Given Sony’s recent foray into customer alienation, I can’t help but direct you to get your hands on your very own Sony sucks ass t-shirt.

The really unfortunate thing here is that the recording industry continues to underestimate the importance of technology in the lives of its customers. The quote, for those of you who can’t see the shirt (or didn’t already order one) comes from the president of Sony BMG, in response to a question on how they were going to address the recent rootkit problem: “Most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”

The truth is, the first part of his sentence is dead on. Most people don’t know what a rootkit is; I’ll admit that I didn’t know what one was until Sony started installing them on people’s machines. But the problem here lies not with what people don’t know – but with what they think they do know (are you cross-eyed yet?).

It’s simple. People, for the most part, “know” they can trust companies like Sony to distribute products in accordance with the law, that will suitably serve the purpose intended, etc. People don’t walk up to a dude selling discs out of a briefcase on 4th and Vine, and run home to install the software on something they just bought from him…but the same people probably wouldn’t hesitate to let their new Switchfoot album (freshly unwrapped) run unrestricted on their PC.

Sony’s got a responsibility here to recognize that they’ve got a responsibility. Their history of quality products has given the public a great deal of confidence, and they’re exploiting it. Sony’s being sued at least six times now…and I figure it serves them right.

Alright, liberal judges: here’s your chance to take a nasty dip out of another “evil corporate giant.” Don’t let us down (remember – Sony’s alienating minorities with their rootkit!).

Sony, rootkit, DRM

Alright friends, it’s time for me to update the list of software I’m using. Accept my apologies for not being a patron of allconsuming.net; I recognize it’s the hip thing to do as a blogger, but I’m just not down with it. You’ll have to live with an unordered list.

Programs open right this instant:

• ecto – my blogging tool of choice for OS X. As far as I know, it could be the only blogging tool of note for OS X. It’s especially fun because it plays extremely well with flickr.
• 1001 – a flickr management tool that plays extremely well with ecto.
• Camino – because I have a substantial distaste for Safari’s brushed metal, and Firefox and Opera both crash regularly on my machine.
• AdiumX – iChat is too user friendly. I need a messaging client with a little balls.

Programs I use daily, but aren’t open right this instant:
• BBEdit – if you’re using any other script/text editor in OS X, you haven’t tried BBEdit.
• Photoshop Elements – because I don’t do enough heavy lifting to require full Photoshop, but I’m not interested in learning something new (is there anything new that even compares to Photoshop?)
• Dreamweaver – after years of “Written in NotePad” badges, I’m tired of scripting everything by myself, and because Frontpage (yes, I have VirtualPC, and can run it) writes code bloated enough to remind you of the latest CSI victim.
• Transmit – the best FTP client I’ve found for OS X.
• iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, etc. – these are staples.
• Quicken – because managing all this bling aint easy.

You’ll notice that there’s no e-mail client in this list; then you might remember my e-mail journey. Well, the latest update to Mail.app had me hoping that perhaps they’d fixed my formatting beef. It didn’t, and Eudora (while functional) is too old school for me…so I’m back to using Gmail’s web interface.

What would you say I’m missing? Is there software that I’m not using that I absolutely should be? Lay it on me…

os x, apple, software