Thoughts on Unity

This is just a short post. I have finally had a chance to try out Ubuntu's Unity Desktop. In short, it appears to be an attempt to mimac macs. There is a dock along the side which functions pretty well with basic drag and drop functionality. Although I would like a little bit more customizability, such as controlling when it is visible and maybe put special applets on it. Also, the if a program is maximized its menu bar combines with the task-bar. Which is kind of cool, but is inconstant with non-maximized windows, and isn't obvious since the menus are hidden unless the mouse is hovering over them.

As for the Ubuntu symbol in the left top corner, clickin on it gives you something akin to Kickoff in KDE4, where you have an entry box where you can type the name of an application or folder and it will show results which you can select to run. It also lists favorites, and shortcuts to menus for other apps. The downside is that if browsing through you applications is a bit tedious with the mouse, however it gives you hints about uninstalled programs you might like, which I think is pretty cool.

Overall, I am pretty impresssed by Unity, but I still like KDE 4 better. And Enlightenment for when I want something a little simpler.

Apple, iTunes, and DRM

First of all, as a Linux user, I am rather annoyed by the fact that you need to use iTunes in order to purchase anything from the iTunes store. Then again, it doesn't matter all that much, since DRM makes it impossible to play anyways.

DRM for those of you that don't know is "Digital Rights Management," or as some more correctly call it "Digitla Restrictions Management." It is the use of technology to restrict the ways that users can use copyrighted material, and is supposedly intended to combat Piracy, though in reality I think the restrictions it places on users, only makes piracy more popular and illegally downloaded materials more attractive than legal downloads. http://www.slate.com/id/2298871/pagenum/all/gives a very good discussion of the issue.

Anyway, my family recently purchased the Third Season of Merlin (from BBC) in my absense via iTunes without fully understanding the limitations of DRM. Then we discovered just how crippling DRM is. First of all, we can't burn the videos onto a DVD that is playable by our DVD player, which would make it impossible for most people to watch the movies on their TVs. Fortunately we have a (older) computer hooked up to our TV, but that only partly solved the problem. The videos are in the .m4v format, and are encrypted which means that the only program that can play it is iTunes. This would be a little annoying in and of itself (I would prefer to play it with VLC), but it is even worse becuas playing movies (at least these TV episodes) is very glitchy on iTunes, with frames constantly freezing, the audio misaligning with the video, and worst of all, about once every 10 minutes iTunes crashes, and it takes about 5 minutes to stop the not responding iTunes program and start it again. To be fair, I was playing off of a data DVD which might possibly be damagged, and iTunes was unable to copy the files to the hard drive, (another failing for iTunes).

Ok, so I looked around and tried to figure out if there was a way to remove the DRM from the files so I could actually watch the content we purchased. And there was, unfortunately it involved playing the content, and recording it. Well, if iTunes crashes whenever I try to play it I can't really record it again, can I?

So, Apple is not going to get any business from me anytime soon, and never if they don't start offering products that are more interoperable with products provided by companies other than Apple. And I am going to avoid DRM as much as possible, which might mean that I will be sticking to DVDs and hard copies until the Movie Industry realizes that DRM is restricting their profits and making consumers unhappy. The music industry figured that out eventually, I just hope that the movie industyr figures it out faster. And I would really like Congress to repeal the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which is in contradiction with the Fair Use Act anyway.

By the way, if anyone knows of a way to legally obtain movies that are playable on Linux besides ripping DVDs, or to remove the DRM of iTunes movies, please let me know.