Steven Leigh's Profile

Let me ask you this: Why does it matter? If people want to use Windows, what difference does that make to you? Granted, if your parents are bugging you every week to help them fix some Windows virus, you have a valid reason to try and steer them toward a Mac, because it directly affects you. But if there is no direct impact on you, what the hell difference does it make what platform people use? This is eerily similar to the homosexuality argument. Ultra-conservatives seem to believe that what other people do in the privacy of their own homes somehow affects their own lives. Get over yourself. I'm glad you've stopped torturing your "friends" with your ridiculous insults. You might even find they spend more time with you now that you treat them like actual human beings instead of belittling their existence.

The reason we can't rip DVD's is people like yourself. You just blatantly admitted to ripping your CD's and then selling them to someone else. In other words, you no longer own any of the songs in your library. The idea that we will all do the same with DVD's is the reason it is illegal. Once you've ripped The Matrix to your hard drive, you'll probably sell that in a yard sale too. A truly clueless article. Articles like this are just hurting the cause even more. Thanks for that.

It is ironic, though, how you wrote an iPhone article asking people to stop writing iPhone articles. :)

Nowhere on that page do they state that you can burn protected files to a CD-RW, because you can't. You can only burn data to a CD-RW, and possibly non-DRM mp3 tracks. This whole discussion is just proving my point further. Why should we have to jump through all these hoops just to backup songs we legally purchased? You can argue all these backup methods as much as you want, but I should be able to make a quick and simple backup of media I have purchased and know that it will work years from now. If I copy Amazon Mp3s to a hard drive for backup, or burn them to a data CD, I know they will work. If I backup iTunes songs to a disc as data, in 4 years I may not be able to authorize it anymore. Which do you think I will choose?

Backing up to CD is not a viable option for two reasons: 1. If you have a large collection (I have more than 4000 songs) this just won't work. And iTunes won't let you burn to CD-RW discs anyway. 2. You lose a LOT of quality by burning and re-ripping, plus you lose all the artwork and ID3 tags and have to re-do them all. The quality of the DRM tracks on iTunes is only 128kbps, and if you reduce that anymore, it becomes unlistenable. By the time you have done all this, you might as well have bought the CD and ripped it yourself. Then you have a full-quality backup already.

"The big problem with lists like this is that they miss the subtleties-- the underlying realities." Actually, the big problem with lists like this is that people take them way too seriously. These are merely my own observations, drawn from my own opinion, and distilled into 8 bullet points. This was never meant to be a long manifesto on everything that is wrong with Apple. It was only meant to bring up a few points that Mac users may not have considered, and to spark discussion. Your points are valid and well-written, of course, but well beyond the point of this article. I would not be the person to cover the entire subject in detail, and if I were going to try and tackle that, I would write a full book, and not a short article.