Best bring your own paddle – because Zune’s don’t come with their own.

It’s well known that the Zune has fairly restrictive sharing through ‘squirting’ songs from one Zune to another. It limits such songs to three days or three plays on the destination Zune (adding DRM to un-DRMed music as it is squirted). But..

I missed this incredibly interesting news item in January: On top of this, it’s possible for rights holders to prevent any squirting whatsoever.

Surely the benefit to record labels is that squirting helps promote their artists?!

If you want to find out what restrictions a track has, you can do a typical Windows hoop-jump.

As for recording, I want to pummel my multi-track with a sledgehammer from Home Hardware. It is not doing what i want it to do, and I contemplated, for the first time tonight, switching to computers once and for all. But I will stay the course with my semi-pro gear, as it sizzles in the basement, and the snow swirls outside for another month.

Remember kids, you are not your gear.

From Emm Gryner’s journal.

Centrica’s latest operating profits were splashed across the early morning news here in the UK. Both the BBC and Sky News gleefully told viewers that despite British Gas’ loss of one million customers, Centrica’s profits still managed to come in at £1.44bn.

The BBC News website retargets this figure towards a £5m rise in British Gas’ profits to £95m.

The world is correspondingly aghast at how a company performing so badly can continue to make so much money. It’s not fair.

Until you analyse a little more: hidden in the aforementioned BBC article is “Centrica’s full-year results were affected by exceptional financial costs”. So what are these costs, and what are the comprehensive full-year results? You won’t find out at the BBC. Or Sky News.

Time to skip over to msn Money, and the AP Business News. Centrica posted a full year loss of £156m on revenue of £16.45bn, which reflects how insignificant British Gas is.

If you really want to find out how this all works out, you need to read the report from Centrica (PDF). Page 17 should do it.

As a software engineer, one usually spends a lot of time and intellectual effort on learning new stuff – languages, components, tools. With the rise of Rich Internet Applications there are lots of different ways of doing similar things. I’ve tended to keep hold of the tools and methods that I’m most familiar with. Notably, the suite of Prototype, Script.aculo.us and Behaviour libraries.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve become increasingly aware of Yahoo’s YUI Library. A substantial and growing collection of interface elements and manipulators that are, in some respects, astonishing. But the learning curve is great. Would I – could I – switch to this instead?

Probably not for existing projects. But for new ones it seems viable. Yesterday’s release of version 2.2 includes such goodies as a browser history manager and a component for building and manipulating data tables (including XHR support!)

But that’s not all.. because David Lindquist has just released a one-column version of a navigator that behaves similarly to Apple’s Column View, and there’s a multi-column version on the way. Gosh.