Steve Jobs 1955 – 2011


We will miss you, may you rest in peace.

You had given us so much, changed our lives by your products and innovations. Allowed us to create amazing movies, music and work of arts with the products you created.

The first computer that I owned was an Apple IIc and I felt in love with Apple the company and its products shortly after that. Since then Apple’s computers have been my computing tool of choice and never used any other platforms. Continue reading “Steve Jobs 1955 – 2011”

Steve’s Thoughts on Music

I will begin by quoting Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple Inc.) on his post on Apple.Com today.

“With the stunning global success of Apple’s iPod music player and iTunes online music store, some have called for Apple to “open” the digital rights management (DRM) system that Apple uses to protect its music against theft, so that music purchased from iTunes can be played on digital devices purchased from other companies, and protected music purchased from other online music stores can play on iPods.

…Music on CDs can be easily imported into the freely-downloadable iTunes jukebox software which runs on both Macs and Windows PCs, and is automatically encoded into the open AAC or MP3 formats without any DRM.

…Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI…. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices.

…However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.

…Music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony’s Connect store will only play on Sony’s players; and music purchased from Apple’s iTunes store will only play on iPods.

…And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

…Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an “open” model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed” model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players.

…If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.

…In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves.”

As a consumer of music and someone who had purchased many content (music, movies and TV shows) from iTunes Store, my main and only concern is to ensure that all my media content are inter operable on any device. That’s because, I always believe in the statement:

Today’s winner may become tomorrow’s looser

Remember when majority of media content, used to be stored on vinyl records, audio tapes, video tapes (Beta and/or VHS), and more recently CDs and DVDs.

Therefore, even though I believe in Apple’s products and prefer their tools over others, based on usability and reliability. I do take certain steps to ensure that these purchased media content are inter operable. This latter step is to ensure my rights to use these content are intact, similar to what Americans have in the United States in the form of Fair use rights. So history tells us, we as consumers cannot rely on any one technology to protect our rights.

I echo Steve Jobs’ call to the Media “giants” to relinquish the need for DRM on content. Imposing DRM on all media content distributed on the Internet is assuming that all consumers are thieves. I understand the contrary is an idealistic way of looking at the situation. What have our society come to when we have to assume everyone to be bad? To protect artist rights; the actual content owners, there have to be other ways.

BTW: CDs and DVDs (to a certain extent) do not have DRM at the moment. We all heard what happened to Sony Music when they tried to put DRM onto their music CDs.

Putting the blame on either Apple Inc. or the Media “giants” may also be unfair. May be the solution is to have the “actual” content owners speak up. The artist should decide on an individual basis if they prefer to have DRM applied to their work. If so, then the media content distributors, may it be one of the Media “giants” or Apple will have to decide whether to distribute their content via the Internet.

My Comments on Steve Jobs’ Keynote at WWDC’06

Apple

Just finished reading the Live coverage of Steve Jobs’ keynote at the Apple 2006 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC’06) in San Francisco.

There are so many new features in the new Mac OS X (code name “Leopard”), it will be even more exciting to be using a Mac starting in 2007.

Two of the features I definitely will use are “Time Machine” and “Spaces”. For the former, I had been trying to find a backup software that does incremental backups on my Macintel. I had been using Carbon Copy Cloner, but its incremental backup (synchronization) feature is broken on Macintels. Now with “Time Machine” built into the up coming Mac OS X, there will not be any more excuse for people to not have a back up of their Macs.

As for the latter, “Spaces”, I also currently use an application, VirtueDesktops, that does similar thing. But Apple’s Spaces is much more featured and some of which I will definitely be able to take advantage of, that is not currently available in VirtueDesktops.

So check out the various sites with coverage of the keynote and start salivating for the next Mac OS X this coming Spring.

Reactions to Steve Jobs’ Keynote at MacWorld 2006

Apple

Earlier today Steve Jobs of Apple Computers made his keynote for the official opening of MacWorld Expo 2006.

He started the keynote with some amazing retail figures. Some of the best financial figures in Apple’s history, which shocked all anaylsts, as a result shot Apple’s stock price 8% during the keynote.

Steve then went on to talk about the new versions of iLife and iWork. The latter does not have much improvements other than new themes for both Pages and Keynote.

A real different story with iLife, many improvements had been introduced to its component of the suite.

iPhoto now enables full screen photo editing and increased its capability of handling up to 250,000 photos in one Photo Library. The speed of scrolling through the photos within a Photo Library has dramatically improved. This is particularly important if you actually have 250,000 photos in your Photo Library.

You can read all about the new features of the other components: iMovie HD, iDVD, GarageBand in the iLife suite at Apple’s web site, but a new component of note is iWeb.

iWeb is a layman’s tool for creating web content from your iLife contents and have these published to .Mac for others to access. The most significant thing about this application is that, iWeb supports exporting of these web content pages in standard web formats (HTML, CSS, RSS, etc.) for publishing to your own web hosting provider.

I have yet to try iWeb but I will. For readers who may like to try an alternative that had been in the market for a while is RapidWeaver by Realmac

The most signicficant announcement from Steve Jobs [Apple] of this keynote are the new Macintosh computers based on the new Intel Core Duo processor.

Apple angered many when Steve Jobs announced the new iMac in his keynote. That’s because Apple had only just updated the iMac 8 months ago. There nothing really changed or added features with the new iMac, accept a brand new Intel Core Duo processor. According to Apple, the new iMac is two times (2x) faster than its predecessor.

The “One More Thing” at this year’s keynote was the announce of a new notebook, strangely called “MacBook Pro”. I share others’ opinions of not liking the label of the new Macintosh Intel based notebook. Although, I can understand why Apple is trying to promote the brand “Mac” or “Macintosh” with this new line.

For the layman purchasers out there, they may mistaken the new line of Macintosh as just any other “Wintel computer” (aka. “PC”). I had always hated people using the term “PC” or “Personal Computer” to refer to computers with Intel processes that runs Microsoft Windows.

I think Apple is worry that by introducing this new line of Intel based Macintosh (or “Macintel”) the average consumers would lump Apple into the likes of Acer, DELL, Lenovo and HP and anyone else who makes a computer based on Intel processors.

One thing I really not happy about with the new MacBook Pro are its included SuperDrive. Apple had just recently transformed all their computers to come built in with a 8x SuperDrive that is cable of producing DVD-DL and DVD+DL. I believe this is definite backwards decision of Apple. Although, the reason for this change could be the result of the new MacBook Pro being developed by a different team of engineers and sourced separately from the rest of the PowerPC based Macintosh. I just hope that Apple rectify this soon in the form of an upgrade option.

One other thing that really would have drove the sales of the new Intel based Macintosh, is the much talked about ability of the new Macintosh to “dual boot” meaning that users are able to choose to start (“Boot”) the Macintosh computer in Windows or some other OS or Mac OS X.

This had initially been concluded as not possible. At least with Microsoft Windows XP. This is because the new Intel based Macintosh uses a technology called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). For Microsoft the first Windows OS to support the EFI technology is the upcoming Windows Vista.

People who knows me well would ask, why I care, if the new Intel Macintosh are dual bootable. Well, if the new Intel Macintosh are dual bootable, then all those consumers who are “on the fence”, can’t decide whether to try a Macintosh or not would have nothing to loose from trying the new Intel based Macintosh.

I think Apple also realizes this fact, and that is why Apple’s current official opinion about Mac users installing other OS onto their Intel based Macintosh is that, “we will not prevent users from installing foreign OS”.

It has been an exciting start for Apple, with many more news and new products to come before December. Time will tell how all these will turn.

One disappointment I have with Steve Jobs’ keynote is that the rumored Apple Media Center Computer did not materialize. The rumors was that they would be a Mac Mini PVR with a revised Apple FrontRow as the main interface. There is still 11 more months in the year, we may still see this rumored product. I personally hope so.

Should I Say I…

hmm… I am glad.

Back on July 23rd this year I wrote in my blog:

… about short videos. Like music videos, TV sitcoms, TV commercials, Movie Trailers, audio skits of any kind which are 15 minutes or less. In these case the entertainment value out weights the quality of video or audio quality of the handheld device on which these videos would be played on….

I wonder if the rest of my post will come true in the near future.

I guess time will tell.