DRM-free music and higher quality? Seriously, iTunes Plus is a no-brainer. There’s not a big selection, yet, but I highly recommend upgrading your current library if you can. At only 30 cents extra, it’s a steal (no pun intended).
Randomosity at its randomest
Monthly Archive for May, 2007
This is what Google Maps will tell you to do if you ask it for directions from Seattle to Paris. Those folks at Google have quite the sense of humor, don’t they?
Now, I don’t advocate mixing operating systems and alcoholic beverages (who knows what you might compile), but if you’re a die-hard gamer like me, you might be interested in the non-alcoholic Wine for Linux. It claims not to be an emulator, but it pretends to be Windows enough to be pretty useful. Basically, it’s a Windows compatibility layer, allowing you to run Windows applications in Linux. It’s not perfect, of course, but it actually works fairly well for running games in Linux, which should hearten any gamer stuck with making do with Unreal Tournament on Linux (I know there are other games, but even so, the selection is pretty limited). However, all is not perfect with Wine, as I’ve found.
It’s the bane of every consumer: digital copy protection. You find it on games, DVDs, music CDs. It’s everywhere and it’s damned annoying. Sometimes it can be extreme, such as the rootkits installed by some Sony CDs. Sometimes it’s easily broken, such as with HD DVDs. But no matter what, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, which is keep people from pirating copyrighted material. What it does do, on the other hand, is hinder legitimate consumers from being able to fully utilize the very things they paid for.
I’ve been using Windows Vista on my laptop for a couple months now, and I have to say it’s pretty awesome. A lot more so than I ever thought it would be, especially considering the anti-hype it was given leading up to and shortly following its release. Contrary to the claims you’ll usually find, I haven’t had problems running games, all the drivers are there and up-to-date (even for graphics), the UAC doesn’t bug me about every single thing, and finally, it doesn’t crash every five seconds.
However, as much as I love Vista, I have come across a few really, really annoying things. Some are directly tied in with the operating system, others are just by-products of incompatibility with certain software or hardware, and still others are just personal peeves. Luckily there aren’t many, so I’m sorry to disappoint if you were hoping for a solid Microsoft-bashing. I don’t cater to fanboys (or fangirls, for that matter).