{"id":690,"date":"2006-10-07T16:41:49","date_gmt":"2006-10-07T21:41:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=690"},"modified":"2008-06-11T14:57:49","modified_gmt":"2008-06-11T19:57:49","slug":"arrogant-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=690","title":{"rendered":"Arrogant Software"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rabid Paladin has a rant on Arrogant Software<\/a>. He mentions Adobe Acrobat, which I have picked on in the past<\/a>. He also singles out Realplayer and iTunes as a couple of particularly onerous offenders.<\/p>\n

It’s been almost a decade since I let Realplayer set foot on my computer. Occasionally I’m compelled to help a friend fix their screwy computer and I’ll see the Realplayer icon in the system tray. I still recoil at the sight of the thing, as if it was a flaming pentagram icon or Carrot Top. <\/p>\n

My own experience with iTunes:<\/p>\n

A while back Pepsi had a promotion where about half of their 12oz drinks had a “free song from iTunes”. This is what actually prompted me to download iTunes in the first place. I snagged a couple of songs. I liked the way you could browse, preview, and download songs. I redeemed a couple of these free songs before I noticed the catch: The songs come in iTunes-only format. Then I remembered a bunch of ranting on Slashdot about DRM when the iTunes service first opened and I realized this is what I was looking at. I didn’t care so much about the copy protection, but I didn’t like the fact that in order to play my songs I had to use their<\/em> player. (Yeah, I know, that’s how it works, blah blah. I could care less.) Nobody could ever get away with selling cassette tapes that would only play on a Sony tape player, but iTunes is doing exactly that with digital music. Yech.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t about to give up my beloved mp3 player of choice to use the bloated and slow-loading iTunes. The shopping interface was perfect, but the player<\/em> interface was about as useful as a twenty-pound salad fork. I also wasn’t a fan of how iTunes tried to abstract my MP3’s into “collections” or whatever. I already<\/em> have them carefully organized and labeled – the last thing I need is a program that tries to impose some other<\/em> organizational system on top<\/em> of that. <\/p>\n

I suppose in some abstract way I still “own” the songs I downloaded, but I have no way of playing them. If I sold someone a television and then told them it would stay at my house and they could come over and watch their television anytime they wanted, I don’t think they would feel like they owned the TV. I don’t feel like I own these songs.<\/i><\/p>\n

So yeah: iTunes is a jerk of a program, although unlike the other two it is partly so by design. <\/p>\n

Hat Tip: The Rampant Coyote<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rabid Paladin has a rant on Arrogant Software. He mentions Adobe Acrobat, which I have picked on in the past. He also singles out Realplayer and iTunes as a couple of particularly onerous offenders. It’s been almost a decade since I let Realplayer set foot on my computer. Occasionally I’m compelled to help a friend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[94],"class_list":["post-690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links","tag-acrobat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}