Extermination of Israel

Now that the Palestinians will soon have the Gaza strip back, one might think Hamas would relax and live in peace. I saw an interview with Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas Leader. Look at these choice quotes:
"Therefore, we will not take over the Gaza Strip and live there peacefully while the Zionist enemy is detaining thousands of our sons and occupying the West Bank. The resistance must move to the West Bank to expel the occupation."
"...We do not and will not recognize a state called Israel."
"We are against any economic cooperation with Israel."
"Let Israel die."
"We will enter (Gaza) and sully the dignity of Israel with our feet. We will stand on the ruins of the Israeli settlements and tell our people we have prevailed. This is nonnegotiable."
Does anybody else recognize this as anti-semitism? I realize that the Arabs have been against Israel for centuries, but the thing that bothers me is that a lot of liberals in the US and Europe support the anti-Israel movements. I have no idea why, but they do.
I wish Mahmoud Zahar would say more stuff like this quote:
"The land of the evacuated settlements should serve as the lungs for the economy to breathe. Schools, playgrounds, agriculture and industry should be established on this land."

Real player makes my head explode

I used to be a huge fan of real player, back when it was the king of the hill. They always had quick releases, and each release made streaming media faster and of higher quality. But, over the last few years, their aggressive marketing strategies have really bothered me. I hate that an installation of real player comes with a bunch of extra crap. Shortcuts all over the place, auto starting apps., etc.

I realize that if Real didn't market their product like this, Real player would be marginalized even more by Microsoft's monopolistic practices (with windows media player). I mean, let's face it. When was the last time you went to a site that required real player? It almost never happens anymore.

Well, I installed real player the other day, and yesterday I was greeted with the 'Real message center', or something like that. Normally I'd just remove it from my startup and go on. But this time I was very upset because the message center announced that I could get the SI swimsuit issue. Real, if you are listening (yeah right), please stop these aggressive adware moves!

Windows Vista features

I just read an interview with Microsoft's Jim Allchin. A few 'must have' features that will sell Windows Vista (at least to someone like me):

1. Start menu filtering. Can't find where that program lives in the start menu? Just start typing the name in the new filter box and it'll show up.
2. Virtual folders. A folder shortcut that shows you all files edited in the last week, or that contain a keyword.
3. Standard user mode. Default user is no longer Administrator! All I can say is, why did it take you 13 years and 9 versions to finally get that feature in Microsoft?!
4. Jim Allchin, "...we are going to encourage people to conceptually leave their machines on more." How? Much less rebooting is required, power usage will be lower, protections against OS hangs, etc. I'll wait and see how well this works in the final product, but again I say, it's about time! He talks about the concept of On and Off for the user in Vista. Most users ignore the standby/hibernate features in Windows today. Vista will automatically take care of things in the background, and when a user clicks Off, it may just hibernate. Vista will intelligently figure out if it should do a full shutdown or not, based on timing, the amount of crap in RAM, etc. I just hope there's a way to allow us power users to manually tell it what we want to do. I hate it when software makes things too easy at the expense of control.
There are a lot of yawners, like the improved searching, the avalon interface stuff, etc.
It does look to me like you are going to need a pretty mean machine to run this. And yet at the same time they are trying to improve Window's power usage? How does that work? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Windows Vista

Here's an article that discusses the online reaction to Microsoft's announcement that the next consumer release of Windows will be called Windows Vista. As expected, the Microsoft apologists love it, and everybody else either is indifferent or hates it (more of the latter). I loved one guy's blog post (mentioned by the article) which saw an acronym in the word Vista (I changed it a bit):
1. Viruses
2. Insecurity
3. Spyware
4. Trojans
5. Alpha
Personally, I don't really care about this choice of name. When Microsoft announced the name Windows XP, I thought it was very stupid. But I got used to it fairly quickly. So I've learned that as long as Microsoft holds a monopoly in Desktop OSes, names don't matter, and we just have to learn to live with whatever Microsoft chooses to throw our way.

Is the Moon Made of Cheese?

I noticed today that Google has a different logo (like they always do for the holidays). This time its in honor of the Apollo moon landings. They also have a link to google moon, which is an addition to google maps. You can look all over the moon from a satellite perspective, and zoom down to a pretty detailed level.

I love how Google is willing to do these kind of geeky things. They also have a sense of humor, because if you zoom all the way down to the lowest level, they show a close up of yellow Swiss cheese! :)

Senator Requests Investigation of 'Grand Theft'

There's been a bit of controversy surrounding the latest Grand Theft Auto PC game. Apparently, you can download a 3rd party code that allows you to put your player into explicit sexual situations. The ESRB is investigating to find out of the original game contained the explicit code, or if it was added by the 3rd party. Rockstar Games did not reveal this content when they applied for an ESRB rating.
Well, there's a senator that is asking the FTC to investigate Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. She hopes to make the entire ratings system more strict, as it has become common practice to avoid the Adults Only rating because most retailers won't sell games with that rating. She also wants the retailers to be investigated to find out if they are allowing children to buy games rated above their age level.
The big surprise behind this news is the identity of this Senator. Its not any republican, as most would expect...it's Hillary Clinton! I guess the dems are finally showing signs of getting in touch with the parents and others in this country that don't want to see our media saturated with smut.

Acid2

A few months ago I blogged about a browser test that would be created by the CTO of Opera software. This test uses most of the latest web standards, and is designed to help browser developers test their support. Acid2 is now finished and live. The timing couldn't be better, considering the browser wars are just heating up again. Microsoft is working on IE 7 which is supposed to be released in a couple of months, in beta. But the head of the IE programming group posted to his blog a few months ago, stating that the IE group would only code to the standards when their customers request it. Of course, their customers are dimwits and don't even know what browser standards are (excuse my bitter rant, this is a pretty big sore spot for me). So we'll have to see if Microsoft passes the acid test this time.

By the way, I ran the acid test in Firefox, IE, and Opera tonight. IE did a horrible job of rendering the page. Neither Opera nor Firefox rendered it correctly, but they both were a lot more correct looking than IE. However, I wasn't testing with the latest version of IE 6, because I haven't installed XP SP 2 (it caused problems with my hardware in the past). If I remember right though, XP SP 2 didn't make any changes to IE's rendering engine, it just made security adjustments.

Where's Windows?

I saw this article talking about the new list of top 500 fastest computers in the world. I put together my own version with the top 25, because I wanted to see the OS for each (not easily viewable in list form on the list). IBM dominates the list, using Linux on most of their systems. There were a few with Unix machines, and even one Mac OS X. But no Windows in site.

Is that because of the cost? I wouldn't think so, considering that Unix and Mac OS X are on the list (not usually free). Maybe it's because Microsoft hasn't released their supercomputer version of windows? Again, Mac OS X is a desktop OS, not intended for supercomputing. Maybe because the manufacturers on the list are competitors with Microsoft? That is the case with IBM, but I don't think Cray and SGI even enter the same markets as Microsoft. And Dell is on the top 25, and they are married to Microsoft in their PC business. So why no Microsoft?

The best reason I can come up with is that it's not feasible to use Windows for this kind of application. Indeed, Microsoft as much as admits this in the supercomputer article linked above, "Microsoft also cautioned that it is not aiming as much for the type of supercomputer that makes the annual list of the 500 largest supercomputers."

Do you think Microsoft would aim for the top 500 list if they could? You bet they would. That list is an excellent marketing tool for the manufacturers, not to mention Microsoft would make a LOT of money with each individual supercomputer produced. I just don't think they are capable of making an OS that is nimble enough to perform at that high of a level.

Linux is younger than Windows by a few years, and it's all over the list. But one of the main goals of Linux from the beginning was speed and efficiency. Microsoft has never shown any inkling to make each release of their OS more efficient. Indeed, MS openly admits that they want you to buy a new PC to get each new version of Windows, and we all know that is usually the best idea.

Joseph Smith=Greatest American Ever?

A while back someone sent me an email with a link to a show that will air on Discovery Channel about the greatest American ever. The nominees were to be voted in by viewers, and the emailer asked me to go vote for Joseph Smith. Well, today I saw a news article about this show and went to check out the list of nominees. Sure enough, Joseph Smith is among the 100 nominees. The article links to a bio of Joseph Smith which was taken from Encyclopedia of World Biography, and it gives a very unflattering description of his life and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It appears to me that they are trying to sway voters by using this single, negative source for his bio.

IBM touts Firefox

Cnet reported that IBM is asking its internal employees to move to Firefox. The company is making the browser available for download on its internal servers, and their IT staff has been trained to give support for Firefox. Apparently, 10% of IBM employees already use Firefox. I see this as a sign that more businesses will start to use Firefox, and Intranet apps should follow.