Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Fact-checking Reuters re: iTunes

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There’s an article from the Reuters news service covering the iTunes ruckus that has some rather surprising errors in it, not to mention being amazingly clumsily written. And, since I can’t leave well enough alone…

Earlier this week, Apple released an update to its iTunes music software for its Macintosh computers, which allows subscribers to download songs for 99 cents each.

Minor nitpick: iTunes does a whole lot more than that.

One feature of iTunes, called Rendezvous music sharing, allows users to share downloaded songs between three Macintosh computers and also allows users to share songs copied from CDs to be shared over the Internet.

Minor nitpick: Rendevouz is a system-level networking technology that allows computers to auto-sense their network environment, configure themselves, and automatically discover available services. iTunes takes advantage of Rendevouz, but is not tied to it.

The update eliminates users’ ability to swap songs copied from CDs, but doesn’t disable the Rendezvous feature, itself.

Minor nitpick: See above, regarding Rendevouz.

Minor nitpick: Songs ripped from a private CD library were available for streaming before the update, and still are (just not over the ‘net at large). They were never officially open for swapping.

The new service has been a hit, with more than three million songs downloaded since the service was released a month ago, according to Apple.

Bad writing: The facts in this paragraph are about the iTunes Music Store. However, with its placement in the story and unclear subject (“The service…” — iTunes? The iTunes Music Store? The Rendevouz-based streaming?), it seems to say that over three million songs have been illegally downloaded over the Rendevouz streaming feature.

Subscribers to the iTunes service, who paid \$10 to join…

Major error: I haven’t got a clue what this might be referring to. Neither iTunes nor any of its features require a \$10 fee of any sort. iTunes is free, all of its features are built-in, and the only charges from the iTunes Music Store are those accrued when purchasing music.

…started receiving notices on their computers from Monday urging them to update their iTunes software. While the upgrade is not mandatory, it shows up on a daily basis, forcing users to reject it until it is downloaded.

Error: I’ve been using iTunes for years, and have purchased a few tracks from the iTunes Music Store, and yet I never got any notice from Apple urging me to do anything. What this probably refers to is the Software Update feature of Mac OS X, which is simply an automated agent that checks Apple’s servers at a regular user-specified schedule to see if there are any available software updates.

If someone had their Software Update scheduled to check in with Apple daily, then they could conceivably get a daily alert about the iTunes update — but then, they’d get a daily alert about any software update that was available and uninstalled. If you choose not to install an update, and don’t want to be notified every time that Software Update runs, you can simply select it and disable any further alerts for that particular upgrade. Nothing is forced or urged upon the customer.

Normally I don’t have much problem with the stories I see on Reuters — but then, I’m not nearly as well-versed in many of the subjects I read from them. If the rest of their news reporting is as solid as this story was, I should just stop paying attention.

Apple updates iTunes, web explodes

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Today, as I took the odd moment here and there to keep an eye on happenings in the web world, I was somewhat startled to watch Apple provoke absolutely ridiculous amounts of stürm und drang with an update to iTunes.

In brief, when iTunes 4 was released a few weeks ago, one of the new features was the ability to stream your music to other computers running iTunes. This was intended as a way for someone with multiple machines in their house to keep all their music in a centralized location, and still be able to listen to the music anywhere — even if the music was stored on dad’s machine in his office, the kids could call up the music collection on their computer in the living room, for instance.

Not too surprisingly, within hours after the update was released, people discovered that the streaming would also work across the ‘net, if the hosting computer’s outgoing bandwidth was strong enough. Not long after that tips were being traded on how to capture the music stream — and suddenly what was intended as a convenience for personal use became yet another way for people to illegally acquire music.

Today, the update to iTunes 4.01 was released. From Apple’s description (with emphasis added)…

iTunes 4.0.1 includes a number of performance and network access enhancements, and only allows music sharing between computers using iTunes 4.0.1 or later on a local network (in the same subnet).

…and the Apple-centric sites absolutely exploded with rage and indignation (and, thankfully, a few somewhat reasonable voices).

Noticeably upset:

Neutral, or posted with actual thought:

Quite honestly, I find this collective tempertantrum to be surprising, and more than a little childish. Apple is having to walk a fine line, balancing their desire to use as little DRM as possible with the music industry’s desire to actually be able to still make money. The fact that they’ve been able to come to an agreement with all five major music industry players that allows the iTunes Music Store to exist with as little DRM as there is, is impressive enough. The balancing act that they’re having to pull, with their customers ~~needs~~ demands on one side, and the music industry on the other, is one that I wouldn’t envy any company, and so far I’ve been impressed with what they’ve been able to pull off.

What we seem to be seeing, at its most base, is the battle between two very strong forms of greed: the greed of the music industry, and the greed of those users who seem to feel that it is their right to be able to listen to anything, at any time, for free.

I, for one, have never understood, or been sympathetic to those who feel that they have some right to free music. As a DJ for many years, I’ve amassed an impressive collection of music — some 1200 CDs or so — and have long lost count of the number of requests I’ve had to make copies of my music for people. Why in the world should I do such a thing?

First off, copying and distributing music is illegal! Yes, I know that the music industry is (very generally) Evil, that CDs are hideously overpriced, and that artists see very little of the money from music sales. However, no matter how small of a percentage an artist might get from any single sale, how much money will they be getting if there are no sales? A little bit of something is still something, but nothing is just that. If there is an artist that I like, I’d much rather pay the money and support them in what little way I can — they created the music, they should be able to reap what rewards they can from that creation.

Secondly, and equally as important in my eyes, I’ve spent untold hours and ungodly amounts of money on building my collection over the years. Why in God’s name would I turn around and proceed to give the fruits of that undertaking away for free? If someone hears music that I have and likes it, they have the ability to take the time and money to find the music themselves (though I’m afraid that many, if not most, are far more likely to spend the time on Kazaa or some other file-trading system than spend the money at a music store). It’s all out there somewhere, and I don’t have any secret tricks or magical conjurings that allow me to find the music I do. Time, patience, a little luck, and money is all it takes.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. The streaming feature of iTunes is a feature — not a right. It is a convenience — not a right. And, most importantly, it is for personal use, for you the consumer to listen to the music that you own. Had Apple allowed the iTunes streaming implementation to continue to exist as-is, they may very likely have faced suits and the dismantling of the iTunes Music Store (quite possibly the first realistic model for online music distribution) when the music industry decided that it didn’t want to support a service that was so obviously and prominently being used for illegal distribution, no matter what the original intent of the service was. Rather than do that, Apple added a slight restriction to the streaming service, so that while streaming still works, and will work in the home, it no longer works over the internet at large. Would you rather have had Apple pull the streaming feature entirely?

Grow up, everyone. This is truly a tempest in a teapot.

Navigation – left or right?

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I breezed through a usability study comparing left- and right-justified site navigation this morning.

I had the standard left-justified navigation for a while, and at one point had a three column layout with sidebars on both sides of the page, but in one of my redesigns I decided to go with the current right-justified navigation, and plan on sticking with it.

My basic reasoning is that this layout emphasizes the content over the navigation. As English speakers read from left to right, the content area has dominance. It also (I think) makes it a little easier to track your position on a page when reading a long post. With left-justified navigation, when you reach the end of a line on a page and move your eyes back left, you need to account for whatever space is taken up by the navigation bar. Using a right-justified navigation scheme, you just let your eyes snap all the way to the left of the page, and no searching is necessary.

Now, these are my opinions only, and I’m not schooled in usability at all, so I could be completely off base with that, so take my reasoning with a grain of salt. It’s just my thinking on an admittedly not very important matter. ;)

(via WebWord)

Getting personal

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An interesting article in the NYT today about the pros and cons of getting personal with weblogs, something I occasionally struggle with. My site tends to be somewhat dry much of the time, but while I occasionally toy with the idea, I’ve never been too sure if I want to “open up” more in such a public medium.

I’m not likely to make a dramatic shift in the tone of this weblog — I’m naturally fairly private and reserved, and not likely to go into any sort of no-holds-barred expose — but there are definitely times I consider broadening the scope of what I write about. Maybe I’ll head that direction at some point, maybe I won’t, I’m not too sure. It bears consideration, however.

Of course, since I just edited this post three times, and almost deleted it, things may stay just as they are. ;)

(via Paulo)

Almost perfect

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My current workspace here at home has been a bit cramped for a while. I’ve got two computers under my desk (one Mac and one PC), and three 17\” monitors on my desk (two for the Mac, one for the PC). It’s a nice workspace, but when you factor in two keyboards and two trackballs, it leaves very little actual deskspace left over.

This weekend, I picked up a new trackball for my Mac (a Microsoft Office Keyboard that I got free from work), my trackball, and my printer all plugged into the USB hub, switchable between both of my computers. Far more manageable, and I’ve got a lot more desk space available (of course, that means I’ll just have that many more soda cans strewn across my desk, but that’s beside the point…).

The only oddball glitch is that, for some odd reason, the Mac will occasionally forget about all the devices after I switch over to the PC and then switch back to the Mac. I’m not sure why this is, and was afraid I was going to have to go back to two sets of keyboards and trackballs. Then I discovered that as long as I leave the old Mac keyboard plugged in (sitting vertically on the floor, leaning against the Mac’s case), then when the Mac doesn’t respond to the keyboard or trackball that are on the switch, all I have to do it tap a key on the old keyboard with my toe, and suddenly everything on the switch starts responding again. It’s a little odd — and not quite a perfect solution, but hey, it works.

This babble brought to you courtesy of the fact that as I’ve been posting rather sporadically for the past week, I need some filler posts on the main page so that my site doesn’t look too tweaky. ;)

Speeding things up

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If all has gone well, I should have just sped up my site when processing new comments or trackback pings, thanks to Sean Willson’s mt rebuild type modification.

Technical details follow (Kirsten, you’ll want to look at this one…)

(via Phil)

By default, MT rebuilds all index templates whenever an entry is created or edited, or when a comment is added. This is done to keep everything as up to date as possible, and is as it should be.

However, as a site grows, and as more bells and whistles are added to it, the time it takes to rebuild all those templates keeps growing. The usual set of index templates includes the main index page, the RSS feed, the main archives index page, the CSS stylesheet, plus whatever archive pages may be set up — all this has to be rebuilt, along with the page for an individual entry, whenever anything changes on a site.

I’d already done what I could to speed up my rebuild by setting my stylesheets to only rebuild when I specifically tell them to (as they normally don’t change), but I’d also added a few more index templates to the mix (the excerpts for my main table of contents page and a secondary RSS feed). All of this was what has caused my server to run so godawfully slow whenever comments or trackback pings are received.

Sean’s modification changes the way MT’s rebuild system works, though. While by default, MT only allows you to set whether a particular template is an index template (and therefore needs to be rebuilt regularly) or not, with this modification in place, there is much finer control over which templates are rebuilt under what circumstances.

So now, my table of contents excerpts, master archive list, and RSS feeds will only rebuild when I add or edit an entry. The main index file will rebuild whenever entries are added or edited, or when new comments are received. Additionally, individual entry pages should rebuild when trackback pings are received automatically, instead of my having to rebuild them manually (which is what I’ve been doing).

Kirsten — the reason I wanted you to peek in on this one is that as this is a modification to the MT system itself, and not just my weblog, you may need to go into your templates and set the rebuild options for each one. Everything may work normally if you don’t, but I’m not entirely sure how it will work if those fields haven’t been set, and you try to add an entry. The changes should be fairly obvious (you’ll need to go into the edit screen for each template, and choose the right option from the new drop-down menu), but if you need any help, feel free to e-mail me or IM me if it’s late enough. Hopefully this doesn’t leave you grumbling at me! ;)

Two Dave Winer grumbles

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I don’t have as many issues with Dave Winer as many other people seem to, but he does occasionally come up with something that I’m tempted to comment on. Today, I gave into the temptation…

Today, Dave is looking back at announcing RSS:

“RSS is an XML-based format that represents what we in the Frontier community call a ‘weblog’….” The funny thing is that it wasn’t grandiose. At that time all weblogs were done in Frontier.

Not really. Frontier may well have been the first commercially available software built for creating and updating weblogs, but I was keeping my weblog up in 1999 (and even prior to that, I think I started using my site to keep my family updated on my life sometime in ’98), using the ‘old fashioned’ method of manually updating my website. I just didn’t know it was a weblog back then.

Unfortunately, at some point during my many site redesigns/updates, I was a fool and trashed all the old static HTML pages of my site from before I started using software to automate my site updates, but I can at least point to my first post using software to automate the process, and the post where I realized I was a ‘blogger’.

So Frontier may have been the first software for weblogs, but weblogs themselves were around pre-99. We just didn’t necessarily know that they were “weblogs”! ;)

Secondly, something I’ve whined about in the past: Dave’s RSS feed drives me up the wall.

Every other RSS feed I subscribe to links each post to its corresponding post on the source website, so when I find something interesting in my newsreader and click on it, I’m taken to the website. Dave’s feed, unfortunately, doesn’t. It seems to have one of three possibilities:

  1. The newsfeed post will link back to the post on Dave’s website. The preferred behaviour, but unfortunately rare.
  2. The newsfeed post will link to whatever the first link in Dave’s post is. For instance, if Dave is commenting on a post on someone else’s site, when I open his post in my newsreader to follow up on it, I’m taken to the link that he’s commenting on, rather than his comments. Incredibly annoying.
  3. The newsfeed post won’t link to anything at all. This seems to be the least common of the occurrences, but common enough that I run into it from time to time.

Seems to me that since Dave is such an RSS evangelist, and one of the co-creators of the format, he could at least create an RSS feed that doesn’t make his readers want to thwack him upside the head every time they try to follow up on something he says!

But maybe that’s just me.