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"So it's back to Utah they go. I'm sure SCO's lawyers can't wait to see Judge Kimball again, after all the horrible things SCO's CEO Darl McBride said about Judge Kimball to the press."

More like lyin' lyons - the fake steve jobs, or pretenderle (Ron Enderle), or the MogTroll.

Based on this article over at ars, it seems like Google had a big part in this. Pushing for open access rules in the FCC frequency auction (that Verizon originally SUED OVER but relented), and creating the Android platform that Verizon KNEW it had to somehow get a piece of, after viewing AT&T laughing all the way to the bank with the iPhone deal... yeah I think this wouldn't be happening without Google.

All applications, operating systems, and runtime environments are supported so long as the devices connect properly to Verizon's CDMA network (they can make use of either the company's cellular and PCS bandwidth). The fee for certification of devices will be "surprisingly reasonable," we're told, and the program will be open to anyone. One Verizon exec went so far as to say that if someone builds a device in their basement on a breadboard, Verizon will test it and activate it. Smaller players will definitely be able to get in on the action, something that hasn't previously been possible.

There is no gun pointed at Microsoft's head, they're fully on board with HD-optical DRM, though they may haggle over pointless specifics

The Sony Reader has an e-ink screen too.

"The Apache license allows manufacturers and mobile operators to innovate . . . without the requirement to contribute these innovations back to the open source community. . . . [they] are protected from the 'viral infection' problem often associated with other licenses."

This leads to a sort of "suspicions confirmed" moment about Google's view of its relationship to the FOSS community: it is a one-way street, in which Google gets benefits, but does not make serious contributions in return. During the run-up to the roll-out of v3 of the GPL, there was argument over the activities of ASPs such as Google, which use open source code as a mainspring of their activities but avoid making public their significant improvements because they do not distribute code. Under GPLv2, only distribution triggers a disclosure obligation.

Many FOSS members regard this as a serious loophole, and wanted it closed in GPLv3, but Google and other ASPs resisted, and v3 was unchanged on this point. See IT Business Edge.

At the Open Source Business Conference last May, Free Software Foundation guru Even Moglen acknowledged the problem, and said he would be working with Google to improve its contributions to the FOSS community.

Judging by Android, his efforts do not seem to be working. Android is based on Linux. The code Google adds to create Android will be open as per the Apache license, but that code can then be taken and turned back into locked programs by phone makers or wireless providers.

This is explained in an ArsTechnica post (characterized by Google as "one of the best explanations for the reasoning behind releasing code under Apache2"):

[A] copyleft license could potentially limit the evolution of the mobile software ecosystem by discouraging commercial development on top of the platform. Proprietary mobile software development companies that integrate Android into their technologies would have to dramatically change their business models if they aren't given the ability to keep their enhancements proprietary.

So the business plan seems to be that Google will persuade FOSS developers to write for Android, but under a system in which their code can be lifted by phone makers and service providers for the profit of others in the system without any reciprocity. (Of course, developers may also be hired by the commercial players to write proprietary programs, but this is not exactly the spirit of FOSS.)

As one Internet comment said: "[The licensing] does not inspire much confidence that this is really some sort of open phone for the users, rather than a potentially interesting, PR-savvy way of saving money for a bunch of manufacturers." Good call.

But Google will sell the advertising, riding on top of everyone else's work.

For those of us who have nothing against commercial software, all of this is just fine, especially the Ars Technica explanations of the advantages of going the commercial route, but if one is a dedicated member of the FOSS community, one might be feeling a little used.

They don't need to "take crack", but at least reading some of the literature on the subject might help.

Firstly, ars technica had a look at Linux Firefox 3 visuals a few days ago. This should hopefully be more soothing to your eyes than the Vista screenshots.

Secondly, the Vista screenshots from the ZDNet article can be summarized as follows:
- If you're using Linux you can skip the first 12 screenshots and replace it with a single apt-get/emerge/etc command.
- Screenshots 13 and 15 are the same as what you'd see in Firefox 2 (and this applies to other screenshots in the series as well).
- Screenshot 20 will completely annoy all system administrators and hobbyists who are constantly reinstalling systems and losing desktop/application configuration settings in the process. It is yet another windows-esque "how do you want to do this?" popup on the first usage of the application.
- Screenshot 23 is another annoyance (an extra useless dialog between clicking on a link and saving the file to disk).
- Screenshots 27-29 can also be ignored by Linux users and replaced with a simple uninstall command to your package manager application.

In summary, I was struggling to see any useful changes shown in the ZDNet screenshot gallery. There were a few minor GUI tweaks shown but even these changes weren't entirely useful. What would have been better is to of shown Firefox 3 passing the Acid2 test or receiving higher benchmark scores for page load speeds. In other words: testing the Gecko layout engine rather than getting excited about trivial GUI tweaks. GUI tweaks and fixes are most welcome but it isn't worth all the hype that Firefox 3 is receiving.

I would switch Firefox almost instantly for Epiphany if the later had an inbuilt and dumbed down adblocker similar to easylist/adblockplus, a dumbed down version of noscript and a few other odd features. A lot of people still don't know the differences between the Firefox and Gecko projects. The *MOST* important thing a browser can do is render websites correctly to the relevant HTML/CSS/etc standards (which is the job of the Gecko layout engine). Switching to Ephiphany would also boost performance of the GUI thanks to Ephiphany using native GTK. Firefox is a heavyweight and that is something I'd much rather replace with a lightweight browser.

Probably get Google's cooperation? From what base case are you inferring that "probably" from? It's not probable from where I stand.

Trust is a lucid thing. Once they start doing bad things by me I will withdraw my trust. Right now I have no problem with them funding the public view from the road, and there simply isn't a slippery slope argument that can be made.

Pro Tip: you can better prove that you're right with evidence instead of calling people morons. Perhaps THAT was what you meant with "Welcome to Slashdot."

This only applies if you use their webmail service with server side encryption. They have to have your key in order to encrypt/decrypt server-side, and they have to turn it over to the authorities if they have a valid warrent. It's the law.

If you use their client-side Java applet to do the encryption on your computer - as they strongly recommends that you do - then this is not an issue. Hushmail never see you keys and thus cannot be compelled to hand them over.

Several other sites covered this story earlier in the month all without the crappy sensationalism of slashdot. I first saw it at arstechnica, which linked to an interview with the CEO by wired.

I'm not usually one to hard on individual slashdot editors, but this is the 4th intentionally misleading troll that zonk has posted today. It is crap like this that caused me to not renew my slashdot subscription so many years.

I mean, the only "innovation" here is that one company is making the CPU, chipset and graphics card. You know, like Intel have been for years. But AMD make one where the graphics card is targeted at gamers. Whoop-de-fucking-do.

Tesla died broke because he spent all his money trying to create a "wireless power distribution" that made no sense. If he had spent more time reading physics and less time building 100+ foot Tesla coils. Were some of his inventions stolen? Undoubtedly. But I think he has only himself to blame for losing all his money.

Except that now MIT has developed wireless power transmission. Guess they need to learn physics as well, oh and stop faking having powered a light bulb wirelessly.

Apple used LLVM to improve the performance of software-fallbacks for OpenGL extensions by a hundred fold in Leopard, and the big part of that was because it was good at optimizing high-level routines depending on the low-level features of the chip, such as Altivec/SSE2 32bit/64bit, PPC/x86 etc. So it stands to reason that, to the extent that SSE4 is usefull, LLVM will make good use of it, just like it did for other extensions.

That sounds pretty practical to me.

http://www.techweb.com/wire/mobile/183702832 -- This one in Illinois http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/07/07/tech/main707361.shtml -- This one in Florida http://web.archive.org/web/20060701105145/http://www.katu.com/stories/87037.html -- This one in Washington http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070522-michigan-man-arrested-for-using-cafes-free-wifi-from-his-car.html -- And another story about the Michigan guy, for those who missed it As dumb as it sounds, to be arrested for using technology the way it was designed, it is happening. Just because computers running Windows automatically do it by default, does not mean you won't get arrested. It's ridiculous, but true. Welcome to the 21st century, where it's considered a felony(by cops and judges) to turn on a standard wifi enabled computer running Windows.

There are various examples known world wide such as in Argentina (1980's) when all of the communications were monitored by the government to "capture the terrorists."

Who needs Argentina as an example? AT&T (for sure) and others (probably) are doing this for the US government right now. That's the purpose behind the FISA update that they keep trying to pass -- lift the existing requirement that the telcos reject government requests that are illegal under existing law.

Pretty sure Slashdot covered it at some point (probably more than once, knowing the propensity toward dupes).

Some links:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70908

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060412-6585.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_vs._AT&T

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/15/amnesty_fisa/index.html

As you may have forgotten about the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy prevention scandal, let me refresh your memory.

Mark Russinovich, formerly of Sysinternals, stated that there were shortcomings in the software design of the Sony BMG installed rootkit that manifest themselves as security holes that can be exploited by malicious software such as worms or viruses. He also mentioned that the XCP software installed silently before the EULA appeared, that the EULA does not mention the XCP software, and that there was no uninstaller, all of which are illegal in various ways in various jurisdictions.

I don't know if the Warden is mentioned, and I don't know about illegality, but if the WoW software can be hacked, what is to prevent the Warden itself from manipulation from outside programs? Such programs that may steal WoW account information so that gold farmers and the like can misuse under-used accounts for profit?

I'm not saying it's guaranteed, but it's happened before.

And it's Multivac not MULTIVAC!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3407/The-Last-Question

You know, given the whole scribd / Asimov / Doctorow thing, I'm rather surprised that's still up there.

Apparently backspace-happy users get lots of spurious words added to their user dictionary which can't be removed without erasing the entire dictionary. You can see this in the Ars Technica review where they're typing away and the iPhone suggests "ARs" as a correction for "are" for some weird reason. The end result is that it's quite easy to fear the autocorrection instead of trust it. (Oh shit, I have to watch how I use the keyboard, or I'll screw up my user dictionary!)

... that shell fonts are poorly rendered ...

Zap!

An interesting choice for the article since it is a summary of an engadet summary of this article, and here is more of supposedly the leaked list.

Sorry but I am not understanding the point of this when NASA has the tech to make chips that can take the high temperatures of Venus. http://arstechnica.com/journals/hardware.ars/2007/09/12/nasa-designs-new-ultra-high-temperature-chips

But it's not really fair to imply that OLPC is ignoring US education. As I said, educational institutes in the US are free to make a case for funding such projects. OLPC will gladly ship the units.

OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte had previously rejected the prospect of selling XO laptops to schools in the United States, but is now seriously reconsidering. According to Negroponte, the laptops would be sold at a higher price in the United States than in developing countries.

You gotta love the Finnish courts: breaking CSS okay

I replied to Alan Kay:

I'm with you completely! Here are a couple messages I posted in the Slashdot discussion "One SimCity Per Child": http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/08/200234

Here's a great article, too!

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071110-original-sim-city-donated-to-one-laptop-per-child-project.html

-Don

He replied:

Thanks very much Don!

A truly great opportunity here I think.

I wonder if it would be possible for you to orthogonalize the "world environment objects" from the control environment drivers so that a variety of people could try to make "interactive brains" for SimCity. (Perhaps on the OLPC, the DBus could be used to connect the two.) This would allow many different ideas to be explored for how different ways and different ages of children could control this game.

For example, I have a grad student (Alex Warth, a fulltime researcher at Viewpoints) who is the best I've worked with in at least 20 years. He has been implementing many languages with a deep meta system he has built. I would love to get him started on trying one version of a language and interface for children to see and put in new rules. It would be great if others did this also. These control modules could be either loaded with SimCity, or more safely, could be in a separate address space and act as an intermediary between users and the rest of the game.

It would be terrific if others tried to do their own modules, just as you stated in your plans. A little friendly design and implementation rivalry would be great for the kids (and we would all learn a lot also). (Do you know of Mike Genesereth's Game Competitions that he runs from a Stanford website? He basically supplies game environments and grad students around the world write programs that try to learn and play the game against each other. Similarly, SimCity is a very rich game environment and could attract lots of very smart designers to make it more extensible and malleable.

To get Alex started, we would need to articulate and list the "rules, heuristics, etc." that the classic SimCity uses. I don't know what form these are in, but I'll bet they look nicer in the reimplementations you've done than in the original game. You probably understand them better than anyone. In any case, if you are interested in this, Alex and I could come visit you (where are you?) and try to pick your brains about ways to give form to these rules that make sense in the world of relatively young children.

Cheers,

Alan

As I stated earlier, The graph is flawed.

You have shown no such thing. All you've shown is that you can't read a graph.

"In 1981 the company sold 210,000 units, leaving the PET in the dust and nearly equaling the TRS-80's numbers." ... The chart does not accurately represent what was presented in the text of the article (eg. Why does the text mention that the Apple II nearly equaled the sales of the TRS-80, yet still show Apple's portion smaller than TRS-80s in the chart?).

If you look at the chart for 1981, you will see that the portions for Apple and Tandy are roughly equal. The dark gray area which is unlabeled in this graph is a continuation of the Tandy numbers from the previous graph. Apple almost held its own against Tandy in 1981, but it didn't beat Tandy - let alone Tandy plus the other manufacturers.

The chart doesn't reflect the number of Atari 800s sold with at least a disk drive. Many Ataris were sold as a cartridge based game system. Should this case be included in the desktop market? Does the fact that the Atari 800 has a keyboard automatically make it a desktop computer?

Absolutely. If you recall, the Apple game market was huge - at least as large as the Atari game market. Atari was no more a 'game machine' than the Apple II was.

You cherry pick small portions of my comments and don't even attempt to offer any rebuttal to the issues that I presented. Hell, you didn't even know about the Apple II clones. You conveniently ignore the "other" category.

I ignored the insiginificant portions of your comments. The issues you presented don't help your case. The Apple II clone market was not large enough to help your case - even if 100% of the 'others' were Apple II clones. That's my point. I didn't ignore the 'other' category, I just pointed out that it can't save your bogus claim.

Besides the obvious fact that the Atari was designed for games, why does the text describe a peak in 1982, yet the graph still shows exponential growth through 1984?

You really can't read graphs, can you? The graph clearly shows Atari's largest share in 1982, and a decrease through 1984.

The ordering of the categories do create a disadvantage to the bottom category. Basically, this type of chart is not entirely useful to this thread topic (other than to show the increasing number of personal computers).

No, unless you consider visually lower categories to be at a 'disadvantage' simply because they are lower - in other words, you don't know how to read a stacked graph.

The chart may use cumulative totals, NONE of the brands show any decline despite the text stating otherwise (eg. Why would Tandy kill the TRS-80 Model 1 if the chart shows it as a success?).

The chart clearly shows year-to-year sales totals, which is why the dark gray Tandy stripe disappears completely in 1984, when TRS-80 sales shrank to nothing. How can you not see this?

If the statistics presented are cumulative

They aren't. These are sales figures, not ownership figures.

it assumes that once that brand is purchased it is always used. How many Model 1's were replaced by an Apple II?

Irrelevant, because the total number of Apple II's sold between 1977-1982 (about 600,000) is half the total number of TRS-80 models sold in the same period (about 1.2 million). After that, Apple was outsold by Atari, Commodore and IBM, so Apple could not possibly have had a majority.

Since the author was concentrating on

As I stated earlier, The graph is flawed.

You have shown no such thing. All you've shown is that you can't read a graph.

"In 1981 the company sold 210,000 units, leaving the PET in the dust and nearly equaling the TRS-80's numbers." ... The chart does not accurately represent what was presented in the text of the article (eg. Why does the text mention that the Apple II nearly equaled the sales of the TRS-80, yet still show Apple's portion smaller than TRS-80s in the chart?).

If you look at the chart for 1981, you will see that the portions for Apple and Tandy are roughly equal. The dark gray area which is unlabeled in this graph is a continuation of the Tandy numbers from the previous graph. Apple almost held its own against Tandy in 1981, but it didn't beat Tandy - let alone Tandy plus the other manufacturers.

The chart doesn't reflect the number of Atari 800s sold with at least a disk drive. Many Ataris were sold as a cartridge based game system. Should this case be included in the desktop market? Does the fact that the Atari 800 has a keyboard automatically make it a desktop computer?

Absolutely. If you recall, the Apple game market was huge - at least as large as the Atari game market. Atari was no more a 'game machine' than the Apple II was.

You cherry pick small portions of my comments and don't even attempt to offer any rebuttal to the issues that I presented. Hell, you didn't even know about the Apple II clones. You conveniently ignore the "other" category.

I ignored the insiginificant portions of your comments. The issues you presented don't help your case. The Apple II clone market was not large enough to help your case - even if 100% of the 'others' were Apple II clones. That's my point. I didn't ignore the 'other' category, I just pointed out that it can't save your bogus claim.

Besides the obvious fact that the Atari was designed for games, why does the text describe a peak in 1982, yet the graph still shows exponential growth through 1984?

You really can't read graphs, can you? The graph clearly shows Atari's largest share in 1982, and a decrease through 1984.

The ordering of the categories do create a disadvantage to the bottom category. Basically, this type of chart is not entirely useful to this thread topic (other than to show the increasing number of personal computers).

No, unless you consider visually lower categories to be at a 'disadvantage' simply because they are lower - in other words, you don't know how to read a stacked graph.

The chart may use cumulative totals, NONE of the brands show any decline despite the text stating otherwise (eg. Why would Tandy kill the TRS-80 Model 1 if the chart shows it as a success?).

The chart clearly shows year-to-year sales totals, which is why the dark gray Tandy stripe disappears completely in 1984, when TRS-80 sales shrank to nothing. How can you not see this?

If the statistics presented are cumulative

They aren't. These are sales figures, not ownership figures.

it assumes that once that brand is purchased it is always used. How many Model 1's were replaced by an Apple II?

Irrelevant, because the total number of Apple II's sold between 1977-1982 (about 600,000) is half the total number of TRS-80 models sold in the same period (about 1.2 million). After that, Apple was outsold by Atari, Commodore and IBM, so Apple could not possibly have had a majority.

Since the author was concentrating on

As I stated earlier, The graph is flawed.

You have shown no such thing. All you've shown is that you can't read a graph.

"In 1981 the company sold 210,000 units, leaving the PET in the dust and nearly equaling the TRS-80's numbers." ... The chart does not accurately represent what was presented in the text of the article (eg. Why does the text mention that the Apple II nearly equaled the sales of the TRS-80, yet still show Apple's portion smaller than TRS-80s in the chart?).

If you look at the chart for 1981, you will see that the portions for Apple and Tandy are roughly equal. The dark gray area which is unlabeled in this graph is a continuation of the Tandy numbers from the previous graph. Apple almost held its own against Tandy in 1981, but it didn't beat Tandy - let alone Tandy plus the other manufacturers.

The chart doesn't reflect the number of Atari 800s sold with at least a disk drive. Many Ataris were sold as a cartridge based game system. Should this case be included in the desktop market? Does the fact that the Atari 800 has a keyboard automatically make it a desktop computer?

Absolutely. If you recall, the Apple game market was huge - at least as large as the Atari game market. Atari was no more a 'game machine' than the Apple II was.

You cherry pick small portions of my comments and don't even attempt to offer any rebuttal to the issues that I presented. Hell, you didn't even know about the Apple II clones. You conveniently ignore the "other" category.

I ignored the insiginificant portions of your comments. The issues you presented don't help your case. The Apple II clone market was not large enough to help your case - even if 100% of the 'others' were Apple II clones. That's my point. I didn't ignore the 'other' category, I just pointed out that it can't save your bogus claim.

Besides the obvious fact that the Atari was designed for games, why does the text describe a peak in 1982, yet the graph still shows exponential growth through 1984?

You really can't read graphs, can you? The graph clearly shows Atari's largest share in 1982, and a decrease through 1984.

The ordering of the categories do create a disadvantage to the bottom category. Basically, this type of chart is not entirely useful to this thread topic (other than to show the increasing number of personal computers).

No, unless you consider visually lower categories to be at a 'disadvantage' simply because they are lower - in other words, you don't know how to read a stacked graph.

The chart may use cumulative totals, NONE of the brands show any decline despite the text stating otherwise (eg. Why would Tandy kill the TRS-80 Model 1 if the chart shows it as a success?).

The chart clearly shows year-to-year sales totals, which is why the dark gray Tandy stripe disappears completely in 1984, when TRS-80 sales shrank to nothing. How can you not see this?

If the statistics presented are cumulative

They aren't. These are sales figures, not ownership figures.

it assumes that once that brand is purchased it is always used. How many Model 1's were replaced by an Apple II?

Irrelevant, because the total number of Apple II's sold between 1977-1982 (about 600,000) is half the total number of TRS-80 models sold in the same period (about 1.2 million). After that, Apple was outsold by Atari, Commodore and IBM, so Apple could not possibly have had a majority.

Since the author was concentrating on

As usual, it's an idiotic Slashbot simplification - if you don't like the results, pretend it's all about bribery. Paramount was paid for switching to HD-DVD, but it's not the only reason. Paramount does appear to believe HD-DVD is technically a superior system.

I'm simply delighted how law enforcement is called bad guys in this analogy =^.^=

There is more than just law enforcement that is interested in the contents. BSA, RIAA and MPAA are the ones I was not mentioning by name. The US post office can open your mail.. But there is a huge red tape procedure to follow. X-ray is one thing to look for explosives. Opening every letter to see if it has the lyrics of a popular song by the RIAA is not permitted by the post office. Inspecting every letter by the DHS for bomb plans is also not permitted, except electronic mail. The post office may know you mailed a CD to your buddy. The package is not inspected to see if it contains the latest teen pop rap.

Online the privacy standards are now seen as a problem to internet users as attacks on users are clogging up the court system an fleecing many to pay the extortion money to the settlement support center. If there was privacy, this would not be a problem.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/6337
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2005/09/suits-against-settlement-support.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051004-5382.html

I did a Google search for the settlement support center. It must not be very popular. I could not find a link to the site.

I had to search for RIAA demand letter to find the info. Even then, I found just refrences to the letter, but not a copy of the letter with information to the settlement support center.

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2007/04/uc-santa-cruz-passes-along-riaa.html

The study is misleading because it does not take age into account. Obesity took off around 1950-1960, so in the average, the overweight and obese are in their fities while the underweight and normal are in their seventies in average, and that's about when age related diseases kick in. Studies such as these are a disaster and the whole medical field has to step up! See also: http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2007/11/06/andy-grove-takes-on-drug-development

Ars Technica Review of 10.5: Time Machine

I never used Shadow copy, but my mother can and does use Time Machine.

Yeah, you're right, it doesn't use ZFS. I got that idea from an ArsTechnica article, which I didn't read all the way through. The article was actually arguing that Time Machine should use ZFS :-P

Unless you can produce a link or some debugger output or something, I'm gonna go ahead and trust ArsTechnica more than I trust you.

SJobs claimed in the keynote when he unveiled Time Machine that 80% knew they should back up regularly, 26% did backup data, but only 4% did backups on a regular basis.

I got those numbers from here, but those numbers were first released (made up? ;P) at WWDC earlier this year IIRC.

(Find files that have been altered from last update -> Copy Said files to alternate drive in directory with the date as a name, make note of files that have deleted)

Trivialising the technical underpinnings of Time Machine is unwise, and plays right into the hands of those who say Apple is all about show and lacks substance. In fact, the way Time Machine knows what files have been modified is really quite elegant and shouldn't be underplayed. I shan't go into the details of it all here, but if you are interested, see the relevant page of John Siracusa's excellent review of 10.5 over at Ars Technica.

In the meantime, you might like to consider learning how to spell.

:|

(Find files that have been altered from last update -> Copy Said files to alternate drive in directory with the date as a name, make note of files that have deleted)

Trivialising the technical underpinnings of Time Machine is unwise, and plays right into the hands of those who say Apple is all about show and lacks substance. In fact, the way Time Machine knows what files have been modified is really quite elegant and shouldn't be underplayed. I shan't go into the details of it all here, but if you are interested, see the relevant page of John Siracusa's excellent review of 10.5 over at Ars Technica.

In the meantime, you might like to consider learning how to spell.

:|

Acording to Arstechnia, the co-president of Naughtydog claims that Uncharted only uses 30% of the cells capabilties and the game looks pretty awesome.
Source: http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2007/10/30/getting-technical-with-naughty-dog-co-president-christophe-balestra
Also video interview:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/21306.html

Of course it still seems like an arbitrary number, but I think the PS3 has a long way before it maxes out. (Its still too expensive though)

He is describing Pirates! of course.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/games/pirates.ars

Almost there.

I stand corrected; I was under the impression that their background image was user-drawn, but in fact it wasn't.

However, in that article, there is no mention of a flexible grid; in this one, there is.

So, Apple did in fact own the home computer market once. In fact, the Apple II proved that a home computer market existed and paved the way for both the Atari and Commodore machines..

I'm not so sure about that: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars/3

Apple competed very well in the early days, certainly, but I don't think they ever had 90% of any market.

That's what she is trying to imply yes, but it is not the case. From the summing up:

Gabriel ran through the screenshots showing the user tereastarr@KaZaA and then showed other instances of her using the same screenname online. "All the fingers in this case point to Jammie Thomas," he argued. He ticked off the evidence of the MAC and IP addresses, a password-protected PC that only the defendant had access to, use of the tereastarr nickname across several services and e-mail accounts across the years, and the "eclectic musical tastes" of Thomas that he said were reflected both on the hard drive and in the shared folder. "These things all point in one direction, and only one direction: that of Jammie Thomas," he said. "Jammie Thomas infringed the record companies' copyrighted recordings."

You may well have a point in what you say, the thing is though that this woman is not the "poster child" to rally round.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/12
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/13


Sure sounds like complaining about design issues to me!