Friday, October 06, 2006

Teaching teachers Ipods are evil

defective by design
UPDATED:
Recently I helped (or rather explained that DRM, Ipods, Itunes and Apple were evil while someone else who knew what they were doing helped) a physics teacher get music from one computer onto her laptop without deleting all the music she already had on it. This was done by plugging the ipod in, choosing not to let itunes synchronise it (and delete everything that the computer did not have) and then going onto options and secleting manage things manualy. This means that all the music you want to transfer accross has to be dragged and dropped (in the larger selections the better) rather than happening automaticaly. but it does beat the DRM.
In a recent survey reported by the BBC (cannot be bothered to find the link) it showed that people who use the internet lots were significantly less likely to have an ipod than the rest of the population - the reason given was that there is a limited choice of stores for online music for ipods. No the real reason is that people on the internet are more likely to know that ipods (and DRM) are evil.

There is a whole campaign - called Defective by design (ipods are defective by design) (ooky picture.

Glossary
DRM means DynamicDigital Rights Management and is where evil companies prevent you from being able to copy music onto devices etc and impose limitations on it through their evil software.(thank you Zzorn for the correction - others see comment)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A reason might also be that people who use the internet will use it to research music players before buying them - and in general the IPOD is beaten in serious tests and expert opinions by players in similar price and feature ranges when it comes to sound quality and ergonomics. And DRM is a factor too, it decreases the versatility and usability of the player.

I didn't know the syncronization in IPOD was that broken, though. Another reason to avoid it.

--zzrn

Anonymous said...

Btw, DRM stands for Digital Rights Mangagement or Digital Restrictions Management, depending on how you want to spin it. Nothing particularily dynamic about it. :-)

--zzrn