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And this, Apple, is how you demonstrate monopolistic behaviour. Thank you for making sure I never want an Apple product.

Seriously, what possible real reason could they have for doing this? The only thing I can think of is that they actually are afraid that the Pre will provide serious competition for their products. Were iTunes a separate entity, they would absolutely welcome another product to which they could deliver revenue generating song sales. Instead, because it's linked to a hardware vendor who makes money selling a piece of equipment in addition to selling songs they have to stop people from buying something that's not theirs. Sorry, not liking the idea Apple.

Good thing amazon.com still sells high quality mp3s without stupid copy protection. I'll keep buying there and putting them on whatever devices I desire (after converting to ogg vorbis though).

Update: Well, it looks like Palm  made it work again. Geee, there's a surprise. I wonder how long this cycle will go on until they both realize it's just a dumb waste of resources.

I have this app that I use on and off. I needed it again and hadn't installed it on my new Ubuntu laptop from System76 (LOVE IT!). So, I installed Wine and hunted down the install cd. I plopped the cd in the drive and and Ubuntu opened up the contents window. I looked at the setup.exe icon for a few seconds and thought "huh, I wonder" and so double clicked it.

Indeed! Ubuntu had done the right thing and associated the .exe with wine! It popped up the install dialog and now I can browse the "C: drive" and start the app up just by clicking on it.

This is a testemant to how great of a job both Wine and Ubuntu of have done. Since I'm rather old school I usually use the command line and was already dreading the act of installing and running the app. Instead, it was quick, easy and very painless. Exactly like I expect my computer usage to be.

A few months ago I changed over to a Linux desktop at work. Because we have exchange I using evolution. Sadly, it's at best a weak replacement for a mail client. Its local message store is barely functional and falls apart horribly with sizes resembling anything that any real user will have.

So, a little while ago, our exchange admins turned on IMAP, I switched to Thunderbird and things were better. Or so I thought. It turns out that, except for Bayesian spam filtering, Thunderbird is just an outlook replacement.

What? Isn't that what I wanted?

No. I want it to be better. Why should I have the exact same capabilities when I can have more?

My current problems are focused around message filtering. Apparently there's a number of things that Thunderbird just doesn't do quite right. Like the fact that it only filters on the Inbox. So, if you're doing serverside filtering before downloading mail you can't re-filter on the client. That just seems silly.

But, the part where it could really be improved is in the general handling of filters. Thunderbird is built on the standard mozilla engine. So, it provides a nice javascript-y programming interface. How hard would it be to add capabilities like regular expressions or the ability have it actually execute code on particular messages? And there aren't even plug ins that do that.

Sure, I could write one, but, if I had the time to do that I wouldn't need the capabilities it would provide.

And that's one of the catch-22's of open source.