Mac Browsing on Windows

If Firefox and Opera (anybody still using Netscape out there?) were not enough competition for Microsoft, now there's another browser for the Windows OS.

Do you want to try it out? Okay, here's the link. Just keep in mind is still in beta developement and it might cause some problems. Bookmarks, installation, fonts... you name it. Sometimes, it's because of a conflict with settings stablished by Internet Explorer. Just don't uninstall your current program.

Once those quirks are worked out, what's there to catch your interest? The list of goodies is rather long if you ask them:

   1. Blazing Performance - yeah sure.
   2. Elegant User Interface - that's a matter of taste.
   3. Easy Bookmarks - right now they're anything but easy.
   4. Pop-up Blocking - quite the standar nowadays.
   5. Inline Find - you mean, like in the Google search?
   6. Tabbed Browsing - even IE has it now.
   7. SnapBack - instantly snap back to search results or the top level of a website.
   8. Forms AutoFill - zzzzz.
   9. RSSBuilt-in RSS - RSS tells you when new content is added to your favorite sites.
  10. Resizable Text Fields - might be useful.
  11. Private Browsing - finally, something interesting (for the ones who surf at work).
  12. Security - we'll see about that one.

The download is only eight megabytes in size, if you don't like it, at least you won't have lost a lot of time.
 

Oo arr mateys, come with us as we walk the plank with MaxitMag satirist Eric Sandstrom as he cooks up the funnies on Pirates of the Caribbean producer, Jerry Bruckheimer. He'll delve into why he's the quintessential producer, why he seems to be competent, and why he finds the need to exhaustively describe what the crew member jobs are. Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Eight.

Jessica Simpson was recently snapped dining with Ken Paves (hair fluffer and lover) at the weekend before the two caught a show together at The Dresden. As you can see, Jessica is looking her very breast again.

She even looks to have lost some weight and looks remarkably better than she did two weeks ago. But who's looking at her face with those gazongas on display.  Makes you want to get both hands and squeeze your monitor together.

And before you ask, yes we are sad enough to get kicks pretending to feel a pair of gigantic boobies by squeezing our Apple Mac LCD. What's that? You do the same thing too? It's okay, you're secrets safe with us.

The launch of music tracks free of digital locks on iTunes has been overshadowed by the discovery that they contain data about who bought them. Some fear this data could be used to identify the owner of the tracks if they turn up on file-sharing sites. The tracks from record company EMI cost more and are of a better quality than standard iTunes songs.

Apple has yet to comment on what it plans to do with the information embedded in the music files. The tracks without the digital locks, known as Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, officially went on sale on 30 May under the iTunes Plus banner. The downloads cost $1.29 (99p) rather than $0.99 (79p). Apple uses a technology known as Fairplay to limit what people can do with downloads. Fairplay can be circumvented by burning tracks to a CD and then converting them to another format.

News site Ars Technica was among the first to discover that downloaded tracks free of Fairplay have embedded within them the full name and account information, including e-mail address, of who bought them. It suggested that this information could be an anti-piracy measure as it could help work out who was putting downloads on file-sharing sites. But it also added that the user information was found on all the tracks that people buy on iTunes whether free of DRM or not.

Two words for Apple: this sucks. Did they really think nobody will notice this?

"If everyone smoked weed, the world would be a better place."

The same could be said about Kirsten Dunst removing all her clothes and posing for a center spread in Playboy magazine. How about it Kirsten? We'll smoke the weed if you bring the spiderman outfit.

"Venom is so fantastical that he's the only new character in Spider-Man 3; we really wanted to give him room to play around -- his just due."

Wonder Woman fan's love Nadia Bjorlin? Oh, believe it!

 Mac fans can curse the iPhone for the delay of OS X 10.5 according to news from Apple. The delays of Vista had Apple laughing in Microsofts face but it looks like the shoe is now on the other foot. According to an Apple press release yesterday, OS X 10.5 dubbed Leopard will not be launched until October of this year.

"We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones," said the company in the release.

Apple sites the delay due to extra resources being needed to launch the iPhone in June. Of course this could be a way of saying that Leopard is borked and they need more time to fix it. The new OS will be a true 64bit operating system and will have a new feature called Time Machine - a facility that allows you to go back in time and change the course of computing history.

Of course, Microsoft should be over the moon by this news as it gives them an extra few months to get their own back on Apples Vista slur campaign.

After acknowledging the existence of a method to bypass the Windows Vista activation routine, a senior product manager at the big M, posted about the effectiveness of this method on his blog.

“This form of product activation is also known as OEM Activation or just OA,” Kochis wrote. Back at the launch of Windows XP when Microsoft introduced Windows Product Activation, we recognized that as easy as end-user activation is, it still represented an extra step. In an effort to reduce the impact of even that extra step but maintain the overall effectiveness of product activation, Microsoft worked with OEMs to develop an implementation that would work best for them and their customers while keeping the goals of product activation clearly in focus. As we looked to develop a solution, it was important to ensure that product activation technology could still deliver an acceptable degree of protection, while at the same time, reduce the need for an extra step by the end user.”

Blood, Guts and Ketchup

Take one Greek myth legend, add in a plenty of muscle bound heroes, mix with lashings of tomato ketchup and cook for 2 hours. It's the basic ingredients for 300, a spectacular movie and possibly the best film in years. Frank Miller's visual blood feast is a fast paced epic of big beefy men chopping each other up into little bits.

So what does our resident Hollywood critic think to all this? Eric Sandstrom straps on his leathers and thrusts his sword deep into 300. What a guy.