Hopeless Geek

Okay … get this shit:

Al Qaeda is stepping up efforts to sneak terrorists into the U.S. and has rebuilt most of its capability to strike here, an intelligence estimate states, according to The Associated Press.
CNN Email Alert

Now, if we know this, are we supposed to feel safer now that the government knows this, more scared that they could attack, or furious as hell that they know and have done nothing about it despite taking away every damned freedom they could in the past six years?

I vote furious.

The president’s ratings have fallen through the floor, hovering somewhere around a 30% approval these days. We, as a people, strongly dislike where he’s taken the nation, and greatly fear the fact that he is completely and intentionally oblivious to what the American people want him to do. He feels that he’s American’s God-given-and-directed leader and that he can do no wrong. We feel he’s a lunatic jackass hell-bent on destroying American’s hard-earned goodwill in the world.

Why aren’t we, the people, looking at kicking his ass out?

With enough support from the public (it would need a lot) we could get the Democrat-controlled congress to put forward a vote to initiate a recall election for the presidential office. We have that power. We’re not just sitting idly by in this carriage and waiting for the ride to be over; we can end this now with the power of our own governmental system.

Consider the following:

• The iPhone is said to run a reduced version of Mac OS X that is “well under” a gigabyte in size, perhaps even as small as 512MB, while keeping Core Animation.
• The tv has animations and transitions a la Core Animation as well as handling protected file formats, QuickTime-powered video, and talking to other Macs and PCs over the network to synchronize files and store them on a (probably HFS+) internal drive.
• The new AirPort Extreme not only handles printer sharing, but disk sharing over AFP and SMB with folder-level access controls for multiple disks. This effectively makes this little base station a network-attached storage device for the home. User-upgradable as well.

The story that needs to be spread.

The video of it happening.

This is happening more and more in America. Police have been given a non-lethal torture device and are intent upon showing people how much pain they can inflict upon you for no reason, and you as a citizen have no real recourse against these individuals at the time of the abuse.

What the officers need to know is very simple for a case like this: once tased, you need several minutes before you can walk reasonably well again. Ordering someone to “Get up!” and using non-complience as a reason for an additional tase is clear abuse of power and of a citizen. Yes, the student handled the situation very badly, and yes he was in the wrong. I’l grant that. However, to be fair, the student was being repeatedly shocked with several thousand volts when he couldn’t obey orders, so I’d be a little upset as well. He then played to the crowd, which quite obviously upset the police officers. They wanted to move him to a controlled area as they had no idea what the crowd would do. I do understand this. I would say, however, their means sucked rather badly. Whatever their concern, the repeated torture of the person for being unable to combat the physical effects of the tase was absolutely uncalled for.

Sometimes this stuff disheartens me, and sometimes it makes me feel very, very happy to live here. Today, it makes me feel very, very happy.

DALLAS — About a dozen residents of a Dallas neighborhood beat a man after reports that he had been showing pornographic pictures to children on a playground, police said.

Brandon Scott Burke, 20, showed up Wednesday at an Oak Cliff apartment complex and was alleged to have shown a magazine with pictures of naked women to some of the children playing there, police said.

Houston Chronicle

House leaders conceded Friday that FBI agents with a court-issued warrant can legally search a congressman’s office, but they said they want procedures established after agents with a court warrant took over a lawmaker’s office last week.
Update 14: House Leaders Concede FBI Right to Search – Forbes.com

Oh wow. It’s amazing what it takes for a congresscritter to actually take up a useful position on unlawful search and seizure these days. It means it has to happen to them and not some unknown person they represent.

Reading over the list of new features in Mac OS X 10.4 and Mac OS X 10.4 Server makes one feel good for the platform.

Best Innovations

Mac OS X

• Spotlight – Friggin’ cool technology that makes the whole system one big database. Taking a hint from Google’s very smart interface this is accessible via one search field for the whole system. Developers can integrate their apps into it and become part of the database as well. All text, everywhere, is indexed. Filesystem, mail, people, everything is available, all the time.
• Dashboard – Blatant steal of Konfabulator, yes, but this is what I wanted, personally. The biggest design flaw in Konfabulator is that it’s always-on. I have an iBook. Those are big friggin’ widgets. I can’t do that. Now, on-when-I-need-them works out great for me. If Arlo wants to add that to Konfabulator then I’m game. Hell, there’s more he can do with Konfabulator anyway than Apple will. Great idea, man, just go further. Make it stand out. Hell, make it code-compatible with Dashboard and then you can share widgets; then you just need to add distinctive features. This could easily become a good thing.
• Automator – Just … exceptional. Task-based scripting for grandma. Just … wow.

Mac OS X Server

• Built-in Xgrid – Mmm. Clusters.
• NT Migration Tool – Pulls accounts and settings off an NT server and sets up the Mac OS X Server to replace the PDC in one step. Very smart.
• Local Software Update Server – Cache Apple’s SU server for your company. Save on bandwidth costs when the next 80MB system update comes out. Or when you have to get 400MB of updates after reinstalling a system…

Best Catch-Ups

Mac OS X 10.4

• 64-bit Library Support – Better late than never. It would have been nice to have this when the 64-bit chips came out (remember that they first shipped with Mac OS X 10.2.8 … ) or at least with the first reference release afterwards. But, it’s here, now.
• ACLs – I honestly can’t express enough how essential it was for Mac OS X to get this. Windows has had this since Windows NT. FreeBSD has had this for several years. When Mac OS X Tiger updated to the FreeBSD core, this came along with it.
• iChat AV – Conferencing for the rest of us. Combined with the iChat Server in Mac OS X 10.4 Server you have an intracompany IM and audio|video conferencing solution (using Jabber, no less). Or you can bring a bunch of people together and just watch the game together without taking off across town (which, of course, defeats the purpose of getting together, but sometimes you can’t make it happen).
• VoiceOver – The Mac was in dire need of a good screen reader. Now it’s built-in. Excellent.

Mac OS X Server 10.4

• Mobile Accounts – An upgrade to the rather useless current Mobile Accounts, this time they added file syncing. Nice afterthought, since Windows NT had this and WinNT is the epitome of “outdated server product” these days.
• Ethernet Link Aggregation – Link bonding in Server. About time.
• Service Failover – Pair services with other servers that can be backups. When the server does down clients go to the other system.
• SpamAssasin – Included. Nice.
• Mail Server Clustering – The tools already did it, so it’s nice that it’s a part of the package now.
• Mail Server Virtual Hosts – Why in the name of Steve hasn’t the Mac OS X Server product ever supported this damn feature?! Finally, years later they put this in the OS. It’s about damned time.
• Site-to-Site VPN – Link up two servers in a WAN and provide it to your network. Everyone else did it so it’s good to see Tiger doing it.

Still Need

As far as Mac OS X will go with this, it’s still lacking some core essentials that it appears we’ll need to wait on 10.6 for.

• Virtual Desktops – Geekery? Not really. Run Final Cut in one set of windows, LiveType in another, and DVD Studio Pro in another. Video geeks would wet their pants for the chance to unclutter when on the road.
• Server Monitor for Clients – A system administrator needs to know the “health” of all computers at a location, not just the servers. Even Remote Desktop can’t do this.
• More?

There’s been some silly speculation as of late that Google’s grand plan is some web-based OS that does everything for everyone.

A bit too quacky if you ask me.

Google’s business is really rather obvious when you look at their offerings:

• Search for webpages
• Search for images (based on webpages)
• Search for Usenet posts
• Search for news articles
• Search for products (based on names and prices)
• Catalog websites (based on topic, results in better searches)
• Sell answers to questions (which are then indexed and available for searching)
• Search product catalogs
• Create and publish weblogs
• Translate webpages into other languages
• Find people

What do all of these have in common? Data mining. Mainly mining text, but also numbers and linking words to images and so on. The core point of Google is to mine data and do something, anything, with it. That’s the point of the company. Mine data about people and then hook them up. Mine data about sites and then list them together. Mine data about products and then show the relevant ones. Mine data about sites, cross-reference the images on the page, and then search for the images. Mine data about all the text available via TCP/IP and then serve up some ads for it that make sense to serve for that topic.

What does email have to do with this? Obviously, advertising is a blatant point on the map for it. Index the message, look for what’s similar, sell you something. Auntie Em got herself killed so you’re in the coffin business, right? Well, yeah, that’s where it could go wrong, eh? Never the less, same technologies as those baddies at the top of the page (that, now that I mention death, will start serving ads about coffins).

It’s just one more place to target ads, and it’s a great one. “Hey kid, mow the lawn!” and, suddenly, you get information on lawnmowers. In fact, if you tell Google where you are they might be able to tell you about lawn moving services in your area as well.

After all, it’s just data, and in the hands of data miners, it’s the breath of life into a new way of looking at it all … again. Take everything you know, mash it all together, sieve it, and serve it up all pretty-like.

Google is what Perl wants to be.