Updates on last week's New Releases

First off, I am happy to say I finally received my official copy of Steven Curtis Chapman's latest album, "This Moment", last Thursday from MusicToday.com (two days after the release date) and was surprised to see that I actually received the "Special Edition" which included the four bonus acoustic tracks. I did not remember ordering that "special" version but I'll take it! This one has the special yellow cover instead of the bluish one. The neatest thing about it is this technology they used to allow you to access a special online site by using the CD as a "key" that is read by a Java applet. I looked at the CD and did not see any special files on it besides the audio files, so I am guessing it generated some signature based on the arrangement of the tracks and use that as a key to allow access to the site. I am curious if I make a CloneCD image copy of the CD if it will still let me access the special content or not. It may actually use hidden bad sectors on the CD or something I am missing. The site that checked the CD is DigitalInsert.com which apparently does this for all sorts of CD's.

As for the Ubuntu 7.10 release last week, I did install it successfully on my Dell Precision 360 as well as two other desktops running 7.04 (an Optiplex GX270 and a Precision 340) and they both upgraded flawlessly and Compiz Fusion runs beautifully on all three of their NVIDIA video adapters. Note that the other two Dell desktops only have 512MB of RAM, and yet 7.10 performs quite responsively on them. Try running Vista and Aero on those machines! Oh, wait a second -- you can't!!

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