According to sources, Apple earlier today declared build 8A428 of Tiger 'gold master,' the final development stage. Companies typically release the 'GM' candidate to manfuacturing for duplication and packaging.

Earlier this week, Apple release a "FC" (final candidate) build to developers and other partners to test the operating system for any last minute "showstoppers." The build reportedly still had a few outstanding issues, but those were not expected to delay Tiger's release.

A lot of people have been reporting a new breed of pop-ups on the web. This increasing menace is rooted in the pop-up capabilities of plug-ins like flash and Java. If you're seeing pop-ups and pop-unders, you're probably visiting sites that have flash or other plug-ins and those plug-ins are being exploited by advertisers to abuse you with annoying pop-ups and pop-unders.

Firefox has the capability to disable these pop-ups but it wasn't enabled by default in Firefox 1.0 because we had concerns about websites that rely on plug-in triggered pop-ups for legitimate functionality.

Give that these pop-ups and pop-unders have really started to spread on the web, we're testing a quick patch that enables the Firefox pref to block them. I blogged about this earlier this month and included manual steps to disable these nasty pop-ups and pop-unders. In addition to this fix, the good news is that for sites where you need these pop-ups, you can just whitelist them like you do other "wanted" pop-ups. This looks (at this stage) like a reasonable trade off.

If you're interested in helping us test this patch, we've packaged it up as a signed extension you can install (and disable or uninstall if you don't like it.) It's available for testing from our ftp site.

We've released Chandler 0.5. It focuses on building out some of the core calendaring functionality for supporting basic individual and collaborative calendaring tasks.

Feel free to play with it, but PEASE NOTE IT'S NOT READY FOR REGULAR USE YET. NOT READY YET. NOT. (Am I afraid of this point being missed?)

The first computer with a built-in spot for an iPod is on its way--and it's not a Mac.

Hewlett-Packard is planning to add a prime spot for Apple Computer's music player in its latest Media Center m7000 desktop PC. The computer doesn't have a dock itself, but rather features a molded piece of plastic that fits around Apple's own dock to allow the device to gracefully dock atop the PC.

The move signals that HP has not lost interest in the iPod.

HP released 20GB and 40GB iPods last year, but has not updated its line since then, even as Apple has added color models and dropped prices. In January, then-CEO Carly Fiorina said that HP would offer a version of the iPod Photo. However, since then, HP's board has ousted Fiorina and the company has not introduced any new iPods.

But new HP-branded iPods are on the way and should be announced in the coming weeks.

About 40 percent of people who buy an HP iPod also buy the company's "tattoos," which let consumers print their own cover for the music player.

Michael Arrieta, senior vice president of Sony Pictures, said at a US Digital Hollywood conference that it wanted to create an "iTunes" for films.

Films will be put onto flash memory for mobiles over the next year, said Mr Arrieta, and it will develop its digital download services for films.

Movie studios are keen to stop illegal file-sharing on peer-to-peer nets and cash in on digital the download market.

This is a chart of icons from various interfaces. Clicking on GUI names, section names or icons themselves will lead to the appropriate page.

We have all been present at discussions (or arguments) in which one of the combatants attempts to clarify or strengthen a point by comparing the subject at hand with another item or situation more familiar to the audience or opponent. More often than not, this stratagem instantly results in the protest that "you're comparing apples and oranges!" This is generally perceived as being a telling blow to the analogy, since it is generally understood that apples and oranges cannot be compared. However, after being the recipient of just such an accusation, it occurred to me that there are several problems with dismissing analogies with the comparing apples and oranges defense.

First, the statement that something is like comparing apples and oranges is a kind of analogy itself. That is, denigrating an analogy by accusing it of comparing apples and oranges is, in and of itself, comparing apples and oranges. More importantly, it is not difficult to demonstrate that apples and oranges can, in fact, be compared (see figure 1).

This morning, I switched my default browser from Safari to Firefox. Next, I think I’ll look at moving from Mail.app to Thunderbird. Maybe I’ll go back, but I’m increasingly starting to feel uncomfortable in Apple-land.

Open or Not My big gripe with Apple, of course, is their cult of hermetic secrecy. We at Sun and our esteemed competitors up in Redmond are engaged in a grand experiment: what happens when you dramatically increase a company’s transparency? Initial results are pretty good for both of us. Apple’s approach is of course, exactly the opposite. They control the message, nothing that’s not part of the message can be said, nobody is allowed to say anything except for Steve, and they’ll sue your ass if you step out of bounds.

The iTunes Music Store (iTMS) UK this morning added a new recording of the J.S. Bach Cello Suites ... The list price is £15.99 for what is usually a 2 CD affair. The price is consistent with regular album releases on iTMS UK, £7.99. Unfortunately, so is the quality.

Apple has maintained since Day One of the iTMS' North American inception that a bitrate of 128kbps offers sufficient (near-CD) quality for music downloads ... 128kbps does the job, if only just. It has not stopped Apple selling literally several hundred million songs in this format, perhaps the lowest-quality of all Digital Rights Managed songs sold on the internet.

But there is one thing that can be done, and that is for Apple to acknowledge that Classical, and to a lesser extent, Jazz music, present exceptional cases. Their listeners are more likely to be audiophiles. The material itself, full of subtleties that must be preserved, is more demanding on codecs, and is done a disservice by poor encoding and low bitrates. This is a fact beyond dispute.

Cody Brocious is a 17-year old 11th grader from Chamberburg, Pa., and like many other teens he loves his iPod and uses the iTunes music store to buy music.

Brocious likes using the Linux operating system more than he does Microsoft's Windows or Apple Computer's Mac OS. But Apple doesn't make software that would let Linux users like Brocious buy songs from the iTunes store, so he did what any 21st-century teen raised in the digital age would do — he and his friends wrote a program to do so themselves.

One of those friends is Jon Johansen, a Norwegian who in 1999 drew the ire of the Motion Pictures Association of America for creating a software program designed to circumvent the copy-protection technology on DVDs.

What they came up with is a program called PyMusique, which hit the Web about two weeks ago. It lets Linux desktop users buy — not steal — music files from iTunes. One unintended consequence of their program is that it saves the songs without the built-in copy-protection code, meaning that songs can be copied to other devices at will.

Brocious says that stripping the Digital Rights Management technology from iTunes songs happened more or less by accident. He first assumed that the copy protection was attached directly by the iTunes server itself. Had that been the case, he says, PyMusique would have left it intact, meaning the program would be subject to the same copy restrictions to which all iTunes users are subject.