Alternate.org

Here is an interesting article on HyperTransport.



Looks like it’s shaping up to be a face-off between Intel and its lapdogs (direct quote from the article, not mine) and the rest of the computer industry (which includes nVidia, Cisco and Sun). Interestingly, Apple is the only PC manufacturer on the HyperTransport consortium, with the rest of the PC industry squarely in the aforementioned lapdog category. Not that they’d have a choice anyway – they are little more than package and distribution channels for Intel and Microsoft these days.



Strangely enough, the article doesn’t mention the big fence-sitter – IBM, whose membership could decide the winner.



Macintosh and XBox sharing the same system architecture – imagine that!

This apparent interference came in the form of Microsoft’s announcement Monday that computer manufacturers who put any icons on the desktop of Windows XP —the new version of its operating system—must also include an icon for MSN, Microsoft’s ISP.



Wha-? Who-the-? How-the-? It’s entirely too frustrating that they keep doing this, and I’m seriously getting sick of hearing about it, writing about it, thinking about it. And it’s an OS I don’t even fucking use! I haven’t seen a Windows desktop or Windows IE explorer window in action since last January, and still it upsets me that they try to do this shit. I don’t know how many times I’ve vowed ‘never to report on MS doing something stupid again.’ And yet I keep doing it, over and over and over. Because they keep finding new ways to stick their head in the sand. I have no doubt that there are smart people at Microsoft, but whoever the hell makes and approves these kinds of decisions should be fucking fired. Wait. I don’t mean fired, I mean fired AT. With a shotgun.

I hate to say this, but the internet is very boring right now. I know Alternate sure as hell is.



But what site isn’t boring, you ask? Well, Urban Forest just got redesigned by yours truly.

So while I was in Nebraska burning myself to a crisp, Jen @ the Bitchlog blogged for 24 hours straight for charity. Go check it out. Gives you a glimpse of what blogs would be like if the bloggers only blogged non-stop instead of having to work for a living. The result? Deeply personal and interesting stories and ideas. A little too much to read for this short attention-span society? Possibly, but still very entertaining.

If you ever go to Lake McConaughy in Nebraska, don’t forget to put sunscreen on your feet. Just a word of advice. When you’re standing on a deck, and the breeze picks up a little, and you wince in pain as it lightly brushes the tops of your feet, that’s bad.

“Stopping just short of accusing Microsoft of stalling, the Justice Department asked an appeals court to deny the company’s request to re-examine whether the software maker illegally mixed software code for two products.”


Yahoo!!

“The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn’t excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws,”



What I sense here is a group of business men who made some very bad business decisions. Rather than blame themselves it seems easier to blame the structure of the internet as being inefficient and “anarchist.” I think it is obvious to anyone that has the slightest clue about the internet that it isn’t the internet that has failed. I would classify it as one of the most successful “inventions” ever. It’s more popular than religion, but not quite as popular as sex (although it fills the void for some).

So, The Chooch tells me that He-Man and Transformers figures have been re-released. I was a huge He-Man fan (ahem) when I was like 4 years old. And surprisingly enough, I hardly recognize any of those figures, except for TrapJaw, because he had a rad name and interchangeable claw-things. And Transformers are over-rated, I think.

So, well, Radiohead uses Apple stuff… Didn’t we already know this?


Oh well, Anyway, it’s a cool article.

If you dig nostalgia at all, then you should enjoy this picture (and article) a great deal. Bear in mind that no matter how great the story is, it will never be as cool as the old Nintendo game.

Chunk looks ahem super, doesn’t he?

“The draft protocol would put national security and confidential business information at risk,”



If any of you questioned whether Bush was tightly in tow of the business community, his reasoning for rejecting the proposal to enforce the germ warfare treaty should erase all doubt.

Blackcomb, the successor to Whistler, was due out in the second half of 2002, Gates said, adding that in both releases, the Internet Explorer browser would become more fully integrated and more central.



Sounds like a great idea to me. Just keep on doing what the Government is already prosecuting you for. Awesome.

Have you heard about this Sklyarov / Adobe / EFF thing? As it turns out, basically, Adobe’s encrypted PDF and eBook software is crap, and easily cracked. So at DefCon, Dmitry Sklyarov gave a little speech on how easy it was to crack it, and expressed distress that Adobe charges customers thousands of dollars to use it. He didn’t release his cracking software, he just explained it and pointed out the holes in Adobe’s security. Now, any self-respecting software company would hire this guy in a second, and make him Vice President of Keeping it Real, but no, Adobe decides to send the Feds after him and have him sent to prison. Cool. So the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) met with Adobe this week and the software giant has backed down on their charges, with Dmitry’s release in the hands of the Federal Govt. One of the EFF’s main points was that Adobe abused the DMCA and used it to arrest someone in a situation that it has no real control over. I think it’s pretty sad when companies suppress people like this instead of giving them the credit they deserve. I mean, the point is that the higher-ups at Adobe don’t know a god-damn thing about software or how it works, and so when a VP says ‘There’s this guy, and he cracked our software, and now he’s telling people that our copy-protection scheme sucks,’ and their knee-jerk response is to get them thrown in prison, because they don’t understand 2 things: 1) The hacker actually did something good for Adobe, because if they listened to him and fixed their software, Adobe’s customers would learn of it and be even more eager to buy it and 2) Bad software is something that needs to be FIXED, not ignored.

This story about Microsoft IIS (IIS is their web server software) is so funny, It took the media and most of IT about 5 years to figure this out? I knew IIS was shite the first time I ever installed it. Especially with WinNUkePro and NTAttack and other Mac GUI based windows attacks in all the Hotline rooms… That alone made it fairly obvious.

Has anyone else noticed that VersionTracker, the Mac-users best-kept secret now has Windows and PalmOS files? Bah to that. I say let those guys find their own shit… VT used to be ‘the Macintosh software source’ not ‘the everybody’ software source.. Now it’s just like Download.com or TuCows or any other useless software site. You ever tried to find software for Mac on Download.com? Terrible. Worthless. VT used to be the only place where any Mac software could be found, and I sincerly hope it doesn’t change just cause they gotta track Winblows crap now. The only other OS I could see happily coexisting on VersionTracker would be Linux, but they’ve got SourceForge all to themselves, for the most part.