Moore’s News Roundup Digest - Monday, December 29, 2003
eWeek: iPod, Therefore I Am
US judges Blast Music Labels' Attack On ISPs And Users
Mac Night Owl: The iPod Battery Brouhaha: Much Ado About Nothing?
eWeek: Rise in LCD-Panel Prices Squeezes PC Makers and Consumers
PC Mag Tests The Apple Power Mac G5
How You Can Thwart ID Thieves
Mac Night Owl: The iPod is Definitely a Trip
The Year Apple Saved Music
How To Make Sure Your 10.3.2 Update Was OK
Mac Night Owl: A Paragraph Worth of Monday Rants[/url]
Internet Now ‘Part Of Daily Life’[/url]
eWeek: iPod, Therefore I Am
"Apple's popular MP3 gadget is at the front lines of a battle for digital rights. Can the government, the entertainment industry and Microsoft stop it?
The phenomenon known as the iPod is emerging from the shadows of Napster and the Mac to become a force unto its own. As a designer toy, it offers the promise of mobility, the allure of 21st Century Art Deco and the gratification of impulse buying.
But behind the scenes, Apple Computer's MP3 device is the bulwark of an increasingly serious battle for digital rights versus the virtual law firm of Achcroft, Valenti and Gates. With the help of an increasingly pliable Congress, Microsoft has moved rapidly to encapsulate digital content in a digital-rights-management layer of protection."
Read more at:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1423033,00.asp
US judges Blast Music Labels' Attack On ISPs And Users
The Register's Ashlee Vance reports:
"A US federal appeals court has dealt the RIAA a long awaited kick to the groin in its pursuit of file swappers, saying the music label lobby group can no longer force Internet providers to turn over their customers names.
"The Friday ruling from a three-judge panel hearing the case for the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia is likely to slow down the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) hunt for file swappers. The judges have blocked the pigopolist mob from being able to subpoena users' names from ISPs. This decision overturns a district court ruling earlier this year that ordered Verizon to give up the goods on its customers....
"The judges were harsh at times in the opinion, calling some of the RIAA's arguments silly and largely saying the RIAA has no merits for its case."
For the full report, visit here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34616.html
Mac Night Owl: The iPod Battery Brouhaha: Much Ado About Nothing?
Everyone wants 15 minutes of fame
Here's the URL for today's commentary:
http://www.macnightowl.com/index.htm#nothing
eWeek: Rise in LCD-Panel Prices Squeezes PC Makers and Consumers
"TAIPEI, Taiwan-Shifts in thin-film-transistor liquid crystal display production here may bring changes to the product mix offered by PC makers to customers in the U.S. and Europe. Analysts said recently that manufacturing transitions and market demands will bring something unfamiliar to consumers of flat-panel displays: a rise in prices.
For the first half of 2003, the dramatic fall in prices for LCD screens encouraged U.S. PC vendors to bundle these slimmer footprint displays with their new PCs. The market also boomed as consumers and businesses bought these flat-panel displays to replace the bulky CRT (cathode-ray tube) screens in existing systems."
Read more at:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,,1422956,00.asp
PC Mag Tests The Apple Power Mac G5
PC Mag says:
"Think Macs are slow? The Apple Power Mac G5 has the horsepower to hang with any of the leading Windows PCs. During testing at PC Magazine Labs this fall, it even outperformed the competition in many cases.
"Of course, Apple continues to excel in other areas. The Power Mac provides impeccable surround sound, whether you hook it to an AV receiver via the bundled Toslink cable or simply attach Apple's 5.1 speakers. It offers an 800-MHz FireWire port and a DVD-R drive, great ways to capture and burn video. But the real story is the speed."
You can check it out at:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1418475,00.asp?kc=PCAV103039TX1K0000565
How You Can Thwart ID Thieves
Businessweek's Jane Black says:
"Here are several simple precautions everyone really needs to take. Ignore them at your peril
"Your identity is arguably your most valuable possession. A clean legal record and credit history open the door to everything from getting a job to securing a home loan and all the other, day-to-day privileges most folks for granted. Stains on those records can take years to erase, but people tend to pay more attention to securing their cars than protecting personal data. That's why identity theft struck 9.9 million Americans last year, costing businesses and individuals $53 billion, according to a survey commissioned by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)."
You can check it out at:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2003/tc20031224_0317_tc073.htm
Mac Night Owl: The iPod is Definitely a Trip
Better believe it!
Here's the URL for today's commentary:
http://www.macnightowl.com/newsletters/2003/12/213.htm#trip
The Year Apple Saved Music
The Las Vegas Mercury's Mike Prevatt writes:
"Once again, the year in music was defined not by groundbreaking works or specific trends per se, but distribution and consumption....
"If there's one dominant "person" or "artist" of the year, it belongs to Apple. Building upon the first-generation versions of iTunes, the hyper-organized MP3 listening/storage program, and iPod, the most successful and culturally significant music device since the debut of Sony's cassette Walkman, the underdog, Bay Area-based company made more attempts than anyone--even the Big Five labels--to lure music listeners into the future. And it did handily, thanks to the unprecedented success of the iTunes Music Store and the upgraded iPod, both perfected to make the transition from physical albums and illegally traded MP3s to legit digital files and portable music collections as easy and cost-efficient as possible."
For the full commentary, visit here:
http://www.lasvegasmercury.com/2003/MERC-Dec-25-Thu-2003/22850642.html
How To Make Sure Your 10.3.2 Update Was OK
Mary on [url=http://www.apple-x.net]http://www.apple-x.net[/url] says:
Some people are claiming that they got a bad download of 10.3.2. The symptoms are Mail crashing, Safari crashing, and kernel panics after applying the update.
See the assertion here:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0116902/
and the thread here:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?128@249.BlJTain5vsd.10@.599e07de
The simplest way to verify that your download was OK is to verify the SHA-1 Digest for the download MacOSXUpdate10.3.2.dmg, assuming you kept a copy of the download.
The download site at Apple is here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120288
For more.
Mac Night Owl: A Paragraph Worth of Monday Rants
Belated security leak reports and 10.3.2 bugs.
Here's the URL for today's commentary:
http://www.macnightowl.com/index.htm#rants
Internet Now ‘Part Of Daily Life’
Inman News reports:
"The growth in the total number of Internet users has slowed markedly in the past two years, but the total number of people who have performed such basic online activities as getting health information, accessing government data, buying products and participating in auctions has increased smartly in the past three years, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s latest report.
"An analysis of telephone survey responses of more than 64,000 people in the past three years showed 63 percent of U.S. adults now are online and many of them, especially those who have several years of online experience, have built Internet use into their lives in practical ways.
“'The Internet is now a normalized part of daily life for about two-thirds of the U.S. population,' said Research Specialist Mary Madden, the author of the report."
You can check it out at:
http://www.inman.com/inmannews.asp?ID=39179
Charles W. Moore
