This card has it all, really: a grim joke about murdering your children, frightening cartoon characters, and (just in case you couldn't picture it on your own) a drawing of a boy blowing up.
To anyone who complains that our society has become too desensitized to violence in recent times because images in TV and movies, I urge you to take a close look at the exploding boy in this vintage postcard and ask you to never raise the argument again.

It's finally here.

With a sleek, aerodynamic design, state-of-the-art navigation system, and the most powerful engines in its class; the most-anticipated vehicle of the year is now available... with Force Powers.

HIM: You should join my religion, because it is the One True Way to salvation.

ME: Okay, tell me: Why are you trying to get me to join?

HIM: Well, because only those souls who accept <SAVIOR> will receive eternal reward in Paradise.

ME: In other words, if you do what your religion says, and make sure other people do too, you get to go to Heaven.

HIM: Er, yes.

ME: So what you're saying is, the human motivation to which religion appeals is... selfishness?

Khaled, a hotel worker, spoke in wonderment of a martyr's encounter at the gates of heaven as someone having their file checked: "There will be blessings for 70 of his family and friends. The 72 virgins are real -- their skin is so pale and beautiful that you can see the blood in their veins. If one of these virgins spits in the ocean, the seawater becomes sweet. The martyr is so special he does not feel the pain of being in the grave and all that his family has to do to cleanse his file thoroughly, is to repay his outstanding debts."

Surely, we ask, this view of the Koran should be seen as philosophical? As a parable? But no, there was a chorus of disagreement from a gathering of his friends in the teeming Jabalya refugee camp near Gaza City: "No. This is real . . . this is as it will be," said Khaled, as much for himself as on behalf of younger Palestinians who now talk endlessly of the benefits of death over life in a bombing campaign that has killed more than 200 Israelis in 18 months.

But Dr Rabah Mohanna, whose Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has claimed its own share of the violence - including last year's assassination of a minister in the Israeli Government -- is confounded by youth's lunge for the grave: "Thousands of young men and women are ready to be blown up. It is a new phenomenon -- you have no idea how big it is."

Baby Bottle Pops were launched in 1998, and have already become one of the top selling lollipop products in the U.S.. Kids love dunking the delicious candy nipple into the powdered candy for a burst of flavor. Sour Baby Bottle Pops were introduced in 1999 to add pucker power to the line.

• The computer has to "boot" each time you turn it on, so that it can copy the operating system from the disk into memory.
• When you run programs, the computer has to copy the programs from the disk into memory before they can do anything. When you quit programs, they are deleted from RAM, but remain on the disk.
• When you work on documents in applications, the data exists only in RAM, until you explicitly "save" it-- tell the program to copy it from RAM onto the disk.
• Each time you turn the computer off, everything in the RAM is deleted-- any data in documents you haven't saved, any programs that are running, the whole active copy of the operating system. This means that when you turn it back on, you have to wait while the computer boots, copying it all back into memory again.

In the episode, bumbling family head Homer Simpson is robbed by street kids and kidnapped by an unlicensed taxi driver after his family ventures to Rio to find a missing orphan that daughter Lisa sponsored.

The family runs across rats and monkeys while looking for the orphan. When they find him, he has grown rich working on a television show and pays for Homer's release in gratitude for shoes Lisa had bought him to escape monkeys at the orphanage.

Rio tourism board president Jose Eduardo Guinle asked the board's legal team to look into what action could be taken.

"He understands it is a satire," tourism board spokesman Sergio Cavalcanti said at the time. "What really hurt was the idea of the monkeys, the image that Rio de Janeiro was a jungle. ... It's a completely unreal image of the city."

The big launch finally arrived. On November 14 at 12:01 a.m., Mr. Gates handed over the first Xbox to a dedicated gamer who had waited for hours at the Toys 'R' Us store in New York City's Times Square. Mr. Blackley and his new girlfriend, Vanessa Burnham, were at the scene. He introduced her to Mr. Gates.


"You know, Seamus, I think she could help you get your act together," Mr. Gates said.

"You think so?" Mr. Blackley asked. "Something has to."

"You ought to marry her," Mr. Gates said.

"You think so?" Mr. Blackley replied.

"Yeah, absolutely," Mr. Gates said. "Here's a ring."

"I'll give it a shot, OK, cool," Mr. Blackley said. He got down on one knee.

"Vanessa, will you marry me?"

She laughed, then answered, "Yes."

"Thank you," Mr. Blackley said.

He rose and they kissed. Everyone in the store applauded. Mr. Blackley put the ring on Ms. Burnham's finger. John Eyler, CEO of Toys 'R' Us, presented a stuffed animal to her. Mr. Gates had been briefed, but he had ad-libbed the part about Mr. Blackley getting his act together.

There were plenty of other moments when Mr. Blackley's flair for "morale building" activities got him into trouble. At one internal meeting, he showed an animation dubbed "Survival of the Fittest." It sported a couple of Microsoft's mascot characters at a shooting range. They fired weapons and eviscerated mascots like Sega's Sonic, Nintendo's Mario, and Sony's Crash Bandicoot. He was quoted in a newspaper as saying, "Playing video games is like masturbation; everyone does it but no one wants to admit it."

Mostly, what one hears from those who shared his company in New Zealand are testaments to Wood's maturity. It is Wood who describes a rare exception to this - a night out in Wellington drinking vodka and cranberry juice that ended with Wood and fellow hobbit Dominic Monaghan climbing up a fountain statue that had been annoying Wood and pissing in it as Liv Tyler, cast as Arwen the elf princess, looked on and said (Wood does a high-pitched Tyler impression), "Guys, what are you doing? Did you just piss in the fountain?" He enjoys this story. "Funny though," he says. "Good memories."

Elijah Wood has the ring. There were other rings, used for different shots, but he has the ring he wore: the ring that was the ring. Jackson gave it to him in a wooden box as he left New Zealand at the end of filming. "It is the one ring," he says, "which is a pretty great thing to have."

He keeps the ring in his office. It's put away, out of sight.

I ask Wood whether he often takes it out and fondles it.


"No," he says. "I haven't taken it out in quite some time. I'd rather just keep it hidden away for now."

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Homer: Donut?
 Lisa: No, thanks.  Do you have any fruit?
Homer: [offers some of the donut he's eating] This has purple stuff
       inside.  Purple is a fruit.
-- Mmm, purple, "Bart on the Road"

Bart: [sighs] I wasted five bucks on these.
Lisa: Where'd you get five bucks?  I want five bucks.
Bart: Aw, I sold my soul to Milhouse?
Lisa: [incredulous] What?  How could you _do_ that?  Your soul is the
      most valuable part of you.
Bart: You believe in that junk?
Lisa: Well, whether or not the soul is physically real, Bart, it's the
      symbol of everything fine inside us.
Bart: [tsking sadly] Poor, gullible Lisa.  I'll keep my crappy sponges,
      thanks.
Lisa: Bart, your soul is the only part of you that lasts forever.  For
      five dollars, Milhouse could own you for a zillion years!
Bart: Well, if you think he got such a good deal, I'll sell you my
      conscience for $4.50.
       [Lisa starts to walk off]
      I'll throw in my sense of decency too.  It's a Bart sales event!
      Everything about me must go!
-- Great selection and rock-bottom prices, but where is the soul?, "Bart
    Sells His Soul"

We have a government that values tolerance, understanding and sensitivity over justice. They value multiculturalism and diversity over prosperity, patriotism and national pride.

Our Prime Minister and government left most Canadians ashamed in the wake of 9/11. Canadians once fought valiantly for the cause of freedom. Two generations have passed since then. Our current government has no such morality, no such courage. Our government's response to September's tragedy sullied the memory of those who sacrificed their very lives to provide the basis for freedom. They provided the basis for freedom, but could not ensure it. Freedom must be earned each day. Our government, and many foolish Canadians, balk at the price (like the rest of the world, we prefer to let you pay for it). Today's government - although not just Canada's in this case - would gladly devalue to meaningless the sacrifice of our veterans when threatened by something as mildly evil and threatening as the Durban conference, never mind something so morally unequivocal as the World Trade Center bombings or Israel's war against those who wish it annihilated.

Were I Prime Minister in September I would have been in New York the next day - serving coffee if need be - but doing something to help. Our Prime Minister waited weeks and lied by saying that Guiliani's office had told him not to come! Can you imagine the shame of being represented in such a way? You are our very generous neighbour, for which I am ever-thankful. If my neighbour's house burnt down tonight, I would be there immediately to offer whatever help I could. True, most days we barely exchange a nod. I have never had them in my home. But there are times where being a neighbour takes on a different meaning. Canada's response to 9/11 was the equivalent of me standing over the ashes of their home and saying "that'll teach you to play with matches". That you are so forgiving of such "friends" as Canada is one of the reasons American culture is so much sought after, and is one of the reasons it will prevail.

We have a government still trying a dozen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall to show that socialism works, and that government has the answers. We face an incredible tax burden due to a redistributive policy that, if not reversed, will see Canada become another Argentina in a generation. Our government is acutely averse to any policy that de-centralizes governmental power, or reduces their influence on the daily lives of people. They believe that charity does not start at home - it starts with the Prime Minister. Government largesse is doled out - in wildly disproportionate amounts to Quebec and other regions that continue to re-elect the ruling Liberals - with little regard for taxpayers and a belief that individuals cannot make a just society, only government can.

If the U.S. would accept Canadians as political refugee claimants you would have a long line at the border. Our country has ceased to be a representative democracy, and is suffering a slow death which the U.S. itself narrowly avoided. The takeover of our educational establishments decades ago has succeeded in destroying most of the characteristics of Canadian society that contributed to its early successes. The politically correct, tolerant-of-all-at-all-costs, multicultural, compassionate collective result is a country that no longer stands for anything. Nor are we against anything, except perhaps the U.S. Canada is a country that would be unable to define itself were there not an America. We cannot say what we are, or what we stand for, but whatever it is, it isn't what you stand for. Such is our anti-identity. What is going on up here is a people constructing a society whose goal is to avoid all that is right with yours.

Most of the authors have not even seen the movies, heard the music CDs, or used the software reviewed; we simply leaf through various online reviews and summarize them while creating grevious typos, factual errors, and outright fallacies in an attempt to shatter the fragile little worlds of people who associate their entire personality and sense of being with a random form of capitalistic media. We plan on continuing to do this until America realizes that we're not defined by the music, movies, and products we buy... so basically, this section will go on for infinity or possibly longer.

Well, whaddaya know about that? In the middle of Day 3 of the "WE HAVE THE WAY OUT" UNIX vs. Windows Saga, Microsoft finally caught a break. To recap, Microsoft and Unisys launched an anti-UNIX site last week-- only word got out on Monday that they were running it on a UNIX server. So, early yesterday, they made a panicked switch to a Windows server to save face... soon after which, the site went completely non-functional, alternating between serving blank pages, "Directory Listing Denied" errors, and, most recently, a cryptic message to the effect that "no web site is configured at this address." One would think that if anyone could get a simple one-page site with a form submission running under Windows 2000 and IIS, it would be the company who wrote the frickin' software. Needless to say, the folks who hustled to launch the pro-UNIX "WE HAVE THE WAY IN" (running flawlessly on UNIX, natch) have probably been giggling nonstop for days.

But Microsoft has finally gotten its page up again after well over a solid day of downtime-- nice illustration of why businesses should switch from UNIX to Windows, guys; bravo-- which means the party's over (at least, until someone hacks the site). And now that the dust is clearing, it appears that the only high-level Microsoft exec to take the fall for the whole fracas was President and COO Rick Belluzzo, who "unexpectedly resigned" today amid a "restructuring," as reported by the Associated Press. (But of course we all know the real reason Belluzzo's walking; HE HAS THE WAY OUT.)

Why do you prefer Macs? With OS X they've now got Doug Wyatt, the guy who wrote OMS, working with them. They're taking music more seriously now. Steve Jobs seems to be running Apple as his hobby and he appears more interested in Pixar, so consequently he's perhaps more interested in visuals - but he may have figured out that music is a good market.

I can take my G4 Titanium laptop with a little Oxygen keyboard that fits in the same bag and I'm pretty much able to do a score anywhere.

Do you use OS X? I feel I can't go near it yet but they seem to be taking their time to really make it work well for musicians. It's changed quite dramatically and I have friends who are switching between OS X and their old system to get used to it. It's taken a long time to get this far but only four years back, everyone was saying Apple was dead and here they are, stronger than ever.

Where do you stand on file-sharing software? The Napster case was fought wrong. Shutting sites down is not the way to go. I earn my living from creating something people can easily rip off - so do the software companies - and there has to be some sort of moral obligation on the part of the user. There are only so many really brilliant people who can write that software. I'm scrupulous about buying all my software to support the companies. I like to meet the people who write the software as, ultimately, what we buy is their personality. These are good times for technology. Grand pianos have been around for 500 years: we've only just started with computers!

In fact, recently I added two more to it, and because it was too long I had to decide to remove one. And it hurt. It really did. Picking someone to take out was hard, and it really came down to a random selection. (I hope he isn't mad at me for it.)

THE trouble with IT is that, like so many other good ideas in life, no sooner have you come up with a wizard field of invention and endeavour than people begin attempting to fix the same ludicrous rules, values and obsessions on to it that they seem determined to attach to every other aspect of life.

Take, if you will, the example of Apple Macintosh users, a body of men and women whose state of computing existence is all too often defined not by utility, but by the colour of their monitor casings. They have hijacked the information revolution and led it blindly down a route mapped out by superficiality and style.

One can only hope the repellent new iMac, resembling a £1380 angle poise lamp with a particularly expansive backside, will bring them to their senses.

For some years now, Apple has managed to divide the computing market with a strategy based on modern good looks blended with historical myth, and it is time the aberration was ended.

There are reasons that Apple owners still recite by rote to defend their choice of system, chief among which is the machine's famously intuitive interface. But while this was once a valid differentiating factor, the fact is all mainstream operating systems have now adopted the principles that made Macs so easy to use in the first place, rendering the point somewhat moot.

Another defence, most often propounded by designers and their ilk, is that the Mac is better suited to creative pursuits. Again, this was true back in the day when Microsoft targeted the business market and Apple concentrated on multimedia applications, but as all major applications will increasingly run on all systems, unless they develop an aesthetic values chip pronto, these days are over.

Apple's only significant difference, as far as we can tell, is that they have condensed the mouse to a single button. Why? Reducing the number of buttons to press might briefly benefit the weak and feeble minded, but in actual fact all that has achieved is to decrease the variety of muscle movements employed and thus increase, in this column's most humble opinion, the risk of repetitive strain injury (RSI).

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if you have bought a Mac, then you've bought Betamax. Think of all the justifications for it that you want, but at the end of the day ownership of a fringe product means losing the benefits of ubiquity and adding to the expense, and is thus illogical.

Diversity is good, of course, but pre-OSX, Apples only run one brand of operating system, the Mac OS. PCs will happily accommodate Linux, Unix, or any one of the Microsoft product range. You want to talk about monopolies? Talk to the Mac, man. The PC ain't listening.

Hate Microsoft? Tough, because the Redmond giant owns a percentage of Apple, and every pound spent on a Mac sees a few more pennies poured into the luxurious foundations of Gates's mansions.

If you really believe that the evil empire must be stopped, buy a PC and run Linux as your OS -- it's the only way you'll stop big Bill. Thinking different? Not thinking at all, more like.

Here's the scoop, folks: your computer is not a lifestyle statement. It's a bog-standard machine intended to fulfil an array of user-defined functions, and spending extra to distance yourself from 90% of the evolutionary pool sounds like muddle-headed foolishness to say the least.

The sooner we stop pretending it is anything other than that, the quicker we realise a computer has no value in itself and only in the things it does, the sooner we will get our heads around these things and start making them really work for us humans. So there.

Genndy Tartakovsky is certainly among the very best animators alive today. His first series, Dexter's Laboratory, was a masterpiece. Now his second one, Samurai Jack, is even better and there couldn't be a greater contrast between the two.

It's classic cell animation, and it's being produced by Hanna-Barbera for the Cartoon Network. If you haven't been watching this series, you're missing something special.

The reason the Palestinians have not adopted these alternatives is because they actually want to win their independence in blood and fire. All they can agree on as a community is what they want to destroy, not what they want to build. Have you ever heard Mr. Arafat talk about what sort of education system or economy he would prefer, what sort of constitution he wants? No, because Mr. Arafat is not interested in the content of a Palestinian state, only the contours.

Let's be very clear: Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilization because if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then, like hijacking and airplane bombing, it will be copied and will eventually lead to a bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That is why the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated. . . .

The Palestinians are so blinded by their narcissistic rage that they have lost sight of the basic truth civilization is built on: the sacredness of every human life, starting with your own. If America, the only reality check left, doesn't use every ounce of energy to halt this madness and call it by its real name, then it will spread. The Devil is dancing in the Middle East, and he's dancing our way.

Brigadier General Sultan Abul Aynayn, the head of Arafat's Fatah movement in Lebanon, who has been accused by Lebanese officials of organizing and arming illegal groups, said in an interview in this coastal camp south of Tyre that ''if a hair of Arafat's head is hurt, the Israelis and the United States will be held responsible.'' . . .

Aynayn added: ''Only the Americans can stop this massacre. They can stop the massacre with one phone call. If there is harm to one hair of the head of Arafat, the United States should protect its interests all over the world. We are not like bin Laden, but we have our own style.''

GRAHAM: A lot of Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country.
NIXON: You must never let them know.

Now allow me to reintroduce my neighbor, Dave (not his real name), whom you first met in my Sept. 22, 2000, column.

When my neighbor saw my iMovies, he immediately ordered a board and software that he said would let him do that on his PC. I told him he should get a Mac. A month ago I asked him how his moviemaking was coming. He looked properly chagrined as he said, "I haven't figured out how to make it work yet."

I lent him the new iMac for a few days and issued a challenge. Since he still, 18 months later, had not completed a single movie project on his Dell, I told him to try making a movie, an audio CD and a DVD on this iMac. And to make things interesting, I offered him no assistance or support -- I told him to look in Mac Help if he had questions.

Three days later I interviewed Dave.

On the first day, he unpacked the iMac, set it up in five minutes and burned two audio CDs with iTunes. He said he never needed to refer to Mac Help and that this whole project was "no problem whatsoever."

On the second day, he used iDVD to create a pair of slide shows using existing digital photos and burned his first DVD. I watched it later, and it didn't stink. In fact, most people would no doubt find it impressive. (I'm so jaded.)

On the third day, he borrowed my Canon ZR-25 camcorder and a tape of my son's last basketball game. I handed him the camera, manual and FireWire cable, and told him he was own his own.

By the end of the day he had imported raw footage into iMovie, edited it, added music and titles, then burned it onto a DVD with iDVD.

As I scribbled furiously, Dave's long-suffering wife added, "He swore less at the Mac than he does at his Dell."

Dave then said he had created more multimedia in three days with the iMac than he had in 18 months with his Dell. He only opened the Help file a couple of times. He concluded, "The hardest part was getting the iMac back in the box."

Before departing I asked if he'd consider a Mac next time. He replied: "Absolutely. In fact, if we hadn't wasted so much money trying to transform that Dell into a multimedia computer, I'd get one today."

The assertion that the State supports marriage through licensing and favourable tax treatment is counterfactual. The assertion that approving same-sex marriage has an adverse impact on traditional marriages is a non-sequitor -- how does it follow that straight people will stop getting married and having children and rasing them in good environments simply because gays and lesbians are allowed to marry and adopt? There's an unstated assumption that homosexuals can't have stable relationships and be good parents, though the assumption comes through very clearly in the argument.

Last November, a Congressional aide named Mitch Glazier, with the support of the RIAA, added a "technical amendment" to a bill that defined recorded music as "works for hire" under the 1978 Copyright Act.

He did this after all the hearings on the bill were over. By the time artists found out about the change, it was too late. The bill was on its way to the White House for the president's signature.

That subtle change in copyright law will add billions of dollars to record company bank accounts over the next few years -- billions of dollars that rightfully should have been paid to artists. A "work for hire" is now owned in perpetuity by the record company.

Under the 1978 Copyright Act, artists could reclaim the copyrights on their work after 35 years. If you wrote and recorded "Everybody Hurts," you at least got it back to as a family legacy after 35 years. But now, because of this corrupt little pisher, "Everybody Hurts" never gets returned to your family, and can now be sold to the highest bidder.

Over the years record companies have tried to put "work for hire" provisions in their contracts, and Mr. Glazier claims that the "work for hire" only "codified" a standard industry practice. But copyright laws didn't identify sound recordings as being eligible to be called "works for hire," so those contracts didn't mean anything. Until now.

Writing and recording "Hey Jude" is now the same thing as writing an English textbook, writing standardized tests, translating a novel from one language to another or making a map. These are the types of things addressed in the "work for hire" act. And writing a standardized test is a work for hire. Not making a record.

So an assistant substantially altered a major law when he only had the authority to make spelling corrections. That's not what I learned about how government works in my high school civics class.

Three months later, the RIAA hired Mr. Glazier to become its top lobbyist at a salary that was obviously much greater than the one he had as the spelling corrector guy.

...

By the way, which bill do you think the recording industry used for this amendment?

The Record Company Redefinition Act? No. The Music Copyright Act? No. The Work for Hire Authorship Act? No.

How about the Satellite Home Viewing Act of 1999?

Stealing our copyright reversions in the dead of night while no one was looking, and with no hearings held, is piracy.

The computer whiz then asked the court to identify the plaintiff in the case. Ware explained that the United States was the plaintiff, and was represented by assistant U.S. attorney Ross Nadel. Heckenkamp said he wanted to subpoena Nadel's "client" to appear in court, and Ware asked him who, exactly, he wanted to bring into the courtroom.

When Heckenkamp replied, "The United States of America," Ware ordered him taken into custody.

"The comments that you are making to the court lead me to suspect that either you are playing games with the court, or you're experiencing a serious lack of judgment," said Ware. The judge added that he was no longer satisfied that Heckenkamp would make his future court appearances.

Heckenkamp had been free on $50,000 bail, and living under electronic monitoring -- prohibited by court order from using cell phones, the Internet, computers, video games and fax machines.

Before two deputy U.S. marshals hauled Heckenkamp away, he threatened legal action against the judge. "I will hold you personally liable," he said. "I will seek damages for every hour that I'm in custody."

New York City was planning to release hundreds of vehicles recovered from the WTC area beginning Monday. In recent weeks, city officials sent owners and insurance companies a letter about how to retrieve the cars from the Fresh Kills landfill...

I have some "inside information" about the next release of the Macintosh operating system. It will be called "Mac OS Y," and will reach an unprecedented level of irrelevance. In true Apple style-over-substance, you will be able to choose between fifteen different "essences," nee "flavors," and the system will require 1GB of RAM for baseline performance, and 10GB of disk space (not including the moderate extra space required to install the optional developer tools). It will be distributed on 4 DVD-ROMs and will require that you reformat your hard disk prior to installation, before dumping a heretofore unheard of sixty-nine million files, randomly fragmented about your disk. Icons will be a whopping 1024x1024 pixels in detail, and are rendered in stunning 128-bit color. A 23" display will be recommended to view a single page of text. "Small screens are a thing of the past," company CEO Steve Jobs claims.

1. Do you care if a few giant companies control virtually all entertainment and information?

2. Do you care if they decide what kinds of technological innovations will reach the marketplace?

3. Would you be concerned if they used their power to compile detailed dossiers on everything you read, listen to, view and buy?

4. Would you find it acceptable if they could decide whether what you write and say could be seen and heard by others?

Those are no longer theoretical questions. They are the direction in which America is hurtling.

Media conglomerates are in a merger frenzy. Telecommunications monopolies are creating a cozy cartel, dividing up access to the online world. The entertainment industry is pushing for Draconian controls on the use and dissemination of digital information.

If you're not infuriated by these related trends, you should at least be worried. If you're neither, stop reading this column. You're a sheep, content to be herded wherever these giants wish.

But if you want to retain some fundamental rights over the information you use and create, please take a stand. Do it soon, because a great deal is at stake.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring will be released in no less than four versions this year. On 8/6, separate widescreen and pan & scan versions will be released, each a two-disc set with identical extra features. Disc one includes the film presented in English Dolby Digital Surround EX and Dolby 2.0 surround (sorry, no DTS). Disc two is where all the goodies are at, and retail will be $29.95 for either the pan & scan or widescreen editions.

Then, on 11/12, New Line will release a mega four-disc set, with a new extended cut of the film created by Peter Jackson himself, and featuring over 30 minutes of additional footage. This cut of the film will be Rated R due to some extended violence, and no retail price has yet been set for this release. The now nearly four-hour film will be spread over the first two discs and presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen (alas, no sound format information is yet available.) Unfortunately, all the supplements for the 4-disc set are still in production, so final details were not revealed. However, the disc is planned to include 3 audio commentaries and another four hours of bonus material. It is also not yet known if all the features on the "standard" two-disc set edition will also be included here.

3. Banana Republic co-founders Mel and Patricia Ziegler start ZoZa, an "athletic formalwear" retailer, in late 2000. Mel says he expects sales to reach $1 billion within seven years. Gary Rieschel of Softbank Venture Capital invests $16.5 million, telling BusinessWeek, "If you have guts and you have capital, how can you not be optimistic about the consumer market?" Here's how: ZoZa's designers revamp its spring 2001 line, intentionally making their dresses two sizes smaller than labeled. Even the svelte are outraged, and ZoZa's merchandise return rate soars to 80 percent. The company shuts down in May 2001, proving that, if the dress doesn't fit, you must, uh, quit.

7. Last May, Citizens Against Government Waste, a group that received funding from Microsoft (MSFT), is caught simulating a "grassroots" campaign to get state attorneys general to drop their antitrust suit against the software giant. One detail that gives the scheme away: Some of the letters supporting Microsoft are from people who have long since died.

60. Washing Off the Stench of Death, Part 1: Philip Morris (MO) proposes changing its name to Altria, presumably to escape the taint of its tobacco-producing past. It does not, however, stop producing tobacco, which does not stop causing cancer.

61. Washing Off the Stench of Death, Part 2: Making matters even more awkward, the name Altria turns out to be already taken by Altria Healthcare, a firm based in Birmingham, Ala., that is not especially pleased to be linked to a noted producer of poor health.

The Mac Bong, or iBong, is made from a water-filled bong mounted inside an old Mac SE 30. The bowl of the bong protrudes from the front of the computer, just below the screen. The mouthpiece sticks out the back.
...
"My bong burnt bright," he wrote, "electrifying fractals dancing in the raging embers, smoke curling like a halo around my bowed and fatal head.... The restlessness of a millennium's solitude soared through my rushing blood, the roar of being alive skipping like a jumping spark through my brain."

The Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) today announced its enthusiastic support for the MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) licensing models recently introduced by Dolby Laboratories. In contrast to the proposed terms for the MPEG-4 Visual license, the approach of the MPEG-4 AAC licensors does not involve royalties on the distribution of audio compressed in the MPEG-4 AAC format.

But Macs have changed. They're still cute, in a modern-art sort of way, but they have a new software engine under the hood. The operating system is tried-and-true Unix with the kind of multitasking that would make an octopus jealous, and the hardware is so fast that some operations get finished before they're started.
   Well, almost. I'm getting carried away. But it's all for a good reason. For the first time in years, I'm madly in love with a computer. I bought a Macintosh dual-processor G4 computer -- the one with two 1-gigahertz processors and a built-in DVD burner -- a few weeks ago and haven't stopped raving about it yet. I'm driving my wife crazy, my cat hides when he sees me coming and my parrot is quickly learning how to repeat "This is amazing!" three times without taking a breath.

Will the iMac save Apple and Steve Jobs? It’s too early to tell. But then again I’m too busy enjoying my new iMac to worry about that.

From poor support to poor product design to marketspeak promises made and engineering promises gone unfulfilled, Apple seems to care very little about the core market that has sustained it...as though we "don’t get it". What a farce, and what an insult. I think I used to have a common feeling with Apple: they would bring insanely great things to market, understating the genius, expecting the world to see the light, and yet we'd both stand by puzzled when the market couldn't see the brilliance. Now, Apple and I are different: they simply dictate what is brilliant, and ignore the markets ignorance--they don't ask or want my (or my ilk's) opinion in the matter. And if, forbid, you offer one, you are Anti-Apple. And what makes all this worse is their utterly incomprehensible silence---on EVERYTHING. With no "free" support anymore, the online troubleshooting sites have evolved into he said-she said forums where the experts (the code writers themselves) never inform. Apple's Tech Discussions are a joke; a world where Joe Blow without source can espouse "technical voodoo". Is it me, or is the first line Tech Support at Apple merely a human tape player that recites "Okay, let's zap the PRAM. Okay, you'll need to reinstall the system software.” Rinse. Repeat. And I think that OS X is, in and of itself, the proof of the shambles that Apple, as a culture, is in.

I have been writing about OS X and its infrastructure since before Copland. It is probably because I have had, for a VERY long time, a prescient feeling about what I want a computer to do. And college, the engineering education, was the worst thing I did, because it provided me the technical know how (or at least the foundation of the know how) about Operating Systems. John Manzione, in last week’s Op-Ed piece, stated that OS X was "still the best OS ever to be developed for any computer." And he is right...but we need to stop comparing against what WAS and start comparing with what CAN BE. And when doing that, OS X is rather disappointing. OS X embodies just about everything that is wrong with Apple.

Apple could have brought fresh new insight to how UNIX looks (metadata, drivers, installers, preferences and configuration), but they haven't, all for this elusive and nebulous concept of "compatibility". Certainly this will be improved, but Apple's silence about the journey is disheartening.

And so it goes... I fear we are a dying breed, the ones who care, the ones who are loyal, the ones who want to make a difference. Everyone else seems to merely want to be spoon-fed, and Apple and the computer and software vendors seem happy to do so. I dread the thought of another 10 years of stagnation in this market...I may go insane.

Much the same right now. We, the West, are much more prosperous than the Middle East because of our ethos (property, secular rule of law, tolerance, blah blah blah), and they see it and are envious. But like Homer, they make no effort to reflect on themselves, choosing instead to seethe at the success of another and suspect that such success comes at a cost to them. Yet there we are, giving them aid in the Carl Sagan ranges, always willing to offer them a free beer from the keg even if it sometimes is mostly foam. Like Homer, given the chance, they would invite us into their homes on the odd chance they could get away with killing us.

"We did it," founder and CEO Michael Dell said. "Back when I started this company, I vowed that I would not rest until we revolutionized the way computers are sold. Well, at long last, that day is here. Bye."

But the barkin' Brit had his script, and went to the next page with relish. “The Mac's intuitive, they say. Oh, yes! Dragging a floppy to the trash can to eject it, that's intuitive!”

“We don't have floppies anymore,” I said, smiling.

Another fellow chimed in, and insisted that the only people who used Macs were people who collected porn, since the Mac was so good at graphics.

“And they can't be networked!” the Brit said with inordinate delight.

“Actually, I have a wireless home network that works just fine, and at the office all the graphics Macs are networked quite nicely. Now, for burning DVDs at home -”

“WHO DOES THAT?” he brayed.

In the coming months, there are likely to be fewer bargains to be had as PC vendors shift the costs to consumers, offering systems with less memory and bumping up the prices for packages that include a flat-panel display.

Microsoft Media Services' images scored dead last in four of our five quality tests. Unless you're an all-Microsoft shop, you can do better. Then again, it is free if you're already using Windows 2000 Server. And if you're using anything else, you can't have it anyway, since Windows Media Services isn't available as a standalone product.

Microsoft Canada, in partnership with Apple Canada, has launched www.machemistry.ca. The new site for Mac-using professionals is part of The Chemistry Project - a Canadian program that explores and promotes good chemistry between the two companies, and Mac owners. Machemistry.ca visitors are invited to experiment with Microsoft Office v. X, Microsoft's latest suite for the Mac. They can take a fun personality litmus test, listen to an original hip hop anthem for the Mac user called "Just a Little Irreverent", and learn from high profile Canadian celebrities who are Mac masters.

Computing Fallacies [or What is the World Coming To?] - Michi Henning



======================================================================



Fallacy 1 Computing is Easy
	- Teach Yourself C++ in 14 Easy Lessons
	- CORBA for Dummies
	- Complete Idiot's Guide to Win32
	- Java for Morons
	- Windows 98 Unleashed



	[now examining different areas - non books]
	- Brain Surgery in 14 Easy Lessons
	- Bridge Design for Dummies
	- Complete Idiot's Guide to Contract Law
	- Air Traffic Control for Morons
	- Ballistic Missiles Unleashed



We are special in the IT industry in that we can find these fallacies. This
talk is an hour long bitching session for everything that has annoyed me in
the last 20 years.



Fallacy 2 Computers Allow People to Do things They Could Not Do Otherwise
	- All you need is a good work processor to create a great doc
	- All you need is a great spreadsheet to make accurate sales predictions
	- All you need is ...



Fallacy 3 Computers Increase Productivity
	- The sound effects in this presentation will make all the difference
	- It only took five hours to format this memo
	- The shading on this pie chart is simply superb
	- The icons on my desktop are lined up perfectly
	[sound of car screeching to a halt for each bullet point]



We still produce exactly the same amount of letters as in 1945. Back then it
was okay to have 3 or so typos per page without re-typing the entire letter.
Nowadays, we rewrite the letter many, many times, changing fonts, format
etc. We are no better off in terms of letters produced.



Fallacy 4 Programs Help Their Users
	- What can we do that will force an upgrade?
	- What can we do for the next release that might sell?
	- How can we kill the competition?



Fallacy 5 If It's Graphical, It's Easy
	- Single click, double click?
	- Where is the #$%^@!! menu??
	- Which part of the UI does *not* do something?
	- With a GUI, anyone can be a
		- System administrator
		- Programmer
		- Typesetter
		- Accountant
		- Statistician
		- ...



Double clicking is politically incorrect in terms of RSI. We have to
re-learn to use single click or to type on ergonomic keyboards.



There are so many UI features that we only learn by accident eg. double
clicking the title bar, dettaching the toolbar.



Why is the minimize button beside the close button on the title bar? This is
equivalent to have the eject seat button right beside the light switch in an
aeroplane.



Let me introduce you to a friend of mine. M$ paperclip. Eyes start to follow
Michi as he walks back and forth across the stage. [Histerical laughter].
It's in principle a really good idea, something that monitors your progress,
but when it starts to interrupt your work, by telling you a joke, it is
ethically wrong to release this to millions of people.



Fallacy 6 Computers are Getting Faster
	- How long does it take for your PC to boot?
	- How long does it take to
		- start your word processor?
		- load a web page?
		- compile a program?
	- how long did it take
		- five years ago?
		- ten years ago?



We have come along and destroyed all the gains we have made in hardware.



Fallacy 7 Programs are Getting Better
	- How often do you need to
		- animate your fonts?
		- embed live information from the web in a document?
		- perform a Fourier analysis?
		- create a pie chart with alpha blending?
		- create a pie chart?



99% of all documents are written to be printed on paper.



His wife was trying to save a 2.2MB for a 2 page Word document on a floppy
disk. Plain text, default font, left aligned. There was one email address,
underlined. After 17 minutes of searching, he found a way to turn off this
email address highlight off. The document was then saved at 800KB.



Fallacy 8 Programmers are Getting Better
	- Average education time 2 years?
	- How many students coming out of university know what a core dump is?
	- Written an Excel macro? You are qualified!
	- Average retention time in a job 18 months



Great programmers have a greater amount of short term memory slots. Most of
these people will have written some assembly at some stage in their lives.



Fallacy 9 Programming is About Date Structures and Algorithms
	- How many times have you written a linked list?
	- How many times have you used STL?
	- How many books have you read about HCI?



We spend so much time designing our API's, but who taught us whether we
should return a boolean or an integer as an error? We are not taught to
design.



Fallacy 10 Open Source is the Answer
	- Economic model is doubtful
	- Source code is useless
	- Motivation for Open Source is inappropriate for most software
	- Nerd culture is counter-productive



We write software for peer recognition. We write fancy structures because
'it's cool', but not particularly useful.



Fallacy 11 Standards all the Solution
	- Usable standards are created only years after the fact
	- Standards are foul compromises



Fallacy 12 We are Making Progress
	- Progress in data structures and algorithms have been remarkably slow
	- Progress in management techniques has been remarkably slow
	- Progress in quality assurance has been remarkably slow



We put all the not so good programmers into quality assurance, when really
it is the hardest part.



Fallacy 13 The Industry Knows Where it is Goling
	- Today's clever hack is tommorrow's solution to take us into the next
	  millenium
	- There haven't b een any new ideas in a decade
	- We have run out of ideas, so we rehash old ones



Oh My God! It's All So...Depressing!



So What Do We Need?
	- 'Progress' is detrimental to progress
	- Focus on design
	- Realistic growth expectations
	- Legislation
	- Code of ethics
	- Growing up!



The best UI people on the planet are those working in the car industry.



We need to make it a criminal law to change certain API's. There are
potentially huge impacts. When we produce a new drug, we can't just release
it to millions of people without some sort of testing.



We have to stop doing things just because they are fun. Nerds are not the
people to run this industry.



Useful Reading
	- Donald Norman 'The Design of Everyday Things'
	- Alan Cooper 'The Inmates are Running the Asylum'
	- Alan Cooper 'About Face'

As for SSE2 vs. Altivec, SSE2 is a toy by comparison. Its architecture does not offer the range of generalized high precision capability that the altivec instruction set does. It is filled with bandwidth limitations, particularly its tiny number of harder to use registers that make it nearly impossible to keep the pipeline full, and it is capable of basically no parallelism whatsoever with the regular FP unit on the processor (which means it must start and stop each unit to switch back and forth, and the lack of generalization makes this an excruciating performance penalty). The small number of registers in particular makes the P3 a better scientific computing processor than the P4 for real world applications because the P4's pipe is too deep to keep it filled. This can be graphically demonstrated with fully optimized applications that force significant branching on real world data.

Gorman: He made it through the crash, but the wing of the plane was blocking his only means of escape.

Stanley: This plane was at an angle and the wing hung in my office door 20 feet away.

I cried, I prayed, and the entire ceiling came down. The furniture was mangled. The tables, the computers, the walls, the ceiling -- everything came down.

And I prayed, saying, "Lord, send somebody, anybody." And out of this smoke I saw the light. It was a flashlight somebody had.

I said, "Lord, just this one time more. If you give me the strength, I'll be able to do it."

I stood up, and I felt so powerful that I could have done anything. When Samson got up and shook off his enemies, that's how I felt. And I said, "This wall is no match for me."

I started clawing my way, climbing, climbing, punching, hitting until the man on the other side saw my hand and my head. And he said, "I can see your hand." I said, "As soon as you can see my head and hand, you just grab and yank me through."

Brian Clark, afterwards I got to know his name, he grabbed my hand and my head and he pulled with all his strength, and I squirmed my way through to this opening.

Gorman: Stanley and Brian miraculously made it down to the lobby, but the entire concourse was engulfed in flames.

First and foremost, c't itself admitted that the G4 should have mopped the floor with "the x86 FPU with its antiquated stack structure and eight registers only"-- so why, when the G4 was shown to be half as fast as the Pentium III, did the magazine just say "gee, we guess the G4's no supercomputer" and then saunter away, hands in pockets, whistling a jolly tune? Doesn't anyone think it's strange that they failed to mention that the SPEC2000 test, as compiled, utterly ignores the G4's Velocity Engine registers, which are what gives that chip its supercomputer-class, greater-than-gigaflop floating point performance? What c't did is tantamount to forcing you to write with your toes and then telling you that your handwriting sucks.

What's more, while the industry just loves SPEC benchmarks, faithful viewer Mark Davis reminds us that they've always been biased towards Intel processors, in part because the SPEC code just floods the chip with a constant stream of perfect instructions and let it work at peak efficiency, which is nothing like how real software is processed. As you may recall from Jon Rubinstein's "Megahertz Myth" spiel, Intel's recent chips take a speed hit from the recurring need to clear and refill those extra-long pipelines due to incorrect predictive branching-- it's that whole "pipeline tax" thing. With the SPEC test, there are no data dependency bubbles, and therefore no pipeline tax, so Intel's chips perform better than they would in actual battle conditions.

Subject: Are you and your family protected?

Several companies such as IBM and Compaq have been offering integrated flat panel computers with offerings like the NetVista and iPaq.

Apple Computer, with the introduction of their latest iMac, has gone one step further, and committed itself to producing a line-up of flat panel computers.

Ahh, a semantic attack! Cute. Microsoft "hotfixes" -do- follow the filename convention used above. Q216309 is the ID of a support centre article. Microsoft do issue security bulletins to interested parties by email (though they use PGP signatures... as if anyone'd check those!) It's a very convincing semantic attack, in fact. It's probably a trojan horse attack rather than a virus. Funny thing is, I can see a lot of Microsoft employees falling for this one ;)

The German tech bible has put the latest dual G4s through the SPEC CPU2000 processor benchmark, and the results make dismal reading for hardcore Apple loyalists. C't found that the RISC-based machines running OS X fall severely short of expectations, being bested in the floating point tests by an eighteen month old Pentium III-based machine

You might still be able to buy one of these, on eBay.

From: "Microsoft Corporation Security Center" <rdquest12@microsoft.com>
Date: Sun Mar 10, 2002 09:32:10 PM US/Pacific
To: "Microsoft Customer" <'customer@yourdomain.com'>
Subject: Internet Security Update
Reply-To: <rdquest12@microsoft.com>

Microsoft Customer,

this is the latest version of security update, the known security vulnerabilities affecting Internet Explorer and MS Outlook/Express as well as six new vulnerabilities, and is discussed in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-005. Install now to protect your computer from these vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could allow an attacker to run code on your computer.


Description of several well-know vulnerabilities:

- "Incorrect MIME Header Can Cause IE to Execute E-mail Attachment" vulnerability. If a malicious user sends an affected HTML e-mail or hosts an affected e-mail on a Web site, and a user opens the e-mail or visits the Web site, Internet Explorer automatically runs the executable on the user's computer.

- A vulnerability that could allow an unauthorized user to learn the location of cached content on your computer. This could enable the unauthorized user to launch compiled HTML Help (.chm) files that contain shortcuts to executables, thereby enabling the unauthorized user to run the executables on your computer.

- A new variant of the "Frame Domain Verification" vulnerability could enable a malicious Web site operator to open two browser windows, one in the Web site's domain and the other on your local file system, and to pass information from your computer to the Web site.

- CLSID extension vulnerability. Attachments which end with a CLSID file extension do not show the actual full extension of the file when saved and viewed with Windows Explorer. This allows dangerous file types to look as though they are simple, harmless files - such as JPG or WAV files - that do not need to be blocked.

System requirements:
Versions of Windows no earlier than Windows 95.

This update applies to:
Versions of Internet Explorer no earlier than 4.01
Versions of MS Outlook no earlier than 8.00
Versions of MS Outlook Express no earlier than 4.01

How to install
Run attached file q216309.exe

How to use
You don't need to do anything after installing this item.

For more information about these issues, read Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-005, or visit link below.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/critical/default.asp
If you have some questions about this article contact us at rdquest12@microsoft.com

Thank you for using Microsoft products.

With friendly greetings,
MS Internet Security Center.

----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Microsoft is registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
Windows and Outlook are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

These things would not have happened in WW2 - again, you can ponder the matter and figure out why, but the fact is that no one would have thought to make this complaint. The nation was at war; the idea that singing a patriotic medley that contained “God” and “Prayer” would be divisive and offensive and cannot be allowed at a RED CROSS MEETING would have struck most people as absolute lunacy. I know there are people who think that the Red Cross decision is a good thing, that we're better off because the kids didn't sing “God Bless the USA,” but all I can do is plead ignorance because the reason escapes me completely.

I can, however, find another charity.

Hi--

I'm sure you're getting plenty of mail already, considering how Slashdotted your article on your OS X conversion is at the moment. But there are a couple of things I wanted to mention about it.

First of all, your run through the platforms over the years pretty closely mirrors mine. I had an Apple //c+ way back when; then got a 386 for DOS (I always did like DOSSHELL better than Windows 3.1), then a series of Windows boxes while I used Macs at work and enjoyed the hell out of them. Then I discovered Linux, and what was more to my taste, FreeBSD-- and got to be as conversant with it as I really could be (just wrote FreeBSD Unleashed, in fact). But a couple of years ago, with dot-com stock bucks, I got myself a G4/450, and that's where my Mac conversion happened. I've been working with OS X since the Public Beta, sending in tons of feedback, and I helped stir up the grass-roots storm that got Apple to redesign their app-binding system in 10.1.

Type and Creator codes are one of those things that I always found so elegant about the classic Mac OS. Filenames should *not* be relied upon for app binding. They're mutable meta-data; the user should be completely free to change filenames without them losing their bindings to the apps they can and will open in. I like being able to name a file "My 2000 Taxes" without having to worry about tacking an ugly ".pdf" onto the end or else it'll stop working.

All apps have a four-letter Creator signature, and a list of file types they will accept. If a file has a Type code of "JPEG", you can drag it over Preview, PictureViewer, Photoshop, GraphicConverter-- anything that says it will accept JPEG files-- and it will darken to show that it will open the file. Similarly, you can set the Creator code on different JPEG files so that some will open in Preview, some in Photoshop, and still others in MSIE. This flexibility is crucial for graphic artists and anybody who works with files in several different apps-- and it's much, much more elegant than Windows' global single-app-per-extension model, where if you remove the extension the file becomes orphaned.

But OS X has been trying to incorporate extension-based mapping as well as Type and Creator codes. Extensions have a global mappings table (which as yet we don't have access to, but we should). This is ostensibly so we can use files that we get from the Internet without having to map Type and Creator codes onto them-- but that's what the Internet Control Panel did in the classic OS, and it worked fine. It was a layer on the file-creation subsystem that put standardized type/creator codes onto new files downloaded from the Net, based on extensions, just like the executable flag that gets set on applications and registers their Creator codes with the Desktop database whenever they're written onto disk during installation.

But this meant that files could now be orphaned if you dared to name them things like "My 2000 Taxes". Horror! So we laid the feedback bomb on Apple, and in 10.1 they made it so each file's extension was hideable on a per-file basis, and you could hide or unhide it manually or through the file-naming process. This way, files sent FROM an OS X machine would open properly under Windows or UNIX, and we'd have the freedom to name them as we see fit, at least on the presentation layer. Plus it protects against "picture.jpg.jpg" and "virus.gif.vbs" issues, which are a direct result of Windows' stupid global extension-hiding "feature".

Anyway... yeah, the Command+O thing for opening files is a little counterintuitive. But like most things in the Mac UI, it has a rationale. The thinking goes, if you're starting a program, you're using the mouse to get to it. But if you're using your keyboard, generally what you're doing is manipulating filenames. It comes from the same mindset that doesn't put keyboard/arrow-key shortcuts on menu items and dialog boxes; it means we don't have the total freedom from the mouse that Windows has, but it does have the benefit of limiting keyboard shortcuts to in-app functionality, which simplifies matters for less powerful users. After all, the Mac UI *is* designed primarily for a shallow learning curve, and so UI elements like contextual right-click menus and arrow-key navigation and launching apps from keystrokes are avoided. It's the one-button mouse philosophy-- it seems limiting, but it's all got rationale.

And finally, the thing about having to Command+Q to quit apps even if their windows are all closed... well, the issue is that on the Mac, the currently active application takes over the entire desktop context. In apps that in Windows would have that big ugly MDI interface (like Word and Photoshop), in the Mac the whole idea is that you could open the application and have it running even if there aren't any open files in it. it's a framework into which you can open files to work with. Some apps, though, *can't* really be useful without an open window, and so they do quit if you close that window. Most of the Utilities are like that, and iPhoto is too. Some aren't (like iTunes), and while in some cases it's because you can have multiple windows open (even if you don't usually), sometimes it would indeed be better to quit when the last window closes. IE is a good example of that.

Oh, and one more thing: Have you tried OmniWeb? You wanna see smooth text, you just gotta see web pages in OmniWeb. http://www.omnigroup.com

Thanks again for a great read! Power to the White Earbud Posse!

Brian

And though it had some missteps and shots in the dark, Macs in the present are something to be reckoned with and rightfully so. They may not create revolutions when it comes to technology [and I'm not saying they're behind here], but to say they merely utilize what they have would be an insulty.

Whatever people think, corporate decisions on which software to buy or implement are not often made by the corporate officers. They’re guided by consultants.

Linux’s only hope of survival at the high end of the corporate systems rests with IBM’s decision to support it. A company that’s half serious won’t trust their core systems to an OS they don’t fully understand or can’t administer properly... unless they can be persuaded to buy a support contract from a serious, substantial IT consulting company. Like Accenture, or Getronics, or IBM. And that goes for the Mac OS too.

We’ve repeated this argument till our throat ached. We’ve actually pursued the Spanish Apple delegation in search of information about this, and about Apple’s discreetest branch: the iServices. To no avail, yet. But we believe Apple’s moving (glacier-slow) in the right direction: iServices is not just in the business of implementing networks and doing small web consultancy and development work for Mac-dependent companies, but actually building the first step of any successful corporate software supplier: a certification procedure, complete with exams and training.

The missing part is still missing. I don’t know of any big consulting firm that will even admit to knowing that WebObjects is all about. Neither will they acknowledge the virtues of Apple’s splendid family of QuickTime products for a great number of uses. Or include Apple’s new solutions when discussing collaborative software for educational institutions. Apple’s got no serious partners, and that is deadly for its corporate credibility, as they can’t hope to build iServices into a full ITC consultancy any time soon. This, again, is Apple’s job not yet done. But at least they’ve begun and are walking in the right direction.

And the money seems to be the explanation here. A Wired article on the hearings noted that in the 2000 election cycle, the entertainment industry gave Democrats a whopping $24.2 million in contributions compared to $13.3 million to Republicans.

So championing the cause of the little guy only counts until the bidding gets high enough.

This partiality is a betrayal of principle. As such, it represents a real political opportunity for the Republicans. Democrats do like to portray themselves as the friends of the little guy and the protectors of ordinary Americans against greedy big business — as demonstrated by their posturing over the Enron collapse. But as Ken Layne pointed out last week, the entertainment industries make Enron’s management look like Boy Scouts.

"Keep your grubby laws off my computer" sounds like a pretty good slogan, and it’s one that Republicans could use against Democrats nationwide. A few smart Democrats, like Rep. Rick Boucher of Virginia, realize this. As Boucher puts it, these companies are "seeking to use their copyright not just to obtain fair compensation but in effect to exercise complete dominance and total control of the copyrighted work...I have told the heads of the major labels I think this is a major mistake that will engender a major public backlash." Unfortunately, Boucher seems to be a voice in the wilderness within the Democratic Party, which has forged a symbiotic relationship with the entertainment industries over the past few decades.

Sonicblue touts a number of automated playback features on the Riot. For instance, it can quickly create a list of your most-played tunes, or of songs from a certain decade. But I found these things to be gimmicky, and they don't work well unless you first run your song collection through a piece of add-on software called MoodLogic, which isn't included.

The Riot purportedly has a battery life of at least 10 hours, which might put it close to the iPod's 12-hour battery life. But I couldn't test this, because the evaluation unit Sonicblue sent me wouldn't hold a charge. In fact, my test Riot, a production-level unit, was plagued with defects.

By Mallard's account, as told to police, she had been drinking and using Ecstasy that October night and was driving home when she struck a man. The impact hurled him headfirst through the windshield, his broken legs protruding onto the hood.

She panicked, she said, and with the man lodged in the windshield, she drove a few miles to her home. There, she parked her 1997 Chevrolet Cavalier in the garage and lowered the door.

Biggs pleaded for help, she told police.

He got none. Not then, or for the next two or three days, as he remained lodged in the windshield, bleeding and slowly going into shock, police said.

Mallard told police she periodically went into the garage to check on the man. She said she apologized profusely to him for what she had done but ignored his cries for help.

When the man died, several of the woman's acquaintances helped remove his body, putting it into the trunk of another car and driving to Cobb Park, where they dumped it, police quoted the woman as saying. Two men found the body Oct. 27.

One reader apologized for the rudeness from some of his fellow Mac fanatics. "We do tend to be too reactionary," he said. "It is just that we feel so strongly about the platform we use and worry about negative remarks that could further damage its reputation and make it more difficult for Apple to compete."