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People who’ve read my list of annoyances regarding iTunes and the iPod Touch may be wondering why the hell I still own a Touch - if I dislike it so much, why not get something else?

More on Things I like about the iPod Touch

#13: No way of checking how much space the apps take. Sure, I can check how much the apps themselves use - but not, of course, sort them by size or anything like that - in iTunes, but I can’t see, for instance, how much space my offline Spotify songs take, or if I should begin trimming my comicbook collection.

More on iPod/iTunes annoyances pt.4 - Again.

As you might’ve gathered from the last few weeks of more or less constant nagging and bitching, I’ve recently gotten an iPod Touch. Despite a number of complaints, it’s still, I fear, better than any of the alternatives, at least for now.

More on No iPhone for me…

…is still the original X-box. Not because of its admittedly mediocre game library, but because of its flexibility.

It can’t have escaped anyone’s attention that I’m kind of a geeky kind of guy. I like fiddling with things. I like taking things apart, see how they work, make my own little contribution, and then put them together again. And so the X-box was more or less made for people like me.

More on My favorite console…

#12: No power profiles. This is a small one, but annoying. When my iPod Touch is connected, as in recieving power from somewhere, I’d like it to stay on and un-autolocked. When it’s not, I’d like the autolock to kick in after about a minute. Laptops and netbooks usually have “power management profiles” of some sort. Why not the Touch?

Told you it was a small one.

Äntligen finns mitt första tryckfärdiga skötebarn att köpa. Spelet heter Evolutionens Barn, och är ett semberättarrollspel som kombinerar dystopier a’ Du sköna nya värld och Venus är Vår med actionanime a’ Ghost in the Shell och Bubblegum Crisis.

Äh, gå till spelets hemsida istället.

Och sen tar du och köper spelet. Kom igen, det kostar inte mycket. Betala efter samvete och plånbok.

Evolutionens Barn är dessutom släppt via Creative Commons Erkännandelicens, vilket i korthet betyder att man får ladda hem, modifiera, sprida, sälja, skapa fanmaterial etc helt fritt. Allt jag kräver är attribueringsrätten, dvs att du måste skriva nånstans vem som ligger bakom verket från början. Tror du att du kan trycka upp EB och gå med vinst - gör det! Gör vad du vill! Kultur ska vara fri.

#10. No shared file area, no file system access. Seriously, Apple, wtf? I know you want us to believe noone needs to access or use the computer’s actual file system anymore, instead you want us to rely on indexing and tagging, and flat motherfucking file structures. Like your hog, Itunes.

Anyways, I’m not ready to go back to your “golden days” of the Macintosh File System. Just so you get what I’m trying to say here, the MFS was Apple’s first file system, used in early Mac OS. It was non-hierarchal, or rather, it supported exactly one level of folders. This is how they want us to treat our computers in 2009: By crippling them, going back to 1984 - which, you know, is kind of fitting given that year’s political connotations. Combined with #5 (No Multitasking), which of course was a stand-out feature of good old Windows 1, 2 and 3.x… Well, it seems Apple are tryint to drag us into the future facing ass-backwards. Seriously, you fucks!

So… Why is the lack of common file area and file system access a bad thing? Well… Let’s say I find a PDF on the web. I can view it kind of OK in Safari - but I can’t save it. If I’m offline, I can’t access the file. Can I download it? Nope. Why? Because I have no file system access. Can I view the same PDF with another PDF viewer, one with a bit more bells and whistles? Nope. I can’t access the files created or used by one app in another app. If I’ve loaded a PDF into the iPod Touch by using Folders, I can’t access that file from PDF Expert. There’s no shared file area. Each piece of software has access to its own little private area, and that’s it.

And sorry, Apple, but that just fucking sucks. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it sucks wet, hairy donkeyballs.

But of course, as we all know, freedom is slavery.

#11. Bluetooth limited. OK, when 3.0 came out, people discovered the iPod Touch has bluetooth. Big whoop, since you can’t do much with it. It has A2DP support (audio sending, for instance sending music to bluetooth enabled speakers), AVRC (for using it as a remote), and PAN (Personal Area Networking). No support for wireless headets, no support for stuff like keyboards etc. Once again, Apple limits the appeal of their product by forcing all users to accept arbitrary limits.

What Apple have here, is possibly the greatest, sweetest machine I’ve come across - aside from battery life and temperature resistance, obviously - and they’ve ruined 90% of its potential by making up bullshit limitations that just makes the machine fail to live up to its full potential. The iPod Touch is a cripple, pure and simple - and the problem is APple’s software, not the hardware.

I recently got myself an iPod Touch. Not to play music, mind you - my Nokia does that at a lower cost in battery. NO, I got a Touch for the apps. However, the process of using, handling, installing stuff on the Touch has left me less than happy.

So, this is me complaining:

#1. Locked into iTunes. I fucking HATE lock-in crap. Even if iTunes had been a competent piece of software and available in Linux, I’d still hate it. Why? Because there’s no choice. If you got an iPod Touch, you use iTunes. Period. regardless of wether or not iTunes actually does what you want it to…

#2. Itunes for Windows is crap. It’s slow, cumbersom, bloated as hell. Can’t speak for the Mac version, haven’t tried it, but this is just simply crap. It crashes as soon as you try to do more than one thing at a time (feels like Goddamn windows 3.1), it hangs, it behaves badly in virtually every way I can imagine it to. Expect more on this.

#3. Restricted development. As a software developer, I like tinkering with stuff. Unfortunately, I’ll need a Mac to develop for the iPod Touch/Iphone, since Apple are monopolistic assholes. Seriously.

#4. Restricted streaming. You can stream music from one iTunes to another - but not to a Touch or Iphone. Why? No good reason whatsoever. In fact, no reason whatsoever, good or otherwise. You need third-party software (like SimplifyMedia, which eats up 10% of the CPU - WHEN FUCKING IDLE). And also, there’s no way to sync libraries - you can’t for instance, have a music-serving server and then use a client computer to put that music on your iPhone. Apple are the kings of mindless, arbitrary restrictions.

#5. No multitasking. Despite having arguably the best kernel in the world for multitasking, especially when considering the machine’s size, there’s no multitasking. One app at a time, that’s the rule. Once again, we’re back in fucking Win3.1-ville.

#6. No scripting or programming languages on the machine itself. No python, basic, OPL, c++, java or whatever - nothing. They claim security and stability; that obviously wasn’t a concern when they built iTunes (se #2).

#7. No Flash. Seriously, they’re trying to market this thing as a mobile surfing device, yet have no support for Flash? Once again, arbitrary restrictions.

#8. Extremely bad support for multiple computers. Noone at Apple considers it possibly that one person might have more than one computer or, indeed, more than one OS on a single computer. So; there’s no way to share iTunes library, for instance. And if you have a Touch, with a lot of apps on it, and try to sync it with a secondary system - even if that system has exactly the same apps thet are on the Touch in question - it scrambles the order of those apps when Syncing. As in, I got X, Y and Z on my touch. I’ve carefully ordered them as Z, Y and X. I got a PC with X, Y and Z. I sync. Now, the order is Y, Z, X. Marvellous.

#9. No selective backup. I can’t choose to make a backup of only the data for one or two apps - backup is all or nothing, with absolutely NO way to check what made it into the backup and what didn’t.

I still use the machine, and I still kind of like it. But there are just enough crap to have to deal with on a daily basis to keep me from becoming a real advocate.

Expect this list to grow.

I just bought the game Space Empires IV from Strategy First/Digital River. I am not happy. Why?

1. The installation process. First I had to download a worthless piece of ass-garbage “downloader”. Which, of course, didn’t work in Linux. It downloaded a 196 mb installation file. That installation file extracted another 196 mb installation file into a temporary directory, and launched it. And that file, finally, was runnable in Linux and seems to have worked OK. I mean, c’mon! Downloaders? Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on.

2. The license. I had forgotten the ridiculously silly licence agreements were. More to the point, I’d forgotten a single purchase just allowed me to install the game on one computer - regardless of wether or not any of the computers I want to install and run the game on are ever used by anyone but me. One purchase, one installation. Got it. So, if I want to be able to play both on my main comp and my tiny EEE netbook, I get to shelf out twice as much. Gee, I never did have this problem with the old DOS games…

3. The anti-piracy crap that’s enforcing the license. Of course, copy protections have always been, well, kind of crap - but this got me genuinely pissed. Why? Well, because I paid for this fucking game, and because I still can’t fucking play it. “Key has expired”, it moans, and wants me to contact support with some “hardware key”. OK, so if I want to run the game on one computer, but both in the real OS and a virtualized OS, I also need to get another license? FUCK YOU.

I mean, this game is GREAT. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s AWESOME, provided you like 4x games (you know, slow-paced turn-based strategy games in space…). But it’s just not fucking worth it. I know boycotting is a blunt and stupid tool, but in this case, the ONLY way for me to enjoy this game - even within the realm of the license - is piracy.

To quote an Invidibles album I bought today: Your mother’s fucking Hitler in hell. This is fucking intolerable. Anti-piracy crap ONLY punishes the customer, NEVER the pirates.

Såhär kommenterade jag en av de SD-artiklar som AB skrivit på sistone:

Man får väl helt enkelt konstatera att c:a 96-97% av de som röstar är smarta nog att se igenom denna mörkerpropaganda. De flesta fattar, trots allt, vad det är för mörka vatten SD fiskar i och vad SD står för. Det här är inte en demonisering av SD; SD gör sig själva till demoner. Man behöver inte smutskasta irrationella, främlingsfientliga nationalister. Det sköter de så bra själva. De gnider in ansiktet med skit och säger “hörni, vad elaka ni är som tycker att vi är smutsiga!”

Det gick tydligen inte hem, för kommentaren togs bort. Jag kan väl i ärlighetens namn fatta varför, även om jag står fast vid vad jag skrev…