By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: February 6, 2007
Tuesday, 6 February 2007
- Imagining a World Without DRM ★
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Dan Moren:
Steve Jobs had the right idea when he announced the iTunes Store in 2003: Apple was not there to eradicate piracy, but to compete with it. Jobs realized the fundamental truth that some people, enamored of what they could get for free, would never come around to buying music legitimately. But he also realized that this was a minority of the people who consume music and media, and that most people, given a reliable, easy-to-use, and—most of all—legal way to buy music would do the right thing.
- Three Ways The Beatles May Change iPods and Apple ★
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Interesting speculation from iLounge’s Jeremy Horwitz that this week’s deal with The Beatles allows Apple to start bundling music with iPods. Their previous legal arrangement with The Beatles prevented that (which is why the U2 iPods haven’t shipped with U2’s music on them), but now that they’ve taken undisputed ownership of the “Apple” trademark, they’re free to sell music on physical media.
- Apple Announced Dates for WWDC 2007 ★
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June 11-15, 2007, at the Moscone.
- Steve Jobs Calls on Music Labels to Let Apple Sell DRM-Free Music ★
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Wow.
Steve Jobs has published a 2,000-word essay on Apple.com titled “Thoughts on Music”. A more apt title would have been “Thoughts on DRM”. The nut of it:
The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.
- Russian School Principal Faces Jail Over Bootleg Copies of Windows ★
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Russian school principal buys computers, which, apparently unbeknownst to him, were loaded with bootleg copies of Windows. He now faces jail time in Siberia. Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks it’s bullshit; Mikhail Gorbachev went so far as to write an open letter to Bill Gates asking him to intervene. Microsoft’s response, more or less? That the principal should enjoy his time in Siberia.
Fake Steve writes:
And you guys at Microsoft still wonder why the entire world hates you? Man oh man. You’ve got more money than God and yet you’re gonna toss some poor broke-ass Russian in prison? Evil.
- Jackass of the Week, October 2000 Edition: Michael S. Malone ★
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Via Fake Steve’s “favorite stories of all time” file comes this gem from Michael S. Malone, written for Forbes in October 2000, titled “Apple R.I.P.”:
Steve Jobs can’t run companies, but he has proven that he is a genius at motivating teams of people to produce extraordinary products. In fact, he may be the greatest project team leader in the history of high tech. That is no small achievement. But it does not translate to being the CEO of a giant corporation.
- Why You Should Be Using Disambiguated URLs ★
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Simon Willison:
There’s one aspect of URL design that is often ignored. Good URLs should be unambiguous. By that, I mean that any logical piece of content should have one and only one definitive URL, with any alternatives acting as a permanent redirect.
Good advice. I’ve been redirecting www.daringfireball.net to daringfireball.net since at least 2003.
- The window.onload Problem (Still) ★
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Detailed article by Peter Michaux on the various techniques for web developers to load JavaScript event handlers before every asset on the page has finished downloading. (Via Simon Willison.)
- Running the DRM Gauntlet ★
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Interesting article from a Songbird developer on the travails of debugging DRM playback APIs on Mac OS X and Windows.
- Freeverse: Think 1.0 ★
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Free new utility from Freeverse, uses a dark translucent background to help you focus on just one application at a time. Yet another potential alternative to apps written specifically for full screen use. I’m not convinced Think is any better than the Hide Others command, but it’s an interesting take on the idea. (Thanks to Daniel Bogan.)
- New ‘Get a Mac’ Ad Mocks Vista’s User Account Controls ★
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I bet Bill Gates is going to love this one.
- ReadyBoost ★
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Michael Tsai:
Vista uses the flash memory as a cache for parts of the virtual memory swap file, and this is apparently a big win for small page-ins. It routes bulk page-ins to the hard disk, even if the pages are on the flash, because with large transfers the disk will be faster. Flash drives wear out after a comparatively small number of writes, so apparently there’s also some kind of lazy writeback from the hard disk to the flash, reducing the number of writes so that the flash’s life will be extended to 10 years. All in all, I think this is pretty clever.
I do too. Makes me think that they ought to start including 1 or 2 GB of flash as a standard component for most PCs.
- Michael Tsai: MacBook Pro Woes ★
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Michael Tsai’s MacBook Pro had a bad hard drive; because he uses SuperDuper to maintain multiple complete clones of his whole drive, he doesn’t think he lost any data at all.
- Visual Comparison of the Complexity of Linux vs. Windows ★
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Fascinating — and in a weird way, beautiful — visual comparison graphing the system calls involved in serving a single HTML page and image using Apache on Linux versus IIS on Windows Server. (Thanks to DF reader Rob Dodson.)