"Lade up with briefness, administer upwith placet not briefness oh"

In green text - middle of card

"Beamof light placet throw light on lock hole !!
Smallness genius too lustronsly!!"

In blue text - printed over middle of the key

"On accont of shape either thickneessk of set measures to, share key unpowered stow down."

In green text - printed at bottom of key

"Whenas key unpowered stow down chron May, forcompany commonness key-holp wield"

In Mac OS X, dialogs (including not only text but visual design) have a consistent format: Status, Reason, Action. They explain what the current situation is--and why a dialog has appeared--and offer action choices to the user. In other words, clear dialogs in Mac OS X communicate to the user: 1) what happened, 2) why it happened, and 3) what to do about it. To ensure that consistent format, Mac OS X dialogs tend to use verbs as button titles.

Although a local newspaper poll showed strong support for the Isotopes name, the mayor of Albuquerque was not amused.

"This isn't a second-rate city that should be taking our name from a cartoon show," Mayor Marin Chavez told reporters upon hearing the name for the new local team.

According to sources, the Cupertino, Calif., Mac maker has been working steadily on maintaining current, PC-compatible builds of its Unix-based OS. The project (code-named Marklar, a reference to the race of aliens on the "South Park" cartoons) has been ongoing inside Apple since the early days of its transition to the Unix-based Mac OS X in the late '90s.

Sources said more than a dozen software engineers are tasked to Marklar, and the company's mainstream Mac OS X team is regularly asked to modify code to address bugs that crop up when compiling the OS for x86. Build numbers keep pace with those of their pre-release PowerPC counterparts; for example, Apple is internally running a complete, x86-compatible version of Jaguar, a k a Mac OS X 10.2, which shipped last week.

Informants now say that one of the areas Apple is addressing in 10.2.1 is the SCSI I/O kit, which stands to provide benefits primarily to developers. "There will be major changes to it," one source said. "These changes are very welcome ... SCSI support in OS X to date has been abominable."

Analysts and users see the built-in copy protection as a potential sales killer because it restricts the use of the built-in DVR, one of the most compelling features of the new PCs.

DVRs, which are sold as companion products for TVs by TiVo and Sonicblue's ReplayTV, are expected to become standard equipment on PCs over the next few years, say analysts.

Already Sony ships Vaio PCs with DVRs and most of the other features found on the HP Media Center PC. But Sony does not impose copy protection. So a consumer could use Sony's GigaPocket Personal Video Recorder software to record a TV show, convert the file to MPEG-2 video with another Sony application and burn the program to a DVD.

The government of Greece is making heroic efforts to humiliate the nation in front of the entire world, by banning all electronic games. That's right; something as innocent as playing computer chess on your laptop in a hotel lobby is now a crime with penalties of up to three months in stir and a fine of 10,000 euros.

The purpose behind this charming legislation is to crack down on Internet gambling (which already was illegal) -- or, rather, to enable legislators to enact their little public dance of righteous aversion to Internet gambling.

Improved enforcement of existing law is all that was needed, but there's a problem. Unfortunately, the Greek government is "incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines," according to an older article from the English-language Kathimerini newspaper, written while the bill was under consideration.

'AZAAN' - AN AMAZING DISCOVERY
Azaan: An incredible medium for the proclamation of Tawheed of Almighty Allah and Risaalat of Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam, the sound of which constantly echoes around the globe.

Amazing though it sounds, but fortunately for the Muslims of the world, it is an established fact. Have a look at a map of the world and you will find Indonesia (an Islamic country) right on the eastern side of the earth’s central landmass. Indonesia consists of numerous small islands, the principle ones amongst them being Java, Sumatra, Borneo and Saibil, all of which are well known. It is the largest country in the world, with 180 million inhabitants. The number of non-muslims here is negligible.

As soon as dawn breaks on the eastern side of Saibil, at approximately 5:30 am local time, Fajar Azaan begins. Thousands of Mu’azzins in eastern Indonesia commence proclaiming the Tawheed (oneness) of the Almighty, Omnipotent and Omniscient Allah and Risaalat (Universal Apostleship) of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam.

The process then continues and advances towards the Western Islands of Indonesia. The time difference between the eastern and western islands of Indonesia is one and a half hours. Hence, one and a half hours after the Azaan has been completed in Saibil, it echoes in Jakarta on Java island. Sumatra then follows suit and before this auspicious process of calling Azaan ends in Indonesia, it has already begun in Malaysia. Burma is next in line, and within an hour of its commencement in Jakarta, it reaches Dacca, the capital city of Bangladesh. No sooner the calling of Azaan ends in Bangladesh, it has already prevailed in western India, from Calcutta to Srinagar. It then advances towards Bombay and the environment of entire India resounds with this august proclamation.

Srinagar and Sialkot (a city in north Pakistan) have the same timing for Azaan. The time difference between Sialkot, Kota, Karachi and Gowadar (a city in Baluchistan, a province of Pakistan) is forty minutes, and within this time, Fajar Azaan is heard throughout Pakistan. Before it ends there, however, it has already begun in Afghanistan and Muscat. The time difference between Muscat and Baghdad is one hour. Azaan resounds during this one hour in the environments of Hijaaz-e-Muqaddas (Holy cities of Makkah and Madinah), Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Iraq.

The time difference between Baghdad and Alexandria in Egypt is again one hour. Azaan continues to resound in Syria, Egypt, Somalia and Sudan during this hour. Alexandria and Istanbul are situated on the same geographical longitude. The time difference between eastern and western Turkey is one and a half hours, and during this time it is echoed with the call to prayer.

Alexandria and Tripoli (capital of Libya) are located at an hour’s difference from one another. The process of calling Azaan thus continues throughout the whole of Africa. Therefore, the proclamation of the Oneness of Allah and the Prophethood of Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam that had begun in the eastern islands of Indonesia reaches the Eastern Shore of the Atlantic ocean after nine and a half hours.

Prior to the Azaan reaching the shores of the Atlantic, the process of Zohar Azaan has already commenced in eastern Indonesia, and before it reaches Dacca, Asar Azaan has started. This has hardly reached Jakarta one and half hours later, then the time of Maghrib becomes due, and no sooner has Maghrib time reached Sumatra, then the time for calling Isha Azaan has commenced in Saibil! When the Muazzins of Indonesia are calling out Fajar Azaan, the Muazzins in Africa are calling out the Azaan for Isha.

If we were to ponder over this phenomenon seriously and studiously, we would conclude the amazing fact that: 'There is not a single moment when thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Muazzins around the world are not proclaiming the Oneness of Almighty Allah and the Apostleship of the noble Prophet Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam on the surface of this earth!' Insha-Allah, this universal and continuous calling of the Azaan shall not cease until the Day of Judgement, and we should all make du`a for the same, AMEEN.

(Translated from Tameer-e-Hayaat)

America's CIA helped Osama and the Taliban overthrow the Soviets in Afghanistan. Maybe Osama bin Laden is still on the CIA payroll? And perhaps they arranged for him and the higher-ranking Taliban to escape .

Is it any wonder that the people of the world have developed

a fear and sometimes open hatred for Muslims when they see:

terror videos for sale at a mosque

. This is madness, it's a blasphemy against Allah, and it must be stopped.





We have decided to cooperate with the authorities here in Britain and

in the USA. Britain must not be used as a base for world-wide Islamist terrorism.

The evidence we have of Islamists activities against India regarding Kashmir

will be given to the Indian authorities. We will help the Russians battle

the evil of the Saudi-Wahhabi sponsored Chechen Mujhadeen. We will help the

Israelis overcome

Arafat and his goons

.

Explaining the recently-announced 5-unit family pack for Jaguar, Bereskin said that it was intended for households who "wanted to find a more affordable solution for staying legal." While the Mac OS X licensing agreement only allows installation on a single system, there is no Windows XP-style activation: "We've never put copy-protection techniques into our software."

He did say, however, that businesses cannot buy a family pack, and that there has been little interest shown below 10-unit licenses.

Consider a Profile if you're seeking a space-saving, high-style design that doesn't come from Apple, but look elsewhere for high-end graphics or maximum configuration options.

The thing that makes fundamental Christianity special is that it’s the only religion that runs smear campaigns. No voodoo witch doctors have ever put together a home video warning voodoo parents of the seductive danger of Christian rock. HP...WR:MELI takes its outrage an extra step into crazy by actually inventing most of the things they hate about Harry Potter. Of course, as the video warns, if you say witchcraft has no power, you have two problems in your line of reasoning. One: you’re ignoring all the people that do have magic powers, and two: you’re saying that God’s warning in the Bible against sorcery is actually worthless. That means that the people who made this video have set it up so that in order for them NOT to be crazy, children need to be flying on brooms and raising bodies from the dead. So say what you want about their book-burning crusade, these people have balls.

Unfortunately, the 4 tests that he did aren't going to show an increase in performance due to the newer bus/memory at all.

PS7 MP Action File: This one is probably memory/cpu intensive, and so will only show raw bandwidth between CPU and RAM, which we know hasn't changed (since the bus from the controller to the CPU hasn't gotten significantly faster compared to the bus between the controller and RAM). Since it only involves those two components, I wouldn't expect any speed gains without a CPU speed increase.

Bryce 5 Render: Same comments as the PS7 test. Since Bryce is doing the rendering and not the video card, it's pure CPU/RAM

iTunes MP3 Convert: Bottleneck is CD-ROM to CPU to HD. Of the 3 only the CPU is actually faster than the system bus.

Altivec Fractal: This is just testing gigaflops. Would you really expect this to change? At all? The CPU hasn't after all...

As someone else said, if you get a test that more evenly balances system performance (like Quartz Extreme, a high power 3D application/game, or a network app) then you'll definately see an improvement, because the controller can basically talk to TWO devices that want to access memory at a time. non-DDR machines can't do that. None of the barefeats tests seemed to put that to it's fullest either.

DMA tasks will be significantly faster. I bet your Quake 3 frame rates will be 1.5 times what they were! Also, look at how OS 10.2 uses video acceleration. Those kinds of operations will be much faster than before.

In fact, there's good reason to believe that these new machines are still going to be bottlenecked, because the processors share a single bus to the controller. PC duallies have separate buses for each CPU. Irrespective of how much L3 cache is connected to the controller, or how fast the RAM behind it runs, the data is choked on that FSB which runs 133 MHz for the 1.0GHz duallies, and 167 MHz for the 1.25 GHz duallies. The new "faster" bus merely keeps pace with the degree of choking; it doesn't relieve it. To relieve it, the G4 bus interface would have had to be redesigned, but that would have required Moto to roll the chip design, and it's clear they are not going to be doing that. If Apple was expecting a new G4 with a new FSB architecture, they would never have created these monsters.

In the last couple of weeks, a number of fan sites have popped up, created by besotted devotees who think she deserves a higher profile in American pop culture.

Feiss is not yet as famous as Mahir or the "all your base" phenomenon, but her fan base is growing -- and not just among Mac users. She has unique appeal to people who use Windows PCs.

There is Ellen Feiss, the fan site and the Ellen Fan Club: beep beep beep, which has set up a Cafépress Web store to sell T-shirts, coffee mugs and flying discs adorned with her image.

The domains ellenfeis.com and ellenfeissfanclub.com have also been registered but are currently empty.

Feiss has been turned into a set of computer icons that, curiously, can be converted to display on machines running Windows XP. She is also the subject of some wallpaper pictures that decorate a computer's desktop.

• DDR SDRAM (whoopee)
• Dual digital video out
• Dual optical drives
• Dual ATA channels for hard drives (supporting four drives total)
• Dual CPUs across the board
• ATI RADEON 9000 (with GeForce4 Ti option)
• AGP4x

• 167 MHz system bus (what is up with that? Dell's top-end systems are up to 533.
• The ATA drive channels are slow and asymmetrical: ATA-100 and ATA-66. Why not ATA-133? It's not like it hasn't been around for years.
• Video out is asymmetrical (ADC and DVI)-- though that may be a good thing
• The price.

Salaam.. everyone person born is a muslim at birth, since it is the true religion.  After time, whether it be parents, where we live whatever, that changes, and people have then conform to their different religions.  So I have reverted back to Islam.  Most people that I have talked to, do not like the word converted.  That means you made an entire switch, which is not true. Since you start off as Muslim,  you are just reverting or coming back to it. I truly hope i have said this correctly. If I have not please forgive me and correct me.

IBM is expected to disclose the technical details of its new 64-bit PowerPC microprocessor designed for desktops and entry-level servers at the upcoming Microprocessor Forum in October. The design, based on the Power4 design which the company uses in high-end servers, is an 8-way superscalar design that fully design supports Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP). The chip also has an AtliVec-like vector processing unit that implements over 160 specialized vector instructions and implements a system interface capable of up to 6.4GB/s.

And what if the U.S. warmongers achieve their aims of gaining control of all sources of oil in Asia (and the Middle East and North Africa), and of the mineral wealth of Central Asia?  Will the Europeans, Japanese and Chinese feel secure in the knowledge that the United States will surely sell them whatever they need to maintain their industrial economies — and their military capabilities?  (The Russian and Chinese leaders surely understand the long-term threat to their national sovereignty, and are acting accordingly.)

Or is there something even more sinister going on?  Is the goal "at the highest level" the extinction of the human species?  If so, will the American people prove to be "useful idiots" facilitating the attainment of this goal?  Or, on the contrary, might they yet awaken from their ignorance, their stupidity, their greed and their egoism, take a hard look at themselves, understand what their lying, vicious, rapacious, hypocritical government is doing in the name of "freedom and democracy", and rein in and reform that government, reconstitute their nation as a republic as the authors of the Constitution intended, and save the world, as they believe (or used to believe) is their manifest destiny?

UPDATE: Within about 13 seconds of my posting this, reader Kurt Revis responds with the following to my comment about app developers not being able to compile for Intel because of legacy 68K code:

I'm sorry, but this is just wrong. Nobody is shipping Carbon apps for OS X with any 68k code, because 68k code no longer works in OS X native apps. (It still works in Classic, of course.)

For many apps (Carbon or Cocoa is irrelevant), it really *should* be a matter of flipping a switch to compile on x86 (or whatever other processor you like). Some apps which use their own PowerPC assembly code will need to rewrite those parts for the new processor, but that's generally a very small amount of code. And many apps (the vast majority) don't have any assembly code at all.

You point out that there may be some bad assumptions about endianness issues when reading from disk/network, or alignment issues in memory, but again these are not huge stumbling blocks (unless the code is REALLY bad). The best practices these days include macros to do byteswapping when reading from disk/network, as appropriate -- the macros do nothing on big-endian machines but swap bytes on little-endian ones, or vice versa.

I'm sure that these issues will affect some people, but it's hardly the end of the world. If the benefits of switching to a new processor architecture are high enough--like making your app run twice as fast--people will do the work. The PPC emulation issue is really the hard part; everything else you mention is trivial in comparison.

This is all more information for me to assimilate into what's admittedly a rather sketchy understanding in my mind of what constitutes software design issues in today's Mac world. It's all a big jigsaw, and I don't pretend to have all the pieces. After having added these, the picture is a bit clearer.

I still tend to think there are other options Apple would choose before Intel, though. And I still think app developers wouldn't stand for having to modify their code again so soon after painfully Carbonizing everything (and having to sell it yet again).

Of course Jihad means struggle. So does Kampf.

Children are savage little things. The jungle is in them, and the wilderness. Occasionally, one will come along in whom the jungle boils and screams, and with that one comes chaos. And with children, chaos is a thing of stones and blood.

The thread is full of charming stuff; they talk about the joys of knifing Jews, and discuss the merits of a particular decapitate-the-infidel tape - who knew it was such a genre? It almost seems as if these guys trade decapitation tapes like l33t hackers swap warez...

There’s more. It’s lovely. Sample message topics: “Do Jews Drink Human Blood?” “Holocoust Never Happened!”

I’d have no interest in this website whatsoever were it not for three things:

1. When there’s a subculture out there ranking the best jihadi decapitation video, you’d best pay attention.

2. When a message board devoted to guidance for Islamic youth doesn’t delete the posts about stabbing Jews, you’d best pay attention.

3. This thread. As far as I can tell, the debate seems to be whether it’s a brother’s job to kill his sexually active sister, or the religious authority’s job.

As much as it might pain the students at clearguidance.com, American churches don’t give two figs for the subject of Islam one way or the other. It’s just not on their radar. There are no pained debates in church basements about how to act towards Muslim friends, or what to do when your friend’s sister comes over with a headscarf. As much as some would like to portray mainstream American religious belief as a Dangerous Ravening Force bent on establishing an Ashcroftian theocracy, most churches look inward. A dear friend of mine is part of a church-group mission to help the Truly Farked - she’s mentoring a down-and-out drug addict, helping her get on her feet. Is that addict a Christian? No idea. Doesn’t come up. Does my friend praise Jeeeeeesus every time she drops off meals or blankets for the addict? Irrelevant. The act is what matters. It’s the gift, not the wrapping.

Apple's Macintosh has found a comfortable and committed niche among enterprise customers with sophisticated graphics and production departments. Linux, meanwhile, has gained a groundswell of support in the last three to four years due to its appeal as the "un-Windows" solution, according to Yankee Group senior analyst and Report author Laura DiDio.
    "Corporate user resentment and dissatisfaction with Microsoft and some of its practices are at an all-time high," DiDio said. A myriad of issues ranging from Microsoft's perceived monopolistic practices, hyperbolic marketing, ongoing security woes, and habitually slipping ship dates of major new product releases as well as confusion surrounding the overall .NET strategy have undermined corporate customer confidence. A recent joint survey of 1,500 corporations by Sunbelt Software, Inc. and the Yankee Group found that nearly 40% of the respondents were so outraged by Microsoft's new licensing scheme that they are actively seeking alternative products.
    "This cumulative dissatisfaction will not necessarily translate into corporate defections to rival operating systems. But it does open the door a crack and raises the possibility that Linux and Macintosh OS X can gain new footholds in an overwhelmingly Windows world," DiDio said.

I think the Europeans and the Americans actually see eye-to-eye in a lot of ways, in the war on terror; and we have a lot of respect for America and its policies, as we would have for any such democracy. After all, America is one of the world's oldest democracies; and as I often tell my European friends, just as we would not expect America to interfere in European affairs, we should not presume to interfere in the internal affairs of the United States. Mutual respect is of great importance here.

www.carder.org

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www.carder.org

W2KnewsFLASH: ~ Service Pack 3 for W2K! ~

But careful, it has not yet been officially announced, and the first problem reports are also already in. Some one just sent me an email with: "Downloaded and installed the final release of W2K SP3. After a clean install and a reboot I got the blue screen of death. Only after uninstalling a rare application from my desktop it worked OK."

W2K SP3 is at the moment we are writing this (Wednesday afternoon, July 31, 2002) not yet on the normal MS download site and not "acknowledged as existing for the wide world" so far. However, it was released yesterday to the MS Premier Support Customers and these are now testing with it. We have installed on a few W2K systems and it seems to be functioning correctly, but careful: TEST, TEST, TEST!. And always backup that system and make an Emergency Repair Disk. Also, always have enough disk space to allow a rollback in case of problems.

We cannot allow the world's worst leaders to develop, and thereby hold hostage freedom-loving countries with the world's worst weapons.

The digital hub always struck me as a ropey idea. It's not that I object in principle to people connecting digital cameras and camcorders to their Macs, it's just that I don't want to be forced to sit through the dross that they subsequently create.

The Apple propaganda machine has been going full tilt for the last while, informing us of the wonderful free iApps that come with every Mac. So what? I like to think that for an investment of over ¤1,000 I'd get something other than an operating system thrown into the box.

When Jobs announced iPhoto, I dutifully went to the Apple site and downloaded it. I looked at it -- and erased it. Yes, it's very nice, but I'm not going to give up Photoshop any time soon.

iMovie? Sorry, my Adobe Premier habit is too ingrained.

If Apple want to impress me, then they'd better write a HyperCard style iMedia and Homepage style iWeb tout suite.

The problem with the iApps is this -- they're not powerful enough. Okay, you say, but they're not aimed at commercial users. This is absolutely correct, and it's also the nub of my argument. I am genuinely concerned that Apple is beginning to neglect its core professional user base in the graphics and media industries. If Adobe ever pulls Photoshop, then the party's over. Macs will be stone dead as far as designers go, and mine will go out the window. Literally.

People talk about the "empowering" potential of the iApps, but having tools available to edit photos and video does not a professional make. The effect is more likely to be similar to that of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint -- where people like me were once paid embarrassingly small amounts of money to produce professional presentations and stationery, offices are now awash with printouts and presentations made by people who think that combining double underlining, bold, and italics is a good thing.

PORTLY APPLE SUPREMO Steve iJobs today announced a new initiative which he claimed will consign the WinTel PC to history.

"The iDiot™ scheme is brilliant in its conceptual elegance and is available in six exciting colours," said Jobs at iApple iExpo i2002 at iNew iYork.

"Put simply, we've realised that our products are bought by people with money to burn who aren't interested in tawdry things like value, compatibility, software choice or performance. What our users want is to pay over the odds for colourful tat. They'll buy anything as long as it's purple, pink, misty buff or moonlight indigo, provided it costs twice as much as the PC equivalent.

UPDATE: As clarified by Kris, the big AppleTalk settling-out test actually occurred in 1989, when the new Ethernet-based implementation of AppleTalk (called EtherTalk) was being developed. Prior to that, AppleTalk was designed to operate over serial cables, and because of the characteristics and limitations of serial topologies, the settling-out behavior wouldn't have been anywhere near as dramatic as it was over Ethernet.

What it might have been was men and women and machines and processes working the way that they were built, trained, and employed. These people did not just show up there at random and begin drilling. They had a plan develped by men and carried out by deceidedly ungodlike individuals.

Why then is God getting all the credit and none of the blame? He did, in fact, move that old mine that was filled with water 300 feet in closer to the new mine so that the miners would break through and almost drown. That was the real miracle! Oh, he didn't do that? That was a faulty map drawn by men many years ago? I see. well, couldn't he have intervened back then when the map was being drawn and fixed so that the nine miners wouldn't become trapped in 2002? A little proactive miracling would seem to work wonders.

There will be single and dual processor CPU options, most likely based on the 7470 Power PC chip, as opposed to the legendary G5, which some sources suggest may never be released. Indeed, in an attempt to get to the bottom of the story behind these persistent rumors, Mac Buyer's Guide spoke to Motorola Canada president Frank Maw in on July 25, 2002. The way he explained things, G5 processors aren't even on the company's radar screen any more. In fact, he doesn't even mention the company's desktop processor business in his corporate presentations and told us there is "no timeline" for future non-embedded PowerPC family processor releases. He maintains that he's not aware of any timeline and says it's "not a big focus" for the company at this point. And so it goes.... 

The final clue that Apple is switching its emphasis from PPC hardware is the decidedly software-oriented thrust of the announcements at the keynote speech by Steve Jobs at Macworld New York in July 2002. No speed bumps at all --but the company clearly showed its intent to turn software into a profit center, with the announcement of "no upgrades" pricing of US$129 for a point upgrade to Mac OS X (10.1 to 10.2); a new version of QuickTime costing $29.95 to enable full-screen viewing (the upgrade disables previous $30 "Pro" product keys); it costs $40 more to add MPEG 2 support to OS 9 and OS X. And then there's its US$99 per year ".Mac" subscription service. All of these items suggest that the company's focus is not on the hardware, but on the software. Although Steve Jobs has a reputation as a hardware guy, I think he's taking the company's new "Switch" mantra to heart....

Would this be cool? Apple's bouncing baby XServe would be backed up by Sun's massive iron, launching the company (er, Snapple? Is that taken?) into the corporate and education server market with Sun's expertise and Apple's scrappy little OS (or some Solaris/OSX hybrid). Sun adds Java know-how, applications, vertical-market solutions, high-end hardware, swoopy multimedia and business accounts. Apple would add all of its consumer know-how, digital video apps and its ability to market stuff and make it whizzy. Together they might even become unlikely corporate heroes of the open source community.

There are numerous ways in which this tradeoff plays out. For example, most embedded code is written in C, which doesn't hold your hand and pretty much requires you to do everything yourself. More modern languages like C++ and Java offer considerable assets to the programmer in terms of handling automatically things which a C programmer would have to do directly. On the other hand, you have to load a much bigger runtime system (consuming memory) and a lot of the code generated by the language runs less efficiently than would comparable C-code (decreasing execution speed). A competent C++ programmer could probably finish his program sooner and it would usually have far fewer bugs, though, and if the hardware can sustain the lowered efficiency of the code, it's still probably the right thing to do.

I only use one word processor, and it runs just fine. I don't need another one.

Sub-argument: PCs are faster. They sure are. In fact, I read recently that a Pentium III can outrun a Pentium IV in certain operations. But my word processor runs plenty fast on a Mac.

Ever done video, MP3s, or DVDs on a PC? Have fun. A couple of years ago, an acquaintance of mine bought a $2,700 "preconfigured" Gateway computer to create digital video tapes. Months, hundreds of dollars in long-distance tech calls, and a bunch of gray hair later, he somehow got Gateway to take it all back for a complete refund. Then he bought a cheaper Mac-based system, and never made another support call.

What's more, Mac programs like iMovie, iTunes, iDVD and iPhoto are all FREE on a Macintosh, and work right out of the box. But then again, there are more word processors available on the PC.

An increasingly annoying trend in support lines in the UK (and undoubtedly elsewhere too) is for the company to substitute training and product knowledge with an "expert system" that prompts the guy on the other end of the line. "Ask them to check their dial-up settings; click here, there, choose this, do that. Ask them to re-install windows, just in case. Ask them do they want fries with that? Don't forget to thank the customer for calling."
That way they can pay minimum wage because the tech support guy isn't actually trained, he's just a monkey who can read and doesn't scream back at abusive customers. Chances are there's fifty of them there, and they all last about 2-6 months. When I call tech support, I -=know=- what's wrong; I want a straight answer to a question like "is there a problem with your routers in this area?" Problem is, the answer to that question requires knowledge of the question - it's unlikely to be in the expert system of stock-questions and stock-answers. It'd be on a status page if they had one (annoyingly few people do!). So now both myself and Bruce have resorted to just hanging up and redialling until we find The Tech Support Yoda, who's much like the person writing those fantastic "Porn Store Clerk" entries -- far too clever to be in that job. What you get is:

Me:  Hi! Is there a problem with the routers in the Luton/Hertfordshire
     area?
TS1: Uh.. what exactly is the problem? Is it that you can't connect to a
     particular website?
Me:  No..  I just want a simple answer.  Do you have a status board
     somewhere in your office? Doesn't it say something like
     "beaver.routers.ntlworld.com -- down for maintenance"?
TS1: I .. er.. look, could you just check your internet dial-up
     connection settings?
Me:  Alright, I'm going to hang up now because you're clearly not
     capable of dealing with my problem.

[.. -click- -redial- -repeat three or four times- -finally-]

Me:   Hi! Is there a problem with the routers in the Luton/Hertfordshire
      area?
Yoda: Hmm! Problem there is, yes! Use alternative dialup number, you
      must.  0845 292-9412
Me:   Thank you! Bye!

That's all I want! It's all I ask for! I despair sometimes, I truly do. :)

The Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry may consider allowing schools and social organisations to use pirated computer software for educational purposes. 

Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said the exemption for such institutions and organisations was to encourage usage among Malaysians and speed up computer literacy among students. 

However, he stressed that other sectors, especially the commercial sector like companies and factories, would be booked if they were found to be using pirated software. 

“We are concerned over the rampant sale and use of pirated computer software in the country and will continue to conduct raids to curb it. 

“But for educational purposes and to encourage computer usage, we may consider allowing schools and social organisations to use pirated software,” he said after opening a state-level National Day poetry-reading contest in Pagoh yesterday.

What the Qur’an does say, however, is very interesting: not only does it subscribe to a warfare-approach to “jihad”, but what comes across also as increasingly clear is the fact that by far the most instances where Muslims are prompted to carry out jihad in the Qur’an, refer to acts of aggressive instigation rather than that of defensive warfare (just examine the subject index in any good copy of the Qur’an). Not only is it permitted, but the Qur’an orders that it be waged till the cause of God prevails. This flies in the face of Armstrong’s blind belief that Muslims “…may never initiate hostilities… and aggressive warfare is always forbidden. The only permissible war, therefore, is a war of self-defense…”. Such injunctions heavily tend towards being exceptions rather than instances of a general rule. Thus, Muslims, as well as some non-Muslim “experts”, who propound this version of “self-defence-only jihad” subscribe to a notion that, with respect to the classical Islamic doctrine, is palpably false. Some modernist Muslims, like the late Fazlur Rahman of Chicago University, have rejected this view owing to its gross misuse of history. As they point out, this notion of “jihad”, as a strategy only for self-defence, is a myth.

If you want to impress someone with your computer knowledge, just add "dot com" to the end of everything you say, dot com.

The partnership is expected to produce a Java-based version of OpenOffice by the end of the year, followed by a commercial StarOffice release sometime in 2003.

"I think you can see OpenOffice running solid on OS X by the end of this calendar year," said Tony Siress, Sun's senior director of desktop marketing solutions.

Until now, Sun did not plan a version of StarOffice for OS X, although the Microsoft Office competitor is available for Linux, Solaris and Windows. An open-source version of the software, called OpenOffice, had already been planned for OS X. OpenOffice.org released a developer build of the product on Thursday.

The survey asked users for opinions on three different editions of Office. The first was Office:mac v.X "Home Edition," which would include Word, Excel, and Entourage, but not PowerPoint. The survey suggested a variety of possible price points, ranging from $199 to $349.

The second was named "Standard Edition," and would include all four of the key Office apps, as in the currently available version. Suggested prices ranged from $299 to $499, with upgrade pricing ranging from $149 to $299.

Either wake up & smell the coffee and stop supporting the unethical business practices of Microsoft Corporation, or get accustomed to getting abused by them. Microsoft holds the availability of Office and Internet Explorer as a sword over Apple’s head. The only way for Apple to get out from underneath the sword is if people escape their dependence upon MS products. Like a drug dealer, MS will give their product away for free at first. This eliminates competition that is dependent upon sales revenues, enables them to grab market share, creates a dependency upon their product, and makes entry into the market by a new competitor next to impossible. After the competition is gone, they have free reign to charge what they please. Remember Word Perfect? They used to own the word processing market until MS saw it as the “killer app.” So MS changed the code in Windows and didn’t reveal the changes to Word Perfect until the critical mass of users switched to MS Word. Now we’re paying $$$ for a word processing program instead of $45 to $60. Netscape was the next “killer app” that MS blasted. Netscape used to own 90% of the market. What happened? MS drug-dealer marketing tactics. Preserve your right as an American to choose. Don’t use or buy any Microsoft products. If you bought Office, return it. Don’t use Internet Explorer. Lastly, as for the review, MS Office is buggy, incomplete, proprietary bloatware with serious security flaws.

AdamBa writes "Speaking to financial analysts and reporters, Bill Gates admitted that .NET hadn't caught on as quickly as he had hoped. The headline ('Gates admits .NET a "misstep"') is a bit misleading; he doesn't think all of .NET was a misstep, just the My Services part (aka Hailstorm). He also said that labelling the current generation of enterprise products as .NET might have been 'premature.' Summary: Microsoft got too excited about locking in users via Hailstorm and botched the overall .NET message." There's also a Reuters report and a NYTimes story on the same subject, which includes the interesting line: "Microsoft also warned today that the era of "open computing," the free exchange of digital information that has defined the personal computer industry, is ending." It isn't clear if Microsoft is talking about something happening beyond their control, or if they're boasting about ending it.

Shouldn't the company care about its customers' vision?


Some columnist recently pointed out that Apple achieved in one stroke everything MS is trying to achieve with .NET, by announcing iCal [apple.com] and iSync [apple.com] last week at MacWorld. Those two programs allow users of Mac OS X Jaguar to connect their PDAs, cell phones and desktop PIM software to a single database and publish them on the Internet, connect with the calendars of others, and resolve conflicts between the two.

In other words, while Microsoft spent two years talking about Web services and technologies, Apple quietly went about actually building them into a program its users will want to use. MS has been announcing and releasing software for other people to build these Web applications, but Apple decided to lead by example instead.

No doubt the next release of Windows will include similar features, and of course they'll be more widely used than Apple's. But just think what might be happening right now if Microsoft had spent as much time creating Web applications for Windows XP as they did promoting them.

If a person could synchronize their PocketPC to their MSN account and Outlook at the same time, then reconcile with all their coworkers' calendars and documents, without having to do anything more than press a button, Microsoft wouldn't need subscriptions to sell the next version of Office or Windows. Instead they settled for getting halfway there so that they could sell more copies of Exchange Server and keep PocketPCs as expensive as humanly possible.

Singing and playing instruments and being all happy-happy-joy-joy with people you despise on Earth. Eww.

Anyway. The "why don't you just kill yourself" argument is backwards when pointed at the atheist. Atheists have every reason to want to live as long as they can and experience as much joy (which can be defined as making others happy despite what the religious think) as possible while he is on earth. Since there is nothing else after death you have to have your fun now!

VA Software (no longer "VA Linux" although embarrassingly their stock symbol remains LNUX)...

Which leads, inevitably, to the question: what effect would it have on the Open Source Movement if SourceForge shut down? Will a sugar-daddy step in to pick up the expenses? IBM could pay for it out of pocket-change, but does IBM care enough to do so?

And how will geeks survive without SlashDot?

No, I don't think that progress and development would stop if SourceForge shuts down. But OSS would surely be seriously inconvenienced without that service.

UPDATE from Steven den Beste. Though I must clarify that I do believe competition is a good thing, and it wouldn't displease me if there were more of it on the Mac side natively. But my point was that the average user, who mocks the Mac for its lack of hardware choice, isn't thinking about the good of the free market. He's thinking about Warcraft.

I'm not arguing against competition; I'm arguing that Apple does in fact support the kinds of competition that people want, and the kinds of competition that they don't support aren't important.

That said, competition isn't everything. Lack of competition doesn't seem to have prevented Apple from developing AirPort and putting it in all its laptops over a year before Dell claimed to be the first to do so, or from creating FireWire and putting it on all its machines by default (and with actual powered ports, too, not those twinky little non-powered ones that can't charge a connected device), or from making laptops with trackpads and with the keyboard toward the back of the base instead of right up front where it gives you RSI, or from being the first computer maker to build-in 24-bit color support or self-calibrating monitors with OS-level out-of-band controls or on-mobo video capture or multiple monitor recognition, or from creating zero-latency CoreAudio or flippin' ColorSync, or from bundling free applications for DV editing and DVD burning. Lack of competition doesn't seem to have hindered these developments, except in the sense that they're under pressure to keep the entire PC world guessing and two steps behind. Yeah, I like having cool toys first too. That's why I got a Mac.

All I had to get past was that there didn't seem to be any competition challenging Apple in these areas. They came along later. Aw, shucks.

Genuine innovation over petty scrabbling for supremacy I'll take any day.


Oh-- and I can't speak to the DDR issue (and I'm sure we've covered it before anyway), but... on a machine where the video is AGP and the sound, modem, Ethernet, and FireWire are all built-in, why on earth would you need six PCI slots?


Another UPDATE-- Marcus reminds me that while the Mac's built-in audio is very nice, to a level that the PC's sound subsystem honestly doesn't come close (it's really not "almost as good" at all), it doesn't support five-channel output like the top-end PC sound cards-- and there isn't a Mac solution for that. So, well, I'm bollixed on that count.

 Sheri/Terri: Look at Missus Potato Head!  She has a head made out of
              lettuce.  [Giggles.]
       Ralph: I can't believe I used to go out with you.
       Janie: Are you going to marry a carrot, Lisa?
        Lisa: [Rolling her eyes.]  Yes, I'm going to marry a carrot.
Sherri/Terri: Ohh!  She admitted it.  She's going to marry a carrot!

Though there have been few official Jaguar builds given to the majority of developers, Apple has not been particularly stringent with its handling of the seeding program for v10.2. With the 10.1 "Puma" update last year, the company took extraordinary efforts to track down leaks, and was embarassed at the reports from CNET News.com and other sites that mentioned how many pre-release builds were out in the open. For Jaguar, Apple is taking more easygoing approach, benefiting all developers.