I'm sure Woody Guthrie would approve!

The lamest bit of phishing I've seen!

Why I still dislike Apple and all they do
Yesterday I had to set up a edit suite based around FinalCut ProHD (v 4.1) - what a painful experience. No extra internal hardware on the G5 - plain vanilla machine with a fresh install of Panther and 1gig of RAM. The first four attempts at opening the capture tool resulted in the machine throwing a kernal panic and me having to re-boot (if it were really Unix I could have fired up a command prompt and KILL'ed the process - but that's another story!). Apparently this is well known if there is no video input but I intentially made sure there was stable video on all three inputs!

Anyhow

• This typifies "Mac people" - I was having an online discussion with someone about Tiger (the latest instance of OS-X) and they mentioned that if you Apple-K on the keyboard during boot you see all the "ugly Unix stuff" (the messages from various modules as they start). This obsession with the style and look of things blinds them to the real underlying power. It is how Apple managed to run all the way to 2002 with an OS (v.7 to v.9) that was technically ten years behind Windows (OS9 compared very well with Windows 3 - cooperative multi-tasker and memory management that needs to be disabled for any sensible apps to run!) and twenty years behind Unix. Never mind the quality - feel the anti-aliased founts!
  
• OS-X is Unix - it isn't! Nobody has regarded BSD as a proper Unix since the early nineties! That and the fact that The Open Group (see the story on C/NET) is still litigating, and not for the reasons Apple suggest - they really want all OSes that claim to be Unix to be submitted to the tests that confirm performance & compliance.
  
• Apple break all hardware standards they adopt - RS422, SCSI, PCI, need I say more?
  
• Linus Torvalds (who knows more about OS design than me or you!) says OS-X is a piece of crap.
  
• Apple would turn us all into consummers of their digital "stuff" - iTunes comoditises music in a way I don't like - why engage with an artist when you can cherry pick their greatest hits? Take no risks, buy only songs you've heard on the radio or seen on MTV and we'll turn into a society that only has place for Christina and Britney. Corporate America will have won.

New SGI supercomputer to scale Linux to 1,024 CPUs - wow, that's scalability! The most processors I ever got Windows working with was four!

Has MasterCard gone on a phishing trip, leaving the back door wide open? - Oh dear!

BBC NEWS | Technology | Schoolboys create mobile seeker - Very cool!

How do you terminate video? - a neat little sheet from AVC.

Rude clients are an annoyance!
I have to go and visit customer sites to quote for installation work regularly - some are as nice as pie (and it isn't just down to the coffee!) and some are stand-offish and disinterested (even though you may be subsequently spending tens of thousands of their cash). It costs nothing to be pleasant and those customers who've made me feel welcome always get seen to first subsequently - if I'm passing and they have a problem I pop in that day and fix it for free - but the rude ones....! They can wait!
You get the best out of people when you treat them well. I may be the hired help but don't behave like I'm a servant!

Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine Online | Feature Article: Taming Kerberos - Having sat through a presentation eariler this week on how well OS-X plays with Active Directory I decided my knowledge of Kerberos was somewhat lacking! Get all the info you need here.

Toddlers' plastic swords seized - Europe gone mad!

Live subtitles with DivX movies
Image adjustment (Pan & Scan, aspect ratio correction, overscan compensation)

High quality subtitle display in windowed and full-screen mode in any player (including Windows Media Player).

DivXG400 supports almost every known subtitle format: SubViewer 1.0, 2.0, SubRip, MicroDVD, SAMI, Sub Station Alpha 3.0, 4.0, JACOsub, DVDSubtitle, VobSub
3.0, 4.0, TMPlayer, SMIL-RealText, AqTitle. Additionally, MicroDVD INI-files are accepted as a wrappers to real subtitle files.

Subtitle output to TV in DVDMax mode (of course, all "classical" modes are supported, too)

Near to 24fps clip playback at 25fps

Apple rebuked over G5 speed-lead claim - again | The Register - yeah, I thought I'd been working on 64-bit processor machines for the last ten years as well!