Keys Corner

I am biased, but I do think Ruth’s latest quilting projects have been very good. So take a look at what’s going on on at sew2speak!

Click on the picture to see more…

(Via stumble upon)

Brian Boyko has written up his experience of using Vista as his sole operating system for 30 days – a detailed report on installing and using the operating system, and on which programs ran without problems under Vista. A good starting point if you are thinking of upgrading to Vista.

He has also done a similar article on living in Linux (Ubuntu) for 30 days, which you might be interested in too.

(Via Stumble Upon)

EMI and Apple have announced that iTunes will sell EMI’s albums at a higher quality (twice the encoding frequency) without any copy protection (DRM), for the same price as the other label’s albums with copy protection. Single tracks will be more expensive, but in my case I almost never buy individual tracks, so that won’t affect me.

Thanks to Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) and Eric Nicoli (EMI Group CEO)!

There’s no mention in the press release as to whether this means that EMI’s CDs will also be sold without copy protection, but Boing Boing reported that EMI had decided to stop selling DRM’d CDs in January this year (I never saw an announcement from EMI at the time).

John McBride on Ars Technica:

...Microsoft is serious about piracy. It likes to refer to the Business Software Alliance—”the voice of the world’s commercial software industry”—which maintains that “35% of the software installed on personal computers world-wide in 2006 was illegal.” Windows Genuine Advantage, part of Microsoft’s antipiracy program, has been in a kind of beta since 2004, but now appears to be ready for prime time:

“Technology built into Vista allows Microsoft to periodically evaluate the OS to make sure it is legitimate, rather than just having one opportunity, when the product key is first entered at activation.”

As he points out, if that doesn’t work 100% correctly, there could be quite a few irritated users, not to mention CIOs responsible for corporate Windows networks, as Vista rolls out.

Having taken on Microsoft by offering free web-based word processing software, Google announced today that they are muscling in on the telecommunications sector next, by offering a free in-home wireless broadband service.