Online Music Purchasing

So, this morning I saw a commercial to try out Rhapsody for 14days free. I dropped by www.51.freerhapsody.com to check it out. In the offer you have to present a credit card in order to get the 14 days. At this point I decided to go visit the main site, www.rhapsody.com, to see if there were any previews of the service. Low and behold, the previews don't work in Konqueror. It states that I need to be using Firefox 1.0.1, which I can't specify as a user agent(1.0 is the only one listed). Safari is also listed, but for version 1.3. So I'm not even going to try out Rhapsody because I don't have a supported browser. In case you're not aware, Rhapsody is Real's online music offering.

I've never bought any music from an online music store before so I wanted to test the waters. Now I had heard some time ago about Bleep. Warp records does all their mp3 purchasing through them, and Warp has one of my favorite artists, Autechre. So I thought why not try out Bleep to see how they perform with Konqueror. Simply Amazing! The preview of tracks worked great, purchasing was easy and they'll even package up an album into on giant zip file for you to download.. all for $9.99 USD.

My favorite part about Bleep, is the EULA for the downloaded content:

You shall be entitled to export, burn or copy Products solely for personal, noncommercial use.

I've not tried any other offerings at this time, but I feel that it is important for Konqueror to support as many as possible as digital content distribution becomes a very well known way of obtaining products/services. Maybe others could share their experiences as well.

Oi veh Xgl

Xgl Xgl Xgl..

Seems like we all just need to really think about how we're going to intelligently use/develop OpenGL in Xorg. I know it is more complicated than that both philosophically and productively, but it's worth mentioning.

I have faith that it will come about in some fashion, but seeing how I don't have much experience in the internals personally I'll just provide the links for everyone to peruse.

FreeBSD and SK

So, I finally got an install of FreeBSD going. Albeit in an emulator, it should still suffice for testing. First thing I've noticed is that the ram usage is off. I'm seeing negative values. If any of you *BSD users are also seeing this or have gotten around it, please let me know. This is my attempt at helping support more than just linux with SK. Hopefully some good will come of this.