College IT Won’t Support Apple Products Mon. Apr 2nd, 07

I’m the co-editor of The Percival Review, South Puget Sound Community College’s literary and arts journal.  We are submitting our budget this week.  Part of that budget includes money for a MacBook.  Right now we have a crappy Dell desktop.  Well, we just got an e-mail informing us that we can’t ask for a MacBook because our IT department won’t allow Apple products.  I can’t believe this.  I’d been mighty confused at the lack of Macs in the library or computer labs, but I just thought it was because the school had a deal with Gateway for cheap computers.  Apple has determinedly priced itself out of the K-12 education system, it’s true.  But this isn’t a corporation who can justify everything  by the needs of the bottom line.  This is a community college.  What are they saying to the students,  ‘We don’t want to be bothered with learning more than one operating system, so we’ll just act like only one exists’?  How can this be legal?  The college gets taxpayer money.  Taxpayer money shouldn’t go toward extending the disgusting Microsoft monopoly.  The really irritating part is that the last time an IT guy came to install some stuff on out computer the first thing he said to me was, “In a perfect world this would be a Linux box.”  Nice.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him in almost any situation I’d agree with him, but since our main use of the computer is Adobe InDesign, this wasn’t one of them.  This tells me that they aren’t enforcing a Microsoft-only policy because they believe it’s the best software.  So, why are they?

BTW, the librarians have fought to get Firefox on their computers, so the school has seen one small victory.

Apple Drops DRM Mon. Apr 2nd, 07

According to Boing Boing, Apple is now selling Music from EMI DRM-free on iTunes!!  This means that if you buy an album from an artist on EMI and you really want me to hear it, you can just send me a track or put one up on your blog and I can play it in whatever jukebox I use.  The bummer thing here is that to a lot of people EMI and Apple will look like the good guys.  In fact, the indie labels who have been selling their music DRM-free for half the price on their own websites still have Apple crippling them with restritions and selling them for double the price on iTunes.  But, now if we link to an album here on The Fates and it’s major label and if it’s on EMI, we can link to the iTunes store if we want.  And I’m with Cory on this: let’s hope Apple opens a web-based store so that people who don’t run the iTunes software (Linux users, etc) can shop there, too.