waffle

Reasons I chose to start over my Parallels VM using Vista instead of XP:

• The prospect of a) locating my XP CD and its serial number, b) installing XP, c) installing updates to XP and d) installing Visual Studio again, each step taking a bunch of hours on its own, did not thrill me.

• I started using XP when it had reached its late beta stage in early 2001. It seems only fitting that I start using Vista when it’s apparently in pretty much the same development stage.

• People are using Vista and giving up on Vista. IT people smarter and more used to it than me are making therapists rich at the prospect of needing to administer one of these mysterious Vista boxes. Vista’s obviously not done done; far from all drivers are done, far from enough features to convince Joe Sixpack to upgrade to Home Starter Basic Premium Wow Edition, far from anyone’s on board in general. But Microsoft’s going to have to slowly work this out over the next few months, and I don’t need to use Windows that much right now on my own computer.

• The prospect of running Windows Update as an actual Control Panel applet — instead of a tedious and horrible ActiveX maze-like construction constantly asking me to update its controls and to allow this or that pop-up window, only stopping to automatically restart my computer — makes me giddy.

• Eventually, more and more people will start using Vista regardless what everyone else says, and I need to be able to get around the OS like I currently do on XP.

• Vista, Parallels, 2GB of RAM and an internal GPU does not an awesome experience make; one more reason to get a new Mac eventually.

• I’m just bloody fucking tired of XP at this point. Seriously.

Some of you are beginning to tire of my periodic posts about how copyright - and “rights” as they stand today - sucks. However, if you need yet another example that it’s just not working, John Gruber’s look at iTunes Ringtone support is a good read.

It’s worth remembering that Apple likely wrestled to be able to let you pick the portion of the song you want as a ringtone, but the entire system reeks of the forced hand of the industry. What will the industry come up with on its own? Several-dollar DRMed ringtone downloads ordered by SMS, or the “ringle” travesty, putting the price of a song, a remix and a downloadable ringtone at around $7.

If we had a sensible rights system, it would be your damn right to do whatever you please with a song you get off a record you bought or downloaded, as long as it didn’t mean deliberate widespread distribution for your own gain. It is certainly fair use to play a 30 second extract from a song in a public place; what difference does it make if your mobile phone emits it because you’re playing it in its media player or because someone’s calling you?

Well, sorta. Greg Joswiak (”Vice President for iPod Product Marketing”) says Apple won’t go out of their way to break iPhone apps - they’ll be silently tolerated in the same way that third-party unofficial Apple TV apps are tolerated.

Not like I need Apple themselves to tell me so, of course.

On the waffle software site, there’s a utility with a stunningly crappy icon, a genuinely ancient latest release and a feature set missing a second half, if you look at the app it plugs into.

I just wanted to say that with ThisService “I am pretty sure I promised this would be out in May” 2.0 off my back, I’m working on it. People who are so intrigued as to consider testing this can send an email using a contact link at the product’s site.