Benjamin Hourigan

Tom Yager makes an interesting use of conservative sentiment in an article from Monday, about OS X:

Apple has redesigned Leopard — Release 10.5 of its software platform — to meet The Open Group’s requirements for compliance with the Unix standard. ... Apple, Darwin and BSD will take computing to the next level by showing equal regard for tradition, performance and users. (emphasis added)

It’s pleasing to see “standards” glamourised in this way, by representing them as venerable and worthy of preservation. As indeed they are. With an adequate respect for traditions, and particularly traditions of interoperability, the computer users of today can expect to leave a data legacy that will continue to be accessible in the future.

On Friday I received a nice Christmas present (of sorts), the Escape Pod Collection 1.

For those who don’t know, The Escape Pod is a weekly podcast that delivers short, fun stories in the fantasy and SF genres. The podcast’s host, Steve Eley, manages to pay the authors whose work is published to the podcast, by way of support from listeners. The Escape Pod Collection 1 was my inducement to and reward for donating $20 to the podcast.

I highly recommend the podcast, which you can subscribe to with iTunes 6, or the podcatcher of your choice. If you enjoy the podcast, as you well may, please consider donating to support it, its host, its authors, and its listeners.

iTunes Australia is finally out. But tracks are $1.69 each, and albums are at least $16.99. When I lived in Melbourne, I used to buy CDs from Dragonfly Discs. There, I could buy classic CDs like David Bowie’s Low for $15. On iTunes Australia, Low is $17.99.

Now, why would I buy Low from iTunes Australia?

At Dragonfly, for A$15 I could get a CD with track listing and booklet that

• I could rip at 320kbps, in any format I want
  
• and copy or burn to CD as many times as I liked
  

on iTunes, A$17.99 would buy me an album of DRM protected files, sans physical CD and booklet, that

• only come in a very lossy 128kbps bitrate
  
• can’t be copied freely without stripping the DRM
  
• can only be burned a limited number of times
  

Why would I want to buy music from iTunes Australia, then?

I understand that this is probably the record labels’ fault, and not Apple’s. Come on, music publishers! Wake up! People won’t pay for digital downloads if they can get the same thing or better from a discount CD store, or by going to a peer-to-peer service to get a non-DRM’ed file for free.

It’s worth noting that in the United States, iTunes users pay a lower price in Australian dollars. The present iTunes pricing of US$9.99 an album comes out at A$13.32 at today’s exchange rate. At that price, I’d consider buying from iTunes Australia. But for now, it’s out of the question.

At least now I can use my Australian credit card to get an iTunes account so I won’t be constantly nagged to sign in while listening to previews on the iTunes music store.

Today, Apple released iTunes 6. This is the most gratuitous major version bump I’ve ever seen.

Sure, new iPods came out today that play video. It’s about time. And the iTunes music store also carries short films and TV shows now. But little has changed in iTunes itself. iTunes has played video for ages, and the store’s been selling music videos for some time.

And let’s not forget that iTunes got a major version bump from 4 to 5 just a week or two ago. To go to six, now, with so few changes in between, is just ridiculous.

Why don’t you ever see a homeless person in a movie or on TV holding a sign that says that? Why do their signs always say something like “will strip for food”? I suppose it’s because those fictional characters neither realise that there are many people who want things other than stripping done for them, nor understand the versatile, abstract power of money. I however, understand these things well.

Currently, my credit card balance is way higher than I would like. While I could keep accumulating debt in the hope that my soon being titled “Dr. Ben Hourigan” will bring a whole load of money my way, I am seriously contemplating finding a job right now, hopefully some kind of proofreading or editing work. Also, if I really want to be working in Japan in the next 6 months (which I do), I’d better apply soon.

In the service of this end, I have posted a new version of my resumé, redesigned in response to Annette’s insistence that the old one was ugly. Anyone who’s familiar with Apple’s new Pages application will immediately see that I used it to do the layout. In fact, I didn’t do much except type one of the templates, it was that good. Overall, I’m really impressed with the new app, which has a lot of DTP functions as well as word-processing ones. It’s just a shame there aren’t any templates for book-length documents, like theses…