AppleInsider has found the icons for the new iTunes countries, thereby confirming iTunes is about to start in Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Not before time for those AU-ers among us. I’m seeing more and more of those white earplugs on the train to work.

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes. So far all the Australian online music stores have concentrated on selling protected WMA files. These haven’t been setting the world alight, partly of course because the files are useless for legions of iPod owners, and from observations, there are hardly any non-iPod portable music players out there in userland. And for myself, I’d refuse to buy files that won’t live beyond the (hopefully long but inevitably limited) life of my player.

Record companies must surely be waking up to it by now. They can’t copy-protect conventional CDs properly — it either breaks the Red Book standard (and thus compatibility) or it doesn’t work. Anything they try is either useless or has been hacked. So you might as well just sell MP3s. They’re no more vulnerable than CDs. And it’s better to be selling copyable songs than no songs at all.

And the reported Apple price of A$1.80 per track is competitive. A quick scout of some WMA-selling stores showed a typical price of A$1.89 per track, with top ten hits at A$0.99.

The other thing this week for Apple fans is the OS X “Tiger” release, though I’m sure they all already know that.

Rumours flying around the internet thanks to Mr Russell Crowe that the iTunes Music Store will finally open for business in Australia tomorrow, April 28th. (See the article – free registration required).

The pricing mentioned (AUD$1.50+) means I’ll probably only be using it to buy individual songs as purchasing the CD, which has no restrictions, is much more appealing and better value than purchasing an entire album online. Still, it will be great to finally catch up with the civilised world, even if my Visa card doesn’t agree.

If like me you’re still clinging to Windows 2000 as the best balance between performance on older machines and the functionality of a newish operating system, you may like to take note that Win2K finishes mainstream support from June 30th.

Yep, only six months after NT4 mainstream finished — hardly seems fair, does it? Yeah okay so it’s almost six years since Win2K was released, but NT4 dates back to… what… 1996?

Personally I reckon it would have been nice to have had an all-encompassing final service pack to wrap things up. Makes things easier when rebuilding machines, you know. Instead Win2K will get a “security rollup” which seems to be code for “we can’t be arsed doing an SP” or possibly “sorry, we’re too busy building Longhorn.”