The MPAA took a break from pillorying 13 year olds to create an unauthorized (pirated) copy of a movie that had been submitted to the ratings board. Read about it at Google News. It is amazing to anyone with any sense that pissing off the people who are responsible for whether your product succeeds or not is really stupid, but the fucktards at the MPAA and RIAA can’t see that by pissing people off, they are shooting themselves. Personally, I haven’t bought a single “label†CD since 2000, and I haven’t felt the loss. I have a lot of music from indies, a lot from the iTMS, and a lot from my existing collection. At the rate the MPAA is going, 2006 might turn out to be the year I buy my last DVD as well. Be sure and click the MPAA link above so you can call them up and tell them, politely please, what hypocritical asshats they are and just what you think of them. Obviously, I won’t be calling myself as technically, ‘asshats’ would be considered, in some circles, to be impolite, and it seems to just pop out of my mouth anytime I am talking about the MPAA and the RIAA.
Amazon’s top-ten sellers list for computers list 8 Macintosh models in positions 1-8. A HP and a Sony laptop round out the top ten. The new Intel duel core machines are currently at #2-5 with the 12†iBook (a lovely bit of kit) at #1. NB: The provided link is live, so rankings may change from when I loaded it.
And now, the most delayed MacWorld recap for online publication. Everyone has by now heard about the new Apple Intel Macs, featuring top-of-the-line Intel dual-core chips. The iMac system is shipping now, and the laptop, named the Macbook Pro, will start shipping next month. The other big news is that Apple sold over 30 million iPods last year, and 14 million over the holiday quarter. New versions of iLife and iWork debuted (see iWeb entry), but the big news is Apple shipping Intel Macs 6 months early, and moving the entire product line to Intel before the end of the year. I expect, however, that the Xserves will remain G5 for some time. New versions of some apps will be required for the new machines, but most apps are either already “Universal†or will run just fine under Rosetta, OS X’s emulation framework. A lot of people are wondering about Windows bootability on the new machines. The new Macs use EFI instead of BIOS, so booting windows will require either a EFI version of Windows, or at least someone hacking up an Windows bootloader for EFI. Nothing has happened so far. Honestly, I expect an bootable Windows by the end of the month. In other Apple news, the iTMS should be hitting 1 Billion songs sold sometime in February.