New and Noteworthy: iTunes bad, WMA good?; NASA and Macs: Like bread and butter; more

iTunes bad, WMA good? An ExtremeTech article glosses over the various pros and cons of AAC and WMA (seemingly confusing the AAC with iTunes and the iPod in general) concluding that WMA is the better standard. The article surmises " IPod sales and iTunes usage will continue to grow but the market will grow even faster, causing their actual market share to shrink. When that happens, and Apple's products become entirely marginalized, I don't want to be stuck with a whole bunch of 99-cent songs encoded with AAC and locked with FairPlay DRM," and incorrectly states that Macs do not support the 5.1 audio spec. More.

NASA and Macs: Like bread and butter NASA has always loved Macs, and the recent expeditions to Mars have proved no exception to the rule. "For our [Mars] landing site work, we always get the highest-end desktop Mac we can find, so we just got one of the G5s with dual 2-Ghz processors and 8 GB of RAM," Matt Golombek, a planetary geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the E-Commerce Times. More.

AirPort donation program Tech Superpowers of Boston is starting a free WiFi-based project for which the company is asking some help. "Our newest initiative is a little bit secretive, but we need more access points - dozens - and cheap. We're appealing to members of the Mac community to donate unused and broken Airport Base Stations to the cause, with the promise that even though they don't know what it's being used for right now, that it will be used for 'good rather than evil.' The end result, like our other WiFi based initiatives (e.g. the "Unwiring" of the Boston Marathon) will be something that shows Apple's WiFi technology on the forefront of the community wireless movement." More.

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