Ok, this is just plain sweet.

iTunes watermarks

For those of you who follow such things, you may have noticed that Apple is selling DRM-free songs on iTunes in response to the widespread hatred of DRM in general (widespread could be exaggeration, but I do certainly have a passionate hatred for it). It has come to be known that these new songs have a "watermark" that contains the buyer's username and email (or some similar identification, not sure on specifics) within the file itself so that a song file can easily identify the original purchaser. There has been some outcry over this watermark from some folks, but I think it really isn't that bad. Now I hate DRM more than most folks, but even I have to say that a watermark is 100 times better than the old DRM crap. If I buy a song on iTunes with this watermark, I can play it on any music player I own with no restrictions; I'm no longer paying for the right to play a song on one (or a very few) players, but the right to play a song on whatever the heck I want. The only possible downside (aside from the 30 cent extra cost on iTunes) is that I can't share my songs on bittorrent, and there really isn't ever a legitimate reason to do that in the first place. So I for one am much more happy with watermarks.

blaaaaaaaa

Allow me to express exactly how motivated I have been this week to do anything other than watch crappy TV movies: I have not been motivated this week to do anything other than watch crappy TV movies. It must have been that Memorial Day holiday; 6 months with no holidays and I was fine, but one three day weekend has killed my motivation.

Anyways, here's an interesting link since I don't feel like posting anything that requires much effort:

Some new ideas for the future of operating systems. Interesting, but I think it will be quite a while before any radical new designs such as this reach production on a significant scale.

Winner

Yesterday I really established how much of a winner I am when I came to work with my shirt accidentally turned inside out. When someone told me right before lunch after I had gone to a couple meetings, I was feeling pretty good about myself, I must say.

In other news, for some reason IDEA, which I spend at least 3/4 of my day in, has a modal dialog for the Subversion diff dialog. That is incredibly annoying when I'm trying to look at two diffs, especially when it would take a one line fix to change it. Dah! So annoying!

In continuing this week's tradition of posting random links, here's my links for the day related to O/R mapping:

Vietnam of Computer Science
More on that
One possible solution

Completely unrelated is this performance comparison of JBossCache and Terracotta.

I would comment on these articles, but at the moment time is lacking...

It would seem as if this blog is becoming more of a browser favorites storage engine than anything...oh well.

Snap

Oh snap: this should be good.

Good article on the near future of Java.