Big news:
File-sharing service Kazaa has agreed to pay record labels a $100 million settlement for allowing tracks to be illegally swapped through its service.

Are you kidding me? And how much were those kids fined again before the Pepsi/iTunes commercial? Can you imagine how many millions if not billions if not... of copyrighted files, music, movies, etc, via Kazaa? And they shell out $100 and call things square?

from article: At its peak it had 4.2 million simultaneous users worldwide.

Okay, easily billions of files.

$100 is better than a kick in the face, and I suppose Kazaa nearly managed to make what they did debately legal by moving to whatever island it was, but let's face it, this is nearly a buy-out by the "record labels" for Kazaa to stop it.

Wonder what this'll mean for Gnutella usage? Is there another player in P2P file trading more popular than LimeWire? These things got so daggum trojan-ridden that I stopped even keeping up with them.

Topic 2:
Ever wish you could run faster? Be smarter? Know how to fly planes? Is the Air Force denying you a pilot's spot because of bad eyesight? Ah, it's time for you to try out Wish I were.... It won't solve any of those personal problems, but it will let your Classic Mac solve similar problems of its own.

The "Wish I were..." control panel provides a method for a system to identify its hardware as another hardware type, via the Gestalt "mach" selector.

The reason for creating this control panel was to assist individuals who install clock chippers, especially to Power Macs. Some applications (for example MachTen) use the response from the Gestalt "mach" selector to determine a Macintosh's hardware type, and thus perform run-time configuration. Clock chipped machines may respond with a value that does not correspond to an existing machine (for example, a clock chipped PowerMac 6100 response as a 6100/80), and some applications may be confused.

This utility can be used to force Gestalt to respond with an acceptable value, and thus the application will function correctly.

Topic 3:
In other news, Thunderbird on OS X is pretty second rate software. Lots of neat features (search is very good so far), and relatively solid, but man oh man does the interface stink. Buttons don't line up, keyboard shortcuts bork, and I feel like I'm running an app that doesn't belong on my platform. Great work getting it here, and a wonderful mail app for the price, but I still only use it for fringe addresses that I want to keep separate from Mail.app rather than consider it ready to be my primary application. Must I remind people of the Napkin Look and Feel?