So lately I've been finding some really good music, mostly due in part to iTunes's sweet new feature, the "MiniStore". Everyone's been whining about the privacy issues, but I've seriously found so much good music in the past couple of weeks, I don't care. One of them, The Calm by Kaskade, is a new album that's… amazing. Think neo-jazz mixed with a dash of funk and electronic riffs. Good stuff. There's a problem though — it's an iTunes Music Store exclusive. When I found out, my heart dropped. How in the world could a band acquiesce to putting their songs in a cage of DRM policies and not even attempt to sell it another way? Anyways, a few months back I read an article about Jon Johansen — the guy who cracked the DeCSS code and spawned a revolution of DVD ripping — and his latest project, PyMusique.
Basically PyMusique was intended to be a fair interface to the iTunes Music Store, and allowed you to buy songs, but when you bought them, PyMusique would strip out their DRM information. So from that point you could share your song with anyone, burn them to CDs, play them in Windows Media,or any mp3 player — it just became a normal mp3. Pretty cool… iTunes even issued a patch against PyMusique, but Johansen got around it in a few hours. I remembered this article about a few days ago and within minutes I found that PyMusique had been renamed to SharpMusique and was still going strong. They even touted a new 'Redownload' feature that allowed you to redownload a song after you paid for it, at no cost.
Through SharpMusique I was able to buy the entire Kaskade album and some new stuff by Imogen Heap, and send it to other people. The interface isn't phenomenal, but it works. There are some stupid quirks.. the redownload function doesn't work. Also, if you're using it, be patient. Don't rush through and double-click every song — I tried that and now I have a song or two on my credit card that I never actually got. In any case, at least I feel happy knowing that the music I have can be played on something other than an iPod.
As an update to the last post about Parallels Workstation, here's a crazy demo video of someone switching between all three operating systems, running on x86 architecture. What gets me is that it's so fast.. it's perfect. The cube effect from Virtue Desktop is really nice too.
I just got into Graphic Design (the class I’ve been wanting to get into since freshman year). I’m finishing the last two computer science courses and the last two perspective courses this semester. So that leaves me with a few electives:
Graphic Design
Operating Systems
Japanese Literature
Racquetball
This title is misleading, since Virtual PC doesn't even run on the new Intel-based MacBooks, but what i'm wondering about is the comparison in functionality. Virtual PC allowed users to switch back and forth instantly (albeit slowly) from Windows to Mac and vice versa, but Boot Camp does no virtualization at all and simply makes a dual-boot, so you have to reboot to get into whatever OS you want. Virtual PC also allowed people to transfer files back and forth between operating systems.. that's pretty slick. (Of course i'm sure you can accomplish the same thing with Boot Camp's dual-boot setup, but again.. you'd have to reboot)
Boot Camp's idea of simplifying the dual-boot process is cool, but the idea of virtualization is awesome. I'm curious to see how some new hypervisor solutions are going to fare against Boot Camp. The best virtualization setup would be something like running Windows inside a Mac session. There's at least one company out there that's making some good progress with that idea — the company is called Parallels and their product, which is in beta testing right now, is called the Parallels Workstation 2.1. The software is amazing — you can run pretty much any operating system inside another one — everything from Windows 3.1 to XP, all the major Linux distros, and even old school OS's like OS/2 and MS-DOS.
I got about 10 extensions installed in Firefox, and if I leave it on for about three hours with a couple tabs open, the thing takes up about 500 megs of memory. It sucks.. probably the only major downfall to Firefox that I can see. This could be happening because of bad coding in the extensions.. hopefully later on Mozilla could release some kind of extension profiler to see how it holds up against boundary conditions and stuff. Meanwhile, lots of people have been finding some cool little hacks to decrease the memory. The best one I've seen is this:
http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2006/03/26/this-may-help-your-firefox-memory-leak/
It went from 40 megs to 900 KILOBYTES. Heh… Pretty nice.
