Tim Lee has posted an excellent missive addressed to the record labels on the iTunes Music Store:

…every customer who buys your products from the iTunes Music Store becomes locked into Apple products. If that’s not changed, that will soon make Steve Jobs the most powerful man in your industry.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution: when you renew your contract, you should demand that Apple remove the digital rights management (DRM) technology from the iTunes Music Store.

I missed it last month when MySQL AB signed an agreeement with SCO. But it’s hard to miss the backlash now. SCO peed in the pool and it’s just not cool to hang out with them anymore. MySQL CEO Marten Mickos defends the deal in a Computer Business Review article from yesterday:

…Mickos maintained that MySQL’s track record in promoting open source and opposing the European technology patent directive should retain the community’s trust. “That’s a hundred times more influential than any deal with SCO could have been,” he said.

As seen recently on the Generator Blog (watch out for annoying popup ads) and Metafilter: ungreek.toolbot.com.

For years, designers have been using fake Latin gibberish known as greeking (or sometimes lorem ipsum, after the customary initial words) as a text placekeeper. It conveys the shape and “color” of text without the distraction of actual content.

Source options include the Esperantists’ Manifesto, Jane Eyre, the Tao Te Ching, the GNU Public License (in Swedish), Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida,” Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” Internet RFC 1630 by Tim Berners-Lee, and good old Lorem Ipsum.

For anyone who was ever enthusiastic about the Palm platform, the last few years have been challenging. In an article also commented on at Engadget and Slashdot, ZDNet columnist Michael Singer lays out his Five reasons for Palm’s slide. They are:

• Palm executives were slow to see the convergence of cellular phones and personal digital assistants
• Palm has had a hard time making its corporate customers happy
• The separation of Palm’s hardware and software units failed to boost Palm’s prospects
• Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky took their knack for innovation with them when they left in 1998 to start Handspring
• Palm had a costly product-planning snafu that stalled its fast-growing sales

The loss of Hawkins and Dubinsky is the biggest in my view. It was the most diluting of many events that have diluted Palm and its image over the years, from the early naming gaffes (Pilot, PalmPilot, Palm Connected Organizer…) to the proliferation of too-similar models (III, IIIx, IIIe, IIIxe…) to the PalmOne/PalmSource split.

I learned this today from an anonymous comment over at FA:OSX. If you want to download RealPlayer but would rather skip the registration and the attempts to distract you into buying the payware version, just go here:

http://www.real.com/freeplayer/?rppr=rnwk

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jima commented on Sat Oct 8 14:16:27 2005:

There’s also another version that the BBC had made exclusively for its radio listeners that doesn’t have all the spyware stuff that you get in the regular RealPlayer version. BoingBoing wrote it up last year, and it looks like the links are still good.