At MacWorld yesterday, Apple introduced film rentals from the iTunes store, but it’s US only for now. The pricing looks good — $3.99 for new films, $2.99 for older ones — and interesting: it’s variable. I don’t know what Apple’s position on films-to-buy was as we still haven’t received this over in the UK, but Apple are notorious in their single-price model for music.
As for the conditions, most of the details are unsurprising as they are similar to the conditions I wrote about a few weeks ago which other stores offer. I’m pleased that rentals will be offered in both standard and high definitions, so hopefully my Mac Mini will be able to cope with viewing them.
In an interesting article titled Scoble/Facebook Incident: It’s Not About Data Ownership, Ed Felton makes a useful point:
Where did we get this idea that facts about the world must be owned by somebody? Stop and consider that question for a minute, and you’ll see that ownership is a lousy way to think about this issue. In fact, much of the confusion we see stems from the unexamined assumption that the facts in question are owned.
Perhaps other web frameworks come with similar powers, but of late I’ve been bowled over by Ruby on Rails’ routes. In Rails, routes are how a request like “GET http://dx13.co.uk/blog/2008/01/07/Routing-in-Rails” is processed into a method call in the Rails application. It’s more powerful and flexible than anything I’ve worked with before in its domain.
Learning about routing in depth has taught me several methodologies and idioms used throughout rails, making it seem far less magical than it felt originally. Getting intimate with some portion of your chosen frameworks allows you to see into the minds of its creators in a way nothing else will, granting insights otherwise missed. This insight makes the workings of the framework more intuitive, meaning you can begin to work with the framework rather than merely in it.
I was looking around the Apple Online Store earlier today and discovered an impressive feature I hadn’t seen before: live chat with a store employee.
You can buy three different English keyboards at the Apple store:
I was trying to find out which was the proper keyboard to buy for a UK layout. The description on given on each product’s page is identical, leaving me none the wiser. I wanted to be sure I’d get the correct one, as sending items back to online stores is a chore. I was wondering how I’d find out.
This evening I was looking into the online services offered by the Inland Revenue as I believe I may have to file a tax return this year. I hoped I’d be able to do it online. As it happens this is possible, via the standard username and password combination.
More intriguing was a link to login using a digital certificate; a potentially far more secure authentication method than a username/password pair.