Kyoto Ratified!!

Really happy to read that the first thing newly sworn in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has done is ratify the Kyoto Protocol. This is fantastic as Australia can now start to regain international credibility in environmental issues.

Mr Howard, you're Fired!

(or why I am voting to remove the Liberal / National coalition in the 2007 Federal Election)

All governments have a use-by date. I think that the current Federal government has definitely past its use-by (probably before the 2004 election in fact) and I feel more strongly than ever that it is time for a change in government. Normally I think about this closer to an election, but this time I was convinced of this in about January or February this year and nothing since then has made me waver. Why? In this blog post I will examine a number of issues and how I think the current government have failed the Australian people and simply do not deserve to be returned. Please note that this is not going to a critique of the Kevin Rudd led Labor party or why they are better.

• Doing nothing on climate change for 10 years. John Howard has never believed this is an issue, even despite what he is telling us in this election campaign. We should have ratified Kyoto (yes it is flawed, but it is the best thing out there), had a carbon trading scheme now (not in several years) and started energy efficiency programs.
• Involved us in Iraq invasion with the US. This is an unjust war and our involvement helped to legitimise the US invasion. We have had a continuing stream of lies for the reason for the invasion and Australia should never have been involved as it has actually made us less safe. This war has brought attention to us from terrorist elements and for an unjust war that it not worth it. Lastly, Howard has no exit strategy from Iraq.
• I can't believe its not Work Choices. Worst piece of legislation in the last 30 years and exceedingly unfair to younger people. We don't really know if this has created more jobs (the economy was doing well before this!!). Besides the Workplace Authority have not released any stats on this so we just have to believe the government saying we are better off???? This legislation has moved the rights too much towards business and needs to be brought back into more middle ground. The guy in charge of this (the snide Kevin Andrews) is now showing his “talents” in the immigration area recently with his comments on African immigrants.

These are my top 3 (equal placing) reasons. I think each is a reason in itself to not vote for the Liberal / Nationals. However, beyond that there are more reasons...

▪ David Hicks. How could our own government let an Australian citizen (no matter what he did) rot WITHOUT trial for years? Our government failed bigtime in doing nothing. Truly pathetic and completely unacceptable on the part of our government. Pathetic too that they had to gag him until after the election.
▪ Not saying sorry to the stolen generation. John Howard has failed miserably on Aboriginal affairs, he is opposed to land rights and saying sorry. We need to heal the wounds here, not create division...
▪ Wasting a very large amount of money on advertising (especially for Work Choices). $1 million a day, how many hospital beds can that buy? Did you know the Federal government is one of the top advertisers in the country? This is a WASTE of taxpayers money and has really been pseudo election advertising all year.
▪ The so called Pacific Solution for refugees. This is a truly awful way to treat displaced people and a complete waste of money (hundreds of millions!!). These people including children are locked up for years while waiting for processing. Surely there is a better way of doing this.

Now I also want to make it clear that this does not mean I am wholeheartedly voting Labor, but looking at the 2 major parties they are the least worst. However, to make things interesting I will be voting much more selectively in the upper house (most likely Green as the Democrats seem ineffectual these days) and helping to return it to a house of review.

So Mr Howard, for dreadful and cynical performance over the past several years....You are FIRED!!! Mr Costello for not having the guts or gumption to challenge for the leadership you are fired too.

Matthew Reilly, Leopard and our new Mac Mini

Last Friday we were at Macquarie Centre for 2 reasons. One was to get our new Mac Mini (10% off at JB HiFi!) which will become our new media centre (more on that in a later post). The 2nd reason was to go to Borders to meet Matthew Reilly and get a signed copy of his new book Six Sacred Stones :)

Also last Friday at 6pm Apple released Mac OS X 10.5, though it is probably better known by its code name, Leopard, which Apple is also using in its marketing. I didn't get a copy on Friday (despite NextByte and JB HiFi being open after 6pm) as I qualify for a $13 upgrade with the Mac Mini purchase.

It has been interesting reading the reports on Leopard (mainly since I am seeing what people's overall experiences are). I generally try to ignore the more sensationalist stuff and instead read sites whose authors know their stuff and give praise or criticism when its due (such as John Gruberor the always excellent Mac OS X reports by John Siracusa's reports).

However, I am really disappointed in the Sydney Morning Herald's incredibly poor and badly researched report "Spotty Leopard makes Mac users catty". The report implies that Apple's latest operating system is flawed and Apple have been deluged with support requests. This is simply not the case and the fault of this error lies equally with a 3rd party hack by Unsanity and Logitech. Unsanity provide "extra" functionality to the Mac by installing stuff in into the parts of the OS that Apple say not to. Generally users who install this stuff keep the hacks up to date, but what is worse, Logitech have installed this as a part of a mouse "driver".

The lesson here is when installing a new OS (whether Mac, Windows or Linux) it is best to start from scratch. Leopard (and Tiger before it) provide an option to "Archive and Install". This copies your old system files (including all the 3rd party stuff into a separate folder) and installs a fresh copy of Leopard, it also can (set by default) copies across all your user and network settings.

Back to the SMH. I have noticed of late there has been an anti-Apple bias in the reporting there (or at the very least they just copy their news from blogs). With a small amount of research (like I did above) the article could have been balanced and less sensationalist and instead provide a bit of guidance to users. At the very least once new information became available the article could have been updated to indicate it was a problem with the Unsanity hack and that users were at risk if they had installed Logitech stuff. Newspapers have a responsibility to report critically and fairly, many people read this stuff and just believe it (I had a few discussions on this at work today trying to dispel the fallacies in this article. So Asher Dunn you are now on notice.

And, yes, I will be doing an Archive and Install on our iMac

UPDATE: Apple have sold over 2 million copies of Leopard. It took Tiger (10.4) a month to sell that many!

Get This cancelled - TripleM you buggers!!!

Just heard today that one of my favourite radio shows (which I grab via podcast) is being cancelled. Triple M have cancelled Get This (see SMH link). Despite several time slot moves they were rating well, not sure I understand the logic of this one!!

Sign this petition to try and reverse this.

Amazon launches MP3 store

This week Amazon have launched the Amazon MP3 Store. What makes this interesting is that the nearly 2 million tracks available do not contain DRM. This is another nail in the coffin for DRM after EMIs announcement in April (see my previous post on DRM removal).

This is the first store to seriously challenge Apple's iTunes Store and the tracks are cheaper than the regular iTunes tracks (let alone the DRM free iTunes Plus ones which cost 30% more). However, only 2 of the 4 major labels are available (EMI and Universal). Also "officially" the store is only available for US residents, however, they don't check the country for your credit card's billing address just your home address. Though I reckon this won't last long...

DRM, AAC and iTunes Store lock-in

Onto my first opinion post. Originally when the EMI/DRM news came out I was going to do a post (albeit shorter than this one) all about that. Well in the end I never finished and it ended up as only a couple of lines in my weekly stuff. Since then I have heard and read quite a few media reports on this and most seem to be treating Apple as though they are the Microsoft of music. I think that is completely wrong, so I wrote this new article :)

Now before going into the article it is worth noting that I have owned 4 Macs (2 still in use), Ruby and I each have an iPod and I have purchased tracks from the iTunes Store. So, yeah, I do like my Apple stuff. Hopefully this will come across as a balanced article and not too much of an Apple fanatic...

Digital Rights Management

I think the announcement by EMI and Apple that all their tracks will be available in May DRM free is really big news. To me this is the beginning of the end of DRM. I really don't like DRM as it restricts what you can do with your music and treats you as if you are a thief. This does not really encourage me to buy new music!! I can buy a CD, play it in my car at home or rip it and put it on my iPod, Phone or mp3 player. With Apple's DRM (called Fairplay) I am restricted to playing only in iTunes or on an iPod. However, it is worth noting there are a couple of simple ways to get around this (not that I have bothered).

Now some of the media reports on this announcement have been interesting as well as a bit misleading. They have focussed on the fact that price of individual songs has increase by 30% (this is for the US store, the Australian price has not yet been announced). Some have mentioned that the quality of the songs has doubled. However, very few have noticed that the prices of complete albums has NOT increased.

AAC files and iTunes Store lock-in

Another thing many of the media reports have been focussing on is that Apple's iTunes store locks you into using an iPod and the change in DRM makes no difference to this. Apple does not use the MP3 format for the iTunes Store (though the iPod can happily play MP3s), instead it uses AAC. Now many in the media seem to think this is an Apple only format (Apple Audio perhaps!). It is not an Apple format, AAC is an international standard just like MP3 and can even be thought of as a successor to MP3 (have a look at John Gruber's excellent post on AAC for a good explanation). Other devices apart from the iPod can also play AAC like the Sony PSP and PS3, Sony Ericsson phones , some Nokia phones and the Xbox 360.

Unlike Microsoft, Apple do not want to control music. What a lot of people forget is Apple makes most of their money of hardware sales (Mac or iPod) as these have a generous margin. Apple instead uses innovative software solutions (such as the iTunes Store, Mac OS X, iMovie or Final Cut Pro) to help drive software sales. It is also worth noting that the iTunes Store makes very little profit.

It is also worth reading Steve Job's Thoughts on Music essay. Also, this announcement from EMI is not just restricted to Apple's iTunes Store (see this Q&A transcript). EMI has made the DRM free tracks are available to any of the other digital music stores.

So its really great that we can now buy some digital music with DRM removed! However, this is only the first step, its time for the other large music companies to follow suit. Oh and hopefully EMI will soon make the Beatles catalog available too :)

Stuff from this week #4

5th paying space tourist arrives at ISS.

Apple has now sold its 100 millionth iPod. Only took them 5 1/2 years! Worth noting that Sony sold 350 million Walkmans over 15 years and that the sales of iPods have been accelerating...

Next update to Mac OS X has been delayed until October.

RTA gives up on priority traffic light system for busses on the North-West T-Way. This system would have been a good idea, allowing busses to get green lights all the way, now the RTA wants to wait until a Sydney-wide system is implemented in 2009. Knowing how things work the Sydney-wide system will be delayed a year or 18 months. You would be better to bring this system online and gradually work on other parts.

Daylight savings to be increased!! Nooooo! This is a bad idea. If anything it should be reduced back to the first weekend in March, the extra week will mean getting up in darkness and having very little extra light in the evening.

John Howard says Work Choices has increased jobs. What a bunch of crap, there is no way this can be reliably measured. This could be due to the minerals boom or the lack of sunspots. Anyway, even if Work Choices has increased jobs it has decreased the bargaining power of employees and reduced their opportunities. Whilst I am not advocating increasing union power, we need to have a good balance between the rights of workers and the rights of the business. We have swung too far towards business with this bad policy and it is time to redress this. I doubt the current Federal Government will change this so it is time to vote them out.

Chaser stunt makes news in the USA. Good also to see the Chaser's ratings are still high (5th spot with 1.3 million for Wednesday just behind Spicks and Specks). It is bad to see even more people watch the diarrhoea that is Today Tonight. Channel 10 has been running repeats of House since the Chaser started 3 weeks ago, with a new episode next week it will be interesting to see if any of the defectors return to House.

San Francisco to London? Google Maps say I need to swim across the Atlantic!! Only takes 31 days. Oh, and I tried to go to Sydney but it would not cross the Pacific!

Soccer Video on YouTube (set to Monty Python's Always Look on the Bright Side of Life)