TidBITS#631/20-May-02
=====================
Think twice before playing a new audio CD in your Mac. Adam looks
at how music labels are treating consumers like criminals by
deliberately creating corrupt audio discs that can gum up your
Mac. Also in this issue, Matt Neuburg positions Layout Master
as a worthy addition to a webmaster's toolbox. We also drool
over Apple's upcoming Xserve rack-mounted server, and note the
releases of speed-bumped iBooks, PopChar X, and Now Up-to-Date &
Contact 4.2.1.
Topics:
MailBITS/20-May-02
Apple Introduces Xserve Rack-Mount Server
Corrupt Audio Discs Stick in Mac's Craw
Layout Master Puts Things in Their Place
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-631.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2002/TidBITS#631_20-May-02.etx>
Copyright 2002 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved.
Information: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Comments: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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MailBITS/20-May-02
------------------
**No TidBITS Issue 27-May-02** -- It is said there's no rest for
the wicked, but of late that homily has been spilling over to
the rest of us as well. So, TidBITS is taking a well-deserved
week off for the U.S. Memorial Day holiday, which, in a fit of
happenstance, coincides with the week of Managing Editor Jeff
Carlson's birthday celebrations and the Mac Mania Geek Cruise
that will be occupying most of my attention. Depending on my
shipboard email connectivity and free moments, TidBITS Talk may
suffer only partial abatement, but in general, please save me the
embarrassment of late or missing replies by holding non-essential
private mail until the second week in June. TidBITS returns with
the 03-Jun-02 issue. [ACE]
**Apple Speed Bumps iBooks** -- Apple today announced an update to
the slick iBook line that adds faster CPUs, 512K on-chip L2 cache,
a more powerful ATI Mobility Radeon graphics processor with 16 MB
of RAM and AGP 2X, larger hard drives, and a new video-out port.
You can now buy the iBook that has a 12.1-inch screen with either
600 MHz or 700 MHz PowerPC G3 processors and 20, 30, or 40 GB hard
drives; the 14.1-inch screen model features the 700 MHz processor
and either a 30 or 40 GB hard drive. With both iBooks you can
choose between a CD-ROM drive and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo drive
and how much RAM you want (starting at either 128 MB or 256 MB,
maxing out at 640 MB). Both models also retain their two USB
ports, FireWire port, AirPort compatibility, 56 Kbps V.90 modem,
10/100Base-T Ethernet, and built-in microphone and speakers.
Pricing starts at $1,200 for the 12.1-inch screen models and
$1,650 for the 14.1-inch models. Despite the lack of anything
revolutionary here, these changes make a very good computer
even better. [ACE]
<http://www.apple.com/ibook/>
**Now Up-to-Date & Contact 4.2.1 Adds Grab-'n-Go** -- Power On
Software has released Now Up-to-Date & Contact 4.2.1, a free
upgrade for users of the Mac OS X-only version of their popular
calendaring and contact management program. In a valiant attempt
to increase the number of hyphens used in Macintosh publications,
Now Up-to-Date & Contact 4.2.1 brings back the Grab-'n-Go utility
from the Mac OS 9 version of the program. With Grab-'n-Go, you can
Control-click text in applications that support contextual menus
(few of which I use regularly, unfortunately) and create new
appointments, tasks, and other event types in Now Up-to-Date.
Also improved are the QuickDay and QuickContact utilities, which
now provide proper menus and can be Command-dragged to new
locations in the menu bar. Finally, you can now move the Now
Up-to-Date & Contact folder to locations other than the top-level
of the Applications folder. The free update is a 16 MB download;
upgrades from earlier versions cost $50, and new copies cost $120.
[ACE]
<http://www.poweronsoftware.com/products/nudc/>
<http://poweronsoftware.com/download/dlNUDC.asp>
**Snap, Crackle, and PopChar X** -- The many enthusiastic fans of
Gunther Blaschek's venerable PopChar utility were rewarded for
their patience this week when he released a Mac OS X version.
PopChar X is a background-only application that puts a small "P"
in the top left corner of the menu bar; clicking on this "P"
causes a window to pop down showing the characters of any font,
their ASCII numeric values, and the keystroke(s) needed to type
them. Clicking a character inserts it in the current application.
<http://www.macility.com/products/popcharx/>
Unfortunately, only ASCII characters are displayed - basically the
first 230-odd characters of a font - whereas many Mac OS X fonts
have hundreds or even thousands more characters (see "Two Bytes of
the Cherry: Unicode and Mac OS X, Part 2" in TidBITS-625_). Also,
the location of the "P" can't be changed and may conflict with
other utilities that use the corner of the menubar, such as
MaxMenus. Blaschek says users can expect these shortcomings
to be corrected in a future version. PopChar X is $30, and
includes a license for the new version of PopChar Pro for
Mac OS 7.1 and later, plus free upgrades for two years. [MAN]
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06780>
<http://www.proteron.com/maxmenus/>
Apple Introduces Xserve Rack-Mount Server
-----------------------------------------
by Mark H. Anbinder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Apple last week introduced a new line of rack-mountable servers,
due to ship in June 2002 and available for ordering now at the
online Apple Store. The 1U (one rack unit in height) Xserve server
offers single or dual 1 GHz PowerPC G4 processors, up to 2 GB of
DDR SDRAM memory, up to 480 GB of storage in four hot-pluggable
ATA/100 drives, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, three FireWire ports,
two USB ports, and one DB-9 serial port. The 19-inch-wide, 1.75-
inch-tall (48.3 cm by 4.4 cm) enclosure allows up to 42 units in a
standard 42U rack, and requires no special tools to change or add
components. On the software side, Xserve includes an unlimited-
license copy of Mac OS X Server (normally $1,000 if purchased
separately), which is pre-configured to include the Apache Web
server, a mail server, QuickTime Streaming Server, WebObjects,
MySQL, and file and print servers for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux
clients. Apple also includes Server Monitor, an application that
keeps tabs on a number of internal hardware sensors and notifies
administrators of problems.
<http://www.apple.com/xserve/>
Pricing starts at $3,000 for a single 1 GHz G4 processor
configuration with 256 MB of DDR memory and a 60 GB drive module.
The mid-range dual-processor configuration is $4,000 with 512 MB
of memory and a 60 GB drive module. A decked-out unit with dual
processors, 2 GB of memory, and four 120 GB drive modules is
$7,800. With the Xserve introduction, Apple is bringing back
on-site repair and warranty options, offering up to three years
of four-hour on-site response during business hours. There are
also optional AppleCare Service Parts kits to enable users to
keep spares on hand for mission-critical servers.
Apple's past ventures into the enterprise server market have
historically been short-lived. The Mac OS-based Apple Workgroup
Servers, the AIX (IBM's flavor of Unix) Apple Network Servers,
and even the never-released Novell Netware for PowerPC servers
are all examples. The last few years have shown Apple making
strong strides into viable server software (such as the old
Rhapsody-based Mac OS X Server 1.x, and the more-recent Darwin-
based Mac OS X Server 10.x), and Xserve offers an astonishing
combination of viable hardware and solid server software at a
compelling price. Cost may be an obstacle to Unix network
administrators who like to buy the cheapest Pentium-based
hardware, but those who want serious server hardware, featuring
an industrial-strength power supply and management features, are
taking a close look at Xserve. We don't blame them; we, like many
others on TidBITS Talk, want one of our own.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=1655>
Corrupt Audio Discs Stick in Mac's Craw
---------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Accustomed to playing CDs in your Mac? Beware. A number of music
labels have released intentionally corrupt audio discs in Europe
and the U.S. that look like industry standard CDs and even play in
some CD players (see Fat Chuck's Corrupt CDs site and the Campaign
for Digital Rights site for lists). But if you ignore or fail to
notice the "Will not play on PC/Mac" warning label on the outside
of the package - if it's even present - you might be in for a rude
surprise.
<http://fatchucks.com/z3.cd.html>
<http://uk.eurorights.org/issues/cd/bad/>
These audio discs use a copy prevention (a more accurate term
than "copy protection") scheme that makes them incompatible with
the Red Book format that defines the Compact Disc standard. The
desired result is that the discs should play in normal audio CD
players, but not in computer CD drives. (See "Copyright: Who
Should Benefit?" in TidBITS-618_ for additional coverage of
this topic.)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06729>
The disc failing to play is annoying in itself, but the rude
surprise is that you may not be able to eject the disc. Apple
recently posted a Knowledge Base article on this topic, offering
a number of workarounds, especially for newer Macs that lack a
manual eject mechanism. Worse, according to reports sent to the
Campaign for Digital Rights, these audio discs may cause some Macs
to crash and some to start up to a gray screen if the disc is left
in the drive at startup.
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106882>
<http://uk.eurorights.org/issues/cd/docs/celdion.shtml>
If the disc still fails to eject after you've tried all of Apple's
suggestions, you'll need to take your Mac to an authorized repair
center and have them extract the disc manually. In the initial
posting of the Knowledge Base article, Apple included a comment
that this repair would not be covered by your warranty or
AppleCare, which, although extreme, was still a reasonable
position. After all, the blame for this happening lies first
with the music labels for making and distributing corrupt audio
discs, and second with the user for inserting it in the CD drive,
and only minimally with Apple for eliminating the manual eject
hole from some Macs. Still, in a situation where Apple was taking
the moral high ground, the warranty comment caused many people to
focus on Apple rather than on the perpetrators of these discs, so
a modification to the Knowledge Base article removed the comment.
(What that means for warranty and AppleCare coverage is thus
unknown.) You can read the original in a Mac Observer article
from last week.
<http://www.macobserver.com/article/2002/05/10.10.shtml>
The music labels should be liable for any charges incurred by
users who need to take their Macs into a dealer for extraction.
There's a big difference between "Will not play on PC/Mac" and "Do
not insert into PC/Mac at risk of rendering computer inoperable."
Plus, record stores should post large warnings near such discs in
the store or face potential liability themselves. Sure, users
shouldn't put these corrupt disks in their computers, but it's
certainly possible for someone to miss the warning, if there is
one (who reads the outside of what looks like a standard compact
disc carefully?). Plus, some people, even knowing that the disc
won't play, may be curious about what does happen if the disc is
inserted - talk about curiosity requiring the cat take a trip to
the vet.
**Cartels without a Clue** -- I don't know what bugs me the most
about this situation. High up on the list is the way the music
cartel is treating customers: as thieves and pirates. Computer
users aren't the only ones affected either, since many normal
CD players, DVD players, and car CD players also reportedly have
trouble with these corrupt audio discs. Some companies believe
that the customer is always right; these music companies seem
to believe that the customer is always criminal.
But can that bit of stupidity compete with the uninformed
arrogance that copy prevention technologies, particularly when
applied in only part of the world, even begin to dent usage of
the peer-to-peer file sharing networks? A cursory search showed
that numerous tracks from the Spider-Man movie soundtrack, one
of the albums listed as corrupt on the Campaign for Digital
Rights site, are readily available for downloading. It takes only
a single person to make a copy of an audio disc - even if it
requires an extra analog-to-digital step - before the music
appears on the file sharing networks. Worse, if certain audio
discs are known to be corrupt, I can see many computer users
downloading copies of the songs rather than purchasing the
disc, just to avoid the hassle.
Then there's the fact that covering the outer track of these
corrupt discs with a black marker or electrical tape can result in
the discs being playable in a computer's CD drive. In other words,
a steady hand with a Sharpie is all that's necessary to defeat the
copy prevention technology? Ooo, that's secure.
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/25274.html>
Of these, I think the prize goes to treating customers as
criminals. Believing that copy prevention technologies can't or
won't be broken, and thinking that they could make any difference
are indeed arrogant and uninformed, but treating your customers
as criminals not only encourages them to act that way, it also
poisons the well for future sales, even for CDs that have no copy
prevention technologies in place. I know that my level of disgust
with the music cartel has distinctly cooled my enthusiasm for
buying music except directly from independent musicians, and
I've certainly heard similar sentiments from others.
**DMCA/EUCD Criminals** -- I used the term "criminals" above quite
intentionally because according to the U.S. Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA - check out the "YMCA" parodies below for a
giggle), circumventing copyright protection technology for any
reason is a criminal offense. There have been many well-documented
cases involving the DMCA - for an overview, read the Electronic
Frontier Foundation's recent report detailing the consequences of
the DMCA after three years. The European Union Copyright Directive
(EUCD) has many of the same kinds of provisions and is generating
similar kinds of protest.
<http://whichwayup.org/writing/ymca/>
<http://www.usethesource.com/Parodies/01/08/04/1121207.shtml>
<http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020503_dmca_consequences.pdf>
<http://uk.eurorights.org/issues/eucd/>
One spot of light comes from U.S. Representative Rick Boucher
(D-Virginia), who plans to introduce legislation that would modify
the DMCA to make it legal to break copy prevention technologies to
exercise fair use rights. Boucher isn't attempting to legalize all
copying - it would still be a violation to copy something with the
intent of violating the work's copyright. There's no telling if
his legislation stands any chance against the deep pockets of the
music and movie cartels, but to judge from the list of Boucher's
Internet and technology initiatives on his Web site, he has a clue
and may be the best hope for action in Congress.
<http://www.house.gov/boucher/docs/fairuse.htm>
<http://www.house.gov/boucher/internet.htm>
**Creative Commons Launches** -- Another bright spot is the recent
launch of the Creative Commons project, which I mentioned in "A
Couple of Cool Concepts" back in TidBITS-617_. Creative Commons
is a non-profit organization founded on the notion that some
writers, artists, musicians, and movie makers would rather share
their creations than exercise the full restrictions of copyright
law, which, thanks to the DMCA, are Draconian.
<http://www.creativecommons.org/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06720>
Creative Commons plans to create a Web-based application that
will help content creators place their works in the public domain
or generate flexible licenses that permit copying and reuse of
copyrighted works. Plus, they're working on a way that creators
can label their works with metadata that makes clear the available
terms of use.
What I like about this approach is that it emphasizes the aspect
of creation that desires an audience - when I write, I do so
because, more than anything else, I want people to read my words.
Yes, I need to earn a living from my writing, but I've managed to
do that in a variety of ways while keeping TidBITS free for over
12 years. What I've done with TidBITS isn't rocket science, and
although it's also not a model that everyone should, or even
could, emulate, it shows that the concept of sharing one's
creative works and earning a living are not mutually exclusive,
as so many of the powerful industry lobbying groups would have you
believe. We'll see how successful Creative Commons becomes, but I
have high hopes for them and plan to use their services myself in
the future.
Perhaps the best aspect of Creative Commons, though, is that
it's applying some creativity to the business end of the copyright
debate. We'd all be better off if as much creativity was put into
business models as into artistic endeavors and creating copy
prevention technologies.
Layout Master Puts Things in Their Place
----------------------------------------
by Matt Neuburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Layout Master 1.1, from Western Civilisation, is software of a
kind I really like: it does one thing and does it splendidly. Like
its earlier companion program, Style Master, which I reviewed in
TidBITS-501_, that one thing has to do with authoring and editing
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the supplement to HTML that is
increasingly becoming the way to dictate the formal details of
your Web pages. The two programs completely overlap with respect
to the area of CSS with which they deal: Layout Master handles
just Position, Background, and Border properties; Style Master
handles all of CSS, including those three. So in theory, you could
work on your CSS using Style Master alone; but you wouldn't want
to, because Layout Master lets you edit Position properties in
the only way that makes intuitive sense - visually.
<http://www.westciv.com/layout_master/>
<http://www.westciv.com/style_master/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05602>
**Historical Interlude** -- If you already know all about CSS, you
can skip this section of the review. Its purpose is to explain
what CSS is, to put it in some historical perspective, and to
summarize the pros and cons of its use.
In the early days of the Web, HTML was a very small language;
there were almost no rules. This fact had two major consequences.
First, HTML was inadequate to sketch more than the most basic
structure of a Web page, which could consist only of successive
paragraphs of text interspersed with occasional images; there
was almost no capability for the author to dictate the style and
positioning of any of that text. Thus, it was hard to make a Web
page look interesting or even good; indeed, one could only guess
how a page would look, since user-defined settings in any
individual's browser could easily foil one's attempts at rational
or aesthetic design.
Second, browser developers made up for this inadequacy by
innovation; in essence they simply forced the evolution of HTML
by unilaterally introducing their own contributions. In some
cases, these innovations were good: Netscape's invention of the
TABLE and FONT tags, for example, made webmasters of every stripe
breathe a sigh of relief. But these innovations were implemented
erratically, leading to a situation where it was almost impossible
to determine how a page would render among the different browsers
and platforms (even different versions of the same browser).
Webmasters spent their time cursing and writing ever more
convoluted workarounds as they tested and retested pages
under all conceivable conditions.
The reaction to this situation has been a gradual but massive
technical and cultural effort to move the Web towards standards,
offering well-defined rules as to what constitutes HTML and as to
what a browser's responsibilities are when interpreting it. The
World Wide Web Consortium has become the de facto clearing house
for rationalization of standards, clarifying the rules for
different versions of HTML and related languages, and providing
tools for automated validation so that webmasters can know
definitively whether their pages are legal HTML or not. Just as
important, new browsers such as Mozilla are aimed explicitly at
complying with those standards. Of course, if you're still using
an older browser you don't reap the benefits of this situation,
but personally I think it's splendid. I no longer worry about
testing my pages with every browser; it has taken me years of
wrangling to bring those pages up to the standard, but I now just
validate them as "HTML 4.01 Transitional," and if an older browser
can't deal with that, I don't care - and I suspect that many Web
authors feel the same.
<http://archive.webstandards.org/>
<http://validator.w3.org/>
<http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/>
We come now to the place of Cascading Style Sheets in all this.
The CSS specification was developed and presented in two stages,
now called CSS1 and CSS2. (And CSS3 is in the works.) As usual,
I simplify for pedagogical purposes, so no letters please...
<http://www.w3.org/Style/LieBos2e/history/>
CSS1 is chiefly about aspects of character and paragraph
formatting: font, size, alignment, leading, paragraph margins.
CSS2, aside from some media-oriented and linguistic innovations
that don't concern us here, chiefly refines the "visual formatting
model" for Web pages. This means that you get to isolate elements
of the page - a word, an image, a paragraph, a whole lot of
paragraphs, whatever - and dictate where on the page they
should go. Positioning that was previously the domain of tables
and frames, or was downright impossible, can thus be specified
through CSS. (Tables and frames are by no means abolished, but
they no longer have to be pressed into service merely for
purposes of positioning.)
For an example, take a look at the W3C's CSS home page. If you're
using a recent browser, you should see a navigation box that
hovers transparently in the upper right of your window even when
you scroll the page. That's done through "fixed" positioning of
this element.
<http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/>
Unfortunately, no browser implements the full CSS2 specification,
and positioning is one of those gray areas that most browsers
implement only partially or with numerous bugs, if at all.
But support is improving; and when you're ready to adopt CSS2
positioning in your Web pages, Layout Master will be there
to help.
**How It Works** -- Layout Master is simple; with the help of the
accompanying tutorial, you can learn the whole program in less
than an hour. It works much like a basic drawing program. An empty
document appears as an empty canvas. Choose New Positioned Element
and a rectangle appears; drag it to reposition it, or drag the
handles at its corners and sides to resize it. The rectangles can
also be aligned or evenly spaced with respect to one another.
Double-click a rectangle, and a floating palette appears where
you can edit Position, Background, and Border properties by value;
for each property, this palette has a Help button that brings up a
text window explaining the property's use, and some properties
also include a Caution button that brings up warnings about
how the property is implemented in certain browsers. A separate
window, the Elements editor, lets you dictate both the layering
order and the all-important containment hierarchy for all
positioned elements, in the most natural and elegant way
imaginable - as an outline.
Behind the scenes, a Layout Master document is actually a text
document - in fact, it's HTML (or, if you so desire, XHTML).
Each rectangle in the canvas represents a DIV tag; the style
information for each tag can go inline into the tag itself, or
into a STYLE tag in the HEAD region, or into a separate stylesheet
document. Because its documents are HTML, and because it knows how
to parse HTML and CSS, Layout Master can be integrated with other
tools you may be using to create your HTML. Instead of a blank
document, you can start with an existing HTML document; Layout
Master can open this, and can safely add positioned elements to
it. You can send a document from Layout Master to another editor,
such as Style Master or BBEdit, and work on it there; when you
save and return to Layout Master, your changes are instantly
reflected.
This technique of sending your document to another editor for
further work is, in fact, how you are expected to give your
document content. After all, an HTML document consisting of
nothing but DIV tags would show up in your browser as blank;
it's the stuff between each pair of DIV tags that constitutes the
actual content of your document. So a typical working pattern
might be to lay out the basic positioning of a document's elements
using Layout Master, and then to use BBEdit or some other text
editor to get some HTML into those elements. Nevertheless, Layout
Master does also allow you to supply content in other ways. For
example, you can just drag text, or an image file, into a Layout
Master document, and presto, it becomes a new positioned element
with that text or image as content. You can also edit content
manually from within Layout Master, but the interface for doing
so is very simple, and the manual discourages you from using this
for anything more than minor tweaking.
Of course you can also send a document from Layout Master to any
browser for previewing. Layout Master does have an internal
preview mode, but it's rather primitive and doesn't show very
well what the page will look like. Besides, you should view the
results of your labors in the browser; Layout Master itself is
just a kind of schematic visual environment, and doesn't aspire
to be more than that.
In short, what Layout Master is trying to do is simply show you
what positioned elements you've got and how they relate to one
another, and give you a rational, dependable, and easy-to-use
environment for editing them. It does this brilliantly. Other
types of editing and display are left to other programs; and
since Layout Master integrates well with those other programs,
that's a perfectly appropriate choice. As I said at the outset,
Layout Master does just one thing, and does it well - and is all
the more endearing for that.
**Conclusions** -- Layout Master is not Mac OS X-native, which
should encourage readers who worry that there's nothing new
under the sun for users of older systems. In fact, Layout Master
doesn't even work perfectly in Mac OS X's Classic environment;
in particular, the Help text appears garbled, and previewing in
a Mac OS X-native browser doesn't work - Layout Master can't even
be made aware of such a browser's existence, because it doesn't
understand about Mac OS X bundles. This, however, is not as big
a problem as one might expect. Since a Layout Master document is
HTML, it can be opened manually into any browser. Besides, Layout
Master can hand a document to BBEdit, which in turn can pass it
off to any browser for previewing; since you'll probably be using
the two programs together anyway, this workaround quickly comes
to seem perfectly natural.
I must confess that, personally, although I really like Layout
Master, I don't yet feel ready to make much use of positioned
elements in my own Web pages, if for no other reason than that
the widely used Internet Explorer 5.1 doesn't handle them well.
And positional elements are a bit tricky, so I know that when I do
start using them, I can expect to have to do a certain amount of
patient experimentation. That being the case, it's a comfort to
feel that when the time comes, Layout Master will be there, making
my experimentation easier through its abilities to form and
portray valid CSS and to work with other HTML tools and browsers.
If you're curious about the brave new world of positioned
elements, and want to get some hands-on experience of what
your life will be like when you stop using tables within tables
to lay out your Web pages, I recommend you give Layout Master
a try.
Layout Master is $50, or it can be purchased together with Style
Master Pro for $80; a free 30-day demo is available for download,
and the manual and tutorial can be viewed online. It requires a
PowerPC-based Macintosh running Mac OS 8 or later with at least 4
MB of RAM (10 MB preferred) allotted to Layout Master.
<http://www.westciv.com/layout_master/download/>
$$
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