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Linked List: September 18, 2006

Monday, 18 September 2006

Most New iPods Now in Stock at Amazon 

Remember: if you buy anything that costs $199 or more through Daring Fireball’s Amazon affiliates link, send me an email telling me what you bought and I’ll give you a one-year DF membership.

YouTube Signs Deal With Warner Music 

BBC News:

Video-sharing site YouTube has signed a deal with media giant Warner Music to allow its material to be used legally.

It means interviews and videos by Warner’s artists can be used in return for a slice of advertising revenue.

The agreement also covers the use of material in homemade videos, which form a large part of YouTube’s content.

A few more deals like this and YouTube just might make it. (Via Jesper via AIM.)

Dreamweaver to Replace GoLive in Adobe Creative Suite 

But they’re apparently still going to develop GoLive as a separate product.

Pogue on Reports of Widespread Bugs in iTunes 7 

Sounds like the bugs are mostly in the Windows version.

Can HP’s Board of Directors Fire Dunn? 

According to Delaware law, no — they can remove her as chair, but can’t remove her as a director. Only the shareholders or a court can. (Thanks to Steve Setzer for the link.)

Fission 1.0 

Rogue Amoeba has shipped Fission 1.0:

Fission is a streamlined audio editor designed to get you editing in minutes, not hours. It works with MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless and AIFF audio, enabling you to instantly trim and split files with no quality loss!

Fission costs $32, but just $18 for registered users of Audio Hijack Pro. I smell a hit.

Authenticated and Private Feeds 

Niall Kennedy on the state of private RSS and Atom feeds. The fact that Google Reader doesn’t support HTTP authentication is an enormous irritation for me, with regard to my members-only feeds.

Jackass of the Week: Andrew Orlowski The iPod’s Achilles Heel? It’s er… Reader’s Digest | The Register 

Andrew Orlowski, at the beginning of a piece for The Register in which he claims the Zune might help Microsoft push more people to subscription-based services:

iTunes dominates the legal download market in the same way the iPod dominates the MP3 player business. It’s hard to remember now that for the first year of its life the iPod was a flop. But once Apple introduced iTunes for Windows, the mass market perception of the device changed from one of expensive luxury to convenience item.

In what way was the iPod ever a flop? The iPod started as a Mac-only peripheral. It sold about as well as a $400 Mac-only music player could have possibly sold. Sure, those first-year sales numbers were low compared to the numbers they’ve achieved since then, and the explosive growth only came after they ported iTunes to Windows — but that doesn’t mean Apple wasn’t utterly delighted by the iPod’s first year.

Further: In this piece, Orlowski claims “iTunes doesn’t make money for anyone except Apple”, implying somehow that the record labels aren’t getting a chunk of each sale. If that were the case — if the record companies weren’t making money on iTunes Store sales, why would they continue to allow their catalogs to be sold through iTunes. It’s quite possible that Apple doesn’t turn much of a profit directly from the iTunes Store, but I see no evidence that the record labels don’t.

Now You See the Chapters Menu, Now You Don’t 

It’s so strange — and, yes, un-Mac-like — for a menu to just come and go like this depending on your current context that I had assumed for the first few days after iTunes 7 was released that the chapter menu had been completely removed, or, more likely, that it had been omitted by mistake. Unlike a lot of the other criticism regarding iTunes 7’s UI changes, this one is not about cosmetics.

JPG 2.0 

Derek Powazek on the new JPG magazine:

Everything is new. You can now create a membership and upload your photos. Members can directly create the magazine by submitting their work, and voting for other members’ submissions. And then there’s the magazine itself: bigger, fatter, less expensive, more often, and, soon, subscribeable.

Two-Day Sale on SuperDuper 

Get 10 percent off for the next two days. I use and highly recommend SuperDuper.

Optimal Width for 1024px Resolution? 

Cameron Moll:

But perhaps just as important as when it will happen is how: What’s the proper width for a layout optimized for 1024?

Spoiler: 960px.

How a Malformed Installer Package Can Crack Mac OS X 

Adam Knight:

By creating a malicious package and setting the authorization level to AdminAuthorization in the package, an attacker can modify root-owned files, execute commands as root, or install setuid-root programs without alerting the user that such actions are taking place. The problem is compounded when you consider that over 90% of Mac OS X users run as the administrator user because it’s what the default user created by the system is.

Knight’s recommendation is not to use an admin account as your main user account; if you do (and I’ll admit I do), my advice is to be very wary of installer packages. Worth noting also that Bill Bumgarner doesn’t run his main user account with admin privileges, either.

Xtorrent Public Beta 1 

Public beta of David Watanabe’s upcoming BitTorrent client. Love that Jasper Hauser icon. Update after giving it a tire-kicking:* Looks beautiful, but crashy as hell. I’ll wait for it to get out of beta.

HP Spying More Elaborate Than Reported 

Damon Darlin, reporting for The New York Times:

Those briefed on the company’s review of the operation say detectives tried to plant software on at least one journalist’s computer that would enable messages to be traced, and also followed directors and possibly a journalist in an attempt to identify a leaker on the board.

Attempting to plant spyware on someone’s computer is a criminal act, is it not? Patricia Dunn, HP’s chairwoman who initiated the spying, has already been demoted from the chair. But why does she remain on HP’s board at all? Do the other board members — whom she commissioned spying against — support her?