When I went to the Apple online store to order a new copy of iLife, I wanted to make sure I changed my email address (which is what Apple also uses as your ID) to my new address. No can do. Here is the completely lame message that I was presented:
This change is not allowed. This account name was originally set up as a .Mac account and upgraded to MobileMe. An Apple ID has already been automatically set up for use with this member name. You can access this Apple ID by using either .Mac or MobileMe addresses (e.g. membername@mac.com or membername@me.com), but you cannot change the Apple ID. If you would like to use a new account name, please create a new Apple ID.
That is swell, but when you leave .Mac, you can’t change your email address and have to create a new account. As an added bonus, there is no ‘logout’ functionality on the Apple store site. So you have to start another browser, create a new account (re-keying all of your info), then go place the items you want to order in your cart again, then, finally, check out. Very, very crappy user experience Apple.
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apple, badideas, shopping, suckage, webtools
Apple also announced individual track prices as low as 69 cents — we’ll see how many tracks actually are priced at that level. Overall, I think that I will still look to Amazon first for my music download needs.
]]>DRM: Aside from my iPod, I have one other device that is able to play Apple’s DRM crippled files and that is an Airport Express. And by and large, it sucks. I have it connected to a Bose CD player in the kitchen which is about 15-20 feet from the Airport base station with a dry-wall wall between the two. Airport Express will play between 1 and 5 songs before it just stops playing music — no error on the iMac side, no indication that there is a problem on the AE side. It usually gets confused at the end of a song. The rest of the music needs of the house are served by Roku Soundbridge network music players. The Roku devices more or less just work with one problem — they can’t play any of the DRM crippled music from the iTunes store. Amazon’s downloads don’t have this issue and are of the same or higher quality as the iTunes files.
Cost: If a CD that I am looking to buy is available on Amazon download; I’m going to download it. That way I don’t have to deal with shipping and storage of the physical CD. The downloads can be significantly less expensive than the CD, especially for imports. And in every case, the download is $1-4USD cheaper from Amazon than from Apple. And did I mention, no DRM on the Amazon files. The Amazon downloader puts the files right into iTunes and even includes the CD cover art at the click of a button so there is no challenge or inconvenience in using Amazon’s downloads versus Apple’s.
So tell me again why I should buy music from Apple? Surely not just because it’s Apple and it’s ‘cool’.
]]>The answer ‘is not a lot’. Syncing bookmarks was cool, but I can do that now with Opera or Evernote. As the me.com service becomes more and more iPhone-centric it becomes less attractive to me because I don’t own an iPhone nor will I own one anytime in the foreseeable future. I can sync my contacts on my Nokia N95 using Nokia Ovi online service. In fact on Ovi, I can sync my calendar, upload photos and video, store and retrieve files, enable push-mail from any POP account to my phone, access map updates and more. I have my own hosting account on dreamhost so I don’t need Apple’s crippled iWeb tied hosting.
The fact that I have stronger alternatives to Apple’s offering as well as the poor performance and outages that accompanied the mobileme ‘upgrade’, the choice was a fairly easy one. It has cost me a little effort in switching sites that were using my .mac email accounts over to another and downloading the files that I was sharing that I will need to get around to re-hosting on mobrec.com . In the end I feel better about not handing over $100+ dollars to Apple every year for what has turned out to be diminishing returns.
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You may want to start by familiarizing yourself with the words and phrases that are banished for 2009.
]]>Technorati Tags:
creativity, fun, photography
I recently purchased Gladwell’s new book Outliers. Hopefully I’ll have time to read it and draw my own conclusions as most of the comments in the Register’s posting refer to statements he has made in public presentations/discussions.
]]>A true service should reflect a reusable business function, not merely some technical/programatic detail. As such, it should have a business owner who defines and controls what changes are appropriate to that function at a business level. Having coders making changes willy-nilly could prove disastrous to the business (but quite satisfying to the coders). It is unlikely that the business service owner will be able to understand the nature of a change from a patch (or even what a ‘patch’ was for that matter). There is no substitute for appropriate documentation and change control procedures to avoid errant changes.
This seems to be an increasingly frequent miss for coders: focusing on the code and what is convenient for the coder rather than on what makes sense for the business that they are supposed to be supporting.
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agile, architecture, badideas, design, development, dubious, ideas, software
Why does a minivan need to have an engine in it that is bigger than what was in a ‘muscle car’ back in the 60s? Do you really need a 2.5 ton pickup truck to drive down to the wings place and pick up a case of beer on the way home? ‘No’ to both.
So there you go: ChrysForGM can consolidate and be the demand side for the oil companies who will continue to pay them for their wasteful services. After all, the oil companies are flush with cash and government is still giving them corporate welfare checks. Please don’t let it be American taxpayers. Again.
]]>To save you the time, here is the formula for a Gartner blog posting of this type: “_insert technology to be disparaged here_ is/will be a failure if it doesn’t solve a business problem and is technology for technology’s sake. It will fail even faster if you do not manage it properly and don’t have accountability.” Done. There you have it. No insight, no facts, just the same set of pro forma platitudes that have existed in the IT industry for years.
It is equally important to notice what doesn’t get written: ‘We (Gartner) told you to drop everything and run after this technology previously without making sure it solved a business problem, etc’.
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