Interesting Stuff

While I’ve been home this break, I’ve been ripping my CDs to MP3s. To accomplish this, I’ve been trying out my brother’s copy of iTunes. It’s quite an impressive little piece of software, particularly concerning its ability to recognize CDs. Apple must have an absolutely huge database to aid in this: it has been able to recognize all but one of my CDs so far (the one being Wave by Antonio Carlos Jobim, a Brazilian artist who helped invent bossa nova back in the 1960s). As anyone who has seen my music collection knows, it’s quite full of obscure, strange titles. However, iTunes had no problem identifying the Israeli techno, the local Tacoma band, or anything else. I was pleasantly surprised. A bit more standardization as regards punctuation and capitalization would be nice, however.

On a tangential note, the Macworld Expo was earlier this week, at which Steve Jobs revealed a Mac running on Intel’s x86 architecture. I am a bit saddened to see this happen, because the ppc architecture is vastly superior to the x86 (except for the clock speed, which is marginally worse but could almost certainly be improved). However, I can understand why Apple would want to switch architectures: the x86 sports a larger code base, a smaller price tag, and is already manufactured as a dual core chip. Still, the idealist in me wishes this hadn’t occurred. Well, we shall see how this all pans out…