Earlier today I bought a $10 album from iTumes, which I wish I hadn't. The reviews were glorious, and the previews not indicative. Listening to the album all I could hear was hipster drivel. Obviously, I wanted my money back. Well, bad luck. iTunes won't give refunds. I tweeted about it, and a friend suggested Rdio. Rdio, a brand new streaming service, currently offers a 3-day free trial -- without the need for a credit card. For $5 let's you stream their huge library on your desktop via an Adobe AIR app or browser, and for $10 let's you also stream from Android/BBerry/iOS, plus be able to sync your music with you offline on these devices. Unlike Last.fm and Pandora, Rdio let's you stream on-demand.

"Researchers in South Korea have built a networking router that transmits data at record speeds from components found in most high-end desktop computers. A team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology created the router, which transmits data at nearly 40 gigabytes per second--many times faster than the previous record for such a device."

Kevin Rose, of Digg fame, wrote a blog post yesterday about the upcoming revolution of the TV. A sentiment that I of course agree with. However, trying to think one step ahead, it makes sense to envision that the next big device that will get "smart," is the car. And when this happens soon, everything else will follow.

Can you believe it's been only six months since Microsoft first unveiled its brand-new and most likely last-ditch effort to regain some significance in the smartphone market? Well, today the company announced that the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools will go gold September 16, and applications submissions will be accepted from early October onwards.

Here's the dirty little secret about Android: After all the work Apple did to get AT&T to relinquish device control for the iPhone and all the great efforts Google made to get the FCC and the U.S. telecoms to agree to open access rules as part of the 700 MHz auction, Android is taking all of those gains and handing the power back to the telecoms.

Lennart Poettering has posted a status update about systemd, an init/upstart alternative. systemd is able now to replace /etc/fstab and cron, and it seems it will be the default init system for Fedora 14. He has also written a post about systemd for administrators.

On the NetBSD Blog, there's an in depth article about how rump can be used for testing and debugging the NetBSD kernel in userspace. "This article explains how rump is the enabling technology for a safe, fast and run-anywhere kernel test suite which requires absolutely no configuration from the person running the tests."

"AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of consumer grade graphics processors. While this Evergreen support isn't yet finished and for the time being is targeted towards Linux developers and enthusiasts, you can now play around with your ATI Radeon HD 5000 graphics processor on an open-source driver while having 2D EXA, X-Video, and OpenGL acceleration."

This summer, too, the Haikuproject is part of the Google Summer of Code event. One of the more interesting projects is the Services Kit (draft document!) by Christophe "Shusui" Huriaux, which is an API to facilitate the creation of native web-enabled programs using standard web protocols and data exchange mechanisms.

Rumours were abound that the first Google ChromeOS device would emerge towards the end of the year. Although this rumour turned out to be false, other snippets of news surrounding Google and the ChromeOS also emerged. One of these stories consists of rumours reported by TechCrunch, and two others are not rumours but simply confirmed facts.

"Toshiba said Wednesday that it had made a breakthrough in hard disk design that will allow hard drives to have much higher capacities than what is currently possible today. The research is in something called bit-patterned media, a magnetic storage technology. The recording surface is broken up into tiny magnetic bits, each of which can hold a single bit of data. The bits are made up of several grains, which are organized in rows. This organization is what makes it possible for data to be found easily."

"The long wait is over and Linux users can finally use the Gmail Videochat! The GMail team recently announced the availability of voice and video chat on Linux. This feature is currently supported on Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions. RPM Support for Fedora Linux and other Red Hat based distributions (like CentOS) is going to be added soon." Some screenshots of GMail Video Chat on Linux in action

Chalk this one up on the 'uh, what?'-list of acquisitions. Intel announced today that it has acquired Mcafee, the security and antivirus company we all know and love. The press release is a bit vague on why, exactly, Intel made this rather odd acquisition.

Fascinating stuff, but not entirely unexpected. As most of you will know, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is working on a tablet dubbed the BlackPad, and according to several sources reporting to Bloomberg, the device will ship with software written by QNs Software Systems, which RIM purchased earlier this year.