News Common PC Linux Mac Amiga CUCUG
The next CUCUG meeting will be held on our regular third Thursday of the month: Thursday, July 21st, at 7:00 pm, at the First Baptist Church of Champaign in Savoy. The Linux SIG convenes, of course, 45 minutes earlier, at 6:15 pm. Directions to the FBC-CS are at the end of this newsletter.
The July 21 gathering will be one of our split SIG meetings. The Linux SIG is currently a TBA.The Macintosh SIG will be examining Widgets for Mac OS 10.4. And, the PC SIGs is tentatively scheduled to be an exploration of extensions for the Firefox web browser.
ToC
Spencer Chin (06/21/2005 12:25 PM EDT)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164901506
MANHASSET, N.Y. -- Jack St. Clair Kilby, retired TI engineer and acknowledged as the first inventor of the integrated circuit, passed away in Dallas Monday (June 20) after a brief battle with cancer.
He was 81.
Considered a pioneer of the microelectronics age, Kilby invented the first monolithic integrated circuit, laying the foundation for a wave of miniaturization and integration that continues at a rapid pace. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for his role in the invention of the integrated circuit.
"In my opinion, there are only a handful of people whose works have truly transformed the world and the way we live in it -- Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers and Jack Kilby," said Tom Engibous, chairman of Texas Instruments, in a statement. "If there was ever a seminal invention that transformed not only our industry but our world, it was Jack's invention of the first integrated circuit."
Kilby was a known as man of few words, but is remembered fondly by friends and associates as both a gentleman and gentle man. Standing 6 feet 6 inches high, he was occasionally called the "gentle giant" in the press.
But Kilby was not afraid to raise his voice on issues near and dear to his heart.
Upon receiving the Nobel prize in physics in 2000, Kilby, in an interview with EE Times, decried what he thought was the disturbing industry trend to tie research into rapid commercialization.
"I see two roles, and I think they're both very valuable," Kilby said during the interview. "Much of what we do has a very strong academic basis. [But] sometimes corporate research is required [so it can be] put into useable form and commercialized."
Kilby was also humble. When interviewed by EE Times in 2000, he was quick to point out that former Fairchild scientist Robert Noyce, who applied for an IC patent July 30, 1959, had developed an IC design that turned out to be more manufacturable than his and could have merited a Nobel prize as well.
Though TI and Fairchild sparred for some years over who invented the IC, today many consider Kilby and Noyce both co-inventors.
Although Kilby had management roles at TI, he considered himself first and foremost an engineer. Besides the IC, he also played a key role in two other inventions-the handheld electronic calculator and the thermal printer. All told, Kilby held over 60 patents for electronics inventions.
"Jack Kilby was always an engineer's engineer," said Gordon Moore, co-founder and chairman emeritus of Intel, in a statement. "He remained true to his technical roots, loyal to the principles of science and was always a gentleman to those who had the pleasure to meet him. He will be missed."
Raised in Great Bend, Ks., Kilby's interest in electronics was fostered early. His father ran a small power company with customers scattered across rural western Kansas. When a severe ice storm drowned telephone and power lines, Kilby's father worked with amateur radio operators to communicate with his customers, triggering the younger Kilby's lifelong fascination with electronics.
Kilby pursued his electronics interest at the University of Illinois, though his studies were interrupted when he joined the Army during World War II. Following the war, Kilby completed his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois in 1947.
Upon graduation, Kilby took a position with Centralab in Milwaukee, where he first worked with transistors. At the same time, he pursued graduate studies in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, receiving a master's degree in 1950. A key turning point in Kilby's career was joining Texas Instruments in 1958 at the urging of Willis Adcock, who at the time managed TI's development department.
Adcock became a mentor to Kilby, guiding and supporting his research work, and later became a vice president at TI before retiring in 1986. When Adcock died in 2003 at the age of 81, Kilby was an honorary pallbearer at Adcock's funeral.
It was during the summer of 1958, while most of his colleagues were on vacation, when Kilby conceived the integrated circuit.
"I was sitting at a desk, probably stayed there a little longer than usual," Kilby was quoted as saying in a 1980 interview. "Most of it formed pretty clearly during the course of that day. When I was finished, I had some drawings in a notebook, which I showed my supervisor when he returned. There was some slight skepticism, but basically they realized its importance."
Kilby's IC, fabricated on a single piece of semiconductor material half the size of a paper chip, was first demonstrated on Sept. 12, 1958. That invention would soon transform the industry.
In 1960, Texas Instruments announced the first chips for customer evaluation, and two years later won its first major integrated circuit contract to design and build a family of 22 special circuits for the Minuteman missile.
For his pioneering efforts, Kilby's TI career took off. After several engineering management positions between 1960 and 1968, he was named assistant vice president. But perhaps seeking more time to tinker, Kilby took leave of absence in 1970 to become an independent consultant for TI.
After retiring from TI in 1983, Kilby remained a consultant with the company, though he also had a stint on the board of directors of optical components supplier Bookham Technology-- considered more of a public relations coup.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Kilby was one of only 13 Americans to receive both the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology, the highest technical awards given by the U.S. government. In 1993, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology.
Kilby also received the first international Charles Stark Draper Prize, the world's top engineering award, from the National Academy of Engineering in 1989. He is also honored in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Kilby is survived by daughters Janet Kilby Cameron and Ann Kilby, five granddaughters, and son-in-law Thomas Cameron. His wife Barbara Annegers Kilby, and sister, Jane Kilby, are both deceased.
ToC
URL: http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/07/08/sasser.suspended/index.html
BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- A German court has convicted the teenager who created the Sasser worm that snarled tens of thousands of computers last year and sentenced him to 21 months' probation.
Sven Jaschan, 19, from the northwest town of Waffensen, could have faced five years in prison as an adult but was tried as a minor because the court determined he created the virus when he was 17, said Katharina Kreutzfeldt, spokeswoman for the Verden State Court outside Bremen.
As part of the sentence, Jaschan will have to perform 30 hours of community work, either at a hospital or a retirement home, Kreutzfeldt said.
Prosecutors say Jaschan sent the computer worm on the Internet on his 18th birthday, April 29, 2004.
It was blamed for shutting down British Airways flight check-ins, hospitals and government offices in Hong Kong, part of Australia's rail network, Finnish banks, British Coast Guard stations, and millions of other computers worldwide.
The court said it was impossible to estimate the amount of damage. So far, no international civil suits have yet been filed, officials said.
Four German lawsuits were settled for under 1,000 Euros each, said Arend Bosse, spokesman for the Rotenburg-Wuemme State Court.
Jaschan was caught last year after a tipster cashed in on a $250,000 reward offered by Microsoft, whose Windows system was prey to the virus.
Microsoft says the virus was part of a growing problem: hackers profiting from Windows vulnerabilities revealed by patches. The virus appeared 18 days after the company posted a patch to fix a flaw, and it attacked computers that hadn't downloaded the patch.
Jaschan, who reportedly spent up to 10 hours a day on his homemade computer, told Stern Magazine in an interview that he created the virus, which he called "Netzsky A," to combat two existing viruses, Mydoom and Bagle. Computer experts named Jaschan's virus "Sasser."
Jaschan, meanwhile, has taken a job at a computer company that creates anti-virus programs. After three years, Jaschan's conviction will be erased from public record if there are no new offenses, Kreutzfeldt said.
Authorities who questioned Jaschan said they believed his motive was to become a famous programmer. He was arrested at his computer at his the home of his mother, who runs a computer store.
ToC
URL: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-07-02-majoras-id-theft_x.htm?csp=15
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Federal Trade Commission helps millions of consumers each year battle identity theft. Now the woman who runs the agency, Deborah Platt Majoras, finds herself a potential victim.
An FTC spokeswoman says Majoras received a letter last week from shoe retailer DSW informing her that her credit card information had been stolen. The spokeswoman declined further comment. The theft was first reported by Newsweek.
Majoras' credit card number was among 1.4 million stolen from a company database.
The Columbus,Ohio-based company discovered the data breach in March. It affected customers in 25 states.
Ohio's attorney general filed suit against DSW in early June, seeking to force the retailer to contact all customers compromised in the breach. Attempts to contact many of the customers were slowed because DSW does not collect addresses at the point of purchase.
Nearly 10 million people fall victim to identity theft annually, costing consumers $5 billion in out-of-pocket losses and businesses $48 billion, according to the FTC.
Here are the steps the commission recommends for people who think their identities may have been stolen:
"The Federal Trade Commission operates an Identity Theft Clearinghouse. Its phone assistance line is (877) IDTHEFT (Spanish-speaking counselors available). You can order a free copy of "When Bad Things Happen to Your Good Name."
Federal Trade Commission ID Theft homepage - http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft/
Filing a Complaint with the FTC - http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft/filing_complaintwftc.html
The three major credit bureaus and the Social Security Administration:
1.) Equifax: 1-800-525-6285ToC
2.) Experian (formerly TRW): 1-888-397-3742
3.) Trans Union: 1-800-680-7289
4.) Social Security Administration (fraud line): 1-800-269-0271
By Eric Dash
Story last modified Fri Jul 08 17:10:00 PDT 2005
URL:
http://news.com.com/CardSystems+Well+meet+security+goals+soon/2100-1029_3-5780265.html
CardSystems Solutions, the credit card payment processor at the center of one of the biggest data breaches, said Thursday that it hoped to comply with the industry's security standards by the end of August, at least eight months after data thieves installed software on its computer network to facilitate a break-in.
CardSystems disclosed last month that its computer network in Tucson had been compromised, putting the sensitive account information of as many as 40 million cardholders at risk for fraud.
The company's chief executive, John Perry, acknowledged that CardSystems had been improperly storing data, violating Visa and MasterCard security rules.
On Thursday, CardSystems said that it had hired AmbironTrustWave, a security auditor based in Chicago, to assess its data protection technology, policies and practices.
Perry said on June 19 that data thieves had obtained from CardSystems' computer network a file containing the names, account numbers and security code data of about 200,000 cardholders. A person briefed on the matter said that software had been installed secretly on the network to facilitate the theft.
MasterCard and Visa said that storing the information on the 200,000 cardholders, even for what Perry called "research purposes," was in violation of their security rules.
At the time, Perry said that the company was taking steps to remedy that practice and that it "no longer stored that data on files." It is unclear if CardSystems was working with another security specialist at that time, but since the incident was disclosed, it said it had bought new software to bolster data protection.
While MasterCard disclosed the incident on June 17, it said that it had focused on CardSystems from as early as April. MasterCard did not conclude that the processor's systems had been breached until a forensic investigation by Cybertrust of Herndon, Va., in mid-May. But an Australian bank said that it was able to detect fraud related to CardSystems as early as the end of last year.
Even before the breach, CardSystems had taken steps to improve its security. In December 2003, it hired Cable and Wireless Americas, now part of Savvis Communications, to conduct a similar security audit for compliance with Visa rules. Savvis said the company made some improvements and was certified by Visa in June 2004. MasterCard said CardSystems was never certified as compliant with its security rules; Visa said CardSystems was no longer in compliance after Visa investigated the processor in May.
Nonetheless, CardSystems was allowed to handle millions of consumer transactions from both card companies and other major brands like Discover Financial and American Express.
The hiring of a new security auditor is a first step as CardSystems works to meet with the payment industry's security rules, which have often been loosely enforced.
Still, CardSystems has several other inquiries on its hands. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and a group of federal banking regulators are investigating the company, and a group of state attorneys general has sent letters requesting information on the break-in.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/20/technology/20credit.html?th&emc=th
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/22/technology/22cards.html?th&emc=th
Audio: http://www.freepress.net/mediaminutes/archive/mm070105.mp3
Text: http://www.freepress.net/mediaminutes/transcripts/mm070105.pdf
Written and produced by John Anderson
(mediaminutes@freepress.net)
Media Minutes content is produced under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license; see
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ for more information.
Two major decisions handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 27th have serious implications for the future of freedom of information online. At stake in the case known as Brand X v. FCC was the future of open access to the broadband Internet, and specifically whether cable companies have to open their networks to competing Internet service providers. In a 6-3 decision the Court ruled they do not. Jeff Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, one of the petitioners in the Brand X case. He says the Court just extended the cable industry's monopoly power over television content distribution to the online world.
[chester2] :14 "These big companies will use their last-mile control to, in essence, sort of flood the online medium and target users with all manner of commercial content, particularly from advertisers."
Without competition at the access level for broadband service, the majority of Americans will now be restricted to just two options: the cable company or dominant phone company, most likely a Baby Bell. Chester says the FCC's already moved to give phone companies the same access exclusivity that cable systems have, and Congress is too far deep into the pockets of both industries to take up the issue. And although local governments have the final say on a cable system's operations via the franchise agreement process, he doesn't think that can be used to mandate open access.
[chester4] :11 "The Supreme Court decision makes it even murkier whether cities, when they negotiate cable franchises, have any say whatsoever in how cable broadband serves their communities."
But the future of broadband access doesn't have to be so bleak. Chester says it's time for some serious grassroots organization to document the fallout from Brand X and begin lobbying now for regulatory changes to restore competition between Internet service providers on both cable and telephone networks.
[chester3] :28 "I think there has to be a kind of short and medium-term, you know, digital guerrilla war against the cable and telephone companies. Show there is discrimination. Develop new coalitions, because there's plenty of even big companies fearful of what this means for them once the cable and telephone industry can prefer, for example, their content over others. So we're in for a, you know, a multi-year campaign to try to reverse this decision."
The Supreme Court also ruled on whether developers of file-sharing software are ultimately responsible for the actions of their users. The central issue in the case of MGM v. Grokster involves the sharing of copyrighted content: the Court decided that peer-to- peer program developers should be held liable for illicit content-sharing, but only if it can be proven that they actively induce such behavior. Matthew Neto, general counsel for Streamcast Networks - one of two peer-to-peer companies targeted by the movie and music industries - says this ruling will chill innovation among those who seek to improve content management and distribution systems.
[neto1] :31 "The guy in the garage and the gal in the executive suite had better be very sophisticated about what they think, let alone what they communicate with each other, let alone what they communicate with their potential customers, because their every thought and their every action will now be subject to discovery in expensive litigation. It seems to me that this will be a full lawyer employment outcome: when there is this great a degree of uncertainty lawyers are going to get pulled into every aspect of innovation and business."
Mike Godwin, legal director of the digital rights advocacy group Public Knowledge, is worried that phone and cable companies might use the ruling to preemptively filter content and thereby restrict what users can find online.
[godwin1] :24 "Will the content companies come after me and say, 'You're providing broadband; you know that some high percentage of the people who are using your broadband services are downloading copyrighted works.' There's some discussion in the majority opinion about what can be inferred from the lack of imposing filters for copyrighted works. I think that the broadband companies also feel that they may be in the crosshairs here."
However, Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn put a positive spin on the decision, noting that it did not outlaw file-sharing technology outright. The Court also upheld a long-standing precedent that just because a technology can be used to duplicate copyrighted work should not restrict its use.
[sohn1] :08 "And in fact, the Court reaffirmed that peer-to-peer as a technology can be used for substantial non-infringing uses."
It's also important to note this decision only clears the way for a lawsuit against peer-to- peer companies, and those involved in this particular litigation are confident that they can prove their innocence against charges that they actively promote copyright infringement.
---[Editor's Note: There has been some comment as to the "activist" nature of the Media Minutes reporting, but, as is noted by people in this field, media effects everybody. It is neither a liberal issue nor a conservative issue. It is a citizen's issue. That being said, I've chosen these reports principally because of their brevity on the Supreme Court decisions. Obviously, reams have been written on them. Some far more strident than these. However, in an attempt to counter any perceived bias, I've included an article (below), "Hostile Reception" from the Wall Street Journal, a publication not noted for a non-sober approach. Broadband and Wi-Fi are computer related issues, with expanding importance in information delivery. I feel I would be remise in not covering topics that have warranted the attention of the Supreme Court.]
ToC
By JACK KAPICA
Tuesday, July 12, 2005 Updated at 1:51 PM EDT
URL:
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050712.gtgoogle0712/BNStory/Technology/
Could it be possible that Canada will make Google or any other Internet search and archiving engines illegal?
Bill C-60, which amends the Copyright Act and received its first reading in the House of Commons on June 20, suggests it could be illegal for anyone to provide copyrighted information through "information-location tools," which includes search engines.
Ottawa copyright lawyer Howard Knopf, of the law firm of Macera & Jarzyna Moffat & Co., has been poring over the bill since it was tabled, and says he was startled to discover the potentially negative effect of Bill C-60's provisions on "information location tools."
The phrasing of the proposed law is difficult, Mr. Knopf says, because at first glance it seems to be a helpful provision in that it limits the liability of companies such as Google to no more than an injunction when they have not received actual notice of infringement. But then the language of the bill works on the assumption that the search engine itself is capable of infringing copyright by having archived copyright material on it.
Section 40.3 (1) of the bill states that "the owner of copyright in a work or other subject-matter is not entitled to any remedy other than an injunction against a provider of information location tools who infringes that copyright by making or caching a reproduction of the work or other subject matter."
That section, he says, implies that "information location tools" would infringe copyright if they archive any material that is copyright, not just material that is itself infringing.
The bill defines information location tools as "any instrument through which one can locate information that is available by means of the Internet or any other digital network."
Search engines in the United States, Mr. Knopf says, have been tested to some extent on this issue, notably for the use of thumbnail photographs. The courts have been leaning in the direction of finding that the material on them is intended for "fair use," meaning it is not in competition with any copyright work.
But Bill C-60 suggests that Parliament considers such archiving activity is illegal.
"Not all people agree with me," says Mr. Knopf. But he adds that either way it is interpreted, it could lead to a court case.
"The way it is drafted strongly suggests that the reproduction and caching activity done by Google or the Wayback Machine at archive.org and similar essential research tools would be illegal in Canada," he says. "It could be read by a court as a 'deeming' provision, which was hopefully not the intention."
But "if the provision is intended to shelter the providers of 'information location tools,' it might have the opposite effect and end up being a Trojan Horse. At the very least, it could turn search and archive engine providers into enforcers for alleged copyright owners, some of whom will surely use their notice powers for abusive purposes. Or it may be a wedge for yet another instance of a tariff to be collected by an aggressive copyright collective."
But, cautions Mr. Knopf, Bill C-60 has received first reading only, and that "there's a lot of time for them to take this out or to fix it."
He warns that "we shouldn't cripple the Googles of the world by imposing copyright chill on the very basis of their architecture. In fact, they perform a very useful service to copyright owners by enabling easy detection of infringement. The owners should go after the actual infringer, rather than effectively shooting the messenger."
ToC
by Kirthi Tennakone, Institute of Fundamental Studies
URL: http://www.dailynews.lk/2005/04/11/fea01.htm
THE United Nations have declared the year 2005 as the World Year of Physics. It is timed to celebrate the centennial anniversary of Albert Einstein's Miraculous Year in which he laid the foundations for a new era of science with profound implications in technology, culture, philosophy and politics.
In 1905, Albert Einstein, then working as an obscure clerk at the Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland, published three seminal papers on the Relativity of Motion, the Photoelectric Effect and Brownian movement. The first gave rise to the theory of relativity resolving an inconsistency between the previous classical theories of mechanics and electromagnetism founded by Isaac Newton and Clerk Maxwell respectively.
... The photoelectric effect, the topic of Einstein's second 1905 paper, refers to the phenomenon of the detachment of electrons from a metal by light impinging on its surface. Einstein explained the mechanism of photoelectric emission, invoking the idea of light quanta introduced earlier by the German physicist Max Planck.
... Einstein's third paper in the year 1905 on Brownian motion, was a derivation from the then existing classical physics. Yet, its far reaching conclusions demonstrated his unmatched foresight. In 1827 the botanist Robert Brown working as the clerk cum librarian to the Linnaean Society in London looked through his microscope and noted a persistent erratic motion of pollen grains suspended in water. Soon it became clear that this motion was not due to extraneous influences but resulted from an inherent thermal agitation of the molecules of the liquid. The liquid molecules constantly bombard the grain from all sides. If the grain is sufficiently small, the molecular hits it receives from one side overshoot those from the opposite side giving a net force pushing the particle. Einstein analyzed this problem mathematically and showed ways of obtaining molecular sizes and their numbers. In fact he demonstrated at the same time that molecules really exist. Jean-Baptiste Perrin, a French physicist at the Sorbonne and the Swedish chemist Theodor Svedberg extended Einstein's work on Brownian motion, enabling a wide range of practical applications in chemistry and medicine. These techniques are indispensable in modern medicine to obtain information about proteins, blood components, cancer cells, viruses etc.
---1905: Science's Miracle Year
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4645093
Scientists call 1905 Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis -- year of miracles -- when he published a series of papers that radically transformed the way we understand the world. In this series, we look at his scientific breakthroughs and the ideas of other great thinkers of this seminal year.
Albert Einstein's Year of Miracles: Light Theory
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4538324
March 17, 2005 · One hundred years ago today, Albert Einstein finished a scientific paper that would change the world. His radical insight into the nature of light would help transform Einstein from an unknown patent clerk to a giant of 20th-century science.
Einstein's Relativity Paper, 100 Years Later
ToChttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4717394
June 24, 2005 · On June 30, 1905, Albert Einstein submitted a paper titled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," which introduced the ideas that would become known as the special theory of relativity.
A pizza dinner yields a cultural phenomenon - and millions of dollars in quarters.
May 10, 2005 -- 5:37 PM EDT
Game Over is a weekly column by Chris Morris <chris.morris@turner.com>
URL: http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/10/commentary/game_over/column_gaming
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - It's easy to see "Halo 2" fans lined up for several blocks in the hours before the game is released and think the industry has never been hotter; but if you want to see what a true phenomenon looks like, jump into your wayback machine and head to 1980.
Once you arrive, slip on your "Members Only" jacket and head into any pizza parlor. See that big crowd of people clustered in the back? Odds are they're watching someone play Pac Man.
Arguably the most influential game in the industry's history (with Pong the only other real contender), Pac Man has made more than $100 million dollars one quarter at a time. He's spawned his own line of trading cards, lunch boxes, board games, breakfast cereals and been the inspiration for a Top 40 hit (Buckner & Garcia's "Pac Man Fever" hit number 9 on Billboard's charts in 1982).
This year, Pac Man turns 25 -- but age isn't slowing the little guy down. 1999's "Pac Man World" and 2002's "Pac Man World 2" both sold over a million copies. And Namco has already announced four Pac Man themed games this year - and versions for Sony's PSP will be announced in the near future. TV Plug & Play game collections featuring Pac Man remain hot sellers. And the rise in cell phone gaming has opened up another opportunity for the original arcade game.
"I think there's a high nostalgia value with Pac Man -- a lot more so than many classic characters," said Sean Mylett, senior marketing manager for Namco. "I think Pac Man is a game where people really remember being younger and pumping quarters and quarters into machines. ... Then there's another level with the 'Pac Man World 3' character. He's an E-rated character. He's very colorful, very safe. It's definitely different than the trends going on in games. He just has an appeal."
And he's not going away.
"As the next generation systems hit," said Mylett, "I can guarantee that Pac Man will be there."
Things have certainly come a long way from the day Toru Iwatani came up with the idea for Pac Man at dinner.
Iwatani, who was also responsible for the arcade classic Galaxian, was trying to come up with a game that looked like a cartoon. At a pizza parlor, he paused after taking his first slice and thought the remainder of the pie looked like a head with its mouth open. He imagined it racing through a maze, eating things -- and the phenomenon was born.
In fact, legend has it Iwatani actually wanted Pac Man to be a pizza, but technological limitations at the time made it impossible.
The game also underwent a name change. Pac Man's original name was Puck Man -- but a savvy executive at Bally/Midway, which distributed the game in the United States, had it changed on all machines, fearing what game room vandals would do with the original moniker.
The name change didn't have anything to do with the game's success, of course. The easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master gameplay earns the credit for that. Personalization didn't hurt, either. While we take knowing the name of today's heroes and villains for granted, Pac Man was the first video game to name its characters (the ghosts, to jog your memory, were Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde) and the first game to offer interludes as rewards for advancing.
In the late 1990s, Twin Galaxies, which tracks video game world record scores, visited used game auctions and counted how many times the average Pac Man machine had been played. Based on those findings and the total number of machines that were manufactured, the organization said it believed the game had been played more than 10 billion times in the 20th century.
"Pac Man changed the psychological profile of the average person," explains Twin Galaxies' Walter Day. "Suddenly old and young, male and female, doctors, dentists, lawyers and housewives found it acceptable to be playing a video game. And Pac Man opened that door for them. Despite the fact that it was technologically advanced, it was as simple as playing a card game for them."
So go ahead and be impressed as you hear about sales numbers for the next "Grand Theft Auto" or see anxious gamers camping overnight to be the first to get their hands on next generation consoles. But weigh that frenzy to the one Pac Man sparked when it was originally released in Japan. The game proved so popular that it incited a shortage of yen coins in the country.
Let's see today's titles manage something like that.
Are classic games making a comeback? Read Return of the Quarter Gobblers <http://money.cnn.com/2004/05/13/commentary/game_over/e3_column_gaming/index.htm>.
Morris, a child of the 80s arcades, is Director of Content Development for CNN/Money.
ToC
July 8, 2005
URL: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_070805_rewrite.html
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. On Thursday morning Americans woke to the news that while they were sleeping London was under attack. By late morning, reports detailed multiple blasts that resulted in dozens of deaths and hundreds of wounded. While cable news anchors endlessly repeated themselves, Wikipedia was quickly assembling a definitive webpage title "7 July 2005, London Bombings."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_London_transport_explosions
Thorough and well organized, the page included the who, what, when, where of the story, as well as the official statements from world leaders, as well as practical information like what public transportation was closed, all with hypertext links to still more information. But how did it all get there so fast? And what is Wikipedia anyway? Clay Shirky has the answers. He teaches in the Interactive Communications Program at NYU and blogs regularly on social software. Wikipedia is one of his frequent topics, and he joins us once again. Clay, welcome back to OTM.
CLAY SHIRKY: Thanks so much, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: Review for us please, just what is a wiki, in the first place?
CLAY SHIRKY: A wiki is a group-created website. The idea is that every page on the website is editable by any of the users. So at the bottom of every page there's a little button that says Edit This Page. You can add alter, move, delete. And then there's another button that says Now Re-Publish This to the Wiki. When you click that second button, the page is updated to reflect your changes. But your changes are then part of the most current version of the page, which is then editable by still other users.
BOB GARFIELD:: And Wikipedia itself, what's its history?
CLAY SHIRKY: Someone, a group of someone set out to do an online encyclopedia called Newpedia. And so they set out to do a well-vetted encyclopedia with lots of editing and lots of oversight. And it was going very slowly. So at some point someone said why don't we throw up one of these wiki things and just create a bunch of articles, and then we can see if we can pull those articles over into Newpedia. So Wikipedia was started as a kind of sideline experiment to Newpedia. Well, Newpedia continued to stagnate. Meanwhile, the Wikipedia took off. And the big surprise was that when you get many eyes on the problem you could actually solve that problem much faster than if you have a sub-class of people responsible for taking care of it.
BOB GARFIELD:: You mean like experts.
CLAY SHIRKY: Like experts (LAUGHS), for example. But the thing is experts certainly participate in the editing of the Wikipedia. It's not that they're excluded, it's that people who haven't been formally nominated as experts also aren't excluded. The Wikipedia takes on the label of an encyclopedia, but actually the ability for an article to come into being in real time out of nothing, as has happened with the London bombings, is something that no other encyclopedia is capable of. It's a capability that doesn't at all fit into the metaphor of an encyclopedia and yet, as you noted earlier, very high quality, highly updated. And it mixes authoritative statements, external links and really actionable information for the people on the ground in London who are still struggling to deal with this.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay but one of the structural problems of Wikipedia is that there's no guarantee that someone adding to existing material actually knows what he's talking about. Tell me how you defeat the problem of just bad information in such rapidly developing events as the London bombing.
CLAY SHIRKY: The answer for all wikis is what makes a wiki good is not the technology but the community. A wiki in the hands of a healthy community has essentially social antibodies. When content is reflected to reflect something that's either inaccurate or intentionally misleading, if there are people watching those pages they can either edit the changes or all wikis contain a history function. So if you go in and deface a page on Wikipedia with information that I know to be wrong, I can simply say roll back to the last version of this page before you came in and wrecked it.
BOB GARFIELD: Understood. But isn't that scant consolation, Clay, for those who have happened to have clicked on Wikipedia before the vandalism has been erased?
CLAY SHIRKY: It would be if the vandalism lasted a long time. There was actually a very interesting study done up at IBM in Cambridge around a project called History Flow that looked at the history of vandalism for highly contentious subjects on the Wikipedia, whether it was abortion or Islam or Microsoft, or any topic that got some group exorcised. And what they found was that vandalism tended to last less than two minutes. People get e-mailed when a page is changed, so it's not passive monitoring. There's highly active monitoring around page changes, particularly for contentious pages, so that the vandalism is found and undone very quickly.
BOB GARFIELD: How does a Wikipedia entry deal with the simple disagreement between two non-vandals who simply have a different point of view or a different, you know, set of apparent facts on a given subject?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Wikipedia has adopted something called the neutral point of view as its goal, which is to say the only material that should go into a Wikipedia article is the material that two people with different points of view can agree to be true. It tends towards a very fact-based description of subjects. Every page has a mirror page called the talk page where conversations about what should and shouldn't go into a wiki page move to. So if you and I were to start an edit war, as they're called, where you're making changes and I'm making changes back, the official Wikipedia answer is that we should move that conversation to the talk page, hammer out our disagreements, and add the resulting material back, so that Wikipedia pages, as their examined, tend toward this neutral point of view.
BOB GARFIELD: I want to get back to the issue of expertise and authoritativeness.
CLAY SHIRKY:: Mmm-hmm.
BOB GARFIELD: Encyclopedias, for example, let's say the Encyclopedia Britannica, is created by a handful of editors and maybe several hundred expert sources, or maybe it's several thousand, but in any case, a relatively small finite number. The people in the encyclopedia business, I understand, tend to sniff at the wiki process as being the product of the mere hoi polloi.
CLAY SHIRKY: Right, right. The question around old versus new--if there's a real revolution afoot, the new product doesn't win because it's better at what the old product does. The new product wins because it does things the old product simply can't do. Where is the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on the London bombings?
BOB GARFIELD: I think I get what you're saying. Arguing over whether Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica is a superior encyclopedia is missing the point entirely. Maybe the question should be is Wikipedia the replacement for all traditional media on breaking news.
CLAY SHIRKY: Well, that's actually one of the really interesting questions here. The first time this pattern showed up on Wikipedia was after the December 26th tsunami when suddenly it became a site for exactly the pattern we're seeing with the London blasts, which is here's the basic information, here's what we know to date, here are some pointers to hotlines, in that case, for missing loved ones and so forth. Whenever there's a really major disaster but no immediate news, the people on cable are often vamping because they have to keep repeating the basic story on the chance that someone has just tuned in, even in the absence of any new information. Wikipedia solves that problem, while at the same having a symbiotic relationship with those news analysts because it points people to the written versions of stories at a certain point in time. So I don't think it replaces them, but I do think it lowers the need for those outlets to have to just continually repeat the basic story in the absence of facts because the Wikipedia is a better place to handle that period of the breaking news.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, Clay. Well, once again, thanks very much.
CLAY SHIRKY: Not at all. Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Clay Shirky teaches at the Interactive Communications Department at NYU, and writes about the Internet on his site, shirky.com.
[Editor's Note: For another example of how wiki are effecting the media, the Los Angeles Times' opinion page is undergoing a wholesale reshaping. The Times will be introducing online interactive editorials called wikitorials. What are wikitorials? How do they work, and why? Check out http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_061705_everybody.html ]
ToC
Phone Giants Are Lobbying Hard To Block Towns' Wireless Plans As Cities Try to Build Networks, SBC and Other Companies Say It's Unfair Competition Going Online in Police Cars
By JESSE DRUCKER and LI YUAN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 23, 2005
URL:
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/wsj/access/857435061.html?dids=857435061:857435061&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Jun+23%2C+2005&author=Jesse+Drucker+and+Li+Yuan&type=8_90&desc=Hostile+Reception%3A+Phone+Giants+Are+Lobbying+Hard+To+Block+Towns%27+Wireless+Plans
GRANBURY, Texas -- After years of waiting for a local phone company to roll out high-speed Internet access in this growing lakeside town of about 6,400 people, municipal information-technology director Tony Tull took matters into his own hands. The city last year invited a start-up telecom firm to hang wireless equipment from a water tower and connect the town. The network now provides high-speed wireless Web access to most of Granbury, and the town is negotiating to buy some of the equipment. But Granbury's foray into the wireless business has propelled it into a battle between cities and technology companies on one side and big telephone companies on the other. SBC Communications Inc., the dominant phone company in Texas, and other big phone companies say that cities should not be allowed to subsidize high-speed Internet connections -- even in areas where the companies don't yet offer the service. Since January, lawmakers in at least 14 states and the U.S. Congress have introduced bills to restrict local governments' ability to fill the gap.
On the other side of the fight, along with Granbury and dozens of towns like it, are Intel Corp., Dell Inc., Texas Instruments Inc. and other tech companies. They stand to gain from the sale of chips, wireless-enabled laptops and other products that use fast Internet networks. Around the country, governments are contracting with providers other than the local telephone or cable companies to build or run the networks using Wi-Fi technology or fiber-optic cables. Wi-Fi, short for wireless fidelity, provides high-speed access to the Web. Traditional telecom providers view such projects as a threat and are pushing for laws to curtail them. While the phone and cable companies control the valuable "last mile" wired connections into homes and offices, the wireless networks use antennas to bypass those lines and can connect directly to the networks of long-distance companies or fiber-optic providers. Plans for such government-coordinated networks are spreading from rural America to larger cities including Philadelphia and San Francisco, and big phone companies have stepped up their efforts to stop them.
The battle is increasingly significant as telephone companies like SBC count on their high-speed Web access businesses -- which generated roughly $5 billion in revenue last year, nearly double the amount two years earlier -- to offset declines in their traditional telephone operations. The telecom providers' main tool in fighting competition from new wireless technologies is an old-fashioned one: lobbying muscle. The nation's phone companies, which themselves received more than $5 billion last year in federal subsidies, argue that government partnerships with telecom providers represent unfair competition.
The industry effort is meeting with some success. Earlier this month, the governors of Colorado and Nebraska signed into law bills that restrict government telecom initiatives. Late last year, Pennsylvania enacted a law that requires cities to seek permission from local phone companies before offering any paid telecom services. Verizon Communications Inc., the dominant carrier in Pennsylvania, had pushed hard for the measure, arguing that government plans would discourage it from further investing in its network. Philadelphia's plan for a citywide wireless network has been grandfathered under the law.
The high-speed networks, sometimes referred to as broadband, offer an always-on connection to the Internet at speeds several times faster than dial-up. They are used for more than surfing the Web. High-speed Internet connections facilitate home health-care monitoring and video conferencing. And customers increasingly are using their fast connections to make phone calls, bypassing telephone companies altogether.
The legislative fights come as the U.S. remains behind many other countries in per capita broadband usage, ranking 12th, according to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In part, that's a result of the country's size and its early lead in dial-up connections. Unlike many other countries, the U.S. has mostly left broadband rollout to private industry.
Granbury is only about 35 miles southwest of Fort Worth, and people who move into town often are surprised to find they can't get cheap, high-speed Web access. In 2001, San Antonio-based SBC installed some high-speed connections, but the company still hasn't rolled out its network to the entire town. According to SBC, only about 20% of the town is wired with digital subscriber lines, or DSL, the technology SBC uses for high-speed Internet service. In Texas, lines serving 25% of SBC customers haven't been upgraded.
DSL technology works only within a certain distance from the hub for a telephone company's network equipment, usually about 14,000 feet, SBC says. Because hubs are expensive to build, SBC and other telecom companies often initially limit the rollout of DSL to neighborhoods close to existing hubs. Granbury has other providers, including Internet Texas, a local service provider, and Charter Communications Inc., a cable operator. But they don't provide complete or affordable coverage to the entire city, according to Mr. Tull.
In late 2002, when Mr. Tull arrived as the city's first technology director, he found that the municipal government had only six email accounts, and some of its 70 computers didn't even have dial-up Web access. Government employees couldn't easily share documents because there was no network connecting the buildings and the speed of Internet service was painfully slow.
Seeking alternatives, he talked with Charter about equipping the municipal buildings with high-speed Web access using fiber-optic cable. Charter's price tag, $875,000, was too expensive, he says. Charter confirmed the talks but declined to discuss the price.
Mr. Tull eventually contracted with a tiny start-up, Frontier Broadband LLC, one of hundreds of rural wireless Internet service providers that have sprung up across the country. The company installed antennas using equipment from Motorola Inc. on a water tower and on a city-owned radio tower in the local cemetery, providing high-speed access to city hall, two firehouses, a wastewater treatment plant and the local airport.
Last November, Frontier started equipping the entire city with Wi-Fi equipment from Tropos Networks Inc., an equipment maker that specializes in citywide wireless networks. Intel was an early Tropos investor. Among Mr. Tull's goals was providing Web access to police cars so officers could check records on the road. He and Frontier later expanded the plans to offer paid, high-speed wireless Web access to residents and businesses, with customers paying Frontier.
So far, roughly 60% of the city is covered, according to Mike Timmins, a co-owner of Frontier. Frontier paid for the equipment and its installation, but the city now is talking with Frontier about purchasing the entire Tropos network -- as well as additional equipment to cover the rest of town -- at a total cost of about $300,000.
Frontier will continue to manage the network and provide technical support. Out of the regular monthly charges of about $19.95 that subscribers pay to Frontier, the city will collect $3 per subscriber each month to recoup the cost of the equipment. "The entire capital outlay is shared," Mr. Tull says.
Craig DeWitt moved his five-person insurance agency to Granbury from Fort Worth in October 2003 but was surprised to learn DSL service wasn't available from SBC. He pays $87.45 a month for Frontier's service for the five computers in his office.
In February, Rep. Phil King, a Republican who chairs the regulated-industries committee of the Texas House of Representatives, introduced a 332-page bill aimed at overhauling the state's telecom regulations. Buried on page 87 was a provision to extend an existing ban on municipalities offering telephone service to also include other telecom offerings, like Wi-Fi.
When Mr. Tull learned about SBC's efforts to persuade legislators to restrict municipal wireless projects, he says, "I figured our project was dead." Mr. Tull twice traveled to the state's capitol in Austin to argue against the proposed legislation. Representatives of many other Texas towns did the same.
SBC is a huge political player in Texas. Last year, the company spent more on state lobbying than any other company or organization, laying out at least $3.9 million, according to Texas Ethics Commission records compiled by the nonprofit group Texans for Public Justice.
"It's not government's role to become a provider," says Jim Epperson, senior vice president for state legislative affairs at SBC. He points to towns that have run into costly failures offering telecom services, and says such spending could force towns to "lay off police officers or shut down libraries."
Mr. Epperson says towns without broadband should consider offering tax incentives to companies like SBC to encourage them to upgrade their networks.
The anti-Wi-Fi legislation moved the tech-equipment industry to action. Dell's founder and chairman, Michael S. Dell, telephoned members of the Texas House, including the speaker, Tom Craddick.
For companies like Dell, Intel and Texas Instruments, the spread of broadband is crucial. Dallas-based Texas Instruments, for example, makes chips for cable and DSL modems and for Wi-Fi routers. The company also makes chips for digital cameras and music players, which increasingly can be used with high-speed Web connections to share photos and songs. Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, now includes Wi-Fi in most of its new laptops.
And Intel, of Santa Clara, Calif., has made Wi-Fi a centerpiece of its strategy, bundling Wi-Fi and other chips as part of its Centrino technology, which has been heavily advertised during the past two years. Intel has provided funding for several cities to help set up neighborhood-wide wireless networks.
"We believe that with Texas and the U.S. continuing to lag behind in broadband penetration, now is not the time to limit choices," says Michael Young, who oversees Dell's state-level lobbying.
At the end of May, the Texas bill containing the anti-Wi-Fi provision died after cable companies lobbied against the bill.
The fight now has moved on to the national stage. Late last month, U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican, introduced the "Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act of 2005," which seeks to prohibit local governments or "any entity affiliated with such a government" from providing telecommunications service in any area where a corporation offers "a substantially similar service."
"I don't think governments should be in these businesses," Mr. Sessions says in an interview. "That's not their core business." Mr. Sessions worked at Southwestern Bell, SBC's predecessor, for 16 years. His wife still works for SBC. During his eight years in Congress, SBC's political-action committee, its employees and their families collectively have been his second-largest source of campaign contributions, donating a total of $75,346, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington research group. Guy Harrison, Mr. Sessions's chief of staff, says the congressman's ties to SBC do not present a conflict of interest.
The telephone industry is fighting the battle on other fronts as well. The New Millennium Research Council, a think tank in Washington, issued a report in February condemning publicly funded Wi-Fi projects, arguing, among other things, that they stymie competition. The council is a project of Issue Dynamics Inc., a public-affairs and consulting firm that has done work for several of the country's major telephone and cable companies, including SBC, Verizon, BellSouth Corp. and Comcast Corp. Some powerful federal lawmakers are rallying to the side of the cities. Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, plan to introduce today the "Community Broadband Act of 2005," stipulating that no state can prohibit a municipality from offering high-speed Internet access to its citizens.
Meanwhile, Granbury is continuing its rollout of municipal Wi-Fi. All eight of the city's police cars now have the service. Building inspectors are accessing the Web via wireless laptops. Frontier will start rolling out the network to the entire city next week and plans to finish it in about a month.
ToC
Paul Thurrott
http://www.wininformant.com/
Microsoft posted an update--but not beta 2--to the Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware beta product that extends the software's expiration date to December 31, 2005, and fixes a few problems with earlier builds. I haven't seen any major functional problems, but Microsoft fixed some notification window and WinSock Layered Service Provider (LSP) removal problems. You can find the new release on the Microsoft Web site.
Microsoft revealed this week that it's getting more aggressive about spam sent through its MSN Hotmail service by marking email messages from unregistered domain names as spam. To avoid this fate, email service providers will need to adopt Microsoft's Sender ID antispam technology, the company says. Right now, only 25 percent of all email sent worldwide is compatible with the Sender ID scheme, which makes it more difficult for spammers to spoof email addresses and hide their true identities. Although we could debate the relative merits of the Sender ID technology, I'm actually pretty happy that someone is being more aggressive about spam. It's about time.
The Microsoft Office team has historically done its own thing with UIs, eschewing the standard Windows way of doing things and creating something slightly unique and, often, confusing. For Office 12, the next major version of Office, Microsoft plans to change the UI yet again. But this time the company might get it right. Instead of making a different UI for no good reason, Microsoft is actually thinking about the way people use the Office applications. One of the big problems is icon overload: The sheer amount of toolbar buttons confuses people. So the company is developing a new ribbon UI element that in many ways will replace the toolbars in Office. In each application, the ribbon will change its icon set based on what you're doing. So if you're writing text, you'll see text-oriented icons, but when you switch to an embedded graphic, the ribbon will display only those icons that are related to graphics. As with Office 2003, the goal of the UI is to expose existing functionality so that users can discover it more easily. But unlike Office 2003, this change might actually work. Whether it will be enough to make customers upgrade remains to be seen.
At the Microsoft Worldwide Partners Conference this week, Microsoft noted that it has distributed more than 218 million copies of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) via Windows Update and Automatic Updates. In February, Microsoft reported the figure as 170 million downloads. According to the company's internal figures, SP2 makes XP 13 to 15 times less likely to be hacked when compared with the base version of XP or XP with SP1. Meanwhile, since March, Microsoft has also distributed more than 2 million copies of Windows Server 2003 SP1, an update that provides many of the same security features that XP SP2 provides.
I got a peek at this device in May. Microsoft this week revealed that it will soon ship a wireless Media Center keyboard and remote control that will help people who have Media Centers in their living rooms interact with the machines. The device features beveled edges for easy two-handed holding, an integrated pointing stick, full Media Center remote-control functionality, a full-sized keyboard with special Media Center buttons, and even power buttons for the PC and TV. I fell in love with the device the second I saw it, and I suspect that most Media Center users will, too. It should cost about $100 when it goes on sale later this month.
Firefox users will want to upgrade to the latest version, Firefox 1.0.5, which the Mozilla Foundation released this week. Firefox 1.0.5 is a minor update but adds security and stability features. On a related note, the Mozilla Foundation also updated its excellent email client, Thunderbird, to version 1.0.5.
(http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.0.5&os=win&lang=en-US)
Today, Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) users have one more reason to switch to Mozilla Firefox (actually, two reasons, if you count this week's new IE security flaw): Google has released a beta version of its Google Toolbar that's designed specifically for Firefox. The Google Toolbar for Firefox looks and acts almost exactly like its IE cousin, but it's built on top of a browser that won't silently load up your PC with spyware while you're innocently navigating the Web. I consider that a good feature. To grab the new toolbar, use Firefox to navigate to the Google Toolbar Web site, and you'll get the right version automatically.
ToC
Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2005 9:10 am
Post subject: Firefox Tweak
By: Kevin Hisel
URL: http://www.cucug.org/starship/viewtopic.php?p=4091
Found this tweak for Firefox out there somewhere. It really seems to help, especially on sites with lots of images on their pages.
--
Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries (type "http" in the "Filter" area to find them faster):
network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer.
Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0".
This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.
If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!
ToC
Well this was certainly an exciting weekend for Windows "Longhorn", so let me recap the recent events!
Late Friday night, Microsoft sent out a first round of Windows "Longhorn" beta invitations to a very select group of testers (e.g. WinHEC attendees, MVPs, Microsoft Partners, etc.). Unlike before though, these invitations contained a unique ID for each tester and also utilized a new beta testing site called Microsoft Connect (http://connect.microsoft.com/). Ultimately, this new site will take the place of current sites such as Microsoft BetaPlace (http://beta.microsoft.com/) and Microsoft WindowsBeta (http://windowsbeta.microsoft.com/). All this was in preparation for the Beta 1 rollout which is still planned for the end of July. Later on this summer, the beta program will be expanded for a second round of testing and will include the more regular beta testers, the Community Technology Preview program, and most likely the public at the large.
Note, this beta program also includes the new Internet Explorer 7 as it was originally just planned for "Longhorn", but will now also be available for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Then, Saturday morning, we got word of screenshots having surfaced for a new Windows "Longhorn" build (5203). This new build was interim one from the WinMain labs that was never meant to leave Redmond, and was part of the Beta 2 code branch. Amoung other things, this branch will include many of the visual enhancements left out the previous WinHEC 2005 build (5048), and even the upcoming Beta 1 build for that matter, which made the screenshots very promising. Naturally, it also made everyone eager to get their hands on a copy of the build. However, we later found out that the person who originally created the screenshots, did NOT give the build to anyone and he's NOT going to leak it. Therefore, we'll have to make due with the screenshots for now and wait 'til, say September, to officially test it out. It's definitely looking good though so, again, here's to the future of "Longhorn"!!!
ToC
By ELIZABETH M. GILLESPIE
The Associated Press
06/25/2005
URL:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories.nsf/technology/story/0130B99C2C3F8FE78625702B0010D564?OpenDocument
The upgrade, called Longhorn, is expected to be released late in 2006.
SEATTLE -- Microsoft Corp. said Friday that the next version of its Windows operating system will have built-in support for Internet data feeds, an increasingly popular way to get news and other information sent straight to a computer.
RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, has yet to break into widespread use, but the world's largest software maker believes it will become a mainstay. "We really believe that RSS is key to how people will be using the Internet in the future," said Megan Kidd, a Windows product manager.
In the long-delayed Windows upgrade, code-named Longhorn and expected to be released late next year, an RSS icon will appear in the Internet Explorer Web browser to make it easy for people to find, much as Apple Computer Inc. has done with its Safari browser.
Longhorn will store all data downloaded to a computer via RSS in a single place. It will maintain a central list of all of a computer user's RSS subscriptions, from Web log entries to photos pulled from an online family picture gallery.
It will include a feature called simple list extensions that will let Web sites use RSS to publish lists of content that users can subscribe to, like chart-topping songs or an online gift registry.
Joe Wilcox, an analyst with Jupiter Research, said Microsoft's foray into RSS is reminiscent of its rush to capture its share of the burgeoning Web browser market in the mid-1990s.
"With the World Wide Web, we had this vast informational system that came along where Windows was not required," Wilcox said. "That posed a potentially serious threat to Microsoft's Windows franchise. They responded by making Internet Explorer part of the operating system."
Microsoft may contend that its RSS push is about improving technology for developers, content providers and consumers, Wilcox said, but, "It's also, I believe, responding to a potential competitive threat."
Having RSS built into Longhorn could pose a serious threat to companies that sell RSS readers that siphon data from the Internet. But Kidd contends that Microsoft isn't out to put anyone out of business.
"This is not a replacement for readers by any means," she said. "What this does is enable more developers to create more readers."
Kidd said Microsoft has done a lot of the "heavy lifting" so software developers can focus on creating useful applications for RSS rather than the "baseline plumping" of the feeds themselves.
For example, Microsoft is hoping developers will come up with handy programs like ones that will send a user's favorite band's tour schedule straight into a desktop calendar, or let a user know when a favorite movie comes out on video.
Wilcox cited research that shows about 6 percent of consumers have an RSS reader on their computers, which makes him wonder if this move is going to be worth Microsoft's while.
ToC
Arfa Karim Randhawa meets Bill and is given a tour of Redmond
Iain Thomson, vnunet.com
15 Jul 2005
URL: http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2139880/preteen-becomes-microsoft
Pic of girl:
http://ivory.vnunet.com/images/microsoft/arfa-randhawa/medium.jpg
Arfa Karim Randhawa, aged 10, has become the youngest person to be certified as a Microsoft engineer.
Randhawa passed her Microsoft Certified Professional examinations last year. She met Bill Gates this week and was taken on a tour of Microsoft's Redmond campus.
The 10 year-old, from Faisalabad in Pakistan, asked Gates why children were not allowed to work for Microsoft and was told that they should concentrate on their school studies.
But he explained that Microsoft has an intern programme which would be available to her once she reached high school level.
Randhawa also asked why there are so few women in the company, suggesting that Microsoft should have an equal number of men and women.
Gates replied that it is sometimes difficult to get women interested in technology.
After first discovering computers at the age of five Randhawa pestered her father for a PC. She has been accepted into Pakistan's Applied Technologies advanced computer institute.
Randhawa is now a Microsoft Certified Application Developer but plans to become a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer, which involves building programs into broader systems for business.
In the longer term she has her sights set on Harvard, or a career at Microsoft.
ToC
from David Noreen, CUCUG
Rich Warren's July 11 column in the News-Gazette mentioned MythTV:
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php
MythTV is an open-source project, with its primary functionality being similar to that of a TiVo on steroids, with far more features, much greater flexibility and the ability to handle an extremely wide variety of content.
Here's a few things that I found using Google:
http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythFeatures
http://www.mythtv.info/moin.cgi/AboutMythTv
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/29/mythtv_hacks.html
[Editor's Note: Thanks, David.]
ToC
TidBITS#788/18-Jul-05
Apple released its financial results for its last fiscal quarter, recording a staggering $3.52 billion in revenue with $320 million in earnings. Both numbers were substantially higher than analyst expectations. The same quarter a year ago produced $2.01 billion in revenue and $61 million in earnings. The company reported selling over 6.1 million iPods last fiscal quarter, which ended 25-Jun-05. Apple also sold nearly 1.2 million Macintosh computers, a 35-percent increase over a year ago.
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jul/13results.html>
Two interesting side facts: gross margins are up from around 28 percent to nearly 30 percent, which is magnificent in a commodity market in which all competitors are seeing shrinking margins. The second is that international sales were 39 percent of revenue. In its SEC filings, Apple broke out sales, showing 495,000 laptops sold and 687,000 desktops. Retail sales accounted for 144,000 computers and $555 million in computer sales (not including other items). The company expects to produce similar revenue and earnings next quarter. Apple now has $7.5 billion in cash and short-term investments on hand, and about $7 billion in assets when considering all assets less all liabilities. [GF]
ToC
by Jeff Carlson <jeffc@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#788/18-Jul-05
In a week that saw a spate of Apple updates, the company's largest was Mac OS X 10.4.2, which incorporated a number of fixes to improve reliability and compatibility. As with earlier system updates, several built-in Apple applications were changed or replaced, such as Address Book, iCal, Safari, Mail, Automator, and Stickies. According to Apple's release notes, Core Graphics, Core Audio, and Core Image also gained updates, with updated ATI and Nvidia graphics drivers thrown in.
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301722>
iChat sees improvements in video performance under certain circumstances, and can be set to log out of one computer automatically if you log in on another. Dashboard also gets a new feature, a Widgets widget that helps you manage your widgets; I know, that sounds like looking at a mirror in a mirror, but it's actually a widget that lets you activate or deactivate installed widgets, and optionally send third-party ones to the Trash. This update also includes a variety of AirPort-related updates, including WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access version 2) support for AirPort Extreme Cards (described elsewhere in this issue).
Mac OS X 10.4.2 is available via Software Update as a 21.5 MB download when upgrading from version 10.4.1, or as a 57.5 MB download for a Combo Update when upgrading from version 10.4.0. You can also download stand-alone installers: a 44 MB update from 10.4.1, or a 58 MB combo update.
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosxupdate1042.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosxupdate1042combo.html>
By Katie Marsal <confidential@appleinsider.com>
Jul-07-2005 01:00 PM
URL: http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1166
Presenting at the Power Everywhere Forum 2005 in Japan, IBM today formally introduced a dual-core version of its PowerPC 970 (G5) processor, which could find its way into Apple Power Macs in the coming months.
The 64-bit chips, code-named Antares, contain two processing units per chip, each with their own execution core and Level 1 cache. Additionally, each core includes a storage subsystem with 1MB Level 2 cache, making the chips twice as efficient as IBM's current 970FX PowerPC G5 processors.
Officially labeled the PowerPC 970MP, the chips pack several power conservation features that allow frequency and voltage demands to adjust on the fly. It's also possible to completely cut power to one of chip's cores when high performance computations are not needed.
According to IBM, the 970MP will be made available in speeds ranging from 1.4 to 2.5GHz. It's believed that Apple has been working with prototypes of the chips since 2004 and could use them in a forthcoming update to its Power Mac G5 desktops, the company said.
Along with the dual-core 970MP, IBM today also officially introduced a new family of low-power PowerPC 970FX chips running at speeds up to 1.6GHz with a 512K Level 2 cache. PowerPC 970FX chips are currently used in Apple Power Mac G5 and iMac G5 systems.
Initially, the new 970FX chips will be available in three flavors: 1.2GHz, 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz. IBM says the 1.6GHz version will typically operate at 16 watts while the the two former versions require a cool 13 watts, possibly allowing Apple to release a G5-based PowerBook.
An official press release <http://www-6.ibm.com/jp/ press/20050707003.html> on the new chips is available in Japanese. As of press time, IBM had yet to update its US website with information on the new chips. A set of slides <http:// ascii24.com/news/i/topi/article/2005/07/07/656844-000.html> from the company's presentation are also available via /ASCII24/, a publication based in Japan.
ToC
by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#783/13-Jun-05
Apple's announcement last week that Macs would be switching away from the PowerPC chip to Intel-based CPUs sure was exciting, wasn't it? After all, Intel is part of the massive Wintel conspiracy that all right-thinking members of the Macintosh rebellion have been fighting against for so many years, correct? (Psst... That's Star Wars you're thinking of. What we have here is just a bunch of technology companies jostling for position.)
Honestly, as soon as my brain stopped spinning from the unexpectedness of it all, I've come to think that this announcement is the biggest non-news event of the year for the vast majority of Macintosh users. Our friend Jason Snell of Macworld has done a bang-up job of answering the most common questions surrounding the announcement, so I encourage you to read his piece; I won't attempt to replicate it here. Instead, here are the three reasons why I'm unperturbed, along with some counterpoint from that little voice in the back of my head.
<http://www.macworld.com/2005/06/features/intelfaq/>
1. Nothing even begins to change for us users for a year, when Apple plans to release the first Macs that will use some chip from Intel. Apple isn't specifying a chip, because it will depend on which one makes the most sense at that point for the Macs that will be first in line to get it (likely the lower end of the Mac line). And since it will take two years for the majority of the Mac line to switch, and until the end of 2007 before Apple plans to stop making PowerPC-based Macs, I just can't see this announcement affecting my life in the near term. So what all the fuss boils down to is that Apple will be releasing new Macs (and a new version of Mac OS X) in a year. I could have guessed that, and knowing that the Macs might have a different CPU doesn't change the fact that they're still vaporware.
For counterpoint, it's worth noting that many organizations have purchase plans that extend years in advance. Obviously, those organizations now know that if they wait 12 to 30 months, they'll be able to purchase Macs that will likely be able to run Windows software at full performance. For such organizations, or anyone who doesn't mind delaying an upgrade until 2006 or 2007, waiting may make sense, and that in turn may hurt Apple's sales in the meantime. Remember, though, that Apple has over $6 billion in cash and no long-term debt, which will help ease any pain from transition. So even though Apple would prefer to not lose any sales, the company can weather a downturn.
2. When push comes to shove, I don't care what CPU is inside my Mac, just as I don't care what chip runs my iPod, my cell phone, or my washing machine. To be fair, that's not entirely true. I care what CPU is in my Mac only to the extent that it enables Mac OS X to operate with acceptable performance and to run the software I need. When I next need to buy a new Mac, I'll have to evaluate whether or not the CPUs currently in use - from whatever company - meet those basic requirements. For instance, our plans to buy a new Power Mac G5 for Tonya remain unaffected. She needs a faster Mac to replace her aging 733 MHz PowerPC G4-based QuickSilver, and in keeping with our basic approach, we'll buy the Mac that provides the most performance for the money at the point in time when it's necessary. It would be nonsensical for Tonya to wait a year or two to buy an Intel-based Mac; if she needs the power now, as she does, she should buy a Mac now. (And she will, once she gets the opportunity.)
On the other hand, Tonya and I use mainstream applications that don't take advantage of the Velocity Engine (also known as AltiVec) unit in the PowerPC chips. The impression I've gotten from talking with developers is that software that relies on the Velocity Engine will require significantly more effort to port to the Intel architecture; as such, users who rely on audio or video software may find themselves waiting for versions that will run on new Intel-based Macs, or they may find their software improving at a slower rate in situations where developers choose to concentrate on porting to Intel chips instead of adding new features. So, some users will likely suffer in the transition, or find themselves limited in the Macs they can buy and use in the 2 to 4 year time-frame.
3. I don't see any significant philosophical difference between Intel and IBM as
Apple's primary chip supplier. There's no underdog here, just a bunch of 600-pound gorillas, and I certainly hope that Intel can meet Apple's need for chips better than IBM and Motorola/Freescale have over the years. Even if I was horribly offended by Apple's move for some reason, what's the alternative? Switching away from a Mac would entail using an x86-based chip (though a system could be purchased from AMD rather than Intel), so that doesn't seem like much of a statement. And switching would also require using Windows or some flavor of Unix; to my mind that would be a matter of cutting off my nose to spite my face.
That said, if you feel betrayed by Apple, it's not entirely surprising. After all, it wasn't long ago that Steve Jobs featured demonstrations of how the PowerPC beat the pants off the Pentium in head-to-head Photoshop tests. In other words, Apple has played up the us-versus-them mentality at the chip level, and is now paying the price with a certain set of customers.
In the end, I see no reason we shouldn't take Steve Jobs at his word with regard to why Apple announced this switch. It's not so much about which chips are available today as what Apple sees as being available in several years. Despite the fact that Apple has been compiling Mac OS X for Intel chips all along, there's no question that the transition will require a lot of effort for Apple and for Macintosh developers. It's not a decision Apple would have made lightly, and for the most part, neither Apple nor developers gain anything by it in the short term. But in the long term, if Apple has made the right decision, the Mac will benefit with increased performance across the line. Users will like the increased performance and design possibilities opened up for Apple, as well as the increased performance for Windows applications. And if all that is true, Apple will sell more Macs and increase the size of the market for developers.
But that's all in the future. For now, the announcement means great PR for Intel, a lot of work for Apple and Mac developers, and business as usual for the rest of us.
ToC
TidBITS#785/27-Jun-05
Last week, when talking about the new version of Snapz Pro X in TidBITS, I mentioned that Tiger changes the default file format used for screen captures taken with Command-Shift-3/4 from PDF to PNG. Thanks to Paul Schreiber for alerting me to the fact that you can change that default format back to PDF or to another format, presumably as long as it's one supported by QuickTime, such as JPG (extra points for anyone who wants to figure out all the possibilities and send me a list). Follow the steps below to make Tiger save screenshots as PDF.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=08132>
1. Open Terminal.
2. Copy the "defaults write" line below, paste it into the Terminal window, and press Return.
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf
3. Log out or restart your Mac to make it pick up the new setting.
If you wish to reset the file format back to PNG, just repeat the steps, replacing "pdf" in the "defaults write" line with "png". [ACE]
ToC
by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#785/27-Jun-05
A few months back, in "Sometimes It's Just Broken" in TidBITS-766_, I wrote about my trials and tribulations in displaying video from my 12-inch PowerBook on our television. I had purchased a Mini-DVI to Video Adapter, but the first one was defective and Apple politely sent me a replacement that worked fine. After that article, a TidBITS reader who worked at Monster Cable offered to send me a review unit of Monster's iTV Link cable, which goes beyond the Apple adapter by also providing audio. After a spate of ignoring video entirely, I finally got around to testing the cable in a real-world situation.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07984>
<http://www.monstercable.com/computer/productPageComputer.asp?pin=2697>
On the Macintosh side, the iTV Link gives you a mini-DVI connector and a standard headphone plug; on the TV side you get an S-video connector and a pair of RCA audio plugs. The connectors all feel solid and well-constructed, and Monster claims they have 24k gold contacts for maximum signal transfer. In fact, the iTV Link Web page lists all sorts of jargon-filled reasons why the iTV Link is utterly fabulous - "heavy-duty double shielding 100% mylar foil and 95% copper braid," "nitrogen-injected dielectric," "super fine multi-stranded copper conductors," and even "DoubleHelix construction dual tightly twisted conductors." Honestly, I haven't the foggiest idea what any of that really means, if anything, but I can say that the audio and video signals from the PowerBook to the television are of good quality. It's tricky to be sure, though, since our 15-year-old Sony TV is awfully fuzzy compared to the PowerBook's crisp LCD screen, and the TV's speakers would undoubtedly be laughed at by any home theater aficionado.
The basic advantage of the iTV Link over Apple's Mini-DVI to Video Adapter is the addition of audio, since watching a picture on the television while listening to faint sound coming from the tiny PowerBook speakers off to the left of the screen isn't an ideal experience. Initially, though, the iTV Link was more trouble to hook up, since I had to swap the S-video and audio connections on the back of the television (insert repeated swearing at the rat's nest of associated cables) from the TiVo to the iTV Link instead of just stealing the S-video cable that already ran from the TiVo to the television. Then I realized I could just plug the iTV Link into the TiVo's input jacks and treat it as "Live TV" in the TiVo's interface. As an added benefit, that means I can record directly from the PowerBook to the TiVo, which is a slightly odd sensation. I haven't tried recording with a DVD yet, but it worked flawlessly with a QuickTime movie.
The iTV Link really is a different beast from Apple's Mini-DVI to Video Adapter; it's a complete solution for sending audio and video to your television, whereas the Mini-DVD to Video Adapter is just that, an adapter that makes it possible for you to plug an S-video or composite cable into your Mac. So if you want to integrate your PowerBook or iBook into your home entertainment system, the $40 iTV Link is worth a try; if all you want to do is have the capability to use a television as a presentation screen, Apple's $20 adapter is all you need.
<http://www.smalldog.com/product/12652174>
ToC
by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#785/27-Jun-05
Before our May trip to New Mexico, my friend Oliver Habicht asked if I wanted to borrow a Canary Wireless Digital Hotspotter, which is one of those little devices for finding wireless networks without needing to pull out the PowerBook. My initial reaction was, "Nah, I like walking around with my PowerBook open!" to show off both the PowerBook and its wireless capabilities, but with a moment's rational thought, I reconsidered and accepted Oliver's kind offer. And in fact, the Digital Hotspotter proved useful to us in Taos, where we desperately needed to find high speed Internet access, since our host for the night was, coincidentally enough, Oliver's mother, who had only a modem connection to the Internet.
<http://www.canarywireless.com/>
Physically, the Digital Hotspotter is unprepossessing. It's roughly 2.5" by 2" by 1" (6.3 x 5.1 x 2.5 cm) and is made of gray plastic. Unlike some of the early portable wireless network detectors, which had only LEDs, the Digital Hotspotter sports a 12-character LCD display across which information about the networks scrolls. A single button turns it on and starts a scan; it turns off automatically after displaying available network information to save the power provided by a pair of AAA batteries. It feels sturdy, and I didn't worry about it breaking when it was rattling around in my PowerBook bag.
Like sniffers such as KisMAC, the Digital Hotspotter performs a passive scan that can detect closed networks (they appear as "Cloaked" in the display). In contrast, stumblers like MacStumbler and iStumbler perform active probes that both fail to detect closed networks and show up in KisMAC's display (the Digital Hotspotter isn't designed to detect active probes). For each network it detects, it displays the network name, the signal strength, the channel, and the encryption status (Open or Secure, where Secure means WEP- or WPA-encrypted, although it doesn't differentiate between WEP and WPA). If more than one network is available, clicking the button multiple times cycles through the display for each one.
<http://www.binaervarianz.de/projekte/programmieren/kismac/>
<http://www.macstumbler.com/>
<http://www.istumbler.com/>
We didn't need the Digital Hotspotter for the first few days of our trip, since wireless Internet access was widely and obviously available. The Albuquerque airport had signs telling everyone that they offered free wireless access, two of the user group meetings at which I was presenting provided access, and Robin Williams and John Tollett of course had wireless access at their house. But once we ventured past Santa Fe on our way to Taos, locating a connection became more difficult. We figured we could eventually find a coffee shop in Taos that would have it, but amazingly, the main one we happened on, the World Cup coffee house, had no wireless network. However, walking a bit further into the Taos Plaza in the center of town and checking regularly with the Digital Hotspotter, we found a network called "made_in_new_mexico" that was wide open and clearly run by the Made in New Mexico store on the Plaza. Using laptops outside in the sunshine isn't the easiest, but we managed to settle on some park benches and take a quick pass through email. Amusingly, a woman saw us working away, Tonya on the iBook, me on the PowerBook, and was ecstatic both that we'd found wireless Internet access and, a moment later, that I knew how to configure Mac OS 9 on her blueberry iBook so it could connect. The next day, before leaving town, we checked mail again, and made a point of stopping in the Made in New Mexico store to thank them and pick up some presents for our parents.
One thing we discovered while playing with the Digital Hotspotter during the trip was that it is more sensitive than our laptops, and I've always considered Tonya's white iBook as the gold standard of laptop sensitivity. If the Digital Hotspotter reports a network as having only a single bar of signal strength, laptops may not be able to lock onto the signal sufficiently.
Although I'm not into wardriving, I recently took the Digital Hotspotter with me while driving to a chiropractor appointment here in Ithaca. On the drive, which is about four miles through rural and lightly populated suburban countryside, the Digital Hotspotter detected eight networks, though some may have been too weak to use for real. All but one lacked encryption, and four of the eight had default network names ("default" or "linksys" in these cases). Interestingly, there may have been even more networks that it missed; Canary Wireless is up front about the fact that there are some access points that the Digital Hotspotter has trouble seeing. In fact, it can see my old Linksys BEFW11S4 wireless gateway, but not if I disable SSID broadcast, thus making it a closed network.
<http://www.canarywireless.com/default.asp?action=article&ID=16>
(Public service note: Even if you wish to leave your wireless network open such that anyone can use it, I strongly encourage you to change the network name and admin password. If you leave them at the default settings, it's trivial for anyone with a modicum of experience to take over and reconfigure your wireless gateway. And if that happens, you'll have to - at the least - reset your gateway to factory defaults and reconfigure it properly.)
Given that it costs $60, I don't personally have enough use for the Digital Hotspotter to buy my own. However, anyone who travels regularly and needs wireless Internet access would find it useful, as would anyone who works with wireless networks for a living and needs to perform security audits, since it's good for verifying where your network is available and for identifying rogue access points.
ToC
by Glenn Fleishman <glenn@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#788/18-Jul-05
A few days after Apple pushed out Mac OS X 10.4.2, which includes client-side changes to AirPort software to support a newer, stronger encryption system, the company released AirPort Software 4.2, incorporating the necessary base station support. Separate versions are available via Software Update or as stand-alone downloads for Mac OS X 10.3.3 through 10.3.9, 10.4.2, and Windows.
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airport42formacosx1033.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airport42formacosx1042.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airport42forwindows.html>
This update adds full support for WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access version 2), which provides an access point the capability to offer AES (Advanced Encryption System) encryption keys. Only newer hardware sold starting in late 2002 can handle the computation required, so original AirPort cards and base stations cannot be updated to handle WPA2.
The original WPA, which appeared as an update to Panther, offers a superior encryption algorithm and other improvements for Wi-Fi security for AirPort Cards, AirPort Extreme Cards, and AirPort Extreme and Express Base Stations (see "AirPort Firmware Updates Fix Major Bugs" in TidBITS-760_). WPA2 is a further refinement - technically, it's the full ratified version of IEEE 802.11i - that works only with AirPort Extreme Cards when connecting to WPA2 Personal- or WPA2 Enterprise-configured networks. AirPort Cards cannot support WPA2 because of limitations in silicon; WPA was designed to be backward compatible with early 802.11b cards, such as the AirPort Card.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07932>
Some businesses have been waiting until WPA2 was released before deploying their Wi-Fi networks because of its government-grade encryption. WPA2 also has a few features that add to WPA, such as fast reauthentication, which allows a laptop using WPA2 Enterprise - a system that uses a unique login that produces a unique session key - to roam without a long delay when moving from base station to base station.
AirPort 4.2 includes new versions of AirPort Admin Utility and AirPort Setup Assistant, and firmware updates for both AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express Base Stations.
This update brings Apple current with the rest of the industry. Interestingly, older WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption is all that is available for the software base station created through the Create Network command in the AirPort status menu. WEP is cryptographically broken; one hopes Apple will eventually offer at least WPA for improved security of ad hoc networks.
ToC
TidBITS#783/13-Jun-05
Apple released Security Update 2005-006 last week, fixing the usual miscellany of possible security holes in services such as the AFP Server, Bluetooth, CoreGraphics, folder permissions, launchd, LaunchServices, MCX Client, NFS, PHP, and the VPN server. All of the holes apply to Mac OS 10.4 Tiger (both client and server versions), but only the Bluetooth and PHP fixes are relevant for those still running Panther, and the VPN fix was already rolled into Mac OS 10.3.9 by a previous security update. For full details, see Apple's description; the download ranges from 3.9 MB to 6.4 MB, depending on the version you need and whether you get it via Software Update or as a stand-alone download. [ACE]
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301742>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/securityupdate2005006macosx1041.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/securityupdate2005006macosx1039.html>
by Geoff Duncan <geoff@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#787/11-Jul-05
Smith Micro Software, Inc. announced its acquisition of Allume Systems, Inc. for $11 million in cash and $1.75 million in Smith Micro stock. Allume, formerly known as Aladdin Systems, is the maker of long-standard StuffIt compression products as well as Spring Cleaning and a number of other Macintosh utilities. The company also recently took over distribution of Corel's graphic products for the Mac under the name Creative Essentials, including CorelDRAW and Corel PHOTO-PAINT. Allume was previously acquired by International Microcomputer Software, Inc. (IMSI) in August 2004.
<http://www.smithmicro.com/default.tpl?group=news_full&id1=273&id2=13>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07806>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07773>
Smith Micro's interest in Allume focuses on the company's development of a new JPEG compression technology that further reduces image sizes by up to 30 percent without additional loss of image quality. Smith Micro plans to license the technology to wireless operators and handset makers, as well as apply it to MPEG video and MP3 audio along with images.
In the Mac world, the acquisition will no doubt cause some trepidation. Allume has a long history with the Macintosh: for instance, its StuffIt compression technology served as the de facto standard for Macs beginning in 1986, and the ubiquitous StuffIt Expander has long been a part of every Mac user's toolkit. Conversely, in the Mac world Smith Micro is best-known (if not well-loved) for its FAXstf line of fax software products, although the company also develops QuickConnect connectivity software for wireless devices. At present Smith Micro seems to plan to keep Allume's products around in their current forms; considering that Allume accounted for about $2.5 million of IMSI's revenues during the first quarter of 2005, it seems unlikely Smith Micro will simply turn off the tantalizing, pre-existing revenue stream represented by Allume's existing products.
ToC
TidBITS#786/04-Jul-05
Microsoft has released Virtual PC 7.0.2, a free minor update that provides full compatibility with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. In particular, the update fixes problems under Tiger with Virtual Switch, Zero Configuration Printing, and the Dock Start Menu. The update is a 17 MB download and will update versions 7.0 and 7.0.1. Microsoft also announced that new copies of Virtual PC 7 purchased before 30-Sep-05 would be eligible for a $30 rebate. [ACE]
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=/mac/download/misc/vpc7_0_2.xml>
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/virtualpc/rebate/rebate.html>
TidBITS#788/18-Jul-05
Apple last week released iPhoto 5.0.3, fixing a few issues in the photo management program. Two improvements involve books: layouts no longer change when moving an image, and a problem that caused some book orders to be cancelled has been fixed. Smart albums also now appear correctly in other iLife programs. And lastly, with Mac OS X 10.4.2 installed, editing an image no longer shifts its colors, a bug that had caused significant consternation. The iPhoto 5.0.3 Update is available from Software Update as a 41 MB download, or as a stand-alone 39.2 MB download. [JLC]
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/iphoto503update.html>
ToC
TidBITS#788/18-Jul-05
Apple's professional line of video editing applications saw updates last week to fix bugs and improve performance. Final Cut Pro 5.0.2, DVD Studio Pro 4.0.1, and Soundtrack Pro 1.0.1 are each available as separate downloads. If you own the entire Final Cut Studio (which also includes Motion 2), you can download a 46 MB updater that applies the fixes to each affected program. [JLC]
<http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/finalcutpro502update.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/dvdstudiopro401update.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/soundtrackpro101update.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/finalcutstudioupdates.html>
TidBITS#788/18-Jul-05
Apple announced that it sold the 500 millionth track via its iTunes Music Store on 17-Jul-05: the song was "Mississippi Girl" by Faith Hill, and Apple's giveaway winner is Amy Greer from Lafayette, Indiana. She'll receive 10 iPods of her choosing, an iTMS gift card for 10,000 songs, and a free trip for four to see the band Coldplay perform. For the interminably curious, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store over two years ago in late April 2003, but just crossed the 300-million-downloads mark in March of this year. If iTMS's sales remained flat, Apple could expect to sell its one-billionth track in about a year; however, the iPod's still- growing sales and popularity will probably bring that date much closer. [GD]
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jul/18itms.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=08166>
TidBITS#786/04-Jul-05
In conjunction with the release of iTunes 4.9, Apple merged its iPod and iPod photo product lines. Gone are the black and white screens that appear on most current iPods - it's all color now. The new lineup includes a 20 GB iPod for $300 and a 60 GB iPod for $400. Apple also introduced a 20 GB iPod U2 edition (black body, now color screen) for $330. At the same time, the price of the 1 GB iPod shuffle has been reduced to $130. [JLC]
ToC
by Andy J. Williams Affleck <andyjw@raggedcastle.com>
TidBITS#786/04-Jul-05
Apple last week released iTunes 4.9, adding extensive support for finding, subscribing to, and managing podcasts, which are audio files that are made available for anyone on the Internet download and listen to (see "Podcasting: The People's Radio" in TidBITS-766_). The new podcast support adds to iTunes functionality that previously required the use of separate programs such as iPodder, iPodderX, NetNewsWire, and others. With iTunes 4.9, Apple has made the process of finding, subscribing to, and listening to podcasts simpler than ever before, but notable confusions and oversights remain to be corrected in future versions of iTunes.
<http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07986>
Launch iTunes 4.9, and you'll see a new Podcasts item in the left-hand column (the Source pane). This is the management interface for podcasts to which you've subscribed. Syndicated podcasts that you can choose to receive appear in the iTunes Music Store as a new genre when browsing.
To view Apple's directory of podcasts, click the Podcast Directory link at the bottom of the screen. Or, you can click the Music Store link in the Source pane, and choose the Podcasts link to browse. As with music in the store, a glitzy page showcases podcasts. Select a podcast or a podcast category to see the same familiar views used to navigate and buy music. The podcast directory is haphazard, containing some moribund podcasts and lacking others that are current, active, and quite popular. Luckily, Apple provides a way on the main Podcasts page in the store to suggest new podcasts and also a way to request the removal of a podcast. Apple hasn't clarified how they will opt to follow suggestions for addition or removal.
<http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewGenre?genreId=26>
<https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/publishPodcast>
Once you find podcasts that interest you, subscribe to them by clicking a simple Subscribe button (which replaces the "Buy" button found on songs). The podcast is listed on your Podcasts page, and the most recent episode is automatically downloaded (more on this later).
All podcasts currently in the iTunes Music Store are free, but there is no reason to assume that this will always be the case. Apple appears to be preparing for that day by featuring podcasts offered by larger media outlets, including public radio, while relegating the early initiators of the distribution format to an Indie category that appears at the bottom of the Podcasts splash page. (Of course, some podcasters will welcome a mechanism by which they can offer for-fee podcasts for premium content just the way that certain radio shows are sold via Audible, Apple, and others now.)
You're not limited to Apple's list, of course. To subscribe to a podcast that's not in Apple's directory, you must first find the syndication link that includes podcasts on the site that's offering the audio downloads. Copy the link, which often ends in .rss or .xml. Then choose Subscribe to Podcast from the Advanced menu in iTunes 4.9 and paste the link. Click OK, and if the link is correct, the podcast appears in the Podcasts list via the Source menu.
Unsubscribing to a podcast is a two-step process. First, you select the podcast in the list and click the Unsubscribe button in the bottom right of the iTunes window. This leaves the podcast listed among your subscribed podcasts with a Subscribe button next to it and retains all episodes you have already downloaded. To remove it (and all episodes) from the list you must Control-click on it and choose Clear from the contextual menu. If you perform this second step first, you can unsubscribe and delete all podcast files at once.
In the iTunes 4.9 preferences, you can set the frequency that iTunes checks for new episodes, how many to download if there are more than one at the time checked, and how many to retain.
Unfortunately, these preferences are global for all podcasts, lacking the granular control provided by other programs that specialize or include podcasts. For instance, NetNewsWire Pro 2.0 allows you to set automatic downloads (but not the number of downloads or items retained) for each feed, as well as a global preference.
A new setting in the iTunes preferences lets you choose which podcasts are synchronized to your iPod (all models except the iPod shuffle, to which you must copy podcasts manually, since Autofill ignores podcasts, much as it ignores audio books) and, of those subscriptions, whether so synchronize all, new, unplayed, or checked episodes. On the iPod, podcasts are also grouped into a single Podcasts playlist and do not appear in other playlists unless you manually put them there in iTunes. Click Wheel iPods display a top-level Podcasts menu item; podcasts on older iPods appear as a Podcasts playlist.
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300558>
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301880>
In iTunes, podcasts are grouped together into the Podcasts entry in the Source list on the left. In fact, they are listed only there; they do not show up in the main library, nor do they appear in any playlists. You can add them to normal playlists manually, but you cannot use smart playlists to manage your podcast listening, a major oversight on Apple's part.
A blue dot next to a podcast name indicates an unheard episode. As with other songs in iTunes, a small speaker icon next to the name indicates that you are listening to, or were in the middle of listening to, a show.
By opening the disclosure triangle next to each podcast in your subscription list, you can view all episodes currently listed in the podcast's syndication feed, which is usually the last five episodes. Download shows that have not been retrieved already by clicking the Get Show button.
To find older episodes, you must visit the podcast's Web site, which takes some doing. First, you must click the right-facing arrow after the podcast's name (assuming you haven't turned these arrows off in your iTunes preferences.) If the podcast is not in the iTunes Music Store (that is, you subscribed to it manually), you will go directly to that podcast's Web site. If, however, the podcast is in the store, you will go to its page in the store where you will find a link to take you to its Web site.
A welcome addition is the information button (an i in a circle) to the far right of each episode which displays the show notes for that episode. Show notes are information - metadata, more technically - about each episode provided by the show's creator. Now you can see what a given show is about before you download it. (This metadata is indexed by Spotlight, making it easier to find archived podcasts on a system running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.)
As noted earlier, the TiVo-like options in iTunes preferences for choosing whether to keep All, All Unplayed, Most Recent, or 2, 3, 4, or 10 episodes can't be set on a podcast-by-podcast basis. Some people may want to keep only the latest versions of podcasts rather than letting them pile up and filling their hard drive while others may be devotees of certain shows and want to hear every single one, no matter how far behind they may fall. I like to keep all the episodes of serials such as The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd regardless of whether they have been heard or not (my five-year-old loves them), whereas I'd prefer to keep only the most recent episode of news-based shows. The only workaround is to keep everything and manually delete older episodes, a tedious process at best.
In another oversight, iTunes could better refine how it manages podcast files. If I listen to an episode and want to remove the file from my hard drive, the only option within iTunes is to select the episode and hit the Delete key, or Control-click it and choose Clear. That action removes the entry from the list of episodes and, optionally, the file from my hard drive. But what if I later want to download it again for some reason? It no longer even appears in the list of episodes with a Get button. It's completely gone. The only way I can find to remove a file but leave the entry in the list is to Control-click on the entry, choose Show Song File from the contextual menu, and then manually move it to the Trash. Even then, the show is still listed as if it were still there and there is no Get button even after iTunes figures out that the file is missing.
Listening to podcasts in iTunes is the same as listening to any music: double-click and listen (or select the podcast and click the play button). iTunes remembers at which point you left off if you stop listening to an episode, so you can easily go back to that point - regardless of file format, which is convenient and a welcome addition to iTunes.
But iTunes 4.9 also suffers from a major bug in that a podcast is marked as played the instant you begin listening to it, as opposed to when you finish listening to it, as with songs. So, if you have iTunes set to keep only unplayed podcasts and you listen to the first 10 seconds of a podcast and then stop to save it for later, it will vanish the next time iTunes updates (according to the schedule you have set in iTunes Preferences). This bug also affects synchronization to an iPod if you base the sync on unplayed episodes. Apple should either create a new category called "In Progress" so you know which podcasts you are in the middle of, or they should treat podcasts like all other music: consider a file as played only within a few seconds of the end. Personally, I'd like to see both: consider a podcast unheard until the last few seconds (not the actual last second as the iPod does) and provide a way to see which podcasts I have started but not finished.
Apple introduced its own podcast, the New Music Tuesday Podcast, which demonstrates a new, exciting feature: bookmarks within a single podcast. Apple's podcast showcases a number of different artists, and as the podcast plays, the album art display on the lower left changes to reflect the current artist. In addition, a new bookmarks menu appears to left of the main track display to provide immediate access to each artist/segment in the list. Apple also released a beta command line tool called the Podcast Chapter Tool which helps power users build their own such menus for their shows. To download it, click Publish a Podcast in the Podcasts page of the iTunes Music Store, click Learn More about Podcasting on iTunes, and scroll all the way to the bottom of that page.
Podcasts work on all iPods, but an updater released last week for fourth generation iPods - those with the click wheel - provides additional podcast support, such as bookmarkability for all podcasts regardless of format, the capability to display show notes by clicking the center button twice, and scrolling long podcast names in the main display. It's possible that older iPods may pick up these new features as well in the future, much as most of the new features of the Click Wheel iPods were rolled out to earlier generation iPods some months after the Click Wheel models were released.
Apple's entry into podcasting is the first for a major company and quite well done for an initial effort. That said, there are a number of significant problems that need to be addressed. I suspect many power users will prefer to stick to their current methods of podcast management so they can continue to take advantage of smart playlists, better file management, and the like. But for the majority of users, iTunes 4.9 does the job and will help take podcasts further into the mainstream.
Support for the popularity of the feature comes from early reports that major media sites, like KCRW, have had enormous boosts in their podcast listenership since iTunes 4.9's release. The L.A. Times reported that KCRW saw an increase from 3,500 to 100,000 daily - yes, daily - downloads of its programs. Other reports noted that iTunes users signed up for a total of one million subscriptions in the first two days.
That popularity is also revealing a few kinks in the system: at least some subscriptions are redirected through Apple's servers rather than downloaded directly, and some of the more popular shows have appeared as inaccessible for some people. Hopefully, these are just short-term glitches.
iTunes 4.9 is free, and you can get it from Software Update or from Apple's Web site as an 11.1 MB download.
<http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/>
[Andy J. Williams Affleck is a project manager for a U.S. federal government contractor and an expert in usable accessibility in Web design. He's long been fascinated by any tool to allow the individual to communicate to others, be it newsletters, email, weblogs, podcasting, or whatever comes next.]
ToC
by Johnny C. Kitchens
URL: http://www.amigamccc.org/journal/0507jami.htm
It's hard to believe, but July 2005 marks the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of the Amiga to the world. Twenty years is a very long time for a computer to be around, and it would be incredible for any consumer electronics to hang around that long. I have written articles for the fifth, tenth and fifteenth anniversary for the Amiga, and each time I wondered if it would be around for another anniversary. Once it passed the tenth, it seemed to be a yearly wonder of whether it would survive or fade away. The last five years certainly have been even more of that. While we have had some news to make us scratch our heads and wonder, we have had too much silence that makes us wonder what is going on. In this case no news may be good news, as we certainly do not need any more bad news.
The worst news of the last five years is that the Amiga has once again changed hands. This probably has created more silence on what is going on than any other event that I can remember. The new owner seems to have clamped down on any news about what is going on. A few little announcements here and there, but nothing to get excited about. The only other news that can come close to being as bad, is that AmigaOS 4.0 still is not out, and we have been told enough times of its impending release to make any announcement about it coming out almost worthless as a news item. As I was in the process of preparing this article the announcement of a new pre-release came out. It is to be the final pre-release before the real thing comes out.
The good news of the past five years, is that the AmigaONE has arrived. Not just one version, but three different versions. With the release of the AmigaONE, there has been a steady flow of beta versions of the new AmigaOS to keep things somewhat interesting for those that own one. There is also the promise of lots of software for the AmigaONE, but they are forced to wait for the the release of AmigaOS 4.0. From what I have seen of the AmigaONE and the beta OS, it appears to be a match made in heaven. The PowerPC is a very efficient processor, and the AmigaOS really takes advantage of it. For those of us waiting for the OS to be released before making a move to the new hardware it really is tough to keep waiting. In the past five years PC hardware has made some rather impressive advances, and thanks to some rather clever emulation software, fans of the Amiga can take advantage of the PC hardware advances. Using even less than state of the art PC hardware can yield some rather amazing Amiga performance numbers. I watched a test using a processor that was top of the line two years ago give Amiga performance equal to fifty Amiga 4000s running 25 Mhz 68040. The fastest 68060 will equal about eight Amiga 4000s.
Speaking of these emulators, take a look at Amiga Forever 6.0. While its emulation is great, take a look at the video of the Amiga coming out event that Commodore held in 1985. Still looks incredible, even today! CPU development has reached a level of development that has brought it face to face with an old enemy - heat. Packing more and more transistors into smaller and smaller areas has caused the heat problem to be a barrier to overcome for current processor designs. To overcome the problem and to keep things moving, 64 bit processors, multiple processors and multi-core processors are the rage. It would be nice to see the Amiga get to use some of these developments as they come out, but as it stands it will be tough just to get to see the Amiga use the G5 PowerPC. Something needs to happen, and soon, for the Amiga or it will never catch up, if it can at all.
Even with all of these disadvantages, the Amiga still can keep me happy. I can cruise the Internet with its less-than-perfect browser without worrying about virus infections or spyware attacks and get to do everything I want to do every day. There are few things that do not work that I wish did, but for the most part, I keep surfing along. I consider this an advantage that is tough to give up. I really like the software I use on a regular basis on the Amiga, especially PageStream. I had to use what is considered the top-of-the-line PC desktop publishing software for a few months, and found it to be as archaic to use as imaginable. Things that I thought were simple to do in PageStream, such as text resizing, were a real pain in this piece of software. On the other hand, I am jealous that a PC owner can buy whatever piece of hardware there is out there, such as printer and be able to use it right away. How long has it been since there was an update of printer drivers for the Amiga? You would need to buy a used or an out of date printer to match up to the latest drivers available for the Amiga. Will any of this change? Maybe! Will the Amiga be around for its twenty-fifth anniversary? Maybe! Will I be here to write a twenty-fifth anniversary article? I sure hope so.
As I was wrapping up this article, a new bit of news hit the computer world that I thought should be part of this article. Apple announced they were moving from the PowerPC to the Intel processor. Immediately the Amiga community wondered how this might change things for the Amiga. It is unknown, and predicting such things is futile. Hopefully it will eliminate the PowerPC shortage that always seemed to occur with the top of the line PowerPC chips. I always heard that they were hard to get because Apple was buying them all up. Some are thinking it will kill the PowerPC. Do not worry about that! The PowerPC is a big seller in the embedded market and in servers. It won't hurt IBM, as they will be busy making PowerPC chips for the huge imbedded market and they will be making processors for the X-Box 360 and Playstation 3. Just imagine being in that situation! IBM already makes a version of the PowerPC for the current Nintendo console. You may remember the last time that Apple switched processors, the effect on the Amiga market was not terrible, but there was an effect. The 68060 announced in 1991 took a lot longer to show up than it should have, and even a little longer after that to be readily available. Apple never used the 68060, as Commodore never used it. The Amiga did get to use the processor in the form of aftermarket accelerators. The price was never very reasonable due to the small market for them. Where would the 68000 series processor be if Apple had stayed with it? This is the sort of thing that the Amiga market could face again. Long development times for new PowerPC chips. With the switch to Intel processors, there will be a lot of cheap used PowerPC Macs out there. If we could just get AmigaOS 4.0 to run on those! Although I have never been a big fan of the Macintosh, Apple's innovations with the PowerPC have at least kept my interest enough to pay attention to their line and even get excited by some of their models. Will that happen with their switch to Intel processors? We will see.
Another bit of news that may be of interest to Amiga history buffs, if only for the small part in played in the history of the Amiga. The Transmeta Corporation has announced the end of the Crusoe chip. This chip got linked to the Amiga when it appeared that the future of the Amiga would be tied to this chip. It appears that this was all propaganda just to give the Amiga community something to talk about. Perhaps they were just gauging our reaction, or trying to influence investors. We may never know.
I've always celebrated July 23 as the Amiga's birthday, so when that day rolls around, take a moment and think about how amazing it is that something like this could hang around for 20 years, and it is still going.
ToC
reported by Kevin Hopkins (kh2@uiuc.edu)
June 16, 2005 -- The General meeting began with Vice President Emil Cobb performing the traditional introduction of officers and guest.
The floor was immediately opened up for Questions and Answers:
Phil Wall talked about Yahoo DSL being offered for $14.95 a month. He wanted to know if that was good. Harold Ravlin talked about SBC's DSL which he noted was $27 per month "if they ever get the billing right." Anthony Philipp said DSL will let you have servers. Richard Rollins noted that DSL is not available everywhere. George Krumins related his experience with his cable connection.
Jerry Feltner asked if the Rural Electrification Agency was promoting a new satellite system for Internet connection.
Someone asked about a sound problem they were having with Windows 95.
David Noreen distributed IGA community support sheets to help out Prairienet.
Wayne Hamilton had a toner cartridge question about his HP Laserjet II. Someone noted that Laser's Edge on Mattis Avenue sells refurbished toner cartridges. They are also available on the web.
Kevin Hopkins showed a external drive case he purchased out at Computer Deli with (some cash and) one of the gift certificates the Deli had provided to support the club. The problem he was having was that the DVD drive he had put in the case was not being recognized by his Mac. It was determined that the DVD drive was PC specific and would not work as a Mac accessory.
Richard Rollins brought up the topic of Apple moving to Intel processors. A lively discussion ensued. Harold Ravlin noted that Apple's intentions track better with Intel's development roadmap than with that of IBM and the PowerPC. It is believed that Apple will begin the conversion with its low end models first, following with the desktops later.
George Krumins reported on XBox and Playstation news. Mike Latinovich offered addition information. Among the items revealed are that there will be a hard drive in Microsoft's XBox and Sony will be using memory cards in the Playstation.
Jim Berger said he was having hardware problems. Someone recommended TuffTest (http://www.tufftest.com) as very useful in ferreting out problems. Harold Ravlin and Mike Latinovich both recommended MemTest 86 for analyzing memory based problems.
http://www.memtest86.com/
http://www.memtest.org/
Wayne Hamilton has a laptop he wants to update from Windows 95 to Windows 98.
ToC
reported by Kevin Hopkins (kh2@uiuc.edu)
The June meeting of the CUCUG executive board took place on Tuesday, June 21, 2005, at 7PM, at Kevin Hisel's house. (For anyone wishing to attend - which is encouraged, by the way - the address and phone number are both in the book). Present at the meeting were: Richard Rollins, Emil Cobb, Kevin Hopkins, Kevin Hisel, Rich Hall, and Anthony Philipp.
Rich Hall: Treasurer Rich Hall said he had nothing special to report. There were no new memberships or renewals at the last meeting.
Anthony Philipp: Anthony reported that Phil Wall may no longer wish to be Linux SIG Chairman anymore. Anthony offered to co-chair.
Kevin Hopkins: Kevin reported that the renewal for the club's P.O. Box had come up and that he and Rich Hall had taken care of that bit of business. Kevin then distributed mail from the P.O. Box.
On a personal note, Kevin asked a question about QuickTime on the PC. He was able to player QuickTime movies but he had no sound. [It turned out that another application (it might have been iTunes) had hijacked the sound. Re-installing Windows Media Player somehow freed it up and now the movies play properly.]
Kevin Hisel: Kevin Hisel reported there had been a server issue on the club's web site but that it went away.
Kevin advanced the idea of doing a presentation on Firefox extensions. Anthony said Mark Zinzow had done one for the U of I PC group and might be enticed to do it for CUCUG. A discussion on various Firefox extensions ensued. Kevin particularly like one called Stumble Upon. Described thusly: "Stumble Upon lets you 'stumble upon' cool websites that have been highly recommended (rated Great!) by friends and community members with interests similar to your own." You can access Firefox's extensions by going to Tools/Extensions. Other extensions mentioned were Ad BLock, Bookmark Synchronize, BugMeNot (bugmenot.com), and Image Zoom.
Emil Cobb: Emil said that the Mac SIG will investigate Widgets for Mac OS 10.4 next month.
He also reported 23 attendees at the Last meeting; 13 coming early to attend the Linux SIG.
Richard Rollins: Richard said he enjoyed the last meeting because Emil had to start it off while he attended to downloading a patch for the router.
Once again, Richard voiced his plea for "programs/presentations." They don't have to be long - 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 10 minutes, anything. They can be on any software or hardware you find interesting or useful.
Richard also brought up the sore point of "talking during the Q & A session." It's a problem. We really want to encourage discussion and the free exchange of information, but that's just the wrong time to break into a bunch of little discussion groups when other people are trying to talk and be heard. Please help us keep focused.
Richard said Steve Gast might be interested in presenting "devices to control devices."
ToC
Meetings are held the third Thursday of each month at 7:00 p.m. at the First Baptist Church of Champaign in Savoy. The FBC-CS is located at 1602 N. Prospect Avenue in Savoy, on the NE corner of Burwash and Prospect. To get to the the First Baptist Church from Champaign or Urbana, take Prospect Avenue south. Setting the trip meter in your car to zero at the corner of Kirby/Florida and Prospect in Champaign (Marathon station on the SW corner), you only go 1.6 miles south. Windsor will be at the one mile mark. The Savoy village sign (on the right) will be at the 1.4 mile mark. Burwash is at the 1.6 mile mark. The Windsor of Savoy retirement community is just to the south; Burwash Park is to the east. Turn east (left) on Burwash. The FBC-CS parking lot entrance is on the north (left) side of Burwash. Enter by the double doors at the eastern end of the building's south side. A map can be found on the CUCUG website at http://www.cucug.org/meeting.html. The First Baptist Church of Champaign is also on the web at http://www.fbc-cs.org .
Membership dues for individuals are $20 annually; prorated to $10 at mid year.
Our monthly newsletter, the Status Register, is delivered by email. All recent editions are available on our WWW site. To initiate a user group exchange, just send us your newsletter or contact our editor via email. As a matter of CUCUG policy, an exchange partner will be dropped after three months of no contact.
For further information, please attend the next meeting as our guest, or contact one of our officers (all at area code 217):
President/WinSIG: Richard Rollins 469-2616 Vice-Pres/MacSIG: Emil Cobb 398-0149 e-cobb@uiuc.edu Secretary/Editor: Kevin Hopkins 356-5026 kh2@uiuc.edu Treasurer: Richard Hall 344-8687 rjhall1@uiuc.edu Corp.Agent/Web: Kevin Hisel 406-948-1999 contact/index.html Linux SIG: Phil Wall 352-5442 phil.wall@pobox.com
Email us at http://www.cucug.org/ contact/index.html, visit our web site at http://www.cucug.org/, or join in our online forums at http://www.cucug.org/starship/ .
