My latest Practical Mac column for the Seattle Times rounds up a variety of OS X news, mentions my like for the soon-to-be-released Office v. X for Mac suite, and talks about putting 1.5 Gb of RAM in my G4 Cube for just $150 (from 1-800-4-Memory.com).
Microsoft officially releases Windows XP next week; Apple's release a few weeks ago of OS X's upgrade 10.1 marked its real beginning. Why X? To signify the unknown: a future in which users may experience (no pun) a consistent powerful interface with few crashes, lots of help along the way, and a general lack of the irritants of all previous consumer OS's. I'd be very interested here (click comments) or via email to hear people's first reactions to both systems.
I'm not in the camp of "Microsoft stole this from Apple" or vice versa. A lot of developments in both systems come out of what people need from their computers, and what both companies were finally able to achieve: seamless digital media exchange (digital cameras, music, video); non-crashable OS (mostly); pre-emptive multitasking and multithreading (one program doesn't hold up another and all share in a round-robin of processor power)
Robert Scoble pointed to Dan Gillmor blogging behind him at the Camden conference; Dan's Web log mentions Donald Norman mentioning an essay he wrote; I have a comment on that essay. (Thought I'd never get there.)
Norman's essay, in brief, is that our educational system promotes individual, competition-based learning and analysis, where the real world promotes cooperative, colleague-influenced collaboration. He's right. But where he leaves off is that we need experts: the school system encourages the individual to master things through competition. Cooperative learning (which he says is mostly labeled cheating) doesn't necessarily promote each individual's ability to become minor experts. This system of education eventually routes people into specialization. Without specialization, we don't have progress, which is an arguable benefit, though I'm alive because of it. Competition plus specialization equals advancement.
A related point is that not every student can become an expert. It would be more appropriate and
I was just watching the Pop!Tech conference again, and it was eerily like being there. On my home machine, for some reason over less bandwidth, I got a very clear voice and video signal via QuickTime streaming, and blew it up to be full screen. It wasn't much different than sitting halfway back in the opera house last year. I was surprised at how immersive it was. Perhaps next year, they can have satellite conferences with the live stuff beamed in and local networking - that was what I missed. And the ice cream social, of course.
I've been working through a problem on the moderated Adobe GoLive discussion list I run with my co-author of Real World Adobe GoLive. The list has been running for nearly two years now and is healthy and happy with about 700 paricipants, but we exercise a fairly tight moderation policy, rejecting a minority of posts that are off-topic, offensive, or just too repetitive.
But the real problem on an ongoing basis is posts that quote too much content from the message they're replying to. Most list members subscribe to the digest form of the list and too-long quotations mean more frequent digests, and a lower words:new content ratio. I tried explaining this on the list only to get a "Glenn, go read your Orwell" e-mail back from one member. I told her that the list was a volunteer effort, and moderated for a reason. Others lists exist, including an
I forgot to mention in my post below on the Camden conference about the article I wrote a few weeks ago for O'Reilly Networks's Wireless DevCenter about an ISP on the coast of Maine that's extended its already good dial-up presence with wireless links offering high-speed service around the coast. Even better, they use wireless to create satellite (no joke intended) offices with local dial-up in smaller towns to which it would be a toll call for residents to reach them, or where they otherwise couldn't afford to place a POP (point of presence).
The reason you don't see more local numbers in rural or less-populated areas is that the ISP must pay the local telco that does long-haul fees to carry its traffic from an office in the small town (the local exchange) back to the ISP's HQ or onto the ISP's ATM network. Otherwise, residents must make a
I've had my first Mac OS X 10.1 blowout. I was minding my own business, using the OS, and suddenly icons stop working, hard drives disappear, and the system starts to fall apart. I try to Restart - no luck. Reboot - the system startup screen shows a progress bar, but no text beneath it describing the startup procedure. The Desktop login doesn't work.
I boot back into OS 9.2.1 - thank God for the dual-boot, backwards compatible options - and run Norton Disk Doctor. Lots of serious errors. Fix 'em. Reboot. Same problem. Dig out the OS X 10.1 upgrade disk. Boot off it. Select an upgrade. Let it run for a half hour. Reboot. I get my Desktop - and then stuff starts to hang.
It's Unix, so I should be able to use the Terminal window to type 'kill -9 ' where process
I'm using the live QuickTime feed from the Camden Technology Conference or Pop!Tech to watch Simson Garfinkel and Nadine Stosser talk about freedom, privacy, and surveillance in Camden, Maine. The sound isn't great, but the video is just fine, and it's very very superb to watch. There's something about watching people who you read or read about actually speak and interact with questions.
I attended the event last year, covering it in about 5,000 words for an online publication. Last year's topic excited me a bit more - "Being Human in the Digital Age" - and many of the speakers this year overlap. So it's great to be able to watch some of it (for free, too!) without making the trek.
Just after posting the below item on Cringely's column, word comes that Sprint is shutting down its Ion service. This service combined very high-speed ADSL (8 Mbps up/1 Mbps) with a block of long-distance and local service. Ostensibly, they had a box that they fed over a DSL-style connection that handled voice both at the customer premises and at the c.o. to split out into the PSTN (public switched telephone network) and Sprint's ATM network.
One poster on Slashdot commenting on this noted that voice long-distance was routed digitally over Sprint's ATM network, which means Sprint was pushing its ATM essentially out to customer equipment. Smart. But obviously not profitable.
Sprint has a much better idea in its Sprint Broadband service, which uses the 2.5 GHz licensed band to offer high-speed line-of-sight service. But when I just visited their page, this service is also suspending acquisition of
Robert X. Cringely, the pseudonymous writer who pens a column for PBS Online, said last week that broadband was dead. I found myself bristling until I read the essay, which was very reasonable and highly depressing. His main point: companies are going out of business selling service that delivers more than they can afford to offer at the price point they offer it at. Broadband was sold on the notion that we'd get teevee over the Internet; instead, most people want (and all they really get and all that's really available) is faster Web page downloads.
This week, he addressed readers who expressed dismay and rejected his premises. My only quibble is that he writes in this week's essay:
The answer has to do with both proximity and reality. In order to qualify for that 1.1 megabit DSL line, you have to be quite near to the telephone company
Unfortunately, the groundswell continues to grow for a national identification card. People supporting the idea cite a number of factors: less hassle for people because they're already pre-approved as legal citizens, less racial profiling says Alan Dershowitz because the card shows that people are pre-vetted, hardly a change from existing driver's licenses.
The point is missed, however, that virtually all current identification schemes in the U.S., including military I.D. cited in the above article, are voluntary. You join the military these days of your own free will. You get a driver's license if you want. Of course, society makes it necessary to have valid photo I.D. to fly, to buy beer if you look young, to rent a car, to cash checks, and to perform a variety of other normal tasks.
The variety of driver's licenses, and the non-connectedness of this system with IRS records and social
Dr. Muqtedar Khan wrote a beautiful open letter to his fellow Muslims about the hypocrisy of justifying any part of the WTC/Pentagon actions. He picks apart several issues to address separately, rather then lumping them into the same pot. One point he raises that I have seen discussed almost nowhere else:
The Israeli occupation of Palestine is perhaps central to Muslim grievance against the West. While acknowledging that, I must remind you that Israel treats its one million Arab citizens with greater respect and dignity than most Arab nations treat their citizens. Today Palestinian refugees can settle and become citizens of the United States but in spite of all the tall rhetoric of the Arab world and Quranic injunctions (24:22) no Muslim country except Jordan extends this support to them.
This has always been a personally difficult point for me. As badly as Israel has and continues to