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Global digital music sales tripled in 2005 thanks
to Apple's iTunes Music Store

post from "My Mac Blog" RSS Feed on 01 April 2006 01:24:00 PM. © "My Mac Blog" RSS Feed

"Global sales of digital music are continuing to rise, generating revenues of $1.1 billion US for record companies last year and softening an overall slump in music sales, the industry said Friday," The Associated Press reports. "The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, said that revenues from digital sales almost tripled from $400 million in 2004. The total number of digital single tracks downloaded online or to mobile phones rose to 470 million units, up from 160 million."

?

?"However, overall music sales continued their decline of recent years, dropping another three per cent in 2005, largely due to a 6.7 per cent drop in the value of CD purchases," AP reports. "Single-song downloads dominated global online sales, accounting for 86 per cent of purchases. Apple Computer Inc.'s ITunes Music Store remains the market leader. 'When you can buy just the songs you like in a digital format, you don't have to buy the album,' said Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media, a U.S. market research firm."

??Full article here.

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20 Great Moments In Apple History

post from "My Mac Blog" RSS Feed on 01 April 2006 01:16:00 PM. © "My Mac Blog" RSS Feed

David M. Ewalt, 03.31.06, 6:00 AM ET

NEW YORK -Like any good Silicon Valley success story, the tale of Apple Computer begins in a garage.

This particular home--in Los Altos, Calif.--belonged to the parents of Steve Jobs, a 21-year-old college dropout, and was frequently visited by two of his friends, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. Jobs and Wozniak had built a kit for a pre-assembled computer circuit board, and roped in Wayne, a draftsman, to design a logo and write a manual. The computer was called the Apple I, and on April 1, 1976, Jobs, Wozniak and Wayne founded Apple Computer in order to market and sell it.

apple_logo_original The computer was never a huge hit, but before long, Apple Computer had established itself as one of the most creative and important forces in the computer industry. Today, "the two Steves" are rich and famous--Wayne sold his stake after a few months, for about $800--and Apple has an influence far larger than its relatively small sales and market-share numbers would suggest.

Click here for 20 great moments in Apple history.

Under Jobs' leadership, Apple has helped usher in now-common features like the mouse and the 3.5-inch floppy disk. The Macintosh, released in 1984, was the first affordable computer to offer a graphical user interface; more than any other device, it's responsible for the fact that nearly every computer in the world uses the familiar system of clicking around a computer's desktop and through its folders.

blue-apple-logo-large Apple has always been a pioneer in the world of design. The original PowerBook laptop set the bar for portable, ergonomic laptops, and in 1998 the transparent, bulbous iMac almost single-handedly moved the world away from dull "beige box" computers. It also spawned a slew of imitators outside the personal computing world; for years following the iMac's debut, the colorful plastic look was copied in designs for consumer goods ranging from kitchen grills to tape dispensers.

More recently, Apple has revolutionized the world of music. The iPod digital music player is a huge hit, with more than 42 million units sold, and in February 2006, Apple's iTunes Music store sold its one billionth song. Pundits have predicted that a competitor would break Apple's stranglehold on the digital music market, but so far no one has come close.

Meanwhile, the iPod has supercharged Apple's top and bottom lines. Last year, fueled primarily by sales of the now-ubiquitous players, Apple enjoyed its best year to date, earning $1.3 billion on sales of $13.9 billion. The company is now worth some $52 billion.

Despite these successes, three decades after its founding and 22 years after it introduced the Macintosh, Apple remains the underdog in a personal computer world dominated by Microsoft. But innovations like the iPod and a new partnership with chipmaker Intel promise to keep the company vital and relevant.

Does Apple have another 30 years in it? Maybe not. But as long as Steve Jobs remains at the helm, it's a sure bet that the company will continue to shock, surprise and intrigue.

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How to easily create Mac OS X rescue CD or DVD

post from "My Mac Blog" RSS Feed on 01 April 2006 01:12:00 PM. © "My Mac Blog" RSS Feed

tiger_box "I remember something very special about my old System 6 machine. That is, the System file was about 400-600 KB and you could put just about any program on a floppy with it, bless it right, and then you had a rescue disk. Things are exponentially more complex for the modern Mac, however. Install disks wind up blowing 400-600 megabytes on the installer and OS alone. It won't fit on a floppy, and unless you trick it right, it won't fit on a CD, either," CODEPOET writes for Mac Geekery.

There's a solution, though, and it's kind of funny how it works. You see, Apple provided a tool for something rather different that also works great for this. In my previous article on NetBoot I showed you how to make an installer image that installed a custom package and noted that it was burnable as well. Well, curious thing about it, it does exactly what we need:

?• It uses your current OS to build the OS for the image
?• It creates an OS that comes in around 500 MB
?• It starts one program, which lists others to use

"Sounds perfect, really. So what we need to do is make this work for us. That part is astonishingly easy," CODEPOET writes.

Easy instructions are in the full article here.

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iPod the Kleenex of MP3 players

post from "My Mac Blog" RSS Feed on 01 April 2006 01:06:00 PM. © "My Mac Blog" RSS Feed

Posted Mar 31st 2006 12:00PM by Scott McNulty

Xerox. Kleenex. iPod. nano

What do they all have in common? They are all brand names that have come to define their category, at least that's what this article argues.

Xerox and Kleenex certainly have transcended being a brand, but are people now calling all MP3 players iPods? It seems like the answer is yes, and is that a bad thing? Certainly not for Apple, though other MP3 player manufacturers might not be so keen on it.

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Class Action Madness: Applying Common Sense to
the iPod Battery and Volume Level Cases

post from "My Mac Blog" RSS Feed on 01 April 2006 12:56:00 PM. © "My Mac Blog" RSS Feed

Dan Knight - 2006.03.31

It's time to stop the insanity of class-action lawsuits that make lawyers rich, reshape next generation products, and scarcely benefit the members of the class at all.

iPod Batteries

One example is the iPod Battery Settlement. As you probably know, rechargeable batteries don't last forever, and to top it off, it's not self-evident that the iPod can be taken apart so the battery can be replaced.

After about two years, most rechargeables are a shadow of their former selves, and Apple charges US$99 to replace an iPod's battery. Well, more precisely, to take your iPod and probably exchange it for the same model with a fresh battery - and the replacement won't have your songs, your data, or the same amount of wear as the one you sent in.

So someone decides to create a class-action lawsuit against Apple covering the millions of G1 to G3 iPod owners in the class - many of whom have already paid for a new battery by this time or simply bought a newer, more feature-laden iPod that also includes a new battery.

In the end, it looks like millions of dollars to the law firm behind the suit and $50 in Apple Store credit for iPod owners who actually kept all of their receipts and filed all of their paperwork properly.

Objections

My first objection is a common characteristic of suits like this, such as the one over Kodak's instant cameras. Rather than giving members of the class cash for their inconvenience, they end up with discount coupons or rebate vouchers. (In the Kodak case, coupons for non-instant Kodak film. But what if the former Kodak instant shooter has switched to Polaroid? The settlement would do them no good at all.)

In the iPod Battery Settlement, the $50 store credit could be used to buy iTunes or applied to anything else sold by the Apple Store. As with the Kodak case and myriad others, the settlement requires that the class members remain loyal customers to benefit. (In the case of 1G and 2G iPods, there's also the option of a $25 check.)

For the record, Apple makes a good profit on their $99 iPod battery replacement program. Third-party batteries are available for US$25-40 with greater capacity than Apple's batteries, and iPodResQ (as just one example) charged US$54 to replace the battery in a 1G/2G iPod.

In cases where users paid Apple for a new battery, the company probably breaks even and possibly turns a bit of a profit even after the $50 credit is issued. And that store credit doesn't cost Apple $50, since there is a profit built into every transaction.

Because some users may have bought third-party batteries and others may have switched to non-Apple MP3 players, the settlement should benefit them even if they never purchase another Apple product in their lives. Allowing a company to get away with offering credit at the company store is a sham.

Full article here.

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New Way to Track Pirated Audio Copies

post from "My Mac Blog" RSS Feed on 01 April 2006 12:46:00 PM. © "My Mac Blog" RSS Feed

MP3-ul-implineste-10-ani-de-zile-2 The Fraunhofer Institute, creator of the MP3, has been presenting a new technology, MusicTrace, which adds a watermark in music tracks stored on physical media (i.e. CD). The technology is designed to track pirated copies.

The process is currently limited to audio CD, but is being validated for online legal audio contents. If it turns to be effective, Music Majors might force online music stores to integrate it into their current DRM.

In the past history, many anti-piracy protections have been released, and for this new one as for the previous ones, the real question is: How long it will take to crack it?

My Take
Where there's a will... there's a way. I certainly understand the recording industries desire to protect its assets, but let's face it... The genie is most definitely out of the bottle, and there is effectively no way to prevent those with the knowledge and desire to subvert these copyright protections from doing so. Much like gun control, the only people that are going to be affected by measures like this are those that are NOT going to try and get around the system in the first place...

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Bad File Descriptors

post from Mac Geekery - Get your geek on. on 01 April 2006 10:25:07 AM. © Mac Geekery - Get your geek on.

I noticed that the scheduled periodic tasks are not happening on my iBook with Onyx. The date last run is not advancing, stuck at February 10.if I run the commands in Terminal I get the following;iBook:~ rick$ sudo periodic daily weekly monthly/usr/sbin/periodic: line 1: /var/log/daily.out: No such file or directory/usr/sbin/periodic: line 106: 605 Broken pipe datecat: /tmp/periodic.YcCNxqpiL8: Bad file descriptorcat: /tmp/periodic.YcCNxqpiL8: Bad file descriptor/usr/sbin/periodic: line 1: /var/log/weekly.out: No such file or directory/usr/sbin/periodic: line 106: 643 Broken pipe datecat: /tmp/periodic.YcCNxqpiL8: Bad file descriptor/usr/sbin/periodic: line 1: /var/log/monthly.out: No such file or directory/usr/sbin/periodic: line 106: 691 Broken pipe datecat: /tmp/periodic.YcCNxqpiL8: Bad file descriptoriBook:~ rick$ I cannot mkdir log in /varhow would I fix the broken pipe at line 106?System is a 700Mhz iBook G3 running 10.4.5I'm keen to learn a bit more about this, any assistance greatly appreciated.thanks

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Option-Delete In Terminal

One of my favorite tricks in editing text is to use the Option key as a modifier. Using the Option key along with arrows allows you skip whole words. Best yet, Option-backspace will delete the entire word behind the cursor; Option-delete will delete the entire word ahead. It annoys me to no end that this behavior doesn't carry over into the Terminal.

Ah, but it does! I mentioned this codepoet, and he said his worked, but he couldn't remember what, if anything, he did to enable it. There are no options to be found that explicitly state this function, but there's something close. Go to Window Settings under the Terminal menu and select the Keyboard pane. Look for Use option key as meta key and enable it. Among many other things, Option-delete will now work just like it does everywhere else.

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http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/configuration/option-delete_in_terminal

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