Think twice before playing a new audio CD in your Mac. Adam looks at how music labels are treating consumers like criminals by deliberately creating corrupt audio discs that can gum up your Mac. Also in this issue, Matt Neuburg positions Layout Master as a worthy addition to a webmaster’s toolbox. We also drool over Apple’s upcoming Xserve rack-mounted server, and note the releases of speed-bumped iBooks, PopChar X, and Now Up-to-Date & Contact 4.2.1.
No TidBITS Issue 27-May-02 -- It is said there's no rest for the wicked, but of late that homily has been spilling over to the rest of us as well. So, TidBITS is taking a well-deserved week off for the U.S
Apple Speed Bumps iBooks -- Apple today announced an update to the slick iBook line that adds faster CPUs, 512K on-chip L2 cache, a more powerful ATI Mobility Radeon graphics processor with 16 MB of RAM and AGP 2X, larger hard drives, and a new video-out port
Now Up-to-Date & Contact 4.2.1 Adds Grab-'n-Go -- Power On Software has released Now Up-to-Date & Contact 4.2.1, a free upgrade for users of the Mac OS X-only version of their popular calendaring and contact management program
Snap, Crackle, and PopChar X -- The many enthusiastic fans of Günther Blaschek's venerable PopChar utility were rewarded for their patience this week when he released a Mac OS X version
Apple last week introduced a new line of rack-mountable servers, due to ship in June 2002 and available for ordering now at the online Apple Store. The 1U (one rack unit in height) Xserve server offers single or dual 1 GHz PowerPC G4 processors, up to 2 GB of DDR SDRAM memory, up to 480 GB of storage in four hot-pluggable ATA/100 drives, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, three FireWire ports, two USB ports, and one DB-9 serial port
Accustomed to playing CDs in your Mac? Beware. A number of music labels have released intentionally corrupt audio discs in Europe and the U.S. that look like industry standard CDs and even play in some CD players (see Fat Chuck's Corrupt CDs site and the Campaign for Digital Rights site for lists)
Layout Master 1.1, from Western Civilisation, is software of a kind I really like: it does one thing and does it splendidly. Like its earlier companion program, Style Master, which I reviewed in TidBITS-501, that one thing has to do with authoring and editing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the supplement to HTML that is increasingly becoming the way to dictate the formal details of your Web pages