When Microsoft moved quickly to protect their their DRM being cracked by the latest FairUse4WM, it was inevitable that Apple should do the same. Sure enough, newly-hatched QTFairUse6 strips the DRM from iTunes music and allows it to be saved as an unprotected file. There is an interesting discussion between its author and users here

The ingenious crack intercepts the music after the DRM has been removed by iTunes before playing the track and while it is still in RAM. It is then dumped it to a file smaller than the original because all the DRM and album cover junk have been stripped out. So far, the process is still only for nerds because it needs Python, the free object-oriented programming language used by heavy-weights such as Google, NASA and Industrial Light and Magic. However, unless Apple release another version of iTunes quickly it is only a matter of time before a more user-friendly version of QTFairUse arrives.

This whole protection business has got out of hand. Some parts of Europe such as France and Scandinavia are questioning the concept of protected music, asking whether it is an infringement of civil liberties and anti-competitive. Then a report is published whose findings suggest that p2p file sharing has little effect on the decline in music purchases and in any case, digital music sales will save the music industry from further decline. There is also a huge rise in free music both as the weekly free iTunes track as well as sites such as Freeplaymusic that are making pirating unnecessary apart from the very latest chart toppers which arguably are no better and far more expensive.

From a personal viewpoint, the reason music sales have sunk is just as likely to be because the quality of new music on sale has declined, just as it did in the pre-punk era of Glam Rock. Then every David Bowie, Adam and the Ants and T Rex was offset by a Gary Glitter, Bay City Rollers and Wizzard. Needlesstosay, their influence on the proto-punk era that followed allowed many of the bands to break away from the hegemony of big labels, to form independents and break the ground for the rise of the unsigned artists we have today, who hand-craft every part of their creations using everyday computers and the same software used in recording studios. Then market their tracks themselves. The story of Arctic Monkey being a classic example of success. Their fans downloaded the tracks the band made available on the web. When the commercially produced tracks became available, the same fans bought them as well. Even now, many of the tracks are still available as free downloads.

Whilst DRM may be something affecting us all or at least every iPod user, for those of us not using Windows, we stand back and look on in amazement as our colleagues reel off a long list of protection they have to run by default to prevent key-loggers, virus infections, trojans and all the nasties out in the untamed corners of the Internet. Apart from the prudent use of a virus checker to stop Word macro infections being forwarded to others, nothing else is necessary… yet. And long may it remain so.

Opposite our office is an old cemetery that has been deemed to be a nature sanctuary and a site of Special Scientific Interest. Behind its ancient cobbled walls lie the graves of men killed in WW1, it is these war graves which protect the special nature of the ground. Now, only foxes, squirrels and birds populate the dense brambles and undergrowth.
The corruption of the cemetery’s ancient occupants is nothing compared with the putrescence Microsoft have sunk to in buying an SSI for their Office OpenXML standard. In this case the initials standing for the Swedish Standards Institute.
46 countries excluded
Until recently the members of the technical committee discussing Microsoft’s application had been composed of three government representatives, someone from Sun, another from IBM, a couple of general IT business reps and a pair of Microsoft Certified partners. It seemed that things were not going Microsoft’s way and rightly so, OOXML has already been rejected in other countries as a broken and unnecessary format. Over 300 technical submissions show that OOXML does such things as forbid dates before 1900 in calculations, that 10% of the proposed standard do not validate as XML and it does not support UTF-8 Internet addresses meaning 46 countries will not be able to write URLs in their own language (more here).
Pay to win
However, not to be put off by dumping such a pile of manure on the world, Microsoft sent e-mails and phoned their Gold Partners, offering financial rewards in the shape of marketing contributions and extra support if they attended the meeting on OOXML and voted for it. This was possible because by paying a hefty fee, the Gold Partners were entitled to attend and vote on whether it was accepted or not. Twenty three of them paid up and duly voted “yes”. So incensed were some of the members of the original committee that they actually left the meeting in protest.
The baddies
The worst thing is that this is not the first time it has occurred. Recent shenanigans in Germany saw Google being excluded from voting at DIN. Similar happenings have taken place around the world such as in Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Columbia, Kenya, Finland, Romania and Portugal. Gold Partners often pack the meetings, Google and others such as Deutsche Telekom, IBM and Sun are prevented from voting and a flawed format gets the nod. In Switzerland the chairman even made it impossible for the committee to not vote for OOXML, even though the committee actually did vote against it (here).
The Goodies
Luckily not all the votes have gone Microsoft’s way, notably in South Africa, Italy, China, India, Czech Republic and Spain. The real problem is that when a country’s standardisation committee decides whether to accept OOXML, even if they reject it, their vote will count as an abstention unless over 75% of the ballot is for rejection. This will be at the final tally when all the world’s standardisation bodies have expressed their opinions.
As Mac users, we have it in the bag already. Apple have kept very quiet about OOXML and include compatibility in their new iWork 08. This is in advance of Microsoft’s own Mac Business Unit who have already seen the free NeoOffice include it but are struggling to bring converters to their own Mac Office suit of applications sometime after they release Mac Office 2008.
What a mess!
Well well well
It looks as though the Swedish Standards Institute have decided to reject the ballot result because Microsoft admitted to stacking the meeting. Instead Sweden will abstain. Apparently Microsoft lay all the blame on IBM. It’s their fault that OOXML is so buggy that it will only get accepted as a standard if enough back-handers are slipped into well greased palms.

Global warming expert and some-time actress Sienna Miller was on Breakfast TV this morning, telling how her agency has become carbon-neutral.

According to Sienna, we can off-set global warming by working out our energy consumption, then pay for projects in Africa to prevent…errr…help them from making the same mistakes as the developed world. Presumably by stopping African villagers from using those highly polluting fuels such as elephant dung and wood. Or perhaps by showing them they don’t need vehicles to travel to the nearest health clinic. After all, it’s probably only three day’s walk for many of them.

Dangerous mortgages
Our London and Country mortgage broker told us something similar. He said our new mortgage is carbon-neutral because L&C will plant trees as off-set. We had never realised mortgages were so dangerous. Exactly which noxious pollutant they emit or how much of the ozone layer’s destruction is down to mortgages has yet to be explained but it must be measurable for L&C to know how many saplings they will need.

Richard, our L&C man and Sienna both had something else in common. Sienna had flown back from Africa where she and the camera crew, producer, director, runner, sound engineer, best boy, key grip and Uncle Tom Cobley have made a film about global warming. Richard has just flown back from Biarritz. Both probably used solar-powered aeroplanes.

Our big push
We have decided to make our computers carbon-neutral. First, we will cut down the electricity they use by putting really strong paper clips over the cables meaning less power gets through. Next, we will go to our elderly parents to stop them using their computer so much. It was four hours yesterday, according to ma-in-law. Instead of all that dangerous on-line shopping and e-mailing they do, we will teach them to use a long length of string with a tin can each end. Alternatively, we could throw away the Microsoft Vista laptop they struggle to understand and give them a Mac instead, they’d be up and running in moments.

And one more thing
Finally, we have decided to ignore any “paperless” application forms. These generate more hard copy than traditional methods and usually on stock proudly proclaiming it is recycled and good for the environment.

Bollox! Nearly all paper has a recycled rags content, most recycled paper uses highly toxic bleaches and longer, less energy-efficient processes than the virgin paper made from the trees my L&C saplings are going to become.

Blimey! We’ve saved the planet.

ElGato have released the next version of software for their amazing Turbo.264 video compressor. The new version, 1.1 has brought new custom settings options for video and audio conversions and user-defined settings can be saved for future projects.

To access the new settings, choose ‘Edit’ from the ‘Format’ drop down menu.

—————-
There should be an image here
but ITPro’s web programmers
can’t get it to work properly
—————-

A new settings sheet will appear, with all set to the default ‘Automatic’.

—————-
There should be an image here
but ITPro’s web programmers
can’t get it to work properly
—————-

The built-in settings can be edited and saved under a new name, the software automatically makes a new setting as soon as any of the defaults are adjusted, this can be renamed to something more appropriate.

—————-
There should be an image here
but ITPro’s web programmers
can’t get it to work properly
—————-

Turbo.264’s customised setting will only let you to set audio and video quality as good as, or less than the original video. Automatic settings are generally at the maximum the output device can show apart from the ‘iPod Standard’ default which is optimised for file size. If you are making a video for a device for which Turbo.264 has no default, it is possible to create exported movies that are not compatible with the device. Usually manufacturers will give the video specifications their product is capable of.

The new features are available only from the Turbo.264 software and not via other applications which use QuickTime codecs, including ElGato’s own EyeTV, possibly the source of many of the videos that need converting. The Turbo.264 compressor is still used instead of the host Mac’s own processor but the customisation options are not available. Very frustrating!

What is time? Nothing more than an illusion according to Douglas Adams and the rant from Kant. Breakfast time is after we wake up but in some parts of the world people have to live on the equivilent of a breakfast a week. Does time move slower for them? In the developed world, time can be measured in billions of years, billionths of a second or the time it takes to get into a spreadsheet.

Why do Excel files take so long to open? A recent spreadsheet file we received took nearly 15 minutes from clicking to displaying. Inside, a few worksheets, some simple graphs and that was it. Opening the same file in NeoOffice, the free open-source Office alternative, took a few minutes, still a long time, though showing how bad Microsoft products can be.

Apple of Newton’s eye
The computations in a huge, multi-layered Photoshop file are infinitely more complicated. File size can be hundreds of times bigger but they don’t leave you wondering whether your computer has had a little hissy fit. Given enough RAM, Photoshop exists in Newtonian Time as a background task, churning through a series of actions on bill board images.

If only it were the same working with Powerpoint, sometimes more like bog snorkelling in treacle. Compared with opening someone’s poster “helpfully” made in Powerpoint, or a newsletter “created” in Excel, Photoshop feels more like Lewis Hamilton though Eau Rouge rather than Button and Barrichello round the Bus Stop.

At least the latter aren’t wasting their time because they get darned well paid for driving un-competitive cars. Unlike the time my partner has just wasted working with a Word file. It simply needed a series of images inserted into a ready-made table. Most were cut and pasted from a Powerpoint file but some had been created in Photoshop and saved as greyscale 8-bit tiffs.

Time makes you mental
One resolutely refused to be inserted into Word. Leibniz would say this was time as part of the mental measuring system especially as it drove my partner nuts. The solution was to copy the tiff from Photoshop into Powerpoint, then copy from there to Word. Yet the same file pasted back into Photoshop showed no difference from the one which Word refused to touch.

The hegemony Office has had on the world seems to be reaching an end as free alternatives are offered by the likes of Sun and Google. Apple, too, have kept their Appleworks suite in a time-warp somewhere back to the latter part of the last century. The new iWork software will do almost everything the average word-processing, presentation-making, spread-sheeter will need, NeoOffice and the like filling in any gaps.

Microsoft have no-one else to blame but themselves. Office is a mess of interfaces, confusing to use and limited in how it integrates with other software or can output its files. Not that we mind as yet another book created in Word is given to us to be redesigned at great cost in QuarkXPress or inDesign so it can actually be printed.

This is charged-for time, our favourite as we bank the cheques.

THERE is a company we have to work with quite extensively, which to protect the innocent we’ll call Company X. This organisation is highly dependent on computerisation and like many British firms, seems wedded to browser-based solutions. The problem is, these are what is technically known as crap.

Even though we are friends with Company X, they make it awfully difficult to work with them. We have to send files to many different departments, ranging in size from a few kilobytes to many hundreds of megabytes. Sometimes they are extremely urgent and have to meet strict deadlines. There is no alternative but to use their web browser interfaces, although once or twice we’ve been able to email small files direct to the intended recipient, usually because they are as frustrated by their company’s systems as we are.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH FTP?
Company X has incredibly slow servers which dribble out web pages,  the file transfer site is as slow, basic and rustic. Like us, the people sending files are all professionals and able to get their heads around such a simple piece of software such as an FTP client. Before the Web was running, we were transmitting files around the world with ZModem so a free GUI FTP program is a cinch. Company X would only need to spend a tiny amount of time keeping their FTP presence up-to-date and in return we would have a robust and reliable file transfer method that should even allow resumable transfers.

To make matters worse, the web programmers for Company X wear those Microsoft tinted shades which make them see only Windows and Internet Explorer. They make the web interfaces, check them from Windows and announce they are up and running. No matter that a vast number of non-Windows users are sending files to Company X’s publishing division from their publishing-industry-standard computers, which cannot see the web pages correctly because the programmers used Windows-specific features or insist they must use a certain non-standard browser.

Then there are the hackers. As part of it’s web presence, Company X has a blogging system open to the outside world, to let staff and others to exchange news and information and leave comments. Bloggers can find  their comments sections have an ever-increasing amount of hacks advertising the usual range of penis extenders, which girlie is bored this afternoon and pharmacy paradises.

iDISK AMENDMENTS
This week, Apple has made some changes to mac.com including giving ten times the storage space. We’ve now each got 20GB of fast, two-way, high-quality file transfer space. Apple also use a browser-based interface as well as one which integrates tightly with Mac OSX. For older Microsoft operating systems, Apple provide a simple file transfer application. They do use WebDAV but that doesn’t limit it to access via a web browser as many programs can manage the iDisk space. We get fed-up with the time wasted using bad interfaces such as Company X’s and my clients really appreciate being able to easily send files to our iDisk Public Folders for us to collect.

We save work to our mac.com iDisks as if they were a disk connected over our LAN. They function exactly like a folder or disk on our desktops and integrate wonderfully with our other disk drives - we have about 4TB across various disks split into many partitions so that we can mirror them in different locations. A new, off-site, 20GB each is a welcome addition almost as cheap as a hard drive itself.

In addition to storage space, Apple’s servers operate its shop front, magazines, information libraries, forums, developers’ sites, email, web hosting, streaming audio and video. They are stylish, slick, efficient and open to all platforms.

WISHFUL THINKING
After trying BT’s attempt to do the same and dealing with the feeble web presence running for many major companies, Apple’s solution is so far ahead I cannot understand why they don’t sell their server space and skills to other businesses.

Apple have really missed a trick here.

WE RECEIVED the details of our home and office this week, currently for sale here. Apparently, we have five bedroms, fully tilled walls and our eves have cuboards, to name just a few features. The amazing thing is that this corruption of the English language was done on a computer, complete with smell czecher and all the other on-line aids.
Hyphen nation
Talking of which, it was as if hyphens do not exist and especially not between ‘double’ and ‘glazed’, nor ‘built’ and ‘in’ and definitely avoiding ‘hole’, ‘in’, ‘the’ and ‘wall’. It took an hour to proof the details and phone them to the estate agent who will pocket quite a few grand for his work.
There, the nice young man chosen by my wife to sell our gaff, was out of the office. His mum fixed the details for us and said they had been keyed-in by their young office junior and schools don’t teach korect speling and puntuashon any more. Which explains two of our pet hates: exclamation marks at the end of sentences to try to add emphasis to dull words; and using a series of full stops to represent an ellipsis which is a grammatical mark in its own right and looks a little like three full stops (never four or more).
Look and steel
She also told me about the software they use – an integrated package for creating the sales sheets, Internet ads and pictures for their shop windows. For all its features the real problem is the software gives them no chance to divert from the templates. This explains why the design of estate agent details are so mundane and pedestrian. The look and feel of their advertisements has been created by an Excel programmer rather than an XPress designer.
Crash test funnies
QuarkXPress was also updated to version 7.3 this week. We had taken part in preliminary testing so were familiar with the changes. However, the real thing seems much less stable than beta versions. Within 15 minutes of installing the update, XPress crashed, the first of at least half a dozen and all when doing innocent actions such as cut and paste. Sometimes the cut items refused to paste.
There is a problem with on-screen display with one section of text stubbornly refusing to show on the screen unless it was highlighted. Then, for no obvious reason, the text reveals itself. The long-standing glitch remains where shadowed boxes sometimes lose the connection with their shadows. The box moves but the shadow remains behind. This is usually a pre-cursor to another crash.
If I didn’t know better I’d say QuarkXPress was a Microsoft product.
The weak ahead
Apple are riding on a high at the moment, despite questions about the iPhone. Real users, such as Ian Wrigley and Number One Son cannot rate it highly enough, even suggesting it will take the place of a new laptop. Hmmm, I’d like to see them play Quake 4 on a telephone before I’ll believe that heresy. Next Tuesday invited journalists will be treated to an Apple event, coincidentally in the same venue they announced the iPhone. Better still, CIO.com have found that in their research of operating systems, OS X is ‘the most cost-effective of them all’, here. While in the same week, forthcoming version of OS X, Leopard, has gained certification as a fully compliant Unix, on a par with AIX, Solaris and HP-UX.
It almost makes us feel sorry for users of wannabe Linux or that proprietary, closed system made by Microsoft.