Army Builder is a windows program that helps you build an army for use in playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle that conforms to the rules of the game. This simple program took all the pain out of building my little Dwarf army and got me playing much faster – I highly recommend it. As there is only a Windows version of the program, I have to run it in a virtual machine (VM), but that has turned out to be a good decision anyway as we’ll see later.
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So Microsoft finally has an ad running that makes some kind of sense. They toss “Lauren” $1,000 to buy a computer and tell her she can keep whatever is left over. At the end of the ad she says that she “got *just* what she wanted”, so then why exactly did we see her go to the Mac store first? This ad is the latest in a mess of PC vs Mac ads that finally scores some points on the PC side, because she couldn’t afford a 17″ Mac laptop but ended up getting money back on a 17″ PC laptop. Sad, but true – the 17″ Mac laptop is a lot more expensive. The thing that leaves me scratching my head is that Microsoft doesn’t make laptops! From a business perspective, how does spending $1,000 to get somebody to buy your $100 product make any sense? If they were to continue this promotion and they gave *me* a thousand bucks to buy a new computer, you know I’d buy a PC too – but then of course, I’d put Linux on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIS6G-HvnkU

I haven’t ever bought one song through iTunes – and it’s because of their stupid DRM (Digital Rights Management) which controlled where you could play that music you bought. That might be changing now as Apple announced at MacWorld (though I heard it through ReadWriteWeb) that they will be offering the 10 million songs in the iTunes store without the onerous restrictions. They will even offer re-downloads of songs you may have already purchased (at high quality) without it. There have been many times that I wanted to grab something off iTunes but refused to do so on principal (and because I have Linux machines that I wouldn’t have been able to listen to the stuff on afterward) and I’m happy to see Apple has finally gotten bold enough to stand up to the record companies on this issue.

My Apple Powerbook G4 is feeling a little slow lately. I’ve been looking at something new and shiny to replace it for about a half a year now and just when I thought I had decided to go with PC hardware and Linux (probably Ubuntu), Apple has upped the ante. One of the things I like about my old powerbook is the aluminum chassis, plastic just doesn’t do it for me – and now the new Macbook is available in aluminum! At $1,300 with a bigger screen than my trusty old 12″ and higher screen res (though I’m not thrilled about the widescreen), a fast processor and a couple GB or Ram, it’s going to be hard to look elsewhere. Then, as if we could make the decision any harder: Open Office 3.0 now offers native OS X support!
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