The Talk Show: Live From WWDC
7:00pm Tuesday • California Theatre
Tickets Available • Fun Will Be Had

Linked List: November 18, 2005

Friday, 18 November 2005

Macworld Benchmarks for new Power Macs ★

Quad-core 2.5 GHz comes out on top, of course, but they’re not that much faster than the lesser Power Macs.

Josh Williams has designed a shirt to celebrate Sony’s wonderful new audio CD rootkit feature:

We don’t know about you, but when we buy a music CD we consider it a friendly invitation for complete strangers to come in and make our computer their personal playground. Install hidden software that hijacks basic components of our system? Open us to attack from viruses and hackers? Sounds perfect!

I’ve already ordered one.

Joel Spolsky on Why the Music Industry Wants Variable ITMS Pricing ★

Spolsky nails it:

Here’s the dream world for the EMI Group, Sony/BMG, etc.: there are two prices for songs on iTunes, say, $2.49 and $0.99. All the new releases come out at $2.49. Some classic rock (Sweet Home Alabama) is at $2.49. Unwanted, old, crap, like, say, Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl) — the crap we only know because it was pushed on us in the 70s by paid-off disk jockeys — would be deliberately priced at $0.99 to send a clear message that $0.99 = crap.

Mac OS X 10.4.3 Claims Cmd-Esc Keyboard Sequence ★

Quicksilver uses Cmd-Esc as the default keyboard shortcut for its useful Services menu item, but the shortcut stopped working in 10.4.3; Quicksilver developer Nicholas Jitkoff thinks it’s because the OS now claims the shortcut on behalf of Front Row, which, if true, would be a bit obnoxious considering that Front Row is only available on new iMac G5s.