Remember MacFUSE? The filesystem that Google's Amit Singh ported over to OS X? Yes, that's the one. Sure, you read about it here on TUAW and thought to yourself, 'That sounds cool but I have no idea why I should care or how I would go about using it.' Fear not, loyal TUAW reader, Jay Savage at Download Squad has got you covered.
On Friday our friends at sister blog Download Squad began a new series titled 12 Days of holiday downloads, rounding up holiday and Christmas-themed downloads for both Mac OS X and Windows. Day 2 was posted today, and so far it looks like a neat series for those of you who like to get their Mac (and Windows PC) into the holiday spirit. Day 1 covered Snö, an app we've mentioned before, can create a snowfall on your desktop (though, as of this writing, Snö's site seems to be unavailable). Day 2 for Mac (today) covers X-MasTree, which we posted about a few days ago.
Mr. Linspire himself, Michael Robertson, posted a little ditty about his love of diet soda. He then compares the short shelf-life of diet soda (Aspartame, in particular, doesn't last long) to the potentially limited life span of any DRM'ed music. His case is mycokemusic.com, which just went away once the iTunes invaded the UK. But he predictably turns his gaze to iTunes, the juggernaut of online music. The logic goes, DRM limits you, forces restrictions, which could hamper or completely invalidate your music collection someday. Right now, if you purchased a bunch of songs on iTunes and wanted to switch from an iPod to something else (people tell me others do in fact make portable music players), you would have to burn and re-rip your music as a bunch of MP3's. Or re-buy them all. Sounds like fun, huh? About as much fun as me copying the giant boxes of audio cassettes I have in the garage onto my hard drive, splitting up the tracks, labeling them, and storing them indefinitely. Always nice to see technology making life easier for us... The eternal question: DRM good or DRM bad? If Michael had his way, we'd all be rockin' to MP3's sans restrictions. But then, I don't see a lot of music labels knocking on his door...
What a grand gesture. Five more years of Office
wasn't enough, so Microsoft went the extra mile and released a fully-functional, virtualization app called VirtualPC XP
for Intel Macs... Nah! I'm just kidding. They popped a JPEG up on their site saying how happy they have been to ride on
the coattails of an innovator for the past 22 years. Or something like that. You can see the birthday card from the Microsoft MacBU to Apple here. It could
have been worse. They could have said: "After 22 years, and a decade-long headstart on the GUI, you are still
#2." I'm thankful for small favors. Truth is, Apple should be thanking Microsoft for sticking through the lean
times. Oh, and that infusion of cash a few years back didn't hurt (awkward to witness though). So thanks Microsoft, now
where's that new version of Virtual PC, hm?
So you've done the
formerly impossible and unnecessary: installed Winders on a Mac. Cool, best of both worlds. But there you are, staring
at that awful primary color, jumbo crayon, sickly plasticky XP theme. Yeah, you could use one of the many mods featured on Download Squad (please, feel free). Or you
could turn your XP rig back into a Mac. At least, you can make XP look a lot more like a Mac. Engadget did this nearly 2 years ago, although
Aqua-Soft is still updating their content. Or why not go old school with an OS 9 flavor? Ah, that's better.
| # | Blogger | Posts | Cmts |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cory Bohon | 89 | 1 |
| 2 | Robert Palmer | 64 | 44 |
| 3 | Steven Sande | 58 | 22 |
| 4 | Scott McNulty | 40 | 0 |
| 5 | Mat Lu | 40 | 10 |
| 6 | Dave Caolo | 37 | 0 |
| 7 | Erica Sadun | 28 | 2 |
| 8 | Brett Terpstra | 23 | 0 |
| 9 | Mike Schramm | 20 | 1 |
| 10 | Michael Rose | 11 | 32 |
| 11 | Christina Warren | 10 | 38 |
| 12 | Joshua Ellis | 3 | 2 |
| 13 | Lisa Hoover | 2 | 6 |
| 14 | Chris Ullrich | 2 | 2 |
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