Slashback: ITunes, Debian, ATMs

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including: iTunes 7.0, Wal-Mart threatens studios over iTunes sales, debate over a proposal to fund Debian, and Googling for ATM master passwords. Read on for details.

Apple Announces iTunes 7, Movies, Set-Top Box. This evening Apple released iTunes 7.0.1, which "addresses stability and performance issues with Cover Flow, CD importing, iPod syncing, and more." iTunes users, especially those on Windows, have been complaining loudly about iTunes 7.0 since its release.

Wal-Mart threatens studios over iTunes sales. camperslo writes, "Playlist reported that Walt Disney President and CEO Robert Iger said that 125,000 downloadable movies had been purchased in the week since Apple's debut of movies on the iTunes Store. That sales level generated $1 million in revenue for Disney, which works out to $8 per movie. They also state that 'Iger told attendees of an investment conference in New York on Tuesday that Disney anticipates seeing about $50 million in revenue from the venture during its first year.'"

Proposal to fund Debian sparks debate. lisah writes, "Debian Project Leader Anthony Towns is now facing a recall vote over his involvement with Dunc-Tank, something Towns himself is willing to explore. Not everyone agrees that such a move is necessary, or even acceptable, and fur is beginning to fly as one community member asks, 'So, just to be clear, you want to punish a Debian developer for their activities outside of Debian? Now that we're in crazy-as-batshit land, who do you want to bring up on charges next?'"

Googling for ATM master passwords. bagsc writes, "Kevin Poulsen of Wired.com strikes fear into another ATM manufacturer. This time, Triton ATMs had their super-secret master codes revealed by simple Google searches. Tranax was the most recent company with this problem, but probably not the last."

Just Write Code

[QuantumG]

What a bunch of political bullshit. For fuck sake people, it's a Linux distribution, not the United Nations. During the many years I spent at the University of Queensland [uq.edu.au] I ran into Anthony Towns a bunch of times. Back then he was a fun loving geek, and I doubt much has changed. We both attended HUMBUG [humbug.org.au] semi-regularly, and had a few laughs. The politics at HUMBUG were annoying too. For a bunch of geeks sitting in a lecture theatre playing around with Linux and ignoring whoever was giving a "presentation" that month, there was a heck of a lot bureaucracy, what with voting held annually for president, vice-president, treasurer, secretary and librarian. There's such a thing as too much organisation. Especially when people lose sight of the big picture and get bogged down in administrivity.

Not really.

[Virak]

The point of Slashback is to post a bunch of updates to recent stories that aren't worth an article on their own, not to post the EXACT SAME STORY TWICE.

No information about WalMart

[Dynedain]

Wal-Mart threatens studios over iTunes sales. camperslo writes, "Playlist reported that Walt Disney President and CEO Robert Iger said that 125,000 downloadable movies had been purchased in the week since Apple's debut of movies on the iTunes Store. That sales level generated $1 million in revenue for Disney, which works out to $8 per movie. They also state that 'Iger told attendees of an investment conference in New York on Tuesday that Disney anticipates seeing about $50 million in revenue from the venture during its first year.'"

Where in that article or the associated links is anything regarding WalMart threatening lawsuits? C'mon editors...

Re:iTunes

[Millenniumman]

First, I'll pretend your extremely exaggerated Godwin-esque analogy was less so.

So you're saying that using a free program that can be used to buy DRMed music is evil, because DRMed music is evil? Well, I'm sure you'll agree that hacking into other people's computers is bad. And yet, you use a computer. And a computer can be used to hack into a computer.

Re:$8 a movie? What a RIP

[7Prime]

Wait, what the hell kind of standard is 640x480? NTSC is 720x480. Why would they change the resolution?

ATM Passwords

[-1-Lone_Eagle]

Is it just me, or am I the only one that doesn't feel sorry for the companies that own and operate these machines. How can you be so lacking in security to not assign each machine it's own individual password. Yes, tedious, Yes, service nightmare. But these machines handle CASH. Isn't it akin to setting up a network where each user isn't forced to change thier password? Be lazy and lose.

Re:iTunes7 on Multi-User XP trashed my libraries

[jesboat]

You said, "it had trouble coping with the concept that there were multiple users on the machine, kept separate music libraries for root and me". Not to be rude, but are you serious?

You say that the expected behavior would be for iTunes to keep the same music library for two distinct users on the system. The whole point of having a multi-user system is so that different users have distinct settings and documents. iTunes behaved perfectly correctly, and, if it had done anything else, it would have been buggy.

You use two user accounts on your system to get privilege separation, and that's fine. Then, because you want the two accounts to share data (not the typical multi-user paradigm), you use trickery to get it to work, and that's fine too. What you shouldn't do is complain when software breaks it.

640 x 480 == iPod Support

[@madeus]

Wait, what the hell kind of standard is 640x480? NTSC is 720x480. Why would they change the resolution?

The change has likely happened as by now both Apple and content owners are relatively happy with the distribution system and both are willing to make videos available at a higher resolution. Putting lower quality more 'disposable' content online (in the form of TV series at QVGA) lowered the risk from the PoV of content owners, but now the system is seen to be 'proven' (popular opinion being that the low resolution of the initially available content being at the bequest of the content owners, with Apple acquiescing to get them on board).

640x480 is of course VGA, and it's 4:3 resolution, as was QVGA, the previous distribution format (NTSC 720 x 480 is also 4:3, but that's because it relies on pixels that are not square). They could have used NTSC with square pixels, but the maximum MPEG4 video resolution on the Broadcom chip in the video iPod can rescale on the fly is 640x480 - I would bet that is why they went with it.

I'm a bit confused though, because I had thought all video content from the iTMS was in H.264 (not MPEG4) and I thought the iPod could only handle playback of H.264 at up to at QVGA size - I guess it's all MPEG4 then?

If the iPod's video chip supported a higher resolution (like NTSC/PAL DVD quality) I expect they would have bumped up the quality slightly. It's a shame it's not actually DVD quality (especially at a time when people are now looking for HD content), but at 640x480 is at least a reasonable size (for comparison, it's better than SVCD, which I've always thought was quite watchable).

Re:Just Write Code

[Russ Nelson]

I like the t-shirt that Jesse Vincent was distributing at OSCON. It reads:

        "Shut the fuck up and write some code."

Re:iTunes7 on Multi-User XP trashed my libraries

[billstewart]

Of course I'm serious, otherwise I wouldn't have been bitching about it on Slashdot :-)

ITunes should have given me a choice about setting it up for shared use or non-shared. Especially for a "personal computer", it's typical to expect that multiple users will want to share resources, and on a machine and an application program targeted towards consumer entertainment you'd also expect that. (That doesn't mean that I expect it to also force the same playlists onto each iPod - it seems to do a good job of keeping track of multiple iPods.)
If the system didn't insist on having a user with Administrator privileges install it, that'd be different.

I didn't use "trickery" to get it to combine the two accounts - I poked around in the menus until I found where it kept the directory information, and it lets you change it. It was annoyingly well hidden, given that music and especially video podcasts are large enough that many users might want to keep them on some drive other than the default C:.

Breaking user preference settings during an upgrade is a real annoyance - most other software, even Mozilla, has finally caught up with the idea that you might want to do a software version upgrade without forgetting all your settings, or at least the idea that if you're *going* to trash all their settings, you should give an "Are you sure?" choice. iTunes didn't actually forget all my settings - it just forgot some of them. It kept the database of information about the tunes I had - it just lost track of where they were stored, including the tunes I'd downloaded from the iTunes Store. Broken, broken, annoying, and not what I'd expect from Apple.

I went back to iTunes 6.0.5

[gelfling]

7 had performance problems including running over 90% CPU just sitting there doing nothing, not even playing a track. A couple of things to note:

Apple needs to do a better of job of documenting versions, e.g. what's different or fixed. This is particular relevant with iPod code. Usually every new version is called "Bug fixes". Ok, what bugs? What's fixed?

Apple needs to do a better job with backwards compatibility or provide a rollback. Going from iTunes 7 to 6 requires you to delete the library and start over. So if the code recognizes that the library is a newer version it should be able to create an older version.