PlasticBoy

Steve Ballmer called for PC makers to create a $100 computer and SolarPC answered with a neat little Linux box. SolarPC also makes fanless systems suitable for use as MythTV boxes.

An upcoming peer-to-peer service has signed licensing deals with three of the big four record labels. The songs will cost 99 cents and be copy protected. Cool, all of the inconvenience of peer-to-peer with none of the cost savings, sign me up!

The album of the week is Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ Shake the Sheets.

Priceless: “Open source faces no more (if not less) legal risk than proprietary software. The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does”

NewsForge has a great article on the Solaris 10 launch. Lots of informative comments from Sun execs.

Linspire has licensed and ported Windows Media to their version of desktop Linux. Microsoft refused their efforts to license Windows Media DRM so there’s no support for music sites like Napster.

The press release claims that it’s difficult to set up unlicensed Windows Media support in current Linux distributions but I should point out that in Fedora it’s as easy as typing “yum install mplayerplug-in”.

Rafe Colburn doesn’t like the idea of amending the Constitution so Arnold Schwarzenegger can be elected president. Personally, I’m all for it. The amending the Constitution part, anyway. It’s a ridiculous requirement and we ought to get rid of it. I also wouldn’t be terribly upset if Arnold was elected, he’s exactly the sort of moderate republican liberals should like. I’d much rather have a Schwarzenegger or a McCain in office than a Bush or a Reagan.

Plus, the proper way to get revenge in case the Constitution is amended and Schwarzenegger is elected is to elect Arianna Huffington ;)

The album of the week is Rufus Wainwright’s Want Two.

The Boston Globe has an editorial on the importance of Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons and Dragons was a not a way out of the mainstream, as some parents feared and other kids suspected, but a way back into the realm of story-telling. This was what my friends and I were doing: creating narratives to make sense of feeling socially marginal. We were writing stories, grand in scope, with heroes, villains, and the entire zoology of mythical creatures. Even sports, the arch-nemesis of role-playing games, is a splendid tale of adventure and glory. Though my friends and I were not always athletically inclined, we found agility in the characters we created. We fought, flew through the air, shot arrows out of the park, and scored points by slaying the dragon and disabling the trap.

[via BoingBoing]

The first two episodes of Dungeon Majesty are now online at Heavy.com. I thought they were very entertaining, it was definitely a good choice not to go with 30 solid minutes of D&D play (the second episode is a visit to a ren faire).

In case you’re having trouble downloading Firefox 1.0, released today, here’s a nice mirror that includes a .torrent.

Ok, I couldn’t resist:

I’m going to try to decompress from the election by taking taking a week long fast from news, television, and blogs. The album of the week is Yo-Yo Ma’s Brahams Sonatas for Cello and Piano. Take a deep breath, relax, listen to some nice music, and I’ll see you in a week.

Cory Doctorow has a post on Boing Boing that perfectly illustrates one of the greatest advantages that open source software has over closed source. With open source it’s almost impossible to get screwed in this manner.