Links for Tuesday August 19^th, 2008

• Mozilla drags IE into the future with Canvas element plugin: Pretty subversive on the part of Mozilla - they are engineering parts of Firefox as ActiveX plugins that can be dropped into IE, giing IE better standards support. IE's presence in the market is really holding back web standards - so anything that makes IE more standards compliant is definitely a good thing.

• Dell's Eee-killer to ship with Ubuntu preinstalled: I'm a fan of the new "netbook/subnotebook" category, but all of the machines that I've seen so far make too many compromises. This Dell looks pretty darn good, however. I'll be interested to see the price, and read the initial reviews.

• Cory Doctorow: Filesharing deal will drive swapping underground: What with the success of iTunes, you'd think that the music companies would focus their efforts on selling music, instead of the ultimately futile effort to catch thieves. But the fact that I'm still linking to articles about this, in 2008, is pretty depressing.

• Analysis: why Apple won't drop Intel chipsets any time soon: Like I said - I sure don't see Apple making their own chipsets, and while doing something with Nvidia is an outside possibility, it's likely that Intel is where it's at.

• Firefly DVD news: Release Date, Extras for Firefly - The Complete Series on Blu-ray: More details on the impending Firefly on Blu-Ray release. Do I have a Blu-Ray player? No. A TV capable of showing HD? No. Do I want to buy this? Oh hell yes.