We dis­cov­ered this great game called Simon Extreme. Simon Extreme is a rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the clas­sic 1978 Milton Bradley game Simon, com­plete with authen­tic game­play and sound sam­ples from the orig­i­nal game. For extra fun take shot of tequila every time your answer is right! Imme­di­ately after writ­ing this title I had to think about Simon Gruber brother of Hans Gruber (Jeremy Irons) in (the 3th part of the Die Hard tri­ol­ogy) Die Hard: With a Vengeance.

DRM (Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment) should be invis­i­ble, unno­tice­able to the end-​user, it should be stored on a server (and synced) which my device (phone, media-​player, TV etc.) con­nects to. Now the whole dis­cus­sion goes: I also should be able to use it with any device for all time, WRONG!!! It’s not any­more about car­ri­ers (tapes, LP’s, CD’s, DVD’s etc.) it’s about for­mats (AAC, H.264, WMV, WMA) are these files inter­change­able, inter­op­er­a­ble? NO, they are not! We have two camps AAC/H.264 (Apple) and WMA/WMV (Microsoft) and some other who-​cares-​non-​important CODECS (FLV, ON2, FLAC, OGG Vorbis, MP3 Pro or what­ever). Tapes en LP’s are almost extinct and these car­ri­ers weren’t inter­change­able (can’t put a tape in a CD-​player can you?). So why the hell should a AAC file play on a Doesn’tPlayForSure device? For the con­sumer!!! If I buy a Audio CD I can play it on my SONY, Harman/Kardon or Sam­sung and even on my Mac, some not though, because of DRM (tadaaaaaa). My point is DRM isn’t there for the artists nor for the con­sumer, it’s there for the big record/movie BOBO’s, so they can con­trol your media (con­trol equals power). I am not even gonna start about the whole HD-​DVD, Blu-​ray, HDMI (High Def­i­n­i­tion Mul­ti­me­dia Inter­face), HDCP (High-​bandwidth Dig­i­tal Con­tent Pro­tec­tion) war. So there you have it! My point of view of DRM and locked for­mats.
I’m on a roll here! There’s some­thing else I want off my chest. Nor­mally I don’t flame com­pa­nies or people, I don’t like it, it’s dis­re­spect­ful! But it’s start­ing to annoy me to get insulted by people who don’t know SH*T about what con­sumers want or need and are extremely jeal­ous about Apple’s iPod/ITMS suc­cess. Either make a better prod­uct (Google way), force them out of busi­ness (Microsoft way), die trying (iRiver/Creative/Real way) or shut-​up! SONY made a MP3 player called Walk­man Bean, although I don’t like it, it’s totally dif­fer­ent then the iPod. I think SONY is the only com­pany which can com­pete head-​to-​head with Apple (style wise, soft­ware wise and hard­ware wise).

Okay, on to the con­test of stu­pid­ity:
Steve Ballmer won’t pass up an oppor­tu­nity to take sev­eral digs at his company’s arch rival Apple. Ballmer said:

…We’ve had DRM in Win­dows for years. The most common format of music on an iPod is ’stolen’. Part of the reason people steal music is money, but some of it is that the DRM stuff out there has not been that easy to use. We are going to con­tinue to improve our DRM, to make it harder to crack, and easier, easier, easier, easier, to use…

Sorry Steve! music and movies are way to expen­sive, Apple has proven this with it’s iTunes Media Store.
In an inter­view with The Guardian, Glaser said that while users pur­chase some music from iTunes, most of their col­lec­tions are ille­gally obtained.

…If you want inter­op­er­a­ble music today, there is a very easy solu­tion: it’s called stealing…

No stupid, it’s called MP3 which doesn’t con­tain any Dig­i­tal ‘Restriction’ Man­age­ment.
And now on to the winner of this stu­pid­ity con­test (drum-​roll please) San­Disk who likes to insult their poten­tial clients by their own pro­pa­ganda iDon’t.com. Hey you’ve bought an iPod stupid donkey fol­lower buy this Sansa e200! Thank god these kind of cam­paigns only work for the weak-​minded people!
I like Apple par­o­dies if they are cre­ative and not insult­ing:
iBra­tor
1984
Switch Campaign.

Yes­ter­day I fin­ished an icon that I had promised to Caf­feinated Cocoa Soft­ware. Adam man­aged to squash out some last minute pesky bugs and deliverd it today. You can down­load Google Importer 1.0 here.

Finally, some­one at Apple took up his old habit of “product marketing”. Clearly explain­ing (in a funny way) the dif­fer­ence between a Mac and a PC. You can view all the Apple ads here.

We had a awe­some week­end at 3 am we checked in in the Col­lege Hotel Ams­ter­dam, a col­lab­o­ra­tion effort between the Stein Group and ROC Ams­ter­dam. It’s an excel­lent lux­u­ri­ous hotel with excep­tional staff-trainee-wannabee’s-students of the Hotel Man­age­ment School, Bakery and Tourism. We got the whole she­bang from my dar­ling mother.

After we checked in we went to the Rem­brandt - Car­avag­gio an amaz­ing once in a life time exhi­bi­tion held in the Van Gogh Museum and Rijksmu­seum.
Dinner was a expe­ri­ence! For exam­ple we got haring-​ice on toast, lob­ster sausage’s and a spaghetti from asperges. The next morn­ing my girl­friend got break­fast in bed and after a shower we went back to our domi­cile. Once again thanks mom!

Apple has for­mally given its thumbs-​up to attempts to install and run Win­dows XP on Intel-​based Macs. It has posted a tool called Boot Camp that allows iMac, Mac­Book Pro and Mac Mini owners to run the Microsoft OS more easily. The com­pany also con­firmed the next major Mac OS X release, Leop­ard, will inte­grate the twin-​OS tech­nol­ogy.
The Boot Camp soft­ware requires Mac OS X 10.4.6, released yes­ter­day and which has already been hailed by sup­port­ers of Windows-​on-​Mac ini­tia­tives as an update that improves the abil­ity to dual-​boot their sys­tems. Boot Camp cre­ates a CD with all the Mac-​specific XP-​compatible hard­ware dri­vers then dynam­i­cally repar­ti­tions the host Mac’s hard drive to make room for the XP instal­la­tion with­out the need to re-​install the native oper­at­ing system.
It also pro­vides a boot­loader to allow users to choose which OS they boot their Intel-​based Macs into.
Apple is offer­ing Boot Camp as a public beta, so it remains a ‘proceed with caution’ util­ity. But it’s still more user-​friendly than the third-​party solu­tion posted on the web last month. Indeed, the Apple release appears to pro­vide the graph­ics dri­vers miss­ing from the system that won a $13,000 prize to get XP on a Mac. Iron­i­cally, if Apple had moved more quickly, it might itself have walked away with the bounty.