“Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player…” - Steve Jobs

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

Mac latops draw a very small amount of power while closed (aka “sleeping”) to preserve the contents of its memory. This small draw of power slowly drains the battery. If a Mac were to “hibernate,” like a lot of PC laptops can do, the memory would be saved to the hard disk and then draw no power at all. Apple doesn’t provide a “hibernate” option, so that’s where Deep Sleep comes in handy. Deep Sleep puts a Mac laptop into a hibernated state, writing the memory to the hard disk so that it draws no power while closed.

I tried Deep Sleep out this past weekend. On Friday, with a fully charged battery, I put my MacBook into “deep sleep” and went home. I didn’t open my computer until Sunday night, and when I did it still had a full charge! If I had just put it to sleep, I’m sure the battery would have been in the 70-80% range on Sunday.

Found this on LifeHacker this morning, made me think of when Brian lamented the lack of a refresh in Finder.

Mac OS X only: Freeware tool Refresh Finder lets you add a Safari-like refresh button to your Finder window.

Die-hard Mac owners might think Tiger’s automatic refresh should render this irrelevant, but there are times when Finder’s auto-refresh just doesn’t do the trick - especially with mounted networked drives. Rather than having to hit back and forward, or worse yet, rather than requiring you to unmount and remount a network drive, you should be able to just click the Refresh Finder button, which runs a very simple Applescript and refreshes the folder you’re looking at. Refresh Finder is freeware, Mac OS X only. To install, move to your Applications folder, then just drag the refresh icon directly onto your Finder toolbar.

We all got together at Craig & Jenny’s house to cook dinner last Friday. The menu: flounder stuffed with mushrooms topped with a tomato reduction; grilled asparagus with pecorino; corn chowder; homemade vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberries. Jillian’s taking the picture. More pics here…

If you could get rid of all your junk mail (we’re talking the paper stuff here) for five years, how much would you pay? Well, a Michigan company called 41Pounds.org is working an innovative business plan that bets you’ll pay $41.

Their points:

• NO MORE JUNK MAIL.
• Save time by eliminating 80-95% of your daily junk mail.
• Save trees - 100+ million trees destroyed annually for junk mail.
• Save water used producing and recycling junk mail.
• Reduce global warming - energy used for junk mail.
• Support your favorite charity - we donate when you sign up.

This weekend Evolution was released for Windows. Evolution is a popular email client in the Linux world, something I looked at when we rolled out the new Exchange server last year. Evolution accesses OWA to connect to the Exchange server, but has the look and feel of full-on email client. This is great for Windows users looking for an alternative to webmail when working at home. LifeHacker also notes:

Like Outlook, Evolution is an email client (which can work with Exchange server, cool!), calendar, task list and memo manager. Unlike Outlook, Evolution does not look at all like a native Windows app. Windows users looking for an alternative to an expensive Outlook license would do well to check out Evolution, but brace yourself for the beautiful open source ugliness.

The Win version of Evolution is for Windows XP only.