations with artists.
Imogen Heap's new CD, "Speak for Yourself," on RCA Victor (a BMG subsidiary), has an extra partition for "enhanced" content. Along with Windows files, there is a Mac file present called "Start.app."
Unlike the Windows version, the Mac malware is not hidden, and does not install itself automatically. You have to do it yourself.
When run, a EULA is first displayed (which does inform the user that software is going to be installed without saying exactly what that software will do).
The user then is prompted by the program for a user name and password. After that information is provided, the program seemingly quits. However, it actually installs two kernel extensions, PhoenixNub1.kext and PhoenixNub12.kext, in the OS X system files.
So. To infect your Mac, you must:
1. Trust Sony.
2. Be curious enough to install mystery software.
3. Locate the Mac software on the audio CD.
4. Manually start the installation process.
5. Override security with a user name/password.
Don't be so smug. This could happen. (Well, before this week, it could have happened. After this week, even people who lack common sense won't make it past #1.)
Loeb says the offending files appear to be part of a DRM solution sold by SunnComm.
Today EMI Group boss Alain Levy said at press conference today that he believed Jobs would introduce multiple price points for iTunes music within the next year.
The Forbes story doesn't add much to what we already know. It notes that executives from the big labels have been "pushing Jobs publicly and privately to move to a tiered pricing system." This public comment could simply be more of the same.
Has the success of the iPod given Apple too much control of the music business? I'm not sure how many consumers feel that way, but it certainly seems to be a problem for the recording industry.
Who will rescue the record labels? This article from Business 2.0 says we should keep an eye on Navio, a company "that wants to help shift the balance of power back to the media companies."
Imagine if you went to a music site to buy a single download for 99 cents, but instead you were offered the option to purchase the perpetual right to that song. With this right, you could download the song to your PC, your iPod, or your cell phone in whatever format was appropriate. And if you got a new computer, or if the digital-rights-management software protecting the file changed one day, you wouldn’t need to buy the song again. Your rights to the song would be stored online. Pay once, and it would be yours forever. If you lost it, you’d just download it again. Or you could share the song with a friend, or even resell it, depending on what rights you bought.
I would be delighted to get more rights with my purchase, but not if I have to buy a "bundle" with unwanted stuff (e.g. ringtones) to get it.
I'm skeptical of the article's claim that Navio-protected content will soon work with the iPod. Anything you can reverse-engineer, Apple can "fix" later with an iTunes or iPod update.
Finally, the idea that power should shift back to the labels strikes me as bizarre. Can we shift a bit more power to the artists and their audience please?
Apple Power Mac towers are relatively easy to upgrade. Just remove the side panel and you have easy access to most of the components inside.
iBooks and PowerBooks are entirely different animals. Once you take them apart, they're never quite the same. If you want to add or change anything other than RAM, you need to know what you're doing.
That's what makes this illustrated guide to iBook surgery so impressive. If you've always wanted to see the inside of an 800 MHz iBook G4, click here.
Sunday night's special live episode of The West Wing on NBC was produced twice -- once for the east coast and again for the west coast. Each version was slightly different. I watched both versions -- I wanted to see how much of the episode was scripted, and if any changes would be made to the second broadcast after the east coast version went to air.
I wasn't the only one. A surprising number of the fans on Television Without Pity admitted to watching both east and west coast versions of the live debate.
That got me thinking about iTunes and video sales and The Long Tail of television.
Seb Janacek asks: will Apple revive an old idea and license Mac OS X to other PC makers?
In a word, no.
Speaking at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller insisted OS X would run on Apple hardware only. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
I think this is more likely. Why give up a strategic advantage to help your competitors if you can grab their market share instead?
Here's some new ammunition for those who think Apple's move to Intel processors is about building computers that can run both Mac and Windows applications.
Apple's U.S. patent application 0050246554 ("System and method for creating tamper-resistant code") describes scenarios in which the user would choose a "first operating system" and a "second operating system" from a set that includes Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux.
There's also mention of a virtual machine, and the option to choose between "Macintosh computer" and "Windows PC."
Check out BusinessWeek's new Byte of the Apple weblog, co-hosted by Peter Burrows, Arik Hesseldahl and Cliff Edwards.
Arik kicks things off with some thoughts about Intel Macs. He says he would be interested in buying a computer that can boot into both OS X and Windows.
The Windows Live demo page is designed to work with the Windows version of Internet Explorer. The site is smart enough to detect the Windows version of Firefox, and it promises that Windows Live will support Firefox.
Where does this leave Mac users? We can't use Internet Explorer. Although there is a version of IE for OS X, it's no longer supported by Microsoft. (It was abandoned after Apple introduced Safari.)
The launch version of the Windows Live page does not load properly in Safari. It appears to be correct in the Mac version of Firefox, but I don't have a Windows box handy to test and see what's actually supposed to appear. The code of the page explicitly tests for Internet Explorer, so I doubt any other browser is seeing what the page makers intended.
Therefore, Windows Live (and Microsoft Office Live) may be designed to keep people using Microsoft's browser rather than its competitors. Obviously, that's not their primary purpose (and Microsoft will probably provide support for some browsers other than IE, if only to comply with its U.S. anti-trust settlement).
The problem for Apple will be the compatibility (or lack thereof) between Safari and these new Microsoft services. If Windows Live or Microsoft Office Live are useful and functional for Mac users, they will need a browser that works. If Safari won't cut it, they may switch to something else. If Apple's Internet strategy is to drive its customers to Safari rather than allowing them to use a product provided by a competitor, any Web services that require a different browser are bad for business.
The coverage I've read has focused on Microsoft's competition with Google and Yahoo, but this is much more than a grab for online advertising revenue.
Way back in 1995, MSN and Internet Explorer represented two competing strategies for Microsoft. The MSN plan was a closed online service, a la AOL and CompuServe (the dominant players at the time). The other plan was to harness the wild Web using a browser: Internet Explorer.
Ten years on, neither strategy has achieved what Microsoft wanted: monthly revenue, millions of subscribers, and a database of credit card numbers. Surprisingly, the winning strategy came from an unexpected place: the Xbox.
While everyone was watching Windows and Office, Microsoft attracted two million subscribers to Xbox Live. That's not just two million gamers. It's two million user IDs, two million credit card numbers, and two million instant messenger users with buddy lists. It's two million consumers for product demos, promotions, and advertising.
The Windows Live strategy looks like the Xbox 360 strategy for Xbox Live: there will be a free level of service and a premium level of service. At the basic level, you get a user ID and basic services; at the premium level, you get more, and Microsoft gets you.
Go to ideas.live.com to see where this is headed in 2006. The instant message demo is more impressive than the personal page aspect of the site, but it's interesting to see RSS feeds built into the custom page (a la Google's custom page service).
It seems like a new, smaller 
Apple 
Sunday night's special live episode of 
Here's some new ammunition for those who think 
