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Heading for Montana. Be back on July 1. I'm praying everything stays running until then. I might get a brief connection in about a week, and if so I'll check in. Happy summer everyone.
The OED looks at blog:
As the publication of the New Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary gets fully under way, one of the major changes to the OED's editorial efforts has been the creation of an editorial office concentrating on the collection and editing of materials relating to North American English....
...The NAEU is also working closely with the new words group in Oxford, carefully reviewing the high-profile new words that are so often of American origin, and drafting new entries for words that have come to our attention. Some of the words we have drafted in recent months include tipping point, gentleman's C, weaponize, collateral damage, blog, skeevy, and perp walk.
There are lots of poorly worded reports about a new virus that infects jpeg picture files. Supposedly you can get the virus by just opening an infected jpeg file. This is not true. The virus infects microsoft windows machines. Parts of the virus are contained in jpeg picture files, but these images are completely harmless unless you are using an infected windows machine. In other words, and as usual, if you are not running windows you are completely safe from this threat. So calling it a jpeg virus (instead of a windows virus) is quite misleading.
Are there any uber bloggers left who haven't switched to OS X?
Just a clarification about my apparently fundamentalist pro-apple position. It's not that I don't think Apple would screw us if they were in a position to. Despite their hippie empower-the-world origins, I do believe they would turn the screws to maximize profits if there was a way to do so. It's just that they are not in such a position. And barring a direct meteor strike on Redmond Washington they won't ever be in that position.
Sure, I'd rather the tidal wave of change was washing up on a truly open and free shore, but that isn't going to happen. No other UNIX is ready for the non-geek user. So given the realities of the situation, and the absolute necessity of stopping Microsoft from assimilating the entire internet, Apple is the best looking compromise. It's not completely free but the foundation is free, and apple is commited to open standards. But beyond that, and most importantly, it just works. I think Apple will lead us, if not to the best of all worlds, at least to the best world we might possibly reach. That's my bit of realcomputertik for the day.
Pre vacation crunch time. Leaving for the wild west on Saturday. Won't be much time for updates. Hopefully I'll get some internet access while I'm away.
Apple has a new ad campaign called Switch. In a break from previous efforts, it's aimed directly at converting Windows users. Looks really good so far. This one (quicktime video clip) seems particularly effecitive.
When asked whether these ads might anger crucial business partner Microsoft, Jobs answered by saying that the Apple Microsoft relationship was very strong, and besides "what's a few marketshare points among friends?" Good answer Steve.
Here's my obligatory pointer to Gordon Mohr's funny solution to the digital rights management issue:
I humbly suggest the most cost-effective and reliable solution to the copyright industries' troubles will be DRM helmets, bolted onto each dutiful consumer at the neck. When these helmets sense watermarked audio or video within earshot/eyeshot, they check their local license manager and instantly "fog up" if payment has not been delivered.In an unrelated story I just installed limewire on Sarah's machine and was showing her how to navigate the gnutella network. I love people's reaction when they first realize the extent of power granted by general purpose computers and peer to peer networks. "You mean I can put anything out there on my computer?"
This will especially teach people not to listen to unauthorized copies of music while driving.
I read yesterday that OS X 10.1.5 overwrites PHP so you have to install that again after updating the OS. This wasn't my experience.
Does it really make sense to put (RARE!) in an mp3 title if you are sharing it with the rest of the world on gnutella? No it doesn't.
You might think you're having a fun day, but I'm downloading a 44 megabyte file I'm not sure I want over a 2 KB/s connection. That's excitement. Much like the pitch drop experiment I found on metafilter.
I read the Times most mornings when I go for coffee. There's usually a copy lying around by the time I get there. But I don't read it so much for the news. I've always already heard all the big stories the day before on the web. But I'm still interested in how they report things.
Anyway, today there is a short story about the FBI's computer systems. I hadn't heard this one, but I simply cannot believe it. Who's in charge here? Apparently agents don't enter their reports in digital form! They just enter a summary of the reports and provide a few key words. So the way it is set up there is no way to search the body of all those reports. You can only search on the keywords!
Well that's the whole freakin' problem right there. What do they expect. Are they trying to do a shitty job? Everybody at the top should be fired immediately if this is true (I'm sure they'll get right on that now that my feelings are known.)
Let me repeat: FBI agents can not search on the full text of other FBI agents reports. Yet google can index the full text of the entire internet and provide advanced search capabilities to millions of users a day for free. Why isn't there a greater outrage about this? I think you could safely assume that 9/11 would not have happened if this problem had been fixed. Agents were aware (and suspicious) that lots of muslim men were taking flight courses well beforehand. But they couldn't put their information together. Can somebody up there please call google? You know, like before the next attack.
My digitalmediatree email accounts are flakey today. No doubt that was curcial information for your day.
I was mentioning this crazy scheme last night to Alex, so here's the link for documentation:
The White List (or "clean list") is proposed policy which will extend government and corporate control over the possession, importation and movement of anything that is alive - plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, everything.In other words, it's not obnoxious enough to make certain plants illegal, they want to make everything a priori illegal, and then make exceptions for just certain plants.
The Plant Protection and Quarantine Safeguarding Review recommends that the United States Department of Agriculture "Consider adopting a modified 'clean list' approach for propagative material, specifying what is permissible subsequent to risk assessment, rather than the current 'dirty list' that prohibits or restricts specific articles only."The cover is that this legislation will protect us from evil invasive species, but you'd have to be pretty dim to think this is trying to protect anything except unbridled profiteering. Look who's behind it:
"Monsanto, DowElanco, American Cyanamid, Zeneca, Dow AgroSciences, SePro, Helena and other herbicide manufactures and "life patent" corporations have funded tremendous propaganda in recent years hyping a spurious "invasive species" threat to natural ecosystems in order to sell more herbicides.(via ethel)
There must be a catch. Silk is a freeware program that enables Quartz text rendering and smoothing introduced in Mac OS X 10.1.5 in all Carbon applications. Mozilla looks amazing with Silk installed! Best upgrade ever. But why doesn't Apple enable this?
I like Silk so much I'm not even going to make fun of them for calling their programs Haxies.
I haven't been too motivated lately. Hopefully that will change soon.
Mozilla is finally done. Officially. Good luck getting through to their servers though. If you want to grab it, try the mirrors.
Apple released a (so far minor) update to X (10.1.5 now.) Stable on two machines so far. Apparently iDisks are much faster, but I can't confirm that personally. If you're running X (sarah, stephen...) click on 'software update' in preferences (that's the light switch icon, don't ask me why) and then click 'update now'.
Apple also released a "public preview" of Quicktime 6. This is built on the new Mpeg 4 standard. Here's a short interview with Jobs. I don't recommend installing this yet, but you can start to work up a little interest. Much better quality at much smaller file sizes (for video and audio.) Now if they could just work out that license fee issue with the MPEG-LA. The also released Quicktime broadcaster looks very interesting too.
Detailed scenario of a 150 kiloton nuclear blast at the base of the empire state building. (Keep clicking 'next' at the bottom of each page.)
I'm very curious why publishing this information (how to defeat a particular audio CD copy protection method with a felt tip pen) does not violate the DMCA? (I think Reuters and C/net published it too.)
I'm not a lawyer, of course, but it seems to be a clear violation. Is it just that the RIAA isn't pressing the issue because it will make them look like fools? Like bigger fools, that is. It certainly would make it clear how over reaching the DMCA is.
In the test, WiFi Metro will integrate Green Packet's SONaccess IP routers and software with WiFi Metro's system of LAN (local area network) "hot spots," allowing users to switch from one network to another as they move in and out of the respective coverage areas, without having to log on and off.That will be an important step. No doubt others are working on this as well.
O.K., now it's starting to get hot. My boasting about not needing an air conditioner for the second straight summer is already looking not so smart...