It has recently been in the news that Apple boss Steve Jobs has requested that all the worlds largest record companies agree to sell their music online without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
I’m sure you’ve come across the problems which I have which is incompatibility. All of a sudden you find you can’t put your music onto your other computer or music playing device.
Apples iTunes which is arguably the best legal music downloading system on the internet has this problem but from reading the news over the past few weeks it has been bought to my attention that it isn’t Apple which is giving us this problem. It is the money hungry record labels which won’t let Apple sell their music without DRM.
We should be able to use our music which we pay for the license to listen to on any medium we see fit without some piece of code saying “no you can’t do that”.
I can’t use any of the music I download off iTunes on anything other than my Laptop or PC because I don’t have an iPod and my other music players don’t support the DRM Apple is forced to put onto the music before they can sell it online.
Although there is a way around this but it is not a method I would like to use on a large amount of tracks. It’s as simple as opening up a program such as Adobe Audition and setting your computers audio input device to Wave and click record. I know its a lot of effort but there is no other way to listen to the music on my phone which is my MP3 playing device.
There is no way they are ever going to stop copyright as people will always find a way around the protection which is put on.
But and it’s a bit BUT what they will end up doing is driving all their valued, law abiding customers onto illegal means of downloading just so they can use the music they download in the manner they want to.
Sources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6337275.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6344929.stm
I haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth. My laptop has been in the repair center for a while (3 weeks and 1 day to be exact). Putting my online life into a bit of a mess with not having Outlook to organize all my email accounts for me. I set my personal email to an IMAP so I could check for important emails but some will have got through as seen as spam.
My last blog was on the spam artist the lowest of all of gods creatures to ever walk this earth. I have just downloaded all my emails from each of my accounts and have a nice healthy collection of around 60% spam (about 900 spam and 200 legitimate emails). So I have just spent the duration of a full to flat laptop battery (Which isn’t much on a Toshiba Tecra A4) replying to emails and sorting out all the junk which managed to sneak through the spam filter.
Right. After the explanation for my absence time for my blog.
I have recently been working with relational databases for a university project which is disappointingly only got a 2.1 for. I wrote an ordering system for solid fuels company (I did a similar project for my A levels but never got it to work in Access which is an awful program). It contained 3 tables and pulled information from all of them allowing the user to add, edit, delete and view all orders, customers and fuels.
At first the use of relational tables was very daunting. I tried to get away without going too far out of my comfort zone but soon found myself grabbing my cyber board and surfing the web for the SQL syntax for JOINs.
I didn’t realize how many different types of JOIN they were and they all do pretty much the same thing but in a slightly different way. Making sense of all of them was going to take a bit longer than the 2 days I left myself to write a fully working ordering system for a solid fuels company. I ended up using INNER JOIN as it only retrieved the data from the right which was related to the content on the right.
W3Schools saved me from my lack of knowledge on tables.
http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_join.asp
This post may seem random but this assignment made me realize how important relational tables actually are.
One of my clients spoke to me when I made their new website and said they get about 3000 spam emails a day. They are mainly the usual offering Viagra, Loans and the phishing which so many people get caught out by.
So I offered him a solution. The solution would involve setting the catch all to delete all the emails it receives and having an online for users to fill in which send the client the emails.
The email one in which spam bots would not be able to guess from using information on the site but not one which would be too complex for users to remember after receiving a reply off the client.
This system was implemented and worked fine until the spam bots attacked. In 3 months 180 spam emails were sent to the account via the contact form. Which in relation to the clients previous email account was nothing but its still 180 too many. To solve this problem I wrote a simple image verification script and I have now added validation to all fields to block out certain patterns which are known spam type emails.