iTunes celebrates its 10th birthday, still takes too long to sync your iPhone

If you've managed to use any piece of technology for ten years, it's safe to say that said piece has some serious lasting power in an era filled with flavors-of-the-week. It's a bit startling to think that Apple's iTunes has now fallen into that category, but sure enough, the music-turned-media-application is now a decade old. Fittingly enough, it just hit version 10.0 a few months ago, and it may very well be tweaked to play nice with an all new device later this week. Head on past the break for a look at the very first iTunes introduction at Macworld 2001, and then think about how many times you've hated your life as you watched that sync progress bar crawl along at glacial speeds. No, seriously, think about it.

Boxee Box firmware gets updated, pulled -- still no Netflix and Vudu

Ouch. Over the weekend, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen tweeted that a new firmware was imminent for the Boxee Box, and given that we'd all been led to believe that both Netflix and Vudu support were inbound shortly, the natural expectation was... well, natural. Late last night the company went live with a new build, but it was pulled from existence within a few hours. According to Boxee's blog post, the new update adds enhancements to control de-interlacing and video filters configuration, support for language selection in subtitle / audio, boosted browser performance and about 812 bug fixes. That's the good news. The bad news is two threefold: there's nary a mention of Netflix support, and while the team is just about there with Vudu, it's also remaining off of the list for this particular update. Moreover, the devs noticed such major issues that the software was yanked from the servers only hours after it was posted, and judging by official comments in the source link below, things still aren't totally ironed out. Translation? Hold tight for now, tough as it may be.