PlasticBoy

Amazon MP3 now has a Linux version of their album downloader. It’s annoying (and puzzling) that music stores force you to use these proprietary downloaders instead of just pushing you the files in a zip or something, but at least they are supporting a lot of platforms.

The album of the week is Goldfrapp’s Seventh Tree.

Ubuntu has launched Brainstorm, a Dell Ideastorm-like site where you can post Ubuntu feature requests and vote them up and down.

The new Mozilla organization dedicated to developing Thunderbird, Mozilla Messaging, has launched. They will also be developing Lightning, Sunbird, and an IM client, which is all very exciting. I’m using Lightning as my calendar at work now and it is looking and feeling much better than it has in the past.

Yahoo! is planning to shut down its Yahoo! Music Unlimited service and redirect it’s users to Rhapsody. It’s sad to see less competition in the streaming music space, I think competition from Yahoo! drove some of the recent improvements to Rhapsody’s player software.

NYTimes covers meat consumption and greenhouse gases.

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

Vampire Weekend is very nice but the Mars Volta are blowing my mind with The Bedlam in Goliath.

Many people have pointed out that the scary thing about Microsoft potentially buying Yahoo is that Yahoo owns many important web sites (Flickr, del.icio.us, upcoming.org, etc.) and supports many important open source projects (PHP, FreeBSD, YUI, Hadoop, Squid, etc.) I’m not worried, though. These days Microsoft is so ineffectual that it would take them at least a decade to ruin all of those sites and projects.