XP has less bloat then W2k - many consider XP to be W2K with bug fixes. Regardless, neither "rock" (IMHO). Linux comes close, MacOS too. We're still waiting for an OS that "rocks."

DOS rocked... all the pain of Linux and none of the functionality

Curious to see how this all works out. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...f095532D96.DTL

Microsoft, RealNetworks settle lawsuit
Excerpt:
In a stunning reversal of one of tech's most bitter rivalries, RealNetworks said Tuesday it has settled its antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft and forged a partnership to co-promote Real's online music service and games.

"Both companies also have found it exceptionally tough to compete against digital music's juggernaut: Apple's iPod digital music player and iTunes online music store and jukebox software."

>I hear is that iTunes is horrible?

Well, perhaps "horrible" is strong, but I disklike it.

As a PC-savvy user I first found myself using iTunes on Boxing Day. I think the root of the problem is iTunes is a Mac application, ported to the PC. As a result, hard-core Windoze user will find a lot of what iTunes does to be counter-intutitive. For example, I put in an audio CD and an icon appears. As a PC user, my instinct is to right-click on that icon and be presented with some options (play, rip, explore, eject, buy (?) etc.) That doesn't happen in iTunes - I've got to click somewhere else.

Or, by default, iTunes starts re-arranging music on people's hard disks. I'm sure this feature is handy - But by default? It's *very* confusing and all day long my wife was saying "Where did my song go!?!!" I almost wish MS made an iPod compatible application that met their UI design rules. Of course then it would only run on a very powerful PC and would be highly bloated. Sigh

Cheers,
Geoff Glave
Vancouver, Canada

ml_ipod:

http://www.winamp.com/plugins/details.php?id=138888

One of the reviewers pointed out that you may not want to use ml_ipod if you're using a 5th gen (new video) ipod. But it should be fine for everything else. I've used winamp for years, so if you aren't using a 5th gen ipod, that's a good alternative. Winamp is great.

I know there are at least a couple of open source itune replacement programs out there that can run on win98. www.ipodlounge.com used to be a good place to research this stuff. So do your homework and come back and tell us what you found and what works and what doesn't work. (That is if you don't want to use winamp, but winamp would be my first choice if I still had a VCR, er, computer running win98.)

itunes is really just an alternative browser/player for music files on your computer and on the itunes web site. There's nothing magical about it. You can easily control what it does and how it does it, and more importantly what it shouldn't do. I wish itunes knew how to deal with flac files, even if it was just for conversion.

I have the winamp flac plugin. Do you know if ml_ipod will 'transcode' from flac to whatever on the way to the ipod, or do I still have to do it separately? I guess I can try it and find out.

-David

Wow, I'm glad you posted this! I was just about to install the plugins that somewhere over the atlantic recommended.

ml ipod did just release a brand-new version of the plugin yesterday. Does anyone know if that one fixed the video bug?

GGlave-oh yeah, nice summarization of itunes for pc folks....they definitely have different underlying apple-think assumptions that I'm not used to. I'm sure apple-people run into the same thing when they try to use a pc-type program, but it's not fun. I am also not too fond of how they want to organize my files on the ipod or my computer. Fortunately, I did turn off the auto-organize (or whatever they call it) feature before it started digging too much-I was also lucky most of my music was in shared folders so itunes hadn't found it yet. sigh....

For those who are still fans (fanatics?) of iTunes and all things Apple, I suggest reading this:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1910646,00.asp

Turns out that Apple has taken a page out of RealNetworks' playbook and, in the latest iTunes release, has started to quietly send back packets from iTunes clients back to Apple and Akamai servers upon playback of any locally stored content. Apparently, iTunes "phones home" as soon as you listen to content in your local library in "Ministore" mode. There are also questions about whether DRM authentication is performed through this mechanism?

Apple's comment is that it any personal information collected from iTunes users is discarded. Do you believe that? If you're an iTunes user, does this change your take about the product?

Is there a way to turn off the sending of data?

It says you can minimize the ministore window, and prevent the transmission of data (or play songs from a playlist). Still, I don't like it. Even Windows Media player allows you to disable this sort of thing. I find this to be very arrogant.

-David

This would be an incredible amount of data to store. Already the burden on systems just to handle the volume of music and video sales is imense. To add snooping to this would be crazy huge.

I'm skeptical.

*note: obviously I know nothing and am trying not to speculate. I will say that there are often initiatives to make it easier and more natural to purchase stuff, but I've never encountered such an initiative to do things that are invasive or to track where users have been. Apple's more keen on showing you what you want than in finding out what you want.

If anyone is paranoid about this, they can always use iTunes offline, or use their iPods for listening I guess. shrug. I'm not that paranoid. This just seems incredibly infeasible.

It might also be worthwhile to check the iTunes EULA. If snooping is going on, it would be mentioned there, I would imagine.

Yeah, you'd think they would mention it, wouldn't you... Sadly they seem to have forgotten to do so.

Accumulating this type of detail data is not uncommon. Many companies construct data warehouses to capture and persist this scale of data--there are already 50 terabyte commercial sector warehouses in existence. The value of this is the analytics/data mining abilities it affords internal analysts. The next time you visit a site like Amazon, think about what enables it to construct "custom" pages for you--that's an indication of the proliferation of this type of data storage and analysis.

Amazon has nowhere near the number of transactions that iTunes has.

Amazon builds custom pages (as does iTunes) based on purchases. From what I read in the article, the journalist is speculating that iTunes is collecting data for market analysis based on what music the user listens to. It's one thing to on the spot capture what music the user is listening to in order to provide reccommendations of similar content. That's not hard to do. But to store this data in order to analyze users' listening habits is another thing entirely. The volume is so big it can't be contained. I know there are ways to store it efficiently. But the scale would exceed those capabilities.

Anyway, I believe the company is much more interested in people buying more stuff and streamlining upsells/additional purchases/etc -- and in using resources to improve this -- rather than to monitor what people listen to. The investment that would need to be put in place to make this happen would not yield enough return to make spying on people worthwhile. OTOH, suggesting music similar to what you're listening to at the moment would be much more likely to have a direct, marked enhancement on sales and would require far fewer resources to put in place.

...not to mention that spying (on customers) is just not their style.

There are bigger fish to fry.

Kidding right?

On peak days Amazon ships between 1 and 2 MILLION packages. Plus Amazon processes a heck of a lot more data than the ITMS does. Really; storing this much information nowadays is peanuts. The "snooping" is done together with Akamai, who can easilly deal with the couple of million customers the store has.

Amazon is in a totally different league than the ITMS.

It is indeed peanuts. Consider Walmart's data warehouse, estimated by some to approach 500 terabytes. There, for example, the big-box titan analyzed what items appeared together on checkout lists and found a relationship between facial tissues and orange juice, thereafter positioning the two close in stores. To perform this type of mining requires massive amounts of transactional detail.

I would not be surprised if Apple used inventories of user's local contents to determine which content has legitimately DRM and which doesn't. Given its recent battles with the recording industry over pricing, this kind of knowledge could give it a bargaining chip..."Cut us a nickel off content cost and we'll consider sharing our strategic customer profiles."

There's a lot more than 1 - 2 million songs per day listened to on iTunes.
If all Amazon's transactions are purchases, and Itunes is supposedly tracking songs listened to by itunes users, I'd say swise is correct that the amount of data Apple would need to store is greater.

Of course, that's a false argument, since Amazon stores much more than purchases. Amazon also stores every item you look at on their website, as well as stuff customers review or rank. They do this, at least in part, for the same reason Apple is collecting this data. To generate recommendations and sell you more stuff.

While I would not refer to this volume of data as peanuts, it's certainly possible to store it all. You could even do it with pretty Apple machines, since Oracle is now available on OSX.

The whole DRM record industry argument made by Somewhere Over the Atlantic is, in my opinion, silly. A list of IP addresses that listened to non-DRM music isn't particularly useful. The more interesting data would be "people who listen to x also listen to y". That data's more useful to retailers (like Apple), then to record companies, though.

If you're worried about this, turn the ministore off. Then itunes stops sending data, except to do CD lookups at CDDB.