This is one of those posts to just keep a personal record of things that popup and are difficult to find answers to. As items are added, the date of this post will also be updated. Issues:
- CTRL + SHIFT + 0 (zero) not working under Vista & Windows 7. While it's not easy to find this answer; however, Microsoft did write KB967893 to address the issue.
This is mostly a reference for the next time that I need to rebuild my workstation, but one of the causes for this is a bug in the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 service pack. You need to run the service pack installation twice in order for it to correctly update all of the TFS client files. If you don't, you may see red "X"s on Reports and/or Documents.
Hey All,
48 hours later and we're back online. AT&T disconnected our DSL service, AGAIN! Fortunately, this time I was able to get new lines installed within 48 hours of the disconnect. Some lacky at AT&T didn't read his email, which lead to the disconnect. The good thing is that I got a free hardware (routers) upgrade to replace the semi-faulty hardware that they originally sold me. It will take a few days to configure the new hardware, but it shouldn't affect you as the site will only be offline for a couple minutes during the switch over. I took the time to reconfigure the network layout as well, and it appears that the new configuration is much more efficient (meaning that it took a few miliseconds off the latency).
Enjoy the site...
Hey Everyone,
It's been a while since I've blogged at all as there have been quite a few things going on lately. First off, the JawberDoo.com site is almost complete. The basic jawb searching is working and allows you to search by Jawb Industry, Jawb Category, Jawb Occupation,Jawb Requirements, and by the jawb location distance from a zip code. Something that Monster is not capable of, plus we don't have all the widgets that slow the site down to a crawl. After I rework some of the jawb provider pages and ensure that everything else is still working, we'll roll out the grand opening.
The major work of late has been for the BeHeard.com site. We are currently in talks with the news provider for the site to work out mutually beneficial options. If all goes well, we'll be providing a WCF 3.51 open source library to access the providers news API from a .NET application. In return, we are seeking a free subscription to their news services. We've already built the library, we just need to work out the details. The development of this site will be going full speed in the next couple of weeks.
Also, I have been neglecting the .NET Tweeks blog, which is going to change soon. Once things quiet down a bit, I'll have plenty of content for the blog. The first release of JawberDoo.com will be in production and it will be the basis for several posts. The work on BeHeard.com will contribute to posts on WCF, so there is quite a lot to blog about.
Take it easy,
Bill Bosacker
UPDATE 07/26/2009: Thanks to the comment posted by Gabe Sumners, this week of loss due to Umbraco was not in vein. Sitefinity is an AWESOME product. It only took about 5 hours to integrate the entire project with Sitefinity, and for about 1/5 ($899) the licensing cost of Umbraco ($4,300-$5,800).
Recently, a client of mine had been pushing the use of a CMS for his project, with Umbraco being his choice. The original plan was to wait about a year or two before switching over, but he had been rather persistent, so I told him that I'd look into it. About every 6 months I evaluate what is out there, but it had been a little longer than that for Umbraco as it was one of the absolute worst CMS's out there when I evaluated it 2 years ago. Now, it is no longer 100% XSLT based and the user side now partially supports the ASP.NET Membership System (what they call members).
I spent a couple days looking at the product and was pleasantly surprised to see how far it had come, but there are still a few quirks. The separation of back office users and application users (members) is not a very good security model. I discussed it in their forums with a few people and we all agreed that their current model does need some work. I provided them with an example of how to accomplish it with a single membership store, something that had never occurred to them. and they appeared to be rather interested in the idea, so everything was good. After fixing a few bugs in the installer that were related to their implementation of the membership system, I was able to get it to install.
The first order of business was to get the existing master pages, style sheets, and images into the system. Our master pages have custom code behinds, so we opted to create an empty Web Application Project (WAP) at the root of the site for our custom code. All of the binaries used and created by Umbraco, were added to the project's references. After adding the master pages to Umbraco, they were included in the project along with their code behind. This allowed us to build and test from a single location and works rather well. In order for it to work though, you need to ensure that the master pages are always writable/checked out. Otherwise, the Umbraco window will not act properly and you won't know why.
After a little bit of coding and moving things around, we were able to get the site running, though we hadn't updated the style sheet and image references yet. The current site uses the ASP.NET Theming System as there is a requirement to provide special themes for holidays and special events. We also used it because the skinning (.skin file) system makes it extremely easy to duplicate a look and feel for controls across the entire site. The style sheet references were rather straight forward as all style sheets exist in the ~/css/ folder, which is rather standard for basic web sites. Media is uploaded through the Umbraco window (see below) and made available through the ~/Media/ folder. It is placed in a sub-folder with the name of the node Id where the object is stored in the database, but there is nothing in the window that tells you how to reference the image.
So, I search the Umbraco forums to figure out how to reference these images. What I initially learn is that there is nothing built into Umbraco to help you access these media objects. There are several posts on the subject and the result of every one is that you must either write a custom XSLT script and create a macro, or use a 3rd party tool to reference the object. At this point I'm thinking, "Are you kidding me?" Why in the world would you have a media section at all, if there isn't an easy method to access the media that it contains. So, I create another post in the forums asking if what was previously posted is true. After 8 replies, everyone confirmed the information and said that I should not be using the Media section for background images.
They say that I should upload the images to an image folder via FTP and then use those images. They don't even consider the fact that businesses who have an SDLC and operate under CMMI or SOX requirements, do not allow anyone other than IT technicians to access production files or databases. These people obviously don't know how real world business works, or what a true CMS is, and Umbraco is starting to look like a DMS/CMS hybrid with a flashy UI. Additionally, every single reply is either a personal attack on me, or an attack on my development background of 30 years. At this point my client decided to drop Umbraco as he was extremely dissatisfied with the forum community, so I posted that the use of Umbraco had been dropped.
Then there is a reply from a very nice guy, Peter Dijksterhuis, who doesn't come up with the answer, but his question does give me an idea for a work-around. Thanks Peter. The work-around consisted of going to the media section, clicking on the object, right clicking on the thumbnail, selecting properties, copying the URL, pasting the URL, and then removing "_thumb" from the URL. A lot of clicks, but it does work. I posted this and then all hell broke loose, due to my prior post that we had decided to drop Umbraco. People start saying that I don't know how to use a CMS, that I shouldn't be allowing web designers to edit style sheets or master pages (their primary job), some one even thinks that I am "...a fictional character designed as flame bait for the other members of this forum..", and the bashing is pretty sad.
On top of this, their silly forum design allows users to give a thumbs up/down for each post/reply, which relates to Karma, and everyone immediately rates every single one of my posts with a thumbs down. While I do believe that this is the most ridiculous feature that I have ever seen in a forum, I am extremely glad that they have it. Why? On a social site this would create unrest and inevitably causes users to leave, which is the effect it is having on my client and myself. It has saved my client, and myself, from making a huge mistake that could have cost us thousands of dollars in wasted development time and software licensing. I would like to thank the Umbraco forum users for showing their true colors.
Lets see how many negative Karma votes this post gets...
On a good note, Telligent is under a lot of pressure to release Graffiti CMS 2.0, which hasn't been worked on since December 2008. While Telligent had originally decided against releasing it to the open source community, the serious drop of activity in their forums may force them to revisit this. Scott Watermasysk is supposed to post something very soon about the future of Graffiti as the What is the future of Graffiti? post by Rob Howard (ex-CEO of Telligent) is almost 4 months old now, and nothing has been done.
The latest .NET Tweeks post is now out and is the first of a multi-part series of Tweeks that developers can use in their everyday development of ASP.NET applications. This week it covers the PageBase idea and how to integrate it with master pages. Next week will cover an abstract method of accessing the business tier from a static class as opposed to directly accessing the business tier.
.NET Tweeks
Over the past few months it appears that a few of the DNSBLs that I had been using, decided to go offline. Hundreds of SPAM messages were getting through. Outlook picked up many of them, but it also has a lot of false positives, so I needed to go through each SPAM message to ensure that valid mail wasn't being flagged. This is a major PITA and completely makes the filtering useless. So today, I did a search for some new DNSBLs.
I already had bl.spamcop.net, which picks up quite a few, but when I added zen.spamhaus.org (the top rated list), the SPAM STOPPED! It was like night and day and I'm very happy thus far. We'll see how well it works over the next few days. I also added lists for Brazil (BR), China (CN), and Russia (RU) from countries.nerd.dk and country.georbl.info as they are the top 3 SPAM countries that I receive SPAM from.
My mail server logs which DNSBL the incoming connections are listed on, so I'll be monitoring them. So far, zen.spamhaus.org hasn't let anything pass that the country lists would pickup, so I'm a happy happy camper. If you've been seeing an increase in SPAM lately, you might want to check these out.
In my spare time I have been working on a new web site that I was hoping to have ready 4 weeks ago. With everything that has been going on, and some bugs that I have discovered in Visual Studio, the project is taking longer that expected. A friend of mine (Vertigo) has been eagerly awaiting the site, so I thought I'd let him and everyone else know that I'm working on it. If the site is successful, it will need to support at least 100,000 users/hour, which is why I'm making sure that everything is designed correctly and I have been talking with some site hosts. When it's ready, I'll post more about the site and it's mission statement.
We just turned on the switch (thankfully missing the red button - whew!) and BeHeard.com is ON-LINE!
The site currently in a public beta phase with blogs and forums while numerous expanded features will be added as they become available. Now you might be asking, "What the hell is BeHeard.com?" It is a non-partisan political forum that Brian Walters has been dreaming about for quite some time. To get the site out as fast as possible, we partnered together and brought the site on-line today.
I tend to stay away from politics and probably won't be all that active on the site, but I can assure you that Brian will be extremely active. He will most likely be very verbal, stirring things up as much as possible. If he gets out of hand, send me a message so that I can remind him that he needs to take a non-partisan stance to the subjects being presented. I encourage everyone to do this as well as he does like to debate. So, if you like to talk politics (one of the three taboos for most sites), then you are welcome to do it here.
The first two add-on features to the site will be the ability to perform a historical search for any legislative member or piece of legislation and for users to be able to create groups with a dedicated blog, forum, calendar, wiki and media center. The legislative database is huge and we are currently working out an efficient way to present the data to you. A typical piece of legislation is over 1MB of XML data, plus we have pictures and the complete resumes for every US legislator going back to the early 90s. Users will be able to place links in their posts that take you directly to a section in the legislative database. This will force users to reference their facts or get flamed to HELL!
Again, this is in a beta stage, with debug code, so you might run into bugs from time to time, but we encourage everyone to check it out and talk about your political opinions on the issues. If you come across a bug, or think of a feature that would be great for the site, write a post in the Site Feedback forum.
ENJOY!!!
I'm sure that you've all seen the latest Apple commercial that has been running for a few weeks, where you see legalese scrolling up the screen, but did you realize that the legalese is for Apple? It's an Apple commercial with Apple making statements, so the legalese is for Apple not Microsoft. I luv the commercials and my iPod, but I am a PC and I think that Apple shot itself in the foot with this one.
As most people know, IE8 was written to be as compliant with the W3C standards as possible, which means that existing sites may not work properly when view from IE8 in Standards mode. All of the Server-side asp controls appear to be compliant with the exception of the asp:Menu control. Microsoft has published the article FIX: The pop-out menus are not displayed when you use Internet Explorer 8.0 in Standards mode to view an ASP.NET Web page that has dynamic menus that links to 2 different hotfixes depending upon which OS you are serving from. To read the full article from the IE8 dev team, go to:
asp:menu fix for IE8 problem available
While discussing a new project today, one thing that came up was the behemoth of an application that Community Server has become and the idea that we don't want Sueetie to go in that same direction. A few years ago, you could say WAP and no one would know what the hell you are talking about. Today, if anyone doesn't know what WAP is, you can write them off as a developer who doesn't know what he's talking about. However, very few people know that you can break up a WAP into several sub-projects. You can also add .aspx pages to a library class, but that's a topic for another time. If you want to know more about WAP and sub-projects, here are some links for you:
I provided the sub-items as an easy way to see the actual posts that ScottGu is referring to.
Yep, that's right. Over the past 2 years, Apple has been working very hard with the music labels and artists to convert all of its media to iTunesPlus (256Kbps AAC encoded & DRM free), and today they turned off the DRM switch. I wrote It's time for an iTunes Boycott of DRM music labels back in January, and the content from those music labels and/or artists has been removed. The latest info about iTunes can be found here:
What's New
A few tracks are $1.29, but the vast majority of the music is still $0.99. I have noticed that some of the tracks that previously were not available as singles (i.e. required the purchase of the entire album), are now available at the $1.29 price while the rest of the tracks are still $0.99. The good thing is that the album prices don't seem to have changed, and you still get full credit for all portions of the album that you have purchased (including iTunesPlus upgrades) when it comes to Complete My Album.
Now if I could only find an easy way to post my iTunes Playlists on a web site, I'd be set. BTW, for those who are not aware, all of the portable media in the iTunes Store can now be played on ANY portable device. So whether you iPod, iPhone, iTouch, Generic MP3 play, or even Zune, you can use iTunes. The only down side at this point is that iTunes can't directly download to a non-Apple device, so you'll need to use the software for your portable player to do the transfers, but who knows, that may change. 
Apparently, IE8 was released on March 11, 2009 and is available for download at:
Internet Explorer 8: Home page
I've only been playing with it for a few minutes, but it does seem to be a little faster than IE7. There is a new Tab Grouping feature (turned on by default) which appears to give tabs that have children tabs, and the children tabs themselves, a background color to define them as a group. Tabs that are not part of a group, or are the last remaining tab of a group, have the normal Windows colors until a child tab is created. At first it looks a little funky, but I'm going to leave it on for a while and see if I like it.
If you have run into any troubles, or just have something to say about IE8, please post a comment here. The download was only about 12MB for the 32 bit version, and 24MB for the 64 bit version (which obviously contains the 32 bit version as well).
WARNING: YOU MAY WANT TO CHECK FOR CHILDREN IN THE ROOM BEFORE VIEWING
Here is link to the latest advertisement for Sony's new BLOCKBUSTER!
A couple weeks ago I did some research to see if I could save money by switching to AT&T U-verse service for Internet and TV service. The difference between U-verse and DSL is that DSL combines the POTS and DSL signals at the frame (local office), while U-verse uses the fiber optic cables in the street which it converts to 2-wire copper at the street junction box nearest to you. This means that there is no distance limitation for U-verse your area just needs to be wired with fiber optic cables.
So, on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009, they came out to install the service after being assured that:
- If I did not like the service I would be able to switch back to my old service (POTS with DSL).
- The TV service would not have any impact on my Internet service.
- My DSL service would be available until I decide to disconnect service.
In actuality, none of the above was true. 30 minutes before the installation tech called, my residential DSL service was disconnected. When he called, he said that it is not possible to have both DSL and U-verse service at the same address, but I later learned that there is no logical reasoning for this as I have 4 CAT-5 wire pairs wired in the building and U-verse only requires 2 wires. I did find that once an address is labeled with U-verse service, everything at that address becomes U-verse or dies. The later being the nightmare.
Prior to this, I had two POTS lines with DSL, one residential and one business. The U-verse service was supposed to be a completely separate and new residential account for Internet and TV service only. Since I was not moving my residential POTS line to U-verse, there should not have been any link between the two, but that is not the way that it was installed. The tech disconnected the DSL at the frame and added the U-verse carrier to my POTS line at the street. This was the beginning of the end.
I told the tech what I had been told and he said that I was incorrectly informed. He said that there is no way to have both DSL and U-verse service at the same address, even though my business DSL line was still working (keyword: was). Since I had no options at this point, I decided to go ahead and convert all of my Internet access over to U-verse ASAP, something that I didn't want to do until I was able to fully test the service.
I spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday trying to setup the 3800HGV-B 2-Wire Gateway to work with my network. Getting outbound connections to work was not really that difficult, but getting inbound connections to work was a completely different matter. Late Wednesday afternoon I called 2-Wire support to find out why the gateway was not allowing inbound server connections. The inbound status section of the gateway had "KILL_<protocol>" item for each server protocol (i.e. DNS, SMTP, POP, etc.), but there wasn't any visible option to remove them.
The guy at 2-Wire told me that they only sell their products to ISPs, who modify the firmware to match their network. A long story short, AT&T screwed up the firmware and blocked all of the server protocols to the DMZ bypass host, which is supposed to bypass the firewall. If you use the gateway's DHCP server to manage IP addresses you have the option to disable firewall intervention for each DHCP client, but Internet servers are usually multi-homed (have multiple IP addresses) and cannot use DHCP. Until this issue is fixed, it is not possible to run servers behind the gateway.
Now on to the TV service. When I first tried it, I thought that it was awesome as it changed channels in less than 1/10th of a second. The HDMI service appeared to be locked into 96Khz digital audio and I didn't get a chance to test if it was true surround sound. The set-top box for TV service is Compact Windows based and looks pretty good. The tech told me that the TV service may impact the Internet service as the total download pipe is 25Mbps, each HD channel requires 7.5 Mbps (max of 2), and my Internet connection was supposed to be an 18Mbps down/1.5Mbps up connection. Do the math.
So, I setup the DVR to record the shows that I watch, all of which are HD. At 8pm on Tuesday, a notice appears on the TV, as the screen goes black. It basically says that I can't watch another HD channel while 2 HD channels are being recorded. The wording is different, but it's no different than how DirecTV works, so I'm thinking that I'll watch one of the channels being recorded. Nope, can't do that....black screen. OK, lets try playing the recording that is currently being recorded. Nope, can't do that either....black screen. Maybe another show that was recorded earlier? Nope, can't do that either....black screen.
I didn't try watching an SD show as SD shows look like crap on a 46" HDTV. It's like watching TV through coke-bottle glasses when you don't need glasses. TV service was out. Internet service was out. So, on Thursday morning I called to cancel service and have my old service restored. Before I tell you how that went, I need to back track a little bit to Wednesday morning.
When I came into the office on Wednesday morning I noticed that my business DSL service was down, but the POTS line was working. I called AT&T support and was immediately routed to AT&T U-verse support. No matter how hard I tried, it was not possible to reach DSL repair directly. As I alluded earlier, once your address is flagged as having U-verse, all services become U-verse. If a service is not a part of U-verse (i.e. DSL) it gets disconnected. So, my business which has the same address as my residence, is now flagged as U-verse. Since DSL is not a part of U-verse, a disconnect order was sent for my DSL service. And since my POTS line is tied to the DSL service, the POTS line had a pending disconnect order as well.
All-in-all, I spent well over 16 hours on the phone trying to get this fixed, but nothing could be done. Once an order is processed, none of the subsequent orders can be stopped. You can try, but all it does is slow down the inevitable as the system physically destroys and releases services. On Thursday, March 19th, 2009, I placed an order for new service while they were still trying to see if anything could be done to end the cascading destruction. I was originally given a March 25th installation date for the new services, then a late afternoon on the 24th date. On Monday morning (the 23rd) I received a call at 9am from a tech who was originally sceduled to fix now broken lines, who said that he would be able to complete the new installation while he works on the repair.
Once the new lines were functional I told him to cancel the repair service as the old IP addresses could no longer be recovered, and I was informed that the repair could not be completed. A new order would need to be placed to get them working. From about 1998 to 2001, this used to be how Pacific Bell (now DBA AT&T) normally did it's business. I had similar experiences back then when they would randomly disconnect service and change the address on my account every 2 weeks. It took me 8 months to get some one to look into why the address on my account was changing, and an entire year to find out that some one had put my DSL number on an Excel spreadsheet of numbers that were to be disconnected.
You would think that AT&T, the largest telco in the world, wouldn't keep repeating the same mistakes over and over, but they do. From previous experience, it typically takes 2-3 years for them to work out all of the kinks in new services and I doubt that U-verse will be any different. Since they weren't even aware of the issues that I discovered over the 2 days that I had service, I doubt that they will be fixed and sooner, which is really sad. Anywho, I just wanted to let everyone know why I had completely disappeared from the face of the Internet for 7 days, and hopefully prevent this from happening to anyone else.
Take it easy,
Bill
After reporting an issue with Adobe Reader 9.0 not working on a fresh install of Windows Vista, I've been waiting for a fix from Adobe. I checked back today and it appears that it was good news that I wasn't able to use the Reader as there is a bug in it that affects all versions prior to 9.1, which was released yesterday. Here is the official post from Adobe:
Security Updates available for Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9
If you have experienced any browser or Adobe Reader crashes while viewing a PDF on the web, especially on any sites that you don't absolutely trust, you may want to perform a complete virus scan of your system(s). This issue goes back to at least version 7, which means that it has been around for years and may have been exploited for just as long.
P.S. Version 9.1 does install correctly and does not crash when opened on fresh installs of Windows Vista.
Who is going to head to their nearest gaming/electronics store on this day and pick up what may be the highest selling console game of all time? Sorry Wii peeps, they are still considering whether or not to come out with a version for you.
I'm a PS3 and proud of it! 
UPDATE 03/30/2009: The slow network issues came back and progressively became so bad that I was experiencing permanent data loss due to connections timing out. I rebuilt the server last weekend w/o Hyper-V and everything is functioning normally. I came across another post about this issue which refers to the Using Registry Values to Enable and Disable Task Offloading MSDN Library article. Once I'm sure that everything is fine I'll perform a full backup of the system partition and give Hyper-V another try with this new information.
I've been using and/or testing Microsoft's Virtual Server technology (the current version is dubbed Hyper-V) for several years, as I was on the technical beta team. The very first stable version was Virtual Server 2005 R2 with patches that later became available around October/November of 2006. Prior to that the host operating system could lockup or the network connectivity of the virtual instances could completely fail, but once it was working it was a great way to create a virtual DMZ.
Today is the first time that I had a chance to try Hyper-V, as it does not work on any machine with an older processor. Pretty much any system with a processor purchased prior to 2007 is out, and even some of the processors from 2007 won't work. The processor must be a 64 bit processor, and it must support both Hardware Data Execution Protection (DEP) and Hardware Virtualization. All new processors have this support. Gibson Research Corporation offers a free application to test your machine named SecurAble.
If your machine passes the test, you are in for a real treat. Hyper-V is several times better than Virtual Server ever was, but it does have one carry over issue from previous versions that got missed. The issue not only affects virtual machines like the original issue in Virtual Server did, it also affects the host operating system; however, there is a work-around. On the host operating system, you need to Disable all of the TCP Large Send Offload properties of all the virtual network adapters in the Device Manager. If you don't disable this property, all large TCP transactions will burst at an incredibly slow rate (i.e. 1KB/sec).
Fortunately for me, I found the Very slow network performance with Intel NIC when TCP Large Send Offload is enabled post in Microsoft's TechNet forums which discusses the issue. This will most likely be fixed down the road, but this adresses the issue and stops the burst transaction bottleneck. I've only been using it for a couple hours, but I immediately observed a tremendous performance increase when I moved my virtual TFS instance from a host machine running Virtual Server 2005 R2 to a host machine running Hyper-V with 1/3 the resources.
Man, this is one thing that had me going for a while. If you have instances setup to run under a specific user account (i.e. to auto-start on power up), you need to ensure that the user accounts have the proper permissions for all of the virtual files that is uses. This is nothing new and the web interface takes care of the virtual machine file permissions for you, but it doesn't manage the permissions for the virtual network adapters. If your virtual network adapter files are in a different folder, as they should be, this can be a problem as the virtual machine may not be able to read the files.
While tightening up security on my servers, I removed the Users group from the root folder that holds all of the virtual files. The next time that I rebooted one of the virtual machines, all of the network connections on that virtual machine reported "Network cable unplugged". To fix the issue, I gave each of the user accounts that the virtual instances are running under, Read & execute permission to the folder that contains the virtual network adapter files and rebooted the virtual machines. You will also want to ensure that the Network Service account has Modify permissions in order for the web interface to function properly as well.
Hey Guys,
Last week I discovered a bug in Windows after restoring my workstation from a backup and then logging into that workstation for the first time. The issue can occur on any system that is using folder redirection where the physical storage location has not changed, but the URI has. Windows is supposed to break down all URIs to their physical machine and location on that machine, but it appears that the folder redirection logic is bugged and may think that the locations are different.
When this happens and the group policy is setup to move the files from the old location to the new location, the move process deletes the files permanently with no chance of recovery. The move process uses XCOPY, which does a copy and then a delete when the file is not on the same file system. The problem is that the copy copies the file on top of itself as the file storage location hasn't changed, and then it deletes the file for the same reason.
I implemented DFS about 3 months ago and the backup that I restored from was made 6 months ago. Since I was using plain old UNC network shares at the time of the backup the URIs used for folder redirection were different than those that are currently being used with DFS. Microsoft is looking into the issue as this should not be possible. There were 2 failures that allowed it to happen, the failure of the folder redirection logic to recognize that the URIs refer to the same physical storage location and the failure of the XCOPY command to do the same.
Take it easy,
Bill
Changes Coming to the iTunes Store is the title of a recent announcement by Apple. As of the first of this year a major portion of the DRM only tracks on iTunes have been made available as iTunesPlus downloads, which is the 256kb/s DRM free version. Steve Jobs has been working toward a DRM free service for quite a while and it appears that he's actually started to pull it off. The four major music labels (Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI), along with thousands of independent labels, have all signed up for iTunesPlus.
This is great news for customers and for people who don't have or can't afford iPods, as iTunesPlus downloads can be played by any MP3 player. A few years back France decreed that all services that provide music to French citizens must ensure that the music can be played by any device that the user wishes to use. Shortly after that iTunesPlus was born and has slowly been gaining speed over the years until the explosion that occurred in the past couple of weeks.
By now you have probably guess what the boycott that I am proposing entails. It is time to let the remainder of the industry know that we want iTunesPlus type tracks and not the DRM tracks that some of the music labels are still enforcing. If you don't see the iTunesPlus symbol next to a track that you are interested in, don't buy it. Instead, send an email to the music label and let them know that you are boycotting their DRM only tracks in favor of DRM free tracks.
Let the boycott begin...
P.S. On a side note, I give my best wishes to Jobs with hopes that he fully recovers from his current medical issues. The CD saved the record industry in the 80s, and Jobs saved the industry this decade. By making individual tracks available for a reasonable price, he has allowed people like you and I to send the record industry the message, "Placing only 2 or 3 goods songs on an album along with 7 or more crappy songs is not acceptable and will no longer be tolerated."
P.P.S Also, I in no way condone piracy. There is no difference between a pirate and a shoplifter. If you illegally obtain any copyrighted material, you deserve everything that the legal system brings to bare. That is all that I will say on this topic.
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