5th December 2007 As of the time of writing, Amazon MP3 is only available to customers in the U.S. of A., so any enthusiasm for its provision of DRM-free digital music offerings has to be tempered by that limitation on its availability. Apple’s iTunes store offers some, but locked down tracks are its mainstay. Amazon’s restrictions aren’t the first in the digital audio world and they are unlikely to be the last too. Pandora have done it in the world of internet radio, and I seem to remember that iTunes might have done it too in their time.
There may be other reasons, but licensing and royalties might need to be negotiated country by country, slowing the rolling out of new products across the world. The iPhone faced an equivalent situation, though that involved mobile telephony providers. Commercial considerations pervade too and I suppose that a worldwide launch of the iPhone might have been too complex a feat for Apple to manage; they probably wanted to nurture a sense of anticipation among customers in any case.
It seems that things are still following the pattern that at least used to be endemic in the motion picture industry: the U.S. gets to see a film first and then everywhere else thereafter. Being able to reuse the movie film reels used in American cinemas has been the studios’ advantage from the staggered releases. Because cinema releases have been staggered, video and DVD releases were staggered too so it’s both intriguing and frustrating to see American companies using a similar launching strategy in wholly different market sectors. It’s amazing how old habits die hard…
1st August 2007 When I first started to use iTunes, it very much played well with other software applications running. Then, a few versions later, the playback began to suffer with iTunes running in any way other than on its own. A solution that I have is to fire up the Windows Task Manager, go to the Processes tab and find iTunes.exe in the list. The next thing is to right-click on this, select the Set Priority and change the setting to Above Normal. Windows will warn you about what you are doing but it usually doesn’t cause any other problem. Yes, it sounds a bit extreme but it always solves the playback problem.
So long as iTunes is merely playing music, all is well. However, when it starts ripping CD’s, it’s a wholly different matter. That is a CPU intensive operation and setting the process priority to Low is a very good idea. I recently got caught out by a default setting of ripping any music CD inserted into the PC and, at Above Normal priority, the PC got locked up. Eventually, I got things back under control and lowered the priority. Needless to say, iTunes will just list the contents of an inserted CD from now on. I have learnt my lesson; keeping the command line open to get at command line process tools would be a very good idea for the future, especially as I know where to find these on the web.
12th June 2007 
Steve Jobs recently surprised an audience at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference with the announcement that the Safari web browser is being made available for Windows. While everyone else is awaiting Apple’s forthcoming iPhone, the Safari announcement is a more important one to me; not being big on phones, I will let the iPhone excitement pass me by. Without either buying a Mac or running OS X in a virtual machine, there was no other way for me to test my web pages in Safari bar looking for a rendering site on the web. Now, that has all changed and I have downloaded the beta to have a look; it should iron out any rough edges that Mac users have been seeing.
Update: Safari seems to have got a mixed reaction from Windows users; some have tried it with Vista and cited issues. Another gripe has been its memory footprint but I have seen Firefox take up 100 MB.
6th February 2007 Windows Vista is only out a week and the incompatibilities are already rolling in. Yesterday, it was iTunes that hit the headlines with Apple making an announcement on its website. More importantly for the likes of me because it affects my work, SAS has announced that Vista compatibility will not be assured until it launches SAS 9.2. This is not exactly a surprise because they have been advising against using Internet Explorer 7 with their products as they have not carried out their validation. Given that this company is cautious about operating system support anyway, it may be that SAS 9.1.3 runs on Vista but they have not validated it to the standards that a large enterprise user would expect. Now, the BBC’s Robert Peston writes an open letter to Bill Gates in his blog following a lost weekend with a laptop running Vista. His problems were hardware related.
There is one surprising thing about all of this: test versions of Vista have been out since last summer and OEM since November or thereabouts. Why have other software and hardware vendors not being looking ahead for this sort of thing? SAS’s advice regarding IE7 is in the same vein and even more surprising. I realise that there is only so much that can be done with a non-final version or, for that matter, in two months but some forward thinking surely could have been employed. I know that full legacy compatibility is a big job but it does look as if someone sat on their laurels. Or else, they are not allowing the release of Vista to upset their development and launch schedules and, given that Microsoft’s offering is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, they might well have a point. I think I’ll sit on the fence for a while longer…
