When I was going over the speed bumped PowerBook models, I noted that an app existed called SideTrack that already gave you much of the same functionality (and more).
The author (Alex Harper, nice guy, who also makes the most excellent MenuMeters) has some really interesting thoughts regarding the introduction of the new PowerBooks. Whether it is a new driver or new hardware, whether he can offer the same 'two-fingered' scrolling and more are covered.
posted on January 31, 2005 at 10:15 PM
StarManta writes: I was looking at a friend's NeXTSTEP computer, and when I found interface builder, i laughed out loud - it hasn't changed a bit in 12 years! I thought you might be interested. (Note: If you decide to post this shot, please rehost - my poor DSL can only take so many hits) :-)
Screen caps are always fun, especially retro. It looks like he's taken a NeXT screenshot and superimposed a few screenshots of some correlating Mac OS 10.2 windows on top of it to give a better idea of how similar things are. I will say I've been a little surprised at some of the mail expressing surprise at the similarities between NeXT and OS X.
That is, forcing women to take jobs as sex workers, or face losing their unemployment benefits while Germany has an unemployment rate of well over 10%...
The Register has an interview up with an anonymous link spammer. If you've followed the blog at all, you'd know these guys are high on my list of asshat behavior...
Apple updated the PowerBook G4's a few minutes ago, and here's the lowdown after a cursory glance...
There's an in-depth article over at C-Net on the booming industry of iPod accessories. It primarily focuses on the fact that out of all the iPods sold, 75% of them were sold in the past year, with 40% of them being sold in the last 3 months of 2004.
Eweek has a twilight-zone-esque article up which is well worth a read as it's just chock full of interesting quotes. One of the really juicy bits comes straight from Microsoft...
A week or so ago I spewed out an almost 20-page whinefest on my multi-front spam problems, and got all sorts of responses. Everything from suggestions to sympathies to the most common: people just getting hammered and asking if I had suggestions for what they should do.
Around a week ago I linked to a commercial that just sorta wigged me out, which involved a bomber and a Volkswagen Polo. At the time I was mostly curious as to whether or not it was a viral, or some enterprising guys looking to make a name for themselves.
Because it's just a retro sort of week, and I hadn't seen these for ages, I figured I'd pass on a link of the uber-cool Apple Computer brochure Matt Groening (of The Simpsons) did for said Apple back in 1989. I sorta wish I wasn't linking to a .Mac server, as it's the sort of thing I'd hate to see disappear of the web.
The actual copy is pretty much verbatim of all their advertising towards students (and weirdly enough, corporate users) of the time, but Groening just gives it such charm. These cartoons predate The Simpsons, and are from waaaay back when he used to the 'Life in Hell' comic strip, so don't expect "eat my shorts'".
So this story is going to get some crazy page hits. What's sad is that I generally remember all of them, and the circumstances surrounding them (OMG, Atari has their new 64-bit Jaguar console... but Apple and Bandai are creating the Pippen!).
There are a lot of things that aren't on there, but it's not that bad of a list in general. With one exception: what the hell is Word 6.0 for Mac doing on there? MacBU != Apple.
Digital-video recorder company TiVo plans to announce Monday the release of a software development kit that lets third-party application makers add new features to TiVo's DVR service.
Yea, I got excited when it came across my desk too. Unfortunately, at least from the examples given, I'm hard pressed to find the inherent coolness in the release...
The story seems to start when Engadget and a few other sites, like Neowin and blink.nu posted some screenshots of the upcoming Windows Mobile 2005. Microsoft sent out the usual cease & desists, which is actually unusual for them, but that's what happened.
Where it turns really weird, is that Engadget was apparently able to cobble together a deal with Microsoft where they got permission to keep their sneak peak images and such up, and they were all over the forums in any case. Dave's Ipaq saw that they were everywhere, and saw that endgadget was able to carry them, so didn't see any reason why he shouldn't be able to carry the leaked snaps if everyone else was, so he did so, and is now having fun legal threatenings being turned his way. Lovely, stupid stuff.
*shrugs* If you're going to try to start assaulting and dismantling the community around your products, at least don't do it half-assed. Apple waited several years before they started their on blitzkrieg the community, but they did it right and in a fairly total fashion. Going by past history, Microsoft will probably need a few tries.
Kevin Rose has taken a new Mac Mini and violated it with a nano-ITX board, basically giving you a x86 PC with a Mac Mini enclosure. Works well, but due to the shape of the motherboard he used the optical drive wouldn't fit. (duh: here's the mirrordot link if the above dies)
I'm going to reserve comment, because no good can come of it. Found at Warrenellis.
Varchars has apparently become obsessed with searching out some of the more asinine 'method' patents going through the system, or that have made it through the system lately:
Groklaw has a decent writeup on the OpenDocument (ODF) format, and how it relates to the newly-opened Microsoft XML schema. From what I can surmise, the fact that Microsoft is doing it is good, but there could be limitations (like what I was worried about), and MS XML really only has one advantage over OpenDocument (which I'd like to have explained to me better).
For a user of an alternative platform, while the devil is the details, this could potentially be one of the biggest stories of the decade:
Microsoft is loosening licensing rules on Office 2003 formats in order to get around new "open standard" restrictions to be adopted by the US state of Massachusetts, according to a state official.
Microsoft told the state it is planning to modify the licensing scheme around its proprietary, patented, XML-based document formats, Kriss said, and as a result Massachusetts is planning to support the formats. Adobe's pdf format will also be supported, Kriss said, according to reports.
Awhile ago, Steve Jobs gave some quotes in a magazine, talking about how as companies mature, the sales guys have a habit of running them and the company starts to lose its soul. Something like that.
I don't post about politics very much, and while I'll be as random as ever on the site that aspect isn't going to change. However, I have been thinking a lot about the upcoming Iraq elections after some conversations earlier today. My heart and mind goes out to those people, and I hope it's the beginning of something better for them in the decades to come.
Microsoft's claims that Linux's reputation for being secure was a myth got smacked around the web a whole lot lately, but I didn't really comment, mostly because I was just so frustrated at it. The problem with an article like this is that it's very good for what it's intended to do, and my hat goes off to them in away. It's very, very smart.
C-Net has another good article up talking about the fault lines that seem to be growing between the independent security researchers and the vendors. Specifically under the microscope is the guy who released a whole slew of vulnerabilities to the public, that it had known about for seven months, without first going to Apple to allow them to have updates ready.
I don't quite know why I find this so amusing:
Subscribers to the UK mailing list of Bang & Olufsen (B&O), the upmarket Hi-Fi firm, were bombarded with six million emails this week. List membes are hopping mad, but B&O blames the problem on flaws with some of its customers’ email systems, rather than any security breach on its part.An email plugging an integrated TV/DVD sent out to the list on Monday (24 January) generated a message storm when it hit buggy Small Business Server 2003 servers. The well-known glitch in email systems of three of the recipients of the message generated a blitz of replicated emails.
Now, both Apple and Bang & Olufsen are high-end luxury product makers, charging a premium to those who like to live the good life, so there are synergies. However, in this case Bang & Olufsen would seem to have a large surplus of email, while .Mac subscribers never really know when they'll be able to have access to email, so it would seem as though a partnership was in order.
Anyone who has read any of the history of our technology, or rather the history of the ways we have have come to try to keep it closed and secret, usually comes away with the feeling that if you create a technical barrier to something, someone, somewhere will create a technical solution to overcoming.
It's generally considered to be always possible, it's just not always easy or worth the effort. It's generally become a defacto rule of thumb and it's easy to become a bit jaded about it. Which is probably why I got such a cheesy grin on my face reading about the guys nilss effort to reverse-engineer the 4G iPod's bootloader so he could slap Linux on it, using the iPod's peizoelectric crystal and guiding himself by the clicks. That's a lot of effort for 64kb of data.
I lost almost an hour playing with the Escape Travel Album, which the screenshot isn't going to do justice (flash required). If you played with the Virtual Thesaurus, or the Visual Google, imagine a system of 3-D connected nodes of locations for your vacation, connected chronologically. Sort of.
Either way it's cool, especially once you drop into an album and have the thumbnails, and below them a 2-D set of nodes connected chronologically. While it can get a little getting used to, I wouldn't be surprised if one day our memories are stored in something like this, with video of course. Wear your camera all day on your jacket, then scrub through your memories for what you want to better recall.
A few days ago a very strange, very trippy, and very cool Visual Thesaurus was released that costs $19.95/year or $2.95/month and works via your browser or installed on your hard drive for $30. And it's Mac compatible (Java). You'll have to check out the free trial to believe all it does.
It reminds me muchly of the uber-cool Visual Google, which doesn't really show any Mac browsers a lot of love, but even on the Mac the glimpse you get makes the crashy crashy worth it. It's that cool. The Visual Thesaurus seems to be much better behaved, or perhaps just less intensive.
Wired has a neat article up pondering what life today would be life without Einstein's theories having been dropped on said life:
"We would be in a glorified 19th century," said Joao Magueijo, author of Faster Than the Speed of Light and a theoretical physicist at the Blackett Laboratory in London's Imperial College. "I mean it in terms of everyday life. His work affected the foundations of physics but also technology, and by extension history, society and culture."
Interesting read, with a lot of neat anecdotes. I wonder what type of computer Einstein would be using, and whether or not he'd have dug Fortran. Perhaps LISP would have been his cup of tea. Something tells me he would have stayed away from Perl, which is rumored to have it's own 'spooky action at a distance'.
core77 has a post about the coolest alarm I've ever seen:
In the evening, after you've set the alarm, the glowing Sfera gradually dims and the music fades as you drift off to sleep. When the alarm chimes in the morning, you must reach up and tap the Sfera to silence it. Which triggers the snooze function and makes the alarm rise higher. As it slowly rises away from your reach, you must stretch higher each time to gain another ten minutes of snooze.When Sfera finally reaches the ceiling, you have no option but to get up and drag it back down to your bed - an action which switches off the alarm.
Apparently it's done by an industrial designer in the Netherlands named Hayat Benchenaa who I've never heard of but who needs to get a deal signed to get this made now.
R0nin pointed me towards MirroDot, which is a sort of... symbiotic... site of slashdot.org that automatically snatches the stories that slashdot links to: not the headlines, but the content itself. It has its own RSS feeds, basically alleviating any need to go to slashdot at all.
This news story is easily one of the scariest things I've read recently, and the ramifications could be large indeed. From Norway...
I had this video (18.5 MB, .wmv, gzipped) passed onto me the other night, and it just blew me away. It's of an artist 'sand painting' live on an overhead projector, and it's just beautiful. No clue where it comes from, what it's about or who is doing it, so I'm hosting it here just to share the beauty because the link in the file goes to a dead URL.
Strange times at a technical school in a former russian state. Think old Red Hot Chili Pepper album + loopy from late night coding session + seemed like a good idea at the time + no one will ever see this. NSFW in any shape or fashion, and I'd have to imagine it's not going to be up for all that long.
Every once in awhile I read something on the web I wish I'd done. Stephen Walli has put up "When are you going to sue your customers?" which is a brilliant essay on the real risk of using OSS in the enterprise as well as a good primer on where the software patent system is.
Similar to the last Mac introduction video, someone put up one of Steve Jobs demonstrates NeXTSTEP 3.0, which is really cute. The site has basically been hammered off the grid for the moment, so I've posted a mirror of it here:
- stevejobs_nextdemo.gz (50 MB AVI)
If you're a Mac user, you'll probably need VLC or MPlayer to view the file. Mirror if you can, and use any mirrors that might be in the comments/trackbacks if you can.
The RIAA is suing another 700+ alleged file-swappers:
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said Thursday that it had filed 717 new lawsuits against alleged file-swappers, including 68 unnamed people at universities.
Fun times. Hopefully they weren't accidently targeted, like Rosario. In related news, the MPAA has filed it's own series of lawsuits, and released a cool new tool called "Parent File Scan" for parents to make sure their kids aren't doing bad things and won't get their parents sued into oblivion:
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) also made available a new free software tool so parents can scan their computers for file-swapping programs and for movie or music files which may be copyrighted. The group said its lawsuits were targeting people across the United States, but did not say how many people were being sued.
Unfortunately, it seems that cool new anti-piracy tool for parents has a very liberal idea of what constitutes bad things on someone's computer:
It searches for and identifies virtually any audio or video file, including popular formats like MP3, Microsoft's Windows Media, the AAC files that Apple Computer's iTunes software often uses, or MPEG video. The software makes no distinction between legally acquired or illegally downloaded files, however--which can total in the thousands.
...the software identified Mirc--a client for the Internet Relay Chat network, where files can be swapped, but where tens of thousands of wholly legal conversations happen every day--and Mercora, a streaming Web radio service that uses peer-to-peer technology but does not allow file swapping.
Allow me to translate:
Hello, parents. We're the MPAA. We have no compunction about being forced to turn our legal bazooka on your household for the actions of your child. We don't want to do it, but you're forcing our hand here. Since you would probably like to keep your house, we suggest you police your computer with our software for things your child may be doing that could come back on you.
Since we are unable to tell whether you are already a customer and your child is simply exercising their fair-use rights by ripping their songs to their hard drive or iPod, you should just play it safe and just not allow that. You may have bought those songs on iTunes, but since we aren't able to tell, it's probably best to just not allow digital songs in general.
We also don't know if that movie file is a home movie, a funny clip they downloaded from the web, or a DVD of Hell Boy they got from peer to peer software which we'd have to sue you for. They could have ripped it themselves to watch, but if they did that they would have violated the DMCA to get it off the DVD and that's illegal. It would probably be better, just to be safe, if you just didn't allow any type of digital media on your computer until we say its OK. You simply can't know whether what they are doing is OK or not. Or rather, we can't know. Thank you for being understanding.
Basically, a targeted Chilling Effect campaign towards parents. Lovely.
By releasing the OpenSolaris OS platform under the CDDL, the open source community will immediately gain access to 1,600 active Sun patents for all aspects of operating system technologies that encompass features ranging from kernel technology and file systems to network management, to name a few.
Patents for Sun's newest technologies, such as the anticipated Dynamic Tracing technology, will also be available under the open access program.
Regarding Funneled Performance, Clinton P writes:
What are the possibilities of 'porting' OS X to the linux kernel? Linux kernel has the real multi threading that is required and seems to be good enough for the IBM 710 multiprocessor server you just mentioned. It seems the BSD decision is holding back OS X. With IBM standardizing on Linux and Apple on the IBM processors it may be worth the effort to migrate.
Lots of questions in this one, so we're going to have to break them out individually in order to keep things coherent.
Cool:
Confirmation of the decision came early Thursday with the posting on Best Buy's Web site of word that the top-of-the-line, $599, 1.42 gigahertz (GHz) Mac mini would be "coming soon" to retail stores (see Web site screen shot below), but that the low-end, $499, 1.25 GHz model would not be sold be sold at its brick-and-mortar locations.
There was a big security dump on OS X a bit ago, but that got picked up enough I didn't really worry about it. This one is a little odder, Secunia is reporting that mRouter, via iSync, has a buffer overflow:
The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error in the handling of the "-v" and "-a" command line options. This can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow by supplying an overly long argument (over 4096 bytes). Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the mRouter application.
Mac OS 10.3.7 and under are affected, but remember that while this isn't good it's a local attack and not remote. I.E., the evildoer would need access to your system in some way. Either by sitting at the keyboard, or through a piece of malware or something else in that vein. This is the type of thing someone exploits to completely own your box once they've gotten onto your system another way.
No patch from Apple (yet) and possibly won't be for older systems, but there is a fix...
Search Engine Roundtable says Google is testing out a new feature that would allow a user to switch the ads they're seeing on the fly:
Google is beta testing the functionality to allow Web visitors to change the ads served up by Google AdSense. For example, you see an ad and it reads "Change to Ads About:" with a listing of related ad topics. When you click on a different topic, it then allows you to "Enter a different topic" and search on it.
The site links to a live example of it up and working on another site (for now) which is worth checking out. It seems neat from a technology POV, but the idea of someone stopping at a site and deciding to cycle through ads just seems a little odd. Perhaps while searching Google, but a site? Maybe after I've had my coffee.
Personally, after the last week or so I'd love to have this functionality reversed so that I could change some of the ads globally and individually for visitors, but I can see where that could cause all sorts of problems for how Google works.
Infoworld has a cautionary article on IBM's new PowerOpen servers, which I meant to jot the other day... specifically the Open Power 710:
The Model 710, which contains a 1.65GHz Power5 chip, 1GB of memory, and a 73GB drive will be available starting Feb. 18 and carry a starting price of $3,449.
Apparently, due to overfishing of local waters, crocodiles have taken to eating people in record numbers. Maybe, they aren't quite clear on that, but they say it's possible and there was much nodding.
Normally this would just be a nice starting point for a conversation with a vegetarian/vegan on the dichotomy of not eating something that has no problem with eating you, but luckily this stuck out at me:
"A professional hunter, Hassen has shot an astounding 17,000 crocodiles over the past 40 years in Malawi.
He once did it for commercial reasons -- sometimes shooting as many as 800 in a season for their skins -- but he now just shoots a few "because I feel I owe something to the communities where I got my start."
He's actually saying he takes time out of his busy schedule to go back and kill a few just to help out. Lovely.
Macminute says Apple will give you a refund of the difference if you ordered a Mac Mini before the price drops yesterday, but you have to call. Good of Apple to do it; although in this situation I can't imagine any sane company not doing it.
All the same, it wouldn't be the first time someone ordered an Apple product and the price had dropped by the time they got it, so I'm glad they checked up on it. It also looks like Target.com has removed all references to the Mac Mini on their site, and the SuperDrive has been returned to 4x.
When you stop and think about it, the first two weeks of the Mac Mini's life have been a bit bizarre, even by Apple standards.
A few of the most common things I get asked are: what the drink on the site is, if it's good, and how to make it. To take care of the first two, it's called a 'White Russian', and yes, it's very good. It's a rich and creamy sipping treat, which finally got some long-due credibility in some circles when The Big Lebowski hit.
Ignore the martini fads, those come and go, but the White Russian has staying power. I know other blogs have word counts and such on their posts, and I've considered adding a "this many white russians went into the making of this post." That would be a little too over the top even for me, but they are that good.
With that out of the way, we're left with the third...
The patch for this came out several days ago, but I'm running into a lot of people who haven't upgraded their MovableType install and they really, really need to. There's a flaw in the script handling comment notification, and all installs below 3.15 are vulnerable if they have it turned on, allowing evildoers to send emails out to any arbitrary person they choose. Namely, spam. Upgrade.
It's become somewhat de jour to treat security flaws as happy accident to promote upgrading in their user base, but SixApart also made the patch available as a plugin for those who haven't upgraded to 3.x. They should be commended for it, it was cool of them to do.
Yea, that's the Mac Mini booting Gentoo. As Pieter points out on his blog, it seems to be running fine. You may remember Pieter from an interview we did awhile ago, and recently he sort of tripped me up by passing a bit of news on...
I was going through some old bookmarks the other night, and happened across an old gem on Jeff Bonwick's blog, "128-bit storage: Are You High?".
It's a great little bit of the web, and explains why Sun decided to jump to 128-bit storage for their new file system instead of 64-bit, along with a small detour about the theoretical limits of storage capacity and just how much it would take to fully-populate a 128-bit data pool.
Chances are your head will be spinning by some of the examples, but much is elaborated on in the comments, which shouldn't be missed. It really shows off the value employee and developer blogs can add for why some things are the way they are. I know it certainly opened my mind on the subject.
C-Net has a surprisingly good article on Sun taking steps towards opening Solaris, including both the potential benefits and the challenges it has cut out for it. Redmonk is wondering if Gentoo's decisions to bring portage to Solaris might signal that Sun could pick up some traction, and it's certainly something to keep an eye on.
It's easy to bash on Sun, and 90% of the time it's warranted... but I still have a soft spot in my heart for them. There are things in Solaris 10 that, from a technology POV, just make my jaw drop. Which is pretty much where the problem is. If you need what Sun is selling, you absolutely need it, it's just that not nearly as many people absolutely need those things like they have in the past as lower end systems have caught up.
Wesley pointed me to the fact that Apple has quietly lowered the prices on some of the expansion options for the Mac Mini:
The company is now offering the Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme wireless option for US$99 (was $129), the 1GB DDR333 SDRAM upgrade for $325 (was $475), and the 80GB ultra ATA hard drive upgrade for $50 (was $80). Apple is also now listing an 8x SuperDrive option instead of the previous 4x model for the same $100 cost.
Gruber passed on this bit of web deliciousness: an archive of Apple commercials that totals 780 megs. It's a bittorrent archive, so you'll want to go here if you're without it, or perhaps someone will be nice and link to a 'getting up to speed' page on bittorrent in the comments.
Because these commercials influenced me so, I decided to look at other commercials Apple had done, During the process of carefully analyze their commercial, I noticed that they have clearly mastered the art of television advertising. Thusly, a decision was made, by me, to compile an archive of Apple Commercials in a single BitTorrent file. It’s not complete but it’s as extensive of a collection you’ll find on the web.
I'd mirror the archive for those who didn't want to go through the hassle, but the last thing I mirrored has gotten completely out of hand since midnight and to be honest, Apple has gotten a little too comfortable with suing websites instead of just sending a notice. Sigh, the fact that that actually went through my head, over some commercials, shows how powerful the chilling effect is.
Slate has a good writeup on the format that could slide around AAC and the others. I kind of meant to get around to some of this back when I was doing my big MPEG writeup, but truth be told I can't verify much of what's supposed to be behind this codec... never got far enough into it. The article also does a pretty good job of explaining why it's good to keep using our indoor voice even though bandwidth is growing. Mmmm, long tail.
Torrez released something called 'TKPal' the other night, which is a bit of PHP code enabling sites to use TypeKey and PayPal in conjunction to charge users for access to specified pages. Erm.
Try it for yourself, and thanks to Tomservo for the heads up. Honestly, it doesn't seem that great so far... but I got some messages asking what the point of some of these sites are. Here's the deal -- they kind of suck right now, and it's primarily about the potential, and where things will be, and where they've come from.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a list of 'endangered gizmos', complete with categories for 'saved' and 'extinct':
FCC Chairman Michael Powell calls TiVo "God's machine," and its devotees have been known to declare, "You can take my TiVo when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!" But suppose none of us had ever been given the opportunity to use or own a TiVo -- or, for that matter, an iPod?
Suppose instead that Hollywood and the record companies hunted down, hobbled, or killed these innovative gizmos in infancy or adolescence, to ensure that they wouldn't grow up to threaten the status quo?
...
Rather than sit back and watch as promising new technologies are picked off one-by-one, EFF has created the Endangered Gizmos List to help you defend fair use and preserve the environment for innovation.
It's worth noting that the iPod, along with firewire drives, open WiFi access points, and CD burners are all listed as endangered due to the push for new laws like the Induce Act. I *Heart* the EFF.
- Google has brought the lead engineer of Firefox onto their payroll, while still leaving him on the Firefox project, which has sparked much talk.
- In another movie-related note, someone with a sharp eye noticed that as of a few hours ago, Google setup a 'video.google.com' subdomain and a '/video' directory, both of which direct back to the main page.
I have a feeling we'll have an idea of what's going on with Firefox/XUL at some point in the future, but it looks as though the google video search is related to Yahoo's recently launched video search which came out of its acquisition of AltaVista. Basically, the entire web, no matter what the medium, is slowly becoming trawl-able across the board.
Yahoo's is interesting in that it allows you to things with RSS, and with video search they've introduced 'Media RSS', which is basically RSS 2.0 with enclosures, similar to how podcasting it done.
Key word is, wants. Silicon.com has the article:
Speaking at the Midem music conference, Napster CEO Chris Gorog said the company was considering offering movies alongside its current catalogue of some one million music tracks.
"We are currently considering moving into video, particularly to tap the younger video-game generation," he told delegates, according to the Financial Times. "I do think that while there are huge players in the delivery of movies like Sky, there could be a role for Napster."
I went back to look at the lost 1984 footage from the introduction of the Macintosh that I saw earlier today, and the site seems to be almost completely offline. Apparently it's been lost for over 20 years, stored on a BetaMax tape, and brought forth on the anniversary.
I'd seen a clip of this before, where the Mac was actually brought out... but it's the first time I've ever seen the whole thing. Check out the blazer and the bowtie. It's quite a treat, especially if you remember the launch of the iMac, and it's very cool of them to bring this out. Since the file is so large, I've mirrored it here for the next while:
If you swing that way, here's a torrent that seemed to have good speeds.
Update: OK, we just cleared 80 gigabytes on this thing... if you can, use the torrent, and if you have some bandwidth burning a hole in your pocket please consider creating a mirror and leaving it in the comments/trackback.
Update 2: The forums got ahold of it, and we just cleared 145 gigs. I'll keep it up as long as I can. I really don't want to have to give up ordering an iPod Shuffle this month over it, so if you could use one of the mirrors in the comments I'd be most appreciative.
Someone pointed me to the... holding page... for a new piece x86/Windows emulation software for Mac OS X:
Lismore Software Systems announces Guest PC a new x86 software emulator for Mac OS X. With Guest PC you can easily create and manage virtual x86 computer on your Mac. You can install Windows operating system and access the application created for Windows compatible computers. Guest PC 1.0 will be available in the beginning of February 2005.
Still wondering how real this is:
The company behind the US-based internet search engine looks set to launch a free telephone service that links users via a broadband internet connection using a headset and home computer.The technology that will enable Google to move in on the market has been around for some time. Software by the London-based company, Skype, has been downloaded nearly 54 million times around the world but no large telecommunication firms have properly exploited it.
Cumulative downloads of the 1.0 release, as the nice graph over at wikipedia shows off. Impressive, and if it keeps up that beautiful trajectory... who knows. I expected Firefox to do well, but probably not this well. Firefox is just kicking ass and taking names:
Today, we celebrate twenty million Firefox 1.0 downloads. But more than that, we celebrate the community that you all have built and we celebrate each and every one you!
I know most Mac users don't understand what the deal is, some of which I covered in 'Gecko's Unsightly Ass', but you have to keep in mind that it's not indicative of how Firefox is on other platforms. The Mac version is getting much better, and those working are working hard, but it just doesn't have the resources behind it.
On Linux, it kicks ass. On Windows, how well it's put together and performs is simply astounding, and they deserve some celebrating. Even if you're a Safari user, whatever, Firefox doing well helps you out indirectly and it was a shiny thing to wake up to. Send 'em some love.
Awhile ago, The Register had a story up saying that a European filing had tipped Apple's hand at creating a Tablet Computer:
The filing, made in May this year but only published this week, covers a "handheld computer" and contains sketches of what look like an iBook screen minus the body of the computer.
“The man obviously needs some sort of counseling,” Reno police Lt. Ron Donnelly told the Reno Gazette-Journal.
Erm.. And as an side, DrunkenBlog may soon have a new guest poster. As a further aside, I'm a little less impressed at the images of people lining up at the Apple Stores for the Mac Mini after seeing this...
So many Mac Mini links, so little time.
Just had it come across the feed that Johnny Carson has passed away, and it made me kind of sad. I remember him as the older, white haired gentlemen who used to make me laugh the most when a joke of his completely bombed. It looks like the smoking did it:
He did not provide further details, but NBC said Carson died of emphysema — a respiratory disease that can be attributed to smoking — at his Malibu home.
Which isn't surprising as awhile ago I watched a 'greatest moments' DVD of his, which showed him talking to guests while taking puffs now and again. Bummer, I'm told it's not a fun way to go.
I mentioned some of the growing pains the other 'nixes are going through in terms of SMP support, and it's worth noting that Linux, the BSDs and Windows aren't alone in this. OS X is still just hitting its adolescence in terms of SMP and will hopefully be taking its own little step further into adulthood with 10.4. This might seem a little weird, as everyone has heard that OS X on a dually kicks much more ass over a single CPU.
I was reading through an Oreilly interview on the improved multiprocessing in FreeBSD, and and it sparked the memory of a conversation I had several days ago where I said: "I'm interested in Linux, but I love the BSDs".
The person was curious as to why I'd say that, and I actually had to think about it for a few seconds. I dig Linux in general, and use it. There are a whole bunch of places where I'd pick using Linux over a BSD. There just isn't quite that same... affectionate warm spot in my head.
I had this video of a car commercial (VW Polo) passed around to me awhile ago, and have passed it to some friends... and I really, really want to know who made it. :/ Some say it's a viral ad, some say it's a group trying to make a name for themselves in the ad industry, which has happened before. If it came from a real ad agency... jesus, their balls must be scraping the ground when they walk, just to come into work and suggest it, and getting it signed off on by the upper-ups. It puts the old 'evil twin' commercial to shame.
BBC News has an interview up with Bill Gates regarding the Media Center PCs they've been hawking for awhile without a lot of success:
Stephen Cole:
Can you summarise what your vision is for digital entertainment?
Bill Gates:
All your base are belongs to us
While whipping up the extra RSS feeds, I encountered a fairly basic question: what's a normal amount of entries to include in a feed? While I have no problem with breaking social norms, if it's just as easy there's no point in bucking the trend... but unfortunately Google is giving me no love here.
Cleaned up a few things off the to-do list for the site last night, only 100 more things to get around to... Nothing major, but it'll help with the other stuff I'm working on going forward. Looking around the front page or the comments should give you an idea of most of it. Oh, and The Cow has been given some more face time here and there. No specific reason, it just amuses me muchly.
I knew a guy in middle school who had a 'hot mom', because she was a lingerie model for JCPenney's catalogues.
When I'm taking screenshots, it always takes me a few moments to figure out how to get a solid white background for my desktop. The first time it took me forever, which may or not mean much as I couldn't for the life of me remember how to change the system time in OS X off of a 24 hour clock.
Last night I had the news that Fort Wayne, Indiana has been dubbed the dumbest town in America by Mens Health Magazine. I found this kind of amusing, as I've actually been to Fort Wayne... and I've certainly been around it as the internet-state highway goes right north of it. It's one of the largest cities in Indiana, right up there with other towns you've never heard of.
Several days ago I saw that ThinkSecret was able to get counsel, and once again my love for the Electronic Frontier Foundation was reaffirmed, which I'll go into in a moment. That faith may not be reaffirmed for everyone, but I know a few people in the EFF, and I honestly don't think they'd marshal resources behind something that wasn't worthwhile.
There are reasons why they're protecting PowerPage and AppleInsider, and reasons why they've marshalled their resources to get attention brought to the Think Secret case so they had a better chance of getting counsel. For those in that camp my inbox has been primarily divided into several veins... my views on them might not be 'popular', and might surely be influenced by my frame of reference, but that's why they're my views and not dogma.
Years ago when spam started to get really going, people started saying it was going to kill email off as a useful and viable medium for communications. I saw bits and pieces of this happening to those around me, but it wasn't such a big deal. I was very careful with my addresses, or at least with who got which one, and it just wasn't that harsh on my end. This has changed, in a very severe way, over the last few years.
Many people will say "If you'd just do this and this you won't have a problem", but I've done many of those things and I still have the problem, and it's just growing worse. My inbox is literally dying off, as I find my behavior changing more and more. And it's not just my inbox, I'm deluged on many fronts, as are many others.
I've been following Apple's lawsuit against ThinkSecret with interest. As Donna Wentworth so eloquently states in 'EFF to Apple: Back Off', there are differences between each case, both between the kids being sued in the ThinkSecret case, and the kids being sued for leaking a Tiger build onto the internet, but it's interesting to note how they all came about at around the same time. As someone once said, it might be "too coincidental to be a coincidence."
On those particularly rough days everyone has, I used to go to this site and realize it could be worse. Recently, I could just hold onto the fact that I wasn't being forced to sell my text books to try to get a lawyer in California to represent me against a huge corporation. Today, and today only, I'm just thanking gawd I'm not this guy and throwing my iSight in the drawer where it can do no harm. Make sure your volume is up, you'll thank me later.
I was just going to post this interview (14 MB) with Steve Jobs that someone sent to me yesterday from after the keynote which I dug (Ken Burns is not mentioned once). However, judging by my Inbox, one of the biggest things that stuck out at people from yesterday's post was the whole Sony thing.
People also sent rants agreeing about the UI problems in 10.4 (Yes, I've seen the movies at Apple's site, and yes I'm scared), but apparently the Sony part sparked caused a whole bunch of speculation to be thrown my way. Obviously I wasn't the only one really confused by it, so it's worth (hopefully) clearing that up.
I meant to have this out late on the night of the keynote, but circumstances, like the keynote not streaming for me, conspired against me. I really did want to watch the actual keynote to let the RDF do its magic and hopefully round out some more rough edges in my mind. That sort of happened, yet sort of didn't.
I finally got it to stream, but I will say that while this wasn't the worst experience I've had with streaming a keynote, it's the most annoying in recent years. Once it was up, it was jerky, and the audio would lose sync with the video way too often for my tastes. Nothing would fix it, not even changing machines and locations or platforms.
I got 19 '-5408 Time Out' errors, which isn't exactly a great lead-in... but my running commentary while watching it is a tradition now. Otherwise I would have given up. Seriously, it was that annoying.
I posted a final comment (well, from me) in the previous post, which basically consisted of some traffic stats and a reminder that you're dealing and commenting on a real person. There's an impersonal cleft to the Internet, to where you're abstracted from the person you're commenting on or dealing with...
It's worth remembering that when it comes to the Mac community, their 'Internet Community' often is the community. If you're a Mac fanatic, seeing your entire community turn on you can be traumatizing, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of his answers were colored by that. It's not the last that will be said on the defendants, but it's all I'm really able to post on the subject right now. Hopefully in the future it'll be more positive.
I'll be putting the blog back to the way it was later tonight (if you look to the left some things were missing) for when I sit down and write up my thoughts on the keynote and what was announced earlier today. I want to watch the delayed keynote first, just to give the RDF a chance to fully work its magic before I give my thoughts on it.
On December 21st, C-Net broke the news that Apple was filing suit against three people for posting a developer build of MacOS 10.4 via BitTorrent, seeking a jury trial and damages. Soon after, a Mac website started posting their names and relative whereabouts online.
As it turns out, someone involved in the situation was a reader of the site. They got in touch with me, one thing led to another, which led to this interview. Our participants:
Desicanuk
One of three defendants named in the suit, with the rest being "John Does".
Nessence
One of two administrators of MacTKA, a Macintosh-oriented BitTorrent tracker where the initial leak occurred.
One of the stranger aspects of having a blog is that if you don't post, people kinda start to get worried. It's your face to them, which I'm actually fairly comfortable with as it's a remarkable improvement over what God gave me. So whenever I don't post for awhile, the longer the time between posts the steadier the trickle of emails asking if everything is kosher.
I was reading through a very sobering VARBusiness article on Apple and it's resellers, and it along with some other things continually makes me wish I'd get off my ass and get that link blog going for awhile I'm working on other things.
