Silverwolf's Auditorium

As many of you are no doubt aware, Fry's Electronics does not have a real on-line store.  You can't order something on-line from Frys.com and pick it up in the store.  You can't even use the web-store as a price guide because the on-line prices have nothing at all in common with the brick-and-mortar store prices.

Furthermore, there is no official website where you can view the current in store specials.  You have to buy the paper.

Well, I wanted to share a website that I found that lists all the specials (complete with scanned images of the add in the paper).  I've been using it for months and it's always been perfectly accurate for me.  The only word of caution I'm going to give you is that some specials are regional only (they will be noted in yellow) so be sure to look for that.

http://www.frys-electronics-ads.com/

From http://www.vnunet.com:

Amazon has launched a public beta of AmazonMP3, a digital music download store which the firm claims has the world's largest selection of DRM-free downloads.

The new service boasts over two million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels.

Well, I have to admit that when I logged onto the Amazon music store I wanted it to suck.  Even before I clicked onto the link I expected it to be another half-baked attempt at a painful service designed by the RIAA.

However, looking at the site it actually looks like a pretty decent music store.  They certainly don't have every album out there, or even most of them.  The catalog looks like it's mostly dominated by independent groups, but there are a few big name artists to be found.  It's even priced to compete with iTunes, Most albums are $8 or $9 USD and individual songs are $0.99 each.  The downloads are unrestricted mp3 files which will play on anything, you can preview tracks before buying, they even have album art. 

That being said though, I still don't think the site is going to be a major threat to iTunes.  Why do I think that ?  It's because of the process you have to go through to purchase songs.  Buying music from iTunes is simplicity itself, you click a button marked "Buy", the music is downloaded, added to your music library, and ready to go in one seamless step.

No web-based service can begin to approach that level of simplicity, Amazon's offering included.  With a web-based process you have to download the files to your computer, remember where you saved them, drag them into iTunes (or windows media player), wait for them to import, delete the extra copies, and then Finally you can put them on your ipod and listen to them.

The whole thing is positively exhausting, even typing about it takes up too much time.  Your average ipod user isn't going to go through that many extra steps unless there is a compelling reason to do so, and I don't think DRM-free music is going to be a good enough reason for most people.  After all emusic.com has had essentially the same service for years now and they still aren't a major player.

You can get the same music from the iTunes music store and the DRM'd files will play just fine on your ipod music player.  What Amazon is going to have to do is offer the DRM-free music at a much lower cost, which makes sense anyway, allofmp3.com has proven to the world that you don't have to demand a buck a song to be successful in this business.

Given the attitudes of most Record Labels I think it's going to be a long long time before we see them offer mp3 albums for 3 bucks a piece.

If you are running OS X and you haven't installed iStat Pro yet I strongly recommend that you do, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to keep an idea on what's going on with your computer.

iStat Pro is freeware, requires OS X 10.4 (for widget support), and displays customizable information about the current state of your mac, including; temperatures, CPU usage, memory usage, hard disk usage, and much more.

It's a must-have for power users.

Here's a screen shot:

You can download it from iSlayer.com by clicking here.

According to an article at Information Week, IBM has decided to join forces with OpenOffice.org, to improve the software, and (hopefully) help it to gain some traction.

They will be releasing a free office suite called Lotus Symphony, which is essentially going to be an IBM branded version of OpenOffice.  Despite Microsoft's clear dominance in this field, lots of businesses still use IBM products, and with IBM pushing this free alternative to Microsoft's Office Suite they just might persuade more business to seriously consider OpenOffice as a platform.

Overall I think this is a very good thing, and a possible move towards an open standard that is sorely needed in this market.

Of course this title is completely arbitrary and assigned by me making it kind of pointless but it's a great piece of software.

Q is based on the excellent open source CPU emulator QEMU from Fabrice Bellard. Pierre d'Herbemont from stegefin.free.fr ported QEMU to OS X and initiated a cocoa Version.

That was the initialization for Mike to develop Q. A completely rewritten cocoa port of QEMU, built directly on OS X, making use of Apples Core-technologies like Coreimage, Coreaudio and OpenGL for in- and output, saving the overhead of crossplattform APIs like SDL, FMOD or GTK.

If you are running a G4 or G5 like me and are looking for an open source way to run X86 software you should give 'Q' a try.  It's been great to me.

You can download it from the 'Q' homepage.