Granting permissions to the ApplicationPoolIdentity

Windows 7 and Windows 2008 RC 2 introduced the concept of managed service accounts and by default, application pools are set to use a managed service account in order to isolate the web application pool without adding additional management of passwords and such.  The downside is that the implementation is half-baked when it comes to giving these accounts permission to other things such as accessing files or directories.

The trick is, when setting the security for the file or folder, select your computer as the location then enter IIS APPPOOL\ApplicationPoolName as the user where ApplicationPoolName is the name of the application pool you want to give permission to.  Microsoft really should make these accounts show up in the GUI, but at least this little trick works.

Why Does Video Cost so Much?

After reading this article about YouTube starting to charge around $5 for certain independent films, I started wondering why it's so expensive to purchase video content instead of music. Don't get me wrong, I think most music is overpriced (most songs went to $1.29 as soon as iTunes allowed them to raise the price from $.99), but from a value proposition, I don't see why video is worth 5 times as much as a song. Sure, bandwidth costs and file sizes are larger due to the inclusion of video and it costs more to produce a video in the first place, but on the other hand, I and most consumers will watch a video once in my lifetime whereas I'll listen to a song multiple times and continue to listen to it throughout my life (assuming it's a good song of course). Is a half-hour show I'll watch once really worth $3.99 (especially when it was originally broadcast over-the-air for free)?